Jane Reece (photographer)

[5] In December 1903 Reece returned from her North Carolina recuperation, and moved to Dayton, where she opened a large photographic studio (she called it "The Rembrandt," hoping the artistic name would help attract clients who wanted studio portraits - her strategy worked well, for within the next year she recorded that she made more than 600 photographic silhouette portraits).

In 1911 Reece traveled to California, where she made a small series of photographs that both define her artistic style and her life at the time.

The series, called The Soul in Bondage, interpreted the mythological story of Andromeda who was bound to rocks by the ocean and rescued by Perseus.

Dominque Vasseur, former curator at the Dayton Art Institute, said this series "symbolizes a psychological and emotional struggle of great proportion which one must assume to be autobiographical.

In 1919 Reece returned to visit friends in Los Angeles, and while there she photographed Edward Weston, Tina Modotti and her common-law husband Roubaix de l'Abrie Richey.

A photograph of Richey posing as Christ was titled Son of Man, while one of Modotti was called Have Drowned My Glory in a Shallow Cup; this has become one of her best known images.

The title comes from a line (from stanza 93) taken from Edward Fitzgerald's 1859 translation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, "Have drown'd my Glory in a shallow Cup/And sold my Reputation for a Song.

Photography historian Naomi Rosenblum said Reece "was a scavenger of styles, finding ideas both in portraiture and for salon work in Naturalists, Symbolist, and on occasion, Cubist art.

Due to her increased fame in the 1920s, Reece was engaged to take portraits of many artists and celebrities of the time, including Count and Countess Ilya Tolstoy, Jan Kubelik, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Herman Sachs, Robert Frost, Roland Hayes and Helen Keller.

By the 1950s, however, pictorialism had largely fallen out of favor in the photography world, and Reece, finding no further use for her archives, donated over 400 photographs to the Dayton Art Institute.

[16] Since Reece's death, her work has been rediscovered, and she is now recognized for her strong artistic vision and her leadership in photography during a changing time in the medium's history.