page_title: Zaida Ben-Yusuf
section_title: Photography career
hierarchical_section_title: Zaida Ben-Yusuf / Biography / Photography career
caption_attribution_description: English: American actress Elsie Leslie (1881-1966) in costume as Lydia Languish in Richard Sheridan's play The Rivals. Photograph exhibited at the 2nd Philadelphia Photo Salon, 1899, and in "The life and portrait photography of Zaida Ben-Yusuf" at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., 2008.
context_page_description: Zaida Ben-Yusuf was an English-born, New York–based portrait photographer noted for her artistic portraits of wealthy, fashionable, and famous Americans during the turn of the 19th–20th century.
  In 1901, The Ladies Home Journal featured her and six other photographers as "The Foremost Women Photographers in America". In 2008, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition dedicated solely to Ben-Yusuf's work, re-establishing her as a key figure in the early development of fine art photography.
context_section_description: In 1896, Ben-Yusuf began to be known as a photographer. In April 1896, two of her pictures were reproduced in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, and another study was exhibited in London as part of an exhibition put on by The Linked Ring. She traveled to Europe later that year, where she met with George Davison, one of the co-founders of The Linked Ring, who encouraged her to continue her photography. She exhibited at their annual exhibitions until 1902.
  In the spring of 1897, Ben-Yusuf opened her portrait photography studio at 124 Fifth Avenue, New York. On 7 November 1897, the New York Daily Tribune ran an article about Ben-Yusuf's studio and her work creating advertising posters, which was followed by another profile in Frank Leslie's Weekly on 30 December. Through 1898, she became increasingly popular as a photographer, with ten of her works in the National Academy of Design-hosted 67th Annual Fair of the American Institute. This was where her portrait of actress Virginia Earle won her third place in the Portraits and Groups class. During November 1898, Ben-Yusuf and Frances Benjamin Johnston held a two-woman show with their works at the Camera Club of New York.
  In 1899, Ben-Yusuf met with F. Holland Day in Boston, and was photographed by him. She relocated her studio to 578 Fifth Avenue, and exhibited in a number of exhibitions, including the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon. She was also profiled in a number of publications, including an article on female photographers in The American Amateur Photographer, and a long piece in The Photographic Times in which Sadakichi Hartmann described her as an "interesting exponent of portrait photography". In 1896 Ben-Yusuf was included in an exhibition organized by Linked Ring, Brotherhood of the London and continued to exhibit with them until 1902.
  In 1900, Ben-Yusuf corresponded with Johnston about an exhibition of American women photographers in Paris timed to coincide with the Universal Exposition. Ben-Yusuf had five portraits in the show, which traveled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. She was also exhibited in Holland Day's exhibition, The New School of American Photography, for the Royal Photographic Society in London, and had four photographs selected by Alfred Stieglitz for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Scotland.
  In 1901, Ben-Yusuf wrote an article, "Celebrities Under the Camera", for the Saturday Evening Post, where she described her experiences with her sitters. By this stage she had photographed Grover Cleveland, Franklin Roosevelt, and Leonard Wood, amongst others. For the September issue of Metropolitan Magazine she wrote another article, "The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture", where she described her work as being more artistic than most commercial photographers, but less radical than some of the better-known art photographers. The Ladies Home Journal that November declared her to be one of the "foremost women photographers in America", as she began the first of a series of six illustrated articles on "Advanced Photography for Amateurs" in the Saturday Evening Post.
  Ben-Yusuf was listed as a member of the first American Photographic Salon when it opened in December 1904, although her participation in exhibitions was beginning to drop off. In 1906, she showed one portrait in the third annual exhibition of photographs at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, the last known exhibition of her work in her lifetime.
caption: Elsie Leslie as Lydia Languish in Sheridan's play The Rivals (1899)
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