A self-taught photographer, Reece worked in a style called Pictorialism, which was popular toward the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century.
“I don’t photograph. I use my camera as an artist uses his brush – to make the picture I already see in my mind,” she told the Monterrey Peninsula Herald in 1945.
It was unusual for women to follow a career path in the arts at the turn of the century, and female photographers were especially rare, according to a Dayton Art Institute narrative published in conjunction with a 1997 museum exhibition “The Soul Unbound: The Photographs of Jane Reece.”
Her photographic style depicts people and scenes in dreamy lighting and soft focus, and it was part of a larger movement known as Photo-Secession, which sought to promote photography as a fine art.
In 1952 she donated more than 9,000 negatives and 400 photographic works to the Dayton Art Institute, the largest body of her work anywhere.
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