Background
Benedicte Wrensted was born in Hjørring, Jutland. She grew up and attended school in Frederikshavn in the far north of Jutland.
Benedicte Wrensted was born in Hjørring, Jutland. She grew up and attended school in Frederikshavn in the far north of Jutland.
She is remembered above all for the many photographs she took of the Shoshone native people in Idaho. Her parents were Captain Carl V. Wrensted, later an innkeeper, and Johanne Borgen. One of the few professions considered suitable for women at the time was photography.
She then opened a studio of her own in Horsens which she ran for a few years before emigrating to the United States with her mother in 1894.
Here she acquired a studio in 1895 where she took photographs of the local inhabitants and recorded the growth of the town. Perhaps her most famous work remains her documentary photographs of the Shoshone and Bannock Native Americans which are considered to be of great anthropological importance.
Wrensted became a United States. citizen in 1912, at age 53, and the same year she ended her career as a photographer. She sold her studio in Pocatello and moved to Los Angeles where she died on January 19, 1949 shortly before her 90th birthday.
Many of her Native American images are preserved at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives.
They were rediscovered in 1984 by Joanna Cohan Scherer who was looking for photographs for the Smithsonian"s "Handbook of North American Indians". She found a collection of glass plate negatives in the National Archives labeled "Portraits of Indians from Southeastern Idaho Reservations, 1897".