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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Sunday, November 13, 2011

Lisette Model

Lisette Model photographed by Weegee



"Never take a picture of anything you are not passionately interested in."

"... photography is an art form which means: human beings expressing their understanding of and connection with life, themselves, and other human beings."

"I am a pationate lover of the snapshot, because of all photographic images, it comes closest to the truth ... the snapshooter['s] pictures have an apparent disorder and imperfection which is exactly their appeal and their style."



"San Francisco, 1949"

"Shadows, Woman with Handbag," 1940-41

"Reflections, New York City," 1939-45

"Sammy's, New York City," 1940-44

"Belmont Park, New York City," 1956

"Coney Island Bather, New York City," 1940

"Metropole Cafe, New York City," ca. 1946




Lisette Model Biography from The Photography Encyclopedia by Fred McDarrah:

Model, Lisette (Austrian, 1901-1983)

Inspirational teacher for a whole generation of young photographers, most notably Diane Arbus, at The New School, Model produced many noteworthy series of photographs. Her candid portraits of people on the fringes of society secured her reputation, and she went on to produce portfolios such as Reflections, portraying those mysterious images in store windows along Fifth Avenue.

Born in Vienna, she studied music with Arnold Schonberg there before moving to Paris, where she continued her musical training. Around 1933 she turned from a musical career to pursue her interest in painting and photography. She quickly focused on subjects that would be her major interest ironic studies of the well to do and sympathetic portraits of the blind and homeless.

Seeking to escape the political unrest of 1938 Europe, she emigrated with her husband, Evsa Model, to New York City. She worked in the photo lab of the newspaper PM until her photos of wealthy vacationers in the south of France appeared in the newspaper and established her reputation. By 1940 the Museum of Modern Art had acquired two of her prints and she was working for Harper's Bazaar. With the guidance of the magazine's art director, Alexey Brodovitch, she took pictures of unconventional nightclub performers as well as more experimental images.

From 1951 to 1954 and from 1958 to her death she was an instructor of photography at The New School. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1965 and a Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grant in 1967. A selection of her photos, Lisette Model, was published in 1979, and her work is held by major institutions, including the George Eastman House in Rochester and the Smithsonian Institution.


Lisette Model Commentary from Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck:

Another refugee who had to stoop to hustling, scrambling, and scraping by, and ultimately to street photography to support herself, was Lisette Model. Although she came from Vienna, Model had a background similar to Gutmann's, which gave her a Berliner's perspective on life. She too had come from a wealthy family and studied painting before taking up photography. She had been exposed to avant garde art and unconventional ideas from the time she was a child, when her favorite playmate was the daughter of composer (and future emigre to Hollywood) Arnold Schoenberg. Like Gutmann, Model turned to photography at the suggestion of a friend who pointed out that with the rise of Hitler, it might be useful to have an itinerant profession.

Since she was living then in Paris with her Russian Jewish husband, this seemed to Model a good idea. With some instruction from Kertesz's wife, Elizabeth, she set out for the south of France to try her hand at street photography. From the very beginning she sought out subjects who would suggest the corruptness of society. Pictures from the test rolls she shot along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice could easily be taken for caricatures George Grosz had drawn of cabaret goers on the Kurfurstendamm.

Like Grosz, Model saw her subjects as misshapen, almost beastly. A wealthy dowager is photographed at a moment when her face has exactly the same expression as her lapdog's. A gambler sunning himself in a chair watches Model with a lizard eye and hands curled like the talons of a pet bird of prey gripping its perch. Model worked often in the late afternoon, thus giving us the impression that darkness is about to descend on the world in which these people live. When she got back to Paris, she continued her project by making pictures of the poor that complemented those she had done of the rich. She again photographed the obese and the grotesque.

Petite and refined though Model was, her photographs are as aggressive as an assault with a blunt instrument. Nearly all are the most direct of street portraits, head on confrontations with unattractive subjects. They have a brutal look whose relentless consistency from one picture to the next implies a universal brutishness inherent in man himself. It's a look Model emphasized by always insisting on big (16 x 20"), rough prints. And in America she continued to see the world in the same terms, photographing both derelicts and society matrons, so that they reflected each other's grossness. She found in American vulgarity the perfect counterpoint to the European decadence she had left behind.

The only change that seems to have come over her photography was in the direction of a greater Expressionism, making her images still more like Gutmann's and Grosz's. Model began photographing reflections of the street in shop windows in a way that makes New York look like the town in which Dr. Caligari lived. She also started a series in which she lowered the camera to the level of the sidewalk to catch the blurry tangle of passing feet. This imagery is straight out of the bad dreams of a refugee from Nazism. The pictures have an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling, as if made by somebody who had lost her footing in a panic in the streets and was being trampled by the crowd.

Some of Model's other pictures from the 1940s, in which she aimed up at passersby at close range, are a variation on the same theme. In one, a banker in a bowler walks under the statue of George Washington on Wall Street. The statue extends its hand in what looks like a gesture meant to keep someone on his knees from rising. A massive, grisly figure, so close that he is out of focus, the banker has a shadow like a bandit's mask concealing his eyes. He bears down on Model as if about to run her over. She appears to be literally beneath his notice.

Thus does a misanthropy that began in Nice continue in New York until, in Venezuela in the 1950s, it seems to have come full circle to have become in effect a vicious circle - in some pictures that she took of life-size voodoo dolls. Sitting up in chairs, these effigies could almost be the mummified corpses of real people. (They look like the slowly decomposing remains of the guests at the Riviera hotels whom Model had photographed in their chairs along the Promenade des Anglais almost twenty years earlier.)

Like Gutmann, Model had a long career as a teacher but a relatively short one as a working photographer. Although she got a steady stream of assignments from Harper's Bazaar for a while, those ended by 1951, and virtually all the photographs for which she is known were taken in the thirties and forties. In fact, her entire American reputation was built on those few test rolls shot on the Riviera. That she was praised effusively for such a meager body of work only made her initial success in America seem to her as specious and potentially transient as life had proven to be in Europe.

She mistrusted the fact that the Americans were, as she put it, "making [a] beginner into a star, putting me on a pedestal for something I didn't even know ... I was doing."' Her rough, overenlarged prints were admired in the same fashion, for an artistry to which they did not pretend. When Edward Weston wanted to know how she achieved the effect they had, she told him that she took her film to the corner drugstore to be processed. The sarcastic answer, the grainy prints, the ugly subject matter, and the crude negatives that were often motion blurred or out of focus were all of a piece. So was the imagery. Like those of Grosz or Gutmann, her pictures match a disregard for art with a disrespect for the world as she saw it.
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Friday, November 4, 2011

Timothy O'Sullivan

Timothy O'Sullivan


"The battle of Bull Run would have been photographed 'close up' but for the fact that a shell from one of the rebel field-pieces took away the photographer's camera."  

"Place and people are made familiar to us by means of the camera in the hands of skillful operators, who, vying with each other in the excellence of their productions, avail themselves of every opportunity to visit interesting points, and to take care to lose no good chance to scour the country in search of new fields for photographic labor."





"Group of Officers, Headquarters Army of the Potomac," 1863

"Harvest of Death, July 4, 1863"

"General Grant and His Staff," 1864

"Slaves, J.J. Stanton Plantation, South Carolina," 1862

"Apache Warrior," 1873

"Old Mission Church, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico," 1873

"Fissure Vent, Steamboat Springs," 1867

"Black Canyon, Colorado River," 1871

"White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly," 1873


Timothy O'Sullivan Biography from Smithsonian American Art Museum:

O'Sullivan began his photography career as an apprentice in Mathew Brady's Fulton Street gallery in New York City and then moved on to the Washington, D.C., branch managed by Alexander Gardner. In 1861, at the age of twenty-one, O'Sullivan joined Brady's team of Civil War photographers. When Gardner left Brady, O'Sullivan went with him, working for Gardner until the end of the war. Several of his images were included in Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War. O'Sullivan built his reputation on images that conveyed the destructive power of modern warfare. His photographs of Forts Fisher and Sedgwick suggest the dismal psychological as well as physical effect of continual barrages of distant cannon fire on the soldiers behind the barricades.

In 1867 O'Sullivan joined Clarence King's geological survey of the fortieth parallel—the first federal expedition in the West after the Civil War. The letter of authorization, dated March 21, 1867, from Brigadier General A. A. Humphreys, chief of engineers, Department of War, charged King "to direct a geological and topographical exploration of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, including the route or routes of the Pacific railroad." O'Sullivan was strongly influenced by King's interest in the arts (he was a member of the Ruskinian group, the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art), as well as by contemporary science and its attendant controversies. His work for the King survey often functioned as both objective scientific documentation and a personal evocation of the fantastic and beautiful qualities of the western landscape.

In 1871 O'Sullivan joined the geological surveys west of the one hundredth meridian, under the command of Lieutenant George M. Wheeler of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. An army man rather than a civilian scientist like King, Wheeler insisted on a survey that would be of practical value. His reports included information likely to be useful in the establishment of roads and rail routes and the development of economic resources. Wheeler's captions for O'Sullivan's pictures provide geological information but also emphasize that the West was a hospitable place for settlers. For example, he compared Shoshone Falls favorably to Niagara Falls, the most popular American symbol of nature's grandeur. Indeed, O'Sullivan's 1874 image of Shoshone Falls, a version of a nearly identical image of the falls he made for King six years before in 1868, emphasized perspective as picturesque as it was dramatically precipitant.

Flat-bottomed boats were used to go up the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to the mouth of Diamond Creek. O'Sullivan commanded one of the boats, which he christened The Picture. Many of his negatives on glass plates were lost in transport, but surviving views of the Colorado's canyons are among his finest.

In 1873 O'Sullivan led an independent expedition for Wheeler, visiting the Zuni and Magia pueblos and the Canyon de Chelly, with its remnants of a cliff-dwelling culture. O'Sullivan's 1873 images of Apache scouts are among the few unromanticized pictures of the western Indian, unlike those of many ethnographic photographers who posed Indians in the studio or outdoors against neutral backgrounds.

From:  Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996)
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