This pictorialist portrait of an unknown young girl was probably taken around 1930 or slightly before. It’s similar to early examples of the artist’s work found in the Oakland Museum of California Collections.

Roger Sturtevant: 1903-1982

A member of Anne Brigman’s circle in Oakland, CA, he went on to be an assistant to Dorothea Lange by the early 1930’s and would eventually become one of the best known mid-century architectural photographers in the San Francisco Bay area.

Obituary: The Alameda Times-Star, Alameda, California, July 16, 1982

Roger Sturtevant

Death has claimed Roger Sturtevant, native and long-time resident of Alameda who gained a nationwide reputation as a photographer of buildings and their surroundings in the Bay Area and throughout the West. Mr. Sturtevant, 79, died in an Oakland hospital last Saturday after undergoing surgery.

He began his career in photography as a youth of 18 growing up in Alameda and was almost immediately recognized as an expert in the use of a camera. First he was a portrait photographer but later went into architectural photography and by 1960 became the winner of the first medal in architectural photography awarded by the American Institute of Architects.

In the 1949 photographic exhibition of Bay Area architecture held in the San Francisco Museum of Art, 31 of the 52 photographs of Bay Area houses on display were taken by Mr. Sturtevant.

In recent years, he lived on his Sonoma County ranch but maintained an apartment on Versailles Avenue in a structure which originally was his family home and is one of the oldest buildings in this city.

Mr. Sturtevant, whose wife, Corinne, died last June 27, is survived by a son, Michael, of San Rafael; a daughter, Jane Pugh, of Belmont, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A private remembrance service is being planned by family members.

Roger Sturtevant: Architectural Photographer

By Dave Weinstein: Lords of the Lens: 8 great architectural photographers—mid-century California was their domain

3. ROGER STURTEVANT

A house could hardly get less pretentious than the Gregory Farmhouse, a 1927 rustic structure with doorways that open flush to the dirt ground.

It was designed by a young man, William Wurster, who would go on to define modern Northern California architecture, making a name both with the structures he designed and his influence as an educator.

The farmhouse also helped define Bay Region architecture, not because people saw it—it was in a forest above Santa Cruz—but because images shot by Sturtevant (1903-1982) appeared in Sunset and House Beautiful magazines in the early 1930s, then in many other publications to this day.

One of the first photographers to build a career around architecture, Sturtevant worked closely with Bay Area modernist pioneers, including Wurster, architect Gardner Dailey, and landscape architect Thomas Church, just as the first truly modern residences were being built in the Bay Area in the 1930s.

He shot for Wurster for decades.

Sturtevant got his start in photography while in high school in San Francisco, as printing assistant to Dorothea Lange, who would go on to win fame for photos documenting farm workers during the Depression.

During that time Sturtevant shot thousands of photos for a federal jobs project for photographers, creating straightforward yet evocative images of historic buildings.

Sturtevant, who won an American Institute of Architects award in 1960, got his photos published in all the leading magazines, often in Architectural Record.

Unlike photographers like Julius Shulman, whose photos could become “choreographic compositions,” author Pierluigi Serraino writes, Sturtevant produced a “stern representation of space with natural light and virtually untouched settings.”

His photos could be dramatic. Sturtevant, who shot dozens of modern schools for Ernest Kump and other architects, turned hallways and playgrounds into almost abstract compositions of lines and shadow, with groupings of students to provide a human touch.

Like every architectural photographer, Sturtevant shot a wide variety of work, from high rises to tract homes designed by Anshen and Allen at Gavello Glen in Santa Clara, and a custom-designed home built by Joe Eichler in Atherton.