Margrethe Mather

Margrethe Mather was born Emma Caroline Youngreen on March 4, 1886, in Salt Lake City, Utah. No formal art school training is confirmed for her in major museum or reference sources, and her early biography before she took up photography and adopted the name Margrethe Mather remains thinly documented.

By the early 1910s she was working as a photographer in Los Angeles and moving in the city's camera club and bohemian art circles. Around 1912 she began a close working and personal relationship with Edward Weston that continued through much of the 1910s and 1920s; the two shared a studio and frequently photographed the same subjects and sitters, and Weston later credited her as an important early influence on his development as a photographer. Mather's own work, portraits and still lifes marked by careful composition and an early command of light, is now considered by the institutions that hold it, including the Center for Creative Photography, to have been innovative and ahead of many of her West Coast contemporaries. In 1930, her friend and later champion William Justema helped arrange a solo exhibition of her work at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.

Mather's later life is less documented, and she fell out of the photographic mainstream in the decades that followed. She died on December 25, 1952, in the Glendale area of Los Angeles County, California, from multiple sclerosis. Her official death record listed her name as Margaret Lipton and her occupation as housewife, identities she never used in her professional life as a photographer. After her death, Justema preserved a significant body of her prints and, in the late 1970s, placed them with the Witkin Gallery in New York, from which the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired what remains the largest single collection of her work, more than 150 photographs.

Critical treatment of Mather has shifted from near invisibility to active reassessment. The Center for Creative Photography, which holds the largest surviving body of her work, credits her as an innovative photographer whose work stood out among her West Coast contemporaries of the period. The 2003 exhibition Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration, mounted at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and reviewed in both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, placed her work alongside Weston's on equal footing and is widely credited with cementing her standing as an independent modernist rather than only a muse and collaborator. The recurring critical theme is one of overdue recognition: for much of the twentieth century her contribution to the visual language she and Weston developed together was undercredited, and recent scholarship has worked to correct that record.

The best documented auction result identified in available records is a USD 9,375 house record at Heritage Auctions, achieved on November 13, 2015; the title of the specific work sold has not been confirmed, and comprehensive lot-level data from major photography auction houses could not be located to confirm this figure as the definitive all-time high. Her photographs circulate primarily through vintage photography specialists and institutional channels rather than through a routine secondary auction market, and her market visibility has been driven far more by museum exhibitions and archival scholarship than by recorded sales. There is no catalogue raisonne of her work.

Mather's work is scarce, concentrated in a small number of institutions, and does not have an established public auction benchmark, which means there is no reliable price history to anchor expectations. Because there is no catalogue raisonne, provenance matters enormously; the clearest documented chain of custody for a major group of her prints runs through William Justema, the Witkin Gallery, and the Center for Creative Photography, and works outside that chain warrant careful institutional verification. Collectors should treat her market as a scholarly and museum driven one rather than an actively traded one, and should expect any available prints to be rare and to require expert authentication rather than reliance on a routine sale history.