In this self-portrait from 1981, Judy Dater poses in the Badlands of South Dakota. “I think the black-and-white self-portraits in the landscape were really about finding something interior about myself,” she said. (Judy Dater Photograph Archive, BANC PIC 2025.036, The Bancroft Library)
As a child, Judy Dater was afraid of the dark.On Saturday mornings, she joined her father at the movie theater he owned in Hollywood. While he worked in his office, Dater would challenge herself to venture deep enough into the pitch-black theater to touch the stage before scurrying back down the aisle to safety.“It took me a long time until I finally had the nerve to do it,” she recalled in a recent interview in her light-filled Berkeley studio. “But I did it.”She was exposed to movies early, quickly falling under their spell — their sights, sounds, and stories. Dater took a particular interest in Westerns, with their rugged cowboys and stallions galloping across the silver screen.“For years, I just went like a happy sponge,” Dater said. “It didn’t matter what it was, I liked it.”In high school, she worked as a cashier at the theater, catching snippets of films during her breaks. Sometimes, Dater would go up to the projection booth, where she’d watch movies above the audience. She became mesmerized by the magic and mystery of black and white.For more than half a century, Dater has built a career making photographs, telling stories with shadows and light. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has recently acquired Dater’s archive, illuminating her life through letters, books, diaries, drawings, and images. Blurring the boundary between documentary and fine art, her photographs offer an intimate look at the people and places she has encountered, guided by an artistic vision that is entirely her own.“Judy Dater has photographed so many different kinds of people from all walks of life — these pictures allow people to get a true sense of who they were,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, Bancroft’s curator of pictorial collections. “Her photographs reveal something that is not easy to capture.”A life in photographsDater’s interest in art started early.Her parents took her to museums, and she developed an appreciation for painting, drawings, and sculpture. By junior high, she was drawing cartoons for her school yearbook and taking classes at an art college.Dater’s collection traces back to her childhood and young adult years. Early materials in the archive include collages; life drawings from her college years; her teenage diary, transformed into an art piece; and old family photographs of her relatives from Russia and Poland.
