Adelaide Hanscom
(born 1876 Empire City, Oregon, died 1932) photographer
Adelaide Hanscom was born in the state of Oregon. Her family moved to Berkeley, California, when she was still a child.
She studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) and studied a photography, later establishing a studio with Blanche Cummings, he two women forming a partnership in 1902. Hanscom's work developed in the Pictorialist style and her images were first published in Camera Craft, the journal of the California Camera Club.
Hanscom's most renowned work was illustrations for the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, an extremely popular translation of twelfth-century Persian poems published in 1905. She used California literary figures, including Joaquin Miller and George Sterling, as models.
"I get my effects by any hook or crook that I can devise, I searched up and down the whole creation to find the face, figure, and temperament to fit the part".