Her Work
Areas of Interest
Most published photographs are supplied with captions consisting of a sentence or two. Perhaps this demonstrates a disbelief in the public's visual ability.
Menzies only occasionally added captions directly to a print. Below, the photographer wryly invites viewers to distinguish the distant Graduate College tower from a roof in the “New Quad” of dormitories.
From collegiate-gothic arches and preening gargoyles to a brutalist administration building, campus architecture formed a large part of Menzies’ portfolio. Her photographs could be wistful at sites of demolition on campus, while embracing the geometry of the new, modern buildings. She paid attention to building maintenance—people working on roofs, on scaffolding and ladders, or shoveling while a steep roof pitches down a sheet of snow.
Menzies tended to frame or even obscure her architectural subjects in tree branches—sometimes adding to a sense of distance as the lens peeks through a thicket. One reviewer of the book Princeton Architecture wrote quizzically: “She seems to be enamored of trees, and, while she photographs largely in leafless season, the buildings are often seen miasmatically or are dwarfed by the more immense flora." Menzies enjoyed playing with patterns and repetition, geometric lines and arboreal tangle, shadow and contrast. She also experimented with technique by using a “solarized” developing process to create an intensely dark image of Nassau Hall’s cupola, and a dark filter for the sky over Palmer Stadium. Menzies’ work at times nears abstraction, even as the work remains representational—and evinces a strong belief in the visual ability of the public.
Focusing on the Environment
We know in a vague way that nonbeauty is bad, squalor is undesirable, but do we ever notice the beauty of life and growing things around us—the intricacy of a wild flower with its shades of color, soft texture, and fragrance? Man’s best machinery can’t duplicate it, even in plastic.
Menzies always lived within walking distance of Lake Carnegie, a recurring pastoral subject whether tranquil or busy with skaters. She was born only about a decade after the opening of the lake, in the house that still stands at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Harrison Street. She moved once in her lifetime, with her parents, to Kingston Road.
The woodcut pictured to the left is Menzies' work—one of her many creative pursuits outside of photography. It depicts Lake Carnegie, and was made in 1961.
Having experienced in childhood a Princeton that felt more rural than suburban, Menzies in later years turned toward documenting signs of pollution in Lake Carnegie. She became an early and staunch advocate for the local and regional environment. On the first Earth Day in 1970, she was named Woman of the Week (for the third time) by a local newspaper, Town Topics, citing her work Millstone Valley. This book was an ode to the region in photographs, punctuated by expository prose on ecology and historical buildings, culminating in an essay that voices urgent environmental concerns, quoted above.
Menzies had published another book, Before the Waters: The Upper Delaware Valley, in 1966, when the proposed Tocks Island Dam project would displace people and historic landmarks near the Delaware Water Gap. Menzies wrote in its preface, “Before this countryside is inundated by the reservoir or enveloped by the Recreation Area, I have tried to record the old places in photographs.”
Now in her third year as photographer for the Princeton Index of Christian Art….[Menzies] divides her days between the Index and her Kingston Road studio. She continues to draw and paint…and, if pressed, will also list canoe-sailing, fishing and carpentry among her interests. One of her associates points out that “she can make a living any time as a handy man.”