Just ‘Sharland’. Always unmoored; no first name, no title, no hint of nationality or gender. It was as though the photographer who was one of LIFE’s most frequent contributors in the Forties (shooting everyone from Shelley Winters to Jawaharlal Nehru), and a prolific freelancer for Collier’s and the New York Times in the Fifties, wanted both to take credit and to disappear.
It’s only when those tiny, tell-tale signifiers — ‘he’, ’she’, ‘they’, ‘his’, ‘her’ — are nowhere to be found that you realise how much your brain comes to depend on them. Whenever Sharland’s name was mentioned, though, even in passing, it was always so carefully, neutrally framed; ‘LIFE photographer Sharland’, ‘in photographer Sharland’s studio’. Which made it much a surprise, last week, to stumble across a 1955 article on summer recipes in the New York Times, that opened; ‘Mrs. Allen Forte of New York City, the professional photographer known as Sharland, is very much at home on the range.’ Just like that, Sharland becomes a woman; becomes Mrs. Allen Forte, wife of a musicologist, and a successful photographer in her own right; becomes blonde, and young, and pretty, and a dab hand at cold rice and shrimp. Look back, past a chain of passenger lists and marriage certificates, she starts out in Los Angeles as an Austrian immigrant called Herta Waitzfelder, whose father is a physician to the stars. Fast forward to the end, in Connecticut, when Sharland Forte — wife of a now-prominent music professor — died, after a decade of living with Alzheimers. (Somewhere in the middle, there was a first, fleeting Hollywood marriage, to British actor Reginald Sharland, that provided her with her professional name.) But did any of that matter, to the photographer who kept (her) public profile so anonymously disciplined, and whose work — like the Bergdorf Goodman advertisements she shot with Barbara Mullen in 1951 — always showed the same elegantly cool control.
