How Stieglitz came to photograph cityscapes

Abstract

Beginning in 1927, at the age of 63, Alfred Stieglitz began photographing the views of Manhattan outside the windows at the Intimate Gallery, his third-floor exhibition space on East 59th Street, and at the thirtieth-floor apartment at the Shelton Hotel, at 49th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he lived with Georgia O'Keeffe. In concerted bursts over the next four years, and then intermittently until ill-health forced the end of his picture-making in 1937, Stieglitz produced about 90 cityscapes, most of them depicting the changing views from .the Shelton and from his seventeenthfloor gallery An American Place, at 53rd Street and Madison Avenue, where he moved operations just after the stockmarket crash of 1929.1 The key set of Stieglitz's photographs in the National Gallery, Washington, DC, deposited there by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, includes 80 New York cityscapes from 1927 and after. The collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art has, among its late cityscapes, a handful that are not present in Washington, being variants in either negative, cropping, or photographic paper. These have been donated in stages over the years by Dorothy Norman. Further examples of variations from the images in Washington are unknown at present. These hard-edged yet lush gelatine silver prints vividly document a building boom of the late 1920s and early Depression years which transformed the refined, residential ‘uptown’ that Stieglitz had known all his life into a skyscraper-ridden ‘midtown’, a centre for office rentals, luxury apartment hotels and the fme art trade (figure 1).     

Platinum Print (Photo-Graphic Art) 1913–17

In the 1920s art museums in the United States began to collect and display photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and other leading photographers as works of art. Previous scholars have acknowledged this movement's significance in Stieglitz's struggle for the institutional recognition of photography. They have, however, scarcely queried the conditions under which this movement began. This article scrutinises the circumstances under which the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, accepted prints from Stieglitz and other practitioners of the medium. It posits that the Boston Museum's decision to accept these prints was motivated by its protean curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy's interest in pictorialist and photo-secessionist photography's creative and political possibilities as well as in Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz's pictures appealed to Coomaraswamy because he recognised in them ways in which the American photographer was referencing strands of classical South Asian aesthetics to develop more inclusive and more symbolic works of American art. One of these filaments was Stieglitz's absorption of a codified language of hand gestures assumed by dancers and deities that Coomaraswamy was concurrently documenting and interpreting in his writings, photographs and films to elevate maligned traditions of South Asian sculpture and performance as Art. In recovering this narrative of Coomraswamy and Stieglitz's overlapping lives and works, this article begins to disentangle histories of collecting, of modernist photography and of the crystallisation of South Asian art history as a scholarly discipline.     

Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Several recent projects devoted to Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) reveal current trends in scholarship regarding this key figure in twentiethcentury cultural history. Two new publications focus primarily upon the myriad significant contributions he made to the ali and culture of the United States. For the historian of photography, these works offer useful insights conceming the intellectual and altistic climate that informed Stieglitz, md which can be productively applied to discussions of his photographic oeuvre. Venturing off the printed page, a documentary film revisits the Stieglitz biography and lauds his photography as one of the major artistic achievements of the twentieth century. Those looking for a comprehensive assessment of Alfred Stieglitz's endeavours as a photographer, however, will have to wait a little longer. The National Gallery of Art in Washington intends to publish a major catalogue, Stieglitz, in 2002, in conjunction with an exhibition featuring a selection of Stieglitz's photographs drawn from their collection. I await this publication with great anticipation. Meanwhile, the National Gallery has developed an innovative website that previews their undertaking.     

‘Swiping … and Daguerreotyping’: Photographing Golf at St Andrews

Abstract

When photography was invented, St Andrews was already a very old town, littered with the remains of a glorious and turbulent his tory: notably the skeletons of a once magnificent cathedral and a large Augustinian priory and a ruined castle, horne of the former bishops and archbishops. Zealous reformers had helped reduce these great symbols of medieval Scotland's archiepiscopal see, which were now picturesque ruins, ideal for recording in the new medium of photography. However, St Andrews in the nineteenth century was more than just ‘that Reformation bombsite’.1 This rather apt phrase was used recently by Les Murray in his poem, St Andrews University AD 2000, one of ten poems specially commissioned to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Fergusson, poet, former St Andrews student and inspiration to Robert Burns. It had a small, sleepy university, with old college buildings nestling among the town's commercial and private properties. But also it had something else alive and stirring in the western end of the town — its famous 'Old' golf course. Around the time the first St Andrews photographs were being made, George Fullerton Carnegie penned the following lines in his Golfiana: Address to St Andrews:     

Susan Lipper

Abstract

When William Norman opened his photographic studio in a tiny redbrick house on Bleury Street in Montreal in late 1856,1 Letter from Alice Notman, Montreal to her parents Mr and Mrs Thomas, Woodwork, England. 28 December 1856. the 30-year-old immigrant could not have dreamed that this small beginning would one day expand into a vast enterprise spanning four Canadian provinces and six states in the eastern USA.² Nor could he have known that the business would continue long after his death, and that the firm's production of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs would become the foundation of an archives of international repute and his pictures cherished by millions.     

An album of seascapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

In 1856 Ernest Lacan, a journalist and early critic in the field of photography, advanced a prediction which only recently has been confirmed, that Gustave Le Gray (1820–c. 1882) ‘s'est fait un nom qui restera dans l'histoire des progrès de la photographie’¹. There is little doubt that in the 1850s Le Gray was considered at least the equal of contemporary luminaries such as Nadar, owing to the following activities and accolades: his highly advanced technical experiments, discoveries and improvements; his several treatises and short notes in journals which dealt with such; his extensive and consistent exhibition record which was accompanied by almost exclusively positive and enthusiastic reviews; persistent application of and investigation into nearly every photographic technique and iconographic theme popular at the time; his informal or professional training of photographers of note such as Henri Le Secq, Charles Nègre, Charles Marville, Maxime Du Camp, Roger Fenton, and Adrien Tournachon; and the ultimate approbation, the grant to him in c. 1858–1859 of the title ‘Photographe de S. M. L'Empereur’. Accordingly, one finds in the histories and photographic journals of his day repeated references to the exceptional quality of Le Gray's prints and the widespread influence of his writings and instruction. Nadar, in his Quand j'étais photographe of c. 1900, included extensive remarks relating to Le Gray's personal life and photographic career, but because of a span of 40 or more years between original events and recollections, Nadar's account of his subject's endeavours is at best superficial, and tends to emphasize anecdote as opposed to factual history. Short treatments dealing primarily with the technical aspects of Le Gray's photography do appear in most 20th-century surveys (Freund, Lécuyer, Gernsheim, Newhall, etc.), but neither these brief synopses nor Nadar's reminiscences constitute what may even faintly be construed as a serious attempt at a reconstruction of the photographer's career and accomplishments2 For essentially revisional biographical information concerning Le Gray, see the author's dissertation¹, especially pp. 1–20, 41–42, 52–53, and 63–47. . In recent years, however, photographic historians, art historians, and to some extent the general public, have witnessed a renaissance of interest in Le Gray's life and works, a revival which has led to more detailed and accurate textual inforinntion, and the attendant availability of a wider range of examples of his works and writings³. It therefore seems propitious to add to this rapidly expanding corpus of Le Gray studies an intensive discussion of what may well be the photographer's most distinguished technical and aesthetic achievement, the Vistas del Mar album of scascapes, here dated c. 1857–1859, now housed in the Art Institute of Chicago.     

The invention and reinvention of Martín Chambi

Abstract

Distanced by over fifty years, Latorre and Thornton offer opposing perceptions of Martin Chambi as an artist.3 This is an abbreviated version of chapter four from my doctoral dissertation, Rethinking Martín Chambi, completed in 1997 at the University of New Mexico. Roberto Latorre, writer for and editor of the intellectual journal Kosko, was an integral part of the cultural milieu of 1 920s Cusco, Peru, where Chambi lived and worked. His statement was part of a review of Chambi's exhibitions from around 1925. Gene Thornton, photography critic at the New York Times during the 1970s, judged Chambi from pictures exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. Both critics reflect the aesthetic sensibilities of their time and the context in which they were writing: what are we to make of such disparate interpretations of the same photographer, including the shift from Latorre's emphasis on Chambi's landscapes to Thornton's interest in his portraits? At issue is the difference between Chambi's sense of himself as an artist during his own life, and how that sense was reshaped when Chambi was rediscovered after his death in 1973.     

Souvenir de Constantinople

Abstract

The University Art Museum of the University of New Mexico has in its possession an albumen print, 34 × 24 em, untitled and unsigned (Figure 1). On the evidence of its process, style, format and subject matter it has been attributed to James Robertson1 Private communication from Bill Jay, the University Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (16th July 1973). , the photographer best known for his studies of Constantinople in the early 1850s and his work as one of the early war-photographers covering the last stages of the Crimean campaign in 1855-1856². A scrap of evidence has now come to light, confirming that the print is indeed by Robertson.     

Georgia and Ida O'Keeffe

Abstract

In 1918 Alfred Stieglitz made his first portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe. By the spring of 1922, two years before their marriage, Stieglitz had produced more than 100 studies of her. Soon after, he turned his camera on others, and sometimes included O'Keeffe in the frame. The location for many of these later images was the Hill, the retreat at Lake George, New York, which was shared with Stieglitz's immediate family and coterie of admirers, colleagues and friends.     

On the rates of convergence for moments convergence in regression models

In one-dimensional regression models, we establish a rate for the rth moment convergence \((r \geqslant 1)\) of the ordinary least-squares estimator involving explicitly the regressors, answering to an open question raised lately by Afendras and Markatou (Test 25:775–784, 2016). An extension of the classic Theorem 2.6.1 of Anderson (The statistical analysis of time series, Wiley, New York, 1971) is also presented.     

Early landscapes by Gustave Le Gray

Abstract

Gustave Le Gray is most widely known for his collodion seascape views which were first exhibited in 1856 at the Photographic Society of London. These views, in their strict horizontal compositions and dramatic skies, anticipate the seascape paintings of Courbet¹, An equally strong parallel exists between Le Gray's landscape photographs and early paintings of the Impressionists. Le Gray's landscape views of the forest of Fontainebleau shown in the 1859 Photographic Salon were described by Burty, a French art critic: ‘he air plays through the leaves, and the sun streaks the dark grass like the hide of a panthe’ ² Ibid., p. 352. , The monumental trees, skies and rushing forests, halted by occasional lines of light, distinguish his landscape images ofthis period. He genuinely loved nature but never idealized it.     

F. Holland Day and ‘the Beautiful Boy’: The Story of Thomas Langryl Harris and Day's Nude Study

F. Holland Day has long been recognised as a pioneer American pictorial photographer and uncompromising advocate for photography as a fine art. His work, particularly his depictions of the male nude and the crucifixion of Christ (for which he was his own model), was somewhat controversial in his lifetime and remains influential. His advocacy culminated in the mounting of the all-important New School of American Photography exhibition in London and Paris more than a century ago. Thomas Langryl Harris, on the other hand, was primarily a painter of miniature portraits and had a questionable reputation. He led a short, tragic life and today is totally unknown in the art world. This article explores the relationship between F. Holland Day and Thomas Langryl Harris, the creation of a nude study of the young man by Day and its subsequent erroneous identification as a ‘study for the crucifixion’.     

‘Mechanism’ Made Visible: Process and Perception in Henry Peach Robinson’s Composite Photographs

This article analyses Henry Peach Robinson’s method of making composite photographs in the context of widespread belief that the photographer’s ‘mechanism’ was perceptible in the appearance of his prints. By examining Robinson’s preparatory and darkroom procedures, as well as the photographer’s extensive writing about his photographic practice, I suggest that composite photographs invited viewers to pay attention to process, and to take it into account in their evaluation of an image. This attitude challenged key tenets of academic art theory – the paradigm for nascent concepts of art in photography – by refusing to subordinate manual labour to that of the mind. While many nineteenth-century critics rejected Robinson’s approach, the debates engendered by composite techniques reveal a persistent fascination with making that advanced photographic practice as a marker of artistic value.     

From Studio to Street: The Urban Photography of Man Ray

Dada and Surrealist photographer Man Ray is rarely associated with street photography, a genre popular with artists and writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet his work demonstrates a closer connection to this area than has previously been acknowledged. From the early Dada constructions to the later photographic depictions of Paris and New York, the city played a crucial role in Man Ray's artistic output. This essay explores Man Ray's urban photography not as an uncharacteristic shift of concerns, as some critics have argued, but rather as an extension of the aesthetic approach taken in his more famous studio-based works. It explores the influence of Eugène Atget, whom Man Ray claimed to have ‘discovered’, and argues that the latter draws on the older photographer's compositional structures, pushing them into more abstract, formalist territory.     

SURELY FADES AWAY

Photography has always had a precarious relation to cultural value: as Walter Benjamin put it, those who argued for photography as an art were bringing it to a tribunal it was in the process of overthrowing. This article examines the case of Polaroid, a company and technology that, after Kodak and prior to digital, contributed most to the mass‐amateurization of photography, and therefore, one might expect, to its cultural devaluation. It considers the specific properties of the technology, the often skeptical reception Polaroid cameras and film received from the professional photographic press, and Polaroid's own strategies of self‐presentation, and finds that in each case a contradictory picture emerges. Like fast food, the Polaroid image is defined by its speed of appearance – the proximity of its production and consumption – and is accordingly devalued; and yet at the same time it produces a single, unique print. The professional photographic press, self‐appointed arbiters of photographic value, were often rapturous about the technical breakthroughs achieved by Polaroid, but dismissive of the potential non‐amateur applications and anxious about the implications for the ‘expert’ photographer of a camera that replaced the expert's functions. For obvious marketing reasons, Polaroid itself was always keen to emphasize what the experts scorned in its products (simplicity of operation), and yet, equally, consistently positioned itself at the “luxury” end of the camera market and carried out an ambitious cultural program that emphasized the “aesthetic” potential of Polaroid photography. The article concludes that this highly ambivalent status of Polaroid technology in relation to cultural value means that it shares basic features with kitsch, a fact that has been exploited by, among others, William Wegman Wegman, William. 1982. Man's Best Friend, New York: Harry N. Abrams.  [Google Scholar], and has been amplified by the current decline and imminent disappearance of Polaroid photography.     

‘The art of correctly painting the expressive lines of the human face’: Duchenne de Boulogne's Photographs of Human Expression and the École des Beaux-Arts

Abstract

Admired in their day as living anatomy, the strange, powerful photographs of human expression produced by or under the direction of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–75) functioned in two fields, medicine and fine art.¹ I would argue that these photographs' credibility in both fields derived from shared practices of ‘drawing from life’, practices laden with expectations of naturalism and legibility, as was photography in general at this time. While it was quite common during the nineteenth century that images made to serve the purposes of one of these fields were studied or circulated in the other, rarely were photographs given both scientific and artistic aims or, even less so, qualities, as Duchenne claimed for his work. Recent scholarship on Duchenne's work has tended to critique its perceived objectivity and scientific meaning by following Michel FoucauIt and unpacking the enlightened bourgeois modes of controlling, investing and understanding representations of the human body.² The exhibition catalogues published in 1999 by the Ecole nationale des beaux-arts and by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art discuss important aspects of the aesthetic context of Duchenne's photographs. However, neither one asked how and why his work was rejected by the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1863, only to become part of the fine art curriculum of the École des Beaux-Arts a decade later. To address those unstudied questions, I will examine relevant aspects of the photographs' creation, forms and functions, and their receptions by the scientific and art communities.     

The late work of Charles Marville

Abstract

Compared with other photographers of his generation, the career of Charles Marville was remarkably long. His first calotypes date from no later than 1851, and some may have been produced earlier than that. Although biographical details about his life are sketchy at best, it is likely that Marvillc continued to work in the medium of wet-plate collodion almost until his death, which is believed to have occurred in 1879.1 The year of Marvillc's death has never been determined precisely. It generally has been assumed that the sale of his studio and equipment, which took place in 1879, followed shortly after his demise. Henri Lc Sccq, who was two years younger than Marvillc, produced no new work after the mid-1850s. Gustave Lc Gray, Charles Ncgre and Edouard Baldus, all of whom were four years his junior, ceased active photography in the 1860s. Of the first generation of French photographers working in the calotype or daguerreotype processes, only Hippolyte Bayard, who was 14 years older than Marville, had a longer active career. Marville produced a large body of calotypes, many of which were published by Blanquart-Evrard, that first revealed what became a lifelong passion for architectural photography.² However, it was only after Marville took up the wet plate in the 1850s that he settled into a full-time career as an architectural photographer.     

Life painting and light painting: Photography and the early Russian avant-garde

Abstract

‘At worst a colour photograph, at best a graveyard on the edge of town’.1 Kazimir Malevich, ‘Posledniaia glava ncokonchennoi avtobiografii’, in Vasilii Rakitin and Andrei Sarab'anov, eds., N. I. Khardzhiev. Stat'i ob avangarde, Moscow: RA 1997, vol. I, 130. Malevich may well have made this remark after looking through the journal Solntse Rossii (Petrograd), No. 293 (September 1915), which ran an obituary and extensive photographic tribute to Konstantin Makovskii. That is how Kazimir Malevich once described nineteenth-century Realism and the stylization of the fin de siecte that had preceded his establishment of Suprematism in 1915. He emphasized further that for him there was no cardinal difference between ‘naturalism’ (his generic denotation of all pre-Suprematist painting) and ‘photography’. Yet only a decade later Aleksandr Rodchenko was exhorting the new society to dismiss painting and to ‘photograph and be photographed’,² replacing his paintbrush with a handcamera — and zhivopis' with svetopis'— to produce some of the most remarkable photographs of the twentieth century.3 ‘hivopis’ (‘life painting’), while an early, indigenous word for ‘photography’ was ‘svetopis’ (‘light painting’); soon, however, replaced by fotografia.