Mary Jane Russell in Dior dress, Paris, 1950

Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper's Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. Louise was born in San Francisco, California to Norwegian immigrant parents. In 1914, she began her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Institute of Art), where she studied design and color with Rudolph Schaeffer, and painting with Frank Van Sloan. Later, in 1923, she studied design, decoration and architecture at Columbia University, New York. In 1928 she married the sculptor Meyer Wolfe, who constructed the backgrounds of many of her photos. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as "environmental" fashion photography.