The photographs of New Jersey native and photographer Elizabeth Menzies came alive earlier this semester during the fifth-annual Princeton University Wintersession. 

Inspired by the Mudd Library exhibition, “Credit Line, Please: Photographs by Elizabeth Menzies,” the exhibition curators Phoebe Nobles, Rosalba Varallo Recchia, and Emma Paradies, and Library Communications Strategist Brandon Johnson, hosted a two-part session in which participants viewed the exhibit and used Menzies photographs to inspire their own images taken with disposable, black-and-white cameras.

“The exhibit has its origins in a long-ago conversation I had with April Armstrong, about Menzies’ photo album of vanishing parking spots on Princeton’s campus in the 1960s,” said Nobles. 

The daughter of a Princeton professor, Menzies sold her first cover photo to Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) in 1936, just three years after she graduated high school. 

The exhibition images originate from a variety of photo collections in the Princeton University Archives and cover a 30-year period of Menzies’ work on campus. In addition to PAW, Menzies would also photograph for the Index of Christian Art (now known as the Index of Medieval Art).

“We found that Menzies had a palpable sense of humor, both in her captions and in her visual work,” Nobles said.

"The exhibit focuses on Menzies' photographs of campus in particular, since her photographs of buildings, grounds, and campus life made their way into University Archives collections. 

“We were also lucky enough to be able to borrow two prints of woodcuts Menzies made from the Graphic Arts Collection at Firestone, and to work with the Index of Medieval Art, which loaned us a document that sheds light on the beginning of Menzies’ employment there, and some fabulous photographs of her Index coworkers,” said Nobles.

From exhibit cases to the classroom

Bringing Menzies into a classroom setting during Wintersession was always a goal for the exhibition curators. 

“I co-led one other Wintersession with April Armstrong in 2023, ‘Princeton 275: Be the Curator,’” said Varallo Recchia. In that session, participants would take archival material from Princeton history and get to interact with it hands-on. They could feel the fabric from a tiger-print mini-skirt from the 70s, or touch the wood of an 1800s walking cane used in the now-banned tradition of Cane Spree.

This time, participants in the Menzies Wintersession would have an informal discussion with the curators before setting out to capture their own photos inspired by her prints. 

“The participants were so thoughtful about Menzies’ work–some critiqued it, and some loved it–but seeing the ways they all took inspiration from the photos in the exhibition was really exciting,” said Paradies.

Session-goers were supplied with a disposable camera with enough film for 27 images. The cameras only captured photos in black and white, and lacked the bells and whistles of modern, digital cameras. 

“Though these contemporary disposable cameras were completely dissimilar in many ways to the cameras and development processes Menzies would have used, the idea was to approximate some of the experience of working with black and white film–a certain number of exposures, unseen until developing,” Nobles said. 

During the second session, participants received prints of their 27 images and discussed the successes and challenges of film photography. 

“Some of the participants had tons of previous photography experience, so our conversations were also really exciting!” said Paradies. “A few were intrigued by black and white photography, as they usually worked with color, and a few talked about the experience of being limited to 27 shots when they were used to being able to take a ton of digital photos and chose the best one.”

Varallo Recchia added, “It was really special to engage with Menzies’ photographs in the way that we did and to provide her original work as inspiration for ourselves and others in the moment.”

“Credit Line, Please: Photographs by Elizabeth Menzies” is showing in Mudd Library through May 27, 2025.