Mike Roberts (1905-1989) American, Large Scale Original Photograph. Shows a DC 3 Mainliner in 1939 flying above the World's Fair on Treasure Island near San Francisco. Signed bottom right. 

Overall: 28 X 38 in. 

Sight: 27 X 37 in. 

#3767 . 

Mike Roberts was born in 1905 on a small Missouri farm. In 1916 a photographer in a horse and buggy stopped by his house, offering to take a family photo, and he was fascinated by the process. When the family was unable to pay for the picture after it was developed, the photographer tore it up, and Mike pieced it back together and kept it the rest of his life. He spent the next year collecting tobacco tags from all the local farmers until he could send a thousand away to get his first camera, which he promptly took apart and then reassembled to understand how it worked, ruining the film pack. A World War I battle photographer who lived nearby gave him some rudimentary lessons, but he was otherwise self-taught. He was kicked out of school in sixth grade for lighting a whiskey bottle full of gunpowder under the schoolhouse, and ran away from home at the age of 16, riding to California on a Harley Davidson with only a few personal affects, among them a new box camera. He settled in San Bernardo after a year and a half of homelessness, when he was offered work at a local photography studio. On one of his earliest assignments in 1923 he was badly burned on his right side when he overloaded a flash pan. He learned from every mistake, and over the next fifty years he gained the moniker "America's Postcard King" for his extremely prolific output and pioneering innovations in Kodachrome postcards, taking pictures of stunning locations as well as countless celebrities, including Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, and Herbert Hoover. His photographed scenes from the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco were published in The Saturday Evening Post, Fortune, and Life Magazine, and led to a commission to take color photographs for a Standard Oil marketing campaign encouraging travel throughout the country. Walt Disney was one of his primary clients for his international picture postcards, and his images were often reproduced by animators for various Disney films in the 1940s and 50s. He became a close friend of Ansel Adams, and the two frequently discussed their techniques, although Roberts rarely received the critical attention that Adams did. During his career he made roughly 200 trips to Hawaii alone, and was known for having shot the first color images of Hawaii for National Geographic. In the 1970s he began to have health difficulties, and gave several lectures on both the East and West Coasts about photography as art. He frequently remarked that critical acclaim was no indication of ability, and was known for encouraging newcomers to photography to simply experiment, rather than seeking academic or professional insight. His son Bob began compiling a book about his work in the late 1980s, which was eventually completed in 2012, over two decades after Mike's death in Alameda, California in 1989.