Elise Forrest Harleston

In the fall of 1919, on the eve of the Harlem Renaissance, a young woman traveled alone by train from South Carolina to New York City to enroll in photography school. Elise Beatrice Forrest was studying the craft at the urging of her fiancé, artist Edwin Augustus Harleston. The plan was for them to marry, then establish a portrait and photography studio in Charleston, an audacious dream for African-Americans living in the segregated South at the dawn of the 20th century.

Elise Forrest Harleston enjoys the distinction of being South Carolina’s first African-American female photographer. She and her husband owned and operated the Harleston Studio at 118 Calhoun Street in Charleston from 1922 until 1931. Unlike other women who worked in photo studios, she was not merely a lab assistant, office manager or cashier but the person behind the camera. For a decade, Elise worked as a portraiture photographer, a field dominated by white men in Northern cities. And though the work she did was unusual, she was overshadowed by her husband in his lifetime and she gave up professional photography after his death.

Elise’s work, on the other hand, has rarely been exhibited, and it has garnered mention in only a few books. “Like most women, she really sacrificed her own career for her husband’s career and desires,” said art historian M. Akua McDaniel of Spelman College. “In many ways, they were a team. And while he recognized her contribution, her contribution was rarely known to the public.”

Elise Beatrice Forrest was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 4, 1891. She was the third of seven children of Augustus Howard Brodie Forrest and his wife, Elvira Moorer Forrest. Her father earned a good living as the head bookkeeper for the city’s lottery, a numbers game owned by whites but operated by blacks.

Elise Forrest met Edwin Harleston in 1913 --- they married six years later in 1919.

Elise and Edwin both graduated from Avery Normal Institute, a private school established in 1868 by the American Missionary Association. She followed her sweetheart to New York, where she found a job at the Howard Orphanage and Industrial School on Long Island. She spent as many weekends as possible traveling into the city to be with Edwin.

Edwin gave Elise a Brownie camera and encouraged her to start using it. He knew that if she could learn photography, she would be useful to him once he established his studio.

She attended the E. Brunel School of Photography in New York City. Taught by Germans; she was the only woman of color in the school. Later through her husband she was able to be under the tutelage of Cornelius M. Battey, head of Tuskegee Institutes photography division.

On May 13, 1931, three days after her husband’s death, Elise buried Edwin next to his father at the Unity and Friendship Society Cemetery in Charleston. The next day, she took a camera to the cemetery and photographed Edwin’s flower-covered, unmarked grave. They were among the last photographs she took before dismantling their studio.

Within a year of Edwin’s death, Elise married a Baltimore schoolteacher named John J. Wheeler, moved to Baltimore, then to his native Chicago and finally to Southern California.

Elise never spoke of her first husband or her work as a photographer, but for almost forty years, she saved all of Edwin’s letters and nearly two dozen of her glass-plate negatives, a cache that was discovered after her death. Widowed for a second time in the 1960s, Elise lived out her retirement years in a two-bedroom bungalow in south Los Angeles and died of a brain aneurysm in 1970 at age 79.

Editor’s note: the author is a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the great-niece of Edwin and Elise Harleston; Photo courtesy of Mae Whitlock Gentry