Alison Frantz

Alison Frantz
Frantz, photographed in 1924 for her Smith College yearbook
Born	Mary Alison Frantz (1903-09-27)September 27, 1903 Duluth, Minnesota, US
Died	February 1, 1995(1995-02-01) (aged 91) New Brunswick, New Jersey, US
Known for	Photography of archaeological sites and artifacts, particularly in the Athenian Agora
Academic background
Education	Smith College Columbia University

Mary Alison Frantz (September 27, 1903 – February 1, 1995) was an American archaeological photographer and Byzantinist. She was the official photographer of the excavations of the Agora of Athens, and a prolific photographer of ancient Greek sculpture, including the Parthenon Frieze and works from the Temple of Zeus, Olympia.

Frantz was born in Minnesota. Following her father's death early in her childhood, she lived briefly in Scotland, where she first took an interest in photography. She studied classics at Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1924. She first visited Greece in 1925 and held a fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) in 1929–1930. She carried out her doctoral research under Charles Rufus Morey, receiving her PhD from Columbia University in 1937. Frantz began working at the ASCSA's Agora excavations in January 1934. From 1935, she took on an increasing share of the excavation's photography, and was made its official photographer in 1939. She also took the first photographs of the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean site of Pylos, images used for the first transcription of the tablets and consequently for the decipherment of Linear B. As part of her work in the Agora excavations, she excavated and restored the Church of the Holy Apostles, the site's last surviving Byzantine structure.

During the Second World War, Frantz joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She worked as an assistant to Carl Blegen, another archaeologist turned agent, and gathered intelligence on European exiles in the United States. She served on an Allied commission to observe the Greek elections of 1946, worked for the US Information Service, and was subsequently the cultural attaché of the US embassy in Athens. In this capacity, she established the Fulbright Program in Greece.

Frantz left the Agora excavations in 1964. Her later work largely consisted of collaborations with archaeologists such as Gisela Richter, Martin Robertson, and Bernard Ashmole. Her publications included some of the earliest archaeological research into Ottoman Greece, as well as photography of archaic kore sculptures, Byzantine architecture, and artifacts from the Aegean Bronze Age. Her work on late antiquity and later periods is considered pioneering, and to have contributed to raising the scholarly standing of post-classical archaeology in Greece. She was considered among the foremost photographers of ancient Greek antiquities, and her work has been cited as a major influence on the scholarship and popular reception of classical Greece.

Early life and education

Mary Alison Frantz was born on September 27, 1903, in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest of five children. Her father, the newspaper publisher Alfred J. Frantz, died of pneumonia in 1905; her Scottish mother, Mary Kate Frantz, moved the family to Edinburgh, where she educated Frantz at home. Frantz received her first camera while in Edinburgh, as a gift from her brother. She later described the experience, at the age of five, of watching her brother develop photographs in a darkroom as an early catalyst of her interest in the subject. After two years, the family returned to the United States. Her mother settled the family in Princeton: Frantz later credited this decision to the proximity of Princeton University, though she said that this was intended "for [her] brothers, of course".

Frantz was educated at Smith College, a women's liberal arts school in Massachusetts, where she was a forward on the field hockey team and a member of both the Greek and the Latin clubs. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics in 1924. Among her teachers at Smith was the art historian Clarence Kennedy, whose use of photography to record ancient and renaissance sculpture, aiming to minimize personal style in favor of documentary accuracy, influenced Frantz's later work. She subsequently spent the 1924–1925 academic year as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. During this time, she made her first visit to Greece, on a short trip organized by the academy's director, Gorham P. Stevens, and his Greek wife, Annette Notaras. Frantz did not enjoy the visit, which lasted just over a month between April and May 1925; she wrote her mother that "Rome [was] far superior to Athens, except for the Acropolis".

Between 1927 and 1929, Frantz worked at Princeton University for the historian Charles Rufus Morey, researching for his Index of Christian Art. She returned briefly to Greece in the fall of 1927, visiting Priscilla Capps at her home in Athens. Capps was a fellow Smith College graduate and the daughter of Edward Capps, the chair of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). She and Frantz traveled to Meteora in northern Greece, which Frantz described in a letter as "the most amazing place [she had] ever seen". Frantz carried out her doctoral studies into Byzantine art with Morey, a prolific supervisor of Byzantine scholars and conduit for the movement of junior scholars between Princeton and the ASCSA. As Princeton did not accept women as students, Frantz's PhD was awarded, in 1937, by Columbia University. She sarcastically referred to the Byzantine period (in Athens, c. 900 – 1204), then out of scholarly fashion, as "the grubby period".

Frantz spent the 1929–1930 academic year working as a librarian at the ASCSA, during which she took her first photographs of ancient Greek monuments. She lived in a room, secured for her by Priscilla Capps, at Miramare Palace hotel in Old Phaleron. She visited Thessaloniki in 1930, where she was given a tour of the Basilica of Saint Dimitrios, a Byzantine church dating to the seventh century CE, by Aristotelis Zachos, the architect who had restored the basilica after its destruction by fire in 1917.

Early career

Frantz started her career in the Athenian Agora excavations, conducted by the ASCSA under the direction of T. Leslie Shear, in January 1934. She initially assisted Lucy Talcott, the excavation's recording secretary, in the Record Department. For much of her work in the Agora excavations, Frantz was an unpaid volunteer. During the 1930s, she worked largely on Byzantine painting, and made a study of the frescoes of several churches – demolished shortly afterwards – which was illustrated by the artist and draftsman Piet de Jong. In 1935, she and Talcott visited the house of the Greek avant-garde artist Photis Kontoglou, where Frantz and Kontoglou discussed the techniques of fresco-painting.

The official photographer of the Agora excavations was Hermann Wagner, a member of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. He was also employed in other excavation roles; from 1935, Frantz was increasingly made responsible for the photographic documentation of the project. She was given the title of official photographer when Wagner stepped down in 1939. Later that year, just before the Second World War, Frantz photographed in two days more than six hundred tablets excavated from the Mycenaean site of Pylos; the tablets, inscribed in the Linear B script, had been brought to Athens by their excavator, Carl Blegen, for safekeeping in the Bank of Greece. A set of prints of the photographs was delivered in 1940 to the University of Cincinnati, where Blegen worked, and was used by Emmett L. Bennett to make the first transcription and edition of the tablets, which he published in 1951. Frantz's obituarist James R. McCredie credited her photographs with enabling the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris in 1952, which demonstrated that the Linear B script had been used to write a form of ancient Greek.

Second World War and aftermath

Following the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940, archaeological work in the country was suspended. Several archaeologists of the ASCSA, led by Rodney Young and Benjamin Meritt, founded the American School Committee for Aid to Greece, which purchased ambulances to send to Greek forces. Frantz joined the committee alongside T. Leslie Shear, who had worked with her on the Agora excavations, Talcott, Edward Capps, George Elderkin, Hetty Goldman and Oscar Broneer. The committee organized a benefit concert to raise funds; Frantz and Talcott also collaborated on a book of photographs, This Is Greece. The book presented a romanticized view of Greece and its heritage, and its text proclaimed the centrality of democracy and independence to Greek life. The royalties for the work, published in 1941, were used for the committee's work. By the end of January 1942, the committee had distributed $24,500 (equivalent to $483,000 in 2025) for aid to Greece.

Frantz moved to Washington, D.C., where she became a fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks research institute. In the summer of 1941, she and Young received a grant of $1,000 (equivalent to $22,000 in 2025) to compile an index of the first ten volumes of Hesperia, the school's academic journal. Young left the project and joined the Office of Strategic Services, the military intelligence agency of the United States, later that year. Frantz finished creating a set of alphabetic index cards, covering almost the whole English part of the index, before herself joining the OSS in the summer of 1942.

Frantz and Young were among several archaeologists, including the Americans Blegen, Meritt, and Shear and the British Alan Wace, to serve in Allied intelligence services in Greece. She was recommended to the OSS by Meritt, then head of the Greek section of the organization's Foreign Nationalities Branch (FNB), for whom she had worked part-time as an indexer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. At the OSS, she initially worked in the Research and Analysis (R&A) branch, before moving later in 1942 to work as an assistant and political analyst for Blegen, who succeeded Meritt in September of that year. The FNB was primarily tasked with interviewing people residing in the United States from European and Mediterranean ethnic groups, and recording their views on the politics and situation of their native countries. Frantz's official title was Junior Social Science Analyst; her work primarily focused on interviewing political exiles from German-occupied Europe. She and Blegen were based in Washington, D.C., and she remained with Blegen as he moved to lead the FNB's Miscellaneous Languages section. Late in 1942, Blegen was appointed as head of the FNB's Chancery; Frantz once again moved with him, and was promoted to senior political analyst. In 1944, James Murphy, the head of the OSS's X-2 Counter Espionage Branch, unsuccessfully attempted to recruit Frantz for counterintelligence work.