By means of A Lady’s Lens: Encampment Photographs Provide New Look At Wild West

Encampment rancher and businesswoman Lora Webb Nichols, well-known for her pictures, was one of many first pals a 19-year-old Nancy Anderson made when she got here to Wyoming from Virginia.

Her plans had been strong. She was going to change into an previous maid instructor for the varsity on the Beer Mug Ranch north of Hanna.

Fortunately for her, life doesn’t at all times go as deliberate.

Anderson not solely made new pals like Nichols, however she additionally met her future husband, dwelling an excellent life with him in Coyote Canyon for 52 years.

During all that point, Anderson remained nice pals with Nichols who was, from nearly the start, like a member of her household.

Anderson was even together with her good friend when Nichols died in 1962.

But Anderson didn’t really get to know her good friend till after Nichols’ demise.

That’s when she actually began learning the 1000’s of pictures her good friend had taken over her lifetime, in addition to the corresponding diary entries.

She wrote every day for 65 years, beginning when she was simply 13 years previous and persevering with to her final day of life.

Looking by means of her good friend’s eyes, Anderson started to see an excellent and delicate soul, trying thoughtfully on the world.

What that created was distinctive — a not-often-seen feminine vantage level of the West at a time when the West was busy making itself right into a gritty, principally male, factor of legend.

Nichols’ images, in contrast to most of what photographers of the time interval took, additionally weren’t stiffly posed studio setups, the place everybody was sporting their Sunday greatest.

Nichols took candid photographs of actual individuals, sporting their actual garments, dwelling their actual lives.

A Life-Changing Birthday Present

Nichols obtained her first digicam from her fiancé and first husband, Bert Oldman.

He’d come to Encampment through the copper growth and wooed his bride-to-be with a Kodak digicam hand-carried to her door on her sixteenth birthday.

The digicam was an on the spot hit and have become an integral a part of Nichols’ every day life.

She would in the end divorce Oldman a decade later, not lengthy after their second baby was born, complaining that he typically uncared for his household, leaving them to fend for themselves for lengthy intervals of time.

But she by no means put down the digicam. It was her eye on the world.

From 1899 till her demise in 1962, Nichols took about 23,500 pictures of life bustling throughout her.

Absolutely Breathtaking

Not all of Nichols’ topics had been ladies, however many had been.

She took intimate pictures of them, capturing their quiet tenacity in addition to moments of tenderness and vulnerability — all at a time when few thought to report any historical past of girls in any respect.

The ladies who look out from Nichols’ pictures are haunting and compelling.

Like the photograph of Nichols’ good friend Nora Fleming nursing her child within the solar. One breast peeks out from her bodice whereas she gazes with obvious mischief in her eye on the photographer.

There’s one other of her good friend Mary Anderson bending on the waist to comb out hair that’s nearly so long as the lady is tall.

She did all that to pile the freshly combed hair again on high of her head in a good bun, away from public view.

There are whimsical moments, too, like her good friend Lizzie leaning on a crutch whereas a pet cat perches precariously on Lizzie’s hip, nibbling delicately at a deal with held excessive.

The second of levity contrasts with a starker backdrop of minimize timber and in any other case empty panorama, talking to a lot work forward in a pioneer neighborhood that was nonetheless constructing itself from the bottom up.

“I mean, this collection is an endless source for interpreting Wyoming during her time frame,” Anderson mentioned. “Endless. Sixty-five years of diary, almost 24,000 images. There are diaries, letters, objects. The collection is absolutely breathtaking.”

As If By Incantation

Anderson and her late husband, Victor, helped lead a cost to protect Nichols’ work within the Nineteen Nineties, after it was found that the chemical compounds that had been used to develop these early pictures had been prone to destroy them in time.

As luck would have it, an educator from Chicago who had retired to Hanna occurred to know precisely what Anderson wanted to do to get began.

“Every time we needed somebody to show us how to do something or do something for us, they just appeared, as if by some kind of incantation,” Anderson mentioned. “The project was blessed with so many people. I wish I could name them all.”

Saving her good friend’s images was one factor. Making them extra accessible to researchers and the general public has been one other.

That’s a journey Anderson remains to be endeavor, however an excessive amount of assist got here from an unintended encounter — one other of these seemingly summoned to the trigger, as if by incantation.

Nicole Jean Hill, a professor of artwork with Humboldt State University, was visiting the world as an artist in residence on the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts.

She found the images on a day journey to Encampment, which she visited as a result of she beloved the city’s identify.

While visiting the Grand Encampment Museum, she seen they claimed to have a photograph assortment with 24,000 images by one pioneer photographer, and a girl at that.

At first she didn’t imagine it. It appeared like a typo.

The largest pioneer pictures assortment she had ever heard of was that of central Nebraska’s Solomon Butcher. His was simply 3,000 negatives.

To suppose a girl had taken so many pictures, beginning on the age of 16, appeared extremely implausible.

But it was additionally extremely intriguing, and that introduced her again to Encampment to search out out extra in regards to the Nichols assortment.

Eventually, by means of her work, the digital format of the gathering was remodeled to a extra accessible one.

Arrangements had been additionally made for the negatives themselves to be held on the Wyoming University’s American Heritage Archive.

Saving The Heap-O-Livin’ Home

Anderson hasn’t stopped working to carry Nichols’ work to mild.

She and different volunteers at the moment are working to revive and protect Nichols’ house, which Anderson purchased in 1962 after her good friend died.

“We hope to make this property something that really honors Wyoming’s pioneer photographer,” Anderson mentioned. “We want to allow people to step back into Lora’s time and her ambiance.”

One chance is to create an artist’s residency. That will likely be troublesome, Anderson acknowledged.

“Generally, artist residencies are undertaken by people or groups with lots of means,” she mentioned. “But I think it’s just really important to kind of prove that a group of people, very usual people, in a Wyoming small town can undertake such a thing.”

Long-term, Anderson hopes to see a gallery of Nichols’ work as a part of the property in order that visiting students can see the place she labored and what she produced in the identical place.

In addition to preserving the house, Anderson and her group have succeeded in itemizing the home in Encampment on the National Register of Historic Places.

A brand new signal was simply put in at what Nichols known as the “Heap-o-Livin’” house.

What Holds Wyoming Together

Nichols’s favourite quote was at all times, “All that holds Wyoming together is baling wire and capable women,” Anderson mentioned, including that her good friend personified that.

Nichols’ house remains to be largely simply because it was on the flip of the century, Anderson mentioned, with authentic woodwork, the fireside, and a staircase.

“It’s a marvelous old Queen Anne, eclectic Victorian house,” she mentioned. “It has a wide front porch with pillars. It’s a small house, although when it was built, it was kind of the Nob Hill region.

“It was up in the more elite part of Encampment, shall we say.”

Anderson’s favorite features in the home are its staircase and fireplace, which she calls the “glories” of the house.

Indoor plumbing has been added as part of the preservation work, along with a remodeled kitchen. But the bathroom still has its old, ornate clawfoot iron tub, and the diamond-shaped windows are still original.

“The renovations have mostly been to just accommodate living in it,” Anderson said. “We try to leave things untouched. We’re just bringing out what’s already been there.”

Unexpected Knocks

There’s buzz around Nichols’ work not just in America, but Europeans are taking note of the female photographer who made so many compelling and artistic images behind the curtains of the authentic West.

“All of the publicity has brought us researchers, and they’re currently working on Lora Webb Nichols projects,” Anderson mentioned. “And they did come and just stay at Encampment.

“Some of them were even here in the house. It’s just given us good wind to our sails to see that, worldwide, Lora holds great interest.”

Hill, for one, has written a few books with pictures by Nichols together with phrases from her diaries.

Meanwhile, a researcher from Paris has been to Encampment, making​ 50 hours of movie footage, together with interviews with most of the individuals dwelling within the neighborhood.

“They are a prize-winning couple in historic documentaries in Europe,” Anderson mentioned. “So we’re very excited she chose Lora for this major project.”

There’s additionally been a historian from Poland who has created an exhibit in her nation that options Nichols’ work.

“A couple of the people in our group actually went to Poland and presented before the film community there,” Anderson mentioned. “So we’re already out there, and we really have exciting things going.

“Nicole’s recent book, which has just arrived here, has had glowing reviews internationally.

So there’s a lot to celebrate, and we celebrate by saving this property,” Anderson continued. “There will likely be nothing like preserving Lora in place, and that’s what we’re making an attempt to do.”

As the thrill has been constructing, Anderson has even had strangers displaying up at her door in Encampment, hoping to see the place the place Nichols lived and labored.

“I know I’m going to have to keep the floor mopped,” Anderson mentioned, chuckling just a little bit. “But I would welcome them. They’d need to visit the museum, and we need to arrange trips to the places where Lora did her photographs.”

Many of the locations Nichols favored for her pictures, together with her favourite pictures rock, are nonetheless within the space.

That’s one thing Anderson hopes will likely be as limitless because the Nichols’ pictures assortment, in terms of this new and wealthy vein of tourism gold in Encampment.

Renée Jean may be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.