Emilie V. Clarkson
A forgotten photographer
The more time I spend reading old photographic literature, the more things I unearth that seem to have been forgotten from modern recollections of photography's history. One of the most obvious omissions I've noticed is the great number of women were active in American photographic clubs in the late 19th century, and how well regarded as photographers some of them were at the time.
Recently the frontispiece of the 1893 American Annual of Photography caught my attention. The photogravure image, titled "Focusing," actually made me laugh out loud, but it also left me wondering quite what the photographer intended. It was attributed to Emilie V. Clarkson; someone who I'd never heard of before. It took some digging, but what I learned was that Clarkson had a very productive decade creating photographic work throughout the 1890s. She exhibited all over the world, screened lantern slides of her work at major clubs across the eastern US, and received glowing reviews and praise from the photographic journals. In 1894 The American Amateur Photographer included her on their list of "Prominent Amateur Photographers" along with one of her contemporaries in the NY photography scene, Alfred Stieglitz.
In her photograph “Focusing” the photographer pictured—a man who is looping his arm around the shoulder of the lady as he shows her the focusing screen of his camera—wears a striped prison shirt and cap. As heavy-handed as it is, I can only guess the prison attire is meant to symbolize the pictured photographer's morally questionable intentions in the scenario. I think it's meant to be a kind of humorous, but biting, commentary on Emilie Clarkson's male photographer colleagues. Her subject here represents the original "guy with camera" archetype.
What's also funny is how the publisher describes the image (note the faint outline of a bell added under its bottom left corner):
The frontispiece this year, as heretofore, is a photogravure. It is from a negative by Miss Emily V. Clarkson, a well-known and highly skilled lady amateur photographer. Miss Clarkson has exhibited a great many photographs of the highest order of technical and artistic merit, both in exhibitions and in photographic periodicals; but no one, we venture to say, of a higher order than the illustration which serves as frontispiece to this volume.
The picture requires no word of explanation; it tells its own story remarkably well. The Wedding Bells, which the engraver has added as his marginal remarque, are an appropriate suggestion of the sequel to this picture.
—1893 American Annual of Photography, p.253.
Maybe it's just my mistaken interpretation, but I think the engraver either missed the point with their addition, or was trying to deliberately muddle Clarkson’s intentions.
After 1901, the year Clarkson married William Moore, she unfortunately seems to have stopped making photographs.
There aren't many examples of her work online apart from the images that were published in the journals, but St. Lawrence University in Clarkson's hometown of Potsdam, NY has a collection of 470 of her glass lantern slides from the 1890s.
Of the handful of her images I was able to find online, I've included a few of my favorites below.
In in my research I also found a biographical sketch from the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts written by Christian A. Peterson in 2012. I’ve included it here:
Emilie Clarkson Moore: A Lady Photographer
Emilie Clarkson began taking photographs in 1888, and she graduated from the Chautauqua School of Photography in 1890. That same year, she joined the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York (SAPNY). She started exhibiting her images the following year. In 1893, she launched solo screenings of her work in New York, Brooklyn and Rochester, and she won prizes for her slides from SAPNY and at competitions run by Amateur Photographer magazine. Clarkson was active in producing lantern slides, and was equally proficient at landscapes, portraits and genre scenes.
In 1894, two prominent photography periodicals included articles about Clarkson and her work. The American Amateur Photographer included her in its list of "Prominent Amateur Photographers." Alfred Stieglitz was also on the list that year. In August 1894, the Photographic Times ran a three-page article on Clarkson as part of its "Distinguished Photographers of Today" series.
Clarkson became the only female founding member of the Camera Club of New York in 1896. In 1898, the Camera Club's quarterly, Camera Notes featured a full-page photogravure of her image, "Spinning" and more images were included in two portfolios of photogravures produced by the Camera Club in 1899 and 1901.
She exhibited her work worldwide, including salons in London, Paris, Milan and Calcutta. Her last known display was part of the 1901 Glasgow International Exhibition.
Source: Christian A. Peterson. Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Privately Published, 2012.
Nice work. I wasn't aware of her before.
Awesome stuff! Hadn't seen these images before, but they're really a treat. Feel quite modern for the time.