George Kendall Warren achieved success in the Boston area as a portrait and celebrity photographer. He also carved out a thriving business as the class photographer for a number of Ivy League and elite colleges including Brown, Dartmouth, Princeton, Williams, and Yale. In 1861, he began taking class photographs for Harvard, many of which reside in albums in the Harvard University Archives. While albumen prints were introduced in the 1850s, Warren continued to use the salted paper print process for the Harvard class albums into the mid-1860s, developing his own particular aesthetic through this early photographic technique. His images of graduating seniors, faculty, staff, campus buildings, landscapes, and surrounding Cambridge area exhibit a balance of both subtle tones and distinct details.
