As a child, Judy Dater was afraid of the dark.
On Saturday mornings, she joined her father at the movie theater he owned in Hollywood. While he worked in his office, Dater would challenge herself to venture deep enough into the pitch-black theater to touch the stage before scurrying back down the aisle to safety.
“It took me a long time until I finally had the nerve to do it,” she recalled in a recent interview in her light-filled Berkeley studio. “But I did it.”
She was exposed to movies early, quickly falling under their spell — their sights, sounds, and stories. Dater took a particular interest in Westerns, with their rugged cowboys and stallions galloping across the silver screen.
“For years, I just went like a happy sponge,” Dater said. “It didn’t matter what it was, I liked it.”
In high school, she worked as a cashier at the theater, catching snippets of films during her breaks. Sometimes, Dater would go up to the projection booth, where she’d watch movies above the audience. She became mesmerized by the magic and mystery of black and white.
For more than half a century, Dater has built a career making photographs, telling stories with shadows and light. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has recently acquired Dater’s archive, illuminating her life through letters, books, diaries, drawings, and images. Blurring the boundary between documentary and fine art, her photographs offer an intimate look at the people and places she has encountered, guided by an artistic vision that is entirely her own.
“Judy Dater has photographed so many different kinds of people from all walks of life — these pictures allow people to get a true sense of who they were,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, Bancroft’s curator of pictorial collections. “Her photographs reveal something that is not easy to capture.”
A life in photographs
Dater’s interest in art started early.
Her parents took her to museums, and she developed an appreciation for painting, drawings, and sculpture. By junior high, she was drawing cartoons for her school yearbook and taking classes at an art college.
Dater’s collection traces back to her childhood and young adult years. Early materials in the archive include collages; life drawings from her college years; her teenage diary, transformed into an art piece; and old family photographs of her relatives from Russia and Poland.
After high school, Dater followed her passion, studying art at UCLA. She moved north in 1962, enrolling at San Francisco State University to complete her studies. There, she took a job helping with registration, handing out class cards — tickets to enroll in courses in a pre-digital era. Knowing how coveted the seats were, Dater secured a spot in her first photography class by taking a card for herself. It was the second semester of her senior year.
“The minute I started photography — right away — I knew this is it,” Dater said.
She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at San Francisco State, and her graduate thesis is included in her collection at Bancroft.
As a student in San Francisco, Dater encountered some of the luminaries of the flourishing West Coast photography scene. She remembers class visits to the homes of photographers Brett Weston and Wynn Bullock, who dispensed generous wisdom and critiqued students’ work. Ansel Adams would have the students over for 5 o’clock cocktails, show them his darkroom, and regale them with stories. Over his fireplace hung a giant brass gong, which he would bang when it was time for guests to leave.
“It was to die for,” Dater said. “I was so incredibly lucky to have that experience as a young student. These extraordinary people were all role models who gave us a path forward.
“They made it seem possible to choose photography as a life pursuit.”
Dater’s collection holds correspondence from Adams and Weston (who enclosed a pine twig in one letter), as well as other West Coast photographers such as Minor White and Imogen Cunningham.
Dater met Cunningham by chance. The two were at Big Sur Hot Springs, now Esalen, where Cunningham was a panelist at a conference celebrating the life and work of photographer Edward Weston. Cunningham saw Dater, then in her early 20s, wandering around and asked if she could take her photograph. In the resulting image, preserved in the archive, Dater has a plaintive look, her hair piled high on her head. After meeting in Big Sur, the two women kept in touch. Cunningham became a mentor and a friend — and in 1974, a subject in Dater’s best-known photograph.
In Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite, Cunningham, 90 at the time the photo was taken, peers around a redwood tree to find a nude and nymphlike Twinka Thiebaud looking back at her, the two exchanging evocative glances. The iconic image was the last in a series of photographs Dater made during a demonstration for a workshop she was teaching, as she recalls.
The picture is layered, drawing from a deep well of art and photographic history. Cunningham, born in 1883, was a pioneering photographer in a field dominated by men, and was among the women in Group f.64, a collective of Bay Area photographers known for capturing the untamed beauty of California. Thiebaud, the youthful model resembling a wood sprite, is the daughter of the celebrated painter Wayne Thiebaud.
“The photograph gestures to universal truths about nature, about women, and about youth and old age confronting one another,” Hult-Lewis said. “When you dig a little more and learn the identities of these people, it deepens the whole experience. But it’s also a wonderful image on its own.”
Dater remembers seeing Persephone as a kid in a book on great American paintings on the coffee table in her family’s home. The photograph takes visual cues from Thomas Hart Benton’s artwork, which portrays an old farmer stealing a peek at the naked Greek goddess. Dater’s image replaces the male gaze with a shared moment between women.
Lauren Kroiz, associate professor in the History of Art Department, counts the photograph as her favorite of Dater’s, noting the “playful way it intervenes in a feminist photographic history that is both local and global.”
In 1976, the photograph became the first full-frontal nude to appear in the pages of Life magazine.
“The nudity is important, but it’s not about that,” Dater said. “It really says something about women’s connection.”
Imagery and empathy
If there’s an invisible thread that connects all of Dater’s photographs, it’s empathy.
Each of Dater’s portraits of Maxine Hong Kingston, a UC Berkeley alum and professor emerita, delicately draws out a different side of the celebrated author. In one image, Kingston plays with her hair, an impish look on her face. In another, she wields a sword, summoning the spirit of her 1976 book, The Woman Warrior. By including an entire series from each photo session, the archive offers a rare look at an artist in action, revealing alternate takes alongside Dater’s most recognized images.
For a more recent project, Dater photographed Bay Area residents posing with their guns. The intimate images in The Gun Next Door are paired with written narratives from the subjects — members of the LGBTQ+ community and a retired epidemiologist among them — complicating assumptions about who owns firearms, and why.
A big part of Dater’s job, though, is to disarm. At the back of her studio, soft light pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Cream-colored parlor chairs sit in front of a black backdrop, opposite an old wooden Deardorff camera. The 1972 field camera, a classic and conspicuous presence, is an icebreaker, Dater said, and an important part of her “trust machine” while making portraits. Dater builds a connection with each of her subjects, listening to their stories, putting them at ease, and directing them through each frame. “People like to be appreciated,” she said. “They like to be heard.”
With her portraits, Dater not only creates pictures that are beautiful to look at, Hult-Lewis said, but also uses light, darkness, shape, and form to capture something deeper about her subjects.
“It’s like looking into their soul, and using art to bring out the innermost person,” Hult-Lewis said.
At the moment, Dater is working on a series on Black luminaries, including former UC Berkeley professor and vice chancellor Russ Ellis, historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., artist Mildred Howard (whose archive Bancroft has recently acquired), and philosopher and activist Cornel West. Once the project is complete, it will join the collection at Bancroft.
Dater’s archive contributes to the trove of materials at Bancroft that bring to life the history of the American West. Once processed, which can take a couple of years, the collection will be open to anyone who wants to learn about Dater’s life and work, and her place in photographic history.
The archive will live beyond her, with the potential to offer inspiration to future photographers, shake loose new insights, and perhaps, Dater noted, unearth “some surprises and revelations.”
Her work speaks for itself, she said, and no two people looking at a photograph will have the same experience.
“I think the main thing is that artists want you to feel something, think about something, question something,” she said. “And as long as you get something from it, that’s what matters.”