Margaret de Motte Brown, born in Illinois, studied photography in New York with Clarence White, one of the preeminent pictorialist photographers of the late 19th-early 20th centuries. She was associated first, with the Photo Secession, and after White and Gerturde Kasebier split with that group, with the Pictorial Photographers of America, for which she served as corresponding secretary. In 1918, after inheriting some money from an uncle, Margaret left her teaching job at the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville, IL, and opened a photography studio in Poughkeepsie, New York. She resumed exhibiting her work, and also began collaborating with a Poughkeepsie neighbor, Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, on "Dutch Houses in the Hudson Valley before 1776" (1929). The book was sponsored by a local historical society whose historian was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Brown also provided photographs for "Pre-Revolutionary Dutch Houses and Families in Northern New Jersey and Southern New York" by Rosalie Fellows Bailey (1936), a continuation of Reynolds' work. She died in Springrield, Massachusetts in 1959.