Working freelance, local photographer Elizabeth Menzies (1915-2003) contributed countless photographs of the Princeton campus to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (PAW) magazine starting in 1936, through the War years, and late into the 1960s.

Menzies was both an insider and outsider; while excluded from the education she documented, she enjoyed privileged access to campus through her father Alan Menzies, a chemistry professor, and her job at Princeton’s Index of Medieval Art. Her camera was her ticket to lecture halls where, in the words of one PAW editor, undergraduates “endured Betty Menzies’ tennis shoes silently padding through the back rows.”

If quietly, Menzies developed a strong voice of her own. The shrewd composition of her work, an eye for architecture both traditional and modern, a dry sense of juxtaposition, and an elegiac glance at sites of change grab our attention. Her work for hire is something more than it needed to be.

This is far from the first time Princeton has exhibited Menzies and her work—during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, multiple exhibits of her photographs, paintings, and prints ran both in town and on campus. However, despite her local fame and influence, there is no one collection of Menzies’ photographs in Princeton's University Archives, and many of the photograph collections in the archives are not searchable by photographer. In creating this exhibition, curators looked through hundreds of boxes of photographs in different collections, searching for Menzies’ distinctive style and her stamp.