13 Facts About Margrethe Mather

Margrethe Mather was one of the best known female photographers of the early 20th century.

Margrethe Mather lived a mostly uncompromising lifestyle in Los Angeles that alternated between her photography and the creative Hollywood community of the 1920s and 1930s.

Margrethe Mather's parents were Danish immigrants who had been converted to the Mormon faith by a missionary in Denmark.

Margrethe Mather's mother died while giving birth to the fourth child in 1889.

When she was born, Margrethe Mather was named Emma Caroline Youngreen.

In 1906 Margrethe Mather moved to San Francisco, perhaps in response to calls for aid after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Margrethe Mather never explained the reason for her name change to anyone, although photography historian Beth Gates Warren speculated that it might have been due to distancing herself from an affair with a physician that began in Salt Lake City.

In 1912 Margrethe Mather moved to Los Angeles, where, according to her friend Billy Justema, she made a living primarily as a prostitute for several years.

Margrethe Mather met photographer Edward Weston in the autumn of 1913 when she went to his studio in nearby Tropico.

Margrethe Mather undertook a series of portraits for the avant-garde magazine The Little Review, including poet Alfred Kreymborg and heiress Aline Barnsdall.

Weston had first experimented with shadows as a dramatic design element in his portrait of Eugene Hutchinson in 1916, but Margrethe Mather formalized this approach into a continuing stylistic element in her portraits for many years after that.

Margrethe Mather mounted a collection of significant new photos for the exhibition, based on a theme of strong patterns made up of repeated combinations of common objects like combs, fans, shells, clocks and chains.

Lipton ran an antiques shop, and Margrethe Mather worked part-time for him while pursuing her photography.