A study of the innovations of European and American photography between World Wars I and II.

The New Vision Photography Between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Arts & Photography

HAMBOURG, Maria Morris

Hambourg, Ms. Maria Morris

Photography & Video

Metropolitan Museum of Art

An "evanescent shadow, a delicate, just perceptible image, the trace of a small plant on a field of periwinkle blue." With this description of one of the very earliest photographic experiments, Maria Morris Hambourg begins the riveting story of photography's first century, a story that concludes on the eve of World War II with the dramatic photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Walker Evans, images imprinted indelibly into the consciousness of the modern era.The 253 works in the exhibition, many of them rare or unique and all of exceptional print quality, have been culled from the more than five thousand that comprise the legendary but seldom exhibited Gilman Paper Company Collection, the most important private collection of photographs in the world. Assembled over the past two decades, the collection is composed of images both ravishing and historically significant, setting the standard of connoisseurship in the field and illuminating the aesthetics of the medium.The first three chapters cover the period from the birth of photography in 1839 through its early maturation in the 1860s, in the locales where it first and most magnificently flourished, in Victorian England and France of the Second Empire and on tours of the Mediterranean basin and beyond, in India and Asia. Chapter Four examines photography in America during the nineteenth century and vividly charts the Civil War and the exploration of the majestic terrains of the American West. Investigations of the self and society are explored in Chapter Five, in the psychologically penetrating portraits and dreamlike landscape studies of the fin de siecle in Europe and America. And in Chapter Six, the modern era rushes into view with the provocative new vision of the twentieth century.The artists represented include such renowned British and French masters as Roger Fenton, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Nadar, Edouard Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray. The American chapter highlights the work of Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and many anonymous practitioners. Revealing portraits of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, and Vaslav Nijinsky, among others, bring to life the charged atmosphere of the turn of the century. And the pioneering imagery of Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Alfred Stieglitz, Eugene Atget, Martin Munkacsi, and Alexander Rodchenko exuberantly re-creates the vitality of the twenties and thirties.The title of the book, The Waking Dream, is taken from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and suggests, in the words of Maria Morris Hambourg, "the haunting power of photographs to commingle past and present, to suspend the world and the artist's experience of it in unique distillations?'Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg and Pierre Apraxine after critical overviews of each of the six chapters, and carefully researched texts by members of the staff of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, enlivened by often surprising and entertaining vignettes, clarify the historical context of the photographs. Unusual attention has been given to the production of the plates, which were executed under the supervision of the innovative and highly regarded photographer and master printer Richard Benson.

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century

Apraxine, Pierre

Apraxine et al., Mr. Pierre

Nadar

Nadar, whose real name was Félix Tournachon (1820–1910), was a conspicuous, even astonishing presence in nineteenth-century France. Engaging and quick-witted, he invented himself over and over, as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic Utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait photographer, a balloonist, an entrepreneur, a prophet of aeronautics. The name "Nadar" was on everyone's lips.  Today, it is Nadar's photography that is remembered. In just a few years he taught himself the young art and became one of its greatest practitioners, making portraits that are intimate and extraordinarily beautiful. His sitters, who were often his friends, included the great men and women of his time: Dumas, Rossini, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Daumier, Berlioz, George Sand, Delacroix. Nadar had a remarkable capacity to elicit his sitter's most natural qualities and to create, even more than a likeness, a true portrait of character.  Nadar's legendary name has been attached not only to his original photographs but to reprints, copies, and a great deal of studio work. For that reason, this volume exactingly reproduces some one hundred photographs from the years 1854–60, the period of his earliest and finest photography, allowing viewers to become familiar with the subtle light and balanced, velvety tones that distinguish Nadar's original work.  Accompanying the photographs are essays that shed new light on the many facets of Nadar. The biographical sketch by Maria Morris Hambourg concentrates on his bohemian youth, his literary and journalistic experiences, and his emergence as a photographer. Françoise Heilbrun carefully traces the roots and development of Nadar's photographic art, while his relation to the art and artists of his time is investigated by Philippe Néagu. André Jammes tells us what became of Nadar's own prints; Ulrich Keller explains how to distinguish them from later prints and copies. Nadar's restless modernity took him beyond portraiture into scientific realms, including medical photography and making pictures underground, activities explored by Sylvie Aubenas. And the myth that the aged Nadar wove in his memoirs―of adventurer, flier, man of the future―is analyzed by André Rouille.  The intriguing, often eminent individuals who confront us from their portraits are further revealed through brief biographies in the book's catalogue section, where Nadar's interpretations of his subjects are also discussed.  A chronology of Nadar's life and numerous additional illustrations further enrich this exploration of a remarkable man and his work. [This book was originally published in 1995 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Heilbrun, Françoise

Neagu, Philippe

History & Criticism

Paul Strand circa 1916

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from February 1998, this is a study of the achievements of the early career of the American photographer, Paul Strand (1890-1976). After studying photography in New York with the social reformer Lewis Hine, Strand began to absorb the ideas of the European avant-garde, and fellow-photographer and art entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz heralded Strand's pictures as the first images of an incisive modern vision. The photographs reproduced here are accompanied by text which traces the early development of Strand's ideas and the complex cultural context of his experiments.

A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue--published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston--presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.
 Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.
 Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."
 Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

Walker Evans

Rosenheim, Jeff L.

Fineman, Mia

Eklund, Douglas

Individual Artists

Princeton University Press

Large square format with 56 beautiful duotone plates by Strand.

Paul Strand : Circa 1916

Work of Atget: The Ancien Regime v. 3

SZARKOWSKI,JOHN

The Gordon Fraser Gallery Limited

New Vision Photography Between the World Wars Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York

Nadar (1820-1910), whose real name was Felix Tournachon, was a conspicuous presence in 19th-century France. He invented himself over and over: as a bohemian writer, a journalist, a romantic utopian, a caricaturist, a portrait painter, a balloonist, a scientific innovator. It is for photography that Nadar is most remembered. In just a few years he taught himself the young art and became one of its greatest practitioners. His sitters, who were often his friends, included many of the great men and women of his time: Dumas, Rossini, Baudelaire, Sarah Bernhardt, Daumier, Berlioz, George Sands, and Delacroix. In this book, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Metroploitan Museum of Art in 1995, some 100 photographs from Nadar's finest period are reproduced and their subjects described. The roots and development of his photographic art and the many types of prints in which his images were disseminated, are also discussed.

#Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Mmuseum of Art, Feb. 10-May 3, 1998.#Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

Paul Strand, Ca. 1916

Strand, Paul

Metropolitan Museum Of Art (new York, N.y.)

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Books by HAMBOURG, Maria Morris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HAMBOURG, Maria Morris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The New Vision Photography Between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Waking Dream: Photography's First Century

Nadar

Paul Strand circa 1916

Walker Evans

Paul Strand : Circa 1916

Work of Atget: The Ancien Regime v. 3

New Vision Photography Between the World Wars Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York

Nadar

Paul Strand, Ca. 1916