| Names: | | | Dates: | 1902, 8 May - 1973, November | | Born: | US, MO, Kirksville | | Died: | US, IL, Chicago |
Preparing biographies Approved biography for Don Loving
(Courtesy of Christian Peterson) |
Donald Loving was born on May 8, 1902, in Kirksville, Missouri, graduated from high school in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Northwestern University for a time. He apprenticed himself to a professional photographer for four months and then headed off to Chicago. He worked in various photographic studios, including Legaré-Loving in Winnetka. While there, he helped produce images of small children for the oversize picture book Busy Little Boys and Girls (1936), by Hazel Mercer Du Clés.
Around 1937, Loving opened his own studio (specializing in home portraiture), and joined both the Photographic Society of America (PSA) and Chicago’s Fort Dearborn Camera Club. In 1941, he was working as a photographer at the Marshall Field department store and during World War II at Bell and Howell. He wrote an article for the July 1944 issue ofPopular Photography on a photographic "jaunt" to the sand dunes of Saugatuck, Michigan, taken by Chicago members of the PSA. Three years later, he moved to Indianapolis, to continue work he had begun earlier for Ethicon Laboratories, a division of Johnson & Johnson.
Loving was known among pictorialists for his solarized nudes. A few of them were reproduced in the 1937 book Photographic Amusements by Frank R. Fraprie, and he wrote an article on the subject that appeared in American Photography in March 1943. He exhibited in international salons from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, his most prolific season being 1937-38, when thirty-one of his prints were accepted. He showed in Bombay, Budapest, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, Ottawa, and Rochester, and in January 1939 presented a one-person exhibition of portraits and pictorial work at the Art Center in Evanston, Illinois. He frequently spoke at camera clubs in the Chicago area and throughout the Midwest.
Loving was particularly active in the Photographic Society of America, the country’s major organization of pictorialists. He became an associate member in 1940 (APSA), and the next year served as chairman of the membership committee and cochair for its national convention in Chicago. He received fellowship status in 1942 (FPSA) and shortly thereafter was elected one of the group’s vice-presidents for two terms.
Still working for Ethicon, Loving returned to the Chicago area in 1960, settling in Highland Park. He retired in about 1965, but a few years later did some real estate work. He died in November 1973.
Christian A. Peterson Pictorial Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Christian A. Peterson: Privately printed, 2012)
This biography is courtesy and copyright of Christian Peterson and is included here with permission.
Date last updated: 1 June 2013.
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