Elise Forrest Harleston

Elise Forrest Harleston (1891 – 1970) was the first female African-American photographer in South Carolina.[1]

Biography

Elise Beatrice Forrest was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 8, 1891, to Elvira Moorer and Augustus Forrest, an accountant. She attended the local Avery Normal Institute, graduating in 1910. She went on to teach in a rural school.[2]

In 1913, she met painter Edwin Harleston and they later became engaged. With Harleston's encouragement and financial support, Forrest traveled to New York City to enroll in the E. Brunel School of Photography in 1919.[1][3] She was the only female of color attending the school and learned many photographic techniques from her German teachers. After graduation, she continued her studies at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where she worked under C. M. Battey.[4] Under his tutelage, Elise became a part of the artistic community that challenged racist stereotypes of African Americans, and her works reflected the image of the "New Negro".

She married Edwin in 1920 and they opened a joint studio and exhibition space at 118 Calhoun Street in Charleston that lasted from 1922 to 1932.[5] There she produced and sold a series of portraits of Charleston's black street vendors.[1] She also supported Edwin's work by taking photographs of the people he intended to paint, such as the subject of his prize-winning drawing A Colored Grand Army Man.[3] While his paintings went on to garner critical acclaim, the contributions of his wife were rarely mentioned.[6]

Harleston and Edwin raised their niece Edwina "Gussie" Harleston Whitlock after her parents died when she was just four years old.[3][7]

After kissing his deathly ill father, Edwin Harleston died of pneumonia in 1931.[3] Elise closed her studio and remarried within a year, to schoolteacher John J. Wheeler. She moved to Baltimore, then to Chicago, and then to Southern California, where she remained until her death of a brain aneurysm in 1970. According to her great-niece, Edwina's daughter Mae Whitlock Gentry, she never spoke of her relationship with Edwin or her work as a photographer.[8]

After Harleston's death 1970, her family found Edwin's letters and a cache of almost two dozen glass plate negatives that she had saved.[8] Many of her papers are now held by Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library.[7]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Teal, Harvey S. Partners With the Sun: South Carolina Photographers, 1840-1940 (Columbia, S.C. University of South Carolina Press, 2001)
  2. ↑ "Harlan, Edwin Augustus (1882-1931) and Elise Beatrice Forrest Harleston (1891-1971)." Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, p. 147.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Gates, Henry Louis, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Harlem Renaissance Lives from the African American National Biography, p. 239.
  4. ↑ Moutoussamy-Ashe, Jeanne. Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers (New York: Dodd Mead & Co. 1986)
  5. ↑ Wills, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (New York, W.W. Norton & Co. 2000)
  6. ↑ Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994)
  7. 1 2 "Harleston, Edwin Augustus, 1882-1931". Emory Finding Aids, Emory University Libraries website. Retrieved Jan. 28, 2016.
  8. 1 2 Gentry, Mae Whitlock. "Elise Forrest Harleston". University of South Carolina, Aiken, website.

Further reading


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