| Dates: | ? - 1915, 2 December | | Born: | US, NY | | Died: | US, NJ, Norwalk |
Preparing biographies Approved biography for Elizabeth Flint Wade
(Courtesy of Christian Peterson) |
Born in New York State, Elizabeth Flint Wade, became known around the turn of the twentieth century as both a writer on photography and a practitioner, collaborating to make pictures of children and/or women with fellow Buffalo pictorialist, Rose Clark.
Wade commenced her literary career in 1893, when the October issue of the American Amateur Photographer published her article "Artistic Pictures, Suggestions How to Make Them." Subsequently, she wrote poetry, short stories, and photographic instruction for a number of other periodicals. Among them were Everybody’s Magazine (1905 and 1906), Photographic Times (1894), and St. Nicholas (1907 and 1911), a children’s magazine. From 1901 to 1912, she provided a monthly column titled "The Round Robin Guild," which was full of humor, anecdotes, and photographic advice. It appeared in Photo Era, where she also served as an associate editor for six years.
She was active in Buffalo organizations, including the Scribbler’s Club, serving as its president, 1906-07, and the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, of which she was a founding member. In 1910, she judged the Buffalo Camera Club’s annual exhibition.
When Wade began working with Rose Clark in 1898, she, reportedly, took care of technique, while Clark provided the creative guidance. They first showed jointly at the March 1899 meeting of the Buffalo Society of Artists. In 1900, they were represented in salons in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. That October, Clark and Wade were privileged to present a show of their work at the Camera Club of New York. They won gold medals in 1901 at both the international exhibition in Turin, Italy, and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Alfred Stieglitz included their pictures in four Photo-Secession exhibitions (in 1902 at the National Arts Club, in 1904 at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute and Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and in 1910 at Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery), but they never became members of the group. Internationally, their work was seen in Leeds, Glasgow, Paris, and in Vienna in 1905, their last known appearance together.
Stieglitz featured a photogravure by them in the April 1901 issue of Camera Notes. Other publications that reproduced their work, between 1900 and 1907, included the Bulletin du Photo-Club de Paris, Brush and Pencil, Century Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and Photo Era. Clark and Wade seemed to have parted ways, photographically, in about 1910.
Wade, unlike Clark, apparently never exhibited photographs made solely by herself. She may, however, have provided the uncredited photographic illustrations for a book by her daughter, Blanche Elizabeth Wade. A Garden in Pink, published in 1905, includes twelve diminutive gravures, richly printed on tissue and tipped into the book. Granted, the landscape subjects are atypical of Wade’s work with Clark, but they are soft and evocative (like all the couple’s figure work) and may represent Wade’s only solo project with the camera.
In 1914, the widowed Elizabeth Flint Wade moved from Buffalo to Norwalk, Connecticut. She died there in her home on December 2, 1915, "at an advanced age," according to the New York Times.
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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