Margaret Sutermeister

Margaret "Daisy" Sutermeister was born in 1875 in Milton, Massachusetts, to Emmanuel Sutermeister and Harriet Georgianna Davenport. Her father, who was of Swiss descent, ran a commercial plant nursery and vegetable garden and was also a fireman.[1][2] Her brother was chemist Edwin Sutermeister. She lived for most of her life in the Capen-Davenport-Sutermeister House on Canton Avenue, which had been built in 1781 and was located on the same property as the family nursery.[1][3]

After leaving school in 1894, Sutermeister took up photography using a glass plate camera to document everyday life in Milton and the surrounding area.[3] Over the next 15 years, she shot a wide range of subjects: romantic landscapes, lively street scenes, scientific experiments, and portraits both formal and candid.[3] Among the people she photographed are middle-class whites, African Americans, Gypsy vendors, farmhands, and Asian laundrymen.[2][3][4]

When her father died in 1909, she took over managing the family's Davenport Nursery and gave up photography.[3]

She died in 1951, and a year later the new owners of her house discovered her 1800 glass-plate negatives in a barn. They donated this archive of turn-of-the-century Massachusetts life to the Milton Historical Society. It was published in the early 1990s by art historian Judith Bookbinder and has formed the basis of a number of exhibitions since.[5]

Ten of Sutermeister's photographs are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.[6]