biography
| sex:
| female
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| lived:
| (1898–1991)
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| biography:
| Photographer, born in Springfield, Ohio, USA. She studied at Ohio State University (1917–18) and briefly at Columbia University in New York City (1918), then took up drawing and sculpture in New York City (1918–21), Paris (1921–3, partially under Antoine Bourdelle), and Berlin (1923). Back in Paris she became an assistant (1923–5) to the photographer Man Ray, and later opened her own portrait studio (1926–9); one of her best-known portraits was of James Joyce. She discovered the work of Eugene Atget (1857–1927), the French photographer known for his documentary-style studies of cityscapes and activities in Paris and its suburbs, and on his death she acquired his archives and thereafter promoted his work. She returned to New York City and worked as an independent documentary and portrait photographer (1929–68), occasionally accepting commissions for Fortune and other magazines. Her best-known work is the series for the Federal Art Project (under the Works Progress Administration), a thorough and sensitive documentation of Manhattan during the 1930s, published as Changing New York (1939). In 1940 she turned to a new subject, capturing in photographs such scientific phenomena as magnetism, gravity, and motion; some of her work was used to illustrate high-school physics textbooks. She also taught photography at the New School for Social Research (1935–68). Her final major projects included a series on rural California and US Route 1 from Maine to Florida. In 1968 she settled in Maine where she worked until her death. |
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