Nancy Rexroth

Nancy Rexroth, born in 1946 in Washington, D.C., and raised in the suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, drew early inspiration from childhood summer visits to relatives in Iowa, which infused her work with a sense of exotic, dreamlike rural memory. She earned a BFA in English from American University, where she developed an interest in photojournalism influenced by masters like Emmet Gowin, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Rexroth pursued her MFA in Photography at Ohio University from 1969 to 1971, studying under professor Arnold Gassan, who introduced her to the inexpensive Diana toy camera—a plastic device with a meniscus lens that produced soft-focus, vignetted images on 120 film. Embracing its imperfections as poetic tools, she experimented intensively, creating her signature impressionistic style during graduate school.

Rexroth's breakthrough came with her seminal series *Iowa* (1970–1976), shot entirely with the Diana in the rural hollows of southeastern Ohio—lands of white clapboard houses, playing children, and intimate interiors that evoked her Iowa reveries as a "psychic journey" of maturation and melancholy. Key images include *Boys Flying, Amesville, Ohio* (1976), *My Mother, Pennsville, Ohio* (1970), *Children and Leaves, Shawnee, Ohio* (1974), and *Waving House, Vanceburg, Kentucky* (1975), rendered in meticulously printed gold-toned gelatin silver for a luminous, ethereal glow. Funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the work culminated in her self-published book *Iowa* (1977, Violet Press; reissued 2017, University of Texas Press), the first monograph dedicated to toy camera photography, alongside her pamphlet *The Platinotype 1977* (1976) after Smithsonian research into historic printing.

After her MFA, Rexroth taught at Antioch College and Wright State University, exhibited widely—from the Corcoran Gallery and Light Gallery to the Center for Creative Photography—and explored platinum prints, Polaroid SX-70 transfers, and digital color. Her pioneering embrace of the Diana's "defects" liberated fine art photography from technical perfection, influencing toy camera movements and snapshot aesthetics. Works reside in prestigious collections like MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum (over 300 prints acquired 2019), and the Smithsonian, cementing *Iowa* as an underground classic that continues to inspire photographers with its haunting, personal poetry.