This is a collection of materials from and about the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe.The collection consists of her notes from color theory classes with Rudolph Schaeffer, other class notes, and a photo album and scrapbook with over 200 photographs documenting her time as a student at the California School of Design (later the San Francisco Art Institute), her travels in the Pacific Northwest as a young woman, travels around California, and family photos. It also includes art opening announcements, calling cards, business cards, newspaper clippings, handmade Christmas cards, art exhibitions brochures, original design examples, party invitations, and postcards.

Louise Dahl-Wolfe (1895-1989) was raised in San Francisco by her Norwegian, marine engineer father who took her and her two sisters to shipyards for fun, and a mother who named her Louise Emma Augusta Dahl (LEAD) because she believed it was good luck for a child’s name to spell out a word (from Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Photographer’s Scrapbook, St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984). Encouraged by an art teacher and one of her sisters, Louise became a student at the San Francisco Institute of Art’s California School of Design (later the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1914 where she took classes on and off through 1922. There she was especially influenced by her courses in color theory with Rudolph Schaeffer. Her interest in photography was ignited when she visited Ann Brigman’s studio. Brigman was a member of the art photography group “Photo-Secession” founded by Alfred Stieglitz, and her photos of nudes taken in the Sierras and Point Lobos captivated Dahl-Wolfe. In her photographic memoir, Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Photographer’s Scrapbook (St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984), she describes being bowled over by Brigman’s photographs and immediately inspired to explore photography. She bought a camera and started experimenting. After her mother died in 1926, Louise left San Francisco to travel in Europe with her friend and fellow photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978) and from there, went to North Africa where she met Meyer (Mike) Wolfe. The two married in 1928 and briefly lived in Wolfe’s home state of Tennessee where Dahl-Wolfe took portraits of the locals, including the photograph, Mrs. Ramsey, Tennessee, which was published as Tennessee Mountain Woman in Vanity Fair in 1933. They moved to New York in 1933 and Louise set up a studio and took freelance work photographing food for Women’s Home Companion and fashion for Saks Fifth Avenue, among other things. In 1936 she began what would be a long and celebrated career as a fashion photographer at Harper’s Bazaar, working under editor Carmel Snow and fashion editor, Diana Vreeland to produce 86 covers and hundreds of spreads. She was known for her pioneering work in color, natural lighting, and shooting outdoors and on location–all of which would eventually become standard practices in fashion photography. She left the magazine in 1958 and retired completely in 1960. In 1984 she published a retrospective of her work and life, Louise Dahl-Wolfe: A Photographer’s Scrapbook (St. Martin’s/Marek).

One document box (containing 5 folders), approximately 0.75 linear feet.

Contact the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive for questions or requests regarding use of these materials.

The collection is open for research use.