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Emma Caroline Youngren was born to a Mormon family in Utah on March 4th, 1886. However, this daughter of Gabriel Youngren and Ane Sophie Laurentzen was not destined to keep her given name, or to stay long in her native Salt Lake City. By the time that she was twenty years old Emma Caroline had changed her name to Margrethe Mather and was on her way to California to pursue a life as a photographer. Her work, both alone and in collaboration with celebrated photographer Edward Weston, set the tone for the shift from pictorialism (softly focused images giving the photograph a romantic quality) to modernity (exploration in form and light).
Margrethe Mather first met Edward Weston in the autumn of 1913 when she visited his photography studio in Tropica, California. The two became fast friends and with a few other colleagues formed the “Camera Pictorialists of Los Angeles” in 1914. This organization grew to be one of the most important camera clubs in the country. However, only two years later Mather and Weston left the club to work alone. At this time Mather and Weston were both working in a traditional pictorialist style. Mather posed (often in character) for Weston in many of his early photographs. In 1916, Mather’s photography began to show hints of her experimental interest in composition, light and form. The magazine American Photography published a photograph by Mather titled The Stairway, which with its dramatic use of shadow and light was Mather’s most sophisticated work to date.
In the studio, Mather used a view camera with 8x10 film because she liked to “see everything clearly (Justema, 12).” While photographing outdoors, Mather preferred a Graflex with 4x5 film. Her photographs were platinum/palladium. Acclaimed photographer Imogen Cunningham said of Mather “She expresses a charming self in her work and a niceness in printing which just makes me grieve that I cannot have a piece of raw platinum in my hand…. (Jasud, 55).”
In 1918, Mather made the Moon Kwan photographs, a series of images of the Chinese poet, Moon Kwan. The series were striking in their composition and completely unconventional at a time when pictorialist photographs were still the favor of the public and critics alike. One reviewer’s reaction to the Moon Kwan series was “The appreciation of this form of composition (however), is at present with the writer purely an intellectual one, like that with some newer forms in music and painting. Presumably the next generation will accept arrangements like this instinctively. Such is the way in which art grows (Warren, 22).”
Mather continued to push the limits of art as she experimented and perfected her style. In 1920, Mather produced many exceptional photographs. She made a series of beautifully composed photographs of the Danish-born actor Otto Matiesen dressed as the French pantomime character Pierrot. She also won praise from her colleagues for her portrait of Reginald Pole portraying Othello and a haunting photograph of a woman turned with her back to the camera entitled Judith (or Portriat of a Lady).
In 1921, Mather and Weston created a formal partnership. They photographed, printed and exhibited joint portraits of Carl Sandburg (a publisher), Max Eastman (an author), Gjura Stojana (a dancer) and the Marion Morgan Dance troupe. In 1923, Weston took a series of nude photographs of Mather at Redondo Beach that won praise from artists all over the world for their explicit use of light and sharp focus.
After the Redondo Beach series was taken, Weston left for Mexico and Mather continued to work alone. She found a dear friend and model in a young man named William Justema, who would go on to write a memoir about her after her death. Mather’s last piece of substantial work was in the early nineteen-thirties for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. She arranged objects such as seashells, chains and combs in repetitive patterns to be used as prototypes for fabric designs.
In 1939, Mather was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She died that same year on December 25th, she was 66 years old. Mather died without ever knowing she would be credited in history as not only a model and source of inspiration for Edward Weston, but also as an established pictorialist, and a pioneering modernist.
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