Pierce, Olive

Documentary photographer based in Rockland (Knox Co.), Me.

Olive Pierce was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925. Since her father had a secure job as a banker, her family's lifestyle was not much changed by the Depression. However, she was profoundly affected by driving through the Dustbowl in the early thirties and seeing families who had lost everything moving west in trucks. She was educated at Vassar College, graduating in an accelerated wartime program in 1945. In 1948 she went to Poland as a secretary to a post-World War II medical mission. She returned with snapshots of Auschwitz and Warsaw in ruins and with the desire to become a photographer.

Pierce had as her mentors and teachers photographers Berenice Abbott and Paul Caponigro. In 1976 she received a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute which turned her toward documentary work. In 1986 she published No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers, based on her experience as a teacher of photography at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. Ten years later, she published Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community .

The 1990 Gulf War shocked Pierce into political awareness about American foreign policy in the Middle East. To oppose the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, she went illegally to Baghdad and Basrah in 1999 under the auspices of Voices in the Wilderness to photograph children. In 2004, after fifty years of working as a photographer, she turned her attention to an audio documentary about the death of a Maine lobster fisherman. She is presently working on a novel with a related theme.

Pierce's photographs have been shown in Massachusetts, Maine, and Chicago, Illinois. She is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts; the Portland Museum of Art; and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine.