Background
Jimmy Hare was born James H. Hare on October 3, 1856 in London, England. He was one of two children and the only son of George Hare and Margaret (Ball) Hare.
Jimmy Hare was born James H. Hare on October 3, 1856 in London, England. He was one of two children and the only son of George Hare and Margaret (Ball) Hare.
A poor student, Hare briefly attended St. John College, London (1870-1871).
Hare went to work for his father, a manufacturer of handmade cameras that were highly regarded for their quality. When the elder Hare, a Yorkshire Quaker, stubbornly resisted new developments in photography, for example, the transition from wet to dry plates, James joined another firm.
At the same time he began taking pictures as a hobby. He soon made his hobby a profession by furnishing photographs of public gatherings and sporting events for use in drawing illustrations for periodicals, in the days before the adoption of the halftone process.
The heavy cameras of the period were mounted on tripods, but Hare, in trying to photograph a balloon ascension, lifted his camera as the craft moved upward, pointed it over the heads of the crowd, and snapped the shutter. He obtained a clear picture and thereafter was a devotee of the hand-held camera.
Hare was quick to adopt American photographic innovations - the dry plate, cut film made by spreading emulsion on celluloid, the film pack on a paper-covered roll, and small cameras - and in 1889, he went to the United States to accept a position as technical advisor to a New York City firm. He quit after a year to produce his own handmade, quality cameras. Only moderately successful, he then became a photographer for the Illustrated American and a free-lance contributor to newspapers. Early in February 1898 the offices of the Illustrated American were destroyed by fire and Hare was out of a job.
Soon afterward, when the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, Hare rushed to the office of Collier's Weekly and persuaded Robert J. Collier to send him to Cuba to take pictures. The Spanish-American War launched Hare on a new career in which he gained fame as one of the most daring and resourceful of battlefield news photographers. With the New York World's famous correspondent Sylvester Scovel, Hare made a trip into the interior of Cuba to interview the rebel leader Gen. M ximo Gómez.
He later covered events leading up to the siege of Santiago and photographed the battles of San Juan Hill and El Caney. In the early years of the twentieth century, Collier's sent Hare to report revolutions in Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, and Mexico, the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and the Balkan wars of 1912-1913.
When Collier's refused to send Hare to Europe in 1914 to report World War I, he went to work for Leslie's Weekly. Over the next several years he traveled throughout Europe covering the war in France, Italy, Greece, and Russia. A small, wiry man, Hare withstood the rigors of warfare better than more robust men. No risk was too great when he was seeking a picture of battle action. In the Russo-Japanese War, told by officials to stay clear of the fighting, he replied: "I might as well set my camera up on Broadway and point it toward Manchuria as to be five miles from a fight. " Although he knew no foreign language, he was understood almost everywhere because of his mastery of pantomime and his sublime impudence.
Intrigued by aviation since his days in England, he ascended in a balloon in 1906 and took the first aerial photographs of New York City. Two years later he snapped the first picture of an airplane in flight, that of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1914, when United States Marines occupied Veracruz, Mexico, Hare flew in the two rattletrap aircraft used for reconnaissance, and during World War I in France he was taken aloft by a French fighter pilot. After the war, in 1919, he covered the first transatlantic flight made by the United States Navy from Newfoundland. Leslie's Weekly ceased publication in 1922, and Hare, now sixty-five, thereafter devoted himself to giving lectures, making guest appearances on radio, and contributing occasional articles and photographs to magazines.
Hare died of heart disease at the home of a daughter in Teaneck, New Jersey, and was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Brooklyn.
In religion Hare was an Episcopalian.
So often was Hare on hand to photograph revolution and strife that the noted correspondent Richard Harding Davis said of him, "No war is official until Jimmy Hare is there to cover it. "
On August 2, 1879, Hare married a Yorkshire girl, Ellen Crapper. They had five children: George James, Harry, Margaret Ellen, Dorothy, and Ruth Kate.
