Her attire, from before I met her in 1976 to the last time I studied with her in 1980, was a brown or red beret, a khaki blouse with two large pockets, moccasins that she called “clam-diggers” and a tailor-made wool skirt. The skirt had two pockets and measured nine-yards around; all the better to climb fences and stone walls in her quest for better photographs.

Her teaching style could well have been the model for Marine Corps drill instructors. Not everyone who started her course finished it. But behind her stern, dogmatic discipline was the desire to have you learn the basics so well you would never forget them.

Even a mild rebuke could be memorable, as when once she commented while reviewing my slides, “This is an unfortunate photograph.“ She said this to me over twenty years ago and I remember it to this day. More than anything she wanted to move all her students to become more perceptive and creative photographers.

I still follow her principles down to the same tripod ball and socket head she insisted that we all use. And it was with sadness that I discarded my “Ball” brand linemen's boots that she considered the only footwear capable of keeping your feet warm standing in 15-degree weather for two or three hours. Forgive me Helen, but I had no use for them when I moved to Florida and I couldn't give them away. They weighed almost a pound each and today’s Goretex boots are lighter, if not quite as warm.

Some of her precepts were: If you don't enjoy photography, take up another hobby -- You do not take pictures, you make them -- A good photographer is a builder. His materials are lines, forms, spaces, tones, colors and textures -- Pictures must have an adequate base -- Consider the placement of your subject matter carefully -- Look for a secondary element that will support the subject -- The best kind of lighting (for color photographs) is a soft diffuse light as on an overcast day or in a light rain, or early in the morning or late afternoon. Never during the middle of the day, and rarely in brilliant sunshine except in making snow pictures -- Shun record-type pictures. Such representational pictures reflect the failure of the photographer to use his imagination, interpretation and creativity.

My last impression of Helen bundled up in a car at 5:45 a.m. during her very last Autumn class in 1980, . It is a cold October New Hampshire morning and, although she is ninety-one and unable to stand for long, wants us, her students, to know that she is there with us as we wait in the dark for a sunrise over Lake Winnipesaukee.

Helen passed away in April of 1982 at the age of 93. Nevertheless, a few years later, almost a dozen of her students showed up in New Hampshire -- same time, same place -- to shoot pictures in that area and tell each other Manzer stories ...

My thanks to Sam W. Morris, formerly of the USIA, from whose monograph I have taken Helen's picture as well as much of the content of this tribute. My thanks too to Freeman Patterson, probably her most famous student, Leo Fiedler and all her other students from whom I also learned so much.