If a picture is worth a thousand words, one downtown Great Bend building and the photographers who have occupied its rooms for decades would have a treasure trove of tales to tell.

When longtime owner Dale Riggs sold the photography studio at 1217 Main Street he had owned since 1978, fellow native photographer Chelsea Morris, owner of Chelsea Mitchell Photography Studio, became the latest to carry on a photographic legacy spanning nearly 75 years.

And Morris couldn’t be happier to carry on the legacy of a man she considers one of her greatest mentors, and a man who has documented some of the most important moments in her life.

“I grew up here,” Morris said. “(Riggs) photographed me as a baby, my senior pictures, our family pictures, I took classes from him at Barton.”

Riggs, who recently retired as a studio photographer and business owner, sees himself as simply the steward of a Great Bend photographic legacy that began shortly after World War II with an Army veteran named George Brannan.

The birth of a legacy

Brannan, a Larned native, came to Great Bend in 1945 after surviving a German prison camp when he was shot down over Berlin in 1944. Working close to Brannan, Riggs was regaled with tales of his time in the war and in the prison camp.

After arriving in Great Bend, Brannan became a professional photographer. He opened a studio on Forest Avenue, later purchasing the building on Main Street. In his time owning the studio, according to Brannan’s 2007 obituary, he took, “thousands of portraits, school photos, and over 7,000 weddings.”

Riggs’ interest in photography began at the young age of 12, when he picked up a camera and photographed his childhood neighbors, the Rochas, on 5th Street. He photographed the couple in front of their clothesline, with thieving crows behind them, as Riggs recalls.

He recently found the original photographs and speaks fondly of the vivid memories they still evoke, of Mr. Rocha, a railroad worker, and Mrs. Rocha, whom he recalls, “had the best tortillas ever, right off the wood-burning stove.”

Riggs still recalls working with Brannan for a few months one fall as a teenager in the 1960s., and nearly endless trips to capture students’ pictures at 30-plus schools across the area, “a four- or five-week marathon,” which would become a yearly routine for him as he took over the shop from Brannan after returning to his roots in Great Bend in the late ’70s.

A memory in each picture

Like the images of the Rochas, Riggs said every image he captured comes filled with vivid memories and unique stories, like a series of “person off the street” photographs Riggs took in his studio in the 1980s. The photos were a poignant slice of the people who built Great Bend and called it home: painters, farmers, bankers, meat packers, old ladies – a little bit of everyone, Riggs said.

As he flipped casually through images old and new, each one came attached to tales filled with sights, sounds and thoughts of a Great Bend long past. 

In capturing pieces of the community and its history, Riggs said, a photographer becomes part of the fabric of that history, sometimes even when they don’t realize it. Even things as simple as capturing buildings, fashion and hairstyles as they were decades ago, “that becomes a record that is historically important.”

For example, there are photos of Riggs and his friends as teens, sitting on sandbags in front of the studio, preparing for a flood that came through the area in the 1960s, as the Red Cross was handing out free cigarettes across the street. “Can you imagine the Red Cross handing out free cigarettes?” he quipped.

Riggs speaks fondly of watching kids grow through his work as a school portrait photographer, seeing generations of kids grow from preschool all the way through to adulthood, just as Morris spoke fondly of.

Capturing people at their best moments is something he loved, saying in photography, much like life, “to do a good job, you’ve got to love them ... you’ve got to try to find the best qualities, to try to give them an image where they can feel good about themselves.”

Riggs still speaks of photography as an art form, where getting the details just right – lighting, exposure, and background details – matters immensely. It’s these significant technical, yet artistic, details he enjoyed passing on to others, such as Morris, just as Brannan passed them on to him.

“It was enjoyable to teach people to see lighting, which is everything in photography,” Riggs said. “People open their eyes and learn to notice things they hadn’t noticed before.”

Riggs himself, who is “mostly” retired, still delights in capturing fields, landscapes, skyscapes, and the occasional family of raccoons, as he walks his rescue dog on the streets and country roads around Great Bend every night. Even in those seemingly mundane moments, Riggs still captures the world with a wonder and beauty only a photographer can.

The legacy lives on

When the old building on Main Street changed hands late last year, countless boxes of prints and negatives dating back to the 1960s and taken by both Brannan and Riggs were included in the sale.

Riggs had long hoped those decades of memories would live on in the hands of the Barton County Historical Society, and Morris decided to help honor that long-held desire. Finally, on a sunny morning in March, as many of those boxes were loaded up and taken south on Main Street across the Arkansas River bridge, that hope finally came to fruition.

Riggs is also happy to see the tradition of the building as a photographer’s haven live on through someone like Morris with the same passion for photography that he has always had.

Morris, like Riggs before her, returned to her Great Bend roots after studying at the prestigious Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif. Prior to returning home, she spent 10 years working under world-renowned photographers in the bright lights of California.

Eventually, though, family, which has always been a vital part of Morris’s life, drew her back to her hometown on the prairies of Kansas. Experiencing the world outside of Great Bend made her realize how much her hometown had to offer.

“I needed to come home and it’s a choice I’m thankful I got to make.”

Morris said she and Riggs stayed in contact for several years. She hoped one day to carry on Riggs’ legacy in the building he brought to photographic life for more than 40 years. With both her own parents having been small business owners in Great Bend, she is proud to carry on that tradition, as well.

“The fact that we’re a third-generation photographer in this space, I think is special, and it’s something I want to keep going if I can,” Morris said. “It’s part of a legacy I hope to begin to do justice.”

But for Morris, the legacy is more than just a building. It is about an investment Riggs made into young photographers like her, instilling in her his passion for photography.

“If it wasn’t from him, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have gone to  California, worked in an industry, and thoroughly fell in love with what I do.”

Even as a child, she remembers coming into Riggs’ studio and recalling the smell of film processing chemicals as, “something magical.”

Both Riggs and Morris are grateful to Barton County Historical Society Director Richard Lartz II for helping them preserve what they consider to be treasured pieces of Great Bend’s history in photographs. Like Riggs, Morris said those pictures are not about the person behind the camera, but the person in front of it.

“After so long, it becomes more about the people in them rather than the photographer holding the negative,” Morris said. “Connecting the two is important, but also finding a person who values them as pieces of history is great.”

Where possible, she said, she would like to be able to also get some of those pictures and negatives back to the subjects in the pictures, but with some of the older photographs, that may not be possible.

Either way, moments in time will live on, well beyond the reach of the lens of the photographers who captured them.