FLORENCE VANDAMM
(1883-1966)
Florence Vandamm was born Florence Van Damm in 1883 in London. She opened a photographic studio there in 1908, as well as working as a painter. She married American photographer George R. Thomas in 1918 and became a Royal Photographic Society fellow the following year. The couple began a photographic partnership; where she focused on studio portraits of actors, he specialised in on-stage photographs. They moved to New York in 1923 and photographed for Vogue, Vanity Fair and the Theater Guild.
The Vandamm studio closed in 1962 and its surviving prints and artefacts were transferred to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. A major exhibition ‘Pinoeering Poet of Light: Photographer Florence Vandamm & the Vandamm Studio’ was created by curator Barbara Cohen-Stratyner in 2013.
Dancer Vera Le Fleming (b. 1901).
Gertrude Lawrence in 'Lady in the Dark' in 1941. Vandamm at Vandamm Studio, 130 West 57th Street in New York
Madge Titheradge (1887-1961), at the time of appearing in ‘The Patriot,' which opened at the Majestic Theatre on January 19th, 1928.
Dancer Vera Le Fleming (b. 1901).