Camera Work: The Complete Image Collection

Mr. Alfred Stieglitz, by Frank Eugene.

CAMERA WORK

THE COMPLETE IMAGE COLLECTION

Alfred Stieglitz

Edited by Marianne Fulton Margolis

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

and The International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the following people at the International Museum of Photography: Robert Doherty, Director, Andrew Eskind, Assistant Director, and Robert Sobieszek, Associate Curator, for their support; Gretchen Van Ness, Susan Stromei, Deborah K. Barsel and Jeff Wolin for their assistance; Christina Clarke and, in particular, James C. A. Kaufmann for patience and good humor in dealing with me and the computer; and W. Paul Rayner, co-editor of Image, and José Orraca, former Conservator, for their advice. I especially want to thank Martha E. Jenks, Director of the Archives, for her help and encouragement.

David Vance, President of the Museum Computer Network, selected the appropriate data classification for use in the computerization of the work. Alan Klotz and his graduate class provided the initial impetus for this project. Thaddeus Bukowski designed the original information forms and John Frater worked with Mr. Vance on the special problems of computerizing a manuscript.

I also appreciate the cooperation and assistance of Dorothy Norman and Jonathan Green.

For generous and valuable advice, I wish to thank Clarence Strowbridge and Thomas Baker of Dover Publications. Also, scholar, poet, writer, critic, Dr. Deba P. Patnaik always knew which of his talents to apply in times of need.

I am most grateful to my husband, Richard Margolis, without whose knowledge of photography and unceasing confidence in me this work could not have been completed.

Copyright

Copyright © 1978, 2019 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is a republication of the work originally published by Dover under the title Camera Work: A Pictorial Guide in 1978.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-83730-7

ISBN-10: 0-486-83730-0

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

83730001

www.doverpublications.com

2019

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTE ON THE CONTENTS AND GLOSSARY OF TERMS

CHRONOLOGICAL PICTURE INDEX

INDEX OF ARTISTS

INDEX OF TITLES

INDEX OF SITTERS

INTRODUCTION

In the fifty numbers of Camera Work, published between the years 1903 and 1917, there appeared some of the finest examples of photography and modernist art. Camera Work chronicled the introduction of modern European art into America—three years before the Armory show, it published plates of Rodin’s and Matisse’s drawings. It recorded public and journalistic reaction to this modern art by reprinting reviews from the newspapers. In addition, as a forum for the discussion and criticism of new work, it acted as a catalyst in the fight to have photography accepted as a medium of artistic expression. The editorial staff stated in issue number 1:

The time appearing ripe for the publication of an independent American photographic magazine devoted largely to the interests of pictorial photography, Camera Work makes its appearance as the logical outcome of the evolution of the photographic art.¹

During this evolution of photographic art, one primary question had always been whether a machine could indeed produce a work of art. Various views were expounded, and while most people felt that photography could not rival the combination of creativity and hand work found in painting, they appreciated its ability to preserve people and places and the freedom it gave painting to explore new areas.

Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1809-1893) wrote that photography’s legitimate business was "to give evidence of facts, as minutely and as impartially as, to our shame, only an unreasoning machine can give."² She stated the crux of the argument against photography as a fine art in 1857:

The power of selection and rejection, the living application of the language which lies dead in his paint-box, the marriage of his own mind with the object before him, and the offspring, half stamped with his own features, half with those of Nature, which is born of the union—whatever appertains to the free-will of the intelligent being, as opposed to the obedience of the machine,—this, and much more than this, constitutes that mystery called Art, in the elucidation of which photography can give valuable help, simply by showing what it is not.³

In an article written in 1859, Baudelaire declared that it was time for photography to return to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts—but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature.⁴ Baudelaire feared that by imitating the extreme accuracy of photography, art would fall away from its reliance on creative imagination and concern itself only with superficial reality.

But pictorial photography sought to break away from its designation as a mindless purveyor of facts and achieve control over its subject matter and mechanical shortcomings. Thus, through obvious manipulation, photographers hoped to show that they were part of the art tradition. Their first consideration was the choice of subject matter. High Art photography of the 1850s concerned itself with depicting scenes from literature, as in William Lake Price’s Don Quixote in his Study, the Bible, in Head of St. John the Baptist by O. G. Rejlander, and allegory, such as Rejlander’s Two Ways of Life. In these productions, models were dressed or undressed in accordance with the theme, with props and backgrounds also lending themselves to the illusion. Decisions about placing, draping and focusing all were made before the picture was taken. After the negative was developed, the photographer could retouch the negative to add or delete details, and could even combine negatives or paste-up prints and rephotograph them to form a new image.

Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901) argued that to admit that photographers had no control over their subjects would be to deny that the works of one photographer were better than another, which would be untrue.⁵ The method he proposed and taught was combination printing. This technique of printing several negatives by means of masks to produce one unified print allowed the photographer to arrange and select only those portions which added to the overall effect. By building an image in the darkroom not only could a photographer compensate for the film’s inability to record true tones for both sky and land simultaneously, but he could construct idealized scenes by, for instance, introducing posed studio models into a pastoral background. Natural detail was of major importance; Robinson stressed the use of proper focus for each portion of the composite picture, and taught that pictorial effect was achieved in photography with the same principles of composition used in academic painting. The photographer was instructed to learn the laws which governed the arrangement of the picture so that he would be capable of producing an agreeable presentation of forms and tones, to tell the story which is to be elucidated, and to embody the spirit of what it is intended the picture shall represent or suggest.⁶

In the 1880s, Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) passionately rebuked any kind of constructed picture, in part because the separate portions of the picture printed with separate negatives failed to allow for a center of interest. Having everything in focus tended to diffuse the power of the subject: This ‘sharp’ ideal is the childish view taken of nature by the uneducated in art matters and they call their productions true, whereas, they are just about as artistically false as can be.⁷ Not only did Emerson feel that this was not art, but he also felt that it was not natural. He believed that when one looked at a scene the subject was clear, and that other sections fell away and were thus less defined.⁸ He therefore suggested a procedure called differential focusing, also known as soft focusing (although he was careful to advise students not to abuse the technique by overdoing it). Robinson had also taught that detail was an inherent quality of photography and should be preserved. He advocated a dramatic approach to the staging of a photograph which resulted in a rather artificial look at life. R. Child Bayley later condemned mid-Victorian photography for these tendencies, claiming that able workers lost themselves in morasses of false sentiment, and swamps of elaborate theatrical unrealities.⁹ Emerson, however, whose theory of composition was based on the ability to see and choose a beautiful subject, deplored the manipulation of the negative. He wanted the photograph to be true to the way he supposed man saw. His approach was based on the scientific discoveries of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Physiological Optics, and not on a desire to make painterly photographs.

Late Victorian photographers such as Emerson had the advantage of commercially made dry plates; these enabled the photographer to develop negatives at his convenience rather than only while the emulsion was still wet. The increased sensitivity of both paper and negatives brought new aesthetic possibilities, such as a wider tonal range, and along with the faster film hand cameras were developed. The photographer was finally freed from the studio as well as the posed subject and painted backdrop. But even though photographers now had new tools that provided sharp, vibrant prints, many pictorialists who felt they were following Emerson’s advice produced out-of-focus, impressionistic images. Llewellen Morgan in The Amateur Photographer reported that little details are interesting to the scientist, but of no value to the artist.¹⁰ For all pictorialists, the primary interest lay in artistic expression of a non-documentary nature. In other words, the pictorialist used the photographic subject as a means to an end: to achieve a satisfactory result, he might emphasize a certain feature of the composition to alter its significance and meaning.

To sum up the situation when Camera Work appeared on the scene, pictorialism was synonymous with artistic and applied to a wide variety of styles; and unlike today, when the distinctions between documentary and art photography have blurred, documentary work was seen as an objective method of recording or reporting facts which did not imitate painting, and consequently could not be aesthetic.

In the early stages of photography man’s interest was captured by the camera’s ability to record facts;