Axel Bahnsen

Axel Bahnsen (1907-1978) attended Antioch College and became a photographer in the 1920s as a student. By his early twenties he had earned an international reputation as a "pictorialist," the dominant photographic art form of the 1930s and 1940s. After 1930 the Photographic Society of America ranked him among the world's top 50 photographers.

While Bahnsen's distinguished artistic career is of great interest (367 award winning Bahnsen salon prints reside in the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library Archives of Wright State University), it is the commercial work that makes the collection of particular archival value. Photographs of Antioch faculty, staff, and incoming students, as well as the portraits of the studio's broad local clientele form an extraordinary historical record. Preservation of the massive collection is an ongoing project at Antiochiana.