Elizabeth Compton Hegemann (1897-1962)

Elizabeth Compton was born in 1897 near Cincinnati, where she attended preparatory schools, afterwards studying at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.  Aside from extended trips abroad, she spent most of her life in Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico.  Of her four marriages—to a Navy aviator, 1916; a Park Service employee, 1925; an Indian Trader, 1929; a ship’s radio officer, 1939—three ended in divorce and the last with the death of her husband, Anton Hegemann, in 1957.

“A determined collector of American Indian and Spanish Colonial crafts, the fruits of her discriminating taste and careful records are owned by several museums.  Always an ardent camera user, she studied professional photography late in life, and devoted much of her energy during a fatal illness to writing the text and preparing fresh negatives and prints from her earlier photographs for use in [the book Navajo Trading Days].  Mrs. Hegemann died in Albuquerque in April 1962, a few days after she had read proofs and approved the sequence of photographs planned for Navajo Trading Days.  The University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Source: NAVAJO TRADING DAYS by Elizabeth Compton Hegemann