🔍
Advanced Search

from New York Times obituary: "Norman was a photographer, writer, editor, arts patron and advocate for social change. . . She attended Smith College and then the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 to 1925, the year she married Edward A. Norman, the son of a founder of Sears Roebuck. They settled in New York City, where Mrs. Norman was a researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union, became involved with the early Planned Parenthood Association and was one of the first supporters of the Group Theater. As she later put it, her life developed around both a desire ''to advance both art and action'' and an interest in people actively involved with either. "In the art world, Mrs. Norman was best known for her close relationship with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she met in 1927. . . Stieglitz became her lover and mentor, encouraging her longtime interest in taking photographs. Mrs. Norman became the subject of many of his photographs and a crucial force in his third and final gallery, An American Place, which he opened in 1932 with her encouragement and money she raised . . . While hardly free of Stieglitz's influence, Mrs. Norman's photographs have a voice of their own. Concise and beautifully composed and lighted, they include some of the last images of Stieglitz and his gallery, as well as portraits of other people she was close to, . . ."