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Mary Alison Frantz (September 27, 1903 – February 1, 1995) was an American archaeological photographer and a Byzantine scholar. She is best known for her work as the official photographer of the excavations of the Agora of Athens, and for her photographs of ancient Greek sculpture, including the Parthenon frieze and works from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Frantz was born in Minnesota. Following her father's early death, she lived briefly in Scotland, where she first took an interest in photography. She studied classics at Smith College, graduating in 1924. She first visited Greece in 1925 and held a fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) in 1929–1930. She carried out her doctoral research under Charles Rufus Morey, receiving her PhD from Columbia University in 1937. Frantz began working at the ASCSA's Agora excavations in January 1934. From 1935, she took on an increasing share of the excavation's photography, and was made its official photographer in 1939. She also took the first photographs of the Linear B tablets from the Mycenaean site of Pylos, images used for the first transcription of the tablets and consequently for the decipherment of Linear B. As part of her work in the Agora excavations, she excavated and restored the Church of the Holy Apostles, the site's last surviving Byzantine structure. During the Second World War, Frantz joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). She worked as an assistant to Carl Blegen, another archaeologist turned agent, and gathered intelligence on European exiles in the United States. She served on an Allied commission to observe the Greek elections of 1946, worked for the US Information Service, and was subsequently the cultural attaché of the US embassy in Athens. In this capacity, she established the Fulbright Program in Greece. Frantz left the Agora excavations in 1964. Her later work largely consisted of collaborations with archaeologists such as Gisela Richter, Martin Robertson and Bernard Ashmole. In 1967, she excavated a Roman tomb on Sikinos, overturning its traditional identification as a temple. Her publications included some of the earliest archaeological research into Ottoman Greece, as well as photography of archaic kore sculptures, Byzantine architecture and artifacts from the Aegean Bronze Age. She was considered among the foremost photographers of ancient Greek antiquities, and her work has been cited as a major influence on the scholarship and popular reception of classical Greece. Early life and education Mary Alison Frantz was born on September 27, 1903, in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest of five children. Her father, a newspaper publisher, died of pneumonia soon afterwards; her Scottish mother, Mary Kate Frantz, moved the family to Edinburgh. Frantz received her first camera there, as a gift from her brother. She later described the experience, at the age of five, of watching her brother develop photographs in a darkroom as an early catalyst of her interest in the subject. After two years, the family returned to the United States. Her mother settled the family in Princeton: Frantz later credited this decision to the proximity of Princeton University, though she said that this was intended "for [her] brothers, of course". Frantz graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics from Smith College, a women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, in 1924. Among her teachers at Smith was the art historian Clarence Kennedy, whose use of photography to record ancient and renaissance sculpture, aiming to minimize personal style in favor of documentary accuracy, influenced Frantz's later work. She subsequently spent the 1924–1925 academic year as a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. During this time, she made her first visit to Greece, on a short trip organized by the Academy's director, Gorham P. Stevens, and his Greek wife, Annette Notaras. Frantz did not enjoy the visit, which lasted just over a month between April and May 1925; she wrote her mother that "Rome [was] far superior to Athens, except for the Acropolis". Between 1927 and 1929, Frantz worked at Princeton University for the historian Charles Rufus Morey, researching for his Index of Christian Art. She returned briefly to Greece in the fall of 1927, visiting Priscilla Capps at her home in Athens. Capps was a fellow Smith College graduate and the daughter of Edward Capps, the chair of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). She and Frantz traveled to Meteora in northern Greece, which Frantz described in a letter as "the most amazing place [she had] ever seen". Frantz carried out her doctoral studies into Byzantine art with Morey, a prolific supervisor of Byzantine scholars and conduit for the movement of junior scholars between Princeton and the ASCSA. As Princeton did not accept women as students, Frantz's PhD was awarded, in 1937, by Columbia University. She sarcastically referred to the Byzantine period, then out of scholarly fashion, as "the grubby period". In 1929, Frantz was appointed as one of the first fellows of the ASCSA. She spent the 1929–1930 academic year working as a librarian at the ASCSA, during which she took her first photographs of ancient Greek monuments. She lived in a room, secured for her by Priscilla Capps, at Miramare Palace hotel in Old Phaleron. She visited Thessaloniki in 1930, where she was given a tour of the Basilica of Saint Dimitrios, a Byzantine church dating to the seventh century CE, by Aristotelis Zachos, the architect who had restored the basilica after its destruction by fire in 1917. Early career Frantz started her career in the Athenian Agora excavations, conducted by the ASCSA, in January 1934. She initially assisted Lucy Talcott, the excavation's recording secretary, in the Record Department. For much of her work in the Agora excavations, Frantz was an unpaid volunteer. During the 1930s, she worked largely on Byzantine painting, and made a study of the frescoes of several churches – demolished shortly afterwards – which was illustrated by the artist and draughtsman Piet de Jong. In 1935, she and Talcott visited the house of the Greek avant-garde artist Photis Kontoglou, where Frantz and Kontoglou discussed the techniques of fresco-painting. The official photographer of the Agora Excavation was Herman Wagner, a member of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. He was also employed in other excavation roles; from 1935, Frantz was increasingly made responsible for the photographic documentation of the project. She was given the title of official photographer when Wagner stepped down in 1939. Just before the Second World War, Frantz photographed in two days more than six hundred tablets inscribed in Linear B from the Mycenaean site of Pylos, brought to Athens by their excavator, Carl Blegen, for safekeeping in the Bank of Greece. A set of prints of the photographs were delivered in 1940 to the Univers.... Discover the Charles Capps Annette Capps popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Charles Capps Annette Capps books.