Lynn Demarest; captured vivid moments from around world
Eluned (McLaren) Demarest saw the poverty of India and the ruins of post-World War II Berlin through the lenses of cameras.
Mrs. Demarest, an award-winning photographer who scoured the world for poignant pictures, died Jan. 28 at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham of cardiopulmonary arrest. The Westwood resident was 85.
Her Welsh name was too hard for most to pronounce, so she was known to most as Lynn. Her work appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek, and other publications, including the Globe, and she produced several books of photography.
The State Department career of her husband, John Y. Millar, took her to many exciting locales - Spain, India, and others - where she honed her skill for finding creative angles and lighting.
"She had a good compositional eye, and she had a real interest in telling a story, so she put the two together," said her daughter, Gwendolen "Wendy" M. Phillips of New York City.
Mrs. Demarest always took plenty of time to get to know her subjects before snapping photos, and was drawn mostly to shots that included people, especially children. In particular, "she was fascinated with faces, and where people came from and how they came to look the way they did," Phillips said.
She also had a soft spot for barns and doorways, family said.
David Hogge - head of archives at the Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which recently acquired some of her work - said her photographs "are very well-composed, very beautiful colors, very artistic, and didactically useful for research."
When the museum was considering her work from India, they wrote that "her slides are vivid and charming views of daily life and culture."
Mrs. Demarest was born in Brooklyn and earned a bachelor's degree in history from Vassar College in 1944 and was married shortly thereafter. She lived in Berlin in the 1950s and turned a portfolio into a pictorial-essay book, "Berlin and the Berliners - a Study of the City."
Eager to learn more of the craft, she earned a degree in photojournalism from the University of Missouri.
She lived in India from 1963 to 1965, and her images of daily life became "The Village - The People."
"She definitely got off the beaten path to get her pictures," said her son, Bruce Millar of Bethesda, Md.
Her technique, he said, involved two key components. "Always bend your knees, and always get in close," he noted in a eulogy he delivered at her memorial service. "She was intrepid," Phillips said. "She would go after it, in sandstorms and all kinds of weather."
As Mrs. Demarest moved from place to place, "she was quite stylish and interested in aesthetics, so when she moved, she'd always take a real interest in having her home be really attractive," her daughter said.
She moved to Beacon Hill in the mid-1960s after getting divorced, and then moved to Beaufort, S.C. Her years there were captured in a book "Ebb Tide - Flood Tide: Beaufort County, Jewel of the Low Country," which she worked on with Gerhard Spieler.
Mrs. Demarest returned to Massachusetts to live in Mattapoisett, where she had long spent her summers.
Her New York-based agent would find her assignments over the years with clients like
She married William Demarest in 1972; he died in 1996.
As digital photography became popular, she avoided being swept up by it. Over the years, she stuck with her usual Hasselbad, Rollei, and Leica cameras.
"She was definitely very much old school and did not embrace modern photographic technology: Photoshop, motor-driver," her son said. "She didn't believe in cropping a picture. She believed that you got one shot, and that was it."
About two years ago, Mrs. Demarest handed over thousands of her photos to the Smithsonian Institution. They are now part of the Lynn McLaren permanent archive collection at the National Museum of African Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
In addition to her daughter and son, Mrs. Demarest leaves another son, David Millar of Washington, D.C.; a stepson, David Demarest of San Rafael, Calif.; one granddaughter and four grandsons. 