Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan

Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan (1871–1963) was an artist and photographer^[1] born in Jackson County, Kentucky, in the late 19th century. She studied to be a teacher but instead apprenticed to a photographer.^[2] By 1901 she owned and operated the Standiford Photographic Studio in Louisville, Kentucky. In the early part of the 20th century she experimented with early photographic techniques such as the autochrome Lumiere and photo-viewing devices such as the diascope. An example of her early photography is the autochrome Lumiere diascope of two of the children of Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey.

2015-12-02 1405 photo file for EBH

Standiford-Mehlingan moved the Standiford Photographic Studio from Louisville to Cleveland, Ohio in 1919, locating first in the Gage Gallery of Fine Arts, then in the Chilcote Building (1925), and subsequently in the Hickox Building at 1030 Euclid Avenue, where she worked into the 1930s. She was awarded prizes for her photographs of Cleveland's elite of the 1920s and 1930s at the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibitions.^[3] A collection of her work, including photographic portraits of important citizens of Cleveland,^[4] is held by the Western Reserve Historical Society.^[5] One of her portraits and a statement about the portrait may be found in The American Annual of Photography.^[6]

A photo of Louis Rorimer (1872-1939)^[7] by Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan appears in an article about him in an interview with his grandson from The Plain Dealer.^[8] Ethel Standiford's portrait of Louis Rorimer is of the patriarch of this family, the father of James Joseph Rorimer (1905-1966) who is the man upon whom the role of Lt. James Granger was loosely based in the film The Monuments Men. James Rorimer was one of the Allied special forces in the Monuments, Arts, and Special Archives program who helped recover confiscated art from the Nazis during World War II. James Rorimer later became the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a major force behind the creation of The Cloisters. His character as a young American soldier is played in the film by Matt Damon. The interviewee in The Plain Dealer article by Steven Litt is also named Louis Rorimer, but he is the grandson of the subject of the Standiford portrait shown in the article and the son of James Rorimer.

Two photographs of Anna Burge Muir, attributed to Standiford studio and borrowed from a 1927 Louisville Herald-Post article, appear in a website about the The Little Colonel stories for children by Annie Fellows Johnston. One is of Anna as a child and one is of her as the grownup wife of lawyer Edward Porter Humphrey. Anna Burge Muir Humphrey was the real-life model for the character Anna Moore (Rob Moore's cousin) in the stories.^[9]

A portrait of Lily Belknap, daughter of Colonel Morris Burke Belknap and Lily Buckner is included in the Louisville Herald Post collection of photos of prominent Louisvillians from Standiford Studio.^[10] Generally, Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan preferred men as subjects for her portraits and discussed her reasons in a 1932 interview published in the Middletown Times Herald in Middletown, New York.^[11]

Faced with financial failure, she filed for bankruptcy and closed the Standiford Studio in 1936. She presented a portfolio of 500 autographed photographs of prominent Cleveland residents to the Cleveland Public Library. Clevelanders are represented in the collection through newspaper photographs and portraits by George Mountain Edmondson and Ethel Standiford.^[12] Ethel Standiford-Mehlingan was the first woman elected president of the Cleveland Photographers Association.^[13]

References