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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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Chapter 6
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NEW TECHNOLOGY,
NEW VISION,
NEW USERS
1875-1925
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Instantaneous Photographs of Everyday Life
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Whether facing the natural landscape or the urban scene, many
photographers other than those investigating motion for scientific reasons
found that they, too, were eager to arrest the continuous flux of life, to
scrutinize and savor discrete segments of time, and to capture them on
glass plates and, later, film. As noted, this first became possible with
the short-focal-length lenses on stereograph cameras. Roger Fenton, for
example, was able to capture the forms of flowing water and fleeting
clouds on the stereograph plate. By 1859, Edward Anthony in New York (pi.
no. 189), George Washington Wilson in Edinburgh, and Adolphe Braun and
Hippolyte Jouvin in Paris (pi. no. 190)— among others—had begun to make
and publish stereograph views of the "fleeting effects'1 of crowds and
traffic on die principal streets of urban centers and, in Jouvin's case,
in marketplaces, public gardens, and at festive events. Acclaimed because
they seemed to embody "all . . . life and motion," these views also
disclose the distinctiveness of different cultural environments.
Stereographs of city streets reveal at a glance the profound
dissimilarities between public life in New York and Paris, for example,
while others make visible the contrast between social conditions in
industrialized countries and in those being opened to colonization and
exploitation (see Chapter 8).
That this interest in the flux of urban life engaged painters of the
time as well as photographers is apparent in canvases by the French
Impressionists that seem to capture as if by camera the moving forms of
people and traffic in the streets and parks of Paris. Besides a preference
for high horizons and blurred figures, similar to that seen in numbers of
stereographs of city streets and exemplified in Claude Monet's Boulevard
des Capucines (pi. no. 303)—a view actually painted from Nadar's
studio—the Impressionists broke with tradition in their preference for
accidental-looking arrangements of figures that appear to be sliced
through by the edges of the canvas in the manner of the photographic
plate. Certain canvases by these painters also mimic the optical
distortions of figure and space visible in stereographs, suggesting that,
as Scharf observed, "photography must be accorded consideration in any
discussion of the character of Impressionist painting."
The appeal of the spontaneous and informal continued unabated during
the last decade of the 19th century and resulted in the extraordinary
popular interest in small, hand-held single-lens cameras that would
simplify the taking of informal pictures (see A Short Technical History,
Part II). Of all the apparatus developed to fulfill this need, the most
sensational was the Kodak camera, first marketed in 1888 by its inventor
George Eastman.
However, this fixed-focus box did more than make it easy for people to
take pictures of everyday events; by making the developing and printing
independent of the exposure it encouraged a new constituency to make
photographs and inaugurated the photo-processing industry.
The Kodak and the snapshot (Herschel's term to describe instantaneous
exposures) were promoted through astute advertising campaigns that
appealed to animal lovers, bicyclists, campers, women, sportsmen,
travelers, and tourists. Freed from the tedium of darkroom work, large
numbers of middle-class amateurs in Europe and the United States used the
Kodak during leisure hours to depict family and friends at home and at
recreation, to record the ordinary rather than the spectacular. Besides
serving as sentimental mementos, these unpretentious images provided later
cultural historians with descriptive information about everyday buildings,
artifacts, and clothing—indisputable evidence of the popular taste of an
era.
The convenience of merely pressing the buttor resulted in a deluge of
largely unexceptional pictures. Despite the suggestion today that the
"aesthetic quality of the snapshot has received less attention than it
deserves," most were made solely as personal records by individuals of
modest visual ambitions. Untutored in either art or science, they tended
to regard the image in terms of its subject rather than as a visual
statement that required decisions about where to stand, what to include,
how best to use the light. Further, since they were untroubled by
questions of print size or quality, they mostly ignored the craft elements
of photographic expression. This attitude, coupled with the fact that
"even' Tom, Dick and Harrv could get something or other onto a sensitive
plate," contributed to the emerging polarity between documentary
images—assumed to be entirely artless—and artistic photographs conceived
by their makers (and others) to embody aesthetic ideas and feelings.
Nevertheless, whether by accident or design, snapshots do on occasion
portray with satisfying formal vigor moments that seem excised from the
seamless flow of life. For one thing, the portability of the instrument
enabled the user to view actuality from excitingly different vantage
points, as in a 1900 image made by French novelist Emile Zola from the
Eiffel Tower looking down (pi. no. 304). In its organization of space it
presented an intriguing pattern of architectural members and human
figures, foreshadowing the fascination with spatial enigmas that would be
explored more fully by photographers in the 1910s and '20s. In a different
vein, the small camera made possible the refreshing directness visible in
images of small-town life by Horace Engle (pi. no. 305), an American
engineer who used a Gray Stirn Concealed Vest camera before turning to the
Kodak. Because the camera was so easy to use, a photographer stationed
behind a window or door, as Engle sometimes was, might intuitively manage
light and form to explore private gestures and expressions that almost
certainly would be withheld were his presence known. This urge to ensnare
ephemeral time, so to speak, also foreshadowed developments of the late
1920s when the sophisticated small Leica camera made "candid" street
photography a serious pursuit among photojournalists. Viewed in sequence
rather than singly, snapshots some-times suggest an underlying theme or
the emotional texture of an event in the manner of later photojournalistic
picture stories and might be considered forerunners in this sense, too.
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303. CLAUDE MONET. Boulevard des Capucines, Paris (Les Grands
Boulevards), 1873-74. Oil on canvas.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of An, Kansas City, Mo.; Kenneth A. and Helen F.
Spencer Foundation Acquisitions Fund.
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3O4. EMILE ZOLA. A Restaurant, Taken from the First Floor or Staircase
of the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1900.
Gelatin silver print. Collection Dr.
Francois Emile Zola, Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
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305. HORACE ENGLE. Unknown Subjea, Roanoke, Virginia, c. 1901.
Gelatin silver print from the original negative.
Pennsylvania State
University Press, University Park.
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However, despite the claim that "the man with a box-camera has as many
chances of preserving pleasure as those blessed (?) [sic] with the more
expensive instruments," the Kodak in itself was limited in scope. But the
spontaneity it emblematized appealed to many serious photographers, who
armed themselves with a more sensitive apparatus of a similar nature—the
hand camera. Individuals of both sexes, from varying backgrounds and
classes, of differing aesthetic persuasions, who usually processed their
own work, produced the kind of imagen' that for want of a better term has
come to be called documentation. Turning to the quotidian life of cities
and villages for inspiration, artists used the hand camera as a
sketchbook, pictorialists tried to evoke the urban tempo, and still others
found it a disarming device with which to conquer the anonymity of modern
life. Serious workers rather than snapshooters. this new breed of
image-maker sought to express a personal vision that embraced the special
qualities of the time and place in which they lived.
The invasion of personal privacy that the small camera user could
effect with ease became an issue in the late 19th century—one that still
elicits discussion today. The question of propriety was raised when
individuals and groups of amateurs, often organized into camera and
bicycle clubs, began to photograph unwitting people in the streets and at
play. Reaction ran the gamut from the gentle satire of an 1887 cartoon in
Britain's Amateur Photographer (pi. no. 306) to more strident
denunciations in which "hand-camera fiends" were admonished to refrain
from photographing "ladies as they emerge from their morning dip, loving
couples, private picnicking parties" under threat of having their cameras
"forcibly emptied." Indeed, it has been suggested that the many images of
working-class people in the streets around the turn of the century may
reflect the fact that they were less likely than middle-class folk to
protest when they saw strangers approaching with a camera.
Street life began to attract hand-camera enthusiasts (and some using
larger equipment, as well) partly because it offered an uncommon panorama
of picturesque subjects. Previously, photographers in search of visual
antidotes for the depressing uniformity of life in industrialized
societies had cither ventured abroad to exotic lands or had searched out
quaint pastoral villages as yet untouched by industrial activity. They
also had photographed the city's poor and ethnic minorities for their
picturesqueness. As urbanization advanced, documentarians, Pictorialists,
hand-camera enthusiasts, and even some who worked with large-format
cameras were drawn by the animated and vigorous street life in the city to
depict with less artifice the variety of peoples and experiences to be
found in urban slum and working-class neighborhoods.
To some extent, the career of Paul Martin, working in London from about
1884 on, typifies the changes that occurred in the practice, usage, and
character of photography everywhere. When Martin began an apprenticeship
as an engraver, he first came in contact with photography as a useful
resource for the illustrator. He taught himself the craft from magazines
that, along with amateur photography clubs, provided technical assistance
and aesthetic guidelines to growing numbers of hand-camera enthusiasts.
Some, like Martin, were working people from moderate backgrounds who were
unable to afford expensive camera equipment or time-consuming processes
that used the platinum and carbon materials favored by aesthetic
photographers. Martin became an accomplished craftsman nevertheless, adept
at making composites, vignetting, and solving technical problems connected
with photographing out-of-doors at night. During the 1890s, a number of
his straight silver prints were awarded prizes in competitions despite
being judged at times as lacking in atmosphere and being too "map-like."
Recent investigations have turned up numbers of photographers of the
quotidian scene, both in cities and in rural localities. In many cases the
photographers remain unknown, despite the fact that such images frequently
were reproduced on postcards when this form of communication grew in
popularity. Among those who supplied images for this purpose were Roll and
Vert in France and Emil Mayer in Austria. Photographing daily life
attracted women, who were beginning to become involved in photography in
greater numbers. Amelie Galup and Jenny de Vasson in France, Christina
Broom in England, and Alice Austen and Chansonetta Stanley Emmons in the
United States (see below) were among the many who took cameras into
streets and rural byways, Because the images are of scenes that take place
in the home and workplace as well as on the street, at times they may seem
similar to the social imagery by John Thomson in London and Jacob Riis in
New York—social photographers who worked in the slums of their respective
cities (see Chapter 8). However, the emotional tone in these works usually
is lighthearted and the scenes casually composed.
Martin claimed that he became a street photographer because he lacked
the financial means to become a Pictorialist, but in fact, enthusiasm for
"real life" cut across class lines, appealing to a broad sector of the
population that included wealthy individuals typified by Giuseppe Primoli
and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Primoli, a Bonaparte descendant who numbered
among his circle the intellectual and cultural elite of Italy and France,
worked between 1889 and 1905 (at first with a brother) to document the
doings of beggars, laborers, street vendors, and performers, as well as
the carefree pursuits of his own social class. Mostly amiable in tone,
with open space surrounding the figures that are the focus of attention,
Primoli's images could also be intense, as evidenced by the strong
contrasts and spatial compression in a view of a religious procession in
Ariccia (pi. no. 308).
The search for the unexpected in the tedium of daily occurrence was
another aspect of hand-camera street photography of the time. As
urbanization advanced, it swept away the distinctive physical and social
characteristics of the culture of the past, substituting undifferentiated
built environments and standardized patterns of dress and behavior.
Hand-camera users endeavored to reaffirm individuality and arrest time in
the face of the encroaching depersonalization of existence. The French
photographer Lartigue was exceptional in that he was given a hand camera
in 1901 at the age of seven and continued to use it throughout his
lifetime to chronicle the unexpected. His early work portrayed the
idiosyncratic behavior of his zany upper-class family whose wealth and
quest for modernity impelled them to try out all the latest inventions and
devices of the time, from electric razors to automobiles to flying
machines. The young Lartigue's intuitive sensitivity to line, strong
contrast, and spatial ambiguity, as seen in a view made in the Bois de
Boulogne in 1911 (pi no. 309), evokes the insouciance of affluent
Europeans before the first World War, a quality that is visible also in
many images by unnamed photographers who worked for the illustrated press
at the time.
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306. UNKNOWN . "What an Exposure!" from The Amateur Photographer, Sept.
23, 1887.
Engraving Gemsheim Collection, Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas, Austin.
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307. PAUL MARTIN. Entrance to Victoria Park, c. 1893.
Gelatin silver
print. Gcrnsheim Collection, Humanities Research Center, Universitv of
Texas, Austin.
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308. GIUSEPPE PRIMOLI. Procession, Ariaia, c. 1895.
Gelatin silver
print. Fondazione Primoli, Rome.
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309. JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE.
Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1911.
Gelatin silver print.
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JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE.
Car Trip, Papa at 80
kilometers an hour
1913
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ACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE
(see collection)
(From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia)
Jacques Henri Lartigue
(June 13, 1894 - September 12, 1986) was a French photographer and
painter.
Born in Courbevoie (a city outside of Paris) to a wealthy family, he is
most famous for his stunning photos of automobile races, planes and
fashionable Parisian women from the turn of the century.
He started taking photos when he was 6, his subject matter being primarily
his own life and the people and activities in it. As a child he
photographed his friends and family at play – running and jumping, racing
wheeled soap boxes, building kites, gliders and aeroplanes, climbing the
Eiffel Tower and so on. He also photographed many famous sporting events,
including automobile races such as the Coupe Gordon Bennett and the French
Grand Prix, early flights by aviation pioneers including Gabriel Voisin,
Louis Blériot, and Roland Garros, and tennis players such as Suzanne
Lenglen at the French Open tennis championships.
Although little seen in that format, many of his earliest and most famous
photographs were originally taken in stereo, but he also produced vast
numbers of images in all formats and media including glass plates in
various sizes, some of the earliest autochromes, and of course film in 2
1/4” square and 35mm. His greatest achievement was his set of around 120
huge photograph albums, which compose the finest visual autobiography ever
produced. While he sold a few photographs in his youth, mainly to sporting
magazines such as La Vie au Grand Air, in middle age he concentrated on
his painting, and it was through this that he earned his living, although
he maintained written and photographic journals throughout his life. Only
when he was 69 were his boyhood photographs serendipitously discovered by
Charles Rado of the Rapho agency, who introduced him to John Szarkowski,
then curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who in turn arranged
an exhibition of his work at the museum.
From this, there was a photo spread in Life magazine in 1963,
coincidentally in the issue which commemorated the death of John Kennedy,
ensuring the widest possible audience for his pictures.
By then as he received stints for fashion magazines, he was famous in
other countries other than his native France, when until 1974 he was
commissioned by the newly elected President of France Valéry Giscard
d'Estaing to shoot an official portrait photograph. The result was a
simple photo of him without the use of lighting utilising the national
flag as a background. He was rewarded with his first French retrospective
at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the following year and had more
commissions from fashion and decoration magazines flooding in for the rest
of his life.
His first book, Diary of a Century was published soon afterwards in
collaboration with Richard Avedon, and from then on innumerable books and
exhibitions throughout the world have featured Lartigue's photographs. He
continued taking photographs throughout the last three decades of his
life, finally achieving the commercial success that had previously evaded
this rather unworldly man.
Although best known as a photographer, Lartigue was a capable if not
especially gifted painter and showed in the official salons in Paris and
in the south of France from 1922 on. He was friends with a wide selection
of literary and artistic celebrities including the playwright Sacha Guitry,
the singer Yvonne Printemps, the painters Kees van Dongen, Pablo Picasso
and the artist-playwright-filmmaker Jean Cocteau. He also worked on the
sets of the film-makers Jacques Feyder, Abel Gance, Robert Bresson,
François Truffaut and Federico Fellini, and many of these celebrities
became the subject of his photographs. Lartigue, however, photographed
everyone he came in contact with, his most frequent muses being his three
wives, and his mistress of the early 1930s, the Romanian model Renée Perle.
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JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE.
Renee Perle,
1930-1932
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JACQUES HENRI LARTIGUE.
Renee Perle,
1930-1932
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Other photographers sought out moments of extreme contrast of class and
dress, as in Fortune Teller (pi. no. 310) by Horace W. Nicholls, a
professional photojournalist who recorded the self-indulgent behavior of
the British upper class before World War I. Others celebrated moments of
uncommon exhilaration, a mood that informs Handstands (pi. no. 311) by
Heinrich Zille, a graphic artist who used photography in his portrayal of
working-class life in Berlin around 1900. Still others, Stieglitz among
them, looked for intimations of tenderness and compassion to contrast with
the coldness and impersonality of the city, exemplified in The Terminal
(pi, no. 312) and other works made soon after Stieglitz returned to New
York from Germany in 1890.
Indeed, in the United States at the turn of the century, photographers
were specifically urged to open their eyes to the "picturesqucness" of die
city, to depict its bridges and structures, to leave the "main
thoroughfares and descend to the slums where an animated street life might
be seen. In part, this plea reflected the conviction held by Realist
painters, illustrators, pictorial and documentary photographers, joined by
social reformers, educators, and novelists, that the social life of the
nation was nurtured in the cities, that cities held a promise of
excitement in their freedom from conformity and ignorance. Stieglitz, in
whose magazine the article appeared, confessed in 1897 that after opposing
the hand camera for years, he (and other Pictorialist photographers) had
come to regard it as an important means of evoking the character of
contemporary life. His suggestion that those using the hand camera study
their surroundings and "await the moment when everything is in balance"
seems to have forecast a way of seeing that 30 years later became known as
the "decisive moment." Whether undertaken consciously or not, the endeavor
to assert the prodigal human spirit by capturing the fortuitous moment
long remained one of the leitmotifs of 20th-century small-camera
photography.
Nor was this development limited to New York. Soon after arriving in
California from Germany in 1895, the young Arnold Genthe obeyed his
"vagabond streak," as he called it, to photograph with a concealed hand
camera in the reputedly inhospitable Chinese quarter of San Francisco.
Over the next ten years, he returned continually to the "Canton of the
West" in search of tantalizing glimpses of an unusual culture. The images
range from the Pictorial to the reportorial (pi. no. 314), a dichotomy
that continued to characterize his work. As owner of a professional studio
in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 eardiquake, Genthe documented the
aftermath of the disaster with fine dramatic clarity, but after relocating
in New York he specialized in polished soft-focus portraits of dancers and
theatrical figures.
Ethnic enclaves were not the only source nor was the small camera the
only instrument for capturing the kinds of subjects now considered
picturesque. Countless photographers began to document aspects of the life
around them using large-plate view cameras to penetrate beyond surface
appearances. That the city could be approached as a subject using a
large-format camera and photographed with reserved grace rather than
subjective urgency can be seen in the images made by Robert L. Bracklow,
an amateur photographer of means, to document the physical structures,
architectural details, and street activity in New York at the turn of the
century (pi. no. 313). With a flair for well-organized composition,
Bracklow's photographs of slums, shanties, and skyscrapers suggest that by
the end of the 19th century both hand and view cameras had become a
significant recreational resource. For instance, E. J. Bellocq, a
little-known commercial photographer working in New Orleans during the
1910s, was able to pierce the facade of life in a Storyville brothel.
Whether commissioned or, as is more likely, made for his own pleasure,
these arrangements of figure and decor (pi. no. 315) project a melancholy
languor that seems to emanate from both real compassion and a voyeuristic
curiosity satisfied by the camera lens.
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310. HORACE W. NICHOLLS. The Fortune Teller, 1910.
Gelatin silver
print. Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England.
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311. HEINRICH ZILLE. Handstands, c. 1900.
Gelatin silver print. Schirmer/Mosel, Munich.
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HEINRICH ZILLE
(see collection)
(From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Rudolf Heinrich Zille
(January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929), German illustrator and photographer,
was born in Radeburg near Dresden, as the son of watchmaker Johann
Traugott Zill (Zille since 1854) and Ernestine Louise (born Heinitz). In
1867, his family moved to Berlin, where he finished school in 1872 and
started an apprenticeship as a lithographer.
In 1883, he married Hulda Frieske, with whom he had three children. She
died in 1919.
Zille became best known for his (often funny) drawings, catching the
characteristics of people, especially "stereotypes", mainly from Berlin
and many of them published in the German weekly satirical newspaper
Simplicissimus. He was first to portray the desperate social environment
of the Berlin Mietskasernen (literally tenement barracks), buildings
packed with sometimes a dozen persons per room that fled from land to the
rising Gründerzeit industrial metropolis only to find even deeper poverty
in the developing proletarian class.
Zille did not feel himself as a real artist: he often said that his work
is not the result of talent but merely hard work. Max Liebermann
nevertheless promoted him. He called him into the Berlin Secession in
1903, put his works in expositions of the upper class, and encouraged him
to sell drawings - and at the time Zille lost his job as a lithographer in
1910 he encouraged him to live from his drawings alone. The Berlin "Common
People" tolled him the greatest respect, and very late in life his fame
culminated in the roaring twenties with the National Gallery to buy some
drawings in 1921, the Academy of the Arts to honour him with a
professorship in 1924, Gerhard Lamprecht to make a movie of his stories in
1925 "Die Verrufenen", and his 70th birthday was celebrated at large in
Berlin. He died one year later.
Less known is that he was the artist of many erotic pictures which are
close to pornography but also show the life of normal people. Some of them
can be seen in the Beate Uhse Erotic Museum in Berlin. In 1983 director
Werner W. Wallroth made an East German movie based on a musical written by
Dieter Wardetzky and Peter Rabenalt. This movie Zille und Ick (Zille and I
in Berlin Dialect) isn't a real biopic but uses parts of Zille's life for
the story.
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HEINRICH ZILLE.
Ruckenansicht, August 1901
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see also: Heinrich Zille.
The Wood Gatherers, 1898

HEINRICH ZILLE.
The Wood Gatherers, 1898
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312. ALFRED STIEGLITZ. The Terminal, New York, 1892.
Gravure print.
From Camera 1911, No. 36. Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Georgia
O'Keeffe.
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ALFRED STIEGLITZ
(see collection)
(b Hoboken, NJ, 1 Jan 1864; d New York, 13
July 1946).
American photographer, editor, publisher, patron
and dealer. Internationally acclaimed as a pioneer of modern
photography, he produced a rich and significant body of work
between 1883 and 1937. He championed photography as a
graphic medium equal in stature to high art and fostered the
growth of the cultural vanguard in New York in the early
20th century.
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ALFRED STIEGLITZ.
Georgia O'Keeffe,
1919
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ALFRED STIEGLITZ.
Georgia O'Keeffe,
1919
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see also:
Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907

ALFRED STIEGLITZ. The
Steerage,
1907
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313. ROBERT L. BRACKLOW. Statue of Virtue, New York, after 1909.
Gelatin silver print from the original negative. New-York Historical
Society; Alexander Alland Collection.
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314. ARNOLD GENTHE. Man and Girl in Chinatown, c. 1896.
Gelatin silver print. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Universitv of
Nebraska, Lincoln; F.M. Hall Collection.
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ARNOLD
GENTHE
(see collection)
(From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
Genthe was born in
Berlin, Germany to Louise Zober and Hermann Genthe, a professor of Latin
and Greek at the Graues Kloster (Grey Monastery) in Berlin. Arnold
followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a classically trained
scholar; he received a doctorate in philology in 1894 at the University of
Jena, where he knew artist Adolf Menzel, his mother's cousin.
After emigrating to San Francisco in 1895 to work as a tutor, he taught
himself photography. He was intrigued by the Chinese section of the city
and photographed its inhabitants, from children to drug addicts, Due to
his subjects' possible fear of his camera or their reluctance to have
pictures taken, Genthe sometimes hid his camera. He sometimes removed
evidence of Western culture from these pictures, cropping or erasing as
needed. About 200 of his Chinatown pictures survive and these comprise the
only known photographic depictions of the area before 1906 earthquake.
After local magazines published some of his photographs in the late 1890s,
he opened a portrait studio. He knew some of the city's wealthy matrons,
and as his reputation grew, his clientèle included Nance O'Neil, Sarah
Bernhardt, and Jack London.
In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake and fire destroyed Genthe's studio,
but he rebuilt. His photograph of the earthquake's aftermath, Looking Down
Sacramento Street, San Francisco, April 18, 1906, is his most famous
photograph.
In 1911 he moved to New York City, where he remained until his death of a
heart attack in 1942. He worked primarily in portraiture and Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and John D. Rockefeller all sat for him. His
photos of Greta Garbo were credited with boosting her career. He also
photographed modern dancers, including Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, and
Ruth St. Denis, and his photos were featured in the 1916 book, The Book of
the Dance. He also was an early experimenter with the autochrome color
photography process.
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ARNOLD GENTHE.
Isatora Duncan
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315. E. J. BELLOCQ. From Storyville Portraits, c. 1913.
Silver print on prinring-out paper, made by Lee Fricdlander from the
original plate.
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E(rnest)
J(ames)
Bellocq
(see collection)
(b New Orleans, LA, 15 March 1873; d New
Orleans, 1949).
American photographer. He is known to have
worked as a commercial photographer in New Orleans from 1895
to 1940 and to have photographed for local shipbuilders and
in the Chinese sector of New Orleans, although none of this
work apparently survives. His photography is known only
through prints made by Lee Friedlander from the 89 gelatin
dry plate negatives found after Bellocq’s death. These
negatives date from c. 1912 and are sympathetic
portraits of prostitutes of New Orleans and interior views
of their workplaces. Known as the Storyville Portraits,
34 were shown by MOMA, New York, in a travelling exhibition
in 1970–71. Bellocq’s life was the subject of Pretty Baby
(1978), a film by Louis Malle.
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E. J. BELLOCQ. Nude.
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The new photographic technologies had a signal effect on the role of
American women in photography. Simplified processing enabled greater
numbers of "genteel" women to consider photography a serious avocation and
even a profession, because by the late 1880s diey were able to take
advantage also of the availability of domestic help and store-bought food,
both of which provided some relief from household routines. At about the
same time, writers in the popular and photographic press, suggesting that
the medium was particularly suited to "the gender sex," urged women to
consider "an accomplishment which henceforth may combine the maximum of
grace and fascination. Encouragement came also from the Federation of
Women Photographers and from competitions designed especially for female
photographers. Unlike the older arts, photography did not require training
in male-dominated academies, long periods of apprenticeship, or large
commitments of time to practice, although greater involvement in the
medium usually yielded more impressive results In addition to those who
became prominent in photo-journalism and Pictorialism (see Chapters 8 and
9), many women used both hand and view cameras to document family life and
domestic customs, recreational and street activities. Chansonetta Stanley
Emmons and Alice Austen were two such women. Images of small-town life,
typified by a scene in the village of Maryborough, New Hampshire (pi. no.
316), were made in 1900 by the recently widowed Emmons, who had turned to
photography as a solace and a means of augmenting a meager income.
Nurtured on genre imagery, Emmons's domestic scenes often were
sen-timental and derivative, but she also could capture evanescent moments
of childhood play with refreshing directness. Austen, originally from a
well-to-do Staten Island family, was less typical in that she not only
devoted some 25 years to a visual exploration of her own social milieu,
but she also investigated the vibrant working-class neighborhoods of lower
Manhattan (pi. no. 317) with an eye for expressive lighting and gesture.
In Austen's case, as was undoubtedly true of other women, the camera
provided a means to overcome psychological and social barriers, enabling a
shy and conventionally reared Victorian "lady" to participate in the
excitement of urban street life.
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316. CHANSONETTA STANLEY EMMONS. Children at Well,
1900.
Gelatin silver print. Culver Pictures, New York.
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317. ALICE AUSTEN. Hester Street, Egg Stand, 1895.
Gelatin silver print. Staten Island Historical Society, Staten Island.
N.Y.;
Alice Austen Collection.
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In die decade before 1900, the possibility that camera views of the
city might be a salable commodity' began to interest individuals and
commercial studios. Using view cameras and tripods as well as hand
cameras, photographers working on their own or for photographic
enterprises undertook to provide images for postcards and magazine
reproduction, for antiquarian societies and libraries, and for artists and
decorators, creating in the process a formidable number of such visual
documentations. For instance, in New York between 1890 and 1910, Joseph
Byron (descendant of a family of English photographers) was involved in a
business with his wife and five children, including the well-known Percy;
they exposed and processed almost 30,000 large-format views both on
commission and on speculation. A similar pictorial record of Paris can be
seen in the work of Paul Geniaux, Louis Vert, and the Seeberger brothers.
These images comprise scenes of urban labors (pi. no. 318) as well as the
activities of the bourgeoisie on their daily rounds. With exceptions,
these competent if detached records of buildings, neighborhoods, sporting
and theatrical events, people at play and at work arc interesting mainly
for their rich fund of sociological information. The most extensive and in
some judgments the most visually expressive document of the urban
experience—also of Paris—was begun just before 1900 by Eugene Atget (pi,
no. 326) (see Profile). Using a simple 18 x 24 centimeter camera mounted
on a tripod, this former actor began to document the city and its environs
for a varied clientele that included architects, decorators, painters,
publishers, and sculptors. Aside from their value and use as descriptive
records of buildings, decor, statuary, storefronts (pi. no. 319),
costumes, and gardens, these beautifully composed images resonate with an
intense though not easily defined passion. Rich in detail but not fussy,
affecting but not sentimental, this great body of work represents Atget's
yearning to possess all of old Paris and in so doing to embrace the
authentic culture of France that modern technology was destroying. Other
large-scale commercial documents often exhibited a patriotic character,
reflecting the growing movements for national self-determination taking
place in various parts of Europe. Forty thousand views of Irish life,
which include scenes of work and play, of city thorough-fares and serene
country landscape (pi. no. 320), were made by Robert French for the firm
of William Lawrence in Dublin. And in view of the political agitation for
independence among groups inhabiting the vast reaches of Russia, it is not
surprising to find the tradition of ethnographic images, mentioned
earlier, continuing into the dry-plate era, with photographers from many
sections documenting places and customs in order to bolster feelings of
national identity. Just as ethnographers in Eastern Europe were determined
to collect evidence of a distinctive literature and folk music,
photographers in Latvia, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Poland contributed to this
surge of nationalism with images of national costume, typical
environments, and regional customs. Since in these less industrialized
regions the medium received less financial support from the urban populace
than in Western Europe and the United States, distinctions between
professional and amateur, between documentary and artistic were not as
codified; the same individual might fulfill all these roles, might at the
same time make commercial post cards and other documentations and submit
works to the local camera club exhibitions. A similar ethnic consciousness
emerged among black photographers in the United States in the early 20th
century.
The demand for portraits and other kinds of pictorial records,
coupled with easier access to equipment, materials, and processing
resulted in an increase in the number of commercially successful studios
run by black entrepreneurs in their own communities. From the early days
of the medium, daguerreotypes and other camera portraits had been made by
unheralded black photographers, but these later enterprises produced
images that depicted, in addition, the social activities of upwardly
mobile urban dwellers and life in rural communities, made both for
commerce and as expressions of black pride. Addison N. Scurlock started a
portrait studio in Washington in 1904 and soon began to document
activities at Howard University where he was official photographer;
Waterfront, 1915, (pi. no. 321) is suggestive of his feeling for mood and
texture when not confined to portraiture or straight documentation. James
Van Der Zee, probably the best-known black studio photographer in the
United States, began a professional career in 1915, opening an
establishment in Harlem a year later to which the well-to-do and famous
came for portraits (pi. no. 322). He also documented social activities for
the community and made genre images for his own pleasure. Had these
photographers not faced the necessity of earning a living in studio work,
both might have produced such images more frequently, a situation that
obviously was true also for the majority of commercial photographers
everywhere who were able to make affecting documents of their social
milieu only in the time spared from studio work. Unlike white Americans,
however, black photographers could not afford the leisure and financial
freedom to indulge in personal expression nor were they able to find a
niche in photojournalism, advertising photography, or social documentation
until after the second World War. Anyone who has poked around attics,
antique shops, and secondhand bookstores is aware of the formidable
quantities of photographic post cards that have accumulated since camera
techniques were simplified in the late 19th century. The post card
format—approximately 31/4 x 5 1/2 inches—appeared in Europe in 1869 and
shortly after in the United States, but it was not until after the happy
conjunction of new rural postal regulations, hand cameras, and special
printing papers that occurred shortly after the turn of the century that
the picture card became immensely popular with Americans—individuals and
commercial studios alike. Artless yet captivating, post card images (even
when turned out in studios) display a kind of irreverent good humor in
their depictions of work, play, children, and pets (pi. no. 323), although
they also could deal with grimmer realities (pi. no. 324). In thee absence
of telephones, glossy picture magazines, and television, the photographic
postcard was not merely a way to keep in touch but a form of education and
entertainment as well.
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318. HENRI, and LOUIS SEEBERGER (SEEBERGER FRERES).
Fishermen near Washerwoman's Boats, c. 1905-10.
Gelatin silver print. Caisse Nationals des Monuments Historiques et des
Sites, Paris.
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319. EUGENE ATGET. Avenue des Gobelins, 1925.
Gold-toned printing-out
paper. Museum of Modern Art, New York; Abbott-Levy Collection; partial
gift of Shirley C. Burden.
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EUGENE ATGET
(see collection)
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320. ROBERT FRENCH. Claudy River, Gweedore, County
Donegal, c. 1890.
Gelatin silver print. National Library of Ireland,
Dublin.
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321. ADDISON N. SCURLOCK. Waterfront, 1915.
Gelatin silver print.
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322. JAMES VAN DER ZEE. Couple in Raccoon Coats,
1932.
Gelatin silver print. James Van Der Zee Estate, New York;
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323. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER (American). Untitled, z.
1900-10.
Gelatin silver post card. Private Collection.
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324. UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER (American). In Memory of
Ida Bravman. 1913.
Gelatin silver post card. Gotham Book Man. New York.
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Profile:
Eugene Atget
(see collection)
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326. BERENICE ABBOTT. Portrait of Eugene Atget, c.
1927.
Gelatin silver print. Witkin Gallery, Inc., New York.
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Eugene Atget (pi. no. 326), the photographer whose extraordinary
documentation of Paris in the first quarter of the 20th century was for
many years uncelebrated, was born in Libourne, near Bordeaux, in 1857.
Orphaned at an early age, he was employed as cabin boy and seaman after
completing his schooling. During the 1880s, Atget took up acting, playing
in provincial theaters, but having settled permanently in Paris in 1890 he
realized the impossibility of a stage career in the capita!. Instead, he
turned to the visual arts, deciding on photography because of his limited
art training and also because he expected that it was a profession that
might yield income from the sale of camera images to his artist-neighbors
in Montparnasse.
Between 1898 and 1914, Atget received commissions from and sold
photographs to various city bureaus, including the archive of the national
registry, Les Monuments historiques, and the recently established Musee
Carnavalet, which had been set up to preserve a record of the history of
Paris. He also supplied documents to a clientele ot architects,
decorators, and publishers as well as artists, keeping records of both
subjects and patrons. One project, for a book on brothels planned but
never realized by Andre Dignimont in 1921, is said to have annoyed the
photographer, but the images for this work (pi. no. 327) have the same
sense of immutable presence as those of other working people photographed
by Atget in the streets or shops of Paris. Often self-motivated rather
than directly commissioned, Atget nevertheless followed in the tradition
marked out by the photographers of the 1850s Monuments historiqites
project and by Charles Marville, who had photographed the neighborhoods
about to be replaced by Baron Haussmann's urban renewal projects. In
common with these photographers, Atget did not find documentation and art
antithetical but attempted to invest even the most mundane subject with
photographic form. He showed no interest in the art photography movement
that already was well established when he began to work in the medium,
seeking instead to make the expressive power of light and shadow as
defined by the silver salts evoke resonances beyond the merely
descriptive.
Beyond supplying images to clients, Atget seems to have had an overall
design or intention for many of his projects. A voracious reader of
19th-century French literature, he sought to re-create the Paris of the
past, photographing buildings and areas marked for demolition in the hope
of preserving the ineffable imprint of time and usage on stone, iron, and
vegetation. A series of tree and park images (pi. no. 328) that Atget made
in the oudying sections around Paris suggest a compulsion to preserve
natural environments from the destruction already visible in the
industrialized northern districts of the city. In the same way, his images
of working individuals may have beer made to record distinctive trades
before they were swept away by the changes in social and economic
relationships already taking place.
In the manner of a film director, Atget made close-ups, long shots,
details, views from different angles, in different lights, at different
times, almost as though he were challenging time by creating an immutable
world in two dimensions. The vast number of his images—perhaps 10,000—of
storefronts (pi. no. 319), doorways, arcades, vistas, public spaces, and
private gardens, of crowds in the street and workers pursuing daily
activities—of just about everything but upper-class life-—evoke a Paris
that appears as part legend, part dream, yet profoundly real.
During the 1920s, the extent and expressive qualities of Atget's work
were unknown to all but a small group of friends and avant-garde artists,
among them Man Ray, who arranged for several works to be reproduced in the
magazine La Revolution Surrealiste in 1926. Atget's final year, made
especially difficult by the death of a longtime companion as well as by
his insecure financial situation, brought him into contact with Berenice
Abbott, who at the time was Man Ray's technical assistant. After Atget's
death in August 1927, Abbott was able to raise funds to purchase the
photographer's negatives and prints and thus bring his work to the
attention of American photographers and collectors when she returned to
the United States in 1929. In 1968 this vast but still uncataloged
collection was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which has
since displayed and published Atget's exceptional images.
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327. EUGENE ATGET. Prostitute, Paris, 1920s.
Gold-toned printing-out paper. Private Collection.
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328. EUGENE ATGET. La Marne a la Varenne, 1925-27.
Gold-toned printing-out paper. Museum of Modern Art, New York;
Abbott-Levy
Collection; partial gift of Shirley C. Burden.
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Eugene Atget
(see collection)
(b Libourne, nr Bordeaux, 12 Feb 1857; d
Paris, 4 Aug 1927).
French photographer. An only child of
working-class parents, he was orphaned at an early age and
went to sea. Determined to be an actor, he managed to study
at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique in Paris for a year
but was dismissed to finish his military service. Thereafter
he acted for several seasons in the provinces but failed to
distinguish himself and left the stage. An interest in
painting but lack of facility led him to take up photography
in the late 1880s. At this time photography was experiencing
unprecedented expansion in both commercial and amateur
fields. Atget entered the commercial arena. Equipped with a
standard box camera on a tripod and 180*240 mm glass
negatives, he gradually made some 10,000 photographs of
France that describe its cultural legacy and its popular
culture. He printed his negatives on ordinary albumen-silver
paper and sold his prints to make a living. Despite the
prevailing taste for soft-focus, painterly photography from
c. 1890 to 1914, Atget remained constant in his
straightforward record-making technique. It suited the
notion he held of his calling, which was to make not art but
documents.
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EUGENE ATGET. Notre Dame,
1925
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EUGENE ATGET. Parc de Sceaux,
1925
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