291: Gallerie of the Photo-Secession

After a year of exhibiting American and European photographs at 291, Stieglitz and Steichen believed they needed an invigorating influx of new ideas. Steichen, at the time, was living in Paris and had befriended many artists. Acting as Stieglitz's European agent, he sent over exhibitions of such artists as Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin, whose drawing Hell was exhibited at 291 in 1910. Many of these early exhibitions, frequently the first presentations of these artists' works in this country, included innovative ways of portraying the human form that often shocked 291's audience with frank depictions of sensuality and challenges to conventional notions of beauty. Stieglitz's aim, however, was not to sensationalize, but to instruct artists and the American public about the fundamentals of the new art and to provoke serious discussion. Although modern art received greater attention after the Armory Show, few New York galleries showed American works. Deeply committed to American artists, Stieglitz made them the focus of his activities after 1915. In 1916 and 1917 he presented a series of exhibitions of the painters Marsden Hartley and Georgia O'Keeffe, and the photographer Paul Strand, that summarized the dramatic changes that had occurred in American art in the past decade. Each artist had integrated the latest developments in modern European art with their own experience and constructed a powerful new vocabulary of form and color. Despite these innovative exhibitions, Stieglitz was forced to close 291 in June 1917. For more than twelve years he had supported the gallery with his own or his first wife's personal income, yet mounting financial difficulties, caused in large part by the United States' entry into World War I, made it impossible for him to continue to do so.

Camera Work

"Only examples of such work as gives evidence of individuality and artistic worth, regardless of school, or contains some exceptional feature of technical merit, or such as exemplifies some treatment worthy of consideration, will find recognition in these pages." Alfred Stieglitz 1903

Camera Work was a quarterly photographic publication by Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionists from 1902 to 1917 that was known for its high-quality reproductions and its effort to establish photography as a fine art.
In 1893 Alfred Stieglitz was editor of American Amateur Photographer but his brusque, autocratic editorial style alienated many subscribers. After being forced to resign in 1896, Stieglitz turned to the New York Camera Club and retooled its newsletter into a serious art periodical known as Camera Notes.[1] He announced that every published image would be a picture, not a photograph. In 1902 Stieglitz formed an invitation-only group, which he called the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression." Among its members were Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, Clarence White and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photo-Secession held its own exhibitions. At this juncture, Stieglitz quit as editor of Camera Notes and became the publisher of a new journal, Camera Work, which was to serve as a vehicle for the Photo-Secession. In addition to photography, Camera Work also reproduced works of modern art, such as Rodin and Matisse before these works were well known. A collection of Camera Work was appraised in Philadelphia on a 2007 episode of Antiques Roadshow with an estimate worth of $60,000 to $90,000.

A. STIEGLITZ

Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946) was an American-born photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. Many of his photographs are known for appearing like those other art forms, and he is also known for his marriage to painter Georgia O'Keeffe, most famous for her large-scale paintings of flowers.

From 1893 to 1896, Stieglitz was editor of American Amateur Photographer magazine; however, his editorial style proved to be brusque, autocratic and alienating to many subscribers. After being forced to resign, Stieglitz turned to the New York Camera Club (which was later renamed The Camera Club of New York and is in existence to this day) and retooled its newsletter into a serious art periodical known as Camera Notes. He announced that every published image would be a picture, not a photograph - a statement that allowed Stieglitz to determine which was which.

Stieglitz's The Steerage
Big camera clubs that were the vogue in America at the time did not satisfy him; in 1902 he organized an invitation-only group, which he dubbed the Photo-Secession, to force the art world to recognize photography "as a distinctive medium of individual expression."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In 1941, Walker Evans's photographs and James Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty.

The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evan's photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty.

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent."Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Family of Man

The Family of Man was a photography exhibit curated by Edward Steichen first shown in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
According to Steichen, the exhibition represented the 'culmination of his career'. The 503 photos were selected from almost 2 million pictures taken by 273 photographers, famous and unknown, in 68 countries, and offer a striking snapshot of the human experience which lingers on birth, love, and joy, but also touches war, privation, illness and death. His intention was to prove visually the universality of human experience and photography's role in its documentation.

The exhibition later travelled in several versions to 38 countries. More than 9 million people viewed the exhibit.

Edward Steichen

Edward Steichen, photographed by Fred Holland Day
Edward Steichen (March 27, 1879–March 25, 1973) was an American photographer, painter, and art gallery and museum curator, born in Bivange, Luxembourg.

Having established himself as a fine art painter in the beginning of the 20th century, Steichen assumed the pictorialist approach in photography and proved himself a master of it. In 1905, Steichen helped create the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz. After World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, he reverted to straight photography, gradually moving into fashion photography. Steichen's 1938 photo of actress Greta Garbo -- below, featured on the Life cover of 10 January 1955 -- is recognized as one of the definitive portraits of Garbo.
During World War II, he served as Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. His war documentary The Fighting Lady won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. After the war, Steichen served until 1962 as the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Among other accomplishments, Steichen is appreciated for creating The Family of Man in 1955, a vast exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art consisting of over 500 photos that depicted life, love and death in 68 countries.

The Iron Heel

The Iron Heel is a novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908.
It is a dystopian work about the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. It is perhaps the novel in which Jack London's socialist views are most explicitly on display. A forerunner of science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 1970s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.

The People of the Abyss

The People of the Abyss (1903) is a book by Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote this first-hand account by living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor. When London wrote his book, the word "the Abyss" was in wide use to refer to the lowest strata of society. H. G. Wells's 1902 book, Anticipations, uses this phrase in this sense throughout, and in several places uses the phrase "the People of the Abyss.". One writer, analyzing The Iron Heel, refers to the phrase "the People of the Abyss" as "H. G. Wells' phrase."
George Orwell was inspired by The People of the Abyss, which he read in his teens, and in the 1930s he began disguising himself as a derelict and made tramping expeditions into poor section of London himself, in emulation of Jack London. The influence of The People of the Abyss can be seen in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

How the Other Half Lives

Jacob Riis is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City, which was the subject of most of his prolific writings and photographic essays. He helped with the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography. In 1877 he served as police reporter, this time for the New York Tribune. During these stints as a police reporter, Riis worked the most crime-ridden and impoverished slums of the city. Through his own experiences in the poor houses, and witnessing the conditions of the poor in the city slums, he decided to make a difference for those who had no voice. He was one of the first Americans to use flash powder, allowing his documentation of New York City slums to penetrate the dark of night, and helping him capture the hardships faced by the poor and criminal along his police beats, especially on the notorious Mulberry Street. In February 1888, the New York Sun published his essay, "Flashes from the Slums: Pictures Taken in Dark Places by the Lightning Process," and in December 1889, Scribner's Magazine published Riis's photographic essay on city life, both of which Riis later expanded to create his 1890 magnum opus How the Other Half Lives. This work was directly responsible for convincing then-Commissioner of Police Theodore Roosevelt to close the police-run poor houses in which Riis suffered during his first months as an American. After reading it, Roosevelt was so deeply moved by Riis's sense of justice that he met Riis and befriended him for life, calling him "the best American I ever knew." Roosevelt himself coined the term "muckraking journalism", of which Riis is a recognized example, in 1906. How The Other Half Lives, as the preface to the Dover edition states, "quickly became a landmark in the annals of social reform." Riis documents the filth, disease, exploitation, and overcrowding that characterized the experience of more than one million immigrants. He helped push tenement reform to the front of New York's political agenda, and prompted then-Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt to close down the police-run poor houses. Roosevelt later called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York".
Riis argued for better housing, adequate lighting and sanitation, and the construction of city parks and playgrounds. He portrayed middle-class and upper-class citizens as benefactors and encouraged them to take an active role in defining and shaping their communities. As a result, awareness of the situation of the poor caused those with the ability to help to be roused from their lethargy.
Riis's idea inspired Jack London to write a similar exposé on London's East End, most notably Whitechapel, called People of the Abyss.

...........................................Girl and a baby on a doorstep

..................................................Minding the baby-scene in Gotham Court

................................................Minding the baby-scene in Gotham Court

....................................................The man slept in this cellar for four years, about 1890

Bottle Alley, Mulberry Bend

......................

Werner Bischof

Werner Bischof (April 26, 1916 – May 16, 1954) was a Swiss photographer and photojournalist. In 1951, he went to India, working for Life magazine, and then to Japan and Korea. For the magazine Paris Match he worked as a war reporter in Vietnam. In 1954, he travelled through Mexico and Panama, before flying to Peru, where he embarked on a trip through the Andes to the Amazonas on May 14. On May 16, his car fell off a cliff on a mountain road in the Andes, and all three passengers were killed.

August 1951 - Okinawa Bischof covers the American Air Base on Okinawa for the international press as an assignment.

16 May 1954 - Peru Werner Bischof dies shortly after his 38th birthday in a car accident in Peña de Aguila in the Andes.

1950 - Great Britain, Italy Works in Great Britain and Italy for international magazines. Birth of son Marco in Zürich.

Don McCullin

Donald McCullin, FRPS CBE (b. October 9, 1935, London, England), is an internationally-regarded British photojournalist, particularly recognised for his war photography and images of urban strife. His photojournalism career, which began in 1959, has specialised in examining the underside of society, and his photographs have depicted the unemployed, downtrodden and the impoverished. Don McCullin is one of the greatest photographers of conflict in our time. His career has covered much of the latter part of the twentieth century - a relentlessly photographed century steeped in conflict.His photographs reveal a ravaged northern England, wars in Cyprus, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia and Beirut, riots in Derry, and famine and disease in Bangladesh. All are photographed with unswerving compassion. As resonant as some of Goya's most terrifying imagery, collectively McCullin's photographs constitute one of the great documents of human conflict and its attendant grief, expressed with a visual lyricism that allows us to glimpse the unbearable.

.....................................Londonderry, 1970

Don McCullin is recognised as one of the greatest war photographers, and throughout the 1960's and 1970's he covered events of global importance for the Sunday Times Magazine including the Vietnam war. His first published story in 1958 concerned his own street gang in North London, and his subsequent images in Britain have looked at the unemployed and the destitute. Abroad, McCullin has covered ecological disasters and the war-torn regions of the world, documenting events normally hidden from view. His work proved so painful and memorable that in 1982 he was forbidden to cover the Falklands war by the British government of the time.

Marc Riboud

Marc Riboud (24 June 1923 - ) is a French photographer, best known for his extensive reports on the East: The Three Banners of China, Face of North Vietnam, Visions of China, and his most recent, In China. In 1957 he was one of the first European photographers to go to China, and In 1968, 1972 and 1976, Riboud made several reportages on North Vietnam and later traveled all over the world, but mostly in Asia, Africa, the U.S. and Japan.
Riboud's photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Géo, National Geographic, Paris-Match, Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award, and has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the International Center of Photography, New York.
One of Riboud's best known images is Eiffel Tower Painter, taken in Paris in 1953. It depicts a man painting the famous structure. He is posed as if a dancer, perched between the metal armature of the tower, below which the city of Paris emerges out of the photographic haze.

Paris, 1953. Le peintre, surnommé Zazou, est à son aise, j'avais le verige et je fermais les yeux chaque fois qu'il se penchait pour tremper son pinceau...

Images commandées ou photos buissonnières, depuis 50 ans Marc Riboud sillonne la planète comme un reporter, un voyageur, un promeneur qui aime prendre son temps. Les amateurs connaissent son goût pour la surprise, sa sympathie pour les êtres. Rétif à la violence, ses photos révèlent le plaisir de l’œil."

Alger, Bouzaréah, 1962. Le 2 juillet 1962, la jeunesse algérienne envahit les rues dans la joie de l'indépendance.

Chine, 1957. Le standard n'existant pas encore, ce fonctionnaire possède autant de téléphones que d'interlocuteurs.

Algérie, la Mitidja, 1963. La grande majorité des algériens étaient analphabètes. Ici, pour que les ouvriers d'une entreprise puissent élire leurs représentants, ceux-ci arborent des numéros.

Felix Greene

Felix Greene (21 May 1909—June 15, 1985) was a British-American journalist who chronicled several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960's.
Born in England, Greene first visited China for the BBC in 1957. He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, Tibet, Cuba va!, and Inside North Viet Nam.
Greene was a cousin of the author Graham Greene. He lived in the San Francisco area for area for twenty years. He died in Mexico of cancer

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Migrant Mother

In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of young Japanese-American girls pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Mathew Brady

"My greatest aim has been toadvance the art (of photography)and to make it what I think I have,a great and truthful medium of history."
Mathew B. Brady

Mathew B. Brady (1822 - January 15, 1896), was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and the documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism. Brady's efforts to document the Civil War on a grand scale by bringing his photographic studio right onto the battlefields earned Brady his place in history. Despite the obvious dangers, financial risk, and discouragement of his friends he is later quoted as saying "I had to go. A spirit in my feet said 'Go,' and I went." His first popular photographs of the conflict were at the First Battle of Bull Run, in which he got so close to the action that he only just avoided being captured.

The thousands of photographs Mathew Brady took have become the most important visual documentation of the Civil War, and have helped historians better understand the era.

Abraham Lincoln taken by Brady on February 27, 1860 in New York City, the day of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech.