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This is a collection of four panorama photographs by photographer Anne Noggle made in the 1960s of a kitchen, a cafe lunch counter, a row of mailboxes, and a neighborhood street corner.  

Keywords: women, aging, panoramic photo, panorama photography, neighborhood, mailboxes

Anne Noggle was born in 1922 in Evanston, IL and spent her formative years living there with her mother and sister—two women who would become important characters in Noggle’s photography. 

Prior to her photography career, Noggle led a markedly different life.  In 1940, with her student pilot license in hand, Anne Noggle became a pilot and eventually a flight instructor as a Women’s Air Force Service Pilot (WASP) in World War II.  At the conclusion of the war, Anne taught flying, joined an aerial circus, and worked as a crop duster.  Art grabbed Noggle’s attention while she was on active duty in the air force in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Stationed in Paris, she spent much of her free time at the Louvre.  Forced into early retirement due to emphysema caused by crop dusting, Noggle registered for college as an art history major at the University of New Mexico in 1959.  She was thirty-eight years old. 

Anne Noggle’s early photographs utilize the 35mm Panon camera.  Most of these 140° photographs are of an aging woman and her surroundings.  In Janice Zita Grover’s introduction to Silver Lining:  Photographs by Anne Noggle, she writes, about the panoramic format, that it is characteristic “to distort space in such a way that subjects distant from the lens appear flattened against deep space; between this effect and the necessity for reading the image side to side, the format gets as close as the still camera can to the implied narrative unfolding of a panoramic opening shot in a film . Noggle’s Panon images of her mother’s circle in Santa Fe have exactly these qualities, as if a newly landed observer…were scrutinizing these women, their curious rites and settings, for the first time.” 

By the early 1970s, however, Noggle moved on to wide-angle portraits featuring herself, her mother, sister, and her mother’s friends.  It is for these photographs that Noggle is most known.  Her interest in women and the aging process is exemplified by self-portraits of Noggle’s own face-lifts and images of her aging body. 

Noggle has been granted two NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Major holdings of Anne Noggle’s work can be found at:  the Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, University of New Mexico—University Art Museum, and the Museum of New Mexico Photographic Archives.  In Washington, DC, American Art has one photograph from Noggle’s Agnes series of two women playing croquet.