SONYA NOSKOWIAK

Entered 5/15/07 by Lisa Horne, Graduate Student in Art History & Curatorial Studies, Spring, 2007.

To readers of Edward Weston's Daybooks, Sonya Noskowiak is familiar as Weston's photographic protégé and intimate friend from 1929 to 1934. In his entry for Feb. 1930, Weston noted: "Sonya I must mention re her first work, almost her very first: a negative of Neil's hand, the back of a chair, and a halved red cabbage." Shortly thereafter, she began printing Weston's commercial portraits and even accumulating her own clientele for portrait sittings. And rather suddenly, this immigrant, who had been born in Leipzig, Germany, and raised in Chile, had a career. It is evident in her photographs from the early 1930s that Weston's influence on her style and subject matter was strong, but ¿ Noskowiak rapidly found ways to use photography in a manner more clearly her own. Acceptance as an art photographer in her own right came as early as 1932 when she was included in the original Group f/64 exhibition at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, along with Weston, Adams, Cunningham, and others. In the following years she had several one-woman shows at several galleries.

Noskowiak and Weston separated in 1934; however, the two were among the eight photographers hired by the California region of the Federal Arts Project in 1936. For a little more than a year she photographed California artists and their paintings, sculptures, and murals, for touring exhibitions available to public institutions. Noskowiak continued to be active in photography until about 1965. Her commercial photography ran the gamut from catalog work for manufacturers of lamps and stoves to architectural photography for prominent California architects. She died in 1975.

Bender, Donna, Sonya Noskowiak, Jan Stevenson, and Terence Pitts. SONYA NOSKOWIAK ARCHIVE. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982: 1-2.