Caroline Littell

ALFRED - Caroline Littell, a noted travel photographer and a longtime resident of Alfred, died Wednesday (March 18, 2015) in Pasadena, Calif. She was 75.

Mrs. Littell had been in hospice because of complications of acute leukemia, her family said.

Mrs. Littell was born Caroline Jane Penelope Byass in Cairo, Egypt, on July 26, 1939. Her parents were British. Soon after the start of the 1940 desert war in North Africa, her father, Lt. Col. F.W. Byass, commanded a regiment of British armor, the 7th Queen's Own Hussars, in the campaign against German and Italian forces. He was killed in action in 1941.

Evacuated from Egypt as an infant, Mrs. Littell spent the war years with relatives in the south of England, where she later attended boarding schools for girls at St. Mary's Convent School, Ascot, and Tortington Park School, Arundel. She went on to study languages in central and eastern Europe and became a fluent speaker of German, French, Spanish and Greek. In the early 1960s, she worked as a trilingual secretary - in English, Spanish and French - for a Paris-based agency of the United Nations.
Mrs. Littell was an indefatigable traveler, and her black-and-white and color photography illustrated articles on tourism and travel in dozens of American and European publications as varied as Travel & Leisure Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the Athens (Greece) News and Ocean Navigator Magazine. In Western New York, her work appeared regularly in The Buffalo News, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the Olean Times Herald, the Hornell Sunday Spectator and The Alfred Sun.

Over the years, and working with her husband, Alan Littell, a freelance journalist based in Alfred, she traveled to Burma and Thailand, French Polynesia, Turkey, Britain, Ireland, the islands and mainland of Greece, and much of east Africa and the Middle East.

On one occasion, when she arrived in Egypt on a newspaper assignment, the customs officer at Cairo Airport examining her entry documents broke into a broad grin when he noticed the birthplace listed on her passport. "Welcome home!" he said.

Among Mrs. Littell's more unusual photographic assignments were voyages in two of the world's largest square-rigged passenger sailing ships, the four-masted barkentines Star Clipper and Star Flyer - one to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, the other to the island group centering on Tahiti, in the South Pacific.

She had exhibitions of her photography at Alfred University and at Alfred State College.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, although she held no university degree, she was employed at Alfred University as director of the language laboratory and as study-abroad coordinator and student adviser. She eventually resigned both positions to devote more time to travel and photography.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by two sons, Harry Littell of Ithaca and Matthew Littell of Altadena, Calif.; four grandchildren; and two brothers, David and Charles Byass, both of England.

A remembrance ceremony is being planned.