I have revised my statistics on women involved in the photography business in Georgia. The new additions to my database made since last April bring that total to over 200 women working in the various aspects of the business. This includes women who worked with their husbands, with their sisters, with their brothers, or alone as photographers or in related occupations. Several new additions held various positions in the period 1900-1910, at the Southern Photo Material Company, including one “foreman lady.” Many were involved only briefly in photography, but some continued their work in other parts of the country.

Isabella Elizabeth Kuhns could be said to have been “born into photography,” as the fifth child and only daughter of photographer William A. Kuhns and his wife Sophia. She was born on September 3, 1865, in Tallahassee, Florida, where her father ran a photograph studio and a carriage business.

She was about five years old in October 1870, when her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Isabella attended the Marietta Street School. It was here her father began the Kuhns photography studio that lasted over fifty years in the Atlanta area.

When she was about sixteen, in 1881, Isabella began to work in the gallery of her brothers Julius and William, known as J.H. & W.T. Kuhns, photographers, who had taken over their father’s business. She worked as the front counter gallery clerk. She continued working for them, and later only for W. T. Kuhns, other than when William worked elsewhere for a few years, and brother Julius took over. She worked in the Kuhns gallery, into the 1920s, working also as the photograph retoucher.

I know she worked in the Kuhns Atlanta studio even after she and her brothers William and Charles left Atlanta and moved in 1922, south to College Park, and they made the commute into the city. Older brother Julius, a widower since 1914, had moved to College Park to live with his daughter Julia, and retired from the Atlanta business in 1924.

His siblings William, Charles, and Isabella were there for Julius’s death in December 1928, which was followed by their brother Henry’s death a few days later. They had already lost their brother Albert only the month before. Charles and William continued to work as photographers in College Park as the Kuhns Bros., and Isabella kept house for them. They were all that was left of the six Kuhns children.

William finally retired about 1933, and Charles, the youngest of the three, continued working as a photographer out of a studio in East Point, and later out of their home. In 1936, Isabella filled out a “Biographical Questionnaire for Permanent Preservation in the Georgia Department of Archives,” for her brother William, at the request of Georgia State Archivist Ruth Blair (on microfilm held at Georgia Department of Archives).

William T. Kühns (and the family did use the umlaut) had turned eighty-two years old, and Isabella told Blair that “he is in very poor health, and is not able to make it out himself– for his mind has slowed up and he is not quite himself any more.” She closed her letter to Blair included with the questionnaire, by saying “Brother is quite a care and takes much of my time and I am not well myself. I’m old too (71 Sept. 3rd) and have all my housework to do. (Bro. Will and Charlie and myself have never married).”

William died two years later, in 1938. Charles, the youngest of the six Kuhns children, continued working as a photographer until about a year before his own death in 1946. He outlived all his siblings, Isabella died before him, on March 11, 1944.

Isabella E. Kuhns was a woman who worked in, and lived for the family business — this includes becoming the caretaker of her brothers, a stressful situation, and the importance of that role cannot be overemphasized. She loved her brothers enough to make it possible for them to work as photographers as long as they could — they were her family.

© E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material, including photographs, without written permission from this blog’s author, is prohibited. With permission, excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to E. Lee Eltzroth and Hunting & Gathering, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.