Total Pageviews

From Pictorialism to Modernism, With Little Notice

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Imagine you're a young photographer. It's 1930, and you're armed with a letter of introduction from a family friend - a fellow patron of the arts. The letter is addressed to Edward Weston.

Alma Lavenson, a young photographer from the Bay Area, had traveled south to Carmel, Calif., to visit Mr. Weston. She had been photographing around Oakland, where she was raised, and was hoping Mr. Weston might critique her work. Her images were heavily influenced by Pictorialism, in which soft-focus lenses created a dreamy effect, rendering reality as if seen by a painter (or a Photoshop filter, if computers had existed back then).

Mr. Weston complimented her compositions, but firmly suggested she jettison her style. It must have been difficult for Ms. Lavenson to be told she had gotten it so wrong. But it was probably not surprising, given Mr. Weston's predilection for sharply focused, crystal clear photographs. He was a champion of Modernism, soon to sweep Pictorialism off the pages of publications like Camera Craft and Photo-Era Magazine, through which Ms. Lavenson stayed current.

Technically, Ms. Lavenson was self-taught, having learned to print while hanging around a drugstore in Oakland. Susan Ehrens, the curator who would collaborate with her many years later, says this was not uncommon. “Let's face it,” Ms. Ehrens said. “None of them went to school. They were all learning photography and had darkrooms in the woodshed.”

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Girl, Majorca, 1961.

Fortunately, a good critique, once digested, often makes the difference in a photographer's career. Ms. Lavenson heeded Mr. Weston's advice, swapped out her soft-focus lens for the sharp one that came with her camera and embarked on a remarkable, if not exactly well known, career.

Shortly after meeting Mr. Weston, Ms. Lavenson began photographing architecture, machinery and still lifes, stressing their formal qualities. She depicted dams, bridges and ships in a manner that highlighted the angular shapes and sweeping curves. In an interview, Ms. Ehrens said Ms. Lavenson had been drawn to the forms, enchanted by “the idea of light on metal, and the way it would gleam in the sunshine.”

In 1932, she was invited to participate in an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, featuring work by a recently formed photo group called f/64. The official members, including Mr. Weston, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, decided to allow auxiliary members to join the exhibition, and Ms. Lavenson was among those chosen.

The f/64 artists' photographs reflected the same shift away from a painterly style that Mr. Weston had urged in Ms. Lavenson's work. The resulting images were primarily stark depictions of nature in the American West, presenting photographic reality as art, unadorned.

“Group f/64 was not about differentiation in style: it was about conformity,” said Rebecca Senf, the curator of photography at the Phoenix Art Museum and the Norton family curator at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, where Ms. Lavenson's archive resides. “As an attempt to distinguish ‘pure' photography from the soft-focus, highly manipulated and very popular California Pictorialist style, the point of Group f/64 was to present a unified front about what the new modernist approach for art should be.”

That exhibition marked the beginning of the best-known phase of Ms. Lavenson's career, in which she had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum and even bested the legendary Ansel Adams in a landscape photo contest. (Mr. Weston placed first, Ms. Lavenson second and Mr. Adams fourth. Her prize was $75.)

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Snow Blossoms, 1932.

Soon after, Ms. Lavenson married a locally prominent lawyer, Matt Wahrhaftig, gave birth to two sons and began to raise a family. She continued to make and exhibit work throughout her life, but photography would never again be her sole focus. It's hard not to view this as a function of the limited role for women in society at the time. Even today, though women have achieved a much greater degree of freedom and equality in the workplace, the balance between family and career proves difficult.

“I do think that Lavenson would have had a more acknowledged career if she had been a man and had actively pursued the opportunities that her male colleagues did,” Ms. Senf said.

After her husband died prematurely, Ms. Lavenson devoted herself to charitable causes and traveled the world, documenting disparate cultures in black and white. She had also taken extended journeys as a young woman, including a trip to Mexico to purchase work from Diego Rivera. The list of countries in which she photographed is too long to enumerate, but she managed to visit every continent except Antarctica and Australia. (She did make it to New Zealand, though, which almost counts. Right, Kiwis?)

The resulting pictures, made over several decades, reflect a humanistic style and an anthropologist's curiosity. Her work has gone largely unseen, as few of the photographs were ever exhibited in museums. While Ms. Lavenson continued to travel and shoot, her Modernist photographs received intermittent recognition throughout the 20th century. She mounted three solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and was included in Edward Steichen's famed “The Family of Man” exhibition, as well as group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Late in life, Ms. Lavenson met Ms. Ehrens, and they began a comprehensive effort to catalog and preserve her archive. The endeavor, which lasted more than a decade, resulted in a major solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1988 and the publication of a book edited by Ms. Ehrens, “Alma Lavenson: Photographs,” which accompanied the show. The exhibition introduced a new generation of viewers to Ms. Lavenson's work. By then, she had fallen off the radar, having never managed to break into the commercial gallery world - which was a fraction of the size it is today, as were the prices garnered for photographic prints in the art market.

“Inspiring” is often a cliché. But in this case, it's perfectly appropriate. Alma Lavenson died in 1989, at the age of 92. She photographed for almost 70 years, documenting Native Americans in New Mexico, abandoned Gold Rush towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Shinto priests in Japan and just about everything in between. She survived the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and lived long enough to photograph the futuristic Transamerica Pyramid.

We should all be so lucky.

DESCRIPTIONAlma Lavenson/Alma Lavenson Associates, all rights reserved Self-Portrait, 1932.

An exhibition of rare, vintage prints from Alma Lavenson's Modernist era are on view through June 1 at Gitterman Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1103, in New York.

Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor, and two of his photo projects have been shown on Lens: “The Value of a Dollar” in 2010 and “MINE” in 2012. Follow him - @jblauphoto - and @nytimesphoto in Twitter.



Pictures of the Day: England and Elsewhere

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from England, Oklahoma, Afghanistan and Norway.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



Sacrifices Set in Adorned Stone

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Recently, James Estrin interviewed Luke Sharrett, a freelance photographer for The New York Times and other publications, about the gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Mr. Sharrett's answers have been edited into a narrative.

I lost my cousin Dave - Pfc. David H. Sharrett II, who was in the 101st Airborne Division - when he was killed by friendly fire in Balad, Iraq.

That was my introduction to Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery and what it means, the tears that are shed there and the family members and friends who come back to visit those who are buried there. I would go back to visit that site where I personally had felt so much grief. It was therapeutic in a way, but I felt that I was almost doing my duty as a representative of my family to see my cousin and to pick a dead leaf or two away from his grave and wipe some dirt off his headstone and talk to him, think about him and remember him.

That's a pretty powerful motivator.

I started noticing the tops of the tombstones in 2010, as I covered active-duty casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery for The New York Times, when I was an intern in the Washington bureau.

DESCRIPTIONLuke Sharrett for The New York Times Sgt. Scott Lange Kirkpatrick, U.S. Army. Died Aug. 11, 2007, in Iraq. Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va.

Section 60 is home to American casualties from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - though there are a few graves sprinkled in of World War II and Vietnam veterans who either died of old age or whose bodies were discovered overseas after many years of being missing in action.

It was always a somber assignment, and every time I was there I would notice something different on the headstones. At Christmastime there would be wreaths on almost every headstone, and around Memorial Day and the Fourth of July there would be American flags.

On Memorial Day and Veterans Day there would be a lot more people, families and friends of the military personnel buried there, and there would be more mementos and trinkets left - tokens that would evoke memories that were sentimental to the person buried there or the visitor. They ranged from predictable things like flowers or their unit insignia to the less predictable, like childhood toys, a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniels or a candy bar.

DESCRIPTIONLuke Sharrett for The New York Times Pvt. Kelly D. Youngblood, U.S. Army. Died Feb. 18, 2007, in Iraq.

There's more to these stories than just the names and dates inscribed on the front of the headstones.

I think you can learn more than just a name and a date and a death anniversary date. There is uniformity to the headstones at Arlington - they're all evenly spaced and evenly carved, and they're all uniform except for the name or perhaps a religious symbol etched into the headstone.

On Dave's gravestone, I've left an American flag patch and I've left him flowers. When I went back during this project, there was a penny from the year of his birth on there that someone had placed. He went to high school in North Virginia, and his grave gets a lot of traffic from his friends and his teammates from his high school football team.

You can see characteristics of the individuals from what is left on their graves. They tell a story. There are some headstones that didn't have anything on it. And that made me stop and wonder who this person was, and why no one had left anything.

DESCRIPTIONLuke Sharrett for the New York Times Pfc. David H. Sharrett, U.S. Army. Died Jan. 16, 2008, in Balad, Iraq. Section 60, Arlington National Cemetery, the day after Veterans Day. The symbol is the Episcopal cross.

Follow @LukeSharrett and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.



Pictures of the Day: Afghanistan and Elsewhere

#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}

Photos from Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, England and Oklahoma.

Follow Lens on Facebook and Twitter.



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)