harvardfineartslib: In honor of Photographer Appreciation Month!Lucy Wallace Porter (1876-1962) beca

harvardfineartslib:

In honor of Photographer Appreciation Month!

Lucy Wallace Porter (1876-1962) became one of the most influential women photographers in the field of art history during the twentieth century. She was the wife of Harvard medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933). Although her husband has traditionally been celebrated as a legendary scholar and photographer, recent research shows that Lucy Porter deserves most of the credit for the latter. Her work with a large-format camera began during their honeymoon year in 1912-1913.

Lucy Porter quickly mastered the mechanics of large-format photography, becoming the more proficient photographer of the two. During 1918-1919 she and her husband traveled in the régions dévastées of northern France, compiling inventories of damaged art works for the Commission des Monuments Historiques. While documenting ruined medieval churches she became chief photographer, “womanning” their two cameras, one of which was a smaller apparatus that could be hand-held or used with a tripod. Lucy continued in this role for her husband’s foundational Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads (1 volume of text, 9 portfolio volumes, Boston, 1923), producing more than two-thirds of the photographs herself.

This collection of 1,500+ unbound photographic reproductions gave medieval sculptures dynamic afterlives, contributing significantly to the formation of the art historical canon during the twentieth century. Lucy Porter also made the majority of the images published in her husband’s Spanish Romanesque Sculpture (2 vols., Florence and New York, 1928). Our picture of Porter the scholar becomes very different if we realize that he often saw Romanesque sculpture through the eyes of his wife.

Lucy Porter had a sophisticated grasp of the art of composition and many of the images she produced display great originality in their design. She had studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College with Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922), one of America’s most prominent art educators of the era and the teacher of artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986).

In this image, Lucy Porter can be seen operating a large-format view camera at the bottom left.

Image:
Church of San Pedro la Rúa, Estella (Navarra), cloister, detail of capital showing the Adoration of the Magi.