The museum is fortunate to have a large collection of photographs by internationally known photographer Nancy Ford Cones (1869-1962). Ford-Cones was a resident of Loveland and she used local people and scenes in many of her pictorial photographs. Her imagery documented early Ohio country life while satisfying an international taste for romantic images of provincial life.
In 1905 the Eastman Kodak Company held a photographic competition that drew twenty-eight thousand entries. Second prize went to a Nancy Ford Cones, then a young farmwife from Loveland, Ohio. Born in Milan, Ohio, in 1869, she became interested in photography in her twenties. In 1897 she met and later married a fellow photographer named James Cones, and in 1905 the couple moved to a twenty-five-acre farm outside Loveland. From then until his death in 1939, James printed all his wife’s negatives, making the two possibly the first husband-and-wife team in the history of American photography. While she did photograph such celebrated figures as President William Howard Taft, most of her work documented the life of friends and relatives on the Cones’ family farm, “Roads Inn” (the Cones called the house Solomon’s Temple). Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, and other camera manufacturers snapped up her rural scenes for major advertising campaigns; many of her photographs also appeared on the covers of such magazines as Country Life in America and Woman’s Home Companion. Throughout her working life she remained true to the place she knew best. “It is a dead sure thing,” she once wrote, “that if you cannot make pictures in and around home, it is positively hopeless to go abroad to find them.”
Nancy Ford Cones died in 1962, her work all but forgotten. But in 1977, in the farmhouse where she had spent most of her ninety-three years, a Cincinnati art dealer discovered and purchased her legacy of four thousand prints and fifteen thousand glass-plate negatives. At once precise and soft with summer light, they recall the steady toil and small pleasures of farm life three-quarters of a century ago, as well as whimsical pictorials, and photographic reenactments of literary characters.
In 2004 the Nancy Ford Cones Gallery was opened on the second floor of Bonaventure. A rotating exhibit of Cones photographs are regularly on display. |
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