Ethel Standiford-Mehling

Ethel Standiford-Mehling (née Conway; 1871–1963) was an American artist and photographer.

Biography Ethel Conway was born in Jackson County, Indiana on January 3, 1871.

She studied to be a teacher, but instead apprenticed to a photographer. A collection of her work, including photographic portraits of important citizens of Cleveland, is held by the Western Reserve Historical Society.

Her photo of Louis Rorimer (1872–1939), the father of museum curator James Rorimer, appears in an article about him in The Plain Dealer.

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 Little Colonel, a series of stories for children by Annie Fellows Johnston. One photo is of Anna Burge Muir 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.

A portrait of Lily Belknap, daughter of Colonel Morris Burke Belknap and Lily Buckner, is included in the Herald-Post collection of photos of prominent Louisvillians from Standiford Studio. Generally, Standiford-Mehling preferred men as subjects for her portraits and discussed her reasons in a 1932 interview published in the Middletown Times Herald.

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.

Standiford-Mehling was the first woman elected president of the Cleveland Photographers Association.

She died at her home in Mount Healthy, Ohio on May 9, 1963, and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery.