: On view at the Columbus Museum of Art January 15 to March 20,
"The Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographers 1885-1920" will
examine the pictures of Frances and Mary Allen who were once
heralded as among the "Foremost Women Photographers in America."
The Allen sisters began their photographic odyssey in the1880s
after progressive deafness cut short their vocations as teachers.
Working within the Arts and Crafts movement, the sisters created
idealized photographs of country scenes, allegorical figure
studies and landscapes in New England, Quebec, California and
Great Britain. This exhibition features 50 platinum prints and
reflects the Pictorial style championed most famously by Alfred
Stieglitz.
"The Allen Sisters" is organized by Memorial Hall Museum,
Deerfield, Mass.
The Allen sisters' photographs have literally been lost from view
for most of the last century. Few people today have seen the
depth and breadth of their work. Beginning in the 1880s, Frances
Stebbins Allen (1854-1941) and Mary Electa Allen (1858-1941) of
Deerfield started working as photographers. Working within social
and aesthetic reforms of the Arts and Crafts movement, they found
Old Deerfield's Eighteenth Century houses and furnishings offered
an ideal environment for their colonial re-creations, and their
family and neighbors further accommodated them by donning period
clothes to complete the pictures.
The Allens' earliest photographs appear in the 1890s. Realizing
the Colonial Revival interests in the past, book and magazine
publishers readily commissioned the Allen sisters' photographs of
children, or costumed figures and country life.
Although these romanticized visions of the past are the Allens'
best-known photographs, Frances and Mary Allen also mastered less
descriptive images with evocative compositions and use of light
in the Pictorial style advocated by eminent photographers such as
Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.
The Allens' artistic prints with contemplative images and
exquisite tonal values were included in exhibitions such as The
Washington Salon and Art Photographic Exhibition, 1896; Third
International Congress of Photography, Paris, 1900; Third
Philadelphia Photographic Salon, 1900; Canadian Pictorialist
Exhibition, Montreal, 1907; and Arts and Crafts 7th Annual
Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago, 1908.
Between 1896 and 1916, the flourishing of the Arts and Crafts
movement in Deerfield played a critical role in the Allen
sisters' careers. Summer exhibitions, national press coverage and
large numbers of tourists provided the Allens with an audience
not found in most rural towns. Connections to urban craft
communities in Boston and Chicago through Madeline Yale Wynne and
Ellen Gates Starr, as well as their friendship with the
photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in Washington, D.C.,
opened more doors for the Allen sisters.
The Allen sisters took their cameras with them on trips to Great
Britain in 1908 and California in 1916, where they created
majestic views quite unlike their New England landscapes. The
Californian landscapes, arguably their most artistic prints,
compose their last large body of work. Frances and Mary's active
work in photography stopped around 1920, the date of their last
catalog, but they continued to sell photographs from their front
parlor until 1935. For the last 11 years of her life, Frances was
blind as well as deaf. The Allen sisters died within four days of
each other in 1941.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book, The Allen Sisters:
Pictorial Photographer 1885-1920, written by Suzanne L.
Flynt, which won the 2002 SPNEA Book Prize, with a foreword by
Naomi Rosenblum, author of The History of Women
Photographers and A World History of Photography.
The Columbus Museum of Art is at 480 East Broad Street. For
information, 614-221-4848 or www.Columbus Museum.org.
