Vera Prasilova Scott
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Vera Prasilova Scott (Czech: Věra Prášilová) (March 25, 1899 – January 31, 1996) was a Czech-American photographer and sculptor. Her main work, which consisted of shadowed, gelatin silver photographs of Houstonian upper class society and intellectuals, has been preserved at the Rice University Woodson Research Center, the Museum of Czech Literature, and the Portland Museum of Art.[1]
Vera was one of seven children born in Kutná Hora, Bohemia in the modern Czech Republic to a professor and a school teacher.[2] In 1910, she was able to enter high school in Prague at Charles University and took an interest in photography and cloth making.[3] At the age of 18 she took an apprenticeship with a well-known Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol and developed her technique in silver halide and bromide photography.[4] After earning a Journeyman's certificate during her apprenticeship, she continued her academic training at Graphics Art School of Munich in Germany.[5] While in Munich she met her future husband Dr. Arthur F. Scott, who at the time was conducting postdoctoral research at the University of Munich as a Harvard Fellow in Chemistry.[6] She graduated with a master's degree and a first prize award in photography in little over a year and returned to Prague to begin her photography career.
Photography career
For a few months Prasilova worked under Tan Stenc to produce photographs for the Ministry of Education of the newly formed Czech Republic, but in 1924 Dr. Arthur F. Scott returned to the United States as a Reed College faculty member and Vera Prasilova followed him.[7] She settled in New York City where she worked as a stills photographer for Famous Players–Lasky, while studying at Columbia University.[8] Vera and Scott later reunited in Portland, Oregon and were married in 1925. It was that same year that Scott received an appointment to the Rice Institute (now Rice University) and the couple relocated to Houston, Texas in 1926.
Once in Houston, Prasilova opened a photography studio on San Jacinto St. and soon became well known for her portraits, whose "highlights and shadows, finished in oil or gum print have the effect of a rich charcoal.[9] Her subjects (were) not posed in a 'look pleasant' stereotype, but their moods are caught and held and veiled just enough to capture their allurement,"[10] Much of Prasilova's clientele included faculty of the Rice Institute, locals of social and political stature and their families as well as visiting celebrities, including Bertrand Russell and Maurice Ravel.[11] Several of Prasilova's portraits were included in the Pacific International Salon of Photographic Art, which hung at the Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon and Art Galleries of Oregon at Eugene in the fall of 1930.[12] Her work was also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1931 and 1932. She also showed her work in the "27th Convention" in Schenectady, NY, 1932, where her work received an Award of Merit. In 1989, Prasilova's photographic portraits were included in the exhibition Frantisek Drtikol and His Pupils at the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague, Czechoslovakia.[13] Her work is also in the permanent collections of the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Oregon and the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague, Czechoslovakia.[14]
