Celebrating Eliza Scidmore
NAT GEO'S FIRST FEMALE PHOTOGRAPHER
I love National Geographic. I subscribe to their magazine and as much as I appreciate their stories, it’s the photography that does it for me. I can flip through those pages and stare in awe at some of the images these photographers produce.
But did you know that images weren’t even a part of National Geographic’s publication until Eliza Scidmore suggested it? Scidmore’s contributions to Nat Geo are truly what shaped the organization to become what it is today.
Who is Eliza Scidmore?
Although Eliza Scidmore was born in Wisconsin in 1856 and raised in DC, the majority of her life was spent travelling around the world. She particularly loved Japan and when she passed in 1928, her ashes were buried on the island.
Scidmore was a prolific photographer and journalist. At one point in the 1880s, she earned $1,000 in a single week for her work. That’s the equivalent of $26,000 today. So when a startup publication called the National Geographic Society sought her out in 1890 (they were only two years old at the time), Scidmore saw an opportunity.
Scidmore made such an immediate impact that by 1892, they elected her to the board. In the decades she would continue her work with National Geographic, her stories and images from across Asia became a staple in the magazine.
Eliza’s contributions
It was the late 1890s when Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the first president of National Geographic, asked Scidmore for her opinion on what the magazine needs. In a letter reply to Hubbard, Scidmore wrote:
“It is a splendid beginning and a marked advance upon what we had before, but we need to have it make another leap and become a full-fledged, serious standard magazine of geographic literature.”
Pictures were exactly what the magazine needed to take that leap. By 1905, 138 photos were included in the previously text heavy publication. This change helped grow subscribership from 3,000 to 20,000 in just two years.
It was also Scidmore who convinced Hubbard and Gilbert H. Grosvenor, the first editor of National Geographic, to include coloured images. Colour was expensive back then and would be a risk for the magazine, but Scidmore saw the future.
““[W]hy not buy a piece of color photography printing?” she wrote. “It’s coming to stay and you might as well take a first flyer on some of the red and yellow temples among green trees with snow on the ground … ”
Once Grosvenor convinced the rest of the board, Scidmore immediately sent phots she had already taken while living in Japan.
“I have had them made uniform in size and strongly colored so that you can cover yourself all over with glory with another number in color and thereby catch a few thousand more subscribers. It is that that seems to strike the average subscriber hardest, after the [stingy] way the great metropolitan magazines dole out their colored samples.”
I love this story so much. Here’s a woman in the late 1800s and early 1900s who was respected, who worked for herself, travelled around the world, and contributed the ideas that would shape one of the most popular brands in the world. When I first read about Eliza Scidmore five or six years ago, I always wanted to celebrate her greatness. This is my first attempt. Expect more.