THE LINKED RING
FOUNDED - MAY 1892
The Linked Ring (also known as "The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring") was a photographic society created to propose and defend that photography was just as much an art as it was a science, motivated to propelling photography further into the fine art world. Members dedicated to the craft looked for new techniques that would cause less knowledgeable to steer away, persuading photographers and enthusiasts to experiment with chemical processes, printing techniques and new styles.
MOTIVATION TO CREATE THE LINKED RING
Photography was interpreted in two ways; art photography and science photography. The science of photography requires practice that determines the outcome of the image, whereas the art aspect of photography concerns itself with the aesthetic experience and success of the photograph to the viewer. These differences created a tension in the craft that the Linked Ring sought to change.
The group was founded in May, 1892, by Henry Peach Robinson, former Photographic Society member George Davison, and Henry Van der Weyde. The Brotherhood was "a means of bringing together those who are interested in the development of the highest form of Art of which Photography is capable". Membership of the group was by invitation only; other members included William Smedley-Aston, Walter Benington, Arthur Burchett, Frank Sutcliffe, Frederick H. Evans, Paul Martin, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Frederick Hollyer, J.B.B. Wellington, Richard Keene, James Craig Annan, Alfred Horsley Hinton, Lydell Sawyer (AKA Lyd Sawyer), Alfred Maskell and later, Americans Alfred Stieglitz, Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr., and Clarence H. White. Although works by female photographers such as those by Zaida Ben-Yusuf were exhibited at the annual shows during the 1890s, it was not until 1900 that Gertrude Käsebier became one of the first elected female members of the Ring.
GERTRUDE KÄSEBIER (nee Stanton)
Born 18th May 1852 Des Moines, Iowa, U.S.A.
Died 12th October 1934 (aged 82) New York City, New York, U.S.A.
AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHER
ZAIDA BEN-YUSUF
Born 21st November 1869 London, England
Died 27th September 1933 Brooklyn, USA
New York-based portrait photographer noted for her artistic portraits of wealthy,
fashionable, and famous Americans during the turn of the 19th–20th century.
LINKED RING SUCCESSES
In November 1893, Robinson created the Photographic Salon, an annual exhibit event in England whose aim was to "exhibit (images) that are description of pictorial photography in which there is distinct evidence of personal feeling and execution". As a result, interest grew in processes such as gum bi-chromate, oil pigment and transfer, and supported the trend in producing images not for reproduction, but works of high value, as well as creating interest in surface texture, papers, and color of print.
In 1896 they began publishing The Linked Ring Papers, which were circulated annually to members until 1909 to promote and discuss the aesthetics and practice of pictorialism.
PHOTO-SECESSION - THE AMERICAN COUNTERPART OF THE LINKED RING
The Photo-Secession was founded by photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Stieglitz wanted to show that photography had artistic expression similar to that of painting and sculpture, emphasizing further the craftsmanship abilities of photographers. Photo-Secession members were also called American Links, and displayed works in the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at Fifth Avenue, New York City. Members include Mary Devens, Frank Eugene, Gertrude Käsebier, William B. Dyer, Eva Watson-Schütze, Edward Steichen, Edmund Stirling, and Clarence H. White.
PROMINENT MEMBERS AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Pictorialist James Craig Annan, born into a household at the forefront of photography technology. In 1866 his father created a four-foot print of an eleven-foot painting with the new process of carbon printing. This became Annan’s primary influence to become a skilled photographer himself. At a young age, learned the process of photogravure in Vienna on a trip with his father. This process allowed Annan to work like an etcher, sharpening, shading, or blurring areas of the picture, describing this process as “a long drawn out pleasure”.
Frederick H. Evans was responsible for leading the Linked Ring's photography magazines, writing publications for the newspaper, and installations at Photo Salon. Regarded as being one of the most gifted and sensitive of "the Links" Evans is known for his images of architecture, specifically cathedrals. He is known to have spent weeks living in the cathedrals he photographed waiting for ideal lighting conditions to reveal the poetry in his subjects.
Frank S. Sutcliffe was most well known for his image “Water Rats”, exemplary of being one of the first images showing depth of field accomplished in camera.
The Brotherhood represented themselves with a logo of three interlinked rings, which were meant in part to represent the Masonic beliefs of Good, True, and Beautiful.
THE SELECTING COMMITTEE OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC SALON OF THE LINKED RING
Reading from left to right the names are as follows:
WALTER BENINGTON, FREDERICK H. EVANS, GEORGE DAVISON, MALCOLM ARBUTHNOT, REGINALD CRAIGIE
(SEATED), J. DUDLEY JOHNSTONE, F.J. MORTIMER, J. CRAIG ANNAN
WILLIAM SMEDLEY-ASTON
Born: 1868
Died: 1941
William Smedley-Aston was with his wife Irene a Victorian Pre-Raphaelite Arts & Crafts photographer and member of the Birmingham Group of artists and the Linked Ring Brotherhood. He was also known as W.S. Aston or W. Smedley.
William Smedley-Aston
WALTER BENINGTON
Born: 1872
Died: 1936
Walter Benington was a British photographer whose work is heavily represented in the National Portrait Gallery. Benington joined the Linked Ring in about 1893 and exhibited with them thereafter. From 1927 he worked as a freelance portrait photographer for Elliott & Fry. His sitters included Ellen Terry, Albert Einstein and Arthur Conan Doyle.
FRANCIS MEADOW SUTCLIFFE
Born: 6th October 1853, Headingley, Leeds, United Kingdom
Died: 31st May 1941, Sleights, United Kingdom
Francis Meadow (Frank) Sutcliffe was an English pioneering photographic artist whose work presented an enduring record of life in the seaside town of Whitby, England, and surrounding areas, in the late Victorian era and early 20th century. His documentation of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in Whitby, led him to be labeled as the "pictorial Boswell of Whitby".
He made a living as a portrait photographer, working first in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and then for the rest of his life in Whitby, living in Broomfield Terrace in Whitby before moving to Sleights, Yorkshire. His father had brought him into contact with prominent figures in the world of art such as John Ruskin, and he resented having to prostitute his art taking photographs of holiday-makers. His business in Skinner Street, a converted jet grinding and polishing works, rooted him to Whitby and the Eskdale valley but, by photographing the ordinary people that he knew well, he built up a most complete and revealing picture of a late Victorian town, and the people who lived and worked there.
His most famous photograph was taken in 1886; Water Rats caused a little comment at the time as it featured naked children playing in a boat, but the image is not erotic. Sutcliffe was using the conventions of the academic nude to show how photography can approach art. He was, however, excommunicated by his local clergy for displaying it, as they thought it would 'corrupt' the opposite sex. Edward VII (then the Prince of Wales) later purchased a copy of the picture.
He was a prolific writer on photographic subjects, contributed to several periodicals, and wrote a regular column in the Yorkshire Weekly Post. His work is in the collection of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society and in other national collections.
Sutcliffe was a founder member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood (as society that existed to promote photography as an art form), and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 1941.
FRANCIS MEADOW SUTCLIFFE
THREE NAKED BOYS AROUND A COBLE, c.1880
FREDERICK H. EVANS
Born: 26th June 1853, London, United Kingdom
Died: 24th June 1943, London, United Kingdom
Frederick Evans was a British photographer, primarily of architectural subjects. He is best known for his images of English and French cathedrals.
Evans was born and died in London. He began his career as a bookseller, but retired from that to become a full-time photographer in 1898, when he adopted the platinotype technique for his photography. Platinotype images, with extensive and subtle tonal range, non glossy-images, and better resistance to deterioration than other methods available at the time, suited Evans subject matter. Almost as soon as he began, however, the cost of platinum - and consequently, the cost of platinum paper for his images - began to rise. Because of this cost, and because he was reluctant to adopt alternate methodologies, by 1915 Evans retired from photography altogether.
Evans ideal of straightforward, "perfect" photographic rendering, unretouched or modified in any way, as an ideal was well-suited to the architectural foci of his work: the ancient, historic, ornate and often quite large cathedrals, cloisters and other buildings of the English and French countryside. This perfectionism, along with his tendency to exhibit and write about his work frequently, earned for him international respect and much imitation. He ultimately became regarded as perhaps the finest architectural photographer of his, or any, era - though some professionals privately felt that the Evans philosophy favoring extremely literal images was restrictive of the creative expression rapidly becoming available within the growing technology of the photographic field.
Evans was also an able photographer of landscapes and portraits, and among the many notable friends and acquaintances he photographed was George Bernard Shaw, with whom he also often corresponded. Evans was a member of the Linked Ring photographic society.
FREDERICK H. EVANS
PAUL EDGAR PHILIPPE MARTIN
Born: 28th August 1938, Windsor, Canada
Paul Martin, also known as Paul Martin Jr., is a Canadian politician who served as the 21st Prime Minister of Canada from December 12th, 2003, to February 6th, 2006.
PAUL EDGAR PHILIPPE MARTIN
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
Born: 11th June 1882, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Died: 23rd November 1966, Rhos on Sea, United Kingdom
Alvin Langdon Coburn was an early 20th-century photographer who became a key figure in the development of American pictorialism. He became the first major photographer to emphasize the visual potential of elevated viewpoints and later made some of the first completely abstract photographs.
CHILDHOOD (1882–1899)
Coburn was born at 134 East Springfield Street in Boston, Massachusetts, to a middle-class family. His father, who had established the successful firm of Coburn & Whitman Shirts, died when Alvin was seven. After that he was raised solely by his mother, Fannie, who remained the primary influence in his early life, even though she remarried when he was a teenager. In his autobiography, Coburn wrote, "My mother was a remarkable woman of very strong character who tried to dominate my life … It was a battle royal all the days of our life together".
In 1890 the family visited his maternal uncles in Los Angeles, and they gave him a 4 x 5 Kodak camera. He immediately fell in love with the camera, and within a few years he had developed a remarkable talent for both visual composition and technical proficiency in the darkroom. When he was sixteen years old, in 1898, he met his cousin F. Holland Day, who was already an internationally known photographer with considerable influence. Day recognized Coburn's talent and both mentored him and encouraged him to take up photography as a career.
At the end of 1899 his mother and he moved to London, where they met up with Day.
Day had been invited by the Royal Photographic Society to select prints from the best American photographers for an exhibition in London. He brought more than a hundred photographs with him, including nine by Coburn, who at this time was only 17 years old. With the help of his cousin Coburn's career took a giant first step.
RISE TO FAME (1900–1905)
Coburn's prints at the Royal Photographic Society attracted the attention of another important photographer, Frederick H. Evans. Evans was one of the founders of the Linked Ring, an association of artistic photographers which was considered at that time to be the highest authority for photographic aesthetics. In the summer of 1900 Coburn was invited to exhibit with them, which elevated him to the ranks of some of the most elite photographers of the day.
In 1901 Coburn lived in Paris for a few months so he could study with photographer Edward Steichen and Robert Demachy. He and his mother then toured France, Switzerland and Germany for the remainder of the year.
When they returned to America in 1902, Coburn began studying with famed photographer Gertrude Käsebier in New York. He opened a photography studio on Fifth Avenue but spent much of his time that year studying with Arthur Wesley Dow at his School of Art in Massachusetts. At the same time, his mother continued to promote her son whenever she could. Stieglitz once told an interviewer, "Fannie Coburn devoted much energy trying to convince both Day and me that Alvin was a greater photographer than Steichen".
The following year Coburn was elected as an Associate of The Linked Ring, making him one of the youngest members of that group and one of only a few Americans to be so honored. In May he was given his first one-man show at the Camera Club of New York, and in July Stieglitz published one of his gravures in Camera Work, No. 3.
In 1904 Coburn returned to London with a commission from The Metropolitan Magazine to photograph England's leading artists and writers, including G.K. Chesterton, George Meredith, and H.G. Wells. During this trip he visited renowned pictorialist J. Craig Annan in Edinburgh and made studies of motifs photographed by pioneering photographers Hill and Adamson. Six more of his images were published in Camera Work, No. 6 (April, 1904). In 1905 he photographed American artist Leon Dabo.
Coburn remained in London throughout 1905 and much of 1906, taking both portraits and landscapes around England. He photographed Henry James for The Century magazine and returned to Edinburgh for a series he intended to be visualizations of Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh.
SYMBOLIST PERIOD (1906–1912)
The years 1906-7 were some of the most prolific and important for Coburn. He began 1906 by having one-man shows at the Royal Photographic Society (accompanied by a catalog with a preface by George Bernard Shaw) and at the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association. In July five more gravures were published in Camera Work (No. 15). At the same time he began to study photogravure printing at the London County Council School of Photo-Engraving. It was during this time that Coburn made one of his most famous portraits, that of George Bernard Shaw posing nude as Rodin's The Thinker.
In the summer he cruised round the Mediterranean and traveled to Paris, Rome and Venice in the fall while working on frontispieces for an American edition of Henry James' novels. While in Paris he saw Steichen's Autochrome color photographs and learned the process from him.
By 1907 Coburn was so well established in his career that Shaw called him "the greatest photographer in the world", although he was only 24 years old at the time. He continued his success by having a one-man show at Stieglitz's prestigious Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in New York and by organizing an international exhibition of photography at the New English Art Galleries in London. At the request of American art collector Charles Lang Freer, Coburn briefly returned to the U.S. so he could photograph Freer's large collection of oriental art and Whistler prints. Coburn became captivated with the "exotic" style of the oriental artists, and it began to have an influence in both his thinking and his photography.
In January 1908, twelve more of Coburn's photographs were published in Camera Work (No. 21). In the same issue there was an anonymous article that leveled some harsh words at him.
Coburn has been a favored child throughout his career… No other photographer has been so extensively exploited nor so generally eulogized. He enjoys it all; is amused at the conflicting opinions about him and his work, and, like all strong individuals, is conscious that he knows best what he wants and what he is driving at. Being talked about is his only recreation.
The author was probably Stieglitz, who sometimes delighted in both promoting and castigating a photographer, especially if he felt the person was becoming too conceited. The criticism did not seem to have a long-term effect on their relationship, as both continued to be close colleagues for many years.
In the spring Coburn had another one-man show, this time at the Goupil Galleries in New York. Soon after he wrote to Stieglitz, "Printing almost entirely in gray now ... think it a reaction from the autochomes". In the summer he visited Dublin, where he made portraits of W.B. Yeats and George Moore. He continued his travels that year with trips to Bavaria and Holland.
The next year Stieglitz gave Coburn his second one-man exhibition at his gallery, which by then had come to be known simply as "291". Another sign of Coburn's prominence at that time was that Stieglitz had only given two shows to one other photographer – Edward Steichen. Back in London, Coburn bought a new home with a large studio area where he set up two printing presses. He proceeded to use the skills he had learned at the County Council School to publish a book of his own photographs called London.
Coburn returned to America in 1910, exhibiting 26 prints at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. He began traveling extensively in the U.S. for the next year, going to Arizona to photograph the Grand Canyon and to California to take photos in Yosemite National Park. He came back to New York in 1912 and took a series of new photos which he published in his book New York. It was during this period that he made some of his most famous photographs from elevated viewpoints, including his best known image The Octopus.
While in New York he met and married Edith Wightman Clement of Boston on October 11th, 1912. In November Coburn and his wife returned to England, and after twenty-three transatlantic crossings he never again returned to the United States.
EXPLORATIONS (1913–1923)
Coburn continued to build his fame by publishing what would become his most famous book, Men of Mark, in 1913. The book featured 33 gravure prints of important European and American authors, artists and statesmen, including Henri Matisse, Henry James, Auguste Rodin, Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Yeats. In the preface to the book, he says:
To make satisfactory photographs of persons it is necessary for me to like them, to admire them, or at least to be interested in them. It is rather curious and difficult to exactly explain, but if I dislike my subject it is sure to come out in the resulting portrait. I had thought of using 'Men of Genius' as the title for this book, but Arnold Bennett objected seriously, saying, very modestly, that he did not consider himself a man of genius, but merely a working author, and absolutely refusing to join the throng unless I changed it, so I told him that if he would give me a better one I would use it. 'Men of Mark' is his alternative.
In 1915 Coburn organized the exhibition "Old Masters of Photography", shown at the Royal Photographic Society in London and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in the U.S. The show included many historical prints from Coburn's own collection.
The following year two pivotal events occurred in his life. He met George Davison, a fellow photographer and a philanthropist who was involved in Theosophy and Freemasonry. This started him on a path of studying mysticism, metaphysical ideals and Druidism. He met Ezra Pound, who introduced him to the short-lived Vorticism movement in Britain. Its new visual aesthetics intrigued Coburn and, provoked by his growing spiritual quest, he began to re-examine his photographic style. He responded by making a bold and distinctive portrait of Pound, showing three overlapping images of differing sizes. Within a brief period he moved from this semi-representative image to a series of abstract images that are among the first completely non-representative photographs ever made.
To make these images Coburn invented a kaleidoscope-like instrument with three mirrors clamped together, which when fitted over the lens of the camera would reflect and fracture the image. Pound called this instrument a "Vortoscope" and the resulting photographs "Vortographs". He made only about 18 different Vortographs, taken over a period of just one month, yet they remain among the most striking images in early 20th century photography.
In 1917 he had a show of Vortographs and paintings at the Camera Club in London. He had recently started painting, in what Ezra Pound called Post-Impressionist style, and the combination of 'second-rate' paintings along with his highly unusual photographs received mixed reviews. Stieglitz in particular did not like the change in Coburn's imagery, and he rejected several prints for a show he was putting together.
On 18th June 1919, he was initiated into Mawddach Masonic Lodge No.1988 in Barmouth and was a member until he resigned on 28th September 1961. Coburn became increasingly involved with the Freemasons, achieving the title of Royal Arch Mason. He also joined the Societas Rosicruciana and delved further into metaphysical studies. Eventually he would devote most of his life to these studies, foregoing photography as his primary interest.
In 1922 Coburn briefly returned to his roots when he published More Men of Mark, a second book of portraits he had taken more than ten years earlier. This volume included previously unpublished photographs that included Pound, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Joseph Conrad, Israel Zangwill and Edmund Dulac.
SPIRITUAL DEVOTION (1923–1930)
In 1923 Coburn met a man who would become a major influence on him for the rest of his life. The man was the leader of the Universal Order, a comparative religious group that grew out of the Order of Ancient Wisdom, and which under the name Hermetic Truth Society organized public lectures and produced the quarterly Shrine of Wisdom magazine. The identity of the man – described as being great and good in every way – was known to Coburn, but it has been kept from anyone outside of the Order due to the Society's strict doctrine of anonymity. There was something about him, however, that struck a chord with Coburn, and "Coburn's solidity as a citizen and the falling-away of all mundane ambition thereafter was due to his direct influence".
Throughout the 1920s and 30s Coburn became fully committed to the beliefs of the Universal Order, which are described in The Shrine of Wisdom magazine as being devoted to "Synthetic Philosophy, Religion and Mysticism". His deep interest in mysticism, and especially freemasonry, was to occupy the greatest part of the remainder of his life. Coburn did much research into the history of freemasonry, as well as on aspects of the occult and mysticism. He presented numerous lectures based on his findings to Masonic gatherings, traveling extensively throughout England and Wales. He also took a particular interest in the ceremonial rituals and rites performed, and in their origins and symbolism.
In 1927 Coburn was made an honorary Ovate of the Welsh Gorsedd, or Council of Druids, and he took the Welsh name "Maby-y-Trioedd" (Son of the Triads).
In 1928 his mother died. She had been a major influence on him for much of his life, and her death was yet one more sign that his new devotion to religious interests was the right course for him.
LATER LIFE (1931–1966)
By 1930 Coburn had lost almost all interest in photography. He decided that his past was of little use to him now, and over the summer he destroyed nearly 15,000 glass and film negatives – nearly his entire life's output. This same year he donated his extensive collection of contemporary and historical photographs to the Royal Photographic Society.
A year later he wrote his last letter to Stieglitz, and from then on he made only a few new photographs. Ironically, just when he was making an almost complete break from photography Coburn was elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
After living in England for more than twenty years, Coburn finally became a British subject in 1932.
In 1945 he moved from his house in Harlech, North Wales to Rhos-on-Sea, Colwyn Bay, on the north coast of Wales. He lived there the rest of his life.
His wife Edith died on October 11th, 1957, their forty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Coburn died in his home in North Wales on November 23rd, 1966.
ALVIN LANGDON COBURN
FREDERICK HOLLYER
Born: 17th June 1838, Pentonville, London, United Kingdom
Died: 21st November 1933, Blewbury, United Kingdom
Frederick Hollyer was an English photographer and engraver known for his photographic reproductions of paintings and drawings, particularly those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and for portraits of literary and artistic figures of late Victorian and Edwardian London.
Hollyer became interested in photography about 1860. He made albumen and carbon prints, but his preferred medium was the platinotype or platinum print process, admired for its permanence and great tonal range. Under the patronage of Frederic Leighton, Hollyer began to photograph paintings and drawings in the 1870s. Artists whose work he published include Edward Burne-Jones, George Frederic Watts, Simeon Solomon, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Of his work with the Pre-Raphaelites, The Times noted that
[H]e may be said to have done as much for their popularity by reproducing their work as Ruskin did with the pen. His modest premises in Pembroke Square, Kensington, became a place of pilgrimage for everybody who was in the aesthetic movement. With Burne-Jones, whom he met in the early seventies, and Watts, his collaboration — for it amounted to that — was particularly close. He photographed their work at different stages — the prints often suggesting modifications to the artists — and his collection of negatives must contain some interesting records of early states. Rossetti, Albert Moore, and Sir W.B. Richmond were other artists whose work was made familiar to the public through Hollyer's reproductions. In workmanship he was extremely fastidious, giving personal attention to every stage of the process, so that the final result was not so much a photograph of a painting as a translation of its qualities into photographic terms.
Hollyer's photographs of drawings were particularly successful; printed on high-quality paper, they were often mistaken for originals. One of the most popular was a study of three heads by Burne-Jones for The Masque of Cupid.
HEADS OF DESPIGHT, CRUELTY, AND DAME AMORET, BURNES-JONES'S
STUDY FOR THE MASQUE OF CUPID, FROM A PRINT BY HOLLYER.
Hollyer also took studio portraits and specialized in interior and exterior photos of houses. For 30 years, he reserved Mondays for portrait photography in his Pembroke Square studio. His sitters included the artists Walter Crane, William Morris, G.F. Watts, and Burne-Jones; the writers John Ruskin, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw; and the actresses Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry. Hollyer eschewed the formal poses of most studio portraiture of his day; in an 1899 interview in The Photogram he said,
The one thing needful for photographers, if they are ever to take a position as artists, is general culture, which includes the study of the work of artists of all other classes. If every photographer would make a real study, for two or three years, of the hands of his sitters, portraiture would take an immense step forward. But the photographer must cease attempting to pose hands and make them pose themselves by giving them some congenial occupation . . The photographer who has met a man half a dozen times should know with absolute certainty what is the most characteristic pose and lighting for his face . . . I think it would be a most useful thing, even from the business point of view, if every photographer would resolve that for every negative made for profit there should be another made for love. The greatest good of the Photographic Salon has been in showing that the best professional photographers could do some of the finest amateur work.
Hollyer did much to establish photography as a fine art. His work was widely acclaimed in his own day; in 1897, a critic in The Studio lamented:
"Mr. Hollyer, in sheer good nature, ought to exhibit a failure now and then, if only to encourage critics. As it is, year by year, they have to ring changes on the most eulogistic adjectives, and feel all the time that they are not doing more than scant justice to memorable work".
Hollyer joined the Royal Photographic Society 1865 and became a Fellow in 1895, but was also involved in The Linked Ring, a society formed in to support pictorialism in opposition to the Photographic Society. He was a member of the Solar Club and became one of the Founder Members of the Professional Photographers Association in 1901.
FREDERICK HOLLYER
JAMES BOOKER BLAKEMORE WELLINGTON
Born: 1858, Lansdown, Bath, United Kingdom
Died: 1939, Elstree, Essex, United Kingdom
James Wellington aka J.B.B. Wellington was an English photographer.
Wellington originally trained as an architectural draughtsman. In the 1880s, however, an association with George Eastman in New York, drew him into the world of photography. Wellington was regarded as a pictorial photographer of note, while his work was clearly inspired by the paintings of John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. He was invited to be a member of the Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1892, and was a regular judge on the selection and hanging committee of exhibitions held by the Photographic Society of Great Britain. He was a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Photographic Society.
Back in England he became a manager of Kodak's factory in Wealdstone and was responsible for a number of practical formulas for improving emulsions and developers, one being a negative intensifier containing silver nitrate, ammonium thiocyanate and sodium thiosulphate, and another being dry-collodion plates with improved sensitivity. Around 1895 he and his brother-in-law H.H. Ward set up a photographic paper manufacturing company, Wellington & Ward. The firm later extended into plates and film manufacture. In July 1922 the company acquired Leto Photo Materials (1905) Ltd, and in 1929 was taken over by Ilford Ltd.
JAMES BOOKER BLAKEMORE WELLINGTON
RICHARD KEENE
Born: 15th May 1825, United Kingdom
Died: December 1894, Derby, United Kingdom
Richard Keene was an early Derbyshire photographer. He was a founding member of the Derby Photographic Society in 1884 and the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom in 1886 as well as being an early member of The Linked Ring.
In 1851 Keene returned to Derby from London to set up as a printer, publisher and bookseller in Irongate under the name Richard Keene and Co. He had an early interest in photography and began taking and selling photographs of Derby and Derbyshire and before long photography became the mainstay of his business. He was a friend of the Rev Edward Abney (1811–1914) and his sons William de Wiveleslie Abney and Charles Edward Abney - all of whom were early photographic experimenters.
Keene established a portrait studio and 'Repository of Arts' selling photographs prints and stereoscopic viewers.
Keene was a founder member of the Derby Photographic Society in 1884. He was also a founding member of the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom which held its inaugural convention in Derby in 1886.
Members at the inaugural meeting of the
Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom,
held at Derby, 12th August to 15th August 1886
He was a skilled stereoscopic photographer and worked with his friend and fellow Derby photographer John Warwick on an acclaimed series 'Derbyshire Stereo-graphs' published in the late 1850s. These are usually credited as 'By John Warwick, Published by Richard Keene'. Keene gave an account of his early photographic work with Warwick in a later lecture, which is reprinted in Maxwell Craven's biography of Keene. In this he makes clear that this early stereoscopic work was a joint enterprise between the two men.
He was invited to become a member of The Linked Ring, an exclusive group of photographers committed to promoting artistic principles in photography. Through this organization and the Photographic Convention he had regular contact with some of the most prominent and successful photographers of the day.
RICHARD KEENE
JAMES CRAIG ANNAN
Born: 8th March 1864, Hamilton, United Kingdom
Died: 5th June 1946, Lenzie, Kirkintilloch, United Kingdom
James Annan was a pioneering Scottish-born photographer and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
The second son of photographer Thomas Annan, James Craig Annan was born at Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, on 8th March 1864. He was educated at Hamilton Academy before studying chemistry and natural philosophy at Anderson's College, Glasgow (later to merge to become the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College; later again, the Royal College of Science and Technology, and eventually becoming, in 1964, the University of Strathclyde).
James Annan subsequently joined his family’s photographic business, T. & R. Annan and Sons of Glasgow, Hamilton and Edinburgh, and in 1883 went to Vienna to learn the process of photogravure from the inventor, Karel Klíč. James Annan introduced the photogravure process into Britain, and T. & R. Annan, having acquired the British Patent holder rights, were to become the leading firm in Britain in gravure photographic printing.
In 1891 James Craig Annan was elected to membership of Glasgow Art Club as a "photographic artist". In 1893 he exhibited his own photogravure work at the Photographic Salon in 1893, as a result of which he was, in 1894, elected a member of The Linked Ring, a select international group of art photographers. The Linked Ring (also known as "The Brotherhood of the Linked Ring") was a photographic society created to propose and defend that photography was just as much an art as it was a science, motivated to propelling photography further into the fine art world. Members dedicated to the craft looked for new techniques that would cause less knowledgeable to steer away, persuading photographers and enthusiasts to experiment with chemical processes, printing techniques and new styles. He also gave lectures to the Edinburgh Photographic Society, on The Arts of Engraving (December 1901) and Photography as a Means of Artistic Expression (May 1910.) In 1900 the Royal Photographic Society invited Annan to mount a one man show, the first in a series of such shows at the Society’s new exhibition rooms on Russell Square, London, and he was subsequently awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Society.
He exhibited further, at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901; the Paris Salon; the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and in 1904, the Royal Commission for the Saint Louis World's Fair chose Annan and Sir William Abney to represent Britain on the International Jury for Photography, Photo-process, and Photo-appliances.
James Craig Annan was to influence the development of photography in North America through having his work exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Galleries in New York, and being featured in the American photographic periodical Camera Notes, published by The Camera Club of New York from 1897–1903 and of which Stieglitz was editor, and featured (1905, 1909, 1912) in the quarterly photographic journal Camera Work (published by Stieglitz in New York between 1903 and 1917). Annan's photographic studio produced many of the photogravures featured in Camera Work.
James Craig Annan died at Lenzie, near Glasgow, on 5th June 1946.
JAMES CRAIG ANNAN
ALFRED HORSLEY HINTON
Born: 1863, London, United Kingdom
Died: 25th February 1908, Woodford Green, United Kingdom
Alfred Hinton was an English landscape photographer, best known for his work in the pictorialist movement in the 1890s and early 1900s. As an original member of the Linked Ring and editor of The Amateur Photographer, he was one of the movement's staunchest advocates.
Hinton wrote nearly a dozen books on photographic technique, and his photographs were exhibited at expositions throughout Europe and North America.
Hinton was born in London in 1863. He attended art school with the hopes of becoming a painter, and became proficient in oil, watercolors, and black-and-white drawing. By 1882, he had discovered photography, and was hired as editor of the Photographic Art Journal in 1887. Hinton briefly worked for a company in Blackfriars selling photographic equipment before taking over a branch portrait studio of Ralph W. Robinson in Guildford in 1891. In 1893, he was hired as editor of The Amateur Photographer, a position he retained for the rest of his life.
During the late 1880s, Hinton became one of a growing number of photographers who believed that photography should be considered a form of high art, a movement that became known as pictorialism. Pictorialism, according to Hinton, employed "the image of concrete things to create abstract ideas". He exhibited several photographs at an early-1890s Leeds exposition described by his contemporary, Alexander Keighley, as the first pictorialist exposition, and was one of the original members of the Linked Ring, an organization formed in 1892 to promote photography as a fine art.
Hinton helped organize the Photographic Salon in 1893, and became the primary English correspondent for the Bulletin of the French pictorialist group, the Photo Club of Paris. A poll conducted by Photographic Life in 1897 found Hinton to be the most popular photographer-exhibitor.
Hinton's staunch defense of pictorialism gained him numerous enemies. His attempt to join the Royal Photographic Society touched off a fierce debate among the readers of the British Journal of Photography, with numerous letters written both in support of his membership and against it. Hinton was a member of the Royal Photographic Society between 1889 and 1893. He continued his defense of pictorialism into the following century, and was unimpressed with the rise of the "American School", which included photographers such as Edward Steichen.
During the early 1900s, Hinton was a regular contributor to the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Graphic, and the Yorkshire Post, and was frequently called upon to judge photo contests. In 1904, he oversaw the British photographic exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair, and he spent his last years writing manuals ("Little Books") to teach photographers basic techniques. In February 1908, he fell ill while returning from a trip to the Scottish Photographic Salon in Aberdeen, and died at his home in Woodford Green. The Royal Photographic Society held an exclusive exhibit of Hinton's work in April 1908.
Hinton's landscape photographs tend to be characterized by prominent foregrounds and dramatic cloud formations, often in a vertical format. He typically used sepia platinotype and gum bichromate printing processes. Unlike many pictorialists, Hinton preferred sharp focus to soft focus lenses. He occasionally cropped and mixed cloud scenes and foregrounds from different photographs, and was known to rearrange the foregrounds of his subjects to make them more pleasing. His favorite topic was the English countryside, especially the Essex mud flats and Yorkshire moors.
Hinton's photograph, "Requiem," was used as the frontispiece of the first issue of Alfred Stieglitz's magazine, Camera Notes, in 1897. His photograph, "Day's Decline," appeared in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Camera Notes two years later. "Reed Harvesting," was exhibited at the first London Salon in 1894, and his "Salt Marshes" was exhibited at the first Paris Salon that same year. Hinton photographs that garnered considerable attention at the Photographic Salon in subsequent years included "Recessional" (1901), "Weeds and Rushes" (1902), "Fleeting and Far" (1903), and "The White Mill" (1907). In a 1907 issue of The Photographic News, Hinton described "Melton Meadows" as his best photograph.
Hinton's "Melton Meadows", "Beyond", "Recessional", "Woods and Rushes", "Fleeting Far", and "Niagara", are now part of the National Media Museum's Royal Photographic Society collection. "Fleeting Shadows" is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collections.
ALFRED HORSLEY HINTON
SALT MARSHES
REQUIEM
MELTON MEADOWS
NIAGARA
ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Born: 1st January 1864, Hoboken, New Jersey, United States
Died: 13th July 1946, Manhattan, New York, United States
Alfred Stieglitz Hon.FRPS was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S. He was married to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
EARLY INTEREST IN PHOTOGRAPHY
German artists Adolf von Menzel and Wilhelm Hasemann were his friends. He bought his first camera and traveled through the European countryside, taking photographs of landscapes and peasants in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. Photography, he later wrote, "fascinated me, first as a toy, then as a passion, then as an obsession".
In 1884, his parents returned to America, but 20-year-old Stieglitz remained in Germany and collected books on photography and photographers in Europe and the U.S. Through his self-study, he saw photography as an art form. In 1887, he wrote his very first article, "A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany", for the new magazine The Amateur Photographer. He then wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany.
He won first place for his photography, The Last Joke, Bellagio, in 1887 from Amateur Photographer. The next year he won both first and second prizes in the same competition, and his reputation began to spread as several German and British photographic magazines published his work.
THE LAST JOKE, BELLAGIO, 1887
In 1890, his sister Flora died while giving birth, and Stieglitz returned to New York.
NEW YORK AND THE CAMERA CLUB (1891–1901)
Stieglitz considered himself an artist, but he refused to sell his photographs. His father purchased a small photography business for him so that he could earn a living in his chosen profession. Because he demanded high quality images and paid his employee high wages, the Photochrome Engraving Company rarely made a profit. He regularly wrote for The American Amateur Photographer magazine. He won awards for his photographs at exhibitions, including the joint exhibition of the Boston Camera Club, Photographic Society of Philadelphia and the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York.
In late 1892, Stieglitz bought his first hand-held camera, a Folmer and Schwing 4×5 plate film camera, which he used to take two of his best known images, Winter, Fifth Avenue and The Terminal. Prior to that he used an 8×10 plate film camera that required a tripod.
Stieglitz gained a reputation for his photography and his magazine articles about how photography is a form of art. In the spring of 1893, he became co-editor of The American Amateur Photographer. In order to avoid the appearance of bias in his opinions and because Photochrome was now printing the photogravures for the magazine, Stieglitz refused to draw a salary. He wrote most of the articles and reviews in the magazine, and was known for both his technical and his critical content.
On November 16th, 1893, the 29-year-old Stieglitz married 20-year-old Emmeline Obermeyer, the sister of his close friend and business associate Joe Obermeyer and granddaughter of brewer Samuel Liebmann. They were married in New York City. Stieglitz later wrote that he did not love Emmy, as she was commonly known, when they were married and that their marriage was not consummated for at least a year. Daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, she had inherited money from her father. Stieglitz came to regret his decision to marry Emmy, as she did not share his artistic and cultural interests. Stieglitz biographer Richard Whelan summed up their relationship by saying Stieglitz "resented her bitterly for not becoming his twin". Throughout his life Stieglitz maintained a fetish for younger women.
In early 1894, Stieglitz and his wife took a delayed honeymoon to France, Italy and Switzerland. Stieglitz photographed extensively on the trip, producing some of his early famous images such as A Venetian Canal, The Net Mender and A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris. While in Paris, Stieglitz met French photographer Robert Demachy, who became a lifelong correspondent and colleague. In London, Stieglitz met The Linked Ring founders George Davison and Alfred Horsley Hinton, both of whom remained his friends and colleagues throughout much of his life.
Later in the year, after his return, Stieglitz was unanimously elected as one of the first two American members of The Linked Ring. Stieglitz saw this recognition as the impetus he needed to step up his cause of promoting artistic photography in the United States. At the time there were two photographic clubs in New York, the Society of Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera Club. Stieglitz resigned from his position at the Photochrome Company and as editor of American Amateur Photographer and spent most of 1895 negotiating a merger of the two clubs.
In May 1896, the two organizations joined to form The Camera Club of New York. Although offered the organization's presidency, he became vice-president. He developed programs for the club and was involved in all aspects of the organization. He told journalist Theodore Dreiser he wanted to "make the club so large, its labors so distinguished and its authority so final that [it] may satisfactorily use its great prestige to compel recognition for the individual artists without and within its walls".
Stieglitz turned the Camera Club's current newsletter into a magazine, Camera Notes, and was given full control over the new publication. Its first issue was published in July 1897. It was soon considered the finest photographic magazine in the world. Over the next four years Stieglitz used Camera Notes to champion his belief in photography as an art form by including articles on art and aesthetics next to prints by some of the leading American and European photographers. Critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote "it seemed to me that artistic photography, the Camera Club and Alfred Stieglitz were only three names for one and the same thing".
He also continued to take his own photographs. Late in 1897, he hand-pulled the photogravures for a first portfolio of his own work, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies. He continued to exhibit in shows in Europe and the U.S., and by 1898 his gained a solid reputation as a photographer. He was paid $75 (equivalent to $2,259 in 2018) for his favorite print, Winter – Fifth Avenue. Ten of Stieglitz's prints were selected that year for the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, where he met and then became friends of Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White.
On September 27th, 1898, Stieglitz's daughter, Katherine "Kitty", was born. Using Emmy's inheritance, the couple hired a governess, cook and a chambermaid. Stieglitz worked at the same pace as before the birth of his daughter, and as a result, the couple predominantly lived separate lives under the same roof.
In November 1898, a group of photographers in Munich, Germany, mounted an exhibit of their work in conjunction with a show of graphic prints from artists that included Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. They called themselves the "Secessionists", a term that Stieglitz latched onto for both its artistic and its social meanings. Four years later, he used this same name for a newly formed group of pictorial photographers that he organized in New York.
In May 1899, Stieglitz was given a one-man exhibition, consisting of eighty-seven prints, at the Camera Club. The strain of preparing for this show, coupled with the continuing efforts to produce Camera Notes, took a toll on Stieglitz's health. To lessen his burden he brought in his friends Joseph Keiley and Dallet Fugeut, neither of whom were members of the Camera Club, as associate editors of Camera Notes. Upset by this intrusion from outsiders, not to mention their own diminishing presence in the Club's publication, many of the older members of the Club began to actively campaign against Stieglitz's editorial authority. Stieglitz spent most of 1900 finding ways to outmaneuver these efforts, embroiling him in protracted administrative battles.
One of the few highlights of that year was Stieglitz's introduction to a new photographer, Edward Steichen, at the First Chicago Photographic Salon. Steichen, originally a painter, he brought many of his artistic instincts to photography. The two became good friends and colleagues.
Due to the continued strain of managing the Camera Club, by the following year he collapsed in the first of several mental breakdowns. He spent much of the summer at the family's Lake George home, Oaklawn, recuperating. When he returned to New York, he announced his resignation as editor of Camera Notes.
THE PHOTO-SECESSION AND CAMERA WORK (1902–1907)
Photographer Eva Watson-Schütze urged him to establish an exhibition that would be judged solely by photographers who, unlike painters and other artists, knew about photography and its technical characteristics. In December 1901, he was invited by Charles DeKay of the National Arts Club to put together an exhibition in which Stieglitz would have "full power to follow his own inclinations". Within two months Stieglitz had assembled a collection of prints from a close circle of his friends, which, in homage to the Munich photographers, he called the Photo-Secession.
We are searching for the ultimate truth... We believe that if only people are taught to appreciate the beautiful side of their daily existence, to be aware of all the beauty which constantly surrounds them, they must gradually approach this ideal. For beauty is the ultimate truth, and truth means freedom".
Stieglitz was not only declaring a secession from the general artistic restrictions of the era, but specifically from the official oversight of the Camera Club. The show opened at the Arts Club in early March 1902, and it was an immediate success.
He began formulating a plan to publish a completely independent magazine of pictorial photography to carry forth the artistic standards of the Photo-Secessionist. By July, he had fully resigned as editor of Camera Notes, and one month later he published a prospectus for a new journal he called Camera Work. He was determined it would be "the best and most sumptuous of photographic publications". The first issue was printed four months later, in December 1902, and like all of the subsequent issues it contained beautiful hand-pulled photogravures, critical writings on photography, aesthetics and art, and reviews and commentaries on photographers and exhibitions. Camera Work was "the first photographic journal to be visual in focus".
Stieglitz was a perfectionist, and it showed in every aspect of Camera Work. He advanced the art of photogravure printing by demanding unprecedentedly high standards for the prints in Camera Work. The visual quality of the gravures was so high that when a set of prints failed to arrive for a Photo-Secession exhibition in Brussels, a selection of gravures from the magazine was hung instead. Most viewers assumed they were looking at the original photographs.
Throughout 1903, Stieglitz published Camera Work and worked to exhibit his own work and that of the Photo-Secessionists while dealing with the stresses of his home life. Luxembourgish American photographer, Edward Steichen, who later would curate the landmark exhibit The Family of Man, was the most frequently featured photographer in the magazine. Fuguet, Keiley, and Strauss, Stieglitz’s three associate editors at Camera Notes, he brought with him to Camera Work. Later, he said that he alone individually wrapped and mailed some 35,000 copies of Camera Work over the course of its publication.v
By 1904, Stieglitz was again mentally and physically exhausted and decided to take his family to Europe in May. He planned a grueling schedule of exhibitions, meetings and excursions and collapsed almost upon arrival in Berlin, where he spent more than a month recuperating. He spent much of the rest of 1904 photographing Germany while his family visited their relations there. On his way back to the U.S. Stieglitz stopped in London and met with leaders of the Linked Ring but was unable to convince them to set up a chapter of their organization in America (with Stieglitz as the director).
On November 25, 1905, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession" opened on Fifth Avenue with one hundred prints by thirty-nine photographers. Edward Steichen had recommended and encouraged Stieglitz, on his return from Europe, to lease out three rooms across from Steichen's apartment that the pair felt would be perfect to exhibit photography. The gallery became an instant success, with almost fifteen thousand visitors during its first season and, more importantly, print sales that totaled nearly $2,800. Work by his friend Steichen, who had an apartment in the same building, accounted for more than half of those sales.
Stieglitz continued to focus his efforts on photography, at the expense of his family. Emmy, who hoped she would one day earn Stieglitz's love, continued giving him an allowance from her inheritance.
In the October 1906 issue of Camera Work, his friend Joseph Keiley said: "Today in America the real battle for which the Photo-Secession was established has been accomplished – the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression".
Two months later the 42 year-old Stieglitz met 28 year-old artist Pamela Colman Smith, who wished to have her drawings and watercolors shown at his gallery. He decided to show her work because he thought it would be "highly instructive to compare drawings and photographs in order to judge photography's possibilities and limitations". Her show opened in January 1907, with far more visitors to the gallery than any of the previous photography shows, and soon all of her exhibited works were sold. Stieglitz, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the show, took photographs of her art work and issued a separate portfolio of his platinum prints of her work.
THE STEERAGE, 291 AND MODERN ART (1907–1916)
In the late spring of 1907, Stieglitz collaborated on a series of photographic experiments with his friend Clarence H. White. They took several dozen photographs of two clothed and nude models and printed a selection using unusual techniques, including toning, waxing and drawing on platinum prints. According to Stieglitz, it overcame "the impossibility of the camera to do certain things".
He made less than $400 for the year due to declining Camera Work subscriptions and the gallery's low profit margin. For years, Emmy had maintained an extravagant lifestyle that included a full-time governess for Kitty and expensive European vacations. In spite of her father's concerns about his growing financial problems, the Stieglitz family and their governess once again sailed across the Atlantic.
While on his way to Europe, Stieglitz took what is recognized not only as his signature image but also as one of the most important photographs of the 20th century. Aiming his camera at the lower class passengers in the bow of the ship, he captured a scene he titled The Steerage. He did not publish or exhibit it for four years.
While in Europe, Stieglitz saw the first commercial demonstration of the Autochrome Lumière color photography process, and soon he was experimenting with it in Paris with Steichen, Frank Eugene and Alvin Langdon Coburn. He took three of Steichen's Autochromes with him to Munich in order to have four-color reproductions made for insertion into a future issue of Camera Work.v
He was asked to resign from the Camera Club, but due to protests by other members he was reinstated as a life member. Just after he presented a groundbreaking show of Auguste Rodin's drawings, his financial problems forced him to close the Little Galleries for a brief period, until February 1908, when it was reopened under the new name "291".
Stieglitz deliberately interspersed exhibitions of what he knew would be controversial art, such as Rodin's sexually explicit drawings, with what Steichen called "understandable art", and with photographs. The intention was to "set up a dialog that would enable 291 visitors to see, discuss and ponder the differences and similarities between artists of all ranks and types: between painters, draftsmen, sculptors and photographers; between European and American artists; between older or more established figures and younger, newer practitioners". During this same period the National Arts Club mounted a "Special Exhibition of Contemporary Art" that included photographs by Stieglitz, Steichen, Käsebier and White along with paintings by Mary Cassatt, William Glackens, Robert Henri, James McNeill Whistler and others. This is thought to have been the first major show in the U.S. in which photographers were given equal ranking with painters.
For most of 1908 and 1909, Stieglitz spent his time creating shows at 291 and publishing Camera Work. There were no photographs taken during this period that appear in the definitive catalog of his work, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set.
In May 1909, Stieglitz's father Edward died, and in his will he left his son the then significant sum of $10,000 (equivalent to $278,852 in 2018). Stieglitz used this new infusion of cash to keep his gallery and Camera Work in business for the next several years.
During this period, Stieglitz met Marius de Zayas, an energetic and charismatic artist from Mexico, who became one of his closest colleagues, assisting both with shows at the gallery and with introducing Stieglitz to new artists in Europe. As Stieglitz's reputation as a promoter of European modern art increased, he soon was approached by several new American artists hoping to have their works shown. Stieglitz was intrigued by their modern vision, within months Alfred Maurer, John Marin and Marsden Hartley all had their works hanging on the walls of 291.
In 1910, Stieglitz was invited by the director of the Albright Art Gallery to organize a major show of the best of contemporary photography. Although an announcement of an open competition for the show was printed in Camera Work, the fact that Stieglitz would be in charge of it generated a new round of attacks against him. An editorial in American Photography magazine claimed that Stieglitz could no longer "perceive the value of photographic work of artistic merit which does not conform to a particular style which is so characteristic of all exhibitions under his auspices. Half a generation ago this school [the Photo-Secession] was progressive, and far in advance of its time. Today it is not progressing, but is a reactionary force of the most dangerous type".
Stieglitz wrote to fellow photographer George Seeley "The reputation, not only of the Photo-Secession, but of photography is at stake, and I intend to muster all the forces available to win out for us". The exhibition opened in October with more than 600 photographs. Critics generally praised the beautiful aesthetic and technical qualities of the works. However, his critics found that the vast majority of the prints in the show were from the same photographers Stieglitz had known for years and whose works he had exhibited at 291. More than five hundred of the prints came from only thirty-seven photographers, including Steichen, Coburn, Seeley, White, F. Holland Day, and Stieglitz himself.
In the January 1911 edition of Camera Work, Stieglitz, dismissive of what he perceived as commercialism, reprinted a review of the Buffalo show with disparaging words about White and Käsebier's photos. White never forgave Stieglitz. He started his own school of photography, and Käsebier and White co-founded the "Pictorial Photographers of America".
Throughout 1911 and early 1912, Stieglitz organized ground-breaking modern art exhibits at 291 and promoted new art along with photography in the pages of Camera Work. By the summer of 1912, he was so enthralled with non-photographic art that he published an issue of Camera Work (August 1912) devoted solely to Matisse and Picasso.
In late 1912, painters Walter Pach, Arthur B. Davies and Walt Kuhn organized a modern art show, and Stieglitz lent a few modern art pieces from 291 to the show. He also agreed to be listed as an honorary vice-president of the exhibition along with Claude Monet, Odilon Redon, Mabel Dodge and Isabella Stewart Gardner. In February 1913, the watershed Armory Show opened in New York, and soon modern art was a major topic of discussion throughout the city. He saw the popularity of the show as a vindication of the work that he had been sponsoring at 291 for the past five years. He mounted an exhibition of his own photographs at 291 to run at the same time as the Armory Show. He later wrote that allowing people to see both photographs and modern paintings at the same time "afforded the best opportunity to the student and public for a clearer understanding of the place and purpose of the two media".
In January 1914, his closest friend and coworker Joseph Keiley died, which left him distraught for many weeks. He was also troubled by the outbreak of World War I for several reasons. He was concerned about the safety of family and friends in Germany. He needed to find a new printer for the photogravures for Camera Work, which had been printed in Germany for many years. The war caused a significant downturn in the American economy and art became a luxury for many people. By the end of the year, Stieglitz was struggling to keep both 291 and Camera Work alive. He published the April issue of Camera Work in October, but it would be more than a year before he had the time and resources to publish the next issue.
In the meantime Stieglitz's friends de Zayas, Paul de Haviland, and Agnes Meyer convinced him that the solution to his problems was to take on a totally new project, something that would re-engage him in his interests. He published a new journal, called 291 after his gallery, that intended to be the epitome of avant-garde culture. While it was an aesthetic triumph, it was a financial disaster and ceased publication after twelve issues.
During this period, Stieglitz became increasingly intrigued with a more modern visual aesthetics for photography. He became aware of what was going on in avant-garde painting and sculpture and found that pictorialism no longer represented the future, it was the past. He was influenced in part by painter Charles Sheeler and by photographer Paul Strand. In 1915, Strand, who had been coming to see shows at 291 for many years, introduced Stieglitz to a new photographic vision that was embodied by the bold lines of everyday forms. Stieglitz was one of the first to see the beauty and grace of Strand's style, and he gave Strand a major exhibit at 291. He also devoted almost the entire last issue of Camera Work to his photographs.
In January 1916, Stieglitz was shown a portfolio of charcoal drawings by a young artist named Georgia O'Keeffe. Stieglitz was so taken by her art that without meeting O'Keeffe or even getting her permission to show her works he made plans to exhibit her work at 291. The first that O'Keeffe heard about any of this was from another friend who saw her drawings in the gallery in late May of that year. She finally met Stieglitz after going to 291 and chastising him for showing her work without her permission.
Soon thereafter O'Keeffe met Paul Strand, and for several months she and Strand exchanged increasingly romantic letters. When Strand told his friend Stieglitz about his new yearning, Stieglitz responded by telling Strand about his own infatuation with O'Keeffe. Gradually Strand's interest waned, and Stieglitz's escalated. By the summer of 1917 he and O'Keeffe were writing each other "their most private and complicated thoughts", and it was clear that something very intense was developing.
The year 1917 marked the end of an era in Stieglitz's life and the beginning of another. In part because of changing aesthetics, the changing times brought on by the war and because of his growing relationship with O'Keeffe, he no longer had the interest or the resources to continue what he had been doing for the past decade. Within the period of a few months, he disbanded what was left of the Photo-Secession, ceased publishing Camera Work and closed the doors of 291. It was also clear to him that his marriage to Emmy was over. He had finally found "his twin", and nothing would stand in his way of the relationship he had wanted all of his life.
O'KEEFFE AND MODERN ART (1918–1924)
In early June 1918, O'Keeffe moved to New York from Texas after Stieglitz promised he would provide her with a quiet studio where she could paint. Within a month he took the first of many nude photographs of her at his family's apartment while his wife Emmy was away, but she returned while their session was still in progress. She had suspected something was going on between the two for a while, and told him to stop seeing her or get out. Stieglitz left and immediately found a place in the city where he and O'Keeffe could live together. They slept separately for more than two weeks. By the end of July they were in the same bed together, and by mid-August when they visited Oaklawn "they were like two teenagers in love. Several times a day they would run up the stairs to their bedroom, so eager to make love that they would start taking their clothes off as they ran".
Once he was out of their apartment Emmy had a change of heart. Due to the legal delays caused by Emmy and her brothers, it would be six more years before the divorce was finalized. During this period Stieglitz and O'Keeffe continued to live together, although she would go off on her own from time to time to create art. Stieglitz used their times apart to concentrate on his photography and promotion of modern art.
O'Keeffe was the muse Stieglitz had always wanted. He photographed O'Keeffe obsessively between 1918 and 1925 in what was the most prolific period in his entire life. During this period he produced more than 350 mounted prints of O'Keeffe that portrayed a wide range of her character, moods and beauty. He shot many close-up studies of parts of her body, especially her hands either isolated by themselves or near her face or hair. O'Keeffe biographer Roxanna Robinson states that her "personality was crucial to these photographs; it was this, as much as her body, that Stieglitz was recording".
In 1920, Stieglitz was invited by Mitchell Kennerly of the Anderson Galleries in New York to put together a major exhibition of his photographs. In early 1921, he hung the first one-man exhibit of his photographs since 1913. Of the 146 prints he put on view, only 17 had been seen before. Forty-six were of O'Keeffe, including many nudes, but she was not identified as the model on any of the prints. It was in the catalog for this show that Stieglitz made his famous declaration: "I was born in Hoboken. I am an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession". What is less known is that he conditioned this statement by following it with these words:
PLEASE NOTE: In the above STATEMENT the following, fast becoming "obsolete", terms do not appear: ART, SCIENCE, BEAUTY, RELIGION, every ISM, ABSTRACTION, FORM, PLASTICITY, OBJECTIVITY, SUBJECTIVITY, OLD MASTERS, MODERN ART, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AESTHETICS, PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, DEMOCRACY, CEZANNE, "291", PROHIBITION. The term TRUTH did creep in but it may be kicked out by any one.
In 1922, Stieglitz organized a large show of John Marin's paintings and etching at the Anderson Galleries, followed by a huge auction of nearly two hundred paintings by more than forty American artists, including O'Keeffe. Energized by this activity, he began one of his most creative and unusual undertakings – photographing a series of cloud studies simply for their form and beauty. He said:
I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life – to show that (the success of) my photographs (was) not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone.
By late summer he had created a series he called "Music – A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs". Over the next twelve years he would take hundreds of photographs of clouds without any reference points of location or direction. These are generally recognized as the first intentionally abstract photographs, and they remain some of his most powerful photographs. He would come refer to these photographs as Equivalents.
Stieglitz's mother Hedwig died in November 1922, and as he did with his father he buried his grief in his work. He spent time with Paul Strand and his new wife Rebecca (Beck), reviewed the work of another newcomer named Edward Weston and began organizing a new show of O'Keeffe's work. Her show opened in early 1923, and Stieglitz spent much of the spring marketing her work. Eventually twenty of her paintings sold for more than $3,000. In the summer, O'Keeffe once again took off for the seclusion of the Southwest, and for a while Stieglitz was alone with Beck Strand at Lake George. He took a series of nude photos of her, and soon he became infatuated with her. They had a brief physical affair before O'Keeffe returned in the fall. O'Keeffe could tell what had happened, but since she did not see Stieglitz's new lover as a serious threat to their relationship she let things pass. Six years later she would have her own affair with Beck Strand in New Mexico.
In 1924, Stieglitz's divorce was finally approved by a judge, and within four months he and O'Keeffe married in a small, private ceremony at Marin's house. They went home without a reception or honeymoon. O'Keeffe said later that they married in order to help soothe the troubles of Stieglitz's daughter Kitty, who at that time was being treated in a sanatorium for depression and hallucinations. For the rest of their lives together, their relationship was, as biographer Benita Eisler characterized it, "a collusion ... a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O'Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union".
In the coming years O'Keeffe would spend much of her time painting in New Mexico, while Stieglitz rarely left New York except for summers at Lake George. O'Keeffe later said "Stieglitz was a hypochondriac and couldn't be more than 50 miles from a doctor".
At the end of 1924, Stieglitz donated 27 photographs to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was the first time a major museum included photographs in its permanent collection. In 1924 he was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal for advancing photography and received an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
THE INTIMATE GALLERY AND AN AMERICAN PLACE (1925–1937)
In 1925, Stieglitz was invited by the Anderson Galleries to put together one of the largest exhibitions of American art, entitled Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, and Things, Recent and Never Before Publicly Shown by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Only one small painting by O'Keeffe was sold during the three-week exhibit.
Soon after, Stieglitz was offered the continued use of one of the rooms at the Anderson Galleries, which he used for a series of exhibitions by some of the same artists in the Seven Americans show. In December 1925, he opened his new gallery, publicly called "The Intimate Gallery" but referred to by Stieglitz as "The Room" because of its small size. Over the next four years he put together sixteen shows of works by Marin, Dove, Hartley, O'Keeffe and Strand, along with individual exhibits by Gaston Lachaise, Oscar Bluemner and Francis Picabia. During this time Stieglitz cultivated a relationship with influential new art collector Duncan Phillips, who purchased several works through The Intimate Gallery.
In 1927, Stieglitz became infatuated with the 22 year-old Dorothy Norman, who then volunteered at the gallery and they fell in love. Norman was married and had a child, but she came to the gallery almost every day.
O'Keeffe accepted an offer by Mabel Dodge to come to New Mexico for the summer. Stieglitz took advantage of her time away to begin photographing Norman, and he began teaching her the technical aspects of printing as well. When Norman had a second child she missed only about two months before returning to the gallery on a regular basis. Within a short time they became lovers, but even after their physical affair diminished a few years later, they continued to work together whenever O'Keeffe was not around until Stieglitz died in 1946.
In early 1929, Stieglitz was told that the building that housed the Room would be torn down later in the year. After a last show of Demuth's work in May, he retreated to Lake George for the summer, exhausted and depressed. The Strands raised nearly sixteen thousand dollars for a new gallery for Stieglitz, who reacted harshly, saying it was time for "young ones" to do some of the work he had been shouldering for so many years. Although Stieglitz eventually apologized and accepted their generosity, the incident marked the beginning of the end of their long and close relationship.
In the late fall, Stieglitz returned to New York. On December 15th, two weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday, he opened, "An American Place", the largest gallery he had ever managed. It had the first darkroom he had in the city. Previously he had borrowed other darkrooms or worked only when he was at Lake George. He continued showing group or individual shows of his friends Marin, Demuth, Hartley, Dove and Strand for the next sixteen years. O'Keeffe received at least one major exhibition each year. He fiercely controlled access to her works and incessantly promoted her even when critics gave her less than favorable reviews. Often during this time they would only see each other during the summer, when it was too hot in her New Mexico home, but they wrote to each other almost weekly with the fervor of soul mates.
In 1932, Stieglitz mounted a forty-year retrospective of 127 of his works at The Place. He included all of his most famous photographs, but he also purposely chose to include recent photos of O'Keeffe, who, because of her years in the Southwest sun, looked older than her forty-five years, next to portraits of his young lover Norman. It was one of the few times he acted spitefully to O'Keeffe in public, and it might have been as a result of their increasingly intense arguments in private about his control over her art.
Later that year he mounted a show of O'Keeffe's works next to some amateurish paintings on glass by Becky Strand. He did not publish a catalog of the show, which the Strands took as an insult. Paul Strand never forgave Stieglitz. He said "The day I walked into the Photo-Secession 291 [sic] in 1907 was a great moment in my life… but the day I walked out of An American Place in 1932 was not less good. It was fresh air and personal liberation from something that had become, for me at least, second-rate, corrupt and meaningless".
In 1936, Stieglitz returned briefly to his photographic roots by mounting one of the first exhibitions by Ansel Adams in New York City. The show was successful and David McAlpin bought eight Adams photos. He also put on one of the first shows of Eliot Porter's work two years later. Stieglitz, considered the "godfather of modern photography", encouraged Todd Webb to develop his own style and immerse himself in the medium.
The next year the Cleveland Museum of Art mounted the first major exhibition of Stieglitz's work outside of his own galleries, but he worked himself into exhaustion making sure that each print was perfect. O'Keeffe spent most of the year in New Mexico.
LAST YEARS (1938–1946)
In early 1938, Stieglitz suffered a serious heart attack, one of six coronary or angina attacks that would strike him over the next eight years, each of which left him increasingly weakened. During his absences, Dorothy Norman managed the gallery. O'Keeffe remained in her Southwest home from spring to fall of this period.
In the summer of 1946, Stieglitz suffered a fatal stroke and went into a coma. O'Keeffe returned to New York and found Dorothy Norman was in his hospital room. She left and O'Keeffe was with him when he died. According to his wishes, a simple funeral was attended by twenty of his closest friends and family members. Stieglitz was cremated, and, with his niece Elizabeth Davidson, O'Keeffe took his ashes to Lake George and "put him where he could hear the water". The day after the funeral, O'Keeffe took control of An American Place.
LEFT - STIEGLITZ IN 1902 BY GERTRUDE KÄSEBIER
MIDDLE - SELF PORTRAIT 1886
RIGHT - SELF PORTRAIT 1907
THE TERMINAL (1892) by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
WINTER – FIFTH AVENUE (1893)
by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
VENETIAN CANAL (1894)
by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
SPRING SHOWERS, THE COACH (1902)
by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
GOING TO THE START (1905)
by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
THE STEERAGE
by ALFRED STIEGLITZ
KATHERINE STIEGLITZ
AUTOCHROME, ca. 1910
GROUP OF ARTISTS IN 1912,
Left to Right: PAUL HAVILAND, ABRAHAM WALKOWITZ, KATHARINE RHOADES,
STIEGLITZ'S FIRST WIFE EMILY, AGNES MEYER, ALFRED STIEGLITZ,
JOHN BARRETT KERFOOT, JOHN MARIN
AUTOCHROME PORTRAIT OF
STIEGLITZ AND HIS WIFE EMILY
ca. 1915
while attributed to Stieglitz, image may well be
the work of Edward Steichen or Frank Eugene.
STIEGLITZ PORTRAIT OF GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
STIEGLITZ IN 1935, PHOTOGRAPHED BY CARL VAN VECHTEN
ELLEN KOENIGER, LAKE GEORGE
ELLEN KOENIGER, LAKE GEORGE
RUDOLF EICKEMEYER Jr.
Born: 7th August 1862, Yonkers, New York, United States
Died: 25th April 1932, Yonkers, New York, United States
Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr. was an American pictorialist photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was one of the first Americans to be admitted to the Linked Ring, and his photographs won dozens of medals at exhibitions around the world in the 1890s and early 1900s. He was famous among his contemporaries for his portraits of high-society women, most notably model and singer Evelyn Nesbit. Eickemeyer's best-known photographs are now part of the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.
Eickemeyer was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1862. Though widely traveled, he would live in Yonkers his entire life. Eickemeyer's father had fled to New York in the early 1850s following political upheavals in his native Bavaria, and became a noted inventor. His firm, Osterheld and Eickemeyer, invented a hat-blocking machine that revolutionized the hat industry, and made a number of advancements in electrical lighting. The younger Eickemeyer joined his father's firm as a draftsman in 1879.
Eickemeyer first became interested in photography as a means to help document his father's inventions. He purchased his first camera, an "abnormally thick" Platyscope B, on February 2, 1884, and took his first photograph, an albumen print of his sister, the following day. Immediately drawn to the camera's artistic potential, Eickemeyer considered pursuing a career as a photographer, but his father disapproved, so he continued working for his father's firm.
Eickemeyer won 11 medals at the Yonkers Photo Club's Lantern Slide Exhibition in October 1890, and over the subsequent decade, he collected over a hundred medals at exhibitions and salons around the world. After his father's death in 1895, he left his father's firm and joined the Carbon Studio in Manhattan, which specialized in portraits, and gained a reputation for photographs of high-society women. That year, he and Alfred Stieglitz became the first Americans admitted to the English pictorialist society, the Linked Ring. While Eickemeyer's work appeared in Stieglitz's Camera Notes, he was unimpressed with the rise of the Stieglitz - led Photo-Secession early in the following century. He was one of four Links who never joined the Photo-Secession, the others being F. Holland Day, Margaret Russell Foster, and C. Yarnall Abbott.
In 1900, Eickemeyer joined the New York Camera Club, and exhibited 154 frames in his first one-man show at the club. That same year, he published his first book, Down South, and was appointed art manager of the Campbell Art Studio on Fifth Avenue, with which he would remain intermittently until 1915. It was while at Campbell that Eickemeyer conducted his famous shoot of New York model Evelyn Nesbit.
Eickemeyer was awarded the gold medal for photography at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The following year, he purchased half of the photographic firm, Davis and Stanford (renamed Davis and Eickemeyer), which operated out of a studio at 246 Fifth Avenue. In 1911, Eickemeyer was commissioned by William Randolph Hearst to photograph American wives of British peerage as part of the coronation ceremonies of King George V.
Eickemeyer hosted a retrospective of his work at the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1922, and made his last submissions to the London Salon in 1926. In 1929, he donated most of his best-known photographs to the Smithsonian Institution. The following year, he served as a judge in Kodak's international photography competition alongside Thomas Edison, John J. Pershing, Richard E. Byrd, and Benito Mussolini. He died at St. John's Hospital in Yonkers in 1932. The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers has a collection of over 200 examples of Eickemeyer's photography.
PHOTOGRAPHIC WORKS
As a pictorialist, Eickemeyer believed photographs were works of art. However, he believed in producing straightforward images and using natural elements to produce artistic effects instead of using photographic techniques (such as soft focus) to imitate traditional art. He was described by photography critic Sidney Allen as the "most versatile" pictorialist of his time, and excelled in both landscapes and portraits.
In 1893, Eickemeyer's photographs, Lily Gatherer and As She Comes Down the Stairs (for which his wife, Isabelle, posed) won silver medals at the Joint Annual Exhibition in Philadelphia, and the latter won the gold medal at the Hamburg International Exhibition. In 1894, Eickemeyer won sixteen medals in ten international exhibitions, including the Royal Photographic Society Albert Medal for his Sweet Home. The following year, he won the Viceroy Gold Medal at the International Exhibition in Calcutta for his photograph, Kitten's Breakfast.
Photographer Roland Rood described Eickemeyer's portraiture photographs of women as "unexceled, frequently unequaled". His 1901 shoot of New York model Evelyn Nesbit is arguably his best-known portrait work, and included a shot of Nesbit clad in a kimono and curled up on a bear-skin rug. Other well-known women photographed by Eickemeyer include opera singer Mary Garden and actress Lillian Russell.
Eickemeyer published three photographic books: Down South (1900), The Old Farm (1901), and Winter (1903). Down South documents the lives of African American sharecroppers on an Alabama plantation, using photographs taken by Eickemeyer during various trips to Alabama during the 1890s. The Old Farm is a collection of rural images, and Winter is a collection of artistic winter images accompanied by quotes from famous authors. Eickemeyer also provided photographic illustration for books by several other authors, including In and Out of the Nursery (1900), a collection of poems written by his sister, Eva.
RUDOLF EICKEMEYER
SWEET HOME
LILY GATHERER
AS SHE COMES DOWN THE STAIRS (1894)
THE MODEL IS EICKEMEYER'S WIFE, ISABELLE
IN MY STUDIO, EVELYN NESBIT, TIRED BUTTERFLY:
EICKEMEYER'S PHOTO OF EVELYN NESBIT LYING ON A BEAR-SKIN RUG
EVELYN NESBIT – SUPER MODEL, SEX-GODDESS