Margrethe Mather
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Margrethe Mather (b. Emma Caroline Youngren March 4, 1886 - d. December 25, 1939) was a photographer and painter who worked in transforming photography to a modern art, exploring form and light. In her youth she worked as a prostitute.
[edit] Career
She is commonly connected with Edward Weston. They were collaborators on many photographs and were close companions. His fame tends to overshadow Mather's considerable work from the period of collaboration and afterwards. Mather and Weston met in 1913 and worked together until he departed for Mexico in 1923 with Tina Modotti. Her work, both alone and in collaboration with 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). The work tended to be more experimental and simple than many others from the period.
In the 1930's she did work for the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, in which she took simple objects like combs and fans then arranged them in repetitive patterns.
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 1930s 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. [1]
