Helen Plummer Gatch was born in 1861 in Alton, Illinois, to Orlando P. S. Plummer, who moved to Portland, Oregon, with his three daughters in 1864 after the death of their mother. As a young woman, she taught school before her marriage to Claud Gatch (born 1859), who worked in banking and served as mayor of Salem, Oregon, from 1893-1896. They had two children, Orytha “Ryth” (later Orytha Gatch Skidmore, 1886-1970) and Thomas Leigh “Tam” (1891-1954).

Helen Plummer Gatch was an ambitious amateur photographer who used her domestic life and her children as subjects for her pictorial photography. She may also have made some documentary photographs during the 1890s, such as an image of the Oregon State Insane Asylum (now the Oregon State Hospital) in Salem. Although she did not construct stage sets for her photographs as other pictorialists did, Gatch used composition, costuming, and titles to pictorialize her subjects and to produce Dutch genre images. One example is “Romeo and Juliet,” made in 1891, showing Ryth and Asahel Bush, Jr., playing Shakespeare at the Bush home in Salem. This image was frequently reproduced and exhibited. Gatch used prominent Salem homes and friends as sets and models, and also photographed at the family summer house on the Oregon Coast near Newport.

Gatch made her mark at the local, regional, and national levels with winning contest entries and acceptance of her work into salons at San Francisco and Philadelphia. She joined the Salon Club (which opposed the Photo-Secession movement) and was involved in the organization of the Federation of American Photographic Societies in 1904. Her work was shown in the first American Photographic Salon (in which she also participated as an organizer) later that year in New York, and it came to Portland the following year as the first show at the new Portland Art Museum. Gatch served on the national preliminary juries for the second and third American Salons, and was also selected as a judge for an Oregon Camera Club exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 1906.

The Gatch family moved to California in 1912. Helen Plummer Gatch died in Oakland on January 11, 1942.

Sources: “Myra Wiggins and Helen Gatch: Conflicts in American Pictorialism,” by Roger Hull, History of Photography, Summer 1992, pages 152-169; "Oregon Camera Club Exhibit Open," Oregonian, November 28, 1906, page 18; vital records via Ancestry.com.