Today let me introduce you to an Early PICT from Hatford, CT, Katherine Lee Enders. She’s a a photographer profiled in the Hartford Courant newspaper in 1923, a piece that was headlined as follows:
Enders was born in 1885. She started her career in photography in 1912 by working as a studio manager for a photographer named Nunzio Vavana. Vavana was both a photographer and an artist. By the mid-1920s he had given up photography and moved to Maine, where he established an artist colony in Ogunquit, ME.
Getting back to the story of Vavana’s office manager, Katherine Lee Enders …
Before Vavana gives up his photography studio, Enders leaves his employ in 1919 and opens her own photography business. First she runs it “at home”, later opening a separate studio location. Enders ultimately build a successful photography business.
In addition to taking photos for people, she gets a lot of those photoe published in the newspaper. Here’s a small selection:
November 13, 1936
October 1, 1922
As I mentioned at the top of this post. there’s a nice writeup about her and her business in the Hartford Courant newspaper in 1923. In addition to the eye-catching headline, it also includes a photo of Enders herself. Note that the quality of the available online scan isn’t great, which is why the photo isn’t clearer:, but I think you can make her out here:
Enders is, of course, just one of the many single women who ran studios for decades on their own; many of them have been profiled previously here on Photographs, Pistols & Parasols. Something that is remarkable about Enders’ story is that her family doesn’t seem to be as well off as the family of many other photographers. So, it’s intriguing that she decides to give up her job managing Vavana’s studio in order to branch out on her own, a move that not only potentially means a drop in income for at least a few months, but also puts her in direct competition with her former boss, Vavana. That’s similar to how Delia Rich goes off on her own in Emporia, Kansas, putting her in direct competition with her former boss, the photographer L.S. Page. Of course, in that case that was by design — Mr. Page didn’t want to have outsiders coming in to Emporia and setting up competition, so he helped finance Delia Rich’s studio to keep the competition amongst themselves. (There is no evidence that Vavana did the same for Enders.) In any case, Katherine Lee Enders successfully runs her studio in Hartford until the 1930s, long after Vavana had left town.
BTW, there’s no evidence that Enders ever married, but interesting when she dies in 1955, her obituary refers to her “Mrs. Katherine Enders” and lists a son, John Enders, as a surviving relative. Maybe he was adopted.
In any case, Katherine Lee Enders had an intriguing professional career, first managing the studio for a successful photographer and at then later running a photography business all on her own for many, many years.
