Untitled - Issues of Image Magazine - George Eastman House

Image Vol. 19, No. 2 June, 1976
Journal of Photography and Motion Pictures of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Anton Bruehl 1
Stieglitz, 291, and Paul Strand's Early Photography 10
Rediscovering Gertrude Kasebier 20
Review 32
IMAGE STAFF
Robert J. Doherty, Director
George C. Pratt, Director of Publications
W. Paul Rayner, Guest Editor
Contributing Editors:
James Card, Director, Department of Film
Andrew Eskind, Assistant to the Director of the Museum
Robert A. Sobieszek, Associate Curator, 19th Century Photography
Philip L. Condax, Assistant Curator, Equipment Archive
William Jenkins, Assistant Curator, 20th Century Photography
Marshall Deutelbaum, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film
Ann McCabe, Registrar
Walter Clark, Consultant on Conservation
Rudolf Kingslake, Consultant on Lenses and Shutters
Eaton S. Lothrop, Jr., Consultant on Cameras
Martin L. Scott, Consultant on Technology
Martha Jenks, Director of Archives
Joe Deal, Exhibitions
Corporate Members
Berkey Marketing Companies, Inc.
Braun of North America, Inc.
Eastman Kodak Company
Flanigans Furniture
Gannett Newspapers
Hollinger Corporation
Polaroid Corporation
Spectrum Office Products
Spiratone, Inc.
3M Company
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Copyright 1976 by International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Chairman, Vincent S. Jones
First Vice Chairman, Wesley T. Hanson
Second Vice Chairman, Alexander D. Hargrave
Treasurer, Robert Sherman
Secretary, Mrs. Arthur L. Stern III
Robert Doherty
Walter A. Fallon
Sherman Farnham
Frank M. Hutchins
Mrs. Daniel G. Kennedy
William E. Lee
David L. Strout
W. Allen Wallis
Frederic S. Welsh
Andrew D. Wolfe
About the Contributors
Joe Deal is on the staff of IMP/GEH. William
Innes Homer is Chairman of the Art History Department
at the University of Delaware. Barbara
L. Michaels teaches History of Photography at
New York University. She has also been Assistant
Curator of the Atget Collection at The
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Front Cover: Anton Bruehl. Untitled and undated. From a
dye transfer print. Back Cover: Bruehl. Charles Laughton,
1933.
Unless otherwise attributed, photographs are from the
IMP/GEH Collections. Negative numbers refer to the
IMP/GEH Print Service files.

Anton
Joe Deal
Bruehl
During the height of his career, which extended
from the late '20s through the '30s, Anton Bruehl
enjoyed a reputation among other photographers
and the public which few photographers
have been able to achieve. His photographs appeared
regularly in the pages of Vogue, Vanity
Fair and numerous other publications. His efforts
to raise the standards of photography in
advertising earned him two Harvard Awards
and eight Gold Medals from the Art Director's
Club.
In 1929 his photographs were included in the
"Film und Foto" exhibition in Stuttgart; again
almost a decade later they appeared in the History
of Photography exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art and "Trois Siecles d'Art aux
Etats-Unis" in Paris where he was one of fortytwo
photographers selected by Beaumont Newhall
to represent almost 100 years of American
photography. Articles were written about Bruehl;
his name was frequently cited in discussions of
modern photography as one of America's leaders,
comparing his work in America to that of
Rodschenko in Russia and Hoyningen-Huene in
Paris. 1 His photographs are exemplary of an internationally
spirited phase in the history of
photography which has since been largely ignored.
Anton Bruehl was born in Australia in 1900 to
German parents. In Australia he studied engineering
and later came to America where he
worked in New York for Western Electric Company.
In 1924 after visiting an exhibition of
photographs by students of the Clarence White
School he gave up his career in engineering to
study photography with White. After only six
months of private lessons with White, during
which time he also worked in the portrait studio
of Jessie Tarbox Beals, Bruehl was asked to
help teach at the White School. 2 The warm relationship
which developed between Bruehl and
Clarence White ended in the summer of 1925
when, on a trip to Mexico with some of his students,
White died of a heart attack.
Bruehl ran the summer school that year, and
in 1926 entered the profession of advertising
photography. He maintained his membership in
the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization
made up mostly of former students
of the White School, and eventually became a
member of its executive committee and jury for
the annual exhibitions held at the New York Art
Center. By 1929, along with photographers such
as Paul Outerbridge and Ralph Steiner, Bruehl
contributed to the transformation of the content
and appearance of the annual exhibitions to the
extent that Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity
Fair, was moved to comment in the foreword to
the 1929 Annual of the Pictorial Photographers
of America: 3
And the inevitable result of this encroachment
of modernism has been that
the old-time quality of "sentimentality" is
very much on the decline in our photographic
art. The once popular "storytelling"
pictures, the tender landscapes
with sheep, the bowls of flowers, the portraits
of little children, have had to make
way for prints in which a new and almost
disordered spirit is evident. The gospel of
mass and the age of machinery have certainly
been making converts among the
American photographers.
If, as is generally agreed, the twentieth century
was accepted late by the Pictorialists who
held closely to pre-war sentiments, it is seldom
acknowledged that Clarence White and the Pictorialist
movement provided a new generation
with the leaders of a widespread phenomenon
in American photography commonly referred to
as "Modern photography." Anton Bruehl's background
in engineering and love of machine
forms in combination with his training under
Clarence White resulted in still life photographs
which give the satisfaction of well-resolved formal
problems and portraits choreographed with
the rhythm and movement characteristic of the
age.
During the '30s Bruehl's studio expanded,
eventually becoming one of the most successful
in New York. In 1933 he made a trip to Mexico
where he shot a series of photographs similar
in many ways to Paul Strand's Mexican photographs
made the same year but not published
until 1940 as The Mexican Portfolio. Bruehl's
1

Mexican photographs had in the meantime
been exhibited at the Delphic Galleries in 1933
and published the same year in a book, Mexico,
which was given an award as the best example
of book illustration by the American Institute of
Graphic Arts for the years 1931-33. Jose Clemente
Orozco, the Mexican painter, wrote about
Bruehl's Mexico:
The first word that comes to mind on
seeing these photographs is magnificent.
Anything that may be expected from the art
of painting is there; perfection of craftsmanship—perfection
of plastic organization.
And this is certainly Mexico as revealed
by great photography. The strong
2
and unique individuality of a people —
mysterious mixture of the most simple and
primitive with the highest refinement and
unaffected, natural good taste.
How many painters have tried to reproduce
those faces, those scenes, those
rhythmic movements. All in vain. The subject
is so powerful and complete in itself
that it would take an effort as powerful
merely to reproduce it. Mr. Bruehl's work
is more than reproduction. 4
Paul Strand's photographs for The Mexican
Portfolio developed into a greater body of work
extending the possibilities of photography in
portraying people of various nations or regions
of the world. But Bruehl never returned to this
use of photography for which he had demonstrated
his talents so well in Mexico; the book
remains however a strong, and elegant demonstration
of the possibilities of this genre.
Shortly before the publication of his Mexican
photographs, Anton Bruehl began experimenting
with color photography, at a time when
many other photographers and photo-technicians
were searching for a practical and effective
method of producing color photographs for
the printed page. In 1932 Fernand Bourges, a
color technician working for Conde Nast Engravers,
developed a process for creating a
color transparency made of thin acetate sheets
coated with light-sensitive emulsions which
were dyed and sandwiched together with glass.
Conde Nast Engravers used these extremely
fine color transparencies as guides and, with
hand work, made the printing plates in a painstaking
process which resulted in some of the
finest color reproductions ever made.
Anton Bruehl was invited to become the chief
color photographer for Conde Nast Publications
working with Bourges under an agreement that
all would collaborate in the production of any
color photographs for advertisers which any of
the three (photographer, technician, or engravers)
contracted for. The team of Bruehl-
Bourges together with Conde Nast Engravers
produced color photographs for the printed
page which had, as an ad in Vogue claimed,
"the compelling beauty of a painting and the
fidelity of a blueprint" without much serious
competition until the advent of Kodachrome in
1935. Among the best of Bruehl's color work
for Vogue and Vanity Fair are the photographs
with rich shadow areas surrounding taut, vibrant
arrangements of singers and dancers
from New York night clubs and stage productions,
such as the one reproduced in black and
white on the cover.
At their best, Bruehl's photographs are deliberate,
non-anecdotal and carefully composed
graphic representations, whether earlier semiabstract
portraits and product photographs or
later color portraits and human still-lifes. The
constant flow through his studio of star personalities
and products of the depressed but
forward-looking economy may have occasionally
resulted, as Bruehl feels, in somewhat less
than enduring photographs. However, it unquestionably
produced a revealing and evocative
portrait of the popular aspirations of a culture,
enabling Dr. M. F. Agha, art director for Vogue,
to state in 1935, that, photography is "a perfect
means of graphic expression for an artist who
lives in the days of skyscrapers, engineers,
saxophones and tap dancing. . . ." 5
Notes
1 Dr. M. F. Agha, "A Word on European Photography,"
Pictorial Photography in America, vol. 5. (New York:
Pictorial Photographers of America at the New York Art
Center, 1929), n.p.
2 From an unpublished interview with Anton Bruehl, July
9, 10, 1975.
3 Frank Crowninshield, "Foreword," Pictorial Photography
in America, vol. 5 (New York: Pictorial Photographers of
America at the New York Art Center, 1929), n.p.
4 Jose Clemente Orozco, from promotional material for:
Anton Bruehl, Mexico, (New York: Delphic Studios, 1933).
5 Dr. M. F. Agha, in preface to: T. J. Maloney, ed., U.S.
Camera 1935, (New York: Morrow & Co., 1935), p. 4.
Selected Bibliography
Bruehl, Anton. Mexico. New York: Delphic Studios, 1933.
. Tropic Patterns. Hollywood, Florida: Dukane
Press, 1970.
Bruehl, Anton, and Bourges, Fernand. Color Sells. New
York: Conde Nast Publications, 1935.
Bruehl, Anton and Lowell, Thomas. Magic Dials. New
York: Lee Furman, 1939.
Sipley, Louis Walton. "Color Grows During the Depression."
A Half Century of Color. New York: MacMillan &
Co., 1951.
Bruehl, Anton. "Dietrich by Bruehl." Cinema Arts, September
1937, pp. 51-57.
. "I Don't Like the Photographic Press." Popular
Photography, January 1938, p. 15.
Kelly, Etna M. "Anton Bruehl, Master of Color." Photography,
November 1936, p. 6.
Maloney, Thomas J. "Photography Comes of Age."
Review of Reviews and World's Work, June 1933, pp.
19-23.
"The Brothers Bruehl." U.S. Camera, March-April 1939,
pp. 34-35.

Stieglitz, 291, and Paul Strand's Early Photography
William Innes Homer
Editor's
Note
The following two articles, "Stieglitz, 291, and
Paul Strand's Early Photography" by William
Innes Homer and "Rediscovering Gertrude
Kasebier" by Barbara L. Michaels, are the first in
a series of papers to be published in Image,
drawn from a symposium titled, "The Art History
of Photography: Recent Investigations,"
sponsored by the International Museum of Photography
at the George Eastman House, on February
20 and 21, 1975.
The participants of the symposium and their
topics were as follows:
Peter C. Bunnell (Princeton University)
"The Early European Photographs of Alfred
Stieglitz"
William Innes Homer (University of
Delaware)
"Stieglitz's Credo of Modernism: Its Manifestation
in Paul Strand's Early Photographs"
Eugenia Parry Janis (Wellesley College)
"The Man on the Tower of Notre Dame:
New Light on Henri LeSecq"
Estelle Jussim (Simmons College)
"The Syntax of Reality: Photography's
Transformation of Nineteenth Century
Wood-Engraving into an Art of Illusion"
Ulrich Keller (University of Louisville)
"Photographs in Context"
Barbara L. Michaels (The Museum of
Modern Art, N.Y.)
"Rediscovering Gertrude Kasebier"
Anita Ventura Mozley (Stanford University)
"Thomas Annan of Glasgow (1829-1887)"
A number of the remaining papers will be
published in forthcoming issues later this year.
10
In 1915, Paul Strand suddenly and unexpectedly
appeared on the photographic scene in New
York with a group of startlingly abstract images,
in particular "Abstraction, Bowls" (1914-15)
and "Abstraction, Porch Shadows" (1914-15) 1
Prior to this moment, it is questionable whether
there was any photographer in America or
Europe who had gone this far in applying the
lessons of abstract painting to photography.
Later, Strand explained that, in executing
these pictures, he "wanted to find out what this
abstract idea was all about and to discover the
principles behind it." He also said: "I did those
photographs as part of that inquiry, the inquiry
of a person into the meaning of this new development
in painting. I did not have any idea
of imitating painting or competing with it but
was trying to find out what its value might be to
someone who wanted to photograph the real
world." 2
Strand brought his experimental photographs
to show Alfred Stieglitz in 1915. They so impressed
Stieglitz that he offered to publish them
in his magazine Camera Work and to give
Strand a one-man show at his gallery at 291
Fifth Avenue. Having thus won Stieglitz's approval,
Strand was immediately welcomed as a
co-worker at 291. As the proprietor told him:
"This is your place, too; come whenever you
want, meet with the other people." Although
Strand became a member of the inner circle
of 291 late in the lifespan of that institution, he
drew a great deal from the embers of creative
vigor that continued to glow there from 1915
to 1917. In the final years of 291, Stieglitz had
become so discouraged by the lack of artistic
vision among photographers that he had almost
given up hope for any progress in the medium.
When Strand appeared on the scene, seeming
to understand what 291 really meant, Stieglitz's
photographic interests blossomed once again.
Strand promised a photographic renaissance;
but like all rebirths in the arts, the pattern of
the past was not repeated exactly. He represented
a modernized version of what the older
Photo-Secession photographers once grouped
around Stieglitz, like Clarence White and Gertrude
Kasebier, had achieved. Strand was a
master of his craft, and he applied principles
of pictorial composition from the fine arts to
his photographic images. But his visual sources
were far more up-to-date, far more advanced for
his time than the earlier Photo-Secessionists'
artistic sources had been in theirs.
This marriage of art and photography, in
modern terms, is exactly what Stieglitz had
been seeking since the early days of the Photo-
Secession. At the beginning of that enterprise,
he had favored Steichen as the person who best
combined the aesthetics of art and photography,
but Stieglitz had always harbored doubts
about the fuzziness and romanticism of Steich­

en's imagery. Strand, however, did not have
these shortcomings. From 1915 on, Strand
made precise, sharp-focus images, compatible
with the "straight" approach that Stieglitz had
advocated at that time. He also understood, it
seems to me, much better than Steichen the
lessons of European Cubism and abstraction.
Learning much from the exhibitions of avantgarde
art at 291 and the Armory Show in 1913,
Strand, it could be argued, became the first
photographer in history whose style was heavily
influenced by modernist painting and sculpture.
Paul Strand was born in New York City in
1890, the only child of Jacob and Matilda
Stransky (the family changed the name to
Strand shortly before his birth). Strand grew up
in the city, attending public schools until 1904,
when he entered the Ethical Culture High
School. It was there that he took a class in
drawing, but, he recalled, he had "very little
interest and little talent for it." More important
for his artistic development was a class in art
appreciation conducted by Charles H. Caffin,
one of the most sensitive and advanced critics
writing in America at that time. Caffin not only
praised the abstractness of Whistler's paintings
and Japanese art, he was also a perceptive
critic of photography and in 1901 published
Photography as a Fine Art, a pioneering book
on pictorial photography. We do not know what
exactly Strand derived from Caffin's course, but
he remembers being impressed by the critic's
wide knowledge, and it may be that Caffin's
sympathy for abstraction influenced Strand's
subsequent interest in that pictorial mode.
Lewis Hine, another of the teachers at, the
Ethical Culture School, introduced Strand to
the discipline of photography. Later renowned
for his moving documentary photographs of
immigrants, laborers, and slum dwellers, such
as "Aged Negro Head, No. 1," Hine was an
instructor in biology and served as a semiofficial
photographer for the school. In 1901,
he had obtained permission to start a class
called "nature study and photography," and it
was there that Strand learned to take photographs
and to develop and print them. Hine's
greatest contribution, Strand recalled, was to
take the class to Stieglitz's Photo-Secession
Gallery at 291. There the students saw some
of the finest available examples of pictorial
photography, works by the English photographers
Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron,
and Craig Annan; the Austrians Henneberg,
Watzek, and Kuehn; the French photographers
Demachy and Puyo; and the Americans
Steichen, Coburn, Kasebier, White, Eugene,
and, of course, Stieglitz.
Greatly stimulated by his visits to 291, Strand
soon decided he would become a photographer.
His father approved of his choice of a career,
although, unlike Stieglitz's father, he could not
offer his son financial support while he learned
his craft. Upon graduation from high school in
1909, Strand had to go to work as a clerk and
salesman in his father's importing business, and
he pursued photography in his free time on the
weekends. During this period, he systematically
studied techniques and materials, consciously
building a solid foundation for his future work
in photography.
In 1911, after his father sold his business,
Strand took his savings and went to Europe for
the summer. He saw no examples of modern
art there that might have influenced his abstract
photographs; the work he admired in the
museums was that of the Pre-Raphaelites and
the Barbizon School, which he now considers
"very poor painting." After his return from
Europe, Strand set himself up as a commercial
photographer, specializing in portraits and
views of colleges and fraternity houses. Nevertheless,
while he was doing commercial work,
he was also practicing photography as an art.
following the currently-fashionable fuzzy, softfocus
styles of the Photo-Secession, reminiscent
of Clarence White. 3
Strand continued to visit 291 from time to
time, studying the exhibitions there and bringing
his work to Stieglitz for criticism. The proprietor
was genuinely interested in the photographs
he showed him, and his comments, the
younger man recalled, were enormously helpful,
for Stieglitz "would look very attentively and
kindly tell me where they succeeded and where
they failed." Stieglitz offered general as well as
specific advice, persuading Strand to abandon
soft-focus effects:
This lens, as you're using it, makes
everything look as though it is made of
the same stuff: grass looks like water,
water looks as if it has the same quality
13

as the bark of the tree. You've lost all the
elements that distinguish one form of nature—whether
stone or whatever it may
be — from another. This is a very questionable
advantage; in fact, you have
achieved a kind of simplification that looks
good for the moment but is full of things
which will be detrimental to the final expression
of whatever you are trying to do.
Strand admitted that this "made a great deal
of sense, and the problem could be easily
solved by stopping the lens down." Clarence
White and Gertrude Kasebier also offered suggestions,
but Strand said that Stieglitz gave
him "the best criticism I ever had from anybody
because it was the kind of criticism that
you could say, 'yes, that's so,' and you could
do something about it."
In addition to the photography he saw, Strand
found himself "tremendously interested" in
Cezanne's watercolors, and he was drawn, as
well, to the works of Matisse and Picasso, all
exhibited at 291 before the Armory Show,
which, in turn, he felt was a "tremendous
event." At the Armory Show, he was particularly
interested in Cezanne (he saw his
oils there for the first time), Picasso and
Brancusi. After that historic show, Strand continued
to visit 291, and he was undoubtedly
stimulated by the Picasso-Braque show and the
Brancusi exhibition, both of 1914. 4
Although Strand had practiced the art of
photography with some success before 1915,
he was suddenly recognized as a major new
talent in that year. The advice he had received
from Stieglitz and his colleagues and the insights
concerning modern art he had gained
from his visits to 291 and the Armory Show
enabled him to produce a remarkable group of
abstract photographs that were unparalleled at
that time. Strand made his first experiments in
this direction at Twin Lakes, Connecticut, during
the summer of 1914 or 1915 (the latter
date is more probable). It was here that he
produced two of his most important images,
"Abstraction, Bowls" and "Abstraction, Porch
Shadows." 5 In the former work, Strand carefully
arranged four kitchen bowls at different
angles and recorded their interlocking abstract
shapes, totally ignoring their utilitarian function.
15

By thoughtfully planning his camera angle and
cutting off just the right amount of each bowl
in framing the picture, Strand created a photograph
that was organized according to rigorous
principles of abstract design. The nearest prototypes
in advanced French painting — his acknowledged
source — are found in Picasso's
and Braque's early Cubist still lifes of 1908-09,
although the closest example, compositionally,
is not a still life but a landscape, Braque's
"Houses at L'Estaque" (1908) (Herman and
Marguerite Rupf Foundation, Bern). Strand,
however, said he was not interested in literally
imitating modernist painting. Instead, his concern
was to bring the constructive methods of
Cubism to the task of creating a photographic
image that was true to the optical properties of
the medium. About his efforts at this time,
Strand said:
I think I understood the underlying principles
behind Picasso and the others in
their organization of the picture space, of
the unity of what that organization contained,
and the problem of making a twodimensional
area have a three-dimensional
character, so that the viewer's eye remained
in that space and went into the
picture and didn't go off to the side. Everything
in the picture related to everything
else.
A similar application of modernistic aesthetics
to photography may be found in Strand's
powerful "Abstraction, Porch Shadows." To
create the desired arrangement, he tilted a
porch table on its side so that its curved edge
created a forceful contrast to the parallel diagonals
of the railing's shadow. Once again he
tried to obliterate his subject's useful function,
fragmenting the elements and placing heavy
emphasis on their formal, abstract relationships.
He skillfully accentuated the formal message of
the photograph by tilting the finished image
ninety degrees from the angle at which it was
taken, thus carrying the viewer still another
step away from the world of physical reality.
The abstractness of this photograph places it
among the most advanced American pictures of
its time, irrespective of medium. Only Arthur
Dove and Marsden Hartley, among American
artists, had previously produced paintings that
reveal this degree of abstraction; Strand surely
16

would have known their works through his visits
to 291. At present, Strand professes great admiration
for Hartley, and he admits that when
he executed "Abstraction, Porch Shadows," he
was visually close to the painter in using bold,
simple geometric shapes and patterns such as
those found in "Abstract Forms" (1914-15). In
the work of both artists, these abstract elements
are treated largely in two-dimensional
terms, arranged with little concern for pictorial
depth. Both Hartley and Strand were exceptional
American artists, for they practiced an
advanced style for their time, the language of
both men echoing the synthetic Cubism of Picasso
and Braque in 1912-13.
Strand's early essays in abstraction helped
him study the relationships between inanimate
objects that he could manipulate and control.
Having done this successfully in "Abstraction,
Bowls" and "Abstraction, Porch Shadows," he
was ready to apply the lessons he had learned
to the world of human activity and to abandon
formal experimentation for its own sake, never
again returning to abstraction in its pure form.
His new approach is found in "Wall Street"
(1915), a street scene in which a group of pedestrians,
casting long shadows, pass before
the Morgan Building, whose imposing mass
dwarfs them. Strand said that, at this time, he
had become "interested in using photography
to see if he could capture the physical movement
of the city and, at the same time, using
the movement of people and automobiles or
whatever it might be, in an abstract way, always
retaining the abstract principle. . . ." His
innate gift of selectivity brought him success in
this venture, for the pattern of the figures in
movement in "Wall Street" could not have been
more effective if Strand had arranged them
himself.
More obviously related to the aesthetics of
Cubism is Strand's celebrated "The White
Fence." In this photograph, taken at Port Kent,
New York, during the summer of 1916, he
claimed he was applying the lessons he had
learned in his 1914-15 abstractions to a subject
taken from the real world, a subject which he
had not manipulated. Strand remarked that the
shapes of the fence, rather than the background,
fascinated him, for each broken picket
was different from every other one. Visualizing
the subject in a Cubist manner, he treated the
fence as a flat, geometric element close to, and
paralleling, the picture plane. By this means he
placed a strict limit on spatial recession. The
simple, planar sides of the buildings behind the
fence similarly prohibit any pronounced flow
into pictorial depth because they, too, are
nearly parallel to the picture plane, serving as a
screen to close off the space. The photograph
succeeds as an abstract design because Strand
reduced the subject to a few clearly defined
geometric elements and balanced them against
each other with consummate skill. In doing so,
his aesthetic was not far from that of the Cubist
painters, although he was certainly particularizing
it through an American experience.
Even more obviously Cubist in derivation is
Strand's "From the Viaduct" (1916). The photographer
admitted that he was affected by
Cubist painting when he consciously stressed
the rectangular composition. This influence is
also visible in his Cubist fragmentation of lettering,
which is found so often in Picasso's and
Braque's works in 1913. Any diagonals that
might suggest space are eliminated, and the
whole is thus meant to read as a grid of horizontals
and verticals crisscrossing the surface
of the picture. This is one of the most abstract
of Strand's images based on the real world.
Thus far, we have been discussing photographs
that show Strand's primary concern with
two-dimensional pattern and abstract form. In
1916, he turned quite emphatically to the real
world, selecting anonymous street people as his
subjects. Strand said his formal experiments
culminated in these photographs, images that
include his "Blind Woman" (1916) and "Portrait"
(1916). To record these common people
going about their daily activities, Strand devised
a false lens for his Ensign reflex camera 6
pointing ninety degrees away from the real lens,
so that he could focus on his subjects without
making them camera-shy. Unlike Baron de
Meyer's contemporary photographs of picturesque
gypsies and peasants, posed in the
studio, Strand's were executed in the streets.
Strand has said "I wanted to solve the problem
of photographing these people within an
environment in which they lived."
He recalled having some thoughts on social
17

eform when he was photographing these people
of the streets, but he was not using his
camera in the manner of Jacob Riis to expose
the mistreatment of the working classes. He
confessed: "I photographed these people because
I felt that they were all people who
life had battered into some sort of extraordinary
interest and, in a way, nobility." The subject of
"Blind Woman", his masterpiece of this group
of portraits, appealed to him simply because
she had "an absolutely unforgettable and noble
face." In his statements about his city portraits,
Strand sounds very much like one of the New
York Realist painters — perhaps Robert Henri
or John Sloan, of the "Ashcan School" or "The
Eight." This group of artists, like Strand, portrayed
the daily activity of common people, not
to point out social injustices, but because their
lives reflected the human drama in its most
natural and telling form, for example, Sloan's
painting "Three A.M." (1909). In this connection,
Stieglitz's representation of the lower
classes in "The Steerage" (1907) could also be
seen as a source of inspiration for Strand's
individual portraits, and we should accept the
possibility that this realistic image influenced
the young photographer.
Stieglitz's discovery of Strand's fresh talent
seems to have rejuvenated the older man and
helped to restore some of the original vitality
of 291. Stieglitz, as we have seen, saw in Strand
the fulfillment of his highest hopes for artistic
photography, and during the last few years of
291 he devoted himself to the celebration of
Strand's genius. He wrote of Strand in Camera
Work:
His work is rooted in the best traditions
of photography. His vision is potential. His
work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely
upon tricks of process. In whatever he
does there is applied intelligence. In the
history of photography there are but few
photographers who, from the point of view
of expression, have really done work of
any importance. And by importance we
mean work that has some relatively lasting
quality, that element which gives all art its
real significance. 7
The one-man show Stieglitz had promised
Strand took place between March 13 and April
3, 1916, and the last two issues of Camera
Work were devoted mainly to reproductions of
Strand's recent photographs. Just as Steichen's
photographs and ideas permeated the early volumes
of Camera Work, Strand's dominated the
last two issues of that periodical. Stieglitz had
thus come full circle. It is fitting that Stieglitz's
most important years of patronage came to an
end with the recognition of an artist working in
the medium which was his own first love —
photography.
Notes
1 This article is based in large part on the section on
Paul Strand in my forthcoming book on the artists of the
Stieglitz circle, Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde,
to be published in 1977 by New York Graphic Society,
Boston.
2 All direct quotations or paraphrases from Strand's
statements were based on interviews with Strand conducted
in 1971, 1974, and 1975. I am indebted to the
photographer for generously making himself available
for interviews when he was in poor health. I am also
grateful to him for reading and correcting an earlier
version of this paper. Although Francis Bruguiere (1880-
1945) stated that he did abstract photographs as early as
1912, there are no works of that date to support his
claim. It is likely that his memory was faulty on this
point.
3 When I first talked with Strand, he could find no examples
of his work from the period before 1914-15. However,
in May, 1975, as I was preparing this paper for
publication, he and Mrs. Strand found a large cache of
his early 3Vi" x .4 1 A" glass positives in a storage warehouse
in New York. The Strands generously allowed me
to study these works, which reveal the photographer's
pre-1915 evolution and which also include other previously
unpublished examples of his abstract photography,
1914-17.
4 The dates of these 291 shows are as follows: Cezanne,
1911 (watercolors); Matisse, 1908 (drawings, lithographs,
watercolors, and etchings), 1910 (drawings and reproductions
of paintings), 1912 (sculpture and drawings); Picasso,
1911 (drawings and watercolors); Picasso and
Braque, 1914 (drawings and paintings); Brancusi, 1914
(sculpture).
5 The photographs by Strand discussed in this article are
well known to students of modern American photography
because they were beautifully and faithfully reproduced,
by photogravure, in the last two issues of Camera Work.
However, the Camera Work photogravures are somewhat
smaller than the platinum prints from which they were
made. For example, the original images of "Abstraction,
Bowls," and "Blind Woman," both in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, measure 13V4" x 9 3 A&" and 13 3 /a" x 10V2"
respectively. The steps in Strand's printing process,
which the photographer described to me, are worth reviewing.
The photographs discussed here were taken on
3'/4" x 4 1 /4" glass negatives, from which he made glass
positives of the same size. He then put these into an
enlarger and projected them onto a larger negative,
which, when developed and printed, would yield contact
prints of the size of those in the Metropolitan Museum,
cited above.
6 Strand no longer owns the original English Ensign reflex
camera which he used for his early photographs.
Much later he purchased one like it for sentimental reasons.
The camera reproduced here is from the collection
of Tom and Elinor Burnside, Pawlet, Vermont. I am grateful
to them for supplying the photograph.
7 Camera Work, XLVII1, October 1916, pp. 11-12.
19

Rediscovering Gertrude Kasebier
20

As art historians we are spoiled, if not sated,
by abundant catalogues, bibliographies and indexes.
A serious art historical investigation can
begin with days of card thumbing and "Art-
Indexing." But there is no such surfeit of photographic
references.
To reconstruct Gertrude Kasebier's career, it
was necessary to supplement meager bibliographies
by speculative searching through magazines
in which she had surely published, and
through those in which she might have been
discussed. This intensive hunt for uncatalogued
material revealed that between 1900 and 1910
Mrs. Kasebier's photographs were frequently
and widely published; her name and photographs
were familiar to thousands of readers of
such popular magazines as The World's Work,
McClure's, Everybody's Magazine and The
Ladies Home Journal.
Among her illustrations are many portraits
which help us understand why, in 1898, Alfred
Stieglitz proclaimed Mrs. Kasebier "beyond
dispute, the leading portrait photographer in
the country," and why Charles H. Caffin and
Frances Benjamin Johnston gave high praise to
her commercial portraits. 1 Numerous portraits
of men show us that Mrs. Kasebier was not
principally a photographer of women and children,
although her pictures of women and children
are best known now. The most famous of
these — "Blessed Art Thou Among Women,"
"The Manger," and "Miss N." — were all published
in the first issue of Camera Work, which
Stieglitz devoted to Mrs. Kasebier. 2
Kasebier's pictures of serene motherhood invite
comparison with those of Mary Cassatt,
but I have found no connection between the
women. Many artists of this period depicted maternal
scenes; Kasebier and Cassatt are simply
two artists best known for mother-child pictures.
Unlike the wealthy expatriate spinster who devoted
her entire life to art, Mrs. Kasebier began
her career in the middle of her life; her Photo-
Secession colleagues (as well as her grandchildren)
called her "Granny."
Mrs. Kasebier grew up in the midwest and
Colorado, came East after her father's death,
and married an unimaginative German immigrant
businessman. She raised three children
on a farm in New Jersey, then moved the family
to Brooklyn near the newly opened Pratt
Institute, where she enrolled in 1889 to study
portrait painting. Photography was not taught
at Pratt in the early years; in fact, the faculty
dissuaded her from it. 3
On a trip to Europe in 1893, her interest in
photography revived and grew until she quit
painting in favor of photography. She returned
to Brooklyn and asked a neighborhood photographer,
Samuel H. Lifshey, to teach her how to
run a portrait studio. Lifshey at first resisted this
unconventional apprentice, but her characteristic
persistence and charm won him over. 4
In the late 1890s, despite her husband's protests
that others might think he could not support
her, she set up her own portrait studio on
Fifth Avenue. 5 She rose to international fame
both as a commercial portraitist and as a member
of the Photo-Secession.
It is as a founding member of the Photo-Secession
that she is best known today. A study
of Mrs. Kasebier's work, showing her aims in
portraiture and suggesting how her portraits
influenced other photographers helps to balance
this lopsided view.
Mrs. Kasebier set two goals for portraits:
1. to show personality: "to make likenesses
that are biographies, to bring out in each
photograph the essential personality . . ." 6
2. to compose pictures clearly and simply:
"One of the most difficult things to learn
in painting is what to leave out. How to
keep things simple enough. The same applies
to photography. The value of composition
cannot be overestimated: upon it depends
the harmony and the sentiment." 7
Mrs. Kasebier's scorn for overstuffed studio
portraiture is evident in her description of a
portrait by W. J. Root of Chicago which had
been reproduced in Photo Mosaics, an annual
of 1898:
We have here a painted, scenic background,
a palm, a gilt chair, and something
which looks like a leopard-skin,
though why it is introduced I cannot imagine,
as summer seems to be indicated;
perhaps it is to cover the legs of the chair,
perhaps it is used because "fur takes
well." I presume if an elephant had been
handy the "artist" would have tried to work
it in. Something should always be left to
the imagination. We do not always see
people under a search light. There is also
a girl in the picture. She cuts the space in
two. There is no center of interest; the eye
wanders about from one thing to another,
the fur rug seeming to be most important
because it is out of place and superfluous.
8
I like to think of the "Portrait of Miss N." as
Mrs. Kasebier's rejoinder to the Root portrait.
"Miss N." was Evelyn Nesbit, well-known as a
model and showgirl before Mrs. Kasebier made
this portrait for Miss Nesbit's protector and
lover, the architect Stanford White. Among the
many drawings and photographs I've seen of
Miss Nesbit (including Rudolph Eickemeyer's
photographs of her), I know of none which so
fully suggests the ripe, youthful, seductive
beauty which enchanted Stanford White and
which later caused Harry Thaw — Miss Nesbit's
rich but crazed husband — to murder White in
a fit of retrospective jealousy. 9 21

Both portraits begin with a young brunette in
a white decollete gown. But "Miss N." tempers
the excesses of Root's portrait: there is no
scenic background; there are no distractions;
there are only the dark curves of the sofa behind
Miss Nesbit, and these draw our eyes back
to Miss Nesbit's dark curly hair and to her face.
There is no mistaking that she is the center of
interest in this picture.
Several creative years lay between Mrs. Kasebier's
statement of what not to do in portraiture
and her portrait of Miss. N. In her earliest efforts
to simplify portraiture, Mrs. Kasebier had
transferred her knowledge of painting to photography.
Most of her portraits of the 1890s
have the deep tones of Renaissance painting.
Her young models wear clothes and expressions
suggestive of paintings from earlier centuries:
there are fur collars, square necklines,
dreamy poses. 10 In "Flora" (c. 1900) the profile
view offers little opportunity to show emotion
or personality; the picture is vaguely reminiscent,
however, of Renaissance portraits.
The beauty of the original platinum print depends
upon the glow of light on the hair and
the sheen of the velvet gown. In a printed reproduction,
much of the original print's luminous
texture and tone are lost.
In 1900, Mrs. Kasebier began photographing
well-known men for The World's Work, a new
serious illustrated monthly, broadly concerned
with art, social problems, history and contemporary
life. The portraits Mrs. Kasebier made
for The World's Work and those she later made
for the art magazine, The Craftsman, deserve
study because they comprise datable groups of
portraits in which we can find changes in her
style. Most of Mrs. Kasebier's portraits before
1900 were neck or bust length, but her portraits
for The World's Work are all three-quarter
length, doubtless because she wanted to show
personality through stance and gesture, as well
as through facial expression.
However, her earliest portrait for The World's
Work, Mark Twain (December 1900) still alludes
to painting. Twain stands against a dark
ground; the face and hands get greatest emphasis.
Only the slight turn of Twain's head
and the projection of his hand and pipe indicate
depth; the background is murky, undefined.
Within this simple format, Twain holds
our attention as though he were in a spotlight,
about to spin one of his fantastic tales.
In her perceptive study of Jacob A. Riis, the
muckraker-photographer (The World's Work,
March 1901), Mrs. Kasebier depicts a tense
man too busy to sit down, too preoccupied to
have had his suit pressed. Although his portrait,
like Twain's, is centered, we feel none of
Twain's ease. Tension has been heightened by
compression of space, space defined only by
the angle of Riis' stance and by his shadow, so
that he seems squeezed between backdrop and
picture plane. In this taut portrait, Mrs. Kasebier
achieved an early success in portrayal through
pose, composition and gesture. 11
Mrs. Kasebier soon arrived at a recognizable
portrait style which is distinguishable by asymmetrical
placement of a seated figure and by
graded areas of tone. Her geometric, orientalized
monogram — an abstracted GK and umlaut—
is often a prominent hallmark.
In The World's Work, the Kasebier photographs
separate themselves from "mug shots"
by other photographers. Mrs. Kasebier introduces
each subject as though we had been
granted a private interview in his office. The
portrait of Booker T. Washington (The World's
Work, January 1901) shows the pose in which
she typically placed her subject: seated to one
side with an arm (or back) parallel to the vertical
edge of the picture, forearm parallel to the
bottom edge, so that the figure fills a lower
corner of the plate. She retains a neutral background
(usually dark, as here; sometimes middletoned).
The figure seems to come forward
from the undefined back plane. Our understanding
of space comes from the angle of the figure
in his chair.
This pose becomes almost a formula in Kasebier's
portraits of this period. 12 Having resolved
the problem of placing the figure within the
frame, she could devote greater perception to
23

her subject, always emphasizing the character
of face and hands. In her portrait of Booker T.
Washington, Kasebier has caught the sober expression
and powerful hands of the man who
recalled in his autobiography, Up From Slavery,
"There was no period of my life that was devoted
to play."
In other photographers' portraits reproduced
in The World's Work we are often struck by
harsh contrasts of lights and darks, but in
Kasebier's portraits graded tones model figures
and lend variety and interest. Mrs. Kasebier no
longer relies on definition of texture as she
did in the early portrait of "Flora". She seems
to have learned that such subtlety would be
lost in reproduction.
Mrs. Kasebier used the seated format frequently,
but not exclusively. In her portrait of
New York Governor Benjamin B. Odell (The
World's Work, July 1901), frontal pose and
direct gaze made a formal, dignified portrait.
Strong vertical lines — the side of his chair,
the front edge of his jacket, part of his left arm
and the outline of the painting behind him —
repeat his pose, reminding us that the governor
is, indeed, an upstanding public official.
The pictures analyzed show the deliberate
composition we would expect from a trained
painter, and they demonstrate Mrs. Kasebier's
principle that "the value of composition cannot
be overestimated." These portraits also illustrate
her statement that:
If you look at one object the surrounding
ones are mere impressions. You know what
stopping down does. Only as much detail
should be permitted as is necessary to
support the composition. 13
But Mrs. Kasebier wished to make "likenesses
that are biographies"; therefore she
kept backgrounds in focus when they added
meaning to her subject. She experimented in
environmental portraiture, in using a person's
surroundings or activity to enhance our understanding
of him. She shows Physics Professor
Michael I. Pupin (The World's Work, March
1901) in a Columbia University classroom, his
backdrop a blackboard full of equations — a
typical situation, a former Pupin student recalled.
14
By 1905, Kasebier photographs were widely
known through publication, not only in The
World's Work, but in Everybody's Magazine,
McClure's Magazine and popular photographic
magazines such as Photo-Era and The Photographic
Times, as well as through Stieglitz's
efforts in Camera Notes, Camera Work and
through his Photo-Secession exhibitions.
The photographs she made in 1906-1907 of
the "Ashcan" painters — properly called "The
Eight" — were published in The Craftsman in
1908. 15 These portraits show how Mrs. Kasebier
matured as a portraitist by using more
varied poses and more complex compositions
than in her earlier work. Although I do not
know the precise order in which she made
them, I have organized them to indicate increasing
complexity and sophistication in Mrs.
Kasebier's vision.
William Glackens was surely one of Kasebier's
least relaxed subjects. With gloves and
walking stick, he appears ready to bolt. Glackens
was, in fact, not happy about the pictures.
He wrote to his wife:
The Craftsman has come out with all of us
a la Kasebier [sic]. They evidently got
proofs from her. They are awfully silly 16
Such negative reactions to Kasebier's portraits
were uncommon in her time, but this comment
is noteworthy even more because Glackens
was one of several contemporaries who remarked
on Kasebier's identifiable style. "A la
Kasebier" [sic] does not define her work —
but notice that Glackens sits in that typical
Kasebier pose, asymmetrically placed on one
side of the picture, his shoulders slightly
angled away. Kasebier has made a decorative
motif of Glackens' upright walking stick; it is
one of several vertical lines which echo Glackens'
stiff-backed position.
In both the Glackens portrait and that of
Arthur B. Davies, there is a departure: a divided
background suggests space behind the
subjects. For Davies, as for earlier portraits,
Kasebier poses the figure in profile, the back
parallel to the picture edge, face turned toward
us. Probably as a result of this sitting,
25

Davies and Mrs. Kasebier became well acquainted,
and she purchased some of his
paintings. Davies, the painter of idyllic landscapes,
was one of the chief organizers of the
Armory Show in 1913. Knowing of the friendship
and artistic admiration between Mrs.
Kasebier and Auguste Rodin, Davies borrowed
seven Rodin drawings from her, to exhibit at
the Armory Show. 17
In Ernest Lawson's portrait the space is shallow,
but defined by the angled chair whose
post marks the front plane and whose rails
diagonally recede in space. The background
here, in focus, is a leafy patterned fabric. Lawson's
relaxed pose suggests a momentary position
and expression.
Even more complex is the portrait of John
Sloan. He sits sideways on a chair set at an
angle, with its back toward us. Space is far
deeper than in any of the early pictures. Sloan
sits in the middle ground; the foreground is
defined by a small table on which his hat and
some photographs rest. Mrs. Kasebier would
surely have removed that hat had she not felt
it added interest to the picture. Note the division
of background into three stripes: the
medium-tone patterned drape behind him recedes
to a light wall, then to a dark area. This
picture is broken into many shapes and tonal
areas, whereas the earliest pictures (Mark
Twain, Jacob Riis) could be read as just a few
areas of pattern and tone.
Although Sloan, who sometimes photographed
his own paintings, did not think much
of soft focus photography (he called it "art
'phuzzygraphy' "), 18 he liked Mrs. Kasebier's
work. In his diaries he described her as "a
very pleasant, middle aged lady, who is doing
some fine things in photography. An Indian
head she showed me was fine. Henri's proofs
are very good, best photographs of him yet. . . .
She knows her profession, sure gets you at
your ease." 19
In her photograph of Everett Shinn, Mrs.
Kasebier has come full circle to tackle and
redefine the problem posed in Root's photograph:
to photograph a full-length figure in a
furnished studio. But her studio has not the
pretentious trappings she condemned in the
Photo-Mosaics portrait; it is bare except for
objects of her own taste and making. There is
the striped Indian rug, which defines the space
Shinn stands in, and her own portrait of Rodin,
20 whose pose repeats Shinn's stance.
Shinn seems unposed; he takes a casual
momentary position one might assume for a
snapshot. Kasebier seems here to have abandoned
the assumption, traditional in painting,
that a portrait ought to be a formal eternal
symbol of its subject; Shinn is shown as he
stood at a photographic "point in time." We
sense he will shift weight soon again, and
take another drag on his cigarette.
Mrs. Kasebier had begun by rebelling
against the status quo, by simplifying portraiture
radically. Then she learned to make
portraits that were more and more complex,
that showed deep space, but were always carefully
composed of interesting shapes and of
light and dark areas. Her earliest portraits took
their cue from painting, her later ones, especially
of Lawson, Sloan and Shinn, seem
conceived in the ground glass.
I believe Mrs. Kasebier deliberately used a
different mode for magazine reproduction than
for exhibition. She carefully chose and clearly
printed portraits for publication. She seldom
used manipulated negatives or handworked
gum prints for published portraits.
Three portraits she made of Robert Henri
show how she selected photographs for their
appropriate use. In the portrait reproduced by
The Craftsman, we sense the presence of the
dynamic organizer and spiritual leader of "The
Eight," the author of The Art Spirit who for
many years was the leading painting teacher in
the United States. This portrait is forceful,
despite printing blemishes (such as the black
spot on his hand) because it depends not on
tonal or textural subtleties, but on Henri's direct
gaze and a variety of shapes such as the
outline of his body, the splayed fingers of his
right hand, his umbrella, his hat.
Mrs. Kasebier must have liked the platinum
portrait or she would not have signed it. But it
is not as graphic as the one reproduced in The
Craftsman; it lacks a sense of presence, of
confrontation. The background detracts from
the subject; the hat and right hand are not
part of a unified pattern. As far as I now know,
it was not published nor exhibited.
The gum print of Henri which Mrs. Kasebier
28

chose to exhibit in her retrospective at the
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in
1929, 21 suggests the thoughtful artistic side of
Henri's personality. His gaze is averted; head
and relaxed long-fingered hands are emphasized
as if to symbolize thought and dextrous
creativity. The outline of brushstrokes is perhaps,
in part, a tribute to Henri's own painting.
The attraction of this print depends largely on
the rich blacks (doubtless achieved with multiple
printing) and the palpable texture of the
paper, qualities which may be appreciated in
exhibition but are lost in reproduction.
Mrs. Kasebier's three portraits of Henri do
not imply sequence; they suggest instead an
understanding that each portrait might show a
different aspect of his personality. But, so far
as I know, these variants were not exhibited
together. Implicit in Kasebier's work, however,
is the concept of multiple portraiture. Years
later, Stieglitz in his Georgia O'Keeffe portraits,
articulated the idea, full grown.
It was often said in Kasebier's time that she
set the example for commercial photographers
to discard their props and backdrops. We now
know that the channels through which her
work became pervasive were the widely circulated
popular magazines as well as photographic
journals. It is easy to understand that
through mass circulation, she created a new
portrait fashion.
Mrs. Kasebier's effect on her Photo-Secession
colleagues is more subtle, and harder to
define. Even before 1900, Kasebier provided an
example to the Stieglitz group of new approaches
to portraiture. By 1900, she had
shown that portraiture could unite commerce
and art. 22 This example would have been
meaningful to Edward Steichen, whose friendship
with Mrs. Kasebier in Paris, 1901, impelled
him to write "She has been goodness
itself to me and pumped much new energy and
enthusiasm into me." 23 Mrs. Kasebier would
have been a model to Steichen that art, photography,
and a means of making a livelihood
could be compatible in commercial portrait
photography.
Alvin Langdon Coburn worked with Kasebier
for about a year around 1902-1903; 24 he surely
knew her portrait methods. (Kasebier's portraits
of Coburn, apparently made during these
years, are in the collections at IMP/GEH and
at The Museum of Modern Art.) Coburn's approach
to portraiture, as he tells of it in his
autobiography, recalls Kasebier's:
A photographic portrait needs more collaboration
between sitter and artist than a
painted portrait. A painter can get acquainted
with his subject in the course of
several sittings, but usually the photographer
does not have this advantage. You
can get to know an artist or an author to
a certain extent from his pictures or books
before meeting him in the flesh, and I always
tried to acquire as much of this
previous information as possible before
venturing in quest of great men, in order
to gain an idea of the mind and character
of the person I was to portray. 25
30

Coburn's statement was made late in his life,
and we cannot surely say his ideas were derived
solely from Mrs. Kasebier. Yet she must
at least have nurtured their shared idea that a
photographic portrait must show not just a
facade but must evoke an entire person.
Stieglitz's great admiration for Mrs. Kasebier's
portraits has already been quoted. It
seems probable that he picked up and perfected
a photographic idea which she initiated:
photographing hands alone as a representative
portrait of a person. We know that
Mrs. Kasebier made photographs of hands before
1903 when R. Child Bayley, editor of the
British magazine Photography, reported his
visit to her studio:
A casual remark of ours about hands
brought out half a dozen big sheets of
paper on which were mounted in succession,
hands and nothing but hands — the
hands of a poet, a coquette, Mark Twain,
a laborer, a plutocrat, a civilized Indian, a
musician, a political economist, a playwright,
an actor. "There is far more to be
seen in hands than many people think.
Look at Mark Twain's hands," said Mrs.
Kasebier, "one can see in them alone the
enervating effect of European luxury upon
the once energetic nervous American. You
Europeans have quite spoiled him." 26
Mrs. Kasebier's daughter recently confirmed
that her mother had made photographs — portraits—not
only of hands alone, but also of
feet. She said these pictures were probably
enlarged excerpts from portraits such as those
illustrated in this article, but were experimental
works which, so far as she recalls, were not
exhibited, sold or published. 27 None is reproduced
here because I have found none.
The use of hands (or feet) alone as an expressive
artistic device, as a study in which a
part of the body stands for the whole, was
developed by Rodin. 28 Mrs. Kasebier and
Rodin had become friends in Paris; they had
undoubtedly been introduced by Edward
Steichen who had met Rodin in 1901. Kasebier
would have known Rodin's fragmentary
sculpture of hands from visits to his studio. 29
Mrs. Kasebier's photographs of hands must
in turn have transmitted Rodin's idea to Stieglitz,
who later perfected this idea in his portraits
of Georgia O'Keeffe's hands. 30 Although
it is possible that Stieglitz saw Rodin's fragmentary
sculpture when he met Rodin in
1911, 31 he doubtless knew the idea first from
Kasebier's translation of hand portraits from
sculpture to photography.
Mrs. Kasebier and Stieglitz were on close
terms during 1902-03 when the first issue of
Camera Work was being published. Stieglitz
visited her studio and undoubtedly knew of her
experiments at this time. Among the scant fragmentary
records of her photographic career
which she passed on to her family are two
autographs from a guest book:
"Alfred Stieglitz Oct. 30/02"
"R. Child Bayley November 3 — 1902"
The photographs of hands which she showed
Bayley had, in all probability, been seen by
Stieglitz just four days before.
I believe Mrs. Kasebier's close colleagues
understood the formal and expressive potential
she found in portraiture. One would not expect
innovative photographers such as Coburn,
Steichen and Stieglitz to copy Mrs. Kasebier's
overt mannerisms, but, rather to expand
imaginatively upon what she had created — or
implied. While pursuing her interest in personality
and in composition, Mrs. Kasebier
provided her colleagues with new outlooks and
fresh starting points for their own portrait work.
Notes
I am particularly indebted to Peter C. Bunnell for
encouragement and advice in this study, and to Gertrude
Kasebier's daughter, Hermine M. Turner, and to
her granddaughter, Mina Turner, for their generous
assistance in providing much new material and many
insights into Mrs. Kasebier's life and career.
1 A. S. (Alfred Stieglitz), "Our Illustrations," Camera
Notes, III, July 1899, p. 24.
Charles H. Caffin, "Mrs. Gertrude Kasebier and the
Artistic Commercial Portrait," in Photography as a Fine
Art, (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901), pp. 55-81.
Reprinted: Hastings-on-Hudson: Morgan & Morgan, 1971;
and New York: Amphoto, 1972.
"An authority recently summed up Mrs. Kasebier as the
best portrait-photographer in the world. This is a sweeping
characterization, entirely just, but to my mind it does
not go quite far enough.
"Mrs. Kasebier is great as an artist and as such her unrivaled
ability is everywhere conceded, but she is greater
still as a professional photographer in that she is putting
the whole force of her individuality into the uplifting and
dignifying of her work, which with her is both art and
profession. Even the most unobservant must appreciate
the fact that a new movement is stirring professional
portrait-photography from one end of this country to the
other."
Frances Benjamin Johnston, "Gertrude Kasebier, Professional
Photographer," Camera Work, I, January 1903,
p. 20.
2 Camera Work, I, January 1903.
3 For basic biography and bibliography see Peter C.
Bunnell, "Gertrude Kasebier," Notable American Women
1607-1950, eds. Edward T. James and Janet W. James,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1971), vol. II, pp. 308-309. But note that Mrs.
Kasebier's last exhibition was held in 1929 (not 1926).
Mrs. Kasebier's nickname "Granny," reference to Mr.
Kasebier's "unimaginative" personality and to the Kasebier's
years in New Jersey: from interviews with Hermine
M. Turner and Mina Turner during 1973 and 1974.
Sydney Starr Keaveney at Pratt Institute was kind enough
to obtain information concerning Mrs. Kasebier's enrollment
and Pratt's early curriculum.
Mrs. Kasebier spoke of being dissuaded from photography
in: Gertrude Kasebier, "Studies in Photography" (Read
before the Photographic Society of Philadelphia), The
Photographic Times, XXX, June 1898, p. 269.
4 Information concerning Mrs. Kasebier's work with Lifshey:
from interview with Mina Turner. Mrs. Kasebier
refers to her work with Lifshey in Kasebier, op. cit., p.
271. Also, re: Lifshey "he had had excellent training in
good New York studios and had also had the advantage
of being Mrs. Kasebier's teacher in the matter of ordinary
photographic technique. As a matter of fact, he gained
as much from Mrs. Kasebier as she did from him." Unsigned,
"Photographers I Have Met: S. H. Lifshey,"
Abel's Photographic Weekly, VII, February 18, 1911, p.
134.
5 Interview with Mina Turner.
6 Giles Edgerton (Mary Fanton Roberts), "Photography
as an Emotional Art: A Study of the Work of Gertrude
Kasebier," The Craftsman, XII, April 1907, p. 88. Reprinted
in Image, XV, December 1972, pp. 9-12.
7 Kasebier, op. cit., p. 272.
8 Ibid.
9 Mary Jean Madigan, Photography of Rudolph Eickemeyer,
Jr., (Yonkers: The Hudson River Museum, 1972),
n.p. reproduces three Eickemeyer photographs of Evelyn
Nesbit. Many other pictures of Miss Nesbit are to be
found in the Robinson Locke Collection, Library of the
Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, New York.
10 See illustrations in Caffin, op. cit.
11 This photograph may have marked the beginning of a
continued acquaintance between Mrs. Kasebier and Riis.
Mrs. Kasebier preserved notes Riis wrote her in 1905
and 1908.
12 For instance, in The World's Work, President Arthur
Twining Hadley of Yale University, January 1901, p.
232; Liberty H. Bailey, Professor of Horticulture in Cornell
Agricultural College, March 1901, p. 467; The Rev.
W. S. Rainsford, Rector of St. George's, New York,
March 1901, p. 467.
13 Kasebier, loc. cit.
14 My father, Julian Loebenstein, an engineering student
at Columbia from 1908 to 1912, has often recalled
a day when Professor Pupin filled the blackboard with
calculus equations. Then, realizing that his solution had
resulted in an incorrect answer, Professor Pupin said
"Gentlemen, the answer is unimportant. If you can write
the basic equation, you can always get a mathematician
for twenty dollars a week to solve it for you!"
Other environmental portraits by Mrs. Kasebier include
Charles G. Bush, The World's Work, February 1901, p.
420; Solon H. Borglum, The World's Work, March 1902,
p. 1871; and Auguste Rodin, see note 22 below.
15 The photographs were illustrations to Giles Edgerton
(Mary Fanton Roberts), "The Younger American Painters:
Are They Creating a National Art?" The Craftsman, XIII,
February 1908, p. 512-532.
16 Ira Glackens, William Glackens and the Ashcan
Group, (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), p. 87.
17 Information about friendship and purchase of Davies
paintings: Interview with Mina Turner and Hermine M.
Turner, spring 1973.
Loan of seven Rodin drawings listed: catalogue #1016,
Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show, (Greenwich,
Conn.: Joseph H. Hirshorn Foundation; distributed
by New York Graphic Society, 1963), p. 285.
Mrs. Kasebier saved a letter from Davies thanking her
for her aid to the exhibition.
18 "My etchings are hung atop photographs, to make
point for art 'phuzzygraphy,' I suppose." John Sloan,
John Sloan's New York Scene, ed. Bruce St. John, (New
York: 1965), p. 180. From diary entry, January 4, 1908
31

concerning the Special Exhibition of Contemporary Art
at the National Arts Club.
19
Ibid., pp. 132-133. From diary entries May 28, 1907
and June 1, 1907.
20
This Rodin portrait is reproduced in Albert E. Elsen,
Rodin, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, distributed
by Doubleday, 1963), p. 212.
21
A label on the back of this print at The Museum of
Modern Art is inscribed "Exhibited at the Studio of the
Department of Photography Brooklyn Institute of Arts
and Sciences Date Jan. 7 1929." The print is listed as
number 34-sp and is illustrated in the Catalogue of the
Exhibition of Photographs by Gertrude Kasebier beginning
January 7, 1929, Studio, Department of Photography,
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.
22 Caffin, op. cit.
23
Letter from Edward Steichen to Alfred Stieglitz, now
in the Alfred Stieglitz Archive in the Collection of American
Literature, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University, quoted with permission of
Georgia O'Keeffe.
24
Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alvin Langdon Coburn Photographer,
eds. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1966), p. 22.
23
Ibid., p. 24.
26
R. • Child Bayley, "Mrs. Kasebier, "The American
Amateur Photographer, XV, 2, February, 1903, pp. 78-79.
27
Interview with Hermine M. Turner, spring 1973.
2 8 Elsen, Op. cit., pp. 173-181, 188. Note especially the
sculptures of hands illustrated p. 176. See also Albert
E. Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture from
Rodin to 1969, (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art,
1969), p. 15.
29 Elsen, Rodin, p. 174.
3 ° See for instance, Doris Bry, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer,
(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1965), plates
13, 20.
31
Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer,
(New York: Random House, 1973), p. 109.
Review
ft.
Kingslake
The Illustrated History of the Camera,
Michel Auer, translated by D. B. Tubbs.
Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975. 26
x 31cm., 287 pages, 605 illustrations, $47.50.
Fotofaszination, Johann Willsberger.
(German text) Giitersloh, Berlin, Munchen,
Wien: Bertelsmann Lexikon-verlag, 1975. 27 x
29cm., 184 pages, 342 illustrations, n.p.
Interest in collecting cameras and other photographica
has grown enormously in the past ten
years, and books are beginning to appear in
which the beautiful and ingenious cameras of
the past 136 years are lovingly pictured and
32
described. Fortunately photography has always
been well documented, and an amazing amount
of information is available to historians in the
numerous journals and magazines of the past
that have been devoted to this subject.
For some reason, writers on camera history
tend to deal almost exclusively with the freaks
and oddities of camera construction; they
scarcely mention the ordinary run-of-the-mill
cameras like the low-cost folding Kodaks, and
the standard folding metal plate cameras like
the Recomar which were made by the thousand
in Europe during the present century. Nor do
they say much about the somewhat earlier folding
wood cameras with a drop front and pullout
bellows, which culminated in the Speed
Graphic, for many years the trade-mark of the
press photographer. Nor do they refer often to
the cheap box cameras used by millions of the
public to take millions of snap-shots, which predated
the popular Instamatic cameras of today.
The book writer is likely to be far more interested
in those unique and unusual cameras,
often made in lots of one by hand, which are
now known only by rare specimens in a museum
or private collection. It seems a little
unfair to regard these exotic items as representing
the main line of camera development.
Michel Auer's book clearly started out to be a
definitive history of the camera, but it has
ended up as a magnificent, heavy, beautiful,
oversized, and expensive picture book, eminently
suitable for coffee-table use. Willsberger's
book is all this too, but the pictures of cameras
are beautifully reproduced in gorgeous color,
all 109 of them, and the author makes no claim
to be writing a formal history. He merely asks
us to enjoy the fascination of beautiful things.
He makes little attempt to describe the various
cameras, but lovingly pictures them, so that we
can almost feel the soft leather and the patina
of old brass and polished wood. The author
does not confine his attention to cameras only,
as he can equally appreciate the fascination of
a good daguerreotype, bottles of chemicals,
stereoscopes, lenses and shutters, magic lanterns,
and exposure meters. He includes many
photographs taken by known and unknown photographers,
and ends with a set of 160 blackand-white
pictures of cameras classified by
type; it is hoped that this will be the beginning
of a serious effort on the part of historians to
develop a formal classification of cameras,
which is urgently needed by collectors.
Returning to the book by Auer, we find in it
well-documented pictures of nearly 440 cameras
from his own and other collections, 50 of which
are in color. There is, unfortunately, no index
and the examples are not classified in any
way, so that often some modern camera is
mixed in with classical cameras from the previous
century. The selection of such a small
sample from the thousands of different models
that have been made and sold must have presented
quite a problem. Actually many wellknown
cameras have been omitted, while some
of those included are rare collector's items that
never enjoyed a wide circulation. Fortunately
the book is in English, but it is regrettable that
there are so many irritating errors; these must
have been the work of the printer's or translator's
devil as the author undoubtedly knew
better. For instance, the Kodak Instamatic 100,
pictured on page 31, did not use Magicubes, it
did not have a plastic triple lens, and it did not
use No. 110 film. One feels that the Leica
scarcely warrants five whole pages out of 285,
and some modern cameras are given an undue
amount of space. The products of such wellknown
companies as the Rochester Optical
Company, and of the many English manufacturers
who flourished at the turn of the century,
are scarcely mentioned, although their
products were extensively used and number in
the tens of thousands.
It is a little unfair to criticise such beautiful
books, which are so remarkably similar in both
size and content. But one cannot resist the
impression that they were written to delight
rather than to inform, the absence of any index
in either book bearing out this conclusion.*
Indeed, in Willsberger's book the pages are not
even numbered! Both books will long remain
the treasured possessions of those who own
them, and they will contribute in both pictures
and information to more detailed histories to
follow.
*A cumulative index to both Michel Auer's The Illustrated
History of the Camera and Johann Willsberger's Fotofaszination
as well as Catalogue Collection Michel Auer,
A Century of Cameras, and An Age of Cameras, has just
been published in a trilingual edition by Helmut Kummer.
Helmut Kummer, Photographic Cameras Index List
(Munchen: Dr. J. Herp, 1976).

International Museum of Photography
at George Eastman House
Office of Extension Activities
900 East Avenue, Rochester, N.Y., 14607
Schedule of Bookings:
June - December 1976
EUGENE ATGET
40 prints — $160/month
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Ok. June 1-30
Midland Center for the Arts, Inc.,
Midland, Mi. Oct. 1-31
Art Academy of Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, Ohio Nov. 15-Dec. 15
HARRY CALLAHAN/CITY
50 prints — $250/month
Midland Center for the Arts, Inc.,
Midland, Mi. Aug. 1-31
COMING ATTRACTIONS
50 prints — $250/month
University of Oklahoma, Ok. Dec. 1-31
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS IV
On extended tour by United States
Information Agency
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS VI
50 prints — $200/month
Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Wa.
May 15-June 15
Lake Placid School of Art, Lake Placid, N.Y.
July 1-31
CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS VII
24 prints — $100/month
Lake Placid School of Art, Lake Placid, N.Y.
July 1-31
University of Wisconsin, Platteville, Wi.
Sept. 1-30
Midland Center for the Arts, Midland, Mi.
Nov. 1-20
BRUCE DAVIDSON
23 prints — $100/month
ROBERT DOISNEAU
25 prints — $100/month
Wichita State University, Wichita, Ka.
June 1-30
ROBERT FRANK
25 prints — $100/month
Clark County Library District,
Las Vegas, Nevada June 20-Aug. 16
University of North Carolina,
Charlotte, N.C. Oct. 18-Nov. 12
FROM THE GEH COLLECTION
99 prints — $400/month
LEWIS HINE II
50 prints — $200/month
EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE
35 prints — $140/month
Saratoga National Park, Stillwater, N.Y.
July 15-Aug. 15
Midland Center for the Arts, Inc.,
Midland, Mi. Sept. 1-30
University of South Carolina,
Columbia, S.C. Nov. 1-30
ARNOLD NEWMAN
50 prints — $200/month
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Ok. June 1-30
University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, Ct.
Nov. 1-30
PHOTO/GRAPHICS
24 prints — $150/month
University of Wisconsin, Platteville, Wi.
Oct. 1-31
EUGENE SMITH
25 prints — $100/month
Oakton Community College,
Morton Grove, II. July 1-31
J. Hunt Gallery, Minneapolis, Mn.
Aug. 15-Sept. 15
JOSEF SUDEK
35 prints — $200/month
TERMINAL LANDSCAPE
40 prints — $160/month
Oakton Community College,
Morton Grove, II. Nov. 1-30
CARL TOTH
25 prints — $125/month
TULSA/LARRY CLARK
49 prints — $200/month
JERRY UELSMANN
29 prints — $125/month
J. Hunt Gallery, Minneapolis, Mn.
June 15-July 15
Hackley Art Gallery, Muskegon, Mi. Aug. 1-30
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Ok.
Oct. 1-30
Ivan Wilson Fine Arts Center,
Bowling Green, Kt. Dec. 1-16
WEST OF THE ROCKIES
25 prints — $100/month
University of South Carolina,
Columbia, S.C. Sept. 1-30
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, In.
Oct. 18-Nov. 17