Biography
Hope Zanes Butterworth—By: Warren Zanes
At one point while I was working on a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I did a project on my mother and her relationship with the German photographer Lotte Jacobi. Lotte was a big presence in Hope’s life, a kind of mentor.When it came to interviewing my mother, I used a cassette recorder and handed her a piece of paper with her answers to the questions I was about to ask. We both laughed at the idea, acknowledging the absurdity, but we proceeded as planned. I wish I still had the interview. I don’t. But she said some interesting things, not all of which she agreed with. This biography is going to be along the same lines. We couldn’t find the one Hope wrote for her most recent show. It’s somewhere in a box.
Growing up with Hope was, despite the coming and going of husbands, a single-parent affair. By the time she married Harry Butterworth, with whom she remained married until his passing, the kids were out of the yard, no longer kids. When we were growing up, however, this meant that when we needed a parent, it was going to be Hope. We’d knock on the darkroom door, wait to be told it was okay to enter. Sometimes you just talked through the door. If you did go in, of course, you’d have to wait to go out. We all spent significant time standing in the dark with our mother. That was our life with her. When and where it all started, her adventures in photography, remains something of a question.
Recently, my sister, Julie, found some old newspaper clippings announcing the results of various amateur photography contests in Canada, where the family was living until just after my birth. As the clippings reveal, Hope won a few prizes for her early photographs, had some images reproduced. It’s clear that she was thinking like a fine art photographer, with intention behind the work. I don’t recall that period, but I do know that my earliest memories include seeing a camera pointed in my general direction. Hope had a way with photographing children, so 35mm and 120mm cameras were often things that came between us and our mother.
When we moved down from Canada to Concord, New Hampshire, Hope took a job at Spruce Tree Nursery School, Barbara Antonson’s pre-school. When time allows and access is easier, we’ll try to put some of that period’s work up on this website. The images are often remarkable. I still remember many of them. With the right subject, Hope’s gift as a portrait photographer was obvious. Likely it was that which led to her working as a wedding photographer, something she mostly hated. I remember her coming home from those jobs, typically cursing her clients, complaining that they didn’t feed her, smoking a cigarette in little more than a few drags (she smoked one a day at that point, but, boy oh boy, she smoked it).
Early on, we suffered through a few nude family photographs, but our dignity as subjects was left largely intact, unless we were the ones to offer it up for dismantling, which sometimes happened. Hope left behind boxes and boxes of prints and negatives, likely more than we’ll ever be able to archive in a real way, unfortunately. What you’ll see here are mostly photographs taken with one of Hope’s many Diana cameras. That was a later stage in her work. Anyone curious about those plastic devices should see the Diana section on this website. It was a Diana image that ended up on the cover of Morphine’s final recording, The Night, released just after Mark Sandman’s death. Hope found a great collaborator in those cameras.
As a photography teacher, Hope led a life that was all but a mystery to us, though we do know that several among her students kept in touch, voiced their gratitude in different ways. But outside of the classroom, Hope wasn’t one to impose her artistic beliefs on anyone. She was largely self-taught and didn’t belong to a community of likeminded creators who scrawled manifestos on napkins in barrooms. Maybe the darkroom itself determined the artistic solitude Hope knew, but I think it was more than that.
My sister has written a little something about gum printing here, and that’s a process Hope discovered with Julie’s encouragement. Gum prints became an important part of Hope’s photographic life in her last busy years. While it’s a process associated with another era in fine art photography, with early Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen work done during their early, “Pictorialist” phases, it fit into Hope’s world, its pace and its mood. As a technique, it’s something of a hybrid between painting and photography, but only in the sense that pigment is brushed onto the printing paper in the course of the process. Julie’s notes will help explain that.
I do believe that if Hope was the kind of photographer with ambitions extending beyond the darkroom and into the art market, we wouldn’t be introducing her work to anyone. But she didn’t. She had the three of us to raise, animals to feed, and her work at The Friendly Kitchen, which went for decades. But a real independence of vision marks her photographs, as you’ll see here. She had a thing that was very much her own, even if she let her influences shine through. It’s a rare occurrence in the crowded world of art and artists.
Whether cameras bring people closer to the world or keep them from entering it is a worthy question. It’s probably both, contingent on the situation. But Hope and her camera did a lot of things together. I don’t know about my siblings, but sometimes I could even feel just a bit jealous. But it’s the lucky ones who find a place they can go to be more fully themselves, and for Hope photography was certainly one such place.