Mary Devens

Mary Devens ( born May 17, 1857 in Ware, Massachusetts, † March 13, 1920 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American photographer. It is one of the most famous personalities among the Pictorialists and founding member of the Photo-Secession.

Life

Mary Devens was the daughter of Arthur Lithgow Devens and Agnes Howard White Devens. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, early discovered her interest in photography. She developed a great interest in reproductive technologies that made the photographer of discretion; particularly the Ozotyp process, the platinum pressure and the rubber Bichromatverfahren. The latter finally mastered so well that they taught it in 1896 in a course in Cambridge Photographic Club.

At the age of about 30 years, she met the Boston photographer F. Holland Day, who encouraged their further career. He produced five of her photographs to the London Photographic Salon of 1898 and introduced them to Alfred Stieglitz, the influential gallerists, founder of the American Photo-Secession and publisher of the magazine Camera Work. Day presented their work in his lecture Photography as Fine Art ( Photography as art) of 1900 in the Harvard Camera Club before and handed some of her prints in 1901 for the exhibition The New School of American Photography one. With Stieglitz Mary Devens entertained for many years an exchange of letters.

1900 - 1901 she traveled to Europe, where he met Edward Steichen and Robert Demachy. Demachy was impressed by their work so that he submitted several of them to be organized by Frances Benjamin Johnston exhibition in Paris, which showed exclusively works by photographers.

In 1902, she was inducted into the British Photographers group Linked Ring and was a founding member of the Photo-Secession. In the same year Stieglitz called it in an article in the Century Magazine one of the ten most influential pictorialist photographers of the United States. Your image The Ferry, Concarneau he published in 1904 in his magazine Camera Work.

Around this time her vision for an unknown reason started strong subside. After 1904 she showed only a few works in exhibitions. Stieglitz took in 1905 their work in the inaugural exhibition of the gallery 291. From the period after 1905 no photographic works more of her are known.