Born and educated in San Francisco, Louise Dahl-Wolfe would later work as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar from 1936 through 1958. I recently came upon an extremely detailed account of her life and San Francisco beginnings on from this website (originally published in April 2010):
“Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895 – 1989) was born in San Francisco. Aspiring to a career as a painter, she attended the California School of Design (now the San Francisco Art Institute). . . . After completing her studies, Dahl-Wolfe designed electric signs from 1921 to 1923; in 1924 she began working for a leading decorator. In 1921 she was invited to the studio of photographer Anne Brigman; this meeting prompted her to buy her first camera, an Eastman bellows camera with a reflector made from a Ghirardelli chocolate box. She used her mother as the subject of her first pictures. Early photographic adventures included taking shots of herself and some friends nude on a beach, using the soft-focus style of her mentor. After Dahl-Wolfe befriended another San Francisco photographer, Consuela Kanaga, who taught her to use a 314-by-414-inch Thorn-ton-Pickard English reflex camera with a Verito soft-focus lens, the two traveled together to Europe in 1927. . . .
Dahl-Wolfe returned to San Francisco in 1928 and began taking commercial black-and-white photographs. . . . After moving with her husband to New York, Dahl-Wolfe was introduced to Frank Crowninshield, then editor of Vanity Fair, who decided to publish her work. . . . This success led to the publication of her first black-and-white fashion work in Harper’s Bazaar in 1936 and her first color work a year later.”
Read the full article here.
Those interested in researching Dahl-Wolfe’s work should check the Louise Dahl-Wolfe Collection at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona in Tucson and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
