Her Career
Working for the PAW
In 1936, three years out of high school and working from her home darkroom on Prospect Avenue, Menzies sold her first cover photograph to the Princeton Alumni Weekly. That photo and many others went uncredited. Menzies’ credit line appeared increasingly during the World War II years, when the campus transformed into a training ground. By the 1950s and 1960s, PAW’s editors tended to feel obliged to explain themselves when running anything but a Menzies cover. Her contributions to the magazine spanned four decades and seven successive editors-in-chief. The image to the right of Palmer Stadium was used on several different occasions throughout the years, often running for football game days and given colorful overlays to match the school colors of the rival team—for example, red for a game against Harvard, or blue for a game against Yale.
A 1961 PAW article recounts editor-in-chief John Davies’ immediate response to the news that women were to be invited to Alumni Day for the first time. Whenever a campus era seemed to be ending or beginning, one name came to mind: “Call Betty Menzies . . . ”
“. . . Now it will be known as ‘Alumnae Day.’ Historic occasion. Call Betty Menzies.”
Working for the Index of Christian Art
Menzies took a part-time job photographing medieval iconography for Princeton’s Index of Christian Art (now the Index of Medieval Art) in 1954, and continued to work for the Index part-time through the early 1980s. While campus instruction was a job generally reserved for men in the 1950s and 1960s, the scholarly Index was then directed and staffed predominantly by women.
Much of Menzies’ work for the Index would have taken place indoors in McCormick Hall using a special camera setup to photograph texts or objects—more cloistered than Menzies’ campus-roving freelance work. Working at the Index also brought Menzies on several summertime trips to Europe with Index Director Rosalie Green and other colleagues, especially during the 1950s. Menzies delighted in finding parallels between Princeton’s architecture and that of English universities on her travels. On a 1955 visit to England, Menzies photographed the Salisbury Chapter House ceiling in detail, later printing the images to affix to Index of Christian Art cards. Menzies’ photographs from Europe in the summer of 1955 seem to have formed the basis of a solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1957–to our knowledge, her only exhibit outside of New Jersey.
The Index of Medieval Art still exists today—currently housed in Green Hall—including card catalogues with some photographs likely by Menzies.