A talk with Paul Starnd; France,Summer 1974

Abstract

Ideas often come from unexpected directions. While I was talking to Paul Strand, I noted him watching his wife Hazel arrange a bouquet of flowers in their home near Orgeval outside Paris. He said to me in mid conversation that he had just arrived at a solution to a problem he had been thinking about for the past few years. He went on to say that beginning over 10 years ago he had made a series of informal portraits of men and women important in French cultural life. How to use these photographs in a meaningful way was a problem, for already there were available a number of picture books of famous personages. Publishers had told him that they felt new photographs of the cultural tlite of France would duplicate much that had already been done. He had also found that publishers who were interested in his pictures wanted to have a say in the selection of people to be included in a book of this kind. Strand indicated he did not want to relinquish control to this degree. The rcsult was that the portraits had been put away for future consideration.     

Ermakov album

Abstract

When I first met Henry Ries in his home in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, I was struck by his generosity in telling me about his career. Born in 1917 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in an assimilated Jewish family, Henry (born Heinz) Ries left for New York on 13 January 1938. Initially, he found employment in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he taught photography at the Jewish community centre and could use their laboratory for his own work. He tried to enlist in the United States Army in December 1941, but this was not possible, since he was an 'enemy alien' and a recent emigrant without American citizenship. In May 1943, he joined the Army Air Corps and received American citizenship. Initially posted to the Pacific theatre, making aerial photographs of China for the 20th Bomber Command, he subsequently transferred to the European theatre, arriving in London in late May 1945. Assigned to the ‘Office Director of Intelligence’, his first job was to evaluate Heinrich Himmler's ‘secret state library’ correspondence with the SS, Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, and others, which was later utilized in the Nuremberg Medical Trial. Three months later, Ries was transferred to Berlin.     

Forum Romanum/Campo Vaccino

Abstract

In a famous passage in his Memoirs, Edward Gibbon describes his first experience of the Roman Forum, in the autumn of 1764: ‘After a sleepless night I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation’.¹ Shordy thereafter, while musing over the ruins, Gibbon decided to undertake the project that was to become his life's work, the monumental Decline and Fall if the Roman Empire, which he completed in 1788. Almost exacdy a century after Gibbon's revelatory stay in Rome, the American writer William Dean Howells paid his first visit to the Forum, in 1866. He was appalled by the conditions he found: ‘In hollows below the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze’.²     

Florent Scoumanne (1884-1981): An unknown,unpretentious, inventive camera constructor

Abstract

Florent Scoumanne, son of a Belgian lawyer, was born in Brussels on 28 September 1884. Always a brilliant student, he finished his schooling at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles where, in 1907, he graduated with a degree in mining engineering, with great distinction. He then studied for one more year at the Montefiore Institute in Liège in order to perfect his knowledge of electricity.     

Russell Sedgfield,the complete photographer

Abstract

On 30th October 1833 Russell Sedgfield, at the age of seven and while on a visit to London, wrote a letter to Master Edward Sedgfield, his younger brother by one year: ‘Dear Edward, I have seen the Monument, River, Ships, and a Steam Boat, and the ships are not as big as our house, and I went out walking and saw St Pauls ...’ The handwriting is firm and decisive. He concluded: ‘Give my love to Papa and Mama, Grandfather, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Charlotte, Henry and Sisters, and I remain, Your Affectionate Brother, Russell.’ A year or two later he wrote a pertinent little poem, The Family Meeting, in which he characterized his ten uncles and aunts. Good observation and the ability to grasp the essentials and weigh things up seem to have been distinctive traits of Sedgfield from an early age.     

Photographs in the Janos Scholz Collection

Abstract

Janos Scholz (1903–1993), who was to become one of the great cellists of the twentieth century, began collecting when he was a child in Sopron, Hungary. After completing his studies at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music, Scholz was named first cellist with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra. In 1932 he joined the Roth Quartet, and the following year he left Hungary to tour with the quartet in the United States. He became an American citizen in 1933 and made his home in New York until his death in 1993. Scholz began to collect prints and drawings in 1935 and over the next three decades he amassed an unrivalled collection ofItalian drawings. In keeping with the nature of his life as a musician, in which he shared his music through public recitals, Scholz announced in 1973 that he had decided to give his drawings to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Soon afterwards he began a new collection, one that focused upon nineteenth-century European photographs on paper.     

Alvin Langdon Coburn

Abstract

One of the most intriguing aspects of Alvin Langdon Coburn's life began when he stopped making photographs. At thirty-six years of age, Coburn had a well established photographic career. He had photographed some of the most important people of his day and was admired and befriended by many of them. A member of the Photo-Secession and the Linked Ring, Coburn was involved in the promotion of photography as an art form. He made Vortographs in 1917 and therefore he is also credited by many as the first purely abstract photographer. Yet, in 1918, Coburn stopped photographing professionally. In his autobiography he said:     

Henry van der Weyde (1839–1924)

Abstract

My great-great-grandfather Henry van der Weyde (figure 1) was a fascinating individual with a variety of talents. He was an artist, society photographer and inventor. He can be regarded as one of the fathers of electric-light photography because, in 1877, he was the first person to use a dynamo to produce electric-arc light to illuminate his studio. This was a revolution in the evolution of photography. He also invented and developed photographic techniques in lenses, lighting, printing and vignetting. He filed 81 patent applications, which were not all in the field of photography.     

The Album of Camille Silvy

Abstract

Camille Silvy (1834-1910), an elusive figure in the history of photography, was very successful in the brief 11 years that he produced photographs. He has been primarily known for his beautifully toned cartes-de-visite, in addition to larger images, most prominently River Scene, France. Recently, much attention has been given to this Silvy masterpiece, which has been the subject of a book and an exhibition.¹ The book, intensively researched by Mark Haworth-Booth, sheds considerable light on Silvy's life and career. One of the items that Haworth-Booth uncovered was an album or scrapbook that belonged to Silvy and now belongs to Silvy's descendants in Paris. This album served as a scrapbook or memory book and provides clues and insights into Silvy's life. It reflects his inspirations and early training, his interests, his professional accomplishments, events in his life, and his lifelong interest in documentation.     

Dorothy Norman: Love and Muse

Abstract

Stieglitz once said he made love through his camera. He felt it in his beginning years with O'Keeffe. He expressed it with Norman. Lovers from 1929 until he died in 1946, Stieglitz and Norman often spoke to each other in metaphors, moving into each other's mind, heart and troubles. They wrote to each other daily, often two or three times a day; and each summer, separated from the other, wrote detailed, often long, usually involved letters, as if, like lovers everywhere, they will yet get to the root of their uncontrollable passion.     

The Poet's Pose

Abstract

In July of 1868, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was on his fourth and final tour of Europe. He had become a literary lion in the grand tradition of the 19th century and enjoyed the kind of reverential celebrity that is now nearly out of style. It was obligatory that he visit with Dickens and Tennyson, and he duly did so. On the 17th or 18th of July 1868, during one of his several visits to Tennyson's house at Farringford on the Isle of Wight, he was taken by Tennyson to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron. Tennyson, along with others among his contemporaries, was aware that the strange woman who took such pains with her photographs and who tyrannized her sitters might be something of a genius. Longfellow was probably just mystified. In a famous quotation, Tennyson abandoned Longfellow to her tender mercies: ‘I will leave you now, Longfellow. You will have to do whatever she tells you. I will come back soon and see what is left of you’¹. Of what was left we cannot be sure, but the photograph that was taken was of an angry old man, with a head resembling the crest of a stormy wave; emotional, strong, raw, and indisputably great. A later critic speculated on a century that could allow men to grow into that special mould of greatness so evident in their very look, and we may also speculate on how they found the photographers who could mirror them so well.     

H. S. Ede visits Stieglitz

Abstract

‘I called on a dealer of pictures, a person really alive to the meaning of art; too much an artist to become rich, more ready to help others than to help himself I took him a paying-in slip on a foreign post office given to me in London by a German artist who had fallen on lean days. Give this to S—if you see him, he had said with a strange laugh. My dealer said I could have brought no better card of introduction, for our mutual friend was a real artist though most people in an official world would think him mad. “There is always something bitter in his messages, but I will try to send him a litde”, he said. I was sorry to have to leave but glad at least to have made this contact with so genuine a man.’     

Lyndall F. Urwick (1891–1983): British Management Authority and His Engineering Management Connection

ABSTRACT

This paper briefly outlines the life and contributions of one of the world's most remarkable figures in management of the twentieth century: the British management authority, Lyndall F. Urwick.

Urwick was influenced considerably by two engineers, American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and French mining engineer Henri Fayol. He was the first British director of the International Management Institute in Geneva. Later he was to set up one of the largest management consulting firms in Britain: Urwick, Orr and Partners. His early ideas on management were influenced by engineers including V. A. Graicunas. As a management consultant, he became associated with American industrial engineers such as H. B. Maynard and Lillian Gilbreth. Urwick was a prolific writer on management, with more than 200 books and papers to his credit. He became a widely known international management authority. The international recognition of Elton Mayo was due partly to Urwick.

Urwick's early acknowledgment of the considerable debt that the field of management owed to engineers received little recognition. He was early concerned about the importance of management training of young engineers but later stressed the difference but close connection between management and engineering. Urwick was an integrator of management concepts. His contribution and his relationship to engineering management are outlined.     

Egypt on Glass

Abstract

In 1883 Willard D. Chamberlain, at the age of 35, became Vice-President of the Beaver Soap Company of Dayton, Ohio^1,2, a fact which has not hitherto featured prominently in treatises on the history of photography. There is at least an indirect connection, nevertheless; Willard Chamberlain was very much a man of his time^3,4, and photography was an important element in his later life. In any event, it is not surprising that a man of his social position and affluence would eventually make the ‘Grand Tour’. Indeed, he did this twice, visiting the Middle East in 1893 and 1898⁵. Besides taking his own photographs, he purchased whatever lantern slides were commercially available. We do not know how he first became interested in photography (he left no diaries or notes), but we do know that he was serious enough about it to have a darkroom in his home⁶. Alas, his work was of indifferent quality, as exemplified by most of the 34 glass lantern-slides which he made and which are now in the Archives and Special Collections of the Wright State University Library⁷. However, the 49 slides by Bonfils and nine by Lekegian, which he purchased and brought back with him, attest to his connoisseurship in the matter.     

Power,autonomy and Weston's imagery

Abstract

Edward Weston (1886–1958) was a photographer, not a philosopher. But Weston had his metaphysical moments, engaging in some heady speculation about the world he photographed. He believed that reality had two distinct dimensions to it, one that was merely physical and perceived by the senses, and a higher, transcendental one that the mind alone understood. This was hardly an original position, and Weston drew heavily from philosophers who had preceded him, notably those 19th-century New England visionaries who came to be known as the Transcendentalists. He kept a collection of short, pithy sayings culled from those on whom he relied, and the words of Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson occupied a prominent place in the ‘grab bag’ of quotations that Weston copied on to Triscut box tops and other odd scraps of paper.     

The photographic experiments of Henry Brougham

Abstract

Of all the British claimants to the invention of photography, Henry Brougham is the one whose experiments have been given least attention in existing histories of photography. In his posthumously published three-volume autobiography of 1871, The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, written by himself, Brougham claimed to have engaged in some ‘experiments upon light and colours’ during the years 1794-–5 (when he was 16 years of age). He had, he tells us, included a discussion of his experiments in a paper offered to the Royal Society in 1795. Most of this paper, his first in the field of natural philosophy, was published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions (No. 86) of 1796 under the title ‘Experiments and observations on the inflection, reflection, and colours of light’. The paper, as published, was an attempt to discover analogous relationships between the bending of light within bodies (refraction or, using the 18th-century term, ‘refrangibility’) and the bending of light outside of bodies (reflection and diffraction or, in Brougham's terminology, flexion). As he wrote in the opening lines of his paper:

It has always appeared wonderful to me, since nature seems to delight in those close analogies which enable her to preserve simplicity and even uniformity in variety, that there should be no dispositions in the parts of light, with respect to inflection and reflection, analogous or similar to their different refrangibility. In order to ascertain the existence of such properties, I began a course of experiments and observations, a short account of which forms the substance of this paper.¹     

Edward Steichen

Abstract

‘The camera’, Steichen wrote in 1947, ‘serves as an instrument for waging war and as an historian in recording the war’.¹ He spoke from experience. By this time, as a veteran of both world wars, he was reflecting upon a long life devoted to photography as art, as an advertising medium, as social commentary, and as war documentation. Although Steichen often used his camera as a very effective propaganda device in wartime, his hatred of war motivated him to use the same instrument to persuade people that war would never provide a lasting solution to human problems.²     

Benjamin Franklin Pease

Abstract

Benjamin Franklin Pcasc (1822–88) was not the only North American to practise photography in Peru but he was the first to establish a permanent residence, and his biography incorporates many elements conlmon to that generation of expatriate who made the portrait studio an international institution. He alone, among the many daguerreotypists who were active in Lima, survived the transition from daguerrean rooms to large corporate salons which distinguished the rise of thc cartede- visite. The importance of his production to the history of photography in Peru is verified by contemporary accounts and by thc numerous daguerreotypes and paper prints which survive from his studio.     

Photographic Miscarriage

Abstract

Henrique Fleiuss (born 1823 in Cologne, died 1882 in Rio de Janeiro) studied literature in Cologne and natural sciences as well as music in Munich. He went to Brazil in 1858 at the suggestion of von Martius, the famous botanist. There, in 1859, he founded the ‘Instituto Artistico’ in partnership with his brother Carlos Fleiuss and the artist Carlos Linde.     

Oliver Wendell Holmes as an amateur photographer

Abstract

On 6th July 1862, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a letter to Coleman Sellers, thanking him for some photographs received and excusing his own negligence in writing. His eldest son, missing in action in Richmond, commanded all his attention, but then Holmes added: ‘If it were not for this war, I should begin getting photographic apparatus tomorrow. If peace ever returns I feel sure I shall try my hand at the art and then I shall be only too happy to send you some of my handiwork in return for the many favors I have received from you’¹. The letter catches Holmes at an interesting point in his life. Always intrigued by photography and well known among his friends as a popularizer of it, he was finally thinking of turning theory into practice.