About this Talk:

Imagine yourself back in the 1860s. You want to have your portrait taken and hope to avoid the city’s famous and expensive (male) photographers. So you seek out some of the female photographers that friends have mentioned: the studio of Matilda Moore on Canal Street, Mrs. Wolf in Brooklyn, and many others listed in the New York City Directory. This illustrated presentation recreates a visit to a few of the hundreds of largely unrecognized woman photographers who worked in New York and in cities across the United States in those early days of the medium. We follow each stage of the experience: arriving in the waiting room, being arranged in the posing chair, being “shot” by Matilda Moore operating the old box camera, obtaining the final images and inserting them in the family album.

About Katherine Manthorne:

Katherine Manthorne is on the Art History faculty of the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Prior to that she was Director of the Research Center at Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Researching American visual culture, she saw a need to highlight the role of women. Her book Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting (Routledge, available in paperback, 2020) featured women of the silent movie era. Two new books continue that focus including Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex (U. of California Press, 2020). More pertinent to this lecture is Women in the Dark: American Female Photographers 1850-1900 (Schiffer Publishing, 2020). She lives in New York City and the Champlain Valley with her husband James Lancel McElhinney.

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