José Maria Mora
José Maria Mora was a Cuban Victorian era still photographer. He was born into a wealthy Cuban planter family. Belonging to a wealthy family he was able to study painting in Paris in the 1860s. His family was forced to flee Cuba in 1868 in the Cuban Uprising and they headed to New York. In New York he found employment with the Napoleon Sarony Company where he specialized in paint photographs - an early form of optical alteration. After two years with Sarony he founded his own company and style and competed with Sarony. He often specialized in portraiting prominent theatrical subjects, writers and members of the nobility. His famous rivals were his former employer Napoleon Sarony and Benjamin F. Falk.
Mora died at the Breslin Hotel in Manhattan in 1926 and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx New York.
