He calls her "the mystery lady" and keeps a reproduction of her portrait pinned to the wall by his desk. She is a late 19th-century beauty in a low-cut gown with a lilac corsage, and Frank Goodyear knows her only as "Miss S."

She also is one of the last remaining puzzles the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's assistant curator of photographs still hopes to solve from the career of Zaida Ben-Yusuf. This accomplished yet little-known photographer focused her lens on what Goodyear calls "a who's who of modern New York"—and one unknown beauty wearing a lilac corsage—between 1897 and 1906.

Until recently, the real mystery was Ben-Yusuf herself. At the age of 26, the British-born photographer opened a Fifth Avenue studio in New York City that quickly began attracting celebrities of the day, including President Theodore
Roosevelt, novelist Edith Wharton, painter William Merritt Chase and actress Julia Marlowe.

"You had the great theater stars, the great artists, the great writers, the great politicians" flocking to Ben-Yusuf's studio to be immortalized in richly toned platinum prints, Goodyear says.

Encouraged in her efforts by Alfred Stieglitz, the era's great advocate of fine-art photography, Ben-Yusuf managed to publish portraits of her illustrious subjects in dozens of leading periodicals, all while circulating among New York's Bohemian avant-garde and even squeezing in a couple of round-the-world trips. And then, suddenly, she turned her back on her brief but brilliant career and vanished from the history of American photography, at least until Goodyear began teasing out her story a few years ago.

A life discovered

His sleuthing was sparked by a 2003 exhibition at the Portrait Gallery featuring 100 photographic portraits from the pages of Art News magazine, which was celebrating 100 years of continuous publication that year. Many of the portraits had come from the Art News picture morgue, and most hadn’t seen the light of day since their original publication decades earlier. Two pictures in particular piqued Goodyear's curiosity—portraits of Everett Shinn, the Ashcan School painter, and Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial.

"I immediately liked the pictures," Goodyear recalls. They were "luscious, velvety, artistic prints," made by someone clearly "sensitive to new creative possibilities in the field of photography." However, the curator was puzzled when he didn’t recognize the name of their creator—Zaida Ben-Yusuf. His surprise increased when a check of the scholarly literature on photography turned up hardly any references to Ben-Yusuf.

"She was somebody who had been almost completely lost," Goodyear says, still sounding astonished at Ben-Yusuf's ability to fall through the cracks in the history of photography. Soon, he was hunting for more of her pictures.

Two turned out to be hiding in his own museum—Portrait Gallery-owned portraits of author William Dean Howells and of James Burton Pond, New York's leading manager of celebrity lecture tours 100 years ago. In the storerooms of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Goodyear found a Ben-Yusuf self-portrait, plus the photo of the young woman identified only as "Miss S." In fact, after a few months of searching, "I began to realize that Ben-Yusuf"s pictures were included [although not displayed] in many major photographic collection in this country."

Ben-Yusuf's photos were quietly waiting to be discovered at the Library of Congress, at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in archives at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and several other places.

Mystery photographer
So how had Ben-Yusuf been overlooked by photography historians? One reason, Goodyear thinks, is that her works had never been gathered together in one place where they might have attracted scholarly notice. "There's not a single archive where you'll find a huge repository of her papers and her photographs," he says.

Instead, traces of Ben-Yusuf's career are scattered across a number of institutions, with her letters and even some of her photographs sometimes hidden in the archives of other artists. And until Goodyear became intrigued by the Art News portraits, no one knew to look for a mystery photographer named Zaida Ben-Yusuf. 

Supported by a Smithsonian Scholarly Studies grant that he was awarded in 2004, Goodyear went on to conduct research in London at the National Archives that established the basics of Ben-Yusuf’s biography—her birth in London in 1869 to an Algerian father and a German mother and her move to New York in 1895.
Although Ben-Yusuf first worked as a milliner upon arriving in New York, Goodyear believes she also was an active amateur photographer by then. Within two years, she had launched her career as a portrait photographer, announcing in a letter to Stieglitz that she was "very much in earnest about it all."

Vintage prints

To track down portraits by Ben-Yusuf, Goodyear trolled through online databases—ProQuest and the American Periodicals Series—that together provide access to the content of more than 1,000 U.S. newspapers and magazines published a century ago. Entering the photographer's name in the powerful search engines led him to digitized reproductions of her portraits in magazines. Armed with printouts of those images and other clues, Goodyear next went looking for the original prints that he suspected were hidden in archives and museum collections.

Unexpected finds

Goodyear's picture-hunting sometimes yielded unexpected results. In trying to locate a portrait of wildlife artist Ernest Thompson Seton, who Ben-Yusuf photographed for a magazine assignment in 1899, Goodyear began by sending a copy of the magazine illustration and a request for help to a blog visited by Seton fans. That eventually brought a tip that many of Seton's papers had ended up at the New York Public Library.

A trip to New York and four hours at the library rummaging through "the depths of their graphics files" produced the original platinum print "stuffed in an old manila envelope," Goodyear recalls. But that was just part of the day's catch.
His thumbing through the files turned up a total of eight vintage prints by Ben-Yusuf—not just of Seton but also a casual study of former President Grover Cleveland on a fishing outing; a photo of Leonard Wood, who led the Rough Riders with Teddy Roosevelt; and several other portraits. Not a bad haul from a place that had earlier told Goodyear they were sure they had no photographs by Ben-Yusuf.

Those eight photographs and about 40 others by Ben-Yusuf will be the subject of an exhibition opening in April 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery. The show will bring together Ben-Yusuf works from 15 museums and other institutions and will be paired with an exhibition of National Portrait Gallery-owned portraits by Ben-Yusuf’s far more famous contemporary, photographer Edward Steichen.

For Goodyear, the Ben-Yusuf exhibition and a related book he is writing are a way to restore the overlooked photographer to her rightful position as someone in the vanguard of early 20th-century portrait photography.

In an era when most photographers were still planting their subjects in front of painted backdrops and forcing them into contrived poses (the painter holding his palette, the politician hefting a weighty tome), Zaida Ben-Yusuf, like Stieglitz and Steichen, was working to legitimize portrait photography as a fine art, Goodyear says.

"Ben-Yusuf needs to be added to that list of people who were doing something, who were really pushing forward the creative possibilities for portrait photography," he says.

Ben-Yusuf's portrait of "Miss S" also will be in the exhibition, among a group of portraits of writers, painters and others in their 20s labeled New York's "Young Moderns."

Showing a visitor some of the portraits that will be in the Ben-Yusuf exhibition, Goodyear gets a curatorial gleam in his eye when he says, "I'll tell you, there is nothing that is more fun than finding new things that someone else didn't know about."