Margaret E. Bullock

Internationally acclaimed fine-art photographer Ella McBride (1862-1965) played an important role in the Northwest's photography community and was a key figure in the national and international pictorialist photography movements. Despite her many accomplishments, which included managing the photography studio of Edward S. Curtis for many years and being an early member of the Seattle Camera Club, McBride is little known today. Captive Light: The Life and Photography of Ella E. McBride reconsiders her career and the larger pictorialist movement in the Northwest. The book accompanies an exhibition that is co-curated by David F. Martin, a Seattle gallerist and leading art historian on Northwest artists of the early twentieth century, and Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum. Captive Light is part of the Tacoma Art Museum's Northwest Perspective Series on significant Northwest artists.

Austere Beauty is the first major survey of Vanessa Helder's life and artistic career. Born in Washington State, Helder (1904–1968) began her artistic training at the University of Washington and then relocated to New York to study at the Art Students League. She then returned to Washington to work for the WPA Federal Art Project at the Spokane Art Center.In 1943 she relocated to Los Angeles, where she became deeply involved in the local art scene and the California Watercolor Society, for the remainder of her career. Helder's exhibition history encompassed not only regional museums and galleries but also stretched throughout the country, most notably her inclusion in the American Realists and Magic Realists exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Her career spanned several periods of major change in American art, from the advent of modernism in the early part of the 20th century to the rise of abstraction in the post-war years. Her unique personal style was a hybrid of traditional and modern ideas -- she worked primarily in watercolor, creating works that radiate clear color and showing a rare talent for tightly controlling a medium known for its fluidity and soft, blurry line.

One of the most innovative Northwest artists of her time, Virna Haffer was an internationally recognized and respected Tacoma photographer who has slipped from both regional and national art history books. In a career spanning more than six decades, Haffer found success as a photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, sculptor, and published writer, though she is primarily known as a photographer. Self-taught, she began her ambitious career in the early 1920s, both running a successful portrait studio and also exhibiting her unique artistic images around the world. Margaret E. Bullock, curator of collections and special exhibitions at Tacoma Art Museum, art historian Christina S. Henderson, and independent curator and gallery owner David F. Martin examined more than 30,000 of Virna Haffer's photographic negatives, prints, and woodblocks at the Washington State Historical Society and Tacoma Public Library's Special Collections were examined to create this book.