Lucy Wallace Porter

Kathryn Brush (University of Western Ontario, Canada) has researched Porter's contribution to her husband's work and concluded by recognising her as a major photographer in her own right.

[1] Brush writes that following their marriage, Wallace Porter went on to produce 'more than two-thirds of the photographs published in his distinguished Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads.

[1] After leaving school, Porter went through two years (1897–1899) of specialised study at the Chicago Kindergarten College, an industry[vague] that was then considered to be very modern and progressive in America.

[1] After beginning her career in New York City schools, in 1906 she resumed her studies in Columbia's Teachers College which was then 'one of America's most forward-looking institutions of its type'.

Brush notes that she helped him to 'judge, compare, and envision links among sculptors and sculptures all over Europe, especially in the regions of present-day France, Spain, and Italy'.

[1] Scholars studying Porter's photographs have noted the direct, front-on view which aligned with the expectations of modern art scholars more than the perspectives of medieval viewers: In almost all cases, Lucy Porter's photographs proclaim their modernity by representing eleventh- and twelfth-century sculpture separated from its architectural contexts [...] Lucy's post-war photography among the ruins of northern France made her well versed in this modernist practice.

She produced a number of images that are striking in their design, artistic quality, and expressiveness, including her now "classic" photograph of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah carved on the trumeau at Moissac.

Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard's research center in Washington, D.C., had also made 2000 prints of photographs featuring Byzantine objects from the original nitrate negatives.

[6] An exhibition titled Camera Woman Along the Medieval Pilgrimage Roads: The Early 20th-Century Photography of Lucy Wallace Porter was held at Harvard University from August to November 2018.

[7] The exhibition was curated by Kathryn Brush (University of Western Ontario) and Joanna Bloom (Photographic Resources Librarian, Harvard Fine Arts Library).