Laura B. Gaites – Photographer

Laura B. Gaites was born in Macomb in 1861. Twenty years later she married H. William Gaites, who soon opened  photography studio in the 200 block of North Randolph Street. She worked with him, and at that time glossy “cabinet card” photographs were popular, like the ones at the right below. By the 1880s, children were frequently photographed, an indication of the growing attention they were beginning to receive in American culture.

The Gaites studio had several elaborate photographic settings, including one for graduation pictures. Partly for that reason, the Gaites studio was the most successful photography business of that era, and Laura Gaites became a well-known photographer. When her husband died in 1917, she continued in the busi-ness. By the time she died in 1952, she had been a photographer for seventy-one years and, just of children alone she had taken some 35,000 images.