An Example of a Kate Mathews Photograph

Kate Matthews, Accomplished Photographer (1870-1956)

 

 

Kate Matthews was one of the first, well-known women photographers in the country. During her lifetime, she printed hundreds of photographs and her work was shown in galleries and museums around the country, including New York’s Whitney Museum of Art and in permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

Kate spent most of her childhood and adult years in Pewee Valley, living in her family home  known as Clovercroft.  She was one of eight children born to Lucien and Charlotta Ann Matthews.  Most of her photographs center around people and places of the Pewee Valley community, befriending and photographing nearly everyone she ran across, including the town minstrel, Jim Felton, who often played for her, and Abe Parker, a laborer she would hire to pick up her trash.

She had whooping cough as a child that damaged her eyesight and rendered her fragile throughout her life.  She could not attend public school so she was tutored at home. Her father was a camera enthusiast and Kate became interested in all phases of his photography.  Her father, noting her interest, bought her first camera for her at 16 years of age.  It was a large, heavy box with a tripod, an extra fine lens and a case of glass plates, as big as a bread box.  Throughout her life she used this camera, developing and printing her own pictures, long after paper film became available.

In the early Pewee Valley days she had a cart and pony to help transport her camera and equipment.  Her work is characterized by a romanticized scene and she often had subjects poised and posed, many times reflecting earlier times.  Kate’s subjects ranged from the people and places in her neighborhood to staged tableaus of author Annie Fellows Johnston’s storybook characters from the Little Colonel series.  Johnston and Matthews were contemporaries who knew each other and their families.  It was Matthews who produced the “Little Colonel” postcards that are collector items today.

Lillian Bratcher, a cousin of Kate’s described her work in the following:  “As simple as that were all her masterpieces, as simple as light itself.  She saw beauty and even captured