Kershaw, Stanley Hill (1891-1963) | McCracken Research Library

married Estelle Becker in 1916 (Philadelphia)

Photographer Stanley Kershaw moved from Chicago to Cody, Wyoming, in 1936 to help establish an artists colony.

Kershaw, a distinguished photographer, specialized in landscape and cloud effects. He worked mainly with black and white photography but also experimented with color. Many of his images were taken along Wyoming roads, as noted in his titles. In his black and white prints, such as Nature’s Cathedrals, Cody Road, Wyoming, Kershaw utilized line and shape in his compositions and created drama through shadow and light. Most importantly, his images give a sense of the land; it is barren, rugged, and, to those unfamiliar with the area, foreign in its forms. The diverse palette Kershaw employed in his color prints appears exaggerated at first but in reality is comparable to the natural colors of Cody’s western landscape. Kershaw was also a precise recorder of his process when capturing images on film, at times even noting the aperture and time of exposure on the verso of printed photographs.