Photographer Elizabeth Felicella on Creating an Archive in the Absence of One

A 2023 exhibition organized by the Architectural Archives traced the career of Minerva Parker Nichols (1862–1949), the first woman in the US to practice architecture independently. The culmination of more than a decade of original scholarship by alum Molly Lester, Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect featured a new series of documentary photographs by Elizabeth Felicella, a New York-based architectural photographer.

A new book from Yale University Press expands on the exhibition with essays by the curatorial team and a catalogue raisonné of Nichols’s built works. In this excerpt, Felicella describes her approach, which resulted in a portfolio of 247 photographs of many of those buildings and their interiors.

On Tuesday, April 2, 2024, Felicella and co-curators of the exhibition will talk about the making of the exhibition and book at a public lecture. An exclusive in-person presentation of the photographic prints made for the book is followed by a reception.
 

A Submission to HABS

Between 2019 and 2022, I photographed nearly all of Minerva Parker Nichols’s known extant buildings in accordance with the submission guidelines of the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS). These require that structures be captured on black-and-white negative film using a large-format view camera that can correct for perspective on site. All HABS submissions require both an original negative and contact print of each view for subsequent digitization and archival storage. I worked with an 8 Å~ 10 Deardorff view camera that happened to be as old as Nichols’s earliest buildings.

We began considering HABS as a permanent repository for our planned photographic documentation after one of our earliest outings as a team. HABS is an extensive collection of architectural photographs, measured drawings, plans and field notes, administered by the National Park Service and housed at the Library of Congress. Its stated mission is to “preserve the architectural legacy of America,” including vernacular and regional forms, for which it provides ample accommodation. We knew that the only work by Nichols archived in HABS was her New Century Club in Philadelphia (1891–2) submitted in 1973, the year of its demolition, and that although she herself was noted in an original data sheet that accompanied the submission, her name was not an operable search term in the database on the Library of Congress website. That was our starting point.

But what I soon came to appreciate in the context of HABS—my own constant point of reference within the overall project—is that “things” in that collection speak among themselves with as much authority as any individual author speaks through them. Perhaps, given the breadth of the collection and its early focus on the vernacular, a Nichols porch or fireplace or front door, no matter how exquisite, would always be one among many porches, fireplaces and front doors in the archive. A door’s having existed—having been crafted, planed, and hung by someone; having been opened and closed as many times and by as many people as it had; having been worn, altered, or lovingly preserved—was as much the point of its inclusion in HABS as a design attributed to a particular author. And this would be just as true for the photographs I would take. The guidelines I followed were meant to ensure correspondence and consistency within the archive over time, and to foster a conversation already well underway.

The photographic process reinforced an important aspect of this: the many intricacies, often unacknowledged—historical, technical, social—that we inevitably step into even before we set to work. Looking through a view camera, there is no mirror to automatically right the world. So, for me, what remains of Nichols’s work was always projected upside down and reversed onto the ground glass of my camera. On the one hand, this meant it was up to me to make sense of the inversions; on the other, the apparatus through which I was seeing—another thing with its own history and its own voice—was always exceedingly present. The tension between seeing what was before me, twice inverted through a wooden box of a camera, and the impulse to skip ahead, to “auto correct” so as to fit within the framework of my own present, my own now, was instructive. It was a constant reminder that there is meaning in both the making and archiving of photographs that lies far beyond personal vision and understanding. And that similarly, as an architect, Nichols had worked in and among technologies and conventions that now carry meaning in ways she could never have imagined.

In the end I arrived at my own inflection of our starting point. Although Nichols’s absence from HABS was something to be addressed, the missing voice was not hers alone; it was also that of the many voices of the things she had propagated. What Nichols had left to the world and what was available to me to photograph was a living archive with its own erasures, mutations, markings of time and change, a collection of things that speak in acquired accents entirely unknown to her.

This portfolio was selected from 247 final views. Another selection was utilized in an exhibition at the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania that centered on a professional and biographical timeline for Nichols constructed by the research team. The documentary function of the photographs was primary to the project. But for me, that is not their only register. Over time, the things I had photographed had taken on lives of their own, particularly the many corridors, doorways and stairs—freed from the task of illustrating Minerva Parker Nichols’s narrative, they could become portals to less orderly histories and reflections on time. An alternate installation that I came to imagine is a projection of the photographs onto the stage of Nichols’s New Century Club (1892-93) in Wilmington, now the Delaware Children’s Theatre. Each “thing” would be cast as itself: newel post played by newel post, cornice played by cornice, window detail, doorknob, stair riser. Together, what this ensemble would enact for us would be a pivot from the past to the present, a performance in which the most compelling dramatic tension centers on us, here in the present, rather than on a distant and ultimately unknowable past. The act of constructing a history would drive the plot. Performance finished, the cast of things would exit stage left, the curtains would close, ready to draw back at a later date—for yet another staging, another audience, another day.