Cincinnati-born but Manhattan-raised, Diana Mara Henry received her first camera in 1951, when she was 3 years old. She was an avid photographer throughout her teen years, but her career took off after she graduated from Radcliffe, where she served as a photo editor of the school paper, “The Harvard Crimson,” and moved back to Manhattan.
It was the early 1970s and the city was in a moment of “cultural chaos and explosion, political upheaval” Henry said in a recent phone interview.
“I definitely was aware that something extraordinary and wonderful had happened to me,” she recalled. “It was just very exciting.”
She did some newspaper work before becoming a full-time freelance photographer, working significantly with “society people” — the Forbes family, Jeannette Watson, Stewart R. Mott — chronicling their parties and weddings at castles in Europe and mansions on Fifth Avenue. But she also made time to document events she felt “were historic and emblematic of the developing social consciousness. I wanted to record for history.”
She photographed myriad Vietnam War protests and marches for women’s rights, the 1972 and 1976 National Democratic Conventions, and also the countercultural highlights, personalities and daily human intimacies happening all around her in New York.
She said the city was a very different place then.
“It was a mix of youthfulness and desperation. Raw talent that for some prevailed and never was realized for others,” she said. The atmosphere was “gritty” but “people knew their neighbors” so “it didn’t feel dangerous at all. It felt like you were home.”
But in 1988 she left New York and photography, becoming an exhibiting artist and moving to Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a place for “the newly wed and nearly dead” as she put it. After a decade there, she moved around for a time before settling in Vermont, where she’s resided since 2012 and authored three books, “Women on the Move,” “A Life in Photography” and “I Am André.”
“I have enjoyed many different experiences and metamorphoses, but I love nature, gardening, foraging, peacefulness, and Vermont is kind of a Shangri-La for that kind of thing,” she said.
Does she ever miss New York?
“Only in the way you miss your youth.”
Diana Mara Henry’s work is available for purchase via the Singulart and Saatchi Art websites.
1971. Children play at Lenox Hill’s Adventure Mountain Playground.
1970s. An advertisement for “thick shakes” at a former subway entrance on Atlantic Av. and Pacific St.
1984. Artist Noel Oard Mapstead paints a mural at Danceteria.
1972. James Brown performs for inmates on Rikers Island.
1977. A moment from the 13th Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York at the World Trade Center.
1973. Man on an escalator at Port Authority Bus Terminal.
1980s. Lower East Side gallery.
1973. Flower bouquets for sale at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
1972. Red Hook block party.
1977. A march for women’s rights
1972. A woman hangs her head out the window in Red Hook.
