Constance Stuart was born in 1914, the daughter of a Scottish mining engineer and his British wife. When she received a Kodak No. 0 Brownie box camera on her 10th birthday, it marked the beginning of a path that would lead her to acclaim and recognition as one of the foremost photographers of her generation. During her youth she lived with her mother in Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, the country her parents had taken her to as a three-month-old baby.
Stuart returned to London in 1933 to study photography and moved to Munich two years later to undertake advanced studies. In 1936 the 21-year-old returned to South Africa and established the Constance Stuart Portrait Studio in the heart of Pretoria. She became a renowned portraitist and soon gained recognition as a photojournalist working for several South African magazines. Stuart was the first South African woman to be accredited as a war correspondent by the South African director of Military Intelligence. In 1944, during World War II, she covered the war in Egypt, Italy and France for the magazine Libertas.
In 1949 Constance Stuart came to the United States and married Colonel Sterling Loop Larrabee whom she had met in South Africa while he was a military attache. The couple settled in Chestertown on Maryland's Eastern Shore, where Stuart pursued photography and bred Norwich and Norfolk terriers. She became an American citizen in 1953.
Constance Stuart Larrabee's work has been exhibited in several museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. In 1997 she generously donated her collection of over 3,000 South African photographs to the National Museum of African Art; her World War II photographs to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; and her extensive work about the Eastern Shore to the Chesapeake Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland.
In 1933, 18-year-old Constance Stuart left her country to spend three years in Europe. It was her goal to become a professional photographer. She attended the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Photography in London and later became an apprentice in the studio of Madame Yevonde (1893-1975), a successful society photographer. Here she learned camera and printing techniques and how to operate a photographic studio. Her training in England, however, was conventional for a woman of her artistic sensibilities and avant-garde tastes. She found inspiration and satisfaction when she continued her education at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt fur Lichtbildwesen (Bavarian State Institute for Photography) in Munich, Germany.
The modernist approach to photography taught at the institute challenged conventional ways of understanding photographic reality and deeply influenced the young photographer. In the tradition of the Bauhaus, a German school of architecture and industrial design that advocated strong, clean design, students of the state institute experimented with form, silhouette, line, texture and light. Stuart's photography embodies this modernist aesthetic, both in her portraiture and documentary work.
Her subjects are often rendered in extreme close-ups or from unusual angles. Her images impress with their purity, sharp definition and contrasting light and shadow. Stuart's photographs of African peoples in rural areas demonstrate her excellent technique and aesthetic vision. In a long-term project, she created a visual record of the life of the people in the countryside, whom she considered "wonderful material" for her camera, "works of art" in and of themselves. Stuart's attentiveness to human expression and her ability to capture poignant moments permeate her imagery.
Stuart carefully composed her photographs of people's activities, architectural features and landscapes. She preferred to use a Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex camera held at chest level that was developed in Germany. The camera's design allowed her to be unobtrusive. Stuart arranged and took her photographs quickly, capturing the appropriate moment, the unusual, the unexpected. This technique and her modernist eye give her images a directness and vibrancy that have survived the decades.