CLARENCE KENNEDY (1892-1972) was trained as both an art historian and a photographer. He cautioned that "the photographer dare not allow himself to use the sculpture for spectacular effects of his own invention....He is not creating something of his own." He began to experiment with lighting and photographing sculpture while a student at the American School in Athens. Returning to the United States, in 1916 he took a position teaching art history at Smith College, where he remained for forty-four years. During this time Kennedy taught photography and made photographs, producing eight volumes of The History and Criticism of Sculpture to be used as teaching aids in his classes at Smith.

Beginning around 1930, Kennedy began a longtime friendship with Edwin Land, with whom he developed the Polaroid instant print process. In the late thirties Kennedy moved away from photography as he became interested in typography, founding the Cantina Press, which he ran out of his home. After assisting in the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in the War Area during World War II, he returned to photography, making landscape images in the 1950s.

(Source: Getty Museum)