Long after becoming a professional photographer herself, Rosalie Thorne McKenna—known as Rollie—discovered that her paternal great-grandmother, Harriet V.S. Thorne [http://www.yourpublicmedia.org/content/connecticut-historical-society/one-woman-photographer] had also been a photographer. After a peripatetic and not entirely happy childhood, Rollie found comfort and stability with her Thorne relatives on her father’s side. Particularly close to her grandfather, who set up an education trust for her, she began spending her summers in Connecticut when she was still in her teens. She eventually settled in Stonington, CT, in 1961, after almost fifteen years of living in Millbrook, NY and New York City (both places where various members of the Thorne family resided).
After finishing coursework for her master’s in art history at Vassar College, Rollie set off to Italy to photograph Renaissance architecture in 1950. Switching her focus to portraits, she began photographing poets, writers and artists in 1951, and photographed many important literary and artistic figures in the mid-twentieth century. Portrait photography was a way of trying to capture what Rollie called “an essence” of a person, a way of portraying people in the spaces they felt most comfortable, without the special lighting and darkroom tricks of studio photographers.
This attitude toward portraits is evident in the three pictured here. Photographing Helen Keller in 1958 for America Illustrated magazine, Rollie captured her subject in a moment of stillness. The portrait offers considerable information about how Keller used her senses of touch (the sunlight on her face) and smell (the roses she stands among) to appreciate the world around her. Likewise, her portrait of sculptor Alexander Calder, pictured in his Roxbury, CT studio in 1958, barely reveals the subject’s face. Instead, he appears hard at work, a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, dwarfed by the tools and metal scraps cluttering his workspace. Poet Derek Walcott and his then-wife Margaret, photographed in Waterford, CT, in 1969, appear happy and unencumbered as they sit on the grass under a tree. Rollie’s informal portrait captured a moment of easy tenderness between them.
Rollie McKenna will be one of three women photographers featured in an exhibition at The Connecticut Historical Society in 2013. For more information, visit http://www.chs.org/page.php?id=512.
