synopsis
At the Crossroads of American Photography examines the aesthetic and personal interrelationships of three photographers who helped define the course of American photography after Steiglitz: Frederick Sommer (1905-1999), Harry Callahan (1912-1999) and Aaron Siskind (1903-1991). Although each member of this "holy trinity" (as they were dubbed by photographer and publisher Jonathan Williams) has been honored with individual museum retrospectives, this is the first full comparison of their work, as well as an exploration of their robust, prescient exchange of ideas about photography, abstraction and metaphor over the course of their 25 years as colleagues and friends. Self-taught as photographers, this trio helped shape a national community of peers and the evolution of photography as an art form, creating a bridge between the purity of Group f/64-era photography at midcentury and the hybrid approaches to the medium seen today.
This exquisitely produced exhibition catalogue highlights the powerful role of such camaraderie in shaping photography at this seminal time, before the emergence of a market for photography and before widespread artistic acceptance of the medium. It brings to light contrasting philosophies of the artist/photographer's role (influenced by Existentialism for Siskind and by the writings of Spinoza for Sommer), the interest in chance as an artistic process, the expressive potential of photographic found objects and collage, experimental abstraction, close affiliations with fine art movements (New Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism), and changing attitudes toward the fine-print tradition.
photos of the book
technical information
Publisher : Radius Books
2009
Language : english
Essays by Keith F. Davis and Britt Salvesen
172 pages
66 b/w photos
Dimensions : 27 x 29 cm
2009
Language : english
Essays by Keith F. Davis and Britt Salvesen
172 pages
66 b/w photos
Dimensions : 27 x 29 cm
about Frederick Sommer
Frederick Sommer (September 7, 1905 – January 23, 1999), was an artist born in Angri, Italy and raised in Brazil. He earned a M.A. degree in Landscape Architecture (1927) from Cornell University where he met Frances Elizabeth Watson (1904–1999) whom he married in 1928; they had no children. The Sommers moved to Tucson, Arizona in 1931 and then Prescott, Arizona in 1935. Sommer became a naturalized citizen of the United States on November 18, 1939. Considered a master photographer, Sommer first experimented with photography in 1931 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis the year prior. Early works on paper (starting in 1931) include watercolors, and evolve to pen-and-ink or brush plus drawings of visually composed musical score. Concurrent to the works on paper, Sommer started to seriously explore the artistic possibilities of photography in 1938 when he acquired an 8×10 Century Universal Camera, eventually encompassing the genres of still life (chicken parts and assemblage), horizonless landscapes, jarred subjects, cut-paper, cliché-verre negatives and nudes. According to art critic Robert C. Morgan, Sommer's "most extravagant, subtle, majestic, and impressive photographs—comparable in many ways to the views of Yosemite Valley’s El Capitan and Half Dome by Ansel Adams—were Sommer’s seemingly infinite desert landscapes, some of which he referred to as 'constellations.'" The last artistic body of work Sommer produced (1989–1999) was collage based largely on anatomical illustrations. Frederick Sommer had significant artistic relationships with Edward Weston, Max Ernst, Aaron Siskind, Richard Nickel, Minor White, and others. His archive (of negatives and correspondence) was part of founding the Center for Creative Photography in 1975 along with Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Wynn Bullock, and Aaron Siskind. He taught briefly at Prescott College during the late 60s and substituted for Harry Callahan at IIT Institute of Design in 1957–1958 and later at the Rhode Island School of Design. Bruce Silverstein Gallery is the New York representative of the Frederick & Frances Sommer Foundation.
- Wikipedia
about Aaron Siskind
Born in New York City, Aaron Siskind graduated from the City College of New York in 1926 and taught high school English until he became interested in photography in 1930. In 1933 he joined the Film and Photo League in New York, a group of documentary photographers devoted to improving social conditions in contemporary society through their pictures. While involved with the League, Siskind made some of his most successful and well-known documentary photographs, including those for The Harlem Document (1937-40), but he had a falling out with the organization in 1941. At the time, his work was assuming a new, more abstract focus, as evident in Tabernacle City, a series of photographs depicting the vernacular architecture of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When his exhibition of this series at the Photo League caused many members to protest his photography outright, he left the organization and found support among Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and other painters, who recognized his elimination of pictorial space and his concentration on the arrangement of objects within the picture plane as qualities aligning his work with their own. Siskind's photographs have been widely exhibited and he won many awards for his photography, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Distinguished Photography Award from the Friends of Photography. Siskind was a photography instructor at Chicago's Institute of Design and served as head of the department there from 1961 to 1971.
Siskind's abstract photographs from the late 1940s and early 1950s were a major force in the development of avant-garde art in America. In rejecting the third dimension, this work belied the notion that photography was tied exclusively to representation. As such, Siskind's work served as an invaluable link between the American documentary movement of the 1930s and the more introspective photography that emerged in the 1950s and 60s.
- Lisa Hostetler
Siskind's abstract photographs from the late 1940s and early 1950s were a major force in the development of avant-garde art in America. In rejecting the third dimension, this work belied the notion that photography was tied exclusively to representation. As such, Siskind's work served as an invaluable link between the American documentary movement of the 1930s and the more introspective photography that emerged in the 1950s and 60s.
- Lisa Hostetler
about Harry Callahan
Harry Callahan (1912-1999) started photography literally for fun, fascinated by the instruments’ beauty. He was first interested by the film camera but didn’t have enough money to afford it so he ended up with a photographic camera: a Rolleicord bought in 1938. Born in a modest family, he quickly abandoned his studies to marry Eleanor Knapp and earn a living working in a Chrysler factory. He used his spare time to photography. His practice evolved as he attended the Detroit Photo Guild where he met, among others, Ansel Adams in 1941. Ansel completely freed me, confessed the beginner.
Later, Harry Callahan became a teacher: first in Chicago, at the Institute of Design, then at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Soon, photography became an addiction for this talented amateur, a kind of silent psalmody made up of the constant repetition of various themes. And so, then, I went through these periods of going from the city to nature to Eleanor… whatever, and I think that became a pattern for me, to just keep photographing in this way. Even though social photography became very fashionable in the late 30’s, with the publication of numerous magazines which offered space (and money) to photo reporters, Callahan decided he was unconcerned and not a story teller. His work is not based on photographic stories, but more on a compulsive attempt to give shape to his inner experience.
On the surface very formal, his images are in fact deeply emotional. They are like musical variations on three themes: architecture and anonymity in the city, nature, and his family, mainly Eleanor. Harry Callahan truly believed in photography: he had faith in it. He photographed photography, instinctively, anxiously searching his way.
- Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Publisher : Radius Books
2009 (1st edition)
2009 (1st edition)