Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna

This exhibition is the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna (1918–2003). Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna is a traveling exhibition organized by the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College. After graduating from Vassar College in 1940, McKenna worked independently as a sought-after architectural and portrait photographer, making unique yet underrecognized contributions to American modernism and documentary photography. McKenna used her camera to forge an unusual path for a woman in mid-twentieth-century America toward both personal and creative freedom. She embraced photography as a way to explore the true complexity of human experience—including her own. She made iconic portraits of many artists and writers, including W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Alexander Calder, Truman Capote, T. S. Eliot, Laura Gilpin, Henry Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, and Eudora Welty.