How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

I started this forum for any collecting hobby and it turned into my camera collecting and using forum. I use it mostly to keep a record of my photo adventures. Nobody but me seems to have photo adventures that visit here....but however. I have so many cameras now that I forget which is which and which ones work and which ones don't. If you have cameras and adventures you would be welcome to post here.

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How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

Post by DuncaninFrance » Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:00 pm

Duncan

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Re: How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

Post by Niner » Sun Mar 07, 2021 12:50 pm

I don't have a subscription to the Telegraph and can't see the story. :loco:
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Re: How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

Post by DuncaninFrance » Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:40 am

With a camera that granted her entry into a working man’s world of cowboys and miners, Nichols was as much a pioneer as those she pictured

By
Lucy Davies
7 March 2021 • 1:00pm

Because Bert Oldman was sweet on Lora Webb Nichols, he gave her a camera for her 16th birthday, in 1899. Oldman was one of several hundred miners drawn to Encampment, Wyoming – then just four ramshackle wooden buildings and a huddle of tents – after a rich copper strike in the nearby Sierra Madre in 1897; Nichols was his wife-to-be.

The first photographs she took with her new camera date from a month after her birthday: shots of her pony, Nibbs, and her cat, Yankee. By the time she died, in 1962, she had taken more than 16,000.

Until six years ago, these pictures, around 100 of which are published for the first time in a new book, had never left Encampment. Today, they are held at the ­University of Wyoming in Laramie, which lies about 80 miles east, though her diaries, which she began at 13 – the earliest entries scribbled on scraps of paper tablecloth and meat wrappers – and continued until her death in 1962, remain at Grand Encampment Museum, near her former home, which she christened “Heap-o-Livin’ ”, and where her friend, Nancy Anderson, lives still.

Anderson, who is now 84, met Nichols in 1956, when she moved to Wyoming to teach in a ranch school. “I was 18 and Lora 74, yet right from the beginning we had this marvellous rapport, so that it was as if I had always known her,” she tells me. “I was rather enamoured with the West, and to me, she embodied that myth.”

In the new book, Anderson recalls developing photographs at Nichols’s side, on a roll-top desk by the upstairs window at Heap-o-Livin’. The gabled house was little changed since it had been built in 1902, and Nichols took great comfort from it. Many of her pictures were taken in front of the living room’s ornate walnut fireplace.


From the very beginning, Nichols photographed almost daily, choosing to record inconsequential chores and rituals (washing, shovelling snow, braiding hair) rather than grand events. Even so, her frank, bold pictures capture the clean-cut thrill of pioneer life, of America’s hugeness and scope.

Born in 1883, in Boulder, Colorado, Nichols’s early years were filled with stories from the Civil and American Indian Wars. Her grandfather was the former captain of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry and, in an unfinished memoir, she describes how she and her elder siblings, Guy and Lizzie, would coax him into giving his Indian War whoop. “Of all the unearthly sounds I ever heard,” she wrote, “I never heard another that made my scalp prickle like that one.” In later life, it was not uncommon to hear her singing Civil War songs with her sons.

While Nichols’s diary entries from the early 1900s suggest a life of dancing and reading, she grasped early that she could turn her ­considerable love for photography into a means of supporting her young family. Around 1905, with two infants crawling about the house, she signed up for a correspondence course and built a darkroom, taking on work as both a photographer and a photo finisher. She called her good shots “dandies”.


When not in the darkroom, Nichols could be found out photographing on her stallion, Kodak. “There was a brief fury over a divided riding skirt,” says Anderson. “It was very unusual for a woman to be taking photographs during Lora’s early years. Wyoming was a working man’s world. Part of her attraction to the field was that photography allowed her entry into that world.”

It helped that Nichols could hold her own intellectually. “She had only a fourth-grade education, but her self-education never ended,” Anderson explains. “She and her sons would quote Dickens and Twain and the Romantic poets to each other. It was an intellectually challenging thing to be with her.”

By 1911, Nichols’s marriage to Oldman had run its course – but business was booming: “I keep most of my old customers and keep getting new ones,” she writes at the time, though, two years on, she is feeling the strain: “This business of being a ‘working girl’ and having no spare time is still a matter of wonderment to me.”


In 1914, she married her cousin, Guy, and had four further children (Ezra, Cliff, Frank and Dick) in the space of six years. Her new husband, though, was given to quitting jobs abruptly, and leaping from one moneymaking scheme to another. During this time, Nichols stopped photographing altogether. Nicole Jean Hill, co-author of the new book, points out that the enthusiasm of her previous diary entries was almost entirely replaced by “dark ponderings on the lack of meaning and purpose in her life”.

A short stay at her mother’s in 1925 seems to have rekindled Nichols’s fire. Later that year she bought a large clapboard building in Encampment and founded three business ventures: the Rocky Mountain Studio, a newspaper that she called The Encampment Echo, and, a few doors down, The Sugar Bowl, serving soda and ice cream.

As well as developing film, her studio lent cameras. When cowboys and young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps – a public works programme instituted in 1933 under Roosevelt’s New Deal – came through town, Nichols would press a Kodak box camera into their hands and ask them to return with pictures of the plains and mountains beyond Encampment. These images make up about a third of her archive.


Things came to an abrupt stop in 1935, with the death of Nichols’s mother, Sylvia. With less than a dollar in her pocket, she left Encampment for California, where she found well-paid work in a children’s home, and rose to become its director. Nichols told her friends that the move was for her health – she had a heart condition from rheumatic fever as a child – “but it was more than that”, says Anderson. “She was devastated. Her son Bert told me that Sylvia’s death drove her to the edge.”

Nichols eventually returned to Encampment in 1956. “She retained a gentle spirit,” says Anderson. “Her life had been impossibly difficult at times and yet anger, bitterness, regret were unknown to her. She had her library, her music, at times religion, but photography seemed her most constant panacea. Even in her final weeks, she was still making pictures, still welcoming visitors to the home.”

Encampment, Wyoming (FW Books, £40) is available from ideabooks.nl

One of the images from the article.
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Duncan

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch? -- W.C. Fields
"Many of those who enjoy freedom know little of its price."
You can't fix Stupid, but you can occasionally head it off before it hurts something.
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Re: How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

Post by Niner » Mon Mar 08, 2021 12:01 pm

A google search showed that PBS Wyoming produced a video on her. If you can see it outside of the US it's interesting on how large her photo collect was and, more importantly, how she could sense the difference between a snapshot of someone and a photo of someone that tells something about the person beyond circumstance.

https://www.pbs.org/video/wyoming-chron ... b-nichols/
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Re: How the West was shot – by photography pioneer Lora Webb Nichols

Post by Aughnanure » Mon Mar 08, 2021 4:21 pm

It comes up in Australia, loud and clear.
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