Anthony Lodwell Dementi (15 July 1891–13 April 1980), photographer, was born Antonio Dementi in Richmond and was the son of Lelia A. Rogers Leary Dementi and her second husband, Antonio Dementi. His father had emigrated from Borgo a Mozzano, Italy, via France in 1881 and worked as a fruit vendor, a clerk, a wagon driver, a brewer, and an oyster dealer before opening a grocery store in Henrico County about 1901. His mother worked variously as a store clerk and in food services as a confectioner, a grocer, and a saloonkeeper. She died in July 1895, and in 1899 his father married Emily Virginia Whiteside. Dementi grew up in Henrico County, where he attended public schools. About 1907 he began anglicizing his name as Anthony L. Dementi.
Dementi had acquired his first camera by the time he was twelve years old and learned photography during his after-school hours. In 1906 he became a clerk with J. J. Hitchcock and Brother, owners of a Richmond photographic studio. Between 1911 and 1914 Dementi worked in Durham, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. About 1914 he returned to Richmond and became a photographer at the Elite Studio, where he had risen to manager by 1917. Dementi married Mae Long in Richmond on 18 October 1917. They had one son.
In 1917 Dementi joined Walter Washington Foster's studio, where he worked until 1924. That year he and William H. Faris opened the Faris-Dementi Studio in Richmond. In 1926 Faris sold his share of the company to Dementi, who changed its name to Dementi Studio. Dementi's half brother, Frank Armstead Dementi, worked with him in the 1920s and 1930s before opening his own business, Dementi's Colonial Studio, in Williamsburg in 1942.
Dementi Studio specialized in custom portrait and commercial photography. The former included business and professional subjects, brides, families and children, and students, particularly at the University of Richmond, where Dementi served as the primary photographer during the 1940s and 1950s. Commercial work included photographing Virginia homes and gardens, advertising, coverage of special events, and aerial shots. Leaving the studio portrait work to assistants, Dementi concentrated on commercial photography in the field. In May 1926 he accompanied the Richmond Light Infantry Blues to France, England, and Belgium, where he photographed the men touring World War I battlefields, parading along the Champs-Elysées, and placing a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris. His images appeared in the New York Times and in the newspapers of Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut.
Because the Richmond News Leader did not employ staff photographers during the 1920s and 1930s, Dementi provided that service from 1924 until 1940, when the News Leader and the Richmond Times-Dispatch created a joint photography department. Dementi covered such subjects as fires, streetcar accidents, and murder trials. He also photographed famous political figures, including Winston Churchill, Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, King Albert I of Belgium, and many governors of Virginia. As the official photographer for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company, he shot a well-known and widely distributed image of three trains converging on the spot in Richmond where the tracks of the Southern Railway Company, the Seaboard Air Line Railway, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company crossed.
After using General Electric's new Photoflash lamps in his studio for several months, Dementi field-tested them during an October 1930 dinner meeting of the Illuminating Engineering Society held at the John Marshall Hotel in Richmond. Using twenty of the new flashbulbs strung along the balcony eaves of the hotel ballroom, he made the first-ever large group photograph using bulbs instead of powder. General Electric published the image in its introductory booklet for the new flashbulbs. During World War II, Dementi set up a studio at Camp Lee (later Fort Lee) and made thousands of photographs of the soldiers there as well as those at Camp Peary and Fort Eustis (later Joint Base Langley-Eustis).
In the post–World War II period, the studio saw its largest growth. It was incorporated in 1948, and ten years later Dementi opened a second location. In 1972 his business merged with his early mentor's Foster Studio to form Dementi-Foster Studios. Dementi served as its first president and then as chair of the board for the rest of his life. Over his career, Dementi trained almost one hundred other successful photographers. In 1953 he received a life membership in the Virginia Professional Photographers Association and in 1961 a life membership in the Professional Photographers of America. In 1999 Style Weekly included him in a list of the one hundred most influential Richmonders of the twentieth century, especially for capturing almost sixty years of Richmond history on film.
Dementi's wife died on 30 December 1973. Anthony Lodwell Dementi died of a heart attack at a Henrico County nursing home on 13 April 1980 and was buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Sources Consulted:
Carolyn Click, "The Patriarch of Richmond Photographers," Richmond Magazine 2 (Dec. 1975): 35–38 (portraits); feature articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 18 Feb. 1968, 23 Nov. 1975; self-reported birth date and middle name in World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1917–1918), Record Group 163, and World War II Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards (1942), Record Group 147, both National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Richmond City Marriage Register; Dementi photographs in Library of Congress, Library of Virginia, Smithsonian Institution, Valentine Museum, and Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC); A Studio Portrait: The Photography of the Dementi Family, 11 Dec. 2000–30 Apr. 2001, exhibition catalog, VMHC; Death Certificate, Henrico Co., Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health; obituaries in Richmond News Leader and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 14 Apr. 1980.