Photography in Australia: A select bibliography

Abstract

Olana, the extraordinary private home of American painter Frederic Church, perches high above the Hudson River, with commanding views of the Catskill Mountains and the verdant countryside, approximately 120 miles north of New York City (figure 1). Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), the internationally recognized painter of exotic locales and the North American landscape, lived much of his adult life at Olana, and it was here he retreated when arthritis curtailed his passion for world travel. Designed by architect Calvert Vaux in a Persian style, but in large measure created by Church, the house is architecturally eclectic, an exuberant physical manifestation of the artist's interests, beliefS and travels. Olana is also home to Church's personal collections offine art, books and photographs. Church assembled at Olana an art collection of fifty pieces (including old master paintings, art by his friends and contemporaries, as well as work of his own), a library of 1900 volumes (mainly travel, geography, science and religion), and a collection of approximately 5700 photographs. Although not a photographer himself, Church was an active collector of photographs throughout his life. This photograph collection, wellpreserved but only recently catalogued, and exhibited for the first time at the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, is of compelling interest to historians of art and photography alike.     

Alfred Stieglitz and New Yark Dada

Abstract

In February of 1921 the photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz mounted the fIrst public exhibition of his work since the closing of his pioneering art gallery, ‘291’, nearly four years earlier.1 An exhibition of 146 of Stieglitz's photographs was held at the Anderson Galleries in New York during February of 1921. This show was instrumental in helping Stieglitz ultimately to reassert his prominence in the New York art world and re-establish his status as an important American artist. Curiously, however, the manner in which Stieglitz and his associates chose to promote the photographer was somewhat unusual. They repeatedly described the camera as an extension of Stieglitz's own body, and his photographs as an extension of his spirit. As a result, they claimed that Stieglitz had achieved a profound physical and spiritual union both with his machinery and with the subjects he photographed.     

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.     

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).     

Gentile's Lost Square Deal Box

Abstract

Charles Gentile (1835–1893), one of the most adventurous and interesting of the nineteenth century British Columbia photographers, began his photographic career in October 1863, a year after his arrival in Victoria from San Francisco. Most of his work was breaking new ground because he was often the first photographer to visit remote parts of the twin colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. In 1864 he even created a small gold rush upon discovering traces of the metal while washing his supplies in a stream.     

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.     

John Bishop Hall

Abstract

Excitement, elation, and scepticism travelled throughout the photographic industry when first reports of a new colour and stereoscopic relief process were published on 1 August 1856.¹ The process was patented by John Bishop Hall in New York, on 27 May 1856 and 20 January 1857. Hall's location at 585 Broadway, New York City was known as the ‘Temple of Art’, occupied by the well known photographer Charles Deforest Fredricks. The photographic journals conceived the name hallotype, a derivative of the ambrotype process on glass. The ambrotype was patented July 1854 by James Ambrose Cutting. Legal action relating to Cutting's several patents on the ambrotype began in the early 1860s. In 1868, Cutting's ambrotype patent extension was denied by the patent office. Jerimiah Gurney, a leading photographer at 349 Broadway, New York City, co-signed Hall's patent. On 13 November 1853 Gurney was awarded first prize in a photographic contest sponsored by Edward Anthony. He was awarded a silver pitcher for his tinted whole plate daguerreotype of a mother and her child. Several medals were awarded to Gurney in 1857, at the annual exhibition of the American Institute.² Gurney objected to the ambrotype process, claiming that it was not permanent. He preferred the hallotype claiming that it could be ‘colored by transparent painting put on from behind; — and the ambrotype is taken on one piece of glass and covered by another, the atmosphere being excluded by a balsamic cement, which secure the faces to each other’.³ A business venture employing the name Hall & Gurney was established at 349 Broadway, known as the ‘Palace of Art’, to exploit the hallotype process.⁴     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of 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.     

Between the wars

Abstract

During the 1930s the Julien Levy Gallery was the liveliest photographic centre in New York City. It opened in 1931, and it was Levy's plan to show photographs along with paintings and drawings and other works of art. It was at his Madison Avenue gallery that New Yorkers first saw the photographs of Atget that Berenice Abbott acquired shortly after the photographer's death, together with Julien Levy, who advanced the purchase funds. It was also there that Walker Evans had his first one-man show, and where Henri Cartier-Bresson was introduced to the American public. Through his series of exhibitions the New York public came to know the work of the avant garde in photography. Indeed, without Julien's pioneering work, the exhibition which the present reviewer organized for The Museum of Modern Art in 1937 would have been the poorer. Julien Levy has never received the recognition he deserves. Now, upon the occasion of receiving the Julien Levy Collection, partly as a gift, partly on extended loan, the Art Institute of Chicago has remedied the situation by publishing this modest but well illustrated and meticulously documented catalogue. Produced by David Travis, the museum's Associate Curator of Photography, it is, without question, the most important scholarly publication on the history of art photography between World Wars I and II. Not only does the book recreate the excitement of the discovery by Julien and his friends that photography was indeed a part of 'modern art', but it contains a wealth of information. Moreover, of the 58 photographs that are reproduced, three-quarters have not been previously published. They were made by 32 photographers. It is well to name them, for 15 have been almost entirely forgotten today. They were: Berenice Abbott, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo, Eugene Atget, Use Bing, Brassai:, Anton Bruehl, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Walter Hege, Gertrude Kasebier, Andre Kertesz, Clarence John Laughlin, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Eli Lotar, George platt Lynes, Lee Miller, Lucia Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Nadar, Oscar Nerlinger, Paul Outerbridge Jr, Roger Parry, Man Ray, Sherril V. Schell, Charles Sheeler, Emmanuel Sougez, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Maurice Tabard, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Clarence H. White.     

The lantern slide and art history

Abstract

About 150 years ago, the first art history courses appeared in America and attracted the attention of inquisitive young students. It all began at Princeton in 1831-32, when the study of Roman antiquities was introduced and lectures on historical architecture were given. Soon such institutions as New York University, Yale, the University of Vermont, and the University of Michigan began giving courses; by the time of the Civil War six colleges had instituted such offerings with varying degrees of success.     

Bonfils & Son,Egypt, Greece and the Levant; 1867–1894

Abstract

Félix Bonfils was born in Saint Hippolyte du Fort, France, on 6th March 1831. Little is known of his early life. Family sources indicate he began his professional career by operating his own printing press¹. On becoming interested in photography, he produced photographs using the heliogravure process invented by Niépce. In due course, he adopted the collodion wet-plate process, with all its well-known complications and encumbrances. For the landscape photographer lie was to become, the task of moving his equipment from place to place must have been formidable, especially in countries where roads and transport were meagre.     

Book Review

Abstract

Chemically induced birth defects, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded James L. Schardcin Marcel Dekker.

Industrial Aspects of Pharmaceutics by Erik Sandel.

Pharmaceutical Paniculate Carriers: Therapeutic Applications Edited by Alain Rolland 1993 Published by Marcel Dekker, Inc.

270 Madison Avenue New York, NY.     

American influence in Cuba, 1855

Abstract

Charles DeForest Fredricks (1823–94), one of the first successful commercial photographic entrepreneurs of the nineteenth century, and, according to M. A. Root, the man who introduced the carte-de-visite to the United States, began his career in Latin America.¹ In 1843 he travelled up and down the Orinoco and Amazon rivers selling daguerreotypes; in all, he spent nine years in Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay and Argentina. At one point he accepted horses in exchange for portraits; the governor of Argentina's Corrientes province in Rosas' Argentina purportedly traded a live tiger for a studio sitting.²     

Lovell Reeve

Abstract

A poet, painter, critic and political organizer, Kenneth Rexroth (1905–82) is best known for having spearheaded the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance if the 1950s, and for his association with the Beat poets. See, for instance, An Autobiographical Novel, Garden City: Doubleday 1963; and selected Poems, New York: New Directions 1984.     

Os 30 Valérios

Abstract

Valério Vieira (1862–1941) was born in Angra dos Reis in Rio de Janeiro. As a young man he went to the capital where he enrolled in the Escola de Belas Artes (School of Fine Arts) without his parents' approval. It appears that he began his photographic activities in the 1880s in several cities of the Vale do Paraíba and in Ouro Preto, an old town in the State of Minas Gerais. Around 1888, he married Carmen Augusta Villas-Boas Teixeira, and in 1892 he came to São Paulo, where he installed his studio at No. 19, Rua da Imperatriz, now the XV de Novembro street.     

Reviews

Abstract

This 1967 New York University doctoral thesis is a highly competent study of the interaction between American landscape painting and the nascent practice of photography between 1839, when the daguerreotype was introduced, and 1880, when the first successful half-tone appeared in the New York Graphic, a portent of competitive undoing for the graphic artist and his role in pictorial reproduction. Early in the period, the influence of the daguerreotype was strongly apparent in portraiture. Photography's main impact on landscape painting awaited later procedural innovations: the wet-collodion process (1851), with negatives that permitted multiple prints; the stereograph (1854), that soared into popularity after the Civil War; the dry-plate process (1871), that obviated the need for the portable darkroom. And it was after mid-century that a fully collaborative relationship between landscapist and photographer was stimulated by two developments: exploration and study of the American West by government- directed surveys, and the burgeoning of a popular illustrated press.     

Lloyd Mifflin of the Susquehanna

Abstract

Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921), known as the ‘Painter and Poet of the Susquehanna’¹, was also a photographer. After his death, the paintings, drawings, etchings, and writings of his estate were placed in the collections of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and the William Penn Memorial Museum. To the high school in his hometown of Columbia, Pennsylvania, he gave part of his library, copies of his published books, and a bronze self-portrait. Altogether, 200 sets of his writings were bequeathed to as many American universities and colleges². His private papers are in the library of Franklin and Marshall College, and two diaries are preserved in the holdings of the Lancaster Historical Society. In contrast, his glass negatives were discarded. One may assume that Mifflin himself had valued them no more highly than did his executors, for the glass plates were found in a junkyard about eight years ago, packed without envelopes or protective paper, in flimsy hosiery boxes.     

Ernst Gundlach

Abstract

The eminent microscope and photographic-lens maker, Ernst W. Gundlach, was born in Pyritz, Prussia¹ in 1834, and at the age of 15 was apprenticed to one of the leading mechanical workshops in Berlin, that of C. Lewert, to learn the trade of instrument maker. Four years later², in 1853, at the end of his apprenticeship, he worked in various workshops in Vienna, Paris, London, and York, always trying to find out how to make lenses, but always frustrated by the jealousy of opticians who wished to keep their secrets to themselves.     

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: