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- In the early 1900s, Buffalo was a center of the aesthetics movement called pictorialism, which sought to create photographs that were as artful as paintings; often their images were characterized by a dreamy quality and soft focus.
Sipprell became one of the foremost practitioners of pictorial photography in the United States. She produced autochromes (color) and platinum, bromoil, gum, and carbon prints; won awards in exhibitions; and had her work published in magazines in the United States and Europe.
As a portrait photographer, Sipprell sought to convey a sense of the whole person and what made each unique. She also photographed landscapes, still lifes, female nudes, major individuals in the arts and government, and people in countries in which she traveled, including Yugoslavia, Italy, Russia, Mexico, and Sweden.
In 1915, Sipprell, then thirty, moved to New York City with Jessica E. Beers, with whom she lived until 1923. She opened a photographic studio in Greenwich Village and eventually became a contract photographer for the Ethical Culture School, where Beers was a principal. Clara became widely renowned. The New York Times called her "the photographer of the great and near-great of the 20th century."
Around 1937, Phyllis Fenner (1899-1982)--a writer, librarian, and anthologist of children's books--became Sipprell's housemate and traveling companion. This relationship continued through the final thirty-eight years of Sipprell's life. In the mid-1960s, they had Harold Olmstead build them a house in Manchester, Vermont.
Clara Sipprell died in April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine. Her ashes are buried in a plot near an outcropping of rock in Manchester. Attached to the rock is a small bronze tablet on which, in accordance with her wishes, are engraved her own name along with the names of Jessica Beers and Phyllis Fenner.
Vermont Vital Records, 1760-2008, (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KF1Y-LBZ), Death 1975
United States Census, 1900, (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MSXF-1D4), Buffalo, Erie, New York
United States Census, 1910, (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M542-GCX), Buffalo Ward 20, Erie, New York
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1885 - 1975 (89 years)
