This exhibition is the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna (1918–2003). After graduating from Vassar College in 1940, McKenna worked independently as a sought-after architectural and portrait photographer, making unique yet underrecognized contributions to American modernism and documentary photography. During her lifetime, McKenna’s work was published in numerous books and magazines including Fortune, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and Vogue. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1955 landmark exhibition Latin American Architecture Since 1945 featured her architectural photographs. She made iconic portraits of many artists and writers, including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Alexander Calder, Truman Capote, T. S. Eliot, Laura Gilpin, Henry Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Eudora Welty. McKenna used her camera to forge an unusual path for a woman in mid-twentieth-century America toward both personal and creative freedom. She embraced photography as a way to explore the true complexity of human experience—including her own.
Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna is a traveling exhibition organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. This is a unique presentation of the exhibition for the Center for Creative Photography organized by Mary-Kay Lombino, Deputy Director and Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator, and Jessica D. Brier, Curator of Photography. The exhibition is generously supported by the Rosalie Thorne McKenna Foundation.
