Nationality American Occupation Photographer, author | Name Nell Dorr | |
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Full Name Virginia Nell Becker Children Virginia (Win), Elizabeth (Betty or Bets), and Barbara (Barby) Died November 15, 1988, Litchfield, Connecticut, United States | ||
Nell dorr mother and child photography
Nell (Becker) Dorr (August 27, 1893 – November 15, 1988) was an American photographer.
Contents
- Nell dorr mother and child photography
- Life and work
- Photography
- Cinema
- Exhibitions
- Collections
- Books
- Articles
- References
Life and work
Dorr was born Virginia Nell Becker on August 27, 1893 in Cleveland Ohio, to Minnie and John Jacob Becker, a photographer. From 1900 the family lived in Massillon, Ohio. Dorr was introduced to photography by her father, John Jacob Becker, a graduate of the Art Institute of Cincinnati, who ran a commercial photography business. It was in Massillon that Dorr made her first successful portrait; of actress Lillian Gish, who spent her summers in the town. The two became lifelong friends.
She married at seventeen to Thomas Koons in 1910 and moved to Florida in 1923 with her family of three girls Virginia (Win), Elizabeth (Betty or Bets), and Barbara (Barby). After her husband’s real estate speculation failed in the 1926 economic collapse, Nell opened her own portrait studio to support the family. Gondolier a local society magazine, was one of her clients.
Meanwhile, she also made personal work in a Pictorialist style of still life, nudes and child subjects, on day trips to the Florida Keys. These were to become the material for her first two books Mangroves and In a Blue Moon.
"... far away, peaceful places where you can throw off your fears and inhibitions, and bathe in the sea and the sun as you please" – In a Blue Moon, Nell Dorr 1939She divorced her husband in 1931 and moved to New York. There she met up with her childhood friend and confidante, movie actress Lillian Gish, and also was introduced to Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz (for whom she baked bread) whose admiration of her individual style gained her useful attention and patronage. She set up her studio in Gish’s home at East 59th Street in 1932 to photograph high society. Venturing into photo murals, Dorr exhibited at Marie Sterner International Gallery. She also showed in 1934, Photographic Etudes at Grand Central Art Galleries, then, in both New York (at the Delphic Gallery) and Paris, Portraits of Famous Men, including photographs of poet Carl Sandberg, and John Van Nostrand Dorr, a prominent scientist and inventor, whom she married.
During the Second World War John Dorr and her sons-in-law were on active duty and she took up residence in New Hampshire with daughters and grandchildren, whom she continued to photograph, using the resultant images in her book Mother and Child the exhibition and publication of which was prompted by her grief over the death of her daughter Elizabeth. The Dorr Foundation funded the printing of the book, donating nearly 1,000 copies to the U.S. Information Agency which regarded it as promoting American family values. Among the exhibitions of her work were MoMA's 1955 world-touring The Family of Man exhibition, also supported by the U.S.I.A., for which four of her images were selected by Edward Steichen.
From the late forties onwards Dorr took up filmmaking, continued exhibiting, and published further books of her work. Her husband John died in 1962.
Dorr died in Litchfield, Connecticut, November 15, 1988.
Photography
Dorr experimented with a range of photographic techniques including the photogram (as used in ‘’In a Blue Moon’’ for the moon images, and some of her murals), macrophotography especially of flowers, mural printing, negative retouching, toning and manipulation, and alternative printing processes. Her work spanned "fanciful scenes of children posed as fairies and wood nymphs amid the scenery of the Florida Keys and Everglades. And there are photograms, Dorr’s later experimental work created without cameras, sometimes with only the light of a kitchen match, which she referred to as her "abstracts."
Cinema
Dorr's first venture into filmmaking was in 1940-1947 when she made a 16mm film of the modernist Kurt Graff Ballet Company titled The Singing Earth. In 1949 she made another 16–mm sound film, Through the Dorr Way (on her husband's Dorr–Oliver Company), then The Golden Key: Enter the Fantasy World of Tasha Tudor (1957) made in collaboration with the children's book illustrator Tasha Tudor.
Exhibitions
Posthumous: