T. O'Conor Sloane Jr.
Thomas O’Conor Sloane, Jr. (1879–1963) was an American photographer. Sloane was born in 1879 in Brooklyn, New York but spent much of his adult life in South Orange, New Jersey. Sloane was already photographing by the summer of 1894, when he photographically documented a week-long cruise with his father on a sloop yacht on Long Island Sound. Pictures of this trip survive in an album he compiled that is now at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut. Sloane was most active as a naturalistic photographer at the turn of the twentieth century, garnering acclaim for  his gum bichromate work. In Sloane's early twenties, he focused primarily on portraiture, becoming a professional sometime thereafter and remaining active until the 1940s, when a diving accident severely impaired his eyesight. Sloane experimented with gum bichromate, platinum, pigment, gaslight and gelatin silver prints and various lenses. Sloane was perhaps an unlikely photographer, having graduated from Columbia University in New York City with a degree in electrical engineering like his father, Dr. T. O'Conor Sloane, a noted scientist, prodigious author of scientific books and articles, and the editor of "Amazing Stories". Sloane briefly taught electrical engineering and was a  research assistant at Columbia, also working independently as an electrical engineer, before becoming a professional photographer. Sloane began exhibiting with Alfred Stieglitz's ("Portrait of Thomas O'Conor Sloane Jr" by Stieglitz, c. early 1900s<nowiki>)</nowiki> cadre of artistic amateur photographers at The Camera Club of New York and in 1902 was an original member of the influential Photo-Secession movement, with his work appearing in that year's National Arts Club exhibition. In addition to exhibitions in New York, Sloane's photographs were exhibited in Chicago and Philadelphia in 1900, London in 1901 and Turin in 1902. Sloane 's photographs appeared in "Photo Beacon" (June 1900), "Camera Notes" (October 1900), "Photographic Times" (November 1900 and January 1904), "The American Annual of Photography" (1901) and "Camera Work, No. 3" (July 1903). An article he wrote, "Photography as a Craft," appeared in the January, 1920 edition of "The Photo-Miniature". By 1931 Sloane had relocated to Westport, Connecticut where in 1935 he was commissioned by the Westport Preservation Alliance (WPA) Federal Arts Project to photograph the historic houses of Westport and environs. His photos were black and white using glass plate negatives. A gum print that he created during this  time was shown at the Connecticut Tercentenary exhibition in New Haven. Sloane maintained a long friendship with fellow Photo-Secessionist and West Redding, Connecticut resident, photographer Edward Steichen. Sloane's photographic work can be found in art auctions, public and private collections, exhibitions, university archives and museums across the nation. Examples include: [https://collections.artsmia.org/search/artist:%22T.%20O'Conor%20Sloane%20Jr.%22 [Untitled: man harvesting<nowiki>]</nowiki>] (c. 1900) in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota; "New York City Construction Site" (c. 1900) in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; "Landscape with Trees" (c. 1905) in the collection of  the Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri; "Cloud Study" (c. 1910) in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York; "Thomas Alva Edison" (c. 1914) in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of The Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Family. Sloane's brother, John Eyre Sloane, also a Columbia graduate, married Thomas Edison's daughter Madeleine. Sloane's son, T. O'Conor Sloane III, was a senior editor at Doubleday.