Although she had a small exhibition at the Art Institute in the late 1940s and a few of her prints were used by her celebrated subjects, Helen Balfour Morrison (1901-1984) was relatively unpublished and unknown in the pantheon of portrait photography.
”I think she didn`t like her prints to get away,” says Morrison`s adopted daughter, dancer Sybil Shearer. ”That`s why so many of the people never saw their pictures.”
It is their loss, for an entire age is unveiled in the faces of Morrison`s subjects-mostly celebrities and high achievers of the 1930s and
`40s whom she captured in Chicago or on her photo commutes to New York with her advertising executive husband, Robert Morrison.
Here is Amelia Earhart looking westward, Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin
(”Helen got lost trying to find a door there,” Shearer relates. ”Wright was charming and gave her a portrait of him by Edward Steichen that he didn`t like because it lacked the animation she was after. She sent him his print, and he liked it better than the Steichen.”)
Here is young Helen Hayes in town for the opening of her husband`s ”The Front Page.” There is a wonderful portrait of Nelson Algren at his kitchen table circa 1943. You can see a smiling Richard Wright at the Ed and Joyce Gourfain house on the South Side just before he caricatured them in ”Native Son,” and architect Mies van der Rohe.
”She loved artists,” Shearer says. ”Many of them sent her their own pictures.”
According to a Tribune review of a 1950 Balfour exhibition at the Chicago Public Library, ”Camera technique to her is unimportant. She is much more interested in the elusive gestures and expressions that reveal the
personalities of the subjects.”
Most of her pictures, the review also says, ”are made by natural lighting, handled with a disdain for craftsmanship that sometimes results in faces half lost in shadows and other obvious technical flaws. Yet this lack of polish gives the pictures a spark of realism that is uncommon among the glamorized portraits of today.”
Using the telephone, reading the Tribune page that announced authors`
visits to the city and mining her husband`s architectural and artistic contacts as well as those of her friends in the arts, Helen Balfour Morrison created an affecting record of the great achievers who passed through Chicago in a bygone era.
