Nationality United Kingdom | Died 21 April 1867 | |
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Occupation Photographer and assistant | ||
Jesse Mann (20 January 1805 – 21 April 1867) was the studio assistant of the Scottish pioneering photographers David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. She is "a strong candidate as the first Scottish woman photographer" and one of the first women anywhere to be involved in photography.
Career
Mann worked in the Hill & Adamson studio, Scotland's first photographic studio in "Rock House", on Calton Hill, Edinburgh for at least three years, until it closed after Adamson's untimely death. She went on to become a school housekeeper.
It is reasoned that a print in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, of the King of Saxony in 1844, taken at the studio whilst Hill and Adamson were unavailable, was taken by Mann. The portrait was known to have been taken by an assistant to Hill and Adamson. Tate curator Carol Jacobi says this demonstrates that "she must have been part of their skilful understanding of how you set up a photograph, so she is a real pioneer." A letter from the painter James Naysmith to Hill, written in 1845, praises Mann as "that most skillful and zealous of assistants".
Mann was included in the 2016 exhibition at Tate Britain, Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age.