The Zelda Mackay Collection

This guest post is written by Katie Cornell, Photographic Preservation and Collections Management (PPCM) Master’s student, University of Rochester and the George Eastman Museum. Katie graduated from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2015 with her BA in Art History, with minors in Asian Studies and European Studies. After her Fulbright year in New Delhi, India, where she researched architectural conservation, Katie began her Master’s at the George Eastman Museum. There, she focuses on nineteenth-century photographs and women’s engagement with photography, especially in regards to the formation of identity, memory, and meaning. Thesis: “‘Woman — you struck oil’: The Zelda Mackay Collection at the George Eastman Museum.”

When discussing women’s role in the history of photography, we have traditionally focused on the successes of only a few female photographers or on the female subjects of famous photographs. #5WomenArtists celebrates the achievements of women in the arts; in this spirit, I want to add women collectors of photography to the discussion. Like the history of female artists, female collectors of the arts have long been overshadowed by the efforts of men and museums. When women collectors of photographs have been considered, their activities were understood as domestic pastimes — for example, a mother or wife putting together a family photo-album in an act of family record keeping, and exhibiting that photo-album in her parlor for guests to thumb through.

However, Zelda Mackay (1893–1985), a twentieth-century collector of nineteenth-century photographs, seems to have had her feet firmly planted in the collecting and domestic spheres. On the one side, Mackay was part of the establishment — the boys’ club — in which she was a woman collecting amongst men. On the other, Mackay applied traditional ideas of domesticity and family record-keeping to collect photographs that seem to have been inaccessible to men, such as women’s personal family heirlooms. In my study of Mackay for my Master’s thesis, I aim to uncover and describe the hybridity of Mackay’s collecting practices, a style of collecting that is possibly more common than has been previously studied or acknowledged.

Zelda Mackay, also known as Zelda Powell, Zelda Powell Mackay, or Mrs. Ralph Mackay, worked as a high school teacher in San Francisco, California in the early- to mid-twentieth century. She began her teaching career at the height of the Visual Instructions Movement, during which time teachers used visual aids to encourage children’s motivation to learn. With this in mind, Mackay started to collect photographs to enhance her lessons, reportedly finding “the study of the daguerreotype a very appropriate project for her art and French classes.”

Her collecting notebook and personal letters suggest that Mackay quickly shifted her focus away from educational photographic objects and towards rare examples of nineteenth-century American photographs, such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes. In a letter she wrote to Mrs. Marian S. Carson, another collector of early photographs, Mackay explained how she “just drifted into the hobby, having only 3 or 4 family dags to start my collection.” By 1944, Mackay announced in another letter to Carson, “I am specializing in daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of Early Calif and San Francisco during the Gold Rush.”

On a schoolteacher’s budget, Mackay amassed a small but rich collection of nineteenth-century photographs, eight hundred and thirty-nine of which are documented in her collecting notebook, now in the Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at the George Eastman Museum. From 1930 until about 1972, she used this notebook to record information about each photograph, including details about the previous owner, the price she purchased it for, and a brief description of the subject. After the last notebook entry, Mackay remarked: “Notice: 1968. Many ordinary unidentified daguerreotypes in my collection were never listed in this little record book. They were not considered of sufficient importance or attractiveness.”

While reviewing the notebook and gathering evidence of Mackay’s collecting patterns, I found that Mackay purchased approximately one-fourth of her photographs from other women. For example, a number of the entries in the notebook mention the 1939 and 1940 National Hobby Shows in Oakland, California, where Mackay met women and later acquired their family photographs and heirlooms. In other instances, Mackay “did a little detective work” to find and write to the female descendants of well-known photographers and families, as Mackay knew that women were the keepers of family photographs.

The notebook is evidence of Mackay’s careful building and curation of a collection that gained the attention of men like Alden Scott Boyer, Beaumont Newhall, Edward Steichen, Robert Taft, Ansel Adams, and other well-known members of the male-dominated art circle. For example, in 1945, Alden Scott Boyer, a famous collector from Chicago known for laying a foundation for the history of photography, wrote to Mackay to congratulate her on a recent addition to her photograph collection:

Dear Collector,

To begin with; woman — you struck oil. The gal held you up… I too would have paid the price had it been offered to me & I congrat[ulate] you on the haul. If you ever sell, sell to me.

Though it is unclear which photograph he was referring to in the letter, Boyer’s envy for the object permeated through his words. By referring to her as “collector,” and suggesting a business transaction, Boyer ultimately admitted Mackay’s place in his world of collecting — a world thought to be dominated by men.

By 1966, after years of continual correspondence, Mackay expressed to Beaumont Newhall her desire to “dispose of [my collection] while I can still make arrangements, and dispose of it the least painfully possible.” In August 1969, the then George Eastman House, under the direction of Newhall, purchased a large portion of Mackay’s photograph collection, a notebook, and four boxes of her papers. Her contributions significantly strengthened the museum’s holdings of pre-gold rush California and Civil War photography.

How can Zelda Mackay’s collecting practices be understood? What is the relationship between Mackay’s twentieth-century practices — collecting, cataloging, exhibiting, and writing about photographs — and women’s traditional nineteenth-century domestic practices? Further, how does Mackay utilize these ideas of domesticity to fit into an institutional circle of established male collectors? These questions guide me as I consider Mackay as part of a network of women who were financially, intellectually, and physically in control of their family photographs, and who seem to have power as keepers of family photographs and memories in non-domestic spaces.