via A Woman’s Intimate Record of Wyoming in the Early Twentieth Century | The New Yorker
On October 28, 1899, Lora Webb Nichols was at her family’s homestead, near Encampment, Wyoming, reading “Five Little Peppers Midway,” when her beau, Bert Oldman, came to the door to deliver a birthday present. The sixteen-year-old Nichols would marry the thirty-year-old Oldman the following year, and divorce him a decade later. The gift, however—a Kodak camera—would change the course of her life. Between 1899 and her death, in 1962, Nichols created and collected some twenty-four thousand negatives documenting life in her small Wyoming town, whose fortunes boomed and then busted along with the region’s copper mines. What Nichols left behind might be the largest photographic record of this era and region in existence: thousands of portraits, still-lifes, domestic interiors, and landscapes, all made with an unfussy, straightforward, often humorous eye toward the small textures and gestures of everyday life. (A selection of images from the full collection, now housed at the American Heritage Center, at the University of Wyoming, was recently published in a catalogue edited by the scholar and photographer Nicole Jean Hill, with a biographical note by Nichols’s family friend Nancy F. Anderson, who served for years as the curator and caretaker of the Nichols archive.)
