The 1911 Salt Lake Temple Photographs

In September 1911, President Joseph F. Smith received eight unauthorized photographs of the Salt Lake Temple interior and a letter from Salt Lake theater promoter Max Florence. Florence said his associates controlled sixty-eight negatives and suggested that, unless the Church bought them, the images could be sold to magazines, postcard makers, or lecture bureaus. Smith refused. “I will make no bargain with thieves or traffickers in stolen goods,” he replied. Within days, the Church published seven of the photographs itself. What had begun as a secret photography project inside the temple had become a public contest over who would control the images and what the public would be allowed to see. [1], [3], [4]

How Bossard got inside

Gisbert Bossard was twenty-one years old when he illegally entered the Salt Lake Temple in order to take pictures of the interior of the building. He had emigrated to Utah after converting to Mormonism, had been baptized in 1907, and had received an Aaronic Priesthood ordination in 1908. By 1911, however, he had become alienated from church leadership. Contemporary reporting and later archival reconstruction describe him as angry at church officials while still claiming belief in the religion itself. [1], [9]

The most plausible route into the temple involved Gottlieb Wutherich, an assistant gardener on Temple Square. Bossard cultivated a friendship with him, and the Garden Room annex gave a person working with the grounds access to the building. Bossard later offered competing stories about exactly how he entered, including claims that he knew several routes, but Walgren judged Wutherich’s assistance to be the most credible explanation. [1]

The photographs appear to have been made in or around June 1911 while the Salt Lake Temple was undergoing its annual cleaning. Furniture covered with canvas appears in several views. Bossard told his father that he hid cameras under his coat and that he worked both during the day and at night, using flash for some exposures. The surviving photographs support the idea that more than one lighting method was used. [1], [8]

By early July, temple employees knew that interior photographs had been taken. W. F. Nauman, the head landscape gardener, alerted temple custodian Benjamin Goddard. Bossard and Wutherich were questioned and denied involvement. Wutherich was dismissed later that month. [1]

Bossard and Florence

The photographs become leverage

On September 1, Bossard, Wutherich, and Salt Lake theater promoter Max Florence incorporated a company intended to dispose of the photographs. Florence soon traveled to New York with the negatives. From there he mailed eight prints to Joseph F. Smith and claimed that the group controlled sixty-eight negatives showing nearly the entire building. He also explained that postcard makers, magazines, and lecture bureaus could provide a profitable market if the Church did not make an offer. [1]

“I will make no bargain with thieves or traffickers in stolen goods.”[1]

Smith’s reply was short and hostile. Florence’s letter had been written as an offer, but its structure was unmistakably coercive: purchase the material and keep it out of circulation, or the owners would seek other buyers and publicity. Later writers commonly describe the episode as blackmail. Florence himself continued to insist that he was pursuing a commercial opportunity [1], [4]

The Church publishes the pictures first

The Church’s first public move was surprisingly aggressive. On September 16, the Deseret Evening News printed seven of the eight photographs sent to Smith. The paper also reminded readers that hundreds of non-Latter-day Saints had toured the temple before its 1893 dedication and reproduced a previously published description of the building’s interior. The effect was to weaken the value of Florence’s threat by making some of the supposedly explosive material public at once. [1], [3]

Max Florence fails to scare the church.[3]

The newspaper response did more than publish the photographs. It attacked Florence personally, rehearsing his business failures and reputation as a saloon keeper. That was a familiar form of early twentieth-century newspaper combat, but it also shows that the Church’s response was not limited to a factual rebuttal. The dispute immediately became a fight over credibility and motive. [1]

Talmage and the authorized photographs

Within days, James E. Talmage proposed a more durable response. On September 18 he suggested that the Church publish its own account of temples with authorized interior photographs. On September 21 the First Presidency appointed him to prepare the booklet, and the assignment was confirmed in writing on September 22. By September 26, Talmage and photographer Ralph Savage were already working inside the Salt Lake Temple, and Savage’s photographs were sent for copyright registration by the end of the month. [1], [4]

This was more than damage control. It changed the information problem entirely. Florence’s leverage depended on the photographs being scarce and unauthorized. Once the Church could distribute clearer, official photographs accompanied by its own explanation of temple worship, the commercial value of Bossard’s collection fell sharply. Utah State University’s collection notes preserve a later Bossard letter acknowledging that The House of the Lord had ruined the value of the photographs. [6], [10]

To answer some of these questions, and to place within the reach of earnest inquirers authentic information…[5]

Talmage’s The House of the Lord (affiliate link) appeared in 1912. Its forty-six photographic plates included extensive authorized views of the Salt Lake Temple interior made by the C. R. Savage Company. The book did not disclose the ritual in the sensational form Florence hoped to sell. Instead, it explained temple doctrine and architecture on the Church’s terms while showing rooms that had previously been difficult for outsiders to see. [4], [5]

A second campaign in New York

At the same time, church representatives were working behind the scenes in New York. Ben E. Rich, who represented the Church in the eastern United States, maintained a close relationship with New York Times reporter Isaac K. Russell, a Utah-born Latter-day Saint. Later research into Russell’s papers shows that he obtained the Bossard-Florence story for the Times and persuaded the paper not to purchase or publish the photographs. Bossard and Florence did not know that the reporter covering them was cooperating with church representatives. [1], [7]

The Church also prepared a competing stereopticon lecture in New York. Correspondence cited by Walgren indicates that a slide company approached by Florence and Bossard instead produced a forty-slide program for the Church. This part of the response is less familiar than Talmage’s book, but it shows how thoroughly church leaders attempted to remove the commercial and publicity advantage from Florence’s hands. [1]

The Bijou show

Florence and Bossard continued anyway. By late October they had arranged a 105-slide lecture, combining Bossard’s temple photographs with newspaper pages, documents, publicity portraits, cartoons, and other anti-Mormon material. The title slide survives: Inside Views and Facts About the Mormon Temple. The University of Utah’s Walgren collection preserves the numbered slide sequence and identifies the New York firm A. J. Clapham Fine Arts as its manufacturer. [2], [9]

The show opened at the Bijou Theatre in New York on November 11. The Deseret News portrayed the opening as a failure and claimed that only eight people attended the first performance. Because the paper was an active participant in the dispute, its attendance figure should be read with that context in mind. What is clearer is that the exhibition did not become the national sensation Florence had hoped for, and the project soon lost momentum. [1]

The photographs outlasted the scandal

Bossard was excommunicated in October 1911. Within a few months he was trying to repair his relationship with the Church, and in January 1912 he offered to turn over the temple photographs without charge. His attempts to regain membership were unsuccessful during his lifetime. [1]

For most of the twentieth century, the majority of the photographs were effectively lost to researchers. In 1993 Kent Walgren located glass negatives and lantern slides at the Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Utah. A complete research set was later deposited at the University of Utah. Utah State University also holds a related Bossard/Florence collection containing about sixty glass lantern slides and fifty-six black-and-white images. [1], [6], [9]

How many photographs were there?

The number sixty-eight comes from Florence’s 1911 letter describing the negatives he and his associates controlled. It should not be confused with the later lecture set. The surviving stereopticon sequence contains more than one hundred numbered slides because it included newspaper pages, certificates, cartoons, studio publicity photographs, maps, and other material in addition to Bossard’s temple photographs. The archival collections also contain duplicate negatives and duplicate lantern-slide sets. [1], [2], [6]

That distinction explains why no single online gallery contains exactly sixty-eight unique temple photographs. The material reproduced below combines the files gathered during research for this article: individually extracted Bossard views identified through Walgren’s inventory, plus the Wikimedia Commons page scans derived from the published Dialogue article. Some of the page scans therefore repeat photographs that also appear as individual images. [1], [8], [11], [12]

What the 1911 episode changed

Bossard and Florence failed to control the story they created. Their photographs were intended to be valuable because the temple interior was inaccessible to the general public. The Church responded by making that scarcity less useful. It published some of the unauthorized images, commissioned its own professional photographs, developed a competing public presentation, and eventually issued an illustrated book explaining temples in an authorized voice. [1], [3], [4], [5]

There is an irony in the result. The unauthorized photographs did not expose a hidden architectural world for very long, because the Church soon released better photographs itself. But Bossard’s images remain historically valuable precisely because they came first. They preserve the Salt Lake Temple in the middle of its 1911 cleaning, with covered furniture, working spaces, murals, council rooms, stairways, and details that authorized photographers sometimes arranged differently before making their own exposures. [1], [8]