Diana Mara Henry Collection (20th Century Photographer)

Background on Diana Mara Henry

Diana Mara Henry is best known for her acclaimed photojournalism documenting social and political activism of the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, perhaps most notably the women's movement and the fight to end the Vietnam War. Over the years, many have recognized Henry's talent for capturing powerful images that have the potential to inspire, prompt reflection, and promote social change. Yet while undoubtedly one of her major achievements, Henry's political photography represents just part of her extensive résumé. In her decades-long photography career, Henry has employed her camera to document a variety of subjects beyond American political activism, has worked as a photography instructor, and has pursued professional ventures in foreign language and business as well as extensive scholarship of topics of repression and resistance in World War II. Recognizing the multilayered nature of Diana Mara Henry's professional life is critical to understanding the full extent of her career achievements.

Diana Mara Henry was born on June 20, 1948 in Cincinnati, Ohio, the only child of Carl and Edith (Entratter) Henry. Henry's parents were the founders and owners of the Lucky Stride Shoe Company, headquarted in Maysville, Kentucky, for which Edith Henry also served as designer. Henry spent the first years of her life in Cincinnati, where she attended the College Preparatory School for Girls from 1953 to 1959. Henry's early life also had a substantial international influence; as a child she traveled to Europe with her parents on multiple occasions and, under the tutelage of her governess, learned to speak fluent French.

In 1959, when Diana was eleven, the Henrys moved from Cincinnati to Manhattan. Here, she became a student at the Lycée Français de New York where she majored in Classics (Greek and Latin). A year before graduating from the Lycée in 1965, Henry went on to Radcliffe College where she earned an A.B. in Government with a minor in History in 1969. While a college student, Henry began to avidly pursue photojournalism, serving as photo-editor of the Harvard Crimson from her sophomore through her senior years, and as a photographer for the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Today. Additionally, she captured publicity shots of the 1968 Eugene McCarthy campaign for The Cambridge Chronicle and completed photography assignments for Time and Newsweek. During her college years, Henry also distinguished herself beyond the world of photography; for one of her classes, Henry penned an essay entitled "The Concept of Time and History," which earned Harvard's prestigious Ferguson History Prize and was published in a 1967 issue of the periodical The Journal for the Study of Cycles. In the summer of 1968, prior to beginning her senior year at Radcliffe, Henry worked as a publicity assistant on location for the Hollywood film If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.

Following her graduation from Radcliffe in 1969, Henry returned to New York City to pursue her interest in journalism through work as a General Assignment Reporter for The Staten Island Advance, a metropolitan daily newspaper. Prior to her position at the Advance, she worked as a researcher for NBC under the direction of television producer Robert Northshield, where she contributed to the network documentary From Here to the Seventies.

Although Henry was employed at The Staten Island Advance for only about one year, from 1969 to 1970, one of her experiences as a reporter would have a lasting impact on her professional life. An assignment for the Advance took Henry to the Alice Austen House, a museum commemorating the life and work of E. Alice Austen, one of the foremost female photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An up-and-coming female photographer herself, Henry was inspired by the mission of the Alice Austen House and became the Vice President and Director of Programs for the museum in 1980. In her capacity as an administrator for the Alice Austen House, Henry played an instrumental role in a successful effort to lobby the New York City government for more than $1 million dollars to restore the museum's house and grounds.

It was at around the same time that she was working for the Advance that Henry also began to pursue a career in freelance photojournalism with a focus on news and documentary photography. In this capacity, Henry would go on to chronicle many iconic aspects of the 1970s sociopolitical landscape, including the presidential campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter and the activities of noted activists and politicians such as Shirley Chisholm, Gloria Steinem, Al Lowenstein, Elizabeth Holtzman, Jane Fonda, Liz Carpenter, and Bella Abzug. Henry also served as the official photographer for the President's Commission on International Women's Year and for the First National Women's Conference. In Houston in 1977, Henry captured a host of now-iconic images of second-wave feminism, including a photograph of Betty Friedan, Billie Jean King, Susan B. Anthony II, and Bella Abzug, Sylvia Ortiz, Peggy Kokernot and Michelle Cearcy bearing the torch that had been relayed from Seneca Falls for the opening of the conference.

Another notable aspect of Henry's political photography from this period was her work documenting the demonstrations of activist organizations such as the Women's Pentagon Action Committee, Women Office Workers/Nine-to-Five, pro-Equal Rights Amendment organizations, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Henry's interest in veterans' issues led her to photograph the 1971 demonstrations on Boston Common and at the ITT Building on Park Avenue in 1973, and the 1981 hunger strike at the Wadsworth Veterans' Administration Hospital in Los Angeles, which sought to call attention to the inadequate treatment of Vietnam veterans suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. Henry's coverage of antiwar activism and veterans' experiences earned her the praise and admiration of Vietnam veteran and Born on the Fourth of July author Ron Kovic, who wrote to Henry: "I believe these photos will last and many years from now be looked at and studied just as Matthew Brady's haunting Civil War photos are today."

At the same time that she was utilizing her photojournalism to chronicle social and political issues, Henry was also using her camera to explore the worlds of cosmopolitan fashion and high society. In the 1970s, Henry photographed events such as Fashion Week in New York City and captured images of famous personalities including designer Diane Von Furstenberg, IBM heiress and bookseller Jeanette Watson Sanger, and writer/social commentator Fran Lebowitz. She also photographed high profile cat shows, including the Empire Cat Show in New York. Starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Henry served as personal and family photographer for Malcolm Forbes, documenting family weddings and other special events for the famous Forbes magazine owner and completing photography assignments for organizations that Forbes actively supported, such as the Hayden Planetarium and the Victorian Society.

Despite the demands of her own photography career, Diana Henry still found time in the 1970s to pursue work as a photography instructor. From 1975 to 1979, she served on the faculty of the International Center of Photography in New York, where she also created and directed the Community Workshop program. From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, she taught photography at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic girls school in Manhattan. Henry's work as an educator even extended beyond photography; from 1973-1974 she was an English instructor at her alma mater, the Lycée Français de New York.

In the early 1980s Diana Henry purchased a home in Kingston, New York and began to divide her time between this upstate residence and Manhattan. Henry was able to pursue her interest in permaculture and environmental conservation in Kingston, where she became a serious gardener and resided in a house set on 100 acres of forest. During this time, her professional activities were also notably divided between the city and the country. On the one hand, Henry pursued an MA degree in Arts Administration at New York University from 1984 to 1986, continued her work as Vice President and Program Director for the Alice Austen House, and completed photography assignments for New York City hospitals such as Mount Sinai and Memorial Sloan Kettering. On the other hand, Henry pursued an extensive photography and oral history-based project in upstate New York spotlighting one room schoolhouses of Ulster County. Drawing on interviews with schoolhouse alumni and former teachers, her own photographs of buildings that had once served as schoolhouses, and older images of schoolhouses in operation, Henry developed an exhibit funded through a New York State Council on the Arts grant. She displayed her exhibit at the Catskill Center for Photography, the Women's Studio Workshop, and the Erpf Catskill Cultural Center in 1986. (Another Henry exhibit, focusing on one room schoolhouses of Vermont, was originally displayed at the Brattleboro Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1980 and subsequently at American International College in 2006 and the Vermont Folklife Center and Vermont History Museum in 2014). Beyond her schoolhouse exhibit, Henry pursued several other professional endeavors in Ulster County in the 1980s; she worked as a journalist for The Daily Freeman, a Kingston-based newspaper, served as an artist-in-residence at the Valhalla, New York public schools and for Reading to Learn Through the Arts in Manhattan, sponsored by a grant from the NY Foundation for the Arts, and, in cooperation with Marist College, taught English at the Otisville Federal Penitentiary in Otisville, New York.

It was while she was dividing her personal and professional time between New York City and upstate New York that Diana Henry met Noel Oard Mapstead, an artist originally from Carmel, California. Henry and Mapstead married in 1986 and had a daugher, Barbara Edith, a year later. When Barbara Mapstead was an infant, the young family moved from New York to California, initially to Benton Hot Springs and shortly thereafter to Noel Mapstead's hometown of Carmel. While raising her daughter on the West Coast, Henry pursued a wide range of professional endeavors. She taught photography at the Santa Catalina School (a Catholic boarding and day school in Monterey) and in the Carmel and Monterery Peninsula School districts. She also founded the photography program at the Carmel Adult School, served as a photo-coordinator for the Brooks Cole college textbook publishing company, and employed her fluency in French as a professor at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey and at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Additionally, Henry continued to develop her own photography exhibits such as "Libel," first displayed at the Pacific Grove Arts Center in 1988. "Libel," which featured a variety of images of men, women, and children accompanied by incongrous and libelous captions, offered a powerful social statement by challenging the notion that photographs and the text that accompanies them always reflect reality.

Before her family's move to California, Henry had also begun to pursue a research project which would inspire her interest for years to come. In the mid-1980s, she started to investigate the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp (KLNa) in France. In 1990, Henry presented a text and photography-based exhibit about Natzweiler-Struthof and Eugène Marlot's experiences at the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel.

After 1994 she met the man and edited the memoirs of the life and the war experiences of André Scheinmann, a German Jewish man who provided Nazi secrets to the British during World War II and was sent to the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp when the Nazis discovered his work as a spy. Ultimately, André survived Natzweiler-Struthof, as well as the Dachau concentration camp, and moved to the United States following the Allied liberation of Europe. Diana Henry first traveled to the site of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, located in the Vosage Mountains of eastern France, in 1985 while on a visit to the hometown of her paternal grandfather. In the years to follow, she made several more trips to the area to capture images of the former Nazi labor and extermination camp, a camp known to have specifically targeted political prisoners like André Scheinmann.

Over the years, Henry remained passionate about sharing André Scheinmann's remarkable story, as well as those of other Natzweiler-Struthof survivors; she authored the article "Call Me André: Memoirs of a Jewish Spy in the Resistance", which was published in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies in 2011, translated The Hell of Alsace, an account penned by French resistance member Eugène Marlot, and currently maintains a Natzweiler-Struthof weblog which contains materials culled from a quarter century of her research, her interviews with survivors, her photography, and her French-to-English translations. Since 2012, Henry has also operated Natzweiler Press, which publishes translations of memoirs, bibliographies, anthologies, and other print materials produced by camp survivors. Scheinmann's memoir, entitled Call Me André: Freedom Fighter and Spy for the Ressistance is set for release at the end of 2014.

While Henry's professional life in California was extremely productive, in 1993 Diana Henry and Noel Mapstead divorced. However, Henry continued to live in California until the late 1990s, when she moved first to Massachusetts and then to with her daughter Barbara. Shortly after relocating to the East Coast, Henry began to pursue an MA in French Language and Literature Translation at Brandeis University, a degree which provided her with the credentials she felt she needed to publish her investigation of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in greater depth. After earning her degree in 2000, Henry eventually moved to Springfield, Massachusetts with her daughter and purchased a Victorian home which she converted into the Lathrop House Bed and Breakfast. Henry operated the Bed and Breakfast for several years in the 2000s while also working as a professor of French at Trinity, Westfield State, American International, and Springfield Technical Community Colleges. In 2012, Henry moved from Springfield to Newport, Vermont where she now resides.

In addition to her continuing work related to Natzweiler-Struthof, Henry has been engaged in a wide range of professional endeavors in recent years related to historical and sociopolitical issues. In the mid-2000s, Henry spearheaded a campaign for a United States postage stamp honoring the women's movement, an endeavor that has won the support of members of Congress and of second-wave feminist icons such as Gloria Steinem. She also played an instrumental role in planning the commemoration of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the First National Women's Conference, an event held in Manhattan in November of 2012. In the last few years, Henry has spoken about feminism and women's issues at events such as the Women Change America Conference at Smith College, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar on Gender History, the Organization of American Historians' Centennial Conference, and on Feminism and Photography at Amherst College. Another current endeavor for Henry is "Front Seat to War," a web-based project exploring the experiences of her father, Carl Henry, in the European theater during World War II. Carl Henry served in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Europe from July 1944 to September 1945, where he participated in the Battle of the Bulge as well as the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp. He penned letters home to his wife Edith nearly every day of the fifteen months he was overseas. Henry has been utilizing "Front Seat to War," to post digital copies of her parents' correspondence, along with newspaper articles, photographs, and other documents and images that provide a compelling window onto her father's war experience.

Without question, Diana Mara Henry's photojournalism has left an indelible mark on history. Her images have been featured in numerous periodicals and newspapers over the last several decades, including Time, The Village Voice, Viva, Reliable Source, Civil Rights Digest, New York, People, Women's Wear Daily, Palm Beach Life, Popular Photography, More, Boston, Southern Exposure, Women Artists' Newsletter and the American Society for Picture Professionals Newsletter. Additionally, her work has appeared in many books including The Spirit of Houston (the official report on the First National Women's Conference in Houston), Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique, The World Split Open, Red Femimism, and Through Women's Eyes. The 2012 book Women on the Move explores second-wave feminism specifically through the lens of Diana Henry's photographs. The venues that have showcased her images are also numerous and include the Women's Museum, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Women's Hall of Fame, and even the 1989 Broadway play The Heidi Chronicles. Because of her achievements as a photojournalist, Henry's name has been listed in The Photography Collector's Guide and Who's Who of Women in America. Even while Henry is well-known and celebrated for her political photography, her achievements as a photography instructor, photographer of subjects beyond sociopolitical movements, and her work in other professional fields are equally noteworthy and significant achievements.