Born in Logansport, Indiana in 1906, Russell E. Elliott, Ph.D (R.E. Elliott) lived a rootless and at times tragic life. After a stint painting cars and living unaccompanied at the local YMCA, R.E. Elliott finished high school as class president, enrolled at the University of Illinois for a degree in journalism, and married his high school sweetheart, Clara Louise.
Elliott moved to Detroit in 1945 to ultimately serve as a community leader in Detroit philanthropic circles at places like the Detroit YMCA—the first YMCA branch in the United States dedicated to racial justice—and raised funds from Detroit’s wealthy to benefit his community and beloved Metropolitan Methodist Church. Elliott later achieved a Ph.D from Detroit’s Wayne State University and held leadership positions in university administration. Throughout his life, Elliott was forever an insatiable reader, a student of Eastern and Western philosophy, and wrote and published poetry extensively. He once wrote, “I guess I am a philosopher without depth, a poet without form — just a lover of books and ideas”.
At some point along the way, Elliott picked up a camera. Featuring skilled portraits of family and his 4 daughters, his beloved northern Michigan woods and water, roaring Detroit, and other travels, Elliott was a hobbyist but dedicated and skilled photographer. Taking thousands of photographs from approximately 1947 until his death in 1977, these images—never shared publicly—are a deeply intimate and quintessential journey through mid-century America.
Upon his death in 1977, Elliott’s photographs were resting largely unseen and unshared at his Northern Michigan lake cottage. Since 2018, these slides have been carefully revisited by Elliott’s maternal grandson, Nicholas Dantzer, whom he never met. Since retrieving and moving these images across the country, Dantzer has reviewed over 20,000 images in the form of Kodachrome slides to curate a selected collection of over 300 photographs.
R.E. Elliott in 1971