Frank La Roche, Photographer of Seattle and the Klondike

Frank La Roche was one of the most accomplished commercial photographers working in the Pacific Northwest during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From his Seattle studio, he photographed a rapidly rebuilding city, the beginnings of Everett, the industries of Puget Sound, and the communities and landscapes of southeastern Alaska.

His most historically significant work came from repeated journeys north before and during the Klondike Gold Rush. La Roche photographed glaciers, ships, mining camps, Indigenous communities, growing Alaska towns, and the difficult trails followed by stampeders toward the Yukon.

Collectors encounter his images in several forms, including mounted albumen and gelatin silver prints, cabinet and boudoir cards, photographic albums, lantern slides, halftone publications, and real photo postcards. These formats are frequently confused in online listings, making careful identification especially important.

Before the Pacific Northwest

Frank La Roche was born in Philadelphia on June 20, 1853. He entered a photographic studio at age 17 and, after two years of training, began operating independently.

His early career was unusually varied. He photographed railroad scenery in Pennsylvania and later worked as a commercial photographer in Florida, Utah, and Iowa. In St. Augustine, he reportedly gained national attention for an extremely long exposure of an old church, leaving the plate exposed from one morning until the following afternoon.

In 1876, La Roche was engaged by Harper Brothers to travel through the South Pacific in search of illustrations. The expedition ended in Honolulu after his traveling partner became ill. La Roche returned to the mainland and opened a gallery in Salt Lake City.

Two years later, the United States government employed him to make a series of astronomical photographs recording the transit of Mercury. He also produced negatives for the French government. The work required him to adapt his photographic experience to telescopic equipment at a time when both astronomy and photography were still technically demanding fields.

La Roche later operated a studio in Des Moines, Iowa, where he won six of seven photography prizes offered at the 1888 state fair. The following year, he headed west.

Photographing a city after the fire

La Roche arrived in Seattle in July 1889, only weeks after the Great Seattle Fire had destroyed much of the commercial center.

Rather than being discouraged by the ruins, he opened a gallery on Second Avenue and soon established himself as one of the city's leading commercial photographers. His studio offered formal portraiture, but La Roche also specialized in scenic, architectural, and industrial photography.

He recorded Seattle's waterfront, streets, ships, businesses, public buildings, logging operations, and expanding transportation network. His photographs document a city rebuilding at extraordinary speed, with temporary structures giving way to brick buildings and new streets extending north from the old downtown.

In 1891, the Lake Union Improvement Company hired La Roche to produce a photographic album promoting its development plans. The finished album contained views of Elliott Bay, Lake Union, Lake Washington, downtown streets, and railway construction along the route that became Westlake Avenue.

The album was created as a sales tool rather than as a purely historical project, but it now provides an unusually detailed record of Seattle's growth.

La Roche also traveled to the new townsite of Everett in 1891 and 1892. His photographs show waterfront construction, railroad development, industrial buildings, forests, and streets that were still little more than cleared paths. These images preserve Everett at the moment when investors and developers were transforming it from a speculative townsite into an industrial city.

Alaska before the Klondike rush

La Roche began traveling to Alaska years before news of Klondike gold reached the wider public.

Between approximately 1890 and 1902, he made repeated trips through southeastern Alaska and the Yukon region. Later accounts credited him with more than 100 northern journeys and thousands of exposures, although the full body of negatives has not survived.

His Alaska catalog included Juneau, Sitka, Wrangell, Kasaan, Killisnoo, Metlakatla, Douglas Island, the Treadwell mines, Muir Glacier, and settlements along the Inside Passage. He photographed town streets and harbors alongside glaciers, churches, mining operations, ships, totem poles, and portraits of Alaska Native people.

Traveling with photographic equipment during this period was difficult. Cameras were bulky, glass negatives were fragile, and supplies had to be carried aboard ships and over trails. La Roche generally returned to Seattle to develop and print the negatives gathered during his journeys.

The resulting photographs were sold to travelers and tourists, included in albums, distributed through his studio, and reproduced in publications.

The Klondike Gold Rush

When the steamship Portland arrived in Seattle in July 1897 carrying miners and reports of immense quantities of Yukon gold, La Roche understood the photographic opportunity immediately.

He booked passage north aboard the steamship Queen, one of the first vessels to leave Seattle after the news broke. The ship reached the bay at Skagway on July 26, 1897.

From the deck, La Roche photographed the Skagway valley before the full arrival of the stampeders. The image records a sparse settlement of cabins, tents, wagons, grazing animals, a small landing platform, and buildings under construction. Within weeks, the quiet shoreline would become crowded with people, supplies, temporary businesses, and animals moving toward the White Pass and Chilkoot trails.

La Roche may have been the first professional photographer to reach Skagway at the beginning of the rush. He continued inland, documenting Dyea, Sheep Camp, the Scales below Chilkoot Pass, stampeders carrying supplies, boat building, river travel, and the difficult landscape separating the Alaska coast from the Yukon watershed.

One surviving photograph includes the young writer Jack London among a group of travelers on the trail. Other images show miners resting before the final ascent of Chilkoot Pass, actors and entertainers crossing the Dyea River, boats negotiating rapids, and immense piles of equipment waiting to be moved inland.

The strongest images combine documentary detail with the scale and uncertainty of the journey. People, horses, boats, tents, and supplies are often dwarfed by glaciers, mountains, rivers, and snow.

En Route to the Klondike

La Roche sold individual mounted photographs, but he sought a broader audience through a six-part publication generally known as En Route to the Klondike.

The series reproduced his photographs alongside descriptive text recounting the route through Alaska and British Columbia. It allowed customers who would never make the journey themselves to follow the stampeders from the coast toward the Yukon.

Collectors should distinguish photographs associated with this publication from original photographic prints. The book and album images were mechanically reproduced as halftones. They may carry La Roche's captions and reproduce his original compositions, but they are printed illustrations rather than gelatin silver or albumen photographs.

Pages, plates, and detached images from the publication are sometimes advertised as original La Roche photographs. Examination under magnification should reveal the printed dot pattern.

Complete or substantially complete copies of the publication belong to a book and Klondike collecting market distinct from the market for individual photographs.

Photographs of Indigenous people

La Roche created many photographs of Native communities in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. His subjects included Coast Salish, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Yakama, Nez Perce, and other Indigenous people, although historical captions and modern seller descriptions are not always accurate.

Some images document people traveling, working, selling baskets, participating in public gatherings, or living within their communities. Others were formal or commercial portraits shaped by the expectations of tourists and non-Native customers.

Period captions often use outdated terminology, simplify tribal identities, or present individuals as generalized Western types. Some titles were intended to make the photographs more marketable rather than to provide an accurate record of the person depicted.

Collectors should preserve original wording when transcribing a photograph, but it is helpful to place inaccurate or offensive historical language in quotation marks and provide a more respectful modern description separately.

Identification is particularly important. A generic dealer title such as “Indian maiden” may conceal the name of the individual, her community, and the circumstances in which the portrait was made. Institutional catalogs and other copies of the same numbered image may provide better information.

These photographs can carry significant historical and market interest, but they should be treated as records of real people rather than simply as decorative Western imagery.

Postcards, boudoir cards, and mounted photographs

One of the most common collecting errors is describing every small La Roche photograph as a real photo postcard.

Much of La Roche's best-known Alaska work was created during the 1890s, before the height of the American postcard era. These images were frequently sold as albumen or gelatin silver photographs mounted on stiff card. Common formats include cabinet cards and the larger boudoir card, which often measures roughly 5¼ by 8½ inches.

A boudoir card is not a postcard. It normally has a photographic print mounted to a larger board, with no postcard address layout on the reverse.

La Roche also sold unmounted photographs in sizes such as approximately 4¼ by 7¼ inches and larger mounted views approaching 8 by 10 inches. These are original photographs, but they should not be called RPPCs unless they were printed on postcard-backed photographic stock.

True photographic postcards credited to La Roche are known, particularly from the early 20th century and his later years in Washington. These normally have a standard postcard back with space for an address, message, and stamp. The front should show smooth photographic tones rather than a printed halftone pattern.

Later commercial postcards and modern reproductions also reuse La Roche images. A card may reproduce an authentic 1890s photograph while having been manufactured decades later.

Identifying original La Roche photographs

La Roche often titled and numbered his images within the negative. Collectors may find captions along the lower edge accompanied by wording such as La Roche, Photo, Seattle, Wash., La Roche, Seattle, or a copyright date.

The negative number can be especially useful. Institutional collections may hold another print with the same number, allowing an unidentified location or person to be confirmed.

Original mounted photographs may also carry a blind stamp or studio imprint on the mount. The paper and mount should be consistent with late-19th- or early-20th-century photographic production, although condition and storage can greatly alter their appearance.

Collectors should consider the entire object. A continuous-tone image does not by itself establish that a print was made during La Roche's lifetime. Copy photographs and modern silver prints can also have continuous tones.

The most convincing period examples combine an original caption or number in the negative, an appropriate studio mount or postcard back, signs of natural age, and a physical format consistent with other known La Roche works.

The 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition

La Roche remained active in Seattle long after the Klondike rush.

In 1909, he was commissioned to produce official photographs of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the world's fair held on the present campus of the University of Washington. Archival accounts state that he received gold medals for his work.

The exposition brought together many of the themes that had defined his career: Seattle's expansion, Alaska tourism, Western industry, transportation, and the commercial presentation of Indigenous cultures.

Photographs connected to the exposition may appeal to collectors of Seattle history, world's fairs, Alaska promotion, and regional architecture. Attribution should still be checked carefully because many photographers worked at the fair and numerous printed views were issued by commercial publishers.

Sedro-Woolley and the later studio

La Roche married Ida M. Crary in Seattle in 1891. Their son, Frank La Roche Jr., later assisted his father in the studio and accompanied him on photographic trips.

After maintaining a Seattle studio for approximately 25 years, La Roche moved his business to Sedro-Woolley around 1914. Advertisements for the later studio promoted portrait work with the memorable line, “La Roche loves the babies.”

The change reflects a shift from long northern expeditions toward community and studio photography. Portraits, family groups, local events, and regional views from Skagit County form a less famous but still collectible part of the La Roche catalog.

He retired around 1928 and transferred the business to his son.

University of Washington biographical records give La Roche's death as April 12, 1936, in Sedro-Woolley. Some museum and archival catalogs instead list 1934, a discrepancy collectors may encounter when researching his work.

Institutional collections

The University of Washington Libraries holds the most substantial publicly accessible La Roche collection. Its finding aid describes more than 400 photographic prints, 74 glass lantern slides, and two albums containing an additional 93 prints. More than 300 images have been digitized.

The collection covers Seattle, Everett, Washington industry, ships, logging, portraits, Indigenous subjects, Alaska communities, glaciers, and Klondike activity.

Additional La Roche photographs are held by the Everett Public Library, the University of Alaska system, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the Spencer Museum of Art, and other regional collections.

The institutional record is particularly important because much of La Roche's original negative archive appears to have been dispersed or lost after his death. Surviving numbered prints in museums and private collections may therefore be the best remaining evidence of individual negatives.

Notes and market conditions from North West Postcards

The La Roche market is difficult to summarize because objects carrying his name range from common printed reproductions to important 19th-century photographs.

Ordinary real photo postcards and later photographic views may be found in the range of approximately $15 to $50, depending on the location and subject. Better Alaska, Klondike, Seattle, mining, logging, or transportation scenes may justify substantially higher prices.

Original boudoir cards and mounted Alaska photographs are frequently offered between approximately $75 and $300. Asking prices vary widely, and an attractive retail listing does not establish that a photograph has sold at that level.

Strong portraits, important Gold Rush views, clearly identified Indigenous subjects, and unusually large exhibition-quality prints can move into the hundreds of dollars. In 2012, a framed 11½-by-15½-inch La Roche silver gelatin photograph sold through Heritage Auctions for $597.50.

Albums and coherent groups belong to a stronger institutional and Americana market. In 2023, an album containing 49 photographs—including 24 La Roche Klondike views—sold through Swann Auction Galleries for $2,000, including the buyer's premium.

That result should not be divided evenly to assign a value to every photograph. The album's subject matter, provenance, historical coherence, and survival as a group all contributed to its appeal.

For most La Roche material, value is driven first by the subject and format. A common later portrait may bring little premium, while an early image of Skagway, the Chilkoot Trail, a named Alaska community, or a documented Indigenous person may attract serious competition.

Condition is especially important with albumen photographs. Fading, yellowing, cracked mounts, foxing, abrasions, and loss of contrast are common. A rare image can remain desirable despite damage, but clean prints with rich tones and original mounts are significantly more attractive.

Additional reading

• "Frank La Roche Photographs", University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections.
• "Frank La Roche Photographs, approximately 1887–1928", University of Washington Libraries Special Collections.
• "Frank LaRoche", Everett Public Library.
• "Frank La Roche, Skagway's First Professional Photographer", Karl Gurcke, Juneau Empire.
• "The Traveling Postcard Photographers of Anacortes", Anacortes Museum.
• "Frank La Roche", Spencer Museum of Art.
• "Frank LaRoche Collection", Everett Public Library Northwest Room.

Example postcards