Karl Huber

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Karl Huber was born in 1898 in Munich, Germany. He arrived in New York in 1929, expecting the "cowboys and Indians" he had read about in books and found, instead, the Great Depression. He rode the rails across North America, experiencing it from the top of a boxcar and taking photographs. Eventually he came to Vancouver, and was impressed by this young city in its stunning natural setting. Though he would take to the road again frequently, Vancouver would be his home until he died. Huber found work as a postcard photographer in the early 1930s and the 1940s, and many of the historic images identified with the city and the surrounding areas in that time period are from his archives. Most are uncredited - they had been work-for-hire, mainly for Gowan & Sutton and, later, for Campbell Studios, both prominent Vancouver postcard producers at the time. In the mid-1940s Huber opened a studio in the 200 block of East Broadway. He initially called it Cosmos Studios, changing it to Hollywood Photofinishing near the end of the 1940s. Here he did studio portraiture as well as custom photofinishing for clients, decades before such work was routinely done by machines. The sheet size of this photograph is 20 x 24 inches. Please note: this work is unframed.