Researching Henry Swift

Described by peers as gentle, self-effacing, and ambivalent toward politics, Henry Swift was Minnesota's third governor for less than a year, completing the second term of Alexander Ramsey, who had been elected United States Senator. With little time or apparent inclination to effect major change, this un-elected governor concentrated on assuring the welfare of Civil War veterans.

After graduation with honors from Western Reserve College in his native Ohio, Swift tutored the children of a slave owner in Mississippi, an experience that reinforced his commitment to abolition. He returned to Ohio, earned a law degree, and began a career in business and government service.

He and his family journeyed to Minnesota in 1853, settling first in St. Paul then St. Peter. With his partners in the St. Peter Land Company, he campaigned, unsuccessfully, to relocate the state capital in their burgeoning Minnesota River town.

Swift left his commercial enterprises in 1861 for the state senate seat that propelled him into the governorship. Later he served two more terms in the senate and was a reluctant candidate for the U.S. Senate. "I shall be ten times happier with my family in St. Peter than as Senator at Washington," he declared characteristically upon learning he had lost the Republican senatorial nomination in 1865. Four years later, he succumbed to typhoid fever at age 45.

Swift County, Minnesota was named after him in 1870.

In the early 1920s he met photographer Edward Weston by chance in Carmel, California and began making photographs as a hobby. He was earning a living as a stockbroker, a career he continued throughout his life. In 1932 he became a founding member of Group f/64 along with Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and several others. Later that year he showed nine prints (the same number as Weston) in the landmark Group f/64 show at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. While participating in the group, he was also able to collect many of the other photographers prints because of earnings as a stockbroker. Cunningham recalls that Swift bought all of the prints from the first show, which, if he paid the listed price for each photo, would have cost him a grand total of $845 for 80 prints.

After Group f/64 dissolved in 1935, Swift's interest in photography waned. He is not known to have exhibited again. When he died in 1962, his widow Florence Swift assembled his collection of photographs from members of Group f/64, sought additional donations from some of the original members of the group, and donated the entire collection to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.