A young woman reclines on a window seat after having fallen asleep, her hand still clutching an open book resting on her lap. At Dusk dates to 1893, and was taken by the prominent Albany, New York Photographer Emma Justine Farnsworth, who copyrighted the photograph the following year. A vintage platinum variant from 1894 can be found in the PhotoSeed archive.

This is the third photogravure of seven included within Art historian Richard Stettiner’s text essay printed for the portfolio, which can be found under the group heading for this work. Pagination on index page indicates E. J. FARNSWORTH was from Albany, N.Y.

Emma Justine Farnsworth: 1860-1952

From Christine Peterson’s biography of the artist: …Farnsworth, who had modest art training, received a camera outfit as a gift one Christmas and began to use it the following summer. The earliest known record of her exhibiting photographs is the second Joint Exhibition of 1888, where three of her pictures were seen. Over the next five years, she also was successful in two newspaper competitions. Her work consisted primarily of genre scenes and figure studies….Farnsworth drew the attention of Alfred Stieglitz. In 1893, she once again showed in the Joint Exhibition, organized by the country’s three leading camera clubs (in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston) and was the only woman to win a medal, prompting Stieglitz to consider her the country’s strongest lady amateur. In 1897, her work comprised the second in an important series of solo exhibitions presented by the Camera Club of New York, of which Stieglitz was a leading member. And three years later, he included an image by her as a photogravure in the January 1900 issue of Camera Notes, printed in brilliant orange ink.

Farnsworth’s pictures were reproduced most frequently during the 1890s. They appeared in the American Amateur Photographer (1893, 1899), Photographic Times (1891, 1892, 1896, 1899, 1900), and Sun and Shade (1893). They were included in two deluxe portfolios of photogravures, issued on the occasion of Berlin’s annual International Exhibition of Amateur Photography in 1896 and 1897. Two years later, the Camera Club of New York also featured one of her gravures in its portfolio American Pictorial Photography I.