Elizabeth Menzies Photo Exhibit Captures an Era of Campus Life

“Credit line, please” reads the stamp that Elizabeth Menzies put on the back of the photos she submitted to the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

She took many photographs for PAW, starting in the mid-1930s, and early in her career the magazine often failed to give her credit, though it’s unclear why. The daughter of Alan Menzies, a chemistry professor, she spent more than 40 years photographing the University she was never able to attend. 

This year, Mudd Manuscript Library has put together an exhibit of Menzies’ work. Phoebe Nobles, a processing archivist at Mudd library who curated the exhibit with Emma Paradies and Rosalba Varallo Recchia, said the inspiration for the exhibit came from a photo album about limited parking on campus that she and colleague April Armstrong *14 discovered. 

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This photo of the Navy V-12 convocation in 1944 is in the Elizabeth Menzies exhibit.

Elizabeth Menzies / Princeton University Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series / Princeton Alumni Weekly Photograph Collection

The album “just has these very kind of saucy, sardonic captions that she typed out and taped into the album and some sort of pretty humdrum photos of parking lots and people walking from their cars to work,” Nobles said.

The exhibit, which will run through April, features photographs from a large cross section of Menzies’ portfolio. One case of photos focuses on Lake Carnegie, which Menzies often photographed, both as an example of Princeton life and as an isolated bastion of nature. 

To preserve the photos, some pictures will be switched out every few months so the exhibit may vary week to week. 

“We don’t have a lot in her own voice,” said Nobles. “We’re fairly certain she would have printed most of this material herself.”

Some of Menzies’ photos appear personal and intimate, others cold and isolated. While archivists don’t have any way to know how Menzies thought about most of her pictures, they do know that she’s finally getting the credit line she always deserved. 

Elizabeth Menzies took this photo of a fencing bout at Dillon Gym.

Elizabeth Menzies / Princeton University Historical Photograph Collection, Grounds and Buildings Series / Princeton Alumni Weekly Photograph Collection