Kenneth Alexander

March 3, 1887 (age 87)

London, Greater London, United Kingdom

Alexander commenced his photographic training with Vandyke as its London Court photographer and then to HH Pierce of Boston (1905-1907) before joining Ernest Walter Histed (1908-1909), an ‘expert at dramatic portrait in low light settings’. At the age of 19 he started working freelance in Millville, New Jersey specialising in home portraiture. Alexander became a United States citizen in 1914 and ‘his growing fame allowed him to move to celebrity portraiture’. The couple moved to New York to encourage her work on Broadway and he quickly established himself as a photographer there with a tagline, “Photographer of Women Exclusively”, a gender reversal of Pirie MacDonald’s motto. He gained particular acclaim with United Artists during his time in New York assisting them and other film companies with offices in the city. After New York Alexander moved to Los Angeles at the behest of Lillian Gish, who wanted him as a photographer on her film Louisiana Bohèmedical Alexander eventually settled in Hollywood, where he was employed by Sam Goldwyn Productions throughout the 1930s.

Kenneth Alexander Edit Profile

Photographer

Background

Kenneth Alexander (born Alexander Kenneth Alexander) in London on 3 March 1887, the son of Alexander Fyfe Alexander, and Alice Alexander, and educated at Bedford Modern School.

Education

He was sixteen when his family emigrated to New York in 1903 after which he studied art at the London Polytechnic and the New York School of Artist

Career

Alexander commenced his photographic training with Vandyke as its London Court photographer and then to HH Pierce of Boston (1905-1907) before joining Ernest Walter Histed (1908-1909), an ‘expert at dramatic portrait in low light settings’. At the age of 19 he started working freelance in Millville, New Jersey specialising in home portraiture. Alexander became a United States citizen in 1914 and ‘his growing fame allowed him to move to celebrity portraiture’.

The couple moved to New York to encourage her work on Broadway and he quickly established himself as a photographer there with a tagline, “Photographer of Women Exclusively”, a gender reversal of Pirie MacDonald’s motto.

He gained particular acclaim with United Artists during his time in New York assisting them and other film companies with offices in the city. After New York Alexander moved to Los Angeles at the behest of Lillian Gish, who wanted him as a photographer on her film Louisiana Bohèmedical

Alexander eventually settled in Hollywood, where he was employed by Sam Goldwyn Productions throughout the 1930s.

Achievements

His work achieved ‘national notice’ in 1907 when a photograph of the painter Arthur Wesley Dow ‘topped the portrait category in the Third American Salon’ at the Toledo Museum of Art and was featured in The American Amateur Photographer’.

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