Self Portrait, 1896

Biography and Photographs from The Cultural Landscape Foundation (Published in honor of Sam Watters' book, Gardens for a Beautiful America 1895 - 1935:  Photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnson)
Clio Visualizing History Biography and Photographs
Frances Benjamin Johnson Facts and Photographs from Your Dictionary
Luminous-Lint Portfolio
The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnson by Maria Elizabeth Ausherman

 

  

Alice Roosevelt Wedding Portrait, 1906

Rose Putzel, 1910

Ethel Reed:  American Graphic Artist, 1896

Susan B. Anthony, ca. 1890

Helen Hay Whitney:  American Poet, Writer, Racehorse Owner, Socialite, and Philanthropist

Eadweard Muybridge:  Photographer, ca. 1890

Charles Follen McKim:  Architect, ca. 1890

Benjamin Harrison:  23rd President of the United States and Family

Theodore Roosevelt's Children at Roll Call Inspection at White House, Archie at Left and Quentin at Right, ca. 1901

The Last Photograph Ever Taken of President McKinley Before He Was Fatally Wounded, Buffalo, N.Y., September 6, 1901

Mammouth Cave, Kentucky, 1891

A Crack with the Blacksmith, ca. 1900

George Washington Carver and Coworkers, Tuskegee Institute, 1902

Laboratory Class, Tuskegee Institute, 1902

Mechanical Drawing Class, Hampton Institute, 1899

Girls Art Class, Eastern High School, Washington, D.C., 1899

Native American Children Going to School, 1899

Schoolgirls Doing Calisthenics, 1899

Two Girls from a Washington, D.C. School Visit to the Library of Congress, 1899

Isadora Duncan's Dance Students

 Biography from Wikipedia:

The only surviving child of wealthy and well connected parents, she was born in Grafton, West Virginia, raised in Washington, D.C., and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Washington Students League following her graduation from Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in 1883 (now known as Notre Dame of Maryland University). An independent and strong-willed young woman, she wrote articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography after she was given her first camera by George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras. She received training in photography and dark-room techniques from Thomas Smillie, the first photographer at the United States Museum, today The Smithsonian.

 She took portraits of friends, family and local figures before working as a freelance photographer and touring Europe in the 1890s, using her connection to Smillie to visit prominent photographers and gather items for the museum's collections. She gained further practical experience in her craft by working for the newly formed Eastman Kodak company in Washington, D.C., forwarding film for development and advising customers when cameras needed repairs. In 1894 she opened her own photographic studio in Washington, D.C., on V Street between 13th and 14th Streets, and at the time was the only woman photographer in the city. She took portraits of many famous contemporaries including Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington. Well connected among elite society, she was commissioned by magazines to do "celebrity" portraits, such as Alice Roosvelt's wedding portrait, and was dubbed the "Photographer to the American court." She photographed Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing with their pet pony at the White House and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villa near Paris.

Her mother, Frances Antoinette Johnston, had been a congressional journalist and dramatic critic for the Baltimore Sun and her daughter built on her familiarity with the Washington political scene by becoming official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations.

Johnston also photographed the famous American heiress and literary salon socialite Natalie Barney in Paris but perhaps her most famous work is her self-portrait of the liberated "New Woman", petticoats showing and beer stein in hand (see above). Johnston was a constant advocate for the role of women in the burgeoning art of photography. The Ladies' Home Journal published Johnston's article "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera" in 1897 and she co-curated (with Zaida Ben-Yusuf) an exhibition of photographs by twenty-eight women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which afterwards travelled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, DC. She traveled widely in her thirties, taking a wide range of documentary and artistic photographs of coal miners, iron workers, women in New England's mills and sailors being tattooed on board ship as well as her society commissions. While in England she photographed the stage actress Mary Anderson, who was a friend of her mother.

In 1899, she gained further notability when she was commissioned by Hollis Burke Frissell to photograph the buildings and students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in order to show its success. This series, documenting the ordinary life of the school, remains as some of her most telling work. It was displayed at the Exposé nègre of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.

 She photographed events such as world's fairs and peace-treaty signings and took the last portrait of President William McKinley, at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 just before his assassination. With her partner, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a successful freelance home and garden photographer in her own right, she opened a studio in New York in 1913 and moved in with her mother and aunt. She lectured at New York University on business for women and they produced a series of studies of New York architecture through the 1920s. In early 1920 her mother passed away in New York.

In the 1920s she became increasingly interested in photographing architecture, motivated by a desire to document buildings and gardens which were falling into disrepair or about to be redeveloped and lost. Her photographs remain an important resource for modern architects, historians and conservationists. She exhibited a series of 247 photographs of Fredericksburg, Virginia, from the decaying mansions of the rich to the shacks of the poor, in 1928. The exhibition was entitled Pictorial Survey--Old Fredericksburg, Virginia--Old Falmouth and Nearby Places and described as "A Series of Photographic Studies of the Architecture of the Region Dating by Tradition from Colonial Times to Circa 1830" as "An Historical Record and to Preserve Something of the Atmosphere of An Old Virginia Town."

Publicity from the display prompted the University of Virginia to hire her to document its buildings and the state of North Carolina to record its architectural history. Louisiana hired Johnston to document its huge inventory of rapidly deteriorating plantations and she was given a grant in 1933 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to document Virginia's early architecture. This led to a series of grants and photographs of eight other southern states, all of which were given to the Library of Congress for public use. Johnston was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects for her work in preserving old and endangered buildings and her collections have been purchased by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although her relentless traveling was curtailed by petrol rationing in the Second World War the tireless Johnston continued to photograph. Johnston acquired a home in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1940, retiring there in 1945, where she died in 1952 at the age of eighty-eight.

"Self Portrait", 2009

Brian H. Peterson:  Word + Image
"A Collector's Eye"
The Blossoming of World:  Essays and Images by Brian H. Peterson
"The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds"
"Connecting With the Light:  The Photography of Brian Peterson 
"Form Radiating Life"
"Masterpieces of Photography from the Merrill Lynch Collection (James A. Michener Art Museum)
Santa Bannon Fine Art Gallery
"The Smile at the Heart of Things" 
Water Elemental Crafts & Fine Art

 

From "Trees, Stones, Water and Light" Series

From "Trees, Stones, Water and Light" Series

"Vatican", 1979

From "Forrest Light" Series

From "Forrest Light" Series

From "Interior Light"Series

From "Portraits, Helen"

From "Rock Forms" Series

From "Earth Forms" Series

From "Life Forms" Series

From "Sea of Light" Series

"I Sing the Body" Series:

"My camera has usually been pointed outward, at trees, water, rocks—blades of grass—fire—people I care about—and light. Always, light. In the fall of 2006 I began to feel the urge to look in the other direction, toward myself. At the time I thought it was because I was in my fifties, and aging was no longer a far-off possibility; it was something I’d begun to live with every day. I needed to turn my gaze inward, to explore my complex relationship with my body—what it looks like and how I feel about it. . . .


My own explorations of self took an unexpected turn when, in the spring of 2007, I learned that some of those signs of aging I’d been experiencing were something else: the early symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Suddenly my body no longer seemed steady and dependable, and I had to come to terms with an uncertain and terrifying future, as well as be open to the strange gifts and revelations that come with this disease. It was natural to try to express some of those feelings in my pictures as well. Oddly enough, the images made before and after the diagnosis were not that different. This made me wonder about my decision to focus on my body at a time when the disease was just beginning to show itself, but I was not, on the surface at least, aware of it. Maybe I sensed that something was wrong. I guess I’ll never know."





Special thanks to Brian H. Peterson for allowing me to reproduce his photographs, here, on my blog.  Without his kind cooperation and generosity this blog entry would not have been possible.  No further use of these photographs is allowed without his permission.


Biography from Santa Bannon Fine Art Gallery:

Brian H. Peterson has more than 35 years experience as a curator, critic, artist, and arts administrator in the Philadelphia area. As a practicing artist, Peterson has had more than 30 solo exhibitions of his photographs since 1980 at galleries and museums throughout the country. His work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Library of Congress, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Berman Museum of Art, the Dayton Art Institute, the State Museum of Pennsylvania, the Danforth Museum of Art, the Michener Art Museum, and the Free Library of Philadelphia. His exhibition at the Berman Museum of Art, Only Connect: A Conversation about Image and Word (January 21—March 9, 2014), draws on both his forty-year career as a photographer and excerpts from his two published memoirs.

Peterson was the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the Michener Art Museum (1990-2013), where he both managed the exhibition program and curated numerous historic and contemporary exhibitions with a wide range of subject matter and genres. He was the editor and principal author of the major 2002 publication Pennsylvania Impressionism (copublished by the Michener and the University of Pennsylvania Press), and also organized the retrospective exhibitions The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer (2004) and Form Radiating Life: The Paintings of Charles Rosen (2006), both accompanied by monographs copublished by the Michener and Penn Press. His recent exhibitions include The Painterly Voice: Bucks County’s Fertile Ground (2011-12) and Making Magic: Beauty in Word and image (2012). His memoir The Smile at the Heart of Things: Essays and Life Stories (2010), was copublished by the Michener and Tell Me Press, New Haven, Connecticut, and reviewed in USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Trenton Times, and numerous other publications and blogs; his most recent book, The Blossoming of the World: Essays and Images, (2011), also was published by Tell Me Press.

Peterson was a member of the Museums Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts in 2003, and has served on the Visual Arts Advisory Panel of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He served as a board member of the Curators Committee of the American Alliance of Museums, and co-authored A Code of Ethics for Curators (2009) for that organization, and in 2002 founded and organized an ongoing national competition promoting excellence in exhibition writing. He received two Fellowships for Visual Arts Criticism from the PA Council on the Arts, and his critical writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Arts Quarterly, The Photo Review, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He was the Founder and Project Director of the Photography Sesquicentennial Project, the Philadelphia-area’s major cooperative celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of photography funded principally by The Pew Charitable Trusts (1988-1990). He taught photography for more than twelve years, at the University of Delaware, the Tyler School of Art, and Swarthmore College, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Delaware (1985), and a Bachelor of Arts (in music composition) from the University of Pennsylvania (1981).

Carl Moon

"Navajo Boy", 1907

"Navajo Maid"

"Haz-Pah, Navajo Maid"

"The Wolf (Ma-Itso)", 1904

"Chick-A-Ponaqie Havasupa (Billy Burro)"

"Vicente, Chief of Navajos", 1905



"Corn Song", 1907



"Sandomingo Peddler", c. 1906

"Peace Pipe"

"Little Maid of the Desert", 1904

"Loti, Laguna Pueblo"

"Chief Gray Hawk, Taos", c. 1910

Biograpy from "Best of the West 2012:  Carl Moon, Photographer with a Native Heart" by Dana Joseph for "Cowboys & Indians, the Premier Magazine of the West":


The face of the handsome youth in the famous Navajo Boy (see "Navajo Boy" photograph above) image is familiar. The photographer who immortalized him in Western culture is not.

Born in 1879 in Wilmington, Ohio, Carl (originally Karl) Everton Moon loved reading stories about Native Americans as a boy. He followed his Western aspirations to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he set up a studio in 1904 and began photographing, painting, and traveling among Pueblo tribe members he befriended.

“Photographing the American Indian in his natural state was the principal aim of Carl Moon,” wrote Tom Driebe, author of In Search of the Wild Indian: Photographs & Life Works by Carl and Grace Moon. “He tried to show the Indian as he lived before civilization hampered his freedom ... and changed his picturesque customs and mode of dress.” Moon knew he was working against the clock of forced acculturation. “About the only thing we have thus far overlooked taking from the Indian,” he wrote, “is his right to perform his religious rites with their accompanying dances in his own way.”

In 1907 Moon moved to Arizona and for seven years gathered paintings and photographs for the Fred Harvey Company at the Grand Canyon; there, he also served as the official photographer for the Santa Fe Railroad and studied painting with visiting artists, including Thomas Moran, Louis Akin, and Frank Sauerwein. Moon married artist Grace Purdie in 1911, and the two traveled the Southwest documenting Native culture. In 1914, the couple settled in Pasadena, California, and embarked on a series of 22 illustrated children’s books about American Indians.

In 1923, Moon approached railroad magnate and art collector Henry E. Huntington with the proposition of selling 300 photographic prints and 24 oil paintings, “an addition that Moon felt would ‘give the student of the future the true coloring of the Indian and his surroundings,’ ” says Jennifer A. Watts, curator of photographs at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Moon died in 1948 in San Francisco; his art lives on at The Huntington, where the collection is being arranged, described, and digitized. “The Moon photographs are not only an important visual resource for scholars and students of tribal peoples at the turn of the 20th century,” Watts says, “but sensitive, beautifully rendered portraits that reveal the artist’s deep admiration for the peoples he photographed.”

George Burke and Lou Warneke

Pat Malone, Hack Wilson, Dan Taylor, "Gabby" Hartnett,, ca. 1930

Lou Gehrig, ca 1930

Ray Pepper, ca. 1932

Lefty Gomez

"Honus" Wagner, 1940

Bill Dickey, 1939

Jimmy Fox

Joe Dimagio, 1936

Babe Ruth, 1935

George Burke Biography from Cycleback.com -- The Center for Artifact Studies:

The Chicago photographer was active from the turn of the 20th century through the 1940s. He shot many of the images used to make the 1933-19355 Goudey baseball cards and was an official photographer for the Chicago Cubs, White Sox and NFL’s Bears. Most of his single player photographs on the market were made in the 1930s and have the distinct Goudey-style posed images. His photographs from this era are easy to authenticate. The backs will have his name and 807 Belmont Ave/Chicago address stamped in ink. The backs usually have typed information at the top, typically the player’s name and a cataloging number. They usually measure about 8" x 10” or postcard size and often have silvering. A few of these circa 1930s photos are reprints of earlier images, often made from his own turn of the century negatives or those of others photographers like Charles Conlon. These reprints are often of good quality and, as made in the 1930s, can fetch good prices if depicting someone like Ty Cobb or Walter Johnson.

Burke’s photographs are relatively plentiful and inexpensive compared to those of Charles Conlon. His photographs are of consistently high quality, with sharp focus and lush sepia-tinged tones. Burke is a case where even the collector with an average budget can buy a quality original photograph by a great photographer.

For years after his Burke’s death, his longtime business partner George Brace reprinted Burke photographs. These reprints usually have Brace’s stamp. The reprinted images are typically light in tone, on bright white paper and without the typically lush, sepia tinged tones of Burke’s originals. As Brace himself was a prominent baseball photographer and owned the exclusive rights to Burke’s negatives, these reprints are collectable, just not worth the same as Burke’s originals.

Original 8” x 10” photos shot by George Brace are also on the market, usually of 1950s - 60s baseball players and with his stamp on back. His originals are relatively plentiful but collectable.

Louise Rosskam and her husband, Edwin, by Charles E. Rokin, late 1945 or early 1946

"General Store, Lincoln, VT", 1940

"Sunbathing on the Commons, Vergennes, VT", 1940

"Canning Beans in Farm Kitchen near Briston, VT", 1940

"Step Children, Washington, D.C.", 1942 (early Kodachrome)

"Air Raid Warden" (early Kodachrome)

"Children's Army, Washington, D.C.", 1942 (early Kodachrome)

"On the Home Front"

"Children in Doorway at the Barney Neighborhood Settlement"

From Rosskam's book "Picturing Puerto Rico under the American Flag"



From Rosskam's book "Picturing Puerto Rico under the American Flag"

From Rosskam's book "Picturing Puerto Rico under the American Flag"

Biography from The Library of Congress Women Photojournalists Project:

Louise Rosskam (1910-2003) is one of the elusive pioneers of what has been called the golden age of documentary photography. Louise's story provides rare insight into the delicate balance women of her generation had to maintain between the domestic roles for which they were trained and the working world in which they labored. She produced meaningful images but opted to define her professional life largely in terms of her husband, Edwin (1903-1985). Working with him for nearly four decades, Louise photographed for newspapers, magazines, government agencies, corporations, political parties and service projects.

The Library of Congress has more than 150 photographs by Louise Rosskam in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, in sets of photographs sponsored by the Standard Oil Company, and in a small group of images acquired from the photographer herself in 1999. See the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=louise+rosskam&sp=1&st=gallery


Early Life:

Leah Louise Rosenbaum was born in 1910 to a prosperous, assimilated Hungarian Jewish family in Philadelphia, but she herself never participated in organized religion. She worked her way through the University of Pennsylvania after her family lost its money during the Great Depression. She majored in science, one of the few courses then open to women. She encountered difficulty obtaining work as a microbiologist because of her gender and her religious background. A self-described rebel, Louise joined leftist circles in Greenwich Village and the burgeoning practice of socially concerned photography to which Edwin Rosskam introduced her. Louise adopted the documentary impulse of the era but recognized its limitations to bring about social change.

The Rosskams married in 1936 and began their life in photography in the rotogravure section of the Philadelphia Record. The newspaper would hire only Edwin so he listed Louise's wages as "gas and oil" in his expense account. Restless after a year, in November 1937 the Rosskams tried an assignment for the one-year old Life magazine. They went to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico to cover the trial of a Puerto Rican nationalist who had led an independence movement that erupted into The Ponce Massacre. Their story was dropped but on their short visit, they committed themselves to return to address humanitarian situations they observed there.

In 1938 the Rosskams began creating documentary picture books, a popular New Deal phenomenon, which coincided with the shift from modernist art photography to socially concerned photography. The Rosskams produced San Francisco: West Coast Metropolis (1939). Although Edwin acknowledged Louise for doing "all of the dirty work," only his name appears on the title pages of that and their next book. For Washington Nerve Center (1939), they relied heavily on images from the Farm Security Administration (FSA). During their research, they came to know Roy Stryker, director of the project.


New Deal Work:

In 1939 when Stryker asked Edwin to reorganize the FSA file, the Rosskams welcomed the steady income. Hearing Stryker brief his staff photographers enabled Louise to see the "unseeable" and to confront harsh realities in her own backyard near N Street S.W. in Washington, D.C. For instance, her photographs of a mock wedding sponsored by a settlement house document that only white children could participate in the cultural events designed to teach etiquette and proper behavior to the lower classes and recent immigrants.

Edwin's job security allowed Louise to freelance. She made custom photo books about the children of wealthy families and portraits of business and government leaders, some of which appeared in The New York Times. Her portrayal of notable figures for the "Interesting People" section of American Magazine stands out. She recalled, "I developed a technique of using three flash bulbs for a portrait, which froze the faces. They were horrible. But [the magazine editors] loved them."

Seeking to balance her uniquely urban experience, Rosskam ventured to New England in July 1940 to record Vermont's towns and countryside. Stryker commandeered these and subsequent photos for the FSA file. Photos of her Washington neighborhood (in color, using film provided to FSA/OWI photographers by Kodak) include Shulman's corner store, one of the few places where races could mix.

Rosskam deepened her racial education by participating in creating Richard Wright's and Edwin Rosskam's 1941 photo book Twelve Million Black Voices, a history of black experience in the United States. Louise helped search the FSA file for relevant photographs, and, like Edwin, defied the racial prejudices of the day by working with a black professional man in the segregated southern city Washington, D.C.

After the United States entered World War II in December 1942, Louise and Edwin prepared a Victory Garden series in May 1943, showing Americans growing their own vegetables because farmers had gone off to war.


Corporate Work:

In autumn 1943, the Rosskams joined Stryker at Standard Oil Company of New Jersey to tell the human story of oil in America. They felt uncomfortable working for a corporation but the opportunity to travel, the freedom on their assignments, and the generous salaries they earned seduced them. An added incentive was that Louise was on the payroll with the status of photographer, equal to her husband.

The Rosskams' most memorable experience on the Standard Oil project was documenting life on towboats and barges along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. They produced Towboat River (1948), an ambitious photo book that was greeted with rave reviews.


Picturing Puerto Rico:
Even before Towboat River was published, the couple departed for Puerto Rico where Edwin headed a photographic survey of the island along the lines of the FSA study of the mainland and Louise worked as a photographer for the project. Although they signed their pictures "The Rosskams," Louise was aware of what each of them contributed. Her microbiology training reinforced her emphasis on the crucial small moments in life. She noted that Edwin had big cameras and big ideas. In a 1979 interview, Louise said her smaller Rolleiflex enabled her to make eye contact with her subjects because a photographer can hold that type of camera at waist-level.

For the Puerto Rico Office of Information, Louise photographed laborers on coffee plantations, on tobacco farms, and in sugar cane fields. She documented the political activities of Luis Muñoz Marín, whose progressive Popular Democratic Party platform for "land reform, literacy, and the amelioration of poverty" was one she and Edwin agreed with. They developed close professional bonds with Muñoz Marín. With enormous regret, they left Puerto Rico in 1953 because their ties with him as governor drew criticism from political opponents.


Photography and Education:

Like many women photographers, Louise specialized in photographs of children. To support her family in the 1950s and 1960s, Louise taught science at the local school and provided photographs for the catalog of a company that made creative toys from natural products.

In 1967-68 the Rosskams immersed themselves in the New Jersey Migrant Program. Their photographs for the Cranbury Migrant School focus on efforts to break the migrant cycle for the southern black and Puerto Rican children who attended the schools.


Last Images:

Louise Rosskam's projects ceased temporarily in the late 1970s when Edwin began his struggle with lung cancer. After his death in 1985, she felt drawn to nature studies: waterscapes, a lone bird, an abandoned farm house--images that helped her grieve.

Her last major project--photographs from 1986 to 1990 showing dilapidated barns on abandoned farms in central New Jersey--marked another turning point in her artistic development. She approached the pictures as metaphors for her own profound loss, as well passionate eulogies to open spaces, farming as a way of life, and fields converted to housing developments and shopping malls.

Even after she was housebound, she continued to tell her story through photographs. She produced a photographically illustrated cookbook for her children that showed which bowls and pots she used for each recipe so they could relive the family's nurturing experiences after her death.


Final Thoughts:

In her last years, Louise began to value the uniqueness of her life's work. She started writing to institutions like the Library of Congress to correct misattributions. She wished to be written into the history of women photojournalists--women who, despite their increased opportunities brought on by the New Deal and the War, had to break from society's deeply engrained gender biases in order to produce some of the most eloquent pictures of the classic documentary tradition. And, when acknowledgment for her work came, Louise still felt ambivalent about changing public perception of her husband's photographic prowess at the expense of her own ego.

"Jack Welpott at the Arles Railway Station, France", by Bill Jay, 1981

"Photography is a holding together of opposites: Light and dark, beautiful and ugly, sublime and banal, concious and unconcious. I am still struck by the power of photography to strip away the bark of the mind and reveal the visceral workings underneath."

"Portrait photography is an experience between two human beings, an experience shared with the viewer through the resulting photograph. If the moment was charged with feeling the image can be personal and revealing.":  Women&OtherVisions by Judy Dater, Jack Welpott , ISBN: 0871001020

"Part of the fascination that photography holds is its ability to unlock secrets kept even from ourselves. Like dreams, the photograph can uncork a heady bouquet of recognition which can escape into the cognitive world. Sometimes the aroma is sharp; sometimes dry. This "shock of recognition" can be, at times, unsettling – it can also be sublime. The expressive portrait can do these things.":  Women&OtherVisions by Judy Dater, Jack Welpott , ISBN: 0871001020

"...to make a photograph as honestly as one can generates an artifact that bears witness to one’s personal truth."








"Carnival Woman": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Imogene Cunningham": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Kathleen Kelly", 1972: Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Geneviev", 1961: Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"The Rag Picker", ca. 1950: Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Aaron Siskind", 1973: Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Theresa Chua": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Near Sacramento": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Convent Wall": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Lincoln Park, San Francisco": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"White Sands": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Voo Doo Doll": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Woman of the 50's": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Old Roses", 2002: Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

"Farmer Twins, Stineville, Indiana": Copyright, Jack Welpott Legacy Trust

Biography from Jack Welpott Photography by Darwin Marable*:

Internationally known photographer and educator, Jack Welpott was born in Kansas City, Kansas on April 27, 1923, but grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. After high school he enrolled in Indiana University, but was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943. He served in the South Pacific as a radio intercept operator until 1946. After WW II, he returned to Indiana University on the G.I. Bill where he earned an M.F.A degree studying with Henry Holmes Smith. Jack and Jerry Uelsmann were the first M.F.A. graduates while Van Deren Coke was also a graduate student. During these years, he became acquainted with Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White all of whom were established photographers and pioneers in American photographic education.

Jack was hired in 1959 by John Gutmann, to teach photography within the Art Department at San Francisco State College, now San Francisco State University. He taught there for the next thirty-three years. When he arrived in San Francisco the Beat Generation was winding down in North Beach, however, he took advantage of the local poetry, jazz, art and culture. He also played jazz piano, which became a lifelong avocation. Years later he said, “When I’m working behind a camera, I feel like I’m trying to achieve something like a jazz musician does.” He also soon became associated with the local photographic community which included Ansel Adams, Ruth Bernard, Oliver Gagliani and Dorothea Lange.

At that time there were almost no photography courses or graduate programs offered at the university level anywhere in the United States. Jack pioneered in creating both photography courses and a graduate program. He also taught one of the first history of photography courses at the college/university level. While providing a solid basis in photographic technique, Jack always encouraged an appreciation of the master photographers. Also, he integrated the ideas of Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, into the reading of photographs, especially dreams, symbolism and the unconscious mind. Jack’s educational goal was to determine the needs of the student, provide constructive criticism and help them develop their own vision. A number of his students have become major contributors to photography: Judy Dater, Leland Rice, John Spence Weir, Michael Bishop, Harvey Himelfarb, and Catherine Wagner among numerous others.

In 1968, with Jack’s support, a number of his students formed the Visual Dialogue Foundation to promote their photographs by producing a portfolio, creating exhibitions, and, in general, publicizing their photographs as fine art. The Museum and Fine Arts Galleries in American had not yet accepted photography as a fine art. Although mindful of Group f64, a number of the members continued to work in the tradition of Group f64, while others began to experiment with photography. VDF became the vortex of San Francisco’s photographic community and established a bridge with Robert Heinecken, another pioneer at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was pushing the parameters of traditional American photography.

In a time of increasing specialization in photography, Jack was unique in that his work was both diverse and unexpected. Formal problems were always of major concern to him. His nudes were erotic and sensual interpretations of the female figure and his best known work. They can also easily mislead the viewer, because he was also interested in integrating subject and technique. Sensitivity to light and composition, especially spatial relations, were always major concerns. His interest in 19th century French painting, especially Henri Matisse, affected his vision. He was also an outstanding portrait photographer and his fragmented landscapes are visual poems which parallel some of the best in landscape photography.

Jack also liked to create new challenges for himself. During 1980 and 1981, he began exploring San Francisco’s cityscape when he photographed the financial district resulting in some unique, and, at times, critical views of the world of business. Known for his black and white photographs, during the 1980′s he photographed in fragments and in color, but always with restraint. And in the 1990′s, Jack combined a photogram of a projected seed pod with pen and ink drawing and hand coloring. In graduate school he studied painting and photography and also taught drawing. With an interest in Abstract Expressionism, he wanted to create a photograph in that genre.

Regarding the creation of a photograph, Jack revealed a mystical side when he stated, “There is the physical sensation of light penetrating everything. The world becomes luminous. Sometimes, one can see a wider, more brilliant, more significant, more detailed world than is apparent to others.”

Jack was a member of the Friends of Photography, Carmel, California and served on the Board of Trustees from 1973-1976. He was also a member of the Society for Photographic Education. In 1973 he was a recipient of the Medal of Arles, France, and in 1979 received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris and the Australian National Gallery among others.



*Darwin Marable was graduated from the University of New Mexico with a Ph.D. in the history of photography. He lectures at the University of California Berkeley Extension and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. His writings have been published in Afterimage, Artweek, Black & White Magazine, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, History of Photography, Lenswork, Photo Metro and The World & I (Washington, D.C. Times).

William Carrick in his Studio

"The Beggar"

"Village Children"

"Horse and Carriage"

"Policeman"

"Chimney Sweep"

"Peasant Women"

"Potato Boy"

"Woodsman"

"Boatman, Volga River"

"Mother and Daughter"

"Peasant"

"Young Woman"

Biography from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia:

William Carrick (1827 - 1878) was a Scottish-Russian artist and photographer. The son of a timber merchant, Andrew Carrick (died 1860), and Jessie née Lauder, he was born in Edinburgh on December 23, 1827. Only a few weeks old, the Carrick family took William with them to the port of Kronstadt Gulf of Finland. Andrew had been trading with this port for some time, and the family would stay there for 16 years.

In 1844, the family moved to St Petersburg, where William became a student at the St Petersburg Academy of Arts, studying architecture under the renowned Alexander Brullov. By 1853, he had completed his studies there and moved to Rome to undertake further studies. Although his family's business collapsed during the Crimean War, in 1856, William Carrick returned to St Petersburg to become a photographer. However, in the summer of the following year he departed for Edinburgh to gain more experience of photography. There he met the photographic technician John MacGregor.

In October, he returned to Russia, taking MacGregor with him in the aim of establishing a business and career. He opened a studio (or atelier) at 19 Malaya Morskaya Street, St Petersburg, making MacGregor his assistant. Carrick quickly made a name for himself capturing pictures of Russian life and pioneering Russian ethnographic photography, obtaining the patronage of Grand Duke Konstantine Nicholaievich of Russia, who presented him with a diamond ring in 1862. In 1865, Count Mihaly Zichy hired Carrick to take pictures of his watercolors, in order to resell them as prints. Carrick did similar business with other artists, Ivan Kramskoi, Viktor Vasnetsov, and Nikolai Ge; after his death in 1879 many of these were published in his Album of Russian Artists.

Carrick and MacGregor made several rural expeditions, including in 1871 a month long trip to Simbirsk province. He amassed a large collection of photographs depicting the lives of Russian and Mordovian peasants. In 1872 his colleague MacGregor died, leaving Carrick in despair. Despite this, Carrick continued his work. In 1876, he became photographer of the Academy of Arts, obtaining a studio in the Academy for his photography. An exhibition of his works was held in the Russian capital in 1869, followed by exhibitions at London (1876) and Paris (1878), all to great acclaim.

Carrick died of pneumonia, at St Petersburg, on November 11, 1878. William Carrick was noted in Russia for his height, which was 6 foot and 4 inches. He had married once, to one Aleksandra Grigorievna Markelova (1832–1916), fathering by her two sons, Dmitry and Valery, whilst adopting her son Grigory from an earlier marriage. He trained Grigory as a photographer, while Valery went on to become a famous caricaturist. His wife Aleksandra, nicknamed Sashura, was a liberal and a nihilist, and for a time the only female journalist at the Peterburskie Vedomosti ("St Petersburg Times").

Photo Credit:  Arnée Carofano

"Two Arrows, Arizona", 2004

"Airstream, Mojave Desert, CA", 2003

"Graveyard, Trona, CA", 1994

"Cosmos Buds"

"Cosmos #1"

"Lotus, Santa Barbara", 2004

"Machado Lake #14"

"Fire & Tree, Santa Barbara, CA", 2010

"Cuyamaca Fire #1, San Diego County, CA" 2003

"Point Fermin, San Pedro, CA", 2010

"Opera House, Havana Cuba", 2002

"Oil Tank, Taft, CA", 1997

Feature by Nell Campbell from the Fall, 2004, issue of "Photographer's Forum":

On a warm Southern California winter day my friend, photographer, and fellow bookaholic, Tom Moore, and I drive south from Santa Barbara to visit and interview Ray Carofano. Ray and his wife, Arnee, live and work in a former Crocker Bank building on Seventh Street in San Pedro, California. San Pedro is a harbor and fishing town located south of LAX off the 405, as we say here in southern California. Probably one of the few if not the last California coastal town that hasn't been totally gentrified. Seventh Street is a somewhat funky and interesting street of art galleries and shops. A nostalgic reminder of the way Southern California coastal towns were thirty years ago before inflated real estate values forced out local businesses. The night deposit drop on the front of the building tells us that we are in the right place. We soon learn that Ray now uses the night deposit drop for film pickup and delivery. The photo lab driver has a key that allows him to retrieve and return the film. The former bank which the Carofanos purchased six years ago serves as their home, studio, darkroom, and as an art gallery, Studio 478. Ray and Arnee are very active in the San Pedro art community, particpating in First Thursday when the galleries have open houses in the evening. According to a recent newspaper article in Random Lengths by Taso Papadakis, Studio 478's opening night parties are legendary for their good exhibitions, live music, and warm atmosphere provided by the host and hostess, Ray and Arnee.

Ray and Arne have been together for about thirteen years. Arne is a painter, SX-70 photographer, former TWA flight attendant, and an active participant in their combined artistic lives. Arnee is responsible for the digital post-production on the commercial shoots. Ray is a commercial and fine art photographer who readily acknowledges Arne's contribution to the success of his career. Ray says that, Arnee is one of the best things that happened to me in my life. She supports my work and what I do. She takes care of all the paperwork in dealing with galleries, consignment forms, where prints are and where they are going. Which allows me time to be creative. There was a period of time in the eighties when I did very little personal work. I was shooting commercially everyday and there wasn't much time for personal projects. When I met Arnee, she was looking at my personal work and said what is this about? How come you are not doing this anymore? At that point, I asked myself that question and started to get back into shooting for myself.

Ray grew up, an only child, in Connecticut, north of Camden in Mount Carmel. As an only child Ray said, that he had periods of loneliness and that he would create diversions, building forts and tree houses, fishing, and exploring the woods. Woods where he once was lost and which he describes as mysterious. Carol McCusker in her text for Carofano's exhibit, terra phantasma, at the Museum of Photographic Arts quotes Carofano, Today, sometimes when I'm working in a wooded area, I relive that experience, and when looking through the viewfinder, I try to isolate things to get that feeling of a strange and mysterious landscape...which allows the viewer to sense what I feel.

Carofano is almost entirely a self-taught photographer. He attended Connecticut State and took one photography class at the Pierre School in New Haven, Connecticut. It was in the sixties when Carofano started getting serious about art. He was going in to New York City almost every weekend to visit the museums especially the Whitney and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1967 was a seminal year for Carofano. He was starting to photograph seriously and as many of his generation did he moved to California. Ray says that he had long hair (he now wears his gray hair in a short braid) but that he didn't dress like a hippie. He did photograph a love-in at Elysian Fields in Griffith Park. In 1968, he returned to Connecticut for a year before returning to California for good. Ray worked at the Riviera Camera store located on Pacific Coast Highway in Redondo Beach. At that time, manufacturers of camera equipment offered sales people deep discounts on their products as a sales incentive. Ray was able to purchase a Nikon at ten percent below dealer's cost. The store owner helped Ray by displaying his photographs in the store and by introducing him to the owner of an advertising agency which specialized in real estate. One of his first jobs was in Santa Barbara photographing an ocean front property slated for luxury condominiums. Ray's job was to photograph oceanscapes at the site. As Carofano's work increased for the advertising agency he reduced his hours at the camera store. Ray was working out of his house in Torrance. His next step was to convert the garage into a shooting area. When he out grew the garage, he rented an industrial space in Gardena for twenty years, until moving to San Pedro. Carofano's commercial speciality was product photography. He has shot everything from automobiles to computers. Through his early product photography for All-Trade, a manufacturer of hand-tools, he became known for tool photography and has shot for Makita. Carofano is still very much involved in commercial work. He says that, commercial work really pays the bills and allows him to pursue his personal work.Ó Ray says, I didn't even plan on becoming a commercial photographer. I had this fantasy that I could make a living back in the sixties selling my own personal prints. That fantasy came to a screeching halt with a pregnant wife. When Ray's first wife was pregnant, there were very few or maybe no photographers who were able to make a living selling prints of their personal work. In December of 1970, I saw Ansel Adams' Moonrise Over Hernandez for sale for one hundred and seventy-five dollars at the Focus Gallery in San Francisco. I think that even Ansel Adams, who was and probably still is the most widely known photographer in the United States, wasn't able to make a living from print sales until late in his career. Carofano's personal work does sell very well as evidenced by thirty print sales at his 2003 solo exhibit at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles. He is aslo represented by the Staton-Greenberg Gallery in Santa Barbara.

Around 1994, after thinking about Arnee's questions about his personal work, Ray made a conscious decision to devote more time to his personal work. When we visited Carofano in February, he was preparing for an exhibition, Ray Carofano/Ten Years, to be held at El Camino College Art Gallery in Torrance. The exhibit consisted of one hundred prints covering the time period 1994-2004. Carofano has a large body of work organized into seven (at this time) series. The titles of the series and the year that Carofano began some of them are, Abstracts (early 1990's), Landscapes (1994), High Tension (1994), Faces of San Pedro (1998), Cuba, Desert, and the Mojave Series (2003). All of Carofano's personal work is shot in black and white. He still primarily shoots film for his personal work but has digital equipment for commercial jobs. He makes his own prints in the darkroom but also prints some images digitally. For the El Camino exhibition, he made thirty-three 8x10 silver gelatin prints of the series, Faces of San Pedro. The black and white silver gelatin prints are split-toned with sepia and selenium. The 8x10's were then scanned and printed digitally as 22x28 inch prints on the Epson 9600 printer. These prints were exhibited in a large grid for the recent El Camino College show.

The Faces of San Pedro series has two distinctions from the other six series. This series is the only one with people as the subject and the only series that was shot in the studio. Carofano shot the portraits with a Mamiya RB67 and strobe lighting. Faces is a portrait series of local San Pedro residents whose faces reflect their hard lives. Carofano met and became friends with some of the subjects in a San Pedro bar that is a meeting place for the artistic community. In the Random Lengths article, Carofano is quoted as saying that, ' Most of the sessions were late at night sometimes two or three after the bars had closed. I think the fact that my subjects and I had a few drinks made for more casual shooting.

Bill Kouwenhoven, the editor of photo metro magazine, wrote about the Faces of San Pedro series in a brochure for Carofano's 2003 exhibition, Personal Alchemies, at the Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles. Kouwenhoven writes: "The Faces of Pedro is a huge investment in time and energy on the part of the photographer and his subjects. San Pedro was always a tough town, and the collapse of the fishing fleet and closing of the canneries have left a deep void on those living there that the expansion of the Port of Los Angeles has yet to fill. In a way, it seems a town that Steinbeck or Chandler would have written about: hard, proud, mule stubborn, and hard pressed by the outside world." As Carofano tells it..."The faces tell a story, a sort of history about San Pedro like nothing else I have photographed."...Carofano's portraits are haunted by the haggard visages and dark shadings that speak of those moving through long nights looking for something that was, and might never be again. They are portraits of characters, not caricatures. Carofano transcends the risk of letting the images fall into cliches, and that is very hard to do.

The High Tension series begun in 1994 which Carofano continues to work on when he finds a film worthy subject is one of my personal favorites. Using his selective vision and creative darkroom techniques Carofano makes luminous abstract images from a subject that one usually thinks of as a blight on the landscape. Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, has written about this series: Delicate yet strong with design dictated by function, these man-made structures become architectural abstractions of near beauty. On his website (www.carofano.com) Ray writes about his landscape work, "...seldom interested in the overall landscape. It's the bits and pieces that make up the landscape that is of interest to me."

Approximately four years ago, Carofano began experimenting with the plastic Holga camera. If you google the Holga camera on the web, you will get 33,100 results. Out of these thousands of possibilities, I was able to learn that the Holga is made in China and production began in 1982. One of the attributes of the Holga is that the lens is plastic which makes an image that is sharp in the center while the sharpness falls off on the corners. It is this quality that appeals to photographers interested in altering the reality of their images. The Holga is an unintentional successor to the Diana which was another Chinese -made plastic camera popular with artists in the 1970's. As a little sidenote, I googled the Diana camera and got 752,000 possibilities. The Holga costs approximately sixteen dollars and is available in camera stores and on the web. The Holga only has one shutter speed and that is 1/100 of a second. It has two aperture settings, f8 and f11. It uses 120 size film and can be formatted as a 6x6 centimeter or as a 6x4.5 centimeter image. Carofano owns six Holgas. Multiple Holgas allow him to use different films at the same time. Because of the single shutter speed Carofano will use a tripod in low-light situations and trip the shutter repeatedly, sometimes as many as sixteen times, in order to build up exposure. Neutral density filters are helpful to cut exposure when working in bright sunlight. Ray also owns a couple of Holgas that have been modified to allow the shutter to remain open, like a B setting, for time exposures.

Carofano's most recent work, The Mojave Series, was shot exclusively with the Holga. On a November 2003 trip to Montana, Ray took his new digital camera, a Mamiya 645, a Leica, and the six Holgas. He says, "...it was too confusing. When your eye sees something, you have to make this decision of which camera to use. On the last four trips to the Mojave, I only took the Holgas. Then, I started seeing that way. After the trip to Montana, I found myself in the computer room, spending hours and hours working on an image, trying to make an image from an eight thousand dollar camera look like an image from a sixteen dollar camera."

With the new Mojave Series, Carofano tones his prints with selenium for permanence. Then, he tints his prints with tea, a combination of Lipton Tea and Berg's Organic Yellow Dye. He experimented for over a year and a half to achieve the best results. In the beginning he ran into problems with staining and unevenness. He discovered that a metal tea pot was one of the problems and he switched to glass, which helped and then he started using distilled water. Tinting, as opposed to toning, affects the whole image not just the silver parts as in toning. Carofano is very open and generous with his technical knowledge. He has taught workshops about his techniques and feels that even using the same techniques photographers see differently and will not come up with identical images.

Carofano is a master printer and over many years of experimentation has developed many sophisticated burning, dodging, and flashing techniques which give his prints their luminous other worldly quality.

He works with two Beseler enlargers. He uses the second enlarger to burn the edges of the print with pieces of plexiglass. This diffusion and burning process gives him the bleeding black effect in his prints. At one time, Carofano was flashing his prints with a 2000 watt second power pack after the print was fully developed and fully stopped but before being moved to the fix. The strobe head was about three feet above the print. He would blast the print four times. This technique gave the print a kind of peach color. If one was to flash the print in the fix, it would become solarized. A four hundred dollar Metrolux II timer which Carofano uses to program nine time sequences allows him to keep track of his complicated print manipulations. My friend, Tom, found it ironic that Ray uses a four hundred dollar timer to make prints from a sixteen dollar camera. The Holga with its soft focus and light leaks has freed Carofano from some of his complicated darkroom manipulations.

We ended our visit to San Pedro with a late lunch with Ray, Arnee, and an artist friend of theirs, Ron Linden. Ron teaches at Long Beach City College and Los Angeles Harbor College. Ron is part of the Carofanos' circle of artist friends and had come to help Ray hang the upcoming show at Studio 478. We ate at UtroÕs, a restaurant overlooking the main channel of the Los Angeles Harbor. We could see the huge cranes that are used to load and unload container ships. Ron or Ray told us that a good crane operator could move one hundred containers in an hour. We talked about art, politics, life in San Pedro, and the possibility of returning for a First Thursday evening.

On the way home Tom and I stopped at Hennessey and Ingalls, an art and architecture bookstore in Santa Monica to satisfy our photography book yearnings. Tom bought a book of Harry Callahan photographs. I bought a book of photographs all taken in 1968 by Magnum photographers, 1968-Magnum Throughout The World, which seemed appropriate considering that both Carofano and I had photographed events of the sixties in our early days.

Irene Kung

"Guggenheim Museum", 2010

"House of Parliment", 2009

"Madona del Soccorso, Villa Jovis", 2012

"Tower Eiffel", 2010

"Edificio Barolo, Buenos Aires", 2008

"Flat Iron Building, New York City", 2008

"Willow Tree", 2012

"Airport Beijing", 2012

"Albero Neve", 2010

"Nuvole III", 2011

"Condor", 2006

"Mosque of Muhammad Ali, Ciro", 2010

Lady Clementina Hawarden

 

"Untitled", 1861

"Agnes and Lionel", ca. 1862

"Clementina Maude and Florence Elizabeth", ca. 1864

"At the Window", 1864

"Agnes Elphinstone", ca.1861

Biography from artdaily.com:

Born Clementina Elphinstone Fleeming in Dunbartonshire in 1822, she was the third of five children of a British father, Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming (1774-1840), and a Spanish mother, Catalina Paulina Alessandro (1800-1880). In 1845 she married Cornwallis Maude, an Officer in the Life Guards. In 1856 Maude's father, Viscount Hawarden, died and his title, and considerable wealth, passed to Cornwallis.

The surviving photographs suggest that Clementina, now Lady Hawarden, began to take photographs on the Hawarden's Irish estate at Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, from late 1857. Many of these were taken with a stereoscopic camera, and the present collection contains several Dundrum images which are one of the pair that comprise a stereoscopic image.

In 1859 the family also acquired a new London home at 5 Princes Gardens (much of the square survives as built, but No. 5 has gone). From 1862 onwards Lady Hawarden used the entire first floor of the property as a studio, within which she kept a few props, many of which have come to be synonymous with her work: gossamer curtains, a Mark Haworth-Booth offered Virginia Dodier the opportunity to make a freestanding mirror, a small chest of drawers and the iconic 'empire star' wallpaper, as seen in several of these photographs. The superior aspect of the studio can also go some way to account for Hawarden's sophisticated, subtle and pioneering use of natural light in her images.

It was also here that Lady Hawarden focused upon taking photographs of her eldest daughters, Isabella Grace, Clementina, and Florence Elizabeth, whom she would often dress up in costume tableau. The girls were frequently shot - often in romantic and sensual poses - in pairs, or, if alone, with a mirror or with their back to the camera. Hawarden's photographic exploration of identity, otherness, the doppelgänger and female sexuality, as expressed in the vast majority of these photographs, was incredibly progressive when considered in relation to her contemporaries, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. As Graham Ovenden comments in Clementina Lady Hawarden (1974), "Clementina Hawarden struck out into areas and depicted moods unknown to the art photographers of her age. Her vision of languidly tranquil ladies carefully dressed and posed in a symbolist light is at opposite poles from Mrs Cameron's images...her work...constitutes a unique document within nineteenth-century photography."

She exhibited, and won silver medals, in the 1863 and 1864 exhibitions of the Photographic Society, and was admired by both Oscar Rejlander, and Lewis Carroll who acquired five images which went into the Gernsheim Collection and are now in Texas. In 1865 Lady Hawarden died, and although her loss was regretted in the photographic journals, her work was soon forgotten.


A major retrospective of Lady Hawarden's life and work can be found in Virginia Dodier's book, "Lady Hawarden:  Studies from Life, 1857-1864".

Nickolas Muray

"Marilyn Monroe"

"Langston Hughes"

"Babe Ruth"

"Gretta Garbo"

"Gloria Swanson"

"Doris Covarrubias"

"Doris Kenyon"

"Andres Segovia"

"Frida on Bench"

"Frida and Diego with Hat"

"Frida Painting 'The Two Fridas'"

"People Gathered Around Dodge in Showroom"

"Magician Revealing Costumed Girl Carried on a Shelf"

"McCall's Styles & Beauty Cover:  Shoes"

The following biography is to be found on the Nickolas Muray Archive Web Site.  It is abridged and adapted from Salomon Grimberg's excellent book, "I Will Never Forget You", which tells of the friendship and love shared between Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray:


"Nickolas Muray was ‘a man for all seasons.’ When he emigrated from his native Hungary to the United States, at twenty-one years of age, he brought with him the belief he would make an indelible contribution. At the time of his death, he seems to have photographed everyone and everything, from presidents to pea soup. Most Americans were familiar with his photographs, if not their creator. Despite talent, personal charm, handsome looks, and boundless creative powers, he managed to live a self-effacing life. He was internationally renowned as a champion fencer; he was a pilot, and a lover of women. The most famous of his lovers was Mexican artist Frida Kahlo with whom he lived an affair that lasted ten years. During that time, he photographed her more than any other person outside his immediate family.

Nickolas Muray was born Miklos Mandl on Febuary 15, 1892 in Szeged, Hungary. Although his name appears in the Book of Birth Registration of the Jewish Community, he was not given a Jewish name. Two years later, his father Samu, who worked as a postal employee, moved the family to Budapest in search of better educational and economic opportunities. His parents favored Miklos over the other children, as he was the most intelligent and unusually handsome, with an engaging personality. Not only did he have a temper, but he was strong-willed, rebellious, and unwilling to accept ‘no’ for an answer. Repeatedly humiliated by rampant anti-Semitism, he resented being denied, for being Jewish, opportunities given other boys. He decided as a boy that he would one day see the world, and never be confined to the limitations imposed upon him by an unfair society.

In August of 1913, armed with $25, a fifty-word Esperanto dictionary, and an unrelenting determination, twenty-one-year-old Miklos Murai arrived at Ellis Island, where he became Nickolas Muray. He immediately found work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at Stockinger Printing Co, doing engraving and color separation. He signed up for English night classes, eager to leave behind any trace of his accent, and he proclaimed himself an atheist.

In 1920, a friend suggested Nick open his own studio. Nick moved to a 2-room apartment at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where he lived in one room and worked in the other. Forced to economize at first, Nick kept all the lights out, except for one bulb. When a client rang the doorbell, he would turn on all the lights. Fortunately, Nick did not have to wait long for his big break. The art director for Harper’s Bazaar commissioned Nick to photograph Florence Reed, who was starring on Broadway.

Overnight, his evocative, soft focus style of portrait photography became a sensation. He was soon photographing everybody that was anybody: actors, dancers, film stars, politicians, and writers. As he grew more successful, he held Wednesday night soirees in the studio for friends and acquaintances to meet, eat, and drink – many brought flasks, as it was prohibition time. It was not unusual for Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Helen Hayes, Paul Robeson, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Eugene O’Neill, or even Jean Cocteau to make an appearance.

In 1923 Nick met artist Miguel Covarrubias, whose friendship would change Nick’s life. Nick and Miguel contributed to many of the same publications, and became the best of friends. Nick visited Miguel in his native Mexico in 1931. On that trip, Nick met Frida Kahlo, who was married to Diego Rivera. Nick and Frida’s first meeting was certainly serendipitous as Frida was supposed to have been with Diego in San Francisco.

Over the next ten years, Nick and Frida carried on a love affair in which they traveled to see one another in Mexico and New York. Their love affair is richly documented, both in their correspondence to one another, and by Nick’s iconic portraits of Frida. But despite their mutual passion, Nick eventually came to see that Frida would always stay true to Diego. He moved on with his life in New York, but a part of him would always be in love with Frida.

Following the stock market crash, Nick shifted his major focus to advertisement photography. In 1931 Nick pioneered the first illustration from a color photograph to be published in an American mass-publication magazine, a swimming pool advertisement in Ladies’ Home Journal featuring seventeen live models wear beach wear in Miami. Even charging $1,000 for a color page, he couldn’t fill the incoming orders fast enough. Soon he also had a contract with Time to do color covers for the magazine. In this period, Nick became one of the leading practicioners of color photography.

Throughout his life, Nick practiced fencing at the highest levels. Even while maintaining his place at the cutting edge of his profession, he found time to train and compete. He was the U.S. Saber Champion in 1928 and 29, and he represented the US in the 1928 and 1932 Olympics.

Nickolas Muray died while fencing in New York City, in 1965. At the time of his death, he had won over sixty fencing medals, and was hailed as “One of the twenty greatest fencers in American History.""



From January 24 through April 21, 2013, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey hosted "Nickolas Muray, Portrait of a Photographer", a retrospective of his work.  It was curated by Salomon Grimberg in collaboration with the Nickolas Muray Photo Archives and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.

The following is from Mr. Muray's essay "On the Portrait" in the catalog.  It was originally published in John Wallace Gillies, "Principles of Pictorial Photography" (New York:  Falk Publishing Company, 1923), pp. 41-43:

On his use of a soft focus lens:

"I favor the soft focus lens because personally I am well satisfied in obtaining a pleasing, general effect as opposed to representing a subject in all its minutest detail. . . . I want my impression of people as seen through my own eyes at a reasonable distance and not through a magnifying glass.  Nor do I desire to see them through a haze.  Therefore, I don't strive for fuzziness of dimness in a picture.  The soft focus lens -- yes, but used intelligently."

On his use of short exposure times:

"With a short exposure a fleeting glance, a twinkly of the eye, or a momentary mood is caught and this tells us more of a sitter than ten or twenty seconds of concentrated staring and tense muscles.  With a short exposure one doesn't assume a natural expression; one has it in spite of oneself."

On his use of the retouching pencil:

"Modifying a negative to my mind is . . .absolutely essential when the camera gives me an overthrutful and erroneous representation of the subject."



Also in the catalog is Mr. Muray's essay "Photographing People in Color", which first appeared in "The Complete Photographer", no. 1.  June 20, 1943, pp. 63-67, copyright 1943, National Educational Alliance, Inc.  Mr. Muray wrote:

"Complementary colors, judiciously used, will enhance a color print. . . .Colors can express personality, and the colors your choose to emphasize should be in keeping with the personality before the camera."

"Perhaps it will help to consider every picture as consisting of two main parts:  subject matter and background.  These are almost equally important, particularly in color photography."

George Hurrell

Ramon Navarro

Pancho Barnes

Dorothy Jordan

Greta Garbo

Jean Harlow

Carole Lombard

Billy Haines

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Gypsy Rose Lee

Irene Homer

Dorothy Sebastian

Katherine Hepburn

Loretta Young

Paulette Goddard

The George Hurrell Story from George Hurrell, Master of Hollywood Glamour Photography (Official web site of The George Hurrell Estate):

George Edward Hurrell was born on June 1, 1904 in Cincinnati, Ohio.  His father, Edward, was born there too, of English and Irish parents.  His paternal grandfather had come from Essex, England where the family had been successful shoe manufacturers for several centuries.  Hurrell’s mother, Anna Mary Eble was born in Germany, but had moved with her family to Cincinatti as a child.

Hurrell came from a large Catholic family and had four brothers and a sister.  His youngest brother, Randy, studied to become a priest, but quit the seminary about one month before taking his vows.  His sister, Elizabeth, went to a nunnery and almost took her vows but decided not to, eventually marrying and raising a family.  An alter boy during his youth, upon reflecting on what his own career path might be, a young George Hurrell initially signed up at the Quigley Seminary in Chicago to become a priest, but decided to go to art school instead. He said, “As long as I can remember I wanted to be an artist.  As a boy, I was drawing all the time, in school and out.  Art was my favorite class in high school.”  Following graduation from high school, that summer he enrolled at the Chicago Art Institute, and later took night school classes at the Academy of Fine Arts studying painting.

Hurrell became acquainted with the camera while in art school, because students typically photographed various indoor and outdoor scenes to use as reference while painting.  Also, serious art students made sure they had a ready inventory of photographic images that they wanted to paint, so that they could use these as reference during the cold winter months when it snowed.

Then, one spring day in 1925, while still attending the Art Institute, Hurrell heard that famed landscape painter, Edgar Alwyn Payne, an alum of the Art Institute, would be giving a lecture at the school.   Mr. Payne was passing through town on his way back home to his wife and family in Laguna Beach after having spent some time lecturing on the East Coast.  Hurrell attended the lecture, and afterwards Payne viewed the student’s work.  Payne was particularly impressed with Hurrells’ experimental painting style, and also liked a recently completed landscape painting.  Payne told him, “If you plan to be a serious artist, you should come back with me to Laguna Beach and paint.  This is where it is all happening.”  Since Hurrell wanted to be a fine artist, he eagerly accepted the opportunity.

Payne and Hurrell set out for Laguna Beach by car, arriving just in time for Hurrell to celebrate his 21st birthday on June 1, 1925.

Hurrell had brought with him from Chicago a second hand view camera so that he could photograph various potential scenes during the warm spring and summer months.  But of course, unlike Chicago, it never snowed in Laguna Beach, and so, at least initially, the camera stayed stored away in the closet at the hillside beach shack.  Hurrell quickly settled into the western life style, enjoying the Mediterranean climate, spending his time going to the beach, fishing, and, of course, painting.  He also managed to find time to experiment with his camera.

Hurrell, always very practical, had discovered soon after his arrival in the seaside community that taking pictures of local artists and the social scene paid much more readily than painting.  But he still continued to paint.

For Christmas dinner in 1925, Hurrell was the guest of the Payne family at the home of William A. Griffith, another prominent Laguna Beach plein air painter.  Payne was founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association and William A. Griffith was the President of the Association, and it was now time to introduce Hurrell to all the major artists in the community.  However, the most important person he met that evening was not a famous or influential painter, but a major character, three years his senior, by the name of Florence Leontine Lowe Barnes.

Florence was a large good-hearted woman with a big smile and hearty laugh.  She was extremely intelligent, could hold her own in any conversation with ‘the guys’ and shared Hurrell’s passion for fishing.  She also was a treasure trove for off-color jokes and witty observations.  She was all this and married to a prominent Pasadena Episcopal minister.  The two became fast friends.

Florence had money — big money – having been born into one of the wealthiest families in America.  In addition to her estate in Pasadena, Florence also owned a large estate on 40 acres along the cliffs in Laguna Beach.  There she installed the first fresh water swimming pool in Laguna Beach over looking the ocean.

George Hurrell was a frequent pool-side guest at her home in Laguna Beach, and they also found time to sneak off and get some fishing in. Whenever they went fishing, they had a bet going who would catch the biggest fish of the day. Florence always set the bet, “Whoever loses has to cook the fish.” Florence was quite competitive and she hated to cook, and so George’s cooking and barbecuing skills greatly improved and became legendary in the seaside community.

Florence loved to host parties at her home in Laguna Beach, and party she did. She had her friends over from Hollywood -- Ramon Novarro among them. In fact, Ramon Novarro was her best friend. At the time, Novarro was the most famous and the highest paid movie star in the world.

As her marriage to the Pasadena Episcopal minister was no longer working, Florence decided to take a trip alone to see the lost city of Machu Pichu in Peru and have time to herself so that she could “just think things through.” Unfortunately, the ship she impulsively boarded in San Pedro turned out to be a gun runner for Mexican revolutionaries. Although initially quite excited about the prospect of a new adventure, she reconsidered and decided to jump ship in San Blas, Mexico, and spent the next seven months roaming through Mexico. When she returned to Laguna Beach, she had a new nickname: Pancho. No longer Florence Leontine Barnes, she was now known as Pancho Barnes -- a name, by the way, she kept through three more marriages.

In 1928 Pancho decided that she wanted to learn how to fly an airplane. She had heard that Orville Wright (of the famous Wright Brothers) was the person who reviewed and signed all application requests. But Orville had a reputation for trying to discourage women to fly. He didn’t like woman driving cars either. Evidently, Orville was worried that if a woman crashed a plane, the publicity could harm the new aviation industry. Pancho did not like the prospect of rejection merely based on gender, so she decided to play a joke on Orville. Along with the written application -- which never inquired as to gender -- applicants had to submit a photo. The photo was later glued onto the license, if Orville signed off. Pancho remembered that her artist friend and painter, George Hurrell, owned a camera. She had seen some of his photos, and thought that his photographic skills were even more impressive than his painting talents. So she asked Hurrell to take her picture for her pilot’s application. For the application photo she dressed up like a man – smoking a cigarette, dirty fingernails and all!

Hurrell felt bad making his good friend Pancho appear so unkempt for the pilot’s license application, and so he insisted on taking some “proper” photos of her. He took several photos of her at her home in Laguna Beach, posed against the back of her favorite chair. He made her look beautiful. And she was not your classic beauty at all. Naturally, she loved them.

Orville signed the application and off she went. She soloed after just a few hours of instruction.

By the way, Pancho later went on to be the first female stunt pilot in Hollywood, Lockheed’s first female test pilot, founded one of the first unions in Hollywood, and set numerous speed records in her Travel Air Mystery Ship airplane whose engine was specially tuned by her best flying buddy and friend, Howard Hughes. Many historians have commented that Pancho was one of the most skilled pilots of the Golden Age of Flight -- regardless of gender. She later re-invented herself in the 1940’s and 1950’s as the owner and hostess of the famous Happy Bottom Riding Club, which was a dude ranch, restaurant and hotel on what is now the site of Edwards Air Force Base. Most people remember Pancho from the film and book, The Right Stuff. In that book and subsequent film of the same name, she was the owner of the restaurant/bar where all the pilots like Chuck Yeager hung out. She always thought that it would be Chuck Yeager who would break the sound barrier, and she was correct. In fact, the achievement was famously celebrated at the Happy Bottom Riding Club.

In 1929, Pancho’s best friend was Ramon Novarro -- who was the biggest movie star at MGM, and also the most famous silent movie star in the world. Novarro, who was of Mexican heritage, was worried that he might not make the transition to sound film because of his slight accent. However, he had a wonderful operatic voice, and so -- to hedge his bets -- he decided that he could always reinvent himself as an opera star in Europe. But he needed some publicity photos to accomplish this. The danger was that if word leaked back to MGM that he was nervous about his career, his new salary negotiations could be jeopardized. So, he could not use any of the usual Hollywood photographers in town -- or anywhere else for that matter.

Pancho had an idea. “Why not use her friend, George Hurrell, to take the photos!” At the time, Hurrell was totally unknown. Besides, Pancho loved the glamorous photos that Hurrell had taken of her, and secretly believed that his destiny was in photography. And so, at Pancho’s urging, Ramon Novarro had a series of photographs taken by George Hurrell.

Ramon Novarro was at this time best remembered for his starring role in the silent film Ben Hur, which was the ‘Star Wars’ of its day in terms of ticket sales.

In one of these photos, "New Orpheus", from 1929, Ramon Novarro is dressed as Parcivil, and is standing in contemplation of his sword, next to Pancho Barnes’ horse. When Pancho saw this photograph, she exclaimed: “If George Hurrell can make my horse look as beautiful as the most handsome man in America, then everyone should be using George Hurrell as their photographer.”

As it turned out, Ramon Novarro did quite well in his contract negotiations and remained at MGM. No opera career. However, Novarro showed the photos that Hurrell took of him to his best friend back at MGM who was having problems of a different sort. Her name was Norma Shearer, who was married to the head of production at MGM -- Irving Thalberg. Norma had recently read a script, called the "Divorcee", that had a part that she very much wanted to play. The role required her to be a sexy vamp -- a modern woman. But, up until this time, Norma Shearer was basically best known for her “all-American girl next door” image. So this role would greatly change her image, and also give her the opportunity to show others that she was a skilled actress, capable of playing several kinds of roles. However, when she showed the script to her husband, he replied “Honey, I don’t think this part is for you. You are not sexy in THAT way.” Well, that really got her upset hearing this from her husband.

Shortly after the ‘bad news’ message from her husband, Ramon Novarro visited Norma with the stack of photos that George Hurrell had taken of him. Looking at the "New Orpheus" photo Hurrell had taken of him she said, “Ramon, you are so sexy in this photo.” In continuing to look through the other photos Hurrell had taken she added, “I have never seen you photographed so beautifully.” Ramon replied, “Yes, Hurrell captured my mood exactly.” Well, she was sold. She decided to have some photos taken by Hurrell so that she could convince her husband that she WAS INDEED sexy in THAT way.

So she showed these photos her husband. He agreed. She was indeed sexy, in THAT way. Their marriage improved, she got the film role. By the way, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress as a result of her portrayal in that film.

It was early October 1929, and Hurrell was offered a job as portrait photographer at MGM. At first he hesitated, thinking that he’d play ‘hard to get.’ Also, he was an independent type person, and didn’t immediately warm to the idea of working for anyone -- even if it was MGM. But then in late October, the stock market crashed. People lost fortunes over night, and even stock brokers were jumping out of windows in desperation. It was the start of the Great Depression. Pancho encouraged her friend to take the job. She even offered to fly him up to Culver City to MGM’s employment office so he could sign his employment contract. Hurrell took her advice. Pancho flew him to his meeting, and on the flight back to Laguna Beach, Hurrell ‘wing walked’ on her plane in celebration.



George Hurell Biography from Wikipedia:

In the late 1920s, Hurrell was introduced to the actor Ramon Novarro, by Pancho Barnes, and agreed to take a series of photographs of him. Novarro was impressed with the results and showed them to the actress Norma Shearer, who was attempting to mould her wholesome image into something more glamorous and sophisticated in an attempt to land the title role in the movie The Divorcee. She asked Hurrell to photograph her in poses more provocative than her fans had seen before. After she showed these photographs to her husband, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg, Thalberg was so impressed that he signed Hurrell to a contract with MGM Studios, making him head of the portrait photography department. But in 1932, Hurrell left MGM after differences with their publicity head, and from then on until 1938 ran his own studio at 8706 Sunset Boulevard.

Throughout the decade, Hurrell photographed every star contracted to MGM, and his striking black-and-white images were used extensively in the marketing of these stars. Among the performers regularly photographed by him during these years were silent screen star Dorothy Jordan, as well as Myrna Loy, Robert Montgomery, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard and Norma Shearer, who was said to have refused to allow herself to be photographed by anyone else. He also photographed Greta Garbo at a session to produce promotional material for the movie Romance. The session didn't go well and she never used him again.

In the early 1940s Hurrell moved to Warner Brothers Studios photographing, among others Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Alexis Smith, Maxine Fife, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney. Later in the decade he moved to Columbia Pictures where his photographs were used to help the studio build the career of Rita Hayworth.

He left Hollywood briefly to make training films for the First Motion Picture Unit of the United States Army Air Forces. When he returned to Hollywood in the mid-1950s his old style of glamour had fallen from favour. Where he had worked hard to create an idealised image of his subjects, the new style of glamour was more earthy and gritty, and for the first time in his career Hurrell was not seen as an innovator. He moved to New York where he worked for fashion magazines and photographed for advertisements before returning to Hollywood in the 1960s.

Hurrell died from his long standing problem with testicular cancer. When his doctors delivered the message to him that he had perhaps only a day left to live, he replied, "Well, at least my girlfriend will never have the pleasure of looking after these two danglers." He died on May 17, 1992.

Since his death, his works have appreciated in value.

Ilse Bing

    


 

















Ilse Bing's biography from the Victoria and Albert Museum:

Ilse Bing was born into a comfortable Jewish family in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in 1899. As a child, her education was rich in music and art and her intellectual development was encouraged. In 1920 she enrolled at the University of Frankfurt for a degree in mathematics and physics, but soon changed to study History of Art.

In 1924 she started a doctorate on the Neo-Classical German architect Friedrich Gilly (1772–1808). Needing to illustrate her thesis, Bing bought a Voigtlander camera in 1928 and started to teach herself photography. The following year she bought a Leica, the new and revolutionary 35mm hand-held camera that had been commercially introduced just three years earlier and enabled photographers to capture fast-moving events.

In 1929, while still pursuing her studies, Bing started to gain photojournalism commissions for Das Illustriete Blatt, a monthly supplement of the illustrated magazine Frankfurter Illustriete. She continued to provide regular picture stories for the magazine until 1931.

At this time, Bing also started collaborating with the architect Mart Stam, a prominent modernist who taught at the Bauhaus school of design from 1928-9 and was appointed chief architect to 'Das Neue Frankfurt' (a major construction project) in 1929. Stam commissioned Bing to record all of his housing projects in Frankfurt. He also introduced her to Frankfurt's avant-garde artistic circles, in particular that of artist Ella Bergman-Michel and her husband Robert, great patrons of the arts who frequently hosted artists such as El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp and Hannah Höch at their house.

With her artistic horizons expanding and finding some commercial success, Bing finally gave up her thesis in the summer of 1929 to concentrate on photography - a rather shocking decision for a woman of her background that astonished her family. The following year, greatly impressed by an exhibition of modern photography in Frankfurt, especially by the work of Paris-based Swiss photographer Florence Henri, Ilse Bing decided to move to Paris, the capital of the avant-garde and epicentre of developments in modern photography.

Ilse Bing arrived in Paris at the end of 1930 and initially found lodgings at the Hotel de Londres, rue Bonaparte, an address recommended by her friend Mart Stam. The Hungarian journalist Heinrich Guttman, who she had met through the publisher of the Frankfurter Illustriete, found her work and lent her his garage to use as a darkroom in exchange for illustrations for articles Guttman wrote for mainly German newspapers. Bing also provided illustrations for a book published by Guttman in 1930 on the history of photography.

For the first couple of years in Paris, Bing still published her work regularly with German newspapers, continuing her association with Das Illustriete Blat. Gradually, she also started to publish work in the leading French illustrated newspapers such as L'Illustration, Le Monde Illustré and Regards, and from about 1932, increasingly worked for fashion magazines Paris Vogue, Adam and Marchal, and from 1933-4, American Harpers Bazaar.

When on assignment, Bing would take extra pictures that satisfied her own artistic interests, and she built up a large body of work for exhibition. During a commission to photograph the Moulin Rouge, she made a series of photographs of dancers which were exhibited in the gallery window at the newly-established publishers La Pléiade in 1931. This was her first exhibition. Later that year, her photographs were included in the 26th Salon Internationale d'Art Photographique, organised by the Société francaise de photographie. They quickly caught the attention of the photographer and critic Emmanuel Sougez who praised the dynamism of the photographs and christened Bing 'the Queen of the Leica'. Sougez continued to be an important and influential supporter of her work throughout the 1930s.

In 1931 Bing moved to 146 avenue de Maine. That year she also met the New York-based Dutch American writer Hendrik Willem van Loon who became her most important patron and introduced her work to American clients. Most importantly, Van Loon showed Bing's work to the collector and gallerist Julien Lévy who included her work in the exhibition Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers at his New York Gallery in 1932.

During the 1930s Bing also frequently exhibited in Parisian galleries, where her work was shown alongside that of Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Florence Henri, Man Ray and André Kértesz.

In 1933 Bing moved to an apartment at 8 rue de Varenne, where she was able to use the kitchen as her darkroom. Here she met her future husband Konrad Wolff, a German pianist also living in the same block of flats whose music she would hear drifting up to her flat. The photographer Florence Henri, whose work Bing had first seen in Frankfurt, also lived at 8 rue de Varenne. However, despite clear links between her work and that of Henri and other photographers from the period, including Kértesz, Bing later claimed that she had little contact with other photographers during her Paris days.

In 1936 Ilse Bing was given a solo exhibition at the June Rhodes gallery in New York. Hosted by her patron Van Loon, she travelled to the USA, where she stayed for three months, during which time she made photographs in New York and Connecticut.

Bing was greatly impressed by New York. She appears to have been enthusiastically received, and her visit aroused some public interest. In an interview in the New York World Telegraph, June 8th 1936 entitled 'Famous German Woman sees life in New York as Transitory and Wild', Bing spoke of her excitement with the 'jazz rhythm' of New York, and by the newness of American cities as well as the wildness of American nature. She saw the New York skyline as a hybrid of the two, stating that, 'I did not find the New York skyline big like rocks. It is more natural than that, like crystals in the mountains, little things grown up.'

Tellingly, Bing asked to be described as a 'German Jew', explaining that her family was still in Germany and that she was worried for their safety.

During her stay, Bing met Alfred Stieglitz, doyen of the American photographic world and great exponent of modern photography. This meeting was, she later stated, a major event in her life and we can see the influence of Stieglitz's vision on Bing's photographs of New York.

Characteristically, Bing also absorbed the aesthetics of other contemporary American artists - some of whom she met through Stieglitz - and her street scenes show the influence of the realism current in American art at that time.

In 1937 Ilse Bing married Konrad Wolff (she maintained her maiden name for her photographic activities, but also assumed the name Ilse Bing Wolff). Although she took fewer photographs during the latter years of the 1930s, she continued to find inspiration in Paris and undertook commissions, including stories on the Glyndeborne opera that were published in 1938, for which she made her only documented trip to the UK. Bing continued to be ranked among the leading photographers of the time, with her work included in an important survey exhibition 'Photography 1839-1937' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the accompanying publication by Beaumont Newhall.

In 1938 moved Bing and Wolff moved together to boulevard Jourdan, hoping to live a comfortable married existence in their new, elegant apartment. However, the photographs Bing made of the splendid views across Paristowards Sacré Coeur from the balcony of this apartment were some of her last in Paris. The outbreak of the Second World War changed everything. In 1940 Bing and Wolff were forced to leave Paris and, both Jews, were interned in separate camps in the South of France. Bing spent six weeks in a camp in Gurs, in the Pyrenees, before rejoining her husband in Marseille, which was under 'Vichy' control. The couple spent nine months there, awaiting visas for America. Eventually, with the support of the fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, they were able to leave for America in June 1941.

Although Bing had managed to take her negatives with her and keep them with her in the camp, she left all her prints behind in Paris in the safekeeping of a friend. This friend then sent them on to Marseille but Bing and her husband had left France before the photographs arrived. The prints remained in a shipping company's warehouse in Marseille, miraculously missing the many bombs that fell on the port, until the end of the War, when they were despatched to Bing in New York. Tragically though, when they arrived, Bing was unable to pay customs duty on all of them, and had to sift through the prints, deciding which to keep and which to throw away. Some of her most important vintage prints, including the only photographs Bing had taken in England, were lost at this time.

After a decade of relative obscurity, Bing held her first one-person exhibition in 17 years at the Lee Witkin Gallery in New York in 1976, the show that marked a revival of interest in her work. In the late 1970s, photography's status within museums was being re-evaluated, and this coincided with a renewed interest in those photographers like Bing whose careers had been somewhat interrupted by the Second World War, as well as feminist art history's interest in giving the careers of women artists due prominence.

In 1976 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired some of Bing's work. Her work was included in a touring exhibition, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago, about the art collection of Julien Levy. This collection, including a large number of Bing's prints, was eventually acquired by the Art Institute. From this point, Bing's work was exhibited more frequently in museums and commercial galleries and acquired by American and French museums. A major retrospective, 'Ilse Bing: Three Decades of Photography' was shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1985 and then toured to the International Center of Photography in New York and the Kunstverein, Frankfurt in 1987. The Musée Carnavalet, Paris, followed in 1988 with a retrospective of Bing's photographs of Paris. This gradual growth of interest in Ilse Bing's work has re-established her reputation at the centre of the development of modern photography and ensured her a permanent place in the history of the medium.This text was originally written to accompany the exhibition The Ilse Bing: Queen of the Leica on display at the V&A South Kensington between 7 October 2004 and 9 January 2005.

"The Sphinx and Pyramid of Khafre"

"Nubie", ca. 1880's

"Forecourt, Temple of Horus"

"Karnak, Interior"

"Pyramid at Saqqara"

"View of the Aswan Along the Nile"

ca. 1870

"Arab Children"

"Egyptian Woman"

"Water Carriers", ca. 1864

    


Biography from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Antonio Beato (after 1832 - 1906), also known as Antoine Beato, was a British and Italian photographer. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, views of the architecture and landscapes of Egypt and the other locations in the Mediterranean region. He was the younger brother of photographer Felice Beato (1832 - 1909), with whom he sometimes worked.

Little is known of Antonio Beato's origins but he was probably born in Venetian territory after 1832, and later became a naturalized British citizen. His brother, at least, was born in Venice, but the family may have moved to Corfu, which had been a Venetian possession until 1814 when it was acquired by Britain.

Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio Beato" and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow managed to photograph at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. But in 1983 it was shown by Italo Zannier (Bennett 1996, 38) that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.

Antonio often used the French version of his given name, going by Antoine Beato. It is presumed that he did so because he mainly worked in Egypt, which had a large French-speaking population.

In 1853 or 1854 Antonio's brother and James Robertson formed a photographic partnership called "Robertson & Beato". Antonio joined them on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm's photographs produced in the 1850s are signed "Robertson, Beato and Co." and it is believed that the "and Co." refers to Antonio.

In late 1854 or early 1855 James Robertson married the Beato brothers' sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace (born in 1856), Edith Marcon Vergence (born in 1859) and Helen Beatruc (born in 1861).

In July 1858 Antonio joined Felice in Calcutta. Felice had been in India since the beginning of the year photographing the aftermath of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Antonio also photographed in India until December 1859 when he left Calcutta, probably for health reasons, and headed for Malta by way of Suez.

Antonio Beato went to Cairo in 1860 where he spent two years before moving to Luxor where he opened a photographic studio in 1862 and began producing tourist images of the people and architectural sites of the area. In the late 1860s, Beato was in partnership with Hippolyte Arnoux.

Interestingly, in 1864, at a time when his brother Felice was living and photographing in Japan, Antonio photographed members of Ikeda Nagaoki's Japanese mission who were visiting Egypt on their way to France.

Antonio Beato died in Luxor in 1906. His widow published a notice of his death while offering a house and equipment for sale.