Willie Anne Wright
Willie Anne Wright (born 1924) is an American photographer known for her colorful cibachrome and grayscale Pinhole Photography.

Biography
Willie Anne Wright was born Willie Anna Boschen, in Richmond, Virginia. Her father was a musician and sometime-artist.

She graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1945 with a BS in Psychology, and from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1964 with an MFA in Painting. She later studied at the Maine photographic workshops in Rockport, Maine and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.

She married and had three children.

Career 
Wright began her artistic career as a painter, teaching art classes at the Jewish Community Center, and was influenced by one of her painting instructors, Theresa Pollak. For a while, she experimented with printmaking. By 1973, she began to focus more and more on photography. Inspired by her surroundings and personal life, her first works incorporated images of her family, friends, and Civil War reenactors. Well known for her use of the old technique of pinhole, she is also an exceptional master in lensless photography, solar printing, and photograms.

Some of her more well known works include her "Civil War Redux" series, which focuses on local Civil War reenactors whom she followed around for several years, her "Pregnant Women" series, which features pregnant friends of hers, and "The Swimmer" series, which features women lounging by poolsides or in pools. In 2023 the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts exhibited a  retrospective of her work entitled Willie Anne Wright: Artist and Alchemist.

Technique 
Wright first experimented with pinhole photography in 1985. For a class project she had to create and use a pinhole camera. She used Cibachrome paper for use in a sixteen by twenty inch pinhole camera. With color-correcting filters she created wide-angle color prints by placing the pinhole close to the film plane. Her images were whimsical with bright colors and a vignette border.

Collections
Wright's work is held in the following public collections:
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Chrysler Museum of Art.
Mary Baldwin University
Walter Cecil Rawls Library and Museum, Courtland, VA
Mariners' Museum.
Southeast Museum of Photography
Smithsonian American Art Museum
New Orleans Museum of Art.
Longwood University.
University of Maine.
University of New Hampshire.

References

External links
 Artist Profile: Willie Anne Wright video at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
 Civil War Redux: Pinhole Photographs of Re-enactments, by Willie Anne Wright | Ester Knows All Things VCUarts
 Summary of the Willie Ann Wright photographs, 1983 | Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

1924 births
Living people
20th-century American photographers
College of William & Mary alumni
Virginia Commonwealth University alumni
21st-century American photographers
Artists from Richmond, Virginia
Photographers from Virginia
Visual Studies Workshop alumni
20th-century American women photographers
21st-century American women photographers