2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageThe Lora Webb Nichols Photography Archive
Saturday, September 22 - 2:00PM to 2:40PM
The proposed presentation is to examine the historical relevance of and share highlights from the photography archive of a Wyoming frontierswoman, entrepreneur, homemaker and image-maker. Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962) created and collected a vast archive of approximately 24,000 negatives over the course of her lifetime in the south-central Wyoming mining town of Encampment. Nichols received her first camera in 1899 at the age of 16, coinciding with the rise of the region's copper mining boom. In addition to the personal imagery, the young Nichols photographed miners, industrial infrastructure, natural and industrial landscapes and a small town's adjustment to a sudden, but ultimately fleeting, population increase. As early as 1906, Nichols was working for hire as a photographer for industrial documentation and family portraits, developing and printing from a darkroom she fashioned in the home she shared with her husband and their children. In 1925, Nichols established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photofinishing service, to help support her family. Her commercial studio was a focal point of the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
The presentation will provide the chronology of the resurfacing of Nichols' archive of images and writings, and an overview of Nichols' complicated biography. Lora's life within the context of the region's mining history and the aspects of Lora's images that make it a distinctive addition to history of photography will be explored. Important passages from Lora Webb Nichols' diaries will be included, which provide context for the places and people the photographs document, as well as personal reflections on how her role as picture-maker defined her experience on the Wyoming frontier. Drawing connections between the work of German photographer August Sander, and FSA photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, the presentation posits Nichols within scope of image-makers that balanced the historical significance of subject matter with the everyday lived experience of the working class.
The Lora Webb Nichols' negatives were recently donated by the Nichols' family to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. The photographs in their entirety are schedule to be accessible online in early 2020.
Since 2013, Nicole Jean Hill has helped the Nichols' family preserve the Lora Webb Nichols archive. Hill received a BFA in photography from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hill's photographs have been exhibited throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia, including Gallery 44 in Toronto, the Australia Centre for Photography in Sydney, and the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon. She is currently a Professor of Art at Humboldt State University where she teaches photography and the history of photography.
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