P14. The Perfect Marriage of Art and Science

Transcription

1 P14. The Perfect Marriage of Art and Science Photography at a Time of Transition WC 3613 By the end of the 19 th Century the foment over art vs science in photography was not limited to Great Britain but was finding expression in other parts of the world, especially in the United States. It is also obvious that the nature of the debate was constantly changing, one of the reasons for which was the rapid evolution of cameras and darkroom technology. The advent of the Box Brownie and other cameras which made photography available to all was also central to the arguments for photography being a form of artistic expression and not simply the successful conduct of a number of technological processes. Photographers, especially those who were either professional or who had established amateur reputations for themselves, wanted to guard against being relegated to the ranks of "snap shooters". Former Air Force pilot, American photographer Wilson Hurst 1 sums up what we would most probably consider the relationship between the art and science in photography. Hurst says simply that Few endeavors offer so perfect a marriage of art and science, providing outlets for a wide range of interests but, looking back, he also reflects that Around the time of the First World War, an aesthetic transition occurred in the art community that drastically altered the concepts of personal expression and the conventions of representation. " The real no longer resided in the external world of nature, institutions, and religion, but was now based on each individuals [sic] unique capacities for experience and perceptions " (J. Green). The impetus of this revolution in America came primarily from the activities of Alfred Stieglitz and his Photo Secession organization. Through various vehicles of expression they staunchly probed for the deeper meaning of art and introduced the modernist movement. 2 Very few people have influenced the way we conceive Photography as much as did Alfred Stieglitz, best known for his association of the Photo-Secession, the 291 Gallery and the magazine, Camera Work

2 Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1864, the son of German immigrants, and died in New York city in As a young man he went to Germany to complete his studies in mechanical engineering. At the Berlin Polytechnic he studied under and eventually became the assistant to the great photographic chemist, Dr. HW Vogel. He never did finish his engineering studies because, in 1883 when he was 19 years old, he bought a camera he happened to see in a shop window and what started as a passion became, as he said, an obsession. While in Europe, Stieglitz travelled widely, photographing mostly landscapes and the beauties of rural peasant life, as in the Black Forest Peasant Girl of This is a platinum print which fully exploits the very wide range of very beautiful tones of which platinum was capable. Alfred Stieglitz: Black Forest Peasant Girl ; Platinum print 23 x 17 cm Vogel had developed the first orthochromatic emulsion that is, one which was more or less equally sensitive to all wavelengths of light 4 and Stieglitz was one of the first photographers to use and exploit the features of this new emulsion. From about 1892, Stieglitz had become so well-known as an amateur photographer both in Europe and America that he was invited to join The Linked Ring. This early work of the young Stieglitz placed him among the Pictorialists, the movement which in High Victorian times led the push to establish photography as a fine art. Given its initial impetus by the introduction of the dry plate process, Pictorialism reached its peak more or less in Edwardian times but began its decline and was superseded by Modernism from around the beginning of the Great War Later, panchromatic emulsions which were more evenly responsive the the spectrum of light replaced it. 2

3 Poster for the American Photo-Secession After Stieglitz returned to the United States, he continued to show his work in the London exhibitions. However, in what was to prove a momentous step, with the enthusiastic support of several noted American photographers, including Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Gertrude Kasebier, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, in 1902 he founded what they called the Photo-Secession. They took this name from the Secession, a group of artists who had broken away from the academic establishment of the Vienna Künstlerhaus in1897. Their first President of the Secession was Gustav Klimt who designed the poster (below), for their first exhibition. Although there was a great diversity of styles within this new movement, the Secessionists later became better known under the generic name of Art Nouveau. Poster designed by Gustav Klimt for the first exhibition of the Secession. 3

4 The first exhibition of selected prints only by the Photo-Secession was announced in Britain in Amateur Photography on April 10, 1902 in the following words: Amongst the more advanced pictorial workers in America a definite movement has now taken place; comparable in some respects with the Linked Ring movement in this country. As might have been expected, the members of the Photo-Secession employed the many special printing techniques, especially gum bichromate already outlined, in their search for personal expression. But they were not without their critics, and not only from the backward looking establishment: for example, unlike its British cousin, the American Amateur Photographer 5 took the view that "We expect an etching to look like an etching, and a lithograph to look like a lithograph, why should not then a photographic print look like a photographic print?" In November 1905, the Photo-Secession opened a gallery, known originally as The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, it later became better-known simply as 291 after its address in Fifth Avenue, New York. However, it was probably through the publication, Camera Work, a luxuriously printed journal the Photo- Secession had its greatest impact, not only in America but world-wide, during the ten years of its publication. Alfred Stieglitz eventually turned away from the rather romantic Pictorialist style of photography he had so enthusiastically embraced as a young man and became almost brutally realist in his pursuit of "real life". A turning point seems to have been immortalised in his photograph, The Steerage, taken when returning from Europe in 1907 and glancing down from an upper deck, he saw the less fortunate steerage passengers disembarking: Alfred Stieglitz: The Steerage, 1907 "There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage... I longed to 5 American Amateur Photographer, 1904, quoted in Leggat, R: Photo-Secession Movement 4

5 escape from my surroundings and join them... A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right... round shapes of iron machinery... I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that, the feeling I had about life..." Stieglitz married the American artist, Georgia O'Keefe in 1924 and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1946, not only promoting her work, but photographing her. She appears to have been his favourite model, although not all are as bleak as the one shown here which is a far call from the romantic view of the Black Forest Peasant Girl. (left) Stieglitz: Georgia O'Keefe, (right) Stieglitz: Georgia O'Keefe, 1921 The close-up taken in 1921 at least in my view begins to foreshadow the nudes and close-ups of fruit so typical of Edward Weston ( ) of the next generation of American photographers, the generation who created the kind of photography we have known in our own life-time. On the Doorstep of The Great War Several things happened of historical importance in photography in the decade immediately preceding World War I. In 1906 panchromatic black and white film became available. This was the kind of film we know today which is responsive much more evenly to all wavelengths of light. It had a further advantage: it made it possible for high quality separation negatives to be made so that in 1907, the Lumiere Brothers in France were able to introduce Autochrome plates. In the same year 1906 the magnate JP Morgan commissioned Edward Curtis to document in photographs the traditional culture of the North American Indian which was demonstrably disappearing. 5

6 Setting the stage for many of the revolutionary ideas and philosophies in America was the resignation from The Linked Ring of leading photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White following the amendment to the rules to limit foreign entries in the 1909 Salon, thus freeing American photography to go its own way rather than tying itself to European trends and fashions. In 1909 the US National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to photograph children working in mills. In 1914, the German microscope manufacturer Leitz hired Oscar Barnack who developed the sprocketed 35mm film which, after the War, would lead to the introduction of the Leica 35mm camera. William Hogarth: Gin Lane, The work of Edward Curtis in documenting the disappearing Amerindian culture and that of Lewis Hine photographing child labour were major advances in a tradition of using photography as a means to promote social reform. Perhaps in the tradition of "One picture is worth a thousand words", back in 1751 William Hogarth had held a mirror up to a gincrazed London with his engraving Gin Lane. In the same tradition, the coalmerchant turned daguerreotypist, Richard Beard took photographs of London street scenes although unfortunately, these have not survived hoping to arouse the public conscience. In Scotland, the Glasgow City Council commissioned Thomas Annan in 1867 to photograph slum areas in the old part of the city facing urban renewal. Thomas Annan: Lane off High Street, Glasgow

7 In New York, too, photography was used to document poverty and hardship by the journalist Jacob Riis. Riis was a journalist, himself an immigrant (he came from Denmark) who shocked his middle-class readers from about 1880 to 1910 with what he called his tour of the darker half of New York City, those slums swelled by the influx of immigrants, not only from the Old World, but from other parts of America following the end of the Civil War. Jacob Riis: Bandit's Roost, c Lewis Wickes Hine who, as mentioned earlier, was hired by the US National Child Labor Committee to photograph children working in mills, had begun his career photographing immigrants at Ellis Island. In his time, he tackled several major issues of conscience in the United States, his last great series of photographs documenting the workers constructing the Empire State Building in the 1930s. Lewis Hine: Midnight at the Brooklyn Bridge 1906, from the series"child Labor (Newsies)" 9 Hine is sometimes criticised because his work is not always consistent from an ideological point of view, but not only did his opinions on social issues change over his lifetime, so did public opinion. We will return to Hine when we look more closely at Photographs of Conscience but for the moment it is important to use Hine to make an important point: photography too had changed if we compare Hine's photo, Midnight at the Brooklyn Bridge with his post-war 1920 work, Mechanic at a Steam Pump, we can see just how far photography had come from the efforts by the Pictorialists to make it more like "art" and had indeed become an art in its own right. Much of this shift can be attributed to two great men, Edward Steichen and Edward Weston. 8 Fullbright American Studies Institute, University of Illinois Chicago:

8 Lewis Hine: Mechanic at Steam Pump, 1920 Steichen and Weston, Giants Setting the Stage Edward Jean Steichen was the elder of these two giants of American photography in the first half of the 20 th Century. He was born in Luxembourge in 1879, but his parents moved to the United states in In 1900 Steichen became a naturalised American, by which time he was a well-established painter with a growing reputation as a photographer even though he had only taken up this new art form in His interest in photography was kindled when he was 16 years old and given a Bull's Eye camera. This was a box camera, later copied by Eastman Kodak in 1895 as their Bullet camera, which was introduced by Samuel Turner and the Boston Camera Manufacturing Company in (left) Bull's Eye Camera, (below) Edward Steichen: Self Portrait with Brush and Palette 1901 Gum-bichromate print. 11 A protégé of Alfred Steiglitz, Steichen joined with him and others in the 1902 Photo-Secession and in 1905, together they founded The Little Gallieries of the Photo-Secession in the two upstairs rooms which Steiglitz had previously made his home at 291 Fifth Avenue. This later became better known as the 291 Gallery and served to promote not only photographic but other artists of

9 the avant-guard including Matisse, Rodin, Rousseau, Cezanne and even Picasso. At this stage of his career, Steichen was clearly aligned with the Pictorialists and was a master of many of the methods they used to emulate painting and other "fine arts". This is well demonstrated in his gum-bichromate photograph The Pond - Moonlight, photographed in up-state New York in This is not a colour photograph the Autochrome process only became available in 1907 but the impression of colour was created by putting down successive layers of gum with coloured pigment in it. In 2006, one of the three known copies in existence 12 was sold at auction for US$2.9 million, the highest price ever paid for a photograph. Edward Steichen: The Pond-Moonlight, gum bichromate with coloured layers, There are several photographs by Steichen which are much better known than The Pond - Moonlight. One of these would have to be his 1938 portrait of actress Greta Garbo which was printed on the cover of Life magazine in (left) Edward Steichen: Greta Garbo (photo 1938), Life Magazine 10 January (below) Edward Steichen: The Flatiron Building, 1905 There is clearly a change of artistic between the very pictorialist heart Flatiron 12 The other two are in museums. 9

10 Building of 1905 and the Greta Garbo portrait of The shift from the rather fuzzy, dark approach of his Pictorialist phase is even more evident in the sharp, clean lines of the 1915 photograph The Lotus, and in those of The Maypole produced in 1932 even though in the last case, Steichen obviously used the "combination printing" or more probably, multiple exposure techniques of earlier times. Edward Steichen: Lotus, Edward Steichen: The Maypole, 1932 In 1922, Steichen burned all his canvasses and worked from then onwards only as a photographer, including for the giant publishing house, Condé Nast, principally as a fashion photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. But it was not only through his photographs that Steichen changed the face of American photography. He was also one of the most significant administrators and curators of photographic institutions of his era. So, during World War I, he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces and in World War II, served as the Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. He won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1945 for a war documentary called The Fighting Lady. From 1947, after the War, Steichen was the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. "Pilots pleased over their victory during the Marshall Islands attack, grin across the tail of an F6F Hellcat on board the USS LEXINGTON, after shooting down 17 out of 20 Japanese planes heading for Tarawa." Comdr. Edward Steichen, November No matter what his many other achievements, Steichen will probably be remembered best for his 1955 mammoth exhibition, The Family of Man which he curated 13 Photo and Caption: U.S. National Archives 10

11 for the Museum of Modern Art. It consisted in over 500 photos by many different photographers showing life, death and love in 68 countries. It toured the world (I saw it in Sydney) and, on Steichen's death, was bequeathed to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the country of his birth, where it is now permanently housed in Clervaux. Eugene Harris: The Flute Player - from the cover of The Family of Man. 14 Edward Henry Weston was born in Illinois in 1886 but spent most of his life in California. As a youth of 16 he was given he was given a Bull's Eye camera by his father with which he photographed parks in Chicago and rural scenes on his aunt's farm. In 1906 one of his photographs was published in Camera and Darkroom, a success which inspired him to move to California. After a couple of years working as an itinerant photographer, taking photos of children, pets and funerals 15, in 1908 he returned to Chicago where he completed a course at the Illinois College of Photography before once more, returning to California. In 1911 he opened his own studio in Tropico. This would be his base of operation for the next two decades. Weston became successful working in soft-focus, pictorial style; winning many salons and professional awards. Weston gained an international reputation for his high key portraits and modern dance studies. Articles about his work were published in magazines such as American Photography, Photo Era and Photo Miniature..Weston began keeping journals in 1915 that came to be known as his "Daybooks." They would chronicle his life and photographic development into the 1930 s This and the longer quotation quotation were taken from the Edward Weston Biography on the web page run by his surviving family: 11

12 Then in 1922, Weston renounced his former Pictorialism style, having come to believe as he later wrote The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh." The reference to steel was not just a literary one but reflected the change of style which followed his visit to the ARMCO Steel Plant in Ohio. This new style emphasised abstract form and demanded sharper resolution of detail in his photographs. (above)portrait of Edward Weston by Tina Modotti, 1923; (above) Portrait of Tina Modotti by Edward Weston (left)imogen Cunningham: Edward Weston, at Point Lobos, 1945 That same year 1922 Weston also visited New York city where he finally met Alfred Steiglitz and Georgia O'Keefe, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler, others on much the same stylistic journey as himself. In 1923 Weston took his mistress Tina Modotti to Mexico where they set up a studio together. It was here that some of Weston's most important portraits and nudes were taken. Then in 1926, he moved back to California where, between 1927 and 1930, he took what are perhaps the most famous of his photographs, the monumental series of close-ups of sea shells, peppers and 12

13 cabbages. According to his son, Cole Weston 16, it was in 1929 that Weston move again, this time to Carmel, still in California, where he took others of his famous photographs, the rocks and trees of Point Lobos. The series of nudes and sand dunes taken at Oceano began in 1936, the same year Weston received a Guggenheim Fellowship for experimental photography. Edward Weston: Dunes, Oceano, 1936 Edward Weston: Nude, (above) Edward Weston: Cabbage, 1931 He spent the next two years taking photographs in the West and South-West, photographs which were later used to illustrate an edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. (left) Four of Weston's most famous photographs: Shell, 1927; Nude, 1936 (print by Brett Weston 1951); Juniper (Lake Tenaya), 1937 (printed by Cole Weston); and Pepper, 1930 (also Cole Weston print) The onset of Parkinson's Disease in 1946 brought an end to Weston's active career as a photographer but with the help of his sons, Brett and Cole, much of his huge output was printed under his direction Photo from 13

14 before his death in Since his sons' deaths, many of Weston's photographs have continued to be printed and sold by others of his family. These days, an original Edward Weston print will fetch between US$5,000 and $500,000. Foundation of Group f/64 In 1932, Weston along with Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Brett Weston founded a group named in honour of the aperture they most commonly used to achieve the great depth of field (albeit with long exposures and stationary subjects) their style of photography demanded. Their Manifesto said, in part,.. The Group will show no work at any time that does not conform to its standards of pure photography. Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts. The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself. Ansel Adams: Winter Yosemite Valley, Members of Group f/64 shared an interest in using view cameras and large plate negatives which were then printed, not in an enlarger, but as contact prints. This meant it was essential that the picture be framed on the ground glass screen of the camera and not in the darkroom., a process Weston called "pre-visualisation", the term the younger Ansel Adams would later adopt in his Zone System. In a sense as Lisa 14

15 Hostetler 18 in her exposition in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's on-line Time Line contends this process.. transformed the role of the artist from printmaker to selector: it was the photographer's choice of form and his or her framing of it that made the picture. She later refined this by saying that it was the emotional experience of form which, for members of Group f/64, was the primary feature of their photographic art