Mortensen/Dunham collection

Please consult “William Mortensen: A Revival,” The Archive 33 (1998) for extensive biographical information including a chronology, bibliography, and essays about his life and career.

William Herbert Mortensen was a Pictorialist photographer born in 1897 in Park City, Utah to Danish parents who had immigrated to the United States, later moving to Salt Lake City when he was 11 years old. He was interested in art from a young age, and studied art under his high school teacher at East Side High School. Mortensen served in the army from 1916-1918; upon his release he attended Arts Students League in New York City, where he lived from 1919 to 1920. With funding from his sister Ellen, Mortensen traveled to Greece in 1920 and continued to study art. He traveled back first to New York and then to Salt Lake City, where he returned to East Side High School to teach art for a year before escorting actress Fay Wray, a friend’s sister, to Hollywood.

Once in Hollywood, Mortensen worked with filmmakers including King Vidor, Ferdinand Pinney Earle, and Cecil B. DeMille. Mortensen worked on the set of DeMille’s King of Kings, as well as at the Western Costume Company. While working in the film industry he painted scenery, made masks, and photographed film stars and scenes.

Mortensen married librarian Courtney Crawford in 1924. In 1931 Mortensen moved to Laguna Beach and opened both a studio and the Mortensen School of Photography. He remarried in 1933 to Myrdith Monaghan, who was featured prominently in his photography. The same year he met George Dunham, an actor and writer and another frequent model for Mortensen, with whom he collaborated on photographic processes as well as books, monographs, and magazine articles. Mortensen wrote 9 books on photography over his lifetime.

Mortensen was known for manipulation of the texture and content of his prints, influenced by his background in drawing and painting. He developed texture screens, techniques to turn black and white images into color prints (as in his Metalchrome process), and an abrasion tone process that he used to retouch images. He was a prominent figure in the Pictorialism Movement and among the Photo-Secessionists, advocating for the treatment of photography as a fine art and supporting the manipulation of photographs to elevate their artistic status. This movement was opposed by Purist photographers such as the group f/64 and Ansel Adams, who called Mortensen “the Anti-Christ” and with whom he engaged in back-and-forth arguments published in Camera Craft and other magazines.

Mortensen died of leukemia in 1965.