To 1920
The first four decades, 1839-80, of American photography are generally, if perhaps unfairly, seen as relatively insignificant when compared to the same period in Europe, when major developments were occurring. It is true that Americans, many, in fact, immigrants from abroad, emulated the medium's growth in England and France, but a closer examination of the American scene reveals dozens of key figures in the advancement of photography. These men (seldom women) were often chemists, engineers, and businessmen, and the emphasis therefore was on improving processes and equipment rather than on the development of a new art form.
Portraiture predominated in the early years, and portrait studios sprang up in the major cities, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati in particular. Itinerant daguerreotypists roamed the back roads of rural America, and people generally marvelled at the idea of photographic likenesses, however uncomfortable long-sitting subjects might appear. Most of these photographers' names remain obscure or have been forgotten, their output scattered or lost. Fires were commonplace, and in 1852, for example, the Anthony brothers' ‘National Daguerrean Gallery’ in New York was completely destroyed. Mergers, bankruptcies, and other commercial vicissitudes also often led to the destruction of stock. However, much has survived in private collections and in library and museum archives both large and small.
Recognizable names had begun to emerge as early as the 1840s. Mathew Brady, for example, established a successful studio in New York, as did Jeremiah Gurney (1812-post-1886), Edward White, Alexander Beckers, Samuel Morse, and John W. Draper (1811-82). In Boston, Albert Southworth and Josiah Hawes began their celebrated firm in 1843. Edward Anthony with J. M. Edwards (1831-1900) established a successful daguerreotype business in Washington, DC, as did the Langenheim brothers in Philadelphia. Early explorers of the Yucatán in Mexico, and John Charles Frémont on his various expeditions to the American West, carried bulky photographic equipment. In 1849 Henry Hunt Snelling published The History and Practice of the Art of Photography and became the dominant spokesperson for photography in its first American decades. He launched The Photographic & Fine Arts Journal in 1851 and was general manager of E. & H. T. Anthony & Co., a major photographic supplier.
Westward expansion, beginning in earnest with the discovery of gold in California in 1849, resulted in the establishment of studios in San Francisco and scattered mining towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Key names of photographers in California such as Isaiah West Taber, Robert Vance, and J. Wesley Jones survive, although most of their work has not. In 1850 the important Daguerreian Journal (later renamed Humphrey's Journal) was begun in New York by Samuel D. Humphrey, and Americans won a number of awards in 1851 at London's Great Exhibition. The 1850s saw the arrival of the wet-plate process, the invention of the ambrotype and tintype, and the beginning of stereo-mania. (In 1853, however, the New York Herald Tribune estimated that an annual 3 million daguerreotypes were being made nationwide.) In 1855 Charles A. Seely, ultimately a holder of many photographic patents, founded the American Journal of Photography, and in 1858 George B. Coale published what was essentially the first how-to book for the growing numbers of amateur photographers, called simply A Manual of Photography. The same year saw the foundation of the American Photographic Society, mainly an association for amateurs. The Cooper Institute of New York City and the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia became centres of photographic activity.
The years 1859-60 saw the introduction of the carte de visite from Europe, which within months, with various kinds of patent albums, became the object of an immense craze. Brady alone sold tens of thousands of cartes through his various studios, and Oliver Wendell Holmes described them as ‘the social currency, the sentimental “greenbacks” of civilisation’. Besides giving a huge fillip to commercial photography, the carte revolution ended the long heyday of the American daguerreotype and consolidated the ascendancy of the wet-plate process. The Civil War (1861-5) marked a significant stage in the emergence of photojournalism, war photography, and, often in response to military needs, documentary and survey work. Brady is the best known of many photographers covering the conflict, though he fielded many employees to do much of the actual work. Another war photographer, Alexander Gardner, was initially an employee of Brady's. Later he founded his own business and gallery, and photographed Lincoln, Supreme Court justices and other dignitaries, and Native Americans visiting Washington.
Continuing fascination with the West resulted in a broadening of the concept of landscape photography. One of its best-known early practitioners was Carlton E. Watkins, one of the first to photograph in the now fabled Yosemite region, using a ‘mammoth-plate’ camera. Timothy O'Sullivan, who had worked for both Brady and Gardner, furthered the development of western landscape photography as a member of the King and Wheeler US Geological and Geographical Surveys (See american west, photography and the (feature)). Other celebrated survey photographers were E. O. Beaman, Jack Hillers, and William Henry Jackson. In 1871 Jackson photographed what were to become—in large part owing to his influential pictures—the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Also in the post-Civil War years, Gardner, Andrew J. Russell (1830-1902), Alfred A. Hart (1816-1908), the English-born John Carbutt, and others inaugurated the first great era of American railway photography.
American photographers were quick to assimilate developments in Europe. Men such as John A. Whipple (1822-91) of Boston competed for patents, and there were frequent debates between Americans and Europeans over who created or perfected a method first. As new techniques were developed, fierce legal battles sometimes ensued. One of the most notorious and protracted of these involved James Cutting of Boston, who held patents to the ambrotype, photolithographic, and bromide processes. Especially his bromide patent, covering a method of considerably accelerating the wet-plate process, became the bane of most practising photographers' and photographic businesses' existences for nearly twenty years from 1854 to Cutting's death in 1867. Rallying at the National Photographic Convention in 1868 in New York, prominent photographers and businessmen fought the renewal of Cutting's patent and ultimately won. From this fraternal effort emerged the National Photographic Association (succeeded later by the National Photographers' Association and, in 1880, by the Photographers' Association of America). Its secretary was Edward L. Wilson (1838-1903), who emerged in the 1870s as the key spokesman for photography in the USA. In 1864 he had launched the journal Philadelphia Photographer (which became Wilson's Photographic Magazine in 1889 and the Photographic Journal of America in 1915). In 1876, with his friend William Notman, Wilson organized photography's successful showing at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.
The 1870s and 1880s saw a proliferation of new and improved methods and equipment, new business groupings, and new markets (for example, the college graduation photograph). By 1875 the magic lantern had become widespread in entertainment and education. In 1877-8 Eadweard Muybridge developed a practical method of photographing horses in motion. Electric lighting in studios became prevalent in the early 1880s, and as dry plates with shorter exposure times boosted amateur photography, George Eastman launched his Kodak camera in 1888 and celluloid roll-film in 1889 (the famed
As the Gay Nineties gathered momentum, and tremendous wealth became commonplace in big cities, posh galleries were opened by men like Benjamin J. Falk in New York and J. C. Strauss in St Louis. Amateurs proliferated, many of them, like Francis Cooper (1874-1944) of Philadelphia, combining their hobby with another fin de siècle craze, cycling. But at the other end of the urban spectrum Jacob Riis and the equally effective Frances B. Johnston and Lewis W. Hine were engaged in documenting the condition of workers in New York's sweatshops and Pennsylvania's mines. Especially Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) had a tremendous impact on thinking Americans. In the meantime, pictorialism emerged as the predominant aesthetic style in the 1890s, and the turn of the century saw the emergence of ‘New Schools’ of photography with Alfred Stieglitz as the chief American exponent of the doctrine of photography as a fine art. Discouraged by the conservative amateurism of organizations like the New York Camera Club, Stieglitz broke free to establish the celebrated Photo-Secession in 1902. His Camera Notes and, later, Camera Work (1903-17) effectively dominated the art photography world for nearly two decades. Although key exhibitions were held in other cities like Philadelphia and Buffalo, New York, largely thanks to Stieglitz, became the principal centre of art photography.
Especially after the celebrated International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Museum, Buffalo, in 1910, leading photographic artists began to break with Stieglitz over his growing inflexibility and emphasis on a ‘straight’ approach in photography. Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, Karl Struss, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and F. Holland Day pursued a more soft-focused emphasis and Platinum Print, a journal reflecting their views, started in 1913.
Arnold Genthe: Ruins of earthquake and fire, San Francisco, 1906
Since 1920
While few photographers were actually given shows within its confines, Stieglitz's An American Place (1929-46) was, during its lifetime, arguably the single most important determining force in American art and photography. It and Stieglitz were the focus of great attention, whether admitted by all concerned or not. All three of Stieglitz's venues, Gallery 291, the Intimate Gallery, and An American Place, were used to introduce European modernism into the American consciousness. Politics and personalities inevitably clashed, and the painter Max Weber, and a number of photographers, as already noted, broke from the brilliant but domineering Stieglitz to go their own way, some to form the Pictorial Photographers of American in 1916. Nevertheless, the prevalent direction in American photography through the first four decades of the century—if not beyond—was provided by Stieglitz.
Edward Steichen, a young and close associate of Stieglitz at the founding of 291 and Camera Work, became in particular something of a bridge from the early Stieglitz era into the 1930s and the war years, and Paul Strand, to whom the last issue of Camera Work was devoted, carried much of Stieglitz's formal and aesthetic sense into the middle of the century as he roamed the world, the American abroad. The Stieglitz charisma extended to the West Coast where in 1931 the Group f.64, in protest over the persistence of soft-focus pictorialism, sought to celebrate ‘straight photography’—the idea that the defining attributes of the other fine arts, painting in particular, need not be applied to a photograph to render it an acceptable objet d'art. Ansel Adams travelled east to meet with the revered Stieglitz. The latter granted him a one-man show in 1936. Like Stieglitz, but with perhaps a more amiable personality, Adams exercised a guru-like charisma; his disciples appeared first on the West Coast but were soon everywhere. The Friends of Photography, of which Adams was a primary founder, existed until 2001. Via Adams and, to a certain extent, in the photographs of Edward Weston on the West Coast (and into the south-west through the paintings of his wife Georgia O'Keeffe), much of Stieglitz's thinking, including his philosophy of ‘equivalents’, would span the continent. However, it was Adams who brought to light the writings of the conservationist John Muir (1838-1914) and the sense of the American West. As Strand had reflected the visionary humanism of Walt Whitman, so Adams celebrated the wilderness of Muir.
The Great Depression, following the stock market crash of 1929, fostered, interestingly, some of the greatest documentary photography of all time. The Farm Security Administration, beginning in 1937, sponsored the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and others.
Steichen went on to great success in celebrity portraiture and fashion photography, something Stieglitz could not fully understand. Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Lee Miller were two others of many who pioneered in the fashion genre, the latter even combining fashion and photojournalism as a war correspondent for Vogue. Steichen, acclaimed for his wartime photography, returned and wrested control of the new department of photography at MoMA, New York, from its first curator, Beaumont Newhall, who in 1937 had mounted the first-ever survey of the history of photography in an American museum. A forgiving man and undaunted, Newhall went on to Rochester to direct the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House.
It was Steichen, too, as a dominant personality in photography through the middle of the century, who mounted perhaps the most talked about photography exhibition in history, The Family of Man, which opened at MoMA in 1955. In its all-embracing style, the show was seen by many as something less than a celebration of the fine art of photography. Nonetheless, it capped Steichen's career and his vision for the world and, notwithstanding the inclusion of a huge transparency of an H-bomb test (the only colour image), embodied for millions of its viewers a sense of hope. It was in large part a reflection of the photojournalistic world. From Riis's How the Other Half Lives (1890) had been born a sociological use of photography that came to fruition in the journalistic magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, and, perhaps most prominently, W. Eugene Smith figured in the public's mind as the pre-eminent photojournalists. The consciousness-raising attributes of the photo-essay pervaded American thinking and seeing through the post-war years, and on into the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s when television helped to kill off magazines like Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1952, Minor White founded Aperture, which became the pre- eminent journal of American art photography. It and the proliferation of fine-arts photography courses in colleges and universities after 1945 were instrumental in assuring that photography as a fine art thrived. The Aperture Foundation went on to publish innumerable important monographs on individual photographers.
Steichen's successor at MoMA in 1962 was John
Szarkowski's attempt to track photographic trends became increasingly problematic after the Vietnam years. While the war and related protests were covered in much the same way photojournalists had always covered conflict, the emergence of a questioning postmodernism in the arts and arts criticism in the 1970s and 1980s caused an explosion of styles that defied easy analysis. American photography also broke loose and, to mention only a few manifestations and artists, ranged widely from defiant image appropriation and manipulation (Sherrie Levine (b. 1947), Robert Heinecken (b. 1931) ) to inventive artists' books (Ed Ruscha (b. 1937), Clarissa Sligh (b. 1939) ). Text, sometimes polemical, was coupled with images (Duane Michals, Allan Sekula, Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) ), and artists like Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, and Bruce Nauman, primarily identified as creators in other media, incorporated photographs into their work in much the way Andy Warhol had done in the Pop art era of the 1960s. Questions of individual and sexual identity were explored in new forms of portraiture (Cindy Sherman, John Coplands, Robert Mapplethorpe). Photographs were created in unique formats (Susan Rankaitis (b. 1949), Louise Lawler (b. 1947), Meridel Rubenstein), two-dimensional exhibitions gave way to sometimes controversial installations (Andres Serrano, William Christenberry), and venerable techniques such as pinhole imaging were resurrected and used in ways never imagined by 19th-century practitioners (Naomi Savage, Bea Nettles (b. 1946) ). Groundbreaking journals were launched (Afterimage, Artforum), and theorists and critics (Susan Sontag, A. D. Coleman) questioned long-held assumptions about photography and its intent and function in American society. Finally, the earlier explorations of Harold Edgerton, Winston O. Link, and others in high-speed photography and elaborate lighting portended the emergence of exploratory digital photography. Meanwhile, as in other developed countries since the 1960s, picture taking became a near-universal activity by amateurs of all ages and social classes. By the 1970s, sociologists, historians, and others were trying to make sense of this torrent of images, photographic collections were being increasingly valued and made available, and the market for classic (or just interesting) images was beginning to boom.
Following the Civil Rights movement, but more evidently in the 1990s, young artists from African-American (Debbie Fleming Caffery (b. 1948), Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) ), Native American (Carm Little Turtle (b. 1952), Jolene Rickard (b. 1956) ), Asian American (Albert Chong (b. 1958), Dinh Q. Le (b. 1968) ), Hispanic American (Louis Carlos Bernal (1941-93), Joseph Rodriguez (b. 1951) ), and other minority communities, who had only occasionally been represented in mainstream American photography over the years (James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Lee Marmon (1949-99) ), began to be heard and seen. Those who had been the sought-after subjects—particularly Native Americans—were, in effect, claiming the right to take the pictures themselves.
Finally, the exploration of the fabled American West continued. There were rephotographic projects (Mark Klett (b. 1952), Gordon Bushaw, Rick Dingus) that attempted to locate and photograph from the exact positions of 19th-century survey photographers. The photographers included in the New Topographics show of 1975 coolly observed the impact of Americans on America, and John Pfahl and Richard Misrach photographed the impact of the human enterprise on the West in colour. By the early 1990s David Levinthal (b. 1949) was photographing toy cowboys and Indians using a giant Polaroid 20 × 24 cm (7 9/10 × 9 1/2 in) Land Camera. The American creative spirit was alive and well as it entered the new century.
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Bibliography
- Smith, J., The Photography of Invention: American Pictures of the 1980s (1989).
- Livingston, J., The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963 (1992).
- Alison, J., et al., Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography (1998).
- Goldberg, V., and Silberman, R., American Photography: A Century of Images (1999).
- Davis, K. F., An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital: The Hallmark Photographic Collection (2nd edn. 1999).
- Willis, D., Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2000).
- Orvell, M., American Photography (2003)
