2005 SPE Scholarship Award Recipients

Sarah Caylor, SPE Scholarship Award recipient

Sarah Caylor is a graduate student at Duke University. She submitted an art history paper for review.

Marginalia: The Treatment of the Photography of Lily E. White, Sarah Hall Ladd and Maud Ainsworth
Taken between 1898 and 1908, the imagery of Portland-area photographers Lily E. White, Sarah Hall Ladd and Maud Ainsworth adopted an international aesthetic, a Pictorial approach to photography intended to evoke a mood redolent with Symbolist, poetic connotations. But these photographers also sought to describe a specific locale, to conjure a sense of geography and, perhaps, history, that is particular to Oregon and the Columbia River Gorge. It is this negotiation – between artistic influences and the specificity of place – that makes their work so distinctive, but it is also what makes it difficult to locate within the confines of current photo-history discourse.

(Image: Lily E. White, Twilight on the Columbia, ea 1902)

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