PAT STURN

 

Pat Sturn was born in Timisoara, Romania in 1910 where she studied photography. She worked as a photographer in Germany before boarding a ship to Canada in the early 1930s. She settled in Windsor, Ontario where she was hired by portrait photographer Will Browne in 1934 to work in his Windsor studio. Thirteen years later, Pat bought Browne's studio upon his retirement and operated it herself. Her studio was in the basement of the Canada Building on Oulette Avenue. It was a haven for poets, musicians, artists and the city's cultural elite, including soprano, Emilia Cundari, who was photographed by Pat in 1952. Pat became very close friends with Pearce "Niki" Lettner, a well-known jeweler whose shop was also on Oulette, until his death in 1977. Pat Sturn was known as Windsor's pre-eminent portrait photographer, until she retired due to ill health in 1981. She would spend the next thirty years in her little stone cottage on the corner of Kildare and Ontario in Walkerville, which Niki had encouraged her to buy. In 2007, after the urgings of many people, Pat put on an exhibit of her work at the Windsor Public Library. The photographs displayed were from many of the unclaimed portraits Pat still had in her posession. It was Pat's idea that any people who recognized themselves or family members in the photographs could claim these pictures free of charge. Pat passed away in March 2011 at the age of 100.

 

Marty Gervais