Marriott C. Morris kept detailed notes about his photographic activities in pocket-sized journals. The Library Company’s holdings include eighteen of his journals (as well as one photographic journal kept by a member of a later generation of the Morris family). In these journals he recorded information such as the time and date he took the photograph, camera settings, the lighting conditions, and his honest appraisal of the finished image. Describing the image on the top left, for example, he wrote: “Motion of steamer jarred camera.” Similarly, he commented that the image below, shot with his new Scovill camera during an 1884 trip to West Point, New York, was a “very poor neg[ative].”

Marriott C. Morris’s journals at the Library Company span the years 1882 through 1917, with the most complete coverage existing between 1882 and 1896. While many of the images in the Library Company’s collection correspond to journal entries, there is not a one to one correlation. If a particular date is known for an image, that information has been included in the catalog record.