During a life filled with extraordinary accomplishments, Edna Leighton Tyler (ELT) achieved great things in a wide variety different areas.
First and foremost, and the reason I’m bringing her up here on this blog, she was an accomplished and very successful artisan photographer, running a studio in New London, CT for many decades starting in 1915. She took photos of people at her studio, and also offered an “at home” photos service, taking photos of people and their properties.
Below is a screen shot of a slide from a talk I gave where I talked about aspects of ELT’s photography career:
In addition to photography, ELT also was prominent in many other areas. Here are a few examples of things she did:
- She founded the Red Cross branch in New London
- She started the New London Garden Club
- She was a prominent Suffragist in Connecticut
ELT did so many things beyond photography that for my talk about her I had to compile a second slide of other things beyond her photography; here’s a screenshot of that slide:
ELT’s friend, Katharine Ludington, was the head of the CT suffragists and later the founder of the CT branch of the Connecticut League of Women Voters. ELT became the head of that new group’s New London branch, serving as its president for many decades, and is frequently mentioned in that capacity in the newspapers. In fact, here’s a photo of ELT that appeared in the Hartford Courant in 1925:
ELT’s friendship with Katharine Ludington encompassed many aspects of ELT’s world, actually. In 1925 Katharine Ludington hired ELT to photograph the Ludington family estate in Old Lyme, CT. Ludington herself later used some of these photos in a book about her family estate. But at the time of the photo shoot, ELT delivered a “booklet” that was a collection of 8×10 sepia-toned prints.
An Internet search revealed that a copy of this booklet is in the archive at the FloGris Museum in Old Lyme, CT. Many thanks to Amy Kurtz Lansing, curator at the museum, for hosting Chris and me on our visits to the archive, and many thanks as well to her for granting us permission to take photographs of ELT’s booklet in order to share them here on the blog.
Note: both photos below are from the booklet. They are credited to Edna Leighton Tyler, 1925, and appear here courtesy the FloGris museum:
While only some of the photos in the booklet are signed by the photographer, all of the photos show her “photographer’s mark”, which looks like a little diamond design made from her initials. ELT. Here’s a closeup look at the bottom of one of the photo that has both a signature and a diamond mark:
BTW, in addition to ELT’s other suffragist activities, a 1917 notice in the New London newspaper mentions that ELT and others performed in what was described as “an amusing militant Suffrage play“ called How the Vote was Won. (The Day newspaper, March 2, 1917) FWIW, you can read more about that play here.
It was fun to read that and then to realize that the opening number of the musical Suffs is an homage to the type of play that suffragists actually performed when the would try to get support from male audiences. (I talked about Suffs in a previous post.)
Now, I don’t think the play that ELT performed was set to music. But in any case, here’s a link to the musical Suffs; the song aimed at gaining men’s support is at the start of the video, so you don’t have to watch the whole thing if you don’t want to.
In any case, more could be written about ELT and her lifetime of accomplishments, but that will have to wait for another day. Suffice to say that ELT was an extraordinary woman, who was an extremely talented early woman artisan photographer.
