Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographers 1885-1920, The

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Winter 2003 by Cohen, Tina

Book Reviews

Suzanne Flynt with a foreword by Naomi Rosenblum. The Allen Sisters: Pictorial Photographers 1885-1920. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield MA, 2002; distributed by University Press of New England. Hardcover, 192 pp., illustrated.

Frances and Mary Allen were sisters who spent their lives together in Deerfield, Massachusetts. They were born four years apart, 1854 and 1858 respectively, and died four days apart in 1941. They first chose to go into teaching and earned college degrees at the State Normal School in Westfield, Massachusetts in 1876. But over the next fifteen years, each of them lost their hearing and left their jobs in education to pursue a collaboration in photography as both a trade and an art. Most of their commercial work illustrates the rural landscape and family traditions of the Deerfield they knew so well.

The author of this first book about the Allen sisters is Suzanne Flynt, curator of Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield, located close by the Allen family homestead. Over the years, 8500 prints and glass plate negatives of the sisters have come to be housed there. Letters and journals of the sisters have been preserved as well. Flynt's book includes one hundred full-page plates of Allen photographs and a richly illustrated text documenting the women's lives and careers. She references historical context, providing background on the development of photography as an art form, the Arts and Craft Movement, and influences of American culture such as the idealization of rustic life. Rosenblum's informative introduction gives the reader Insight into other early twentieth-century women photographers pioneering the profession. Thus this book is helpful as a collation of a category too often neglected.

Many of the most compelling pictures by the Allens are portraits of Deerfield youngsters. The sisters elicited from these children a complete naturalness in their poses. They faced the camera, individually or in groups, with no self-consciousness or anxiety. These compositions are a tribute to the joys of rural life, especially the simplicity of childhood and feeling safe and loved. That the Allen sisters were so drawn to that theme suggests that in their own experience they had appreciated the support of family, the potential of childhood, and the traditions of life in the country. But Flynt does not romanticize her subjects as she surveys their lives. We see the role health concerns played, with ailments dogging both women. Tragically, Frances' vision deteriorated beginning in 1918. Flynt's research presents the Allens as intelligent, creative and well-respected women; and perhaps most centrally, as tenaciously hardworking. She does not pronounce them extraordinary or heroic, but it seems clear they led remarkable and exemplary lives. They supported themselves economically, keeping abreast of technological and artistic trends in their craft, and stayed at the center of an extensive family, never marrying or raising children of their own but integrally involved with the Allen offspring. They were knowledgeable about the issues of the urban working-class and immigrants through connections to social reformer Jane Addams. They traveled in America and abroad and had as close friends other well-educated, politically involved, articulate women.

Happily, we are left with questions as well as answers after reading this book. Flynt has given us an informed introduction to two artists and their intriguing, meditative work. Her book gives readers the opportunity to ponder the compositions and consider the creative process. An exhibit of Frances and Mary Allen's photographs, curated by Suzanne Flynt, will travel from Deerfield beginning in 2003, when it goes to Winterthur Museum (Delaware), followed by a spring 2004 show at Cornell University (New York) and a fall 2004 show at the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art. More information on the collection and exhibit can be found on the web-site www.deerfield-ma.org.

Tina Cohen

Archivist, Deerfield Academy

Deerfield, Massachusetts