Rosalie “Rollie” McKenna is best known for her work as an architectural and portrait photographer who documented the modernization of New York City and some of the most popular literary minds of the mid-20th Century. A 1940 graduate of the private college in Poughkeepsie, McKenna also took extensive pictures of the campus’ historic buildings.
Mary-Kay Lombino and Jessica Brier are the curators behind the new exhibit at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, called “Making a Life in Photography.” They believe it’s McKenna’s first career-spanning exhibition — which is surprising, because Brier says McKenna is the most represented individual photographer in the Loeb’s collection.
“That really sent us down the rabbit hole of finding out who this person was, and finding that she had this unbelievably rich and interesting career, [she was] extremely prolific, and [had] a huge archive that was basically untouched," adds Brier.
McKenna, who died at age 84 in 2003, carved out a career as a freelance photographer at a time when women of her class were still largely expected to get married and stay at home. In addition to Vassar, McKenna boasted a long list of clients that included “Vogue,” “Vanity Fair,” “Fortune,” and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. While she did marry early in her career, the extremely short-lived union primarily benefitted McKenna by giving her an alias: she would still occasionally go by “Mrs. McKenna” to lend herself a certain legitimacy with customers who might have refrained from hiring a single queer woman.
Lombino says McKenna launched her business by taking photos for Vassar Professor Richard Kroutheimer, who needed pictures for his architecture students to reference.
“It’s interesting to think that he asked her to make a certain kind of photograph, and then she takes that on as her style," Lombino notes. "You can see it in two different ways: was Richard Kroutheimer using this young person’s talent, or was she using his cache and his influence in the world to get her work out there? And I would say both.”
McKenna’s style was straightforward — after all, her work was literally meant to be studied. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. For example, while another photographer might walk up to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and capture its famous dome from the ground-up, McKenna scaled the cathedral complex until she found the perfect floor and angle to depict the dome head-on and up-close.
Her portraits shared a similar honesty. Lombino says McKenna found family in a network of friends that included Vassar alum Elizabeth Bishop, fellow photographer Laura Gilpin, and famous poets like Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas. She profiled each of them, and instead of posing her subjects in a manipulated studio, she followed them into their spaces and pulled from a list of tricks to make them feel relaxed.
“Someone described her as fiddling with her camera as though she didn’t know how to work it. And then the person who was being photographed would get a little concerned, try to help her with this issue, and she would realize, ‘Oh, they’re not posing anymore.’ And that’s when she would take their photograph," Lombino explains. "So you’ll see them in much more relaxed states.”
McKenna’s portrait series of Thomas, captured shortly before his death in 1953, would become one of her most well-known works. She also contributed to MoMA’s first photography showcase of Latin American architecture in 1955, and photographed Helen Keller alongside her interpreter and companion, Polly Thompson, in 1958.
Brier suspects McKenna’s time with Keller and Thompson, and with couples like Elizabeth Bishop and Lota De Macedo Soares, was transformational: she saw how two women could live together and support one another. A few years later, McKenna met her longtime partner, Patricia Willson, and moved to Stonington, Connecticut, where the pair tore down the fence between their neighboring houses and raised three of Willson’s four children.
Despite an extensive resume, Brier says McKenna received little recognition for her work. Her photographs were often copied and printed without credit, and even when she contributed to a large exhibition, like the MoMA showcase, the subjects were the star of the show. However, Lombino says McKenna preserved her own legacy. In addition to keeping extensive records and copies of her work, McKenna published an autobiography called “A Life in Photography” in 1991. Brier and Lombino say they drew heavily from the book for the exhibit.
“We read every single one of her diaries, and she kept diaries for years," Brier smiles. "She knew that, yeah, no one else was going to do this work. She was a woman who made a career in the 1950s — no one else was going to do this for her. And so she made sure that it was gonna happen, and she made sure that a project like this could happen after her lifetime, which is an incredible thing."
“Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna” runs through June 2.
