Although Carlotta Corpron was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, she spent her formative years in India, where her doctor father was a medical missionary. In 1920, she returned to the United States and became a student at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti, Michigan (now Eastern Michigan University). There she became a member of a local organization named Zeta Tau Alpha (no relation to the NPC organization of the same name). When the local became the Mu Mu Chapter of Alpha Sigma Alpha, Corpron was one of the charter members.
She attended the 1926 Alpha Sigma Alpha convention held at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago. She also served as Supervisor of Tabernacle, a national office. After graduation from MSNC she headed to New York City to study fabric design and art education at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University. She is listed as the ex-collegio secretary of Mu Mu Chapter and her address is 122th Street in NYC. After getting her Master’s, she started teaching.
Her first teaching job was at the Women’s College of Alabama (now Huntingdon College). In 1928, she moved to Ohio to take a job at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Applied Art. The 1933 Alpha Sigma Alpha magazine lists her as lost with a last known address in Cincinnati. That year, she purchased her first camera.
That camera, with real film, was used to take pictures of her students’ artwork. When preparing to teach a photography class, she went to Los Angeles to refine her photographic techniques. Her earliest works began with abstractions and patterns in nature forms. This was achieved by the overlapping of negatives.
In 1935, she moved to Denton, Texas, where she took a job at Texas State College for Women (now Texas Woman’s University). She kept learning and refining photographic techniques. Corpron was included in an “Abstraction in Photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s. She retired in 1967 and continued to live in Denton.
Corpron retired from TWU in 1967. The San Francisco Museum of Art’s 1975 “Women of Photography: An Historical Survey” included her work. That exposure led to her photographs being featured in exhibitions at museums and galleries across the country. These include the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her personal archives were given to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Texas.
She died on April 17, 1988 at the age of 86.
