San Francisco Institute of Art. Beginning in 1914 and
over the next six years, Dahl-Wolfe studied drawing,
anatomy, design, and painting—subjects that would
form the foundation for her subsequent career in
photography. She learned the nuances of color
arrangement, which she later put to use in her work
with Kodachrome, one of the first commercially
available color films. Her studies with the figure
would also pay off, helping her to realize how the
body’s form behaves beneath clothes.
During the early twentieth century, California was
undergoing a cultural renaissance and San Francisco
was its epicenter. Besides a cadre of fellow Califor-
nian painters, Dahl-Wolfe was exposed to masters
such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse at the 1915
Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San
Francisco. A year later, she attended a performance
of the experimental Ballets Russes, featuring sets by
Picasso, Georges Braque, and Andre Derain, music
of Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, and chor-
eography by Vaslav Nijinsky. This fertile cross-dis-
ciplinary climate seemed to foster in Dahl-Wolfe an
appreciation of all art forms that would later man-
ifest itself in her work: she posed models in front of
avant-garde artworks and the leading visual, per-
forming, and literary artists—including Isamu
Noguchi, Jean Cocteau, and Colette—numbered
among her portrait sitters.
It was in 1921, however, that Dahl-Wolfe was first
introduced to the power of photography as an art
form.Shehadbeenworkingasanelectricsign
designer when a friend introduced her to Anne Brig-
man, a photographer whom had been a member of
Alfred Steiglitz’s Photo Secession. Dahl-Wolfe vis-
ited Brigman’s Oakland studio and was ‘‘bowled
over’’ by Brigman’s daring images of nude female
figures posed in harmony with nature. Subsequently,
Dahl-Wolfe and a few other art students made their
own ‘‘Anne Brigmans’’ using a Brownie box camera.
Inspired, Dahl-Wolfe practiced photography
whenever and wherever she could, even producing
a makeshift enlarger from a Ghiradelli chocolate box
as well as a darkroom light powered by a Ford
Model A car battery. She wandered the streets of
San Francisco with photojournalist Consuela
Kanaga, meeting other Bay Area photographers of
import, including Francis Bruguie`re, Dorothea
Lange, and Edward Weston. Some of her best train-
ing involved photographing store models from a
friend’s showroom. ‘‘Those girls were at least forty
years of age,’’ she wrote in her autobiographyA
Photographer’s Scrapbook(1984), ‘‘I practiced light-
ing on them, to get them to look chic, elegant,
beautiful, and yet natural—and that took work.’’
In 1923, Dahl-Wolfe left for New York to study
interior design and architecture, returning to work
in a California decorating firm. At Kanaga’s insis-
tence following her mother’s death, Dahl-Wolfe
left for an excursion abroad. While in North Af-
rica, she spotted Tennessee sculptor Meyer (Mike)
Wolfe from a train window and was immediately
enamored. The couple wed a year later and spent
time in the Great Smoky Mountains. Some of
Dahl-Wolfe’s most moving portraits were taken
during her time in Tennessee, includingMrs. Ram-
sey—Tennessee Mountain Woman(her first pub-
lished photograph in 1933 in Vanity Fair) and
sensitive images of African-Americans. Indeed,
her observant portraits of Nashville self-taught
sculptor William Edmondson helped him to secure
a 1937 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, as the first African-American to have a
solo show at that institution.
While other designers and photographers trans-
lated the machine aesthetic into fashion or sought
to capture Greek statues anew, Dahl-Wolfe pre-
ferred to show active women who paralleled the
increasing freedom they (and she) found in society;
what was dubbed the ‘‘New Woman’’ in public be-
came the ‘‘New Look’’ in fashion. Together with
her husband, Dahl-Wolfe created sets that she
wove into daring, sometimes surrealistic, composi-
tions. At the same time women were leaving the
home and entering into the workforce, Dahl-Wolfe
also pioneered the practice of photographing in
exotic locales, including Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil,
and Spain.
Throughout her career, Dahl-Wolfe repeatedly
turned down offers to work forVanity Fairand
Conde ́ Nast, accepting only Harper’s Bazaar’s
situations because it offered her the freedom to
work in her own studio. In fact, when a newly
hired art director peered through her viewfinder
to check on a shot in 1958, she promptly quit,
retiring altogether in 1960. All told, Harper’s
Bazaar published over 600 of her photographs,
plus the 86 that graced their covers. Nonetheless,
Dahl-Wolfe never believed photography to be
equal to painting. ‘‘Photography’s not a fine art,’’
she explained, ‘‘though you can use it to interpret
in artistic ways....Some people are just better at it
than others.’’ Dahl-Wolfe certainly was; she was
the living example of the daring forthright women
she captured with her camera. As Richard Avedon,
the leader of the next generation of fashion photo-
graphers, put it, ‘‘She was the bar we all measured
ourselves against.’’
LeslieK. BrownDAHL-WOLFE, LOUISE