Last year, in our March 2016 issue, I told the story of Nadia Price, one of this area's most acclaimed photographers.
Born in 1916, the daughter of the Mid-South's largest Cadillac dealer, Nadia attended the old Memphis Art Academy, where she studied painting and sculpture with her sister, Billie. When she was 16, her father gave her an old Speed Graphic press camera, and she told reporters, “Naturally, I photographed everything I could capture on film. My favorite shots were ‘human interest’ photographs. Thus began my collection.”
She took pictures and also began to hone her sculpting and painting skills while attending Miss Hutchison’s School. She graduated from there in 1937, and began an internship paying $12 a week with a local commercial photographer named Avery N. Stratton, where she first learned film processing, printing, and retouching skills.
During World War II, she was the official photographer for the Fisher Aircraft Works, a former General Motors auto-body factory in North Memphis that had been converted to making parts for B-25 bombers.
In 1946, she teamed up with another photographer, Caroline Jenkins, and opened a studio in the basement of an old house on Union. They called the business “Photography by Nadia” and at first their specialty was children’s portraits, but they soon branched out to include all kinds of photography: commercial, architectural, family portraits, camp meetings, church groups, weddings — even insurance claims. By 1949, the two women were doing so well that they opened their own studio at 187 South Cooper.
With her distinctive touch, Nadia converted that corner of the hum-drum building into an eye-catching art-deco-style studio (shown here), complete with pink neon lighting and an apartment on the second floor.
One of the few women in Memphis known only by her first name, Nadia caught the attention of the Downtown Association of Memphis, which in 1966 named her one of the “Five Outstanding Women Who Work.” A newspaper reporter noted, “Capturing the essence of Nadia would equate to catching water in a sifter.”
Nadia closed her studio in 1971, and most Memphians driving down Cooper know it as the somewhat ramshackle home of Baggott Sheet Metal Works. By the time she retired, she estimated she had captured the people and places of the Mid-South on more than 100,000 images.
This week, wrecking crews pulled down her old studio and the remains of the Baggott company. I'll guess I'll wait and see what goes up on the corner, but I doubt it will be as distinctive — or memorable — as the studio with the sign "Photography by Nadia."
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY RICHARD WOODALL, from his Facebook page.
