Woman of the Century/Catharine Weed Barnes

BARNES, Miss Catharine Weed, photographer and editor, born in Albany, N. Y., 10th January, 1851. She is the eldest child of the Hon. William Barnes and Family P. Weed, daughter of the late Thurlow Weed. After receiving an academical education in Albany she entered Vassar College, but was obliged to give up the idea of graduating because of illness resulting from overwork. In 1872 she accompanied her parents to Russia, where Mr. Barnes was an official delegate from this country to the International Statistical Congress in St. Petersburg. She has traveled much in this country and abroad, and is a close student and haul worker. She took un photography in 1886, having previously given much time to music and painting. On her mother's death, in 1889, she assumed charge of her father's household in Albany but gave all her spare time to camera work. After contributing many articles to various periodicals devoted to photography she went on the editorial staff of the "American Amateur Photographer" in May. 1890. She is an active member of the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York, of the New York Camera Club, and the Postal Photographic Club, an honorary CATHARINE WEED BARNES. member of the Chicago Camera Club and of the Brooklyn Academy of Photography, and has won prizes at various photographic exhibitions as an amateur. She is a member of the National Photographcrs' Association of America, a professional organization. Miss Flames is also connected with several literary and musical associations and belong to the Sorosis Club of New York. She has a special portrait studio carefully planned, in a building separate from her residence, but is continually altering it for her favorite work of making illustrations and character studies. She does all the work in studio, laboratory and printing-room herself and is a thorough reader of everything bearing on camera work. Her great desire is to encourage women to take up this work as a regular profession. Her own preference is for figures and interiors rather than for landscapes, She makes lantern-slides from her own negatives and shows them in her oxyhydrogen lantern, and has read several papers before societies in different cities, besides recording her camera experiences in her own magazine. In 1888 she received a diploma for the excellence of her work exhibited at Boston and a silver medal in 1S91 for lantern-slides. She entered the Enoch Arden prize competition in the Washington convention of the Photographers' Association of America for iKgowith three pit Hires, which were judged entitled to second place by an eminent art critic who examined all the photo- graphs exhibited, and entered the Elaine competition in Buffalo in 1891. She is the first woman amateur photographer who has ventured to compete with professionals and was invited to read a paper in their Buffalo convention. Her new studio and laboratory are well fitted for photographic work, and owe most of their excellence to contrivances of her own designing- Her editorial work on the "American Amateur Photographer" at first covered the ladies' department only, but she has recently became associate editor. She is editing the woman's photographic department in "Outing," and has contributed a series of articles to "Prank Leslie's Weekly." Some of her pictures have been reproduced in art journals, and her reputation as a photographer is national. She was invited to address the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom at Edinburgh in July, 1892. during her camera trip through England and Scotland.