Beyond the pale … lost in time and in the hills of Fly Creek is the … Whimsy Hill Studio at the sign of the “Lady with Horse.” Lady left New York City where she was considered to be the negative retoucher with soul and bought a happily haunted old farmhouse. She and her horse rode the country roads and woods in exquisite loneliness. The aloneness became one of the sources of Lady’s magic. It allowed her to recall all past talents, even the ones of which she was not aware. With the knowledge gained having been an artist, a fashion designer, a student of historical environments, a retoucher with more than fifty years experience, and her strong intuition and empathy makes this photographer … unique. — Nick Argyros Photo |
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I am happy to have broken rules and ignored guidelines … I couldn’t be where the people are and the traffic is … I am lost in the boondocks … no money for equipment, lights, light meters, darkroom, cameras, lenses, reflectors, posing chairs, impressive reception room, etc., and 40 years doing negative retouching does not teach one to be a photographer when one is too old to be a retoucher. So I became a photographer anyway … with a creaky camera stand and an 80-year-old camera with a broken shutter, working within a four by nine foot area in a very shabby old farmhouse, cluttered to the gills with props. The light is from a window and the exposure meter is a reusable intuition. I have learned (almost too late) that too much is too bad. View Show Scenes at PhotoCenter, Troy, New York — Lady Ostapeck |
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Lady Ostapeck and her father in the early 1920s. The photograph was taken at the Mueller Studio in New York City, which Lady O says was popular with those of Finnish origin.
Lady Ostapeck [1918 – ] Born in Brooklyn of Finnish descent, Lady Ostapeck began her photography career as a negative retoucher working for many of the best studios in New York City. Tired of city life, Ostapeck moved to Otsego County in 1960 and began to seriously consider photography as a means of expression. “I wanted to be an artist when I was a little girl, I used to live in the Metropolitan Museum and pretend it was my own,” says Lady Ostapeck, who models herself of the 19th-century, soft focus artist, Julia Margaret Cameron — who like Ostapeck turned to photography later in life. Lady she found an antique Corona 4 x 5 camera in a Salvation Army thrift store and began to make whimsical portraits and narratives, which often have as much to do with Ostapeck's fantasies as they do the sitters. Believing that the photographs tell their sitters something about themselves they did not already know, the photographer poses them in props and costumes from her large personal collection. She has exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, Cobleskill; Spiratone and Modernage, New York; Rochester Institute of Technology and the Light Source Gallery, Baltimore, as well as in Finland and Great Britain. Her work has been featured in such periodicals as Modern Photography and Popular Photography.
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Lady Ostapeck is a Fellow of the now defunct New Pictorialist Society, an organization dedicated to resurrecting photographic motifs and styles that were all but forgotten for nearly three quarters of a century. Although the group that was founded in 1967 no longer is active, Lady Ostapeck has kept the pictorial tradition alive. “At the turn of the [20th] century, Pictorialism was the most beloved of all forms of photography … later it became the most maligned … and today is all but forgotten. The New Pictorialists are devoting a fraction of their resources to making knowledge of this rare art form available to others.” —
Catharina Marlowe, former editor, AVISO, |
At 87, this lady is still on the go
