Nancy Rexroth

Nancy Rexroth (born 1946) is an American photographer noted for her pioneer work utilizing the Diana camera. In 1977, she published Iowa – the first printed monograph of work completed with a plastic camera.

Rexroth was born in Washington D.C. While completing her BFA in English at American University, she developed an interest in photojournalism and was influenced by the work of Emmet Gowin, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She then went on to receive her MFA in Photography at Ohio University (1969-1971).

In 1969, during her graduate studies, Ohio University professor, Arnold Gassan, introduced Rexroth to the Diana camera. This toy camera used 120 (medium format) film and was known for the soft focus and impressionistic, ‘dreamlike’ images it produced as a result of its plastic lens. Although some photographers saw the effects of the Diana camera as hindrances, Rexroth embraced and explored its defects.

After completing her MFA, Rexroth moved back to the Washington, D.C. area. While there she participated in a summer internship at the Smithsonian Institution, researching the platinotype process. As a result of this internship came what would be Rexroth's second publication, The Platinotype 1977 (1976), a pamphlet on modern platinum printing.

In 1973, she moved back to Ohio to teach at Antioch College and Wright State University, and to work on a photographic series that became her first published book, Iowa, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Rexroth's most notable work, Iowa, is a series of dream-like and poetic images. Each seemingly candid and liquid composition includes a soft focus and vignette, characteristic qualities of Diana camera images. In The Snapshot, author Jonathan Green writes, “The Diana images are often like something you might faintly see in the background of a photograph. Strange fuzzy leaves, masses and forms, simplified doorways. Sometimes I feel as though I could step over the edge of the frame and walk backwards into this unknown region. Then I would keep right on walking.” Speaking to the appearance of Rexroth’s work, Mary Abbe of the Minneapolis Tribune Paper states, "The show's most striking image, "A Woman's Bed" Logon Ohio 1970, is also one of its simplest. "A Woman's Bed" is a shadowy picture of a dark headboard half-buried by a drift of stark, white, primordially pure bedding. The headboard's design and the way the bed edges into a corner suggests the narrow confines of the lives it sheltered […] a mysterious womb of light wrapped in darkness."

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