Lucy Wallace Porter

He is known to have been an innovative “scholar-photographer” though later critical studies have shown that Porter was the principal photographer who accompanied him on his travels from 1919 onwards. Kathryn Brush (University of Western Ontario, Canada) has researched Porter's contribution to her husband's work and concluded by recognising her as a major photographer in her own right. Brush writes that following their marriage, Wallace Porter went on to produce 'more than two-thirds of the photographs published in his distinguished Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. Upon her death, her estate was bequeathed to Harvard University.

Porter was born and raised in Ansonia, Connecticut, the daughter of Thomas Wallace and Ellen Bryant. Her father and uncle co-owned Wallace & Sons, a large factory that produced copper wires for electronics.

She studied art history, music, and the sciences at Miss Porter's Young Ladies' School in Farmington, Connecticut. She then enrolled in Yale's School of Music within one of the first classes to admit women in 1895–1896.

After leaving school, Porter went through two years (1897–1899) of specialised study at the Chicago Kindergarten College, an industry that was then considered to be very modern and progressive in America. After beginning her career in New York City schools, in 1906 she resumed her studies in Columbia's Teachers College which was then 'one of America's most forward-looking institutions of its type'. During these years, she specialised in art, history, and literature.

Scholars studying Porter's photographs have noted the direct, front-on view which aligned with the expectations of modern art scholars more than the perspectives of medieval viewers: In almost all cases, Lucy Porter's photographs proclaim their modernity by representing eleventh- and twelfth-century sculpture separated from its architectural contexts [...] Lucy's post-war photography among the ruins of northern France made her well versed in this modernist practice. Despite the constraints imposed upon her, much of her work from the first half of the 1920s displayed considerable creativity and imagination. She produced a number of images that are striking in their design, artistic quality, and expressiveness, including her now "classic" photograph of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah carved on the trumeau at Moissac.

An exhibition titled Camera Woman Along the Medieval Pilgrimage Roads: The Early 20th-Century Photography of Lucy Wallace Porter was held at Harvard University from August to November 2018. It described Porter as 'one of the most influential women photographers in the field of art history during the twentieth century'. The exhibition was curated by Kathryn Brush (University of Western Ontario) and Joanna Bloom (Photographic Resources Librarian, Harvard Fine Arts Library).

In 1949 Porter donated the collection of photographs taken by the couple on their journeys to Europe to Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. The collection is now held at Harvard's Arthur Kingsley Porter Teaching and Research Collection, Special Collections, Fine Arts Library. By the late 1970s the majority of the Porters' photographic history had been destroyed as a result of the 'deteriorating and highly flammable cellulose nitrate negatives'. Before their removal, 35 mm negatives were made at the Library. Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard's research center in Washington, D.C., had also made 2000 prints of photographs featuring Byzantine objects from the original nitrate negatives. In the late 1980s, an exchange between the Getty Museum and Harvard's visual collections also resulted in some 2000 new prints from the Porters' Collection being made for the Getty. Photographs attributed to Porter are also to be found in the Conway Library's collection of architectural photographs at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. This collection is currently (2020) being digitised as part of the Courtauld Connects project.