Lora Webb Nichols created and collected approximately 24,000 negatives over the course of her lifetime in the mining town of Encampment, Wyoming. L. Nichols received her first camera in 1899 at the age of 16, coinciding with the rise of the region’s copper mining boom. The earliest photographs are of her immediate family, self-portraits and landscape images of the cultivation of the region surrounding the town of Encampment. In addition to the personal imagery, L. Nichols photographed miners, industrial infrastructure and the small town’s adjustment to a sudden, but ultimately fleeting, population increase. As early as 1906, L. Nichols was working for hire as a photographer for industrial documentation and family portraits, developing and printing from a darkroom she fashioned in the home she shared with her husband and their children. After the collapse of the copper industry, L. Nichols remained in Encampment and established the Rocky Mountain Studio, a photography and photofinishing service, to financially support her family. Her commercial studio was a focal point of the town throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Throughout two marriages, the rearing of six children, the proprietorship of several small businesses and a relocation to California later in her life, L. Nichols made and collected photographs. L. Nichols often photographed the women in her community and their duties as mothers and homemakers. These images provide a unique perspective on the role of women and their cultivation of community in this era. The photographs present women actively engaged in all aspects of life, both private and public, work and play. They contain raw and intimate moments of domestic life, such as her neighbour breastfeeding her new son on the front porch (Nora and Irwin Fleming, 1907) and her friend brushing out her long hair inside L. Nichols’s log cabin (Mary Anderson, 1911). Because she made images in Encampment over the course of several decades, her photographs are imbued with an intimacy and candour that is unexpected and unique for this time period and evince a playfulness and richness of life often missing from historical records.

Additionally, Nichols created formal portraits of the workers and travellers passing through this desolate region, including a collection of portraits of the young men who arrived in the area to complete public works projects with the Civilian Conservation Corp in the 1930s. Carl Phillips, 1933 and Leonard Gentry, 1933 are two examples of these portraits that document the influx of people into Encampment during the Great Depression.

L. Nichols also collected and archived the work of other amateur and professional photographers working in the Encampment area. Serving as the region’s main source for photofinishing services from 1906 to 1935, L. Nichols had access to many of the other photographs being captured throughout the region. Many of the photographs she collected were made by manual labourers working on ranches and public works projects.

In the 1990s, L. Nichols’s negatives were preserved and scanned by Nancy and Victor Anderson with financial support from L. Nichols’s son Ezra Nichols, and temporarily loaned to the Grand Encampment Museum. In 2015, L. Nichols’s negatives were officially donated to the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming and made publicly accessible through an online database.