The Witch of Kodakery: The Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins, 1869-1956 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780874221480)

At the dawn of the 1900s, photography--then promoted by the Eastman Kodak Company as "Kodakery"--was sweeping the country as a popular hobby and gaining recognition as an art form. Witch of Kodakery: The Photography of Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956), by Carole Glauber, is the richly illustrated biography of a pioneering Northwest photographic artist.

Born in Salem, Oregon, Myra Albert Wiggins began her career in 1891 at the Art Students League in New York City. After returning to the Pacific Northwest, she earned a national reputation for her eloquent pictorial photographs, which appeared in numerous publications and exhibits across the U.S. and Europe. Her admission in 1903 to the Photo-Secession, a group founded by Alfred Stieglitz to promote photography as an art form, reinforced her stature and linked her with the photographic avant-garde.

Later in life Wiggins--a woman of great artistic talent, energy, and acumen for self-promotion--became a recognized painter, poet, public speaker, and arts activist, and she was a founding member of the still-active Women Painters of Washington. Her life spanned the long era from stagecoach to commercial airlines, and she was equally comfortable exploring Oregon's largely unknown Mt. Jefferson wilderness, the Tomb of the Kings in Jerusalem, or sipping tea at the White House. "In many ways," writes Glauber in the book's preface, "she embodied the emergence of the 'New Woman, ' independent, energetic, and ambitious, as was the 'Kodak Girl, ' created and promoted by the Eastman Kodak Company."

The Witch of Kodakery features reproductions of more than 70 original photographs and a foreword by Terry Toedtemeier, curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum.