Monday, April 2, 2012

Alexander Gardner

"Alexander Gardner"





"Lincoln, Cracked Glass Plate"

"Lincoln and Tad," 1865

"Lincoln and McClellan at Antietam," 1862

"Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter," July, 1863

"John Wilkes Booth," ca. 1865

"Hanging of Lincoln Conspirators," July 7, 1863

"Lewis Payne (Powel), Lincoln Conspirator"


"Group at Ranch on Clear Creek, Kansas," 1867






Alexander Gardner Biography from the Lee Gallery of Fine 19th and 20th Century Photography:

Alexander Gardner was an American photographer. He is best known for his photographs of the American Civil War and his portraits of American President Abraham Lincoln.

Alexander Gardner was born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1821. He became an apprentice silversmith jeweler at the age of fourteen. Alexander Gardner had a Calvinist upbringing and was influenced by the work of Robert Owen, Welsh socialist and father of the cooperative movement. By adulthood he desired to create a cooperative in the United States that would incorporate socialist values. In 1850, Alexander Gardner and others purchased land near Monona, Iowa, for this purpose, but Alexander Gardner never lived there, choosing to return to Scotland to raise more money. He stayed there until 1856, becoming owner and editor of the Glasgow Sentinel in 1851. Visiting The Great Exhibition in 1851 in Hyde Park, London, he saw the photography of American Mathew Brady, and thus began his interest in the subject.

Alexander Gardner and his family moved to the United States in 1856. Finding that many friends and family members at the cooperative he had helped to form were dead or dying of tuberculosis, he stayed in New York. He initiated contact with Brady and came to work for him, eventually managing Brady's Washington, D.C., gallery.

Unfortunately, the most famous of Alexander Gardner's work has been proven to be a fake. In 1961, Frederic Ray of the Civil War Times magazine compared several of Gardner's photos showing "two" dead Confederate snipers and realized that the same body has been photographed in multiple locations. Apparently, Alexander Gardner was not satisfied with the subject matter as it was presented to him and dragged the body around to create his own version of reality. Ray's analysis was expanded on by the author William Frassanito in 1975.

Abraham Lincoln became an American President in the November, 1860 election, and along with his appointment came the threat of war. Alexander Gardner, being in Washington, was well-positioned for these events, and his popularity rose as a portrait photographer, capturing the visages of soldiers leaving for war.

Brady had had the idea to photograph the Civil War. Gardner's relationship with Allan Pinkerton (who was head of an intelligence operation that would become the Secret Service) was the key to communicating Brady's ideas to Lincoln. Pinkerton recommended Alexander Gardner for the position of chief photographer under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Topographical Engineers. Following that short appointment, Alexander Gardner became a staff photographer under General George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac. At this point, Alexander Gardner's management of Brady's gallery ended. The honorary rank of captain was bestowed upon Alexander Gardner, and he photographed the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, developing photos in his traveling darkroom.

Alexander Gardner worked for the photographer Mathew Brady from 1856 to 1862. According to a New York Times review, Alexander Gardner has often had his work misattributed to Brady, and despite his considerable output, historians have tended to give Gardner less than full recognition for his documentation of the Civil War.

Lincoln dismissed McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, and Alexander Gardner's role as chief army photographer diminished. About this time, Alexander Gardner ended his working relationship with Brady, probably in part because of Brady's practice of attributing his employees' work as "Photographed by Brady". That winter, Alexander Gardner followed General Ambrose Burnside, photographing the Battle of Fredericksburg. Next, he followed General Joseph Hooker. In May 1863, Gardner and his brother James opened their own studio in Washington, D.C, hiring many of Brady's former staff. Alexander Gardner photographed the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1863) and the Siege of Petersburg (June 1864–April 1865) during this time.

He published a two-volume work: "Alexander Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War" in 1866. Each volume contained 50 hand-mounted original prints. Not all photographs were Alexander Gardner's; he credited the negative producer and the positive print printer. As the employer, Alexander Gardner owned the work produced, like any modern day studio. The sketchbook contained work by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, James F. Gibson, John Reekie, William R. Pywell, James Gardner (his brother), John Wood, George N. Barnard, David Knox and David Woodbury among others. A century later, photographic analysis suggested that Alexander Gardner had manipulated the setting of at least one of his Civil War photos by moving a soldier's corpse and weapon into more dramatic positions.

Among his photographs of Abraham Lincoln were the last to be taken of the President, four days before his assassination. He also documented Lincoln's funeral, and photographed the conspirators involved (with John Wilkes Booth) in Lincoln's assassination. Alexander Gardner was the only photographer allowed at their execution by hanging, photographs of which would later be translated into woodcuts for publication in Harper's Weekly.

Alexander Gardner was commissioned to photograph Native Americans who came to Washington to discuss treaties; and he surveyed the proposed route of the Kansas Pacific railroad to the Pacific Ocean. Many of his photos were stereoscopic. After 1871, Gardner gave up photography and helped to found an insurance company. Alexander Gardner stayed in Washington until his death. When asked about his work, he said, "It is designed to speak for itself. As mementos of the fearful struggle through which the country has just passed, it is confidently hoped that it will possess an enduring interest."

Bibliography:

Keith Davis, Jane Aspinwall, Marc Wilson, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art , The Origins of American Photography From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1839-1885.

Alexander Gardner, Gardner s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1959.

Brooks Johnson, Susan Danly, An Enduring Interest: The Photographs of Alexander Gardner, Norfolk, VA: The Chrystler Museum, 1991.

D. Mark Katz, Witness to an Era: The Life and Photographs of Alexander Gardner, New York: Viking Press, 1991.

Bob Zeller, William A. Frassanito, Catalogue of Photographic Incidents of the War From the Gallery of Alexander Gardner, Photographer to the Army of the Potomac, Corner of 7th and D Streets, Washington D.C., Tampa, FL: Center for Civil War Photography, 2003.
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Thursday, March 1, 2012

Agustí Centelles

Agustí Centelles




"Refugee Camp, Bram, France," 1939





"Mariano Vitini Behind Barricade, Barcelona," 1936

"Republican Family," 1936

 
Agustí Centelles Biography from TypicallySpanish.com:

The Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles is sometimes referred to as the Spanish Robert Capa, the legendary war photographer who left behind him in Paris when he fled Europe for the United States in 1939 what later became known as the ‘Mexican suitcase, a treasure trove of shots taken by Capa and others during the Spanish Civil War. The suitcase was in reality three cardboard boxes, which finally came to light in Mexico City after being lost for decades and were handed over in December 2007 to the New York International Photography Centre, founded by Capa’s brother, after years of negotiations.

Centelles had his own suitcase which he took with him when he fled Spain at the end of the Civil War. Its contents now form part of Spain’s historical memory as part of an extraordinary collection of 12,000 negatives and photographic plates which was recently sold to the Ministry of Culture for the sum of 700,000 € by Centelles’s children, including negatives which were discovered in a rusty biscuit tin, until then hidden from view, in their father’s laboratory just last year. The photojournalist’s heirs had received other offers, including from the Generalitat de Cataluña, and one from Sotheby’s which almost tripled the Ministry’s, but decided to accept the offer made by the state for a ‘greater diffusion’ of their father’s work. Their only condition for the sale was that the collection must remain together.

Although born in Valencia (in 1909), Agustí Centelles i Ossó moved to Barcelona at a very young age and there began his career in the profession which would later earn him the title of one of the fathers of photojournalism in Spain. He was one of the first photographers in the country to use a Leica camera, which he bought in the 1930s for the sum of 900 pesetas, a fortune at that time. The legacy now in the hands of the Spanish state is his visual testimony of the Spanish Republic, of the Civil War as an official photographer for the Republican government, and of his internment in a refugee camp in France.

Along with thousands of others, Centelles fled to France in 1939 just hours before Barcelona fell to Franco’s Nationalist forces, taking his photographs with him in a suitcase for fear that they would be used to identify people and carry out reprisals. He was to spend the next seven months in refugee camps in France, first in Argelès-sur-Mer and then in Bram, where he continued to photograph the horrors of war, sleeping with his suitcase clutched in his arms to prevent it being stolen.

He was allowed to leave the camp in September 1939 and found work in a photographic studio in Carcassonne, living there in exile until 1944 when he walked back home over the Pyrenees after the French Resistance movement he had been working with on producing false passports was arrested by the Germans. He left his precious suitcase behind for safekeeping with the French family in Carcassonne who had taken him in, telling them not to hand it over to anyone but him.

The suitcase stayed there for more than two decades, and it was not until 1976, the year after Franco died, that Centelles was able to return to Carcassone to recover the photographs he feared would have been confiscated by the Franco regime. He spent the rest of his life on restoring, copying and cataloguing each and every one of the photos which had been hidden for so many years. Agustí Centelles died in 1985 at the age of 76, the year after his work was recognised with an award from the Ministry for Culture of the Premio Nacional de Fotografía.
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Thursday, February 2, 2012

Charles Émile Joachim Constant Puyo

Puyo, photographed by Nadar





"Montmarte," 1906

"Bords de Seine," no date

"Woman Carrying Jug Down a Hill," 1924

"Tree Study," 1914

"Vengeance," 1896

"The Straw Hat," 1906

"Chant Sacrè," 1900

"Au Jardin Fleuri," 1899

"La Tapisserie," 1900


Émile Joachim Constant Puyo Biography from Wikipedia:

Émile Joachim Constant Puyo (November 12, 1857 – October 6, 1933) was a French photographer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As the leading advocate of the Pictorialist movement in France, he championed the practice of photography as an artistic medium. For most of his career, Puyo was associated with the Photo Club of Paris, serving as its president from 1921 to 1926. His photographs appeared in numerous publications worldwide, and were exhibited at various expositions in the 1900s.

Puyo was born to a prominent bourgeois family in Morlaix in 1857. His father, Edmond Puyo (1828–1916), was a painter, amateur archaeologist, and politician, who served as Mayor of Morlaix in the 1870s. His uncle, Édouard Corbière, was a best-selling author, and his cousin, Tristan Corbière, was a well-known poet. Puyo studied at the École Polytechnique before joining the French Army as an artillery officer, rising to the rank of commandant during his career, and commanding a squadron at the School of Artillery at La Fère. He served with the French Army in Algeria during the 1880s.

Puyo began drawing at a young age. Around 1882, he started using cameras to photograph his drawings. Fascinated with cameras, he began using photography to document his various travels in North Africa. By the following decade, he had become one of a growing number of photographers who believed photography was itself a form of high art, in the same manner as other art forms such as painting or sculpture. These photographers formed what became known as the Pictorialist movement.

In 1894, Puyo joined the Photo Club of Paris, which had been founded by Maurice Bacquet, and helped organize a Salon for the club. He wrote several articles for the club's Bulletin, establishing himself as the chief theoretician of the French Pictorialist movement. In 1896, he published his first book, Notes sur la Photographie Artistique, which explained how photography could be used to create works of art.

Following his retirement from the military in 1902, Puyo was able to devote himself more fully to photography. In an effort to achieve greater artistic effects, Puyo and the Photo Club experimented with gum bichromate and oil pigment processes, and developed special soft-focus lenses that achieved impressionistic effects. Puyo wrote or co-wrote several books for the club during this period describing these processes in detail.

After World War I, the decline of Pictorialism in favor of straight, unmanipulated photographs was a source of continuing frustration for Puyo. As president of the Photo Club during the 1920s, he remained passionately dedicated to the Pictorial style.

Puyo retired as Photo Club president in 1926, and returned to his home in Morlaix. He died in 1933, and is interred with his family at the Cemetière Saint-Martin-du-Morlaix.

Puyo believed that for a photograph to be considered art, it must create a beauty independent of the subject, and thus believed art photographers should be more concerned with beauty rather than fact. He considered the manipulation of a photograph to be an expression of individuality, and believed that manipulation was necessary to eliminate the sense that the photograph was produced by an unemotional machine.

Common themes in Puyo's photographs include landscapes, female figures in various poses, and various aspects of late 19th-century Parisian life. He was greatly influenced by artistic movements of the day, especially Impressionism. One of Puyo's better known works, “Montmartre,” was inspired by Edvard Munch's “Rue Lafayette.” Art Nouveau patterns appear in many of Puyo's photographs of women.

Puyo's work has been exhibited at museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Centre Atlantique de la Photographie in Brest. A large number of Puyo's photographs are on display at the Morlaix Museum, founded by his father in the 1870s.
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Sunday, January 1, 2012

Andrea Modica

"Andrea Modica" by Francesco Nonino



From "Fountain" Project

From "Fountain" Project

From "Treadwell" Project

From "Italy" Project

From "Italy" Project

From "Human" Project

From "Minor League" Project

From "Minor League" Project

From "Portrait" Project

From "Portrait" Project

From "Still Life" Project


Many thanks to Andrea Modica for her kind cooperation, and for allowing me to feature her work here on my blog.


Andrea Modica Biography:

For almost fifteen years, Andrea Modica photographed a family in her rural town in upstate New York. It is here, through a young girl named Barbara and her extended family, that Modica created her work from the series "Treadwell". Transforming reality into fantasy, Modica creates narratives that seem to have no beginning or end, yet present endless scenarios.

In a fictitious town called Treadwell, Barbara and her friends pose for the photographer, who creates images with an 8" x 10" view camera. Like Faulkner's Jefferson County or Cheever's Shady Hill, Modica's Treadwell is a place where anything is possible. Through intense collaboration and trust, events unfold before our eyes, questioning our sense of reality.

Andrea Modica is one of photography's most important image-makers. Her work has been exhibited across the country and is in many collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A MFA graduate of Yale University, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prestigious awards. Andrea's work has been featured in many magazines, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and American Photo to name a few. Her five books, including "Minor League" and "Treadwell" have met with critical acclaim. Andrea teaches at the International Center for Photography, the Woodstock Photography Workshops and the Santa Fe Workshops. She currently teaches at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
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Friday, December 2, 2011

Evelyn Hofer

Evelyn Hofer by Andreas Pauly






"Anna and Emma, Dublin," 1966

"Gravediggers, Dublin," 1966

"Paris," 1967

"Phoenic Park on a Sunday, Dublin," 1966

"Eighth Street, Washington, D.C.," 1965

"Washington, D.C.," 1965

"Miranda, London," 1980



Many thanks to Andreas Pauly and the Evelyn Hofer Estate for their kind cooperation, and for allowing to feature Ms. Hofer's work here on my blog.


Evelyn Hofer Obituary by William Grimes for the New York Times, published November 11, 2009:

Evelyn Hofer, a photographer whose searching, exactingly composed portraits imparted a grave serenity to her human and architectural subjects and who collaborated on a renowned series of travel books with eminent writers in the 1950s and 1960s, died on Nov. 2 in Mexico City. She was 87 and lived in Mexico City.

The cause was a stroke, said Andreas Pauly, her longtime assistant and the heir to her photographic estate.

Working with a cumbersome four- by five-inch viewfinder camera, Ms. Hofer (pronounced HOE-fer) photographed her subjects on location but favored carefully composed scenes with a still, timeless aura.

A flawless technician, much sought after as a teacher by younger photographers, she searched, as she put it, for an ''inside value, some interior respect'' in the people she photographed, nearly always in black and white. Her architectural photographs, too, seemed to eliminate the distractions of the here and now.

The art critic Hilton Kramer, one of Ms. Hofer's champions, praised her powers of  ''pure observation'' and her dedication to form. ''Somehow she manages to make of the visual rhythms of Manhattan architecture, both new and old, something as distant from the vulgarities of the workaday world as a design by Palladio -- and something quite as elegant,'' he wrote in a review of her photographs in ''Manhattan Now,'' a 1974 exhibition at the New-York Historical Society.

Ms. Hofer's studied approach -- the gravity and stasis of her portraits owed much to the German photographer August Sander -- put her at odds with the candid, on-the-fly photography of contemporaries like Robert Frank. She remained unrecognized by most critics and curators, and never received a museum show in the United States. In 1994 the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented a retrospective of her work, ''The Universal Eye.''

Her stock was higher with writers, many of whom were keen to collaborate with her, as Mary McCarthy, V. S. Pritchett and James (later Jan) Morris did in several highly regarded literary portraits of Florence, London, New York, Dublin and Spain.

''She has an extraordinary eye for subtle differences in the quality of light and in the details of texture and shape, whether her subject is the Duomo in Florence or two young waiters in a Dublin restaurant, and she has extraordinary patience, too, in capturing from every subject the exact image she intends to wrest from it,'' Mr. Kramer wrote in 1977, reviewing an exhibition at the Witkin Gallery in Manhattan. ''She is, in my opinion, one of the living masters of her medium.''

Evelyn Elvira Hofer was born on Jan. 21, 1922, in comfortable circumstances in Marburg, Germany, where her father was in the pharmaceuticals business. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, her fervently anti-Nazi father took the family to Geneva and later Madrid.

Evelyn intended to become a concert pianist and applied to the Paris Conservatory but failed to gain entrance. After abandoning the idea of a musical career, she apprenticed to photographers in Zurich and Basel. She later took private lessons in Zurich with Hans Finsler, who was known for ''object photography.''

After Franco's victory in Spain the Hofers emigrated to Mexico, where Evelyn began working as a professional photographer and finding the images that became part of her first book, ''The Pleasures of Mexico'' (1957), which she later disowned.

Her career began in earnest after she arrived in New York in 1946 and began working with Alexey Brodovitch, the great art director of Harper's Bazaar. In New York she became friends with the artist Richard Lindner, a fellow German émigré, who took her artistic education in hand and, she later said, ''showed me how to look.'' Another close friend was the artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg.

In 1959, she and other artists contributed photographs to Mary McCarthy's literary and historical travel book ''The Stones of Florence.'' Her photographs were singled out for special mention by many critics, and the book's success led to a collaboration with V. S. Pritchett on ''London Perceived'' (1962).

''I have never seen a volume of London photographs that evoked the complexities of the city with such subtle discrimination,'' Philip Toynbee wrote in The New York Times Book Review. ''The headwaiter stands, with a certain pensive arrogance, behind a laid table in the Garrick Club; a milkman calls on an old lady who is just managing to keep up appearances in the near-squalor of her Battersea rooms; in the Red Lion public house, Duke of York Street, a bowler-hatted businessman eyes his tankard of bitter with the affection of a very, very long acquaintance.''

These, he wrote, were superior genre studies of Londoners ''caught in their natural habitat.''

The travel format served Ms. Hofer well in two more ventures with Pritchett, ''New York Proclaimed'' (1965) and ''Dublin: A Portrait'' (1967), as well as in ''The Presence of Spain'' (1964), by James Morris, and ''The Evidence of Washington'' (1966), by William Walton. She returned to Italy to chronicle Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1833 visit for ''Emerson in Italy'' (1989), with text by Evelyn Barish.

In her later years she photographed the Basque country of Spain and its people, as well as the village of Soglio in Switzerland, where she spent her summers. She also produced a number of lush, painterly still-life photographs, in color, using the dye-transfer process. Many of these images were included in the monograph ''Evelyn Hofer,'' published by Steidl in 2005.

Ms. Hofer is survived by a sister, Aline Schunemann-Hofer of Mexico City.
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