Kate Matthews

Kate Seston Matthews (August 13, 1870 – July 5, 1956) was an American photographer who depicted tableaux vivants and scenes of everyday life in her community of Pewee Valley, Kentucky, at the turn of the 20th century.

Early life

Kate Seston Matthews was born in New Albany, Indiana, on August 13, 1870. After a childhood illness weakened one of her eyes and left her very frail, Lucien G. and Charlotta Anne Clark Matthews arranged for their youngest daughter to be educated at home while her seven siblings attended school. Sometime between 1880 and 1895, the Matthews family moved to Oldham County, Kentucky, where they eventually bought a fourteen-room Victorian house and roughly twelve acres on Ashwood Avenue in Pewee Valley. Matthews lived in the family home known as Clovercroft until she died on July 5, 1956.

Photographs

Kate Matthews was introduced to photography by the husband of her oldest sister, Lillian, while she was spending a summer with the couple and their children in Vermont. Charles Barrows Fletcher, a camera enthusiast, noticed that the usually shy and quiet teenager was curious about all aspects of photography. He mentioned Kate's interest in a letter to her father and suggested that it would be nice if she had her own camera. On his next business trip to New York, Lucien Matthews bought his youngest daughter the finest professional camera he could find.

Despite numerous technological advancements in photography over the next several decades, Matthews used that big bellows-style camera with glass plate negatives, black hood, and tripod for the rest of her life. She experimented with cameras that captured snapshots via automatic shutters, but she considered her photography an art and preferred to control light exposure with a lens cap. She also controlled every step of the development process in her own darkroom. She hand-tinted some photographs and frequently gave friends and family signed prints or sent them postcards made from prints.

Matthews' devotion to photography was considered somewhat eccentric in the small, traditional community of Pewee Valley. She would load the large camera, tripod, and costumes into her pony cart along with relatives, neighbors, or visiting children she persuaded to serve as models. Then she would drive to preselected locations where they recreated scenes from fairy tales and story books. Matthews' niece, Lillian Fletcher Brackett, described her aunt as an artist who was extremely focused and somewhat "dreamy" when her "genius was burning." When a writer from the Louisville Courier-Journal asked Matthews about her technique, she said "I am very conscious of light... I watch it from day to day and when it is where I need it, I use it."

In an era when few women ventured into photography, Matthews won prizes at the Kentucky State Fair, in contests in Chicago, Columbus, and Pittsburgh, and in other regional and national competitions. She had photographs published in The American Annual of Photography seventeen times between 1896 and 1923. Her photos also ran in The Youth's Companion, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Illustrated American, The Forward, The Brown Book of Boston and Burr McIntosh Monthly. is housed in the Photographic Archives in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Louisville.