Photography, Painting, and Charles Sheeler's View of New York

Troyen, Carol. The Art Bulletin 86.4 (Dec 2004): 731-749,640.

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View of New York, Sheeler's 1931 depiction of his photography studio, reflects a pivolal moment in the artist's career, the moment when he decided to subordinate his work in photography to his ambitions as a painter. The painting also points to a critical moment in the history of American photography, in which Sheeler's personally expressive style began to be supplanted by a documentary aesthetic. The shift in stains, leadership, and taste in American photography provides a revealing context for evaluating Sheeler's paintings and photographs from this period and for understanding the career change immorlalized in View of New York. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

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TranslateFull text Turn on search term navigation In 1935, Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery, New York, sold Charles Sheeler's View of New York to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for $2,200 (Fig. 1). Although considerably reduced from her original asking price of $3,500, it nonetheless represented a substantial sum during the worst days of the Depression.1 The acquisition was praised in the press, the writer for the Christian Science Monitor noting with approval that it signified an important fulfillment of the museum's promise to purchase contemporary American art. She then described the picture as exemplifying the cool, dispassionate aesthetic of the machine age: "[Sheeler] paints the clean, flat surfaces, the straight, defining lines. . . . he displays how his design is motivated by the standardized forms conditioned by machines. The modulations, the differentiations which are induced by feeling and the personal margin, are wanting altogether."2 The reviewer was mistaken. View of New York, which depicts part of Sheeler's photography studio at 310 East Forty-fourth Street, is an extremely personal picture. Painted with delicate, subtly varying brushwork and arranged with Sheeler's customary sensitivity to formal balance and evocative design, the picture is dominated by his big view camera on a stand. It also shows a lamp and a chairpresumably used by models and clients-conspicuously empty and turned away from the camera. The casement window, open to a bright sky, underscores the irony of the title, for there is no specific evocation of New York-or of any other place, for that matter-in the view. Sheeler immortalized his studio at what proved to be a critical juncture in his career, the moment when he decided, at the urging of his new dealer Halpert, to downplay his activity as a photographer in order to promote his identity as a painter. View of New York can thus be read as "a self-portrait of an artist uncomfortable with self expression."3 As a portrait of the artist's own workplace, it knowingly participates in the

tradition of studio images as confessionals, as projections of the artist's measure of his own career.4 It is a lament, in which the empty chair, the covered camera, and the switched-off lamp allude to Sheeler's withdrawal from a nearly twenty-year career in photography. The open window is a traditional romantic motif signaling transition to an unpredictable future. View of New York speaks of disconnection and possible loss in the face of uncertainty. However, View of New York tells more than the poignant story of a middle-aged artist at a crossroads (Sheeler was forty-seven when he painted the picture). His decision to effectively end his career as a photographer seems disappointing, perhaps even a mistake, so extraordinary were his achievements in the medium up to that point. Yet this view of Sheeler's career change does not take into account the practical considerations that likely affected his decision. These considerations, in turn, shed light on the nature and status of photographyin the United States in the early 1930s, and on the nature and status of Sheeler's position in the world ofphotography as well. If the contents of View of New Yorkthe covered camera, the empty chair-reflect Sheeler's meditation on his career thus far, its style, which makes canny use of his experiences as a photographer, promises a new and rich artistic direction. And the circumstances of its creation indicate his relation to the culture around him. In setting aside his persona as a photographer, what, exactly, was Sheeler saying goodbye to, and what was he embracing? The answers to these questions suggest that the period of the early 1930s was a pivotal moment not just in Sheeler's career but also in the development of Americanphotography. Prime among the practical considerations affecting Sheeler must have been money. He was not a high roller, but he enjoyed fine things.5 He had already begun collecting the Shaker and other early American objects that he would feature in his paintings of the 1930s; in View of New York, he balances his camera with Danish designer Kaare Klint's stylish Safari chair, a landmark of contemporary furniture design. His career had been marked by moves of studio and home to increasingly prestigious addresses: by 1931 he was working in a recently constructed building in the heart of prosperous Midtown, and he would soon move his residence from South Salem, New York, to the more exclusive Ridgefield, Connecticut. Sheeler had always made a living from commercial photographic work, which both paid his bills and subsidized his artistic endeavors. While in Philadelphia he supported himself by taking photographs of newly built houses for local architects. In the 1920s he produced photographs of type-writers, spark plugs, and other products for advertising agencies. Even more lucrative was his work for Cond Nast Publications. Early in 1926, Edward Steichen recruited him to produce fashion and celebrity photographs for Vogue and Vanity Fair (Fig. 2), and he continued to take pictures for those magazines until the spring of 1929. Although he described the job as "a daily trip to jail" and grumbled that it left

him little time for anything else, it provided him with an extremely comfortable income. He found the commissions to photograph the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Plant near Detroit, Michigan, in 1927 and the White Star Steamship Line's SS Majestic in 1928 both more satisfying artistically and an additional source of money.6 But this all came to an end in the spring of 1929-a few months before the stock market crash-when Sheeler left for Europe. Although he would publish a few more photographs of consumer goods, sweater sets, and celebrities over the next several years, by the onset of the Depression he could no longer count on regular commercial commissions.7 During the 1920s Sheeler had had reasonable success in selling paintings. His most promising sale came in 1926, when Duncan Phillips bought Skyscrapers (Fig. 3) from the dealer Charles Daniel for $400-the largest sum his paintings had yet commanded (but probably about what he earned from a single photograph published in Vanity Fair8). Such discerning collectors as Ferdinand Howald, John Quinn, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney had already bought paintings and drawings from him through Daniel and other New York dealers. In 1930, Sheeler's Upper Deck (Fig. 4) appeared in the exhibition Paintings and Sculpture by Living Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in a group show at the Downtown Gallery, where it attracted considerable attention. When Edith Halpert-by this time the most dynamic and successful contemporary art dealer in New York, with a clientele that included, among others, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller- offered him an exclusive arrangement to sell his paintings at her gallery, it must have seemed an appealing proposal. At the time, Sheeler's future as an artistic photographer seemed less promising. In contrast to the excitement surrounding his creative work in the late 1910s, when he, Paul Strand, and Morton Schamberg were hailed as "the Trinity of Photography," and when he attracted the support of prestigious patrons and gallery directors,9 from the mid-1920s he showed and sold very little. In fact, during this period, many photographers found opportunities-to exhibit, to gain critical attention, to sell-quite limited. Museums took little notice: although Alfred Stieglitz's donations of groups of his own photographs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1924 and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1928 inaugurated those institutions' permanent collections ofphotography, museums rarely sought to acquire or display photographs as works of art.10 Few commercial galleries had any interest in handling photography in the late 1920s. Even Stieglitz showed only paintings at this time. J. B. Neumann's New Art Circle hosted an occasional display (where, for example, Ralph Steiner's photographs were on view in early 1926), as did the Daniel Gallery (which showed Man Ray's rayographs in March 1927). Otherwise, the Art Center, an umbrella organization given to earnest exhibitions of craft and illustration, served as the principal place for exhibitions of photography in New York. It also housed the headquarters for the Pictorialist Photographers of America, which, until the Art Center closed in the early 1930s, presented exhibitions in its spaces.11 While the Art Center

generally featured shows of the Beautiful Hands in Photographic Art sort, it. hosted serious exhibitions from time to time: Paul Outerbridge showed work in 1924, Anton Bruehl in 1926.12 As a forum for the promotion of photography, it virtually stood alone. Yet despite its good intentions it proved ineffective. In this era, photographers seemed to make art mostly for each other or for themselves: "Photographers who pursued personal aesthetic goals of adult interest were few, and for the most part they worked in secret."13 Sheeler showed at the Art Center in February 1926; the majority of the work came from the late 1910s. That exhibition followed by only a few days the close of Sheeler's show of paintings and drawings at J. B. Neumann's gallery. It is not clear whether the reviewer for Art News had this coincidence in mind in writing about the Art Center show, "there are but few exhibitions of paintings that can hold their own against the artistry of Mr. Sheeler's photographs."14 In any case, the accolade is unusual on two counts. First, as a discussion of an exhibition of photography, it was all but unique in the 1920s. Art News, the voice of the mainstream, preferred to cover such stories as "Jules Bache Buys Raphael for $600,000," in its issue of March 16, 1929, than to comment on Paul Strand's exhibition at the Intimate Gallery that same month. The more progressive art magazines evinced little more interest in the subject of photography.15 Second, the review makes claims for the superiority of the medium-at least as practiced by Sheeler-at a time when photography's status as an expressive artistic vehicle encountered serious resistance. In an earlier show that included both paintings and photographs by Sheeler, his photographs were denigrated as "a different class of art."16 Even A. Everett (Chick) Austin of the Wadsworth Atheneum, perhaps the most adventurous museum director in the United States during this period (and one of the first to promote photography with museum exhibitions), expressed reservations. He commented, The camera cannot ever come up to the art of painting as there are so many elements such as design and color that are left out, and there is less of the quality of mind and creative intelligence. The imaginative element enters the photograph only in the arrangement and choice of the subject.17 Photography faced such skepticism about its status throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. In the late 1910s and the 1920s, partisans had fiercely debated how to attain acceptance for photography as an art form, a medium equivalent to painting and sculpture. They divided into several camps. The pictorialists continued to practice a style of photography that claimed legitimacy by appropriating painterly effects. More vital was the group arotind Stieglitz, who advocated the purity of the photographic endeavor and championed the medium as a unique means of expressing an individual vision. Steichen represented yet another viewpoint, promoting photography as the medium of 1920s jazz Age modernism-the medium of commerce and celebrity.18 The conflict between

Stieglitz's and Steichen's groups especially boiled down to whether photographywas a private art or a public idiom, whether the photographer worked for himself and those with similar sensibilities or for the larger community served by the printed page. Although the practice of neither faction was as polarized as their rhetoric (Strand, for example, did some advertising work), they defined their positions loudly, publicly, and in passionate opposition to one another.19 For Stieglitz and his followers, modernism was to be found in photographic abstraction, in the ideal of the expressive form, and in the minimally manipulated (but exquisitely crafted) print. Photographic artistry was a matter of vision, not mechanical process, of the brilliant eye that perceives and frames the perfect image before the shutter is tripped. (Stieglitz famously remembered "a three hours' stand during a fierce snowstorm . . . awaiting the proper moment."20) For Steichen, an equally vigorous proselytizer for a more inclusive view of the artistic potential inherent in photography, modernism was available everywhere: "If I can't express the best that's in me through such advertising photographs as 'Hands Kneading Dough' [Fig. 5], then I'm no good."21 Steichen, who in the 1920s had been in the forefront of making modernist photographic treatments of commercial products the style in advertising, both exposed a huge middlebrow audience to modernism through his advertising work and helped promote photography as the premier medium of the Jazz Age. But with the onset of the Depression, he saw modernistic commercial photography go out of fashion. Glamour and stylization in advertising were gradually replaced by storytelling imagery and testimonials from Mrs. Everyday, and he adjusted his approach accordingly.22 During the same period, Stieglitz had stepped back from the debate, photographed little himself, and showed no photography in his galleries between March 1925 (Alfred Stieglitz Presents: Seven Americans) and March 1929 (Paul Strand: New Photograps). The late 1910s and 1920s are now regarded as a high point in the history of American photography, yet by the end of the decade, the medium's principal advocates realized little success in attracting the attention-and approbation-of the greater art world. To Sheeler, these difficulties must have felt especially personal. Steichen, who would remain a lifelong friend, had been his conduit to broad public exposure in the pages of Vanity Fair and Vogue and had steered other stimulating jobs his way, but Sheeler found his notion of photography less congenial than Stieglitz's. Stieglitz, whose approval he had sought-and won-as a fledgling photographer, and whose sense of whatphotography should be came close to his own, had rejected him. As a result, Sheeler also became estranged from Paul Strand, Stieglit's principal acolyte, who until then had been his collaborator and friend.23 He retained a strong bond with Edward Weston, whom he had met in 1922, but Weston lived in California. By and large, these artists operated in very small, nearly invisible, circles, and, if anything, opportunities for exposure and recognition had declined since the 1910s. If these photographers were, in the words of John Szarkowski, the "acknowledged leaders of a

small and esoteric sect,"24 by about 1930, the frustrations of art world inattention must have outweighed the consolations of community-and the photographic communities that had sustained Sheeler experienced significant strain, and were about to be supplanted. Sheeler did not comment directly on the tensions of working in photography at this time. However, his extraordinary Rouge series offered a brilliant solution to navigating the competing demands of the Stieglitz and Steichen camps. Sent to Michigan to document the new Model A plant for a Kord Motor Company promotional campaign, he produced a serics of photographs-with the photographs he made of his eighteenth-century fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in the late 1910s, arguably his greatest achievement in the medium-that combined the individually expressive, sensuous print with the graphic, reproducible image. The Rouge photographs collapsed the distinction between commercial and fine art25 and pleased both Ford and the art critics. Sheeler's next major group of photographs, made at Chartres Cathedinl in France in the spring of 1929, was less successful both commercially and critically; the fate of these works indicates that the frictions in the photographic community had taken its toll and that a change in photographic fashion was in the wind. This majestic series of fourteen images rivals the Doylestown set and the Rouge photographs in ambition and achievement. As has been noted, it displays structural parallels with those other two series: the Chartres group is introduced by a complete view of the subject, then proceeds with a careful examination of fragments of the whole-fragments that did not record every significant feature of the place but, as Sheeler himself claimed, when added up presented its essence (Fig. 6): "By a carefully selected series of sections of Chartres I hoped to produce a more comprehensive presentation than would be possible in any one photograph showing the cathedral in its entirety."26 Just as he offered no views of the upstairs of the Doylestown house and no image of a completed car from the Rouge, he showed no interior views of the cathedral, with its magnificent rose window, or of the west facade in the Chartres set. Although the photographs have been described as revealing "an intensely formal concern while [Sheeler's] emotional reactions are underplayed,"27 they served as the vehicle for the expression of deep feeling, which Sheeler alluded to in his typically understated way: "The outstanding experience in France was the realization of a wish of long-standing to see Chartres, . . . I never expect to get over that."28 Sheeler evidently regarded the Chartres photographs as intensely important, though it is not clear what he intended to do with them. Their reception (or lack of it) with critics, colleagues, and the public nonetheless had a significant impact on Sheeler's career, and it says much about the direction of Americanphotography at the time. The prints themselves offer a few clues. Sheeler priced several of them at twenty-five dollars, which was a rather modest sum-roughly two hundred dollars in early-twenty-first-century purchasing power-

but he apparently did not sell many. One or two of the prints are unique, while several images were printed a half dozen times or more. This suggests that Sheeler may have considered offering them both individually and in sets or albums, as he had done with the Doylestown images and photographs of African sculpture. He also printed his images in various sixes, from about 9 by 7 inches to more than 19 by 15 inches, the latter being among the largest prints he ever produced.29 The small prints are warm-toned, velvety, elegant. Many of them-and only the prints in this size-bear Sheeler's address stamp (310 East Forty-fourth Street) and his cataloguing numbers, implying that he thought of them as a scries and anticipated exhibiting them. The large prints seem less satisfactory to the modern eye. Conventional black-and-white gelatin silver prints, printed in a more workmanlike fashion than the smaller ones, they may not have been intended for sale.30 They show greater contrast and sharper detail, but what they lose in subtlety of surface they gain in graphic impact. They indicate how the images might have looked reproduced in some fashion-in a drawing, in a mural, in a picture book.31 These experiments with printing the images to emphasize their graphic quality may indicate that by this time Sheeler was already thinking of his photographs as existing in the service of something else, not just as aesthetic objects in themselves. Sheeler himself never explained whether anything beyond artistic curiosity prompted these experiments with scale. They may have represented another attempt to bring together fine and more popular art, to reconcile the conflict between photographs ax unique, sensuous, personal expressions and their function as reproducible instruments of mass communication. It is tempting to speculate, for example, that Sheeler had in mind the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers when the made the largest Chartres prints. But nothing came of this, and Sheeler eventually submitted to that show a triptych made from several Rouge photographs. A 1935 Camera Club label (Sheeler joined the New York Camera Club in the mid-1930s, in part to use the darkroom) on the back of another image indicates that he continued to print from the Chartres negatives into the 1930s, yet few, if any, left his possession. He exhibited them only a few times after returning from Europe, and then in groups of two or three; the entire set of fourteen was not seen together until Sheeler's retrospective at the Museum of Modem Art in 1939. And, unlike the Rouge photographs, which caused a flurry in the press when they first appeared, the Chartres photographs elicited little critical response.32 The disappointing lack of interest in this series of photographs may have been due to the absence of a forum for presenting them to the public. The Depression diminished the potential market for fine art prints and photographic albums; the country's populist mood favored mass-market picture books instead.33 The difficulty may also have been with the subject matter, foreign and focusing on a monument from the past, which might have seemed ill-timed in an era when photographers were

increasingly called on to take contemporary America as their subject.34 Moreover (as will be discussed below) the inherent abstraction of Sheeler's photographic style was going out of fashion (just as abstraction in painting had), to be succeeded by a new kind of realism, at times nearly reportorial, in which the Chartres photographs decidedly did not share. The seeming indifference to the Chartres photographs did not bode well for Sheeler's future as an artistic photographer, just as the shift in advertising styles reduced the likelihood that he could continue to make a living through commercial work. In light of the declining opportunities in photography, Edith Halpert's offer of a paintings show with the proviso that he set photography aside may not have seemed such a hard bargain. And in light of his investigations of the potential of the Chartres images and his satisfaction with the paintings and drawings he derived from his Rouge photographs, it may have been a discipline he welcomed. When Sheeler began View of New York late in 1980, he was starting to find opportunities to introduce to the public the new ideas and methods he was developing in his paintings. Perhaps View of New York, with its inoperative and somber photographic studio but bright painterly sky, can be read as both elegiac and ambitious. Its elegiac aspects are clear. Sheeler depicts his studio as neither a sanctuary nor a salesroom, as artists of the previous generation (notably, his former teacher, William Merritt Chase) had done. The room exhibits no obvious self-promotion, nor is it displayed as an arena for conviviality or community. The space feels crowded, yet emotionally bereft. The covered camera signals Sheeler's farewell to his craft; the empty Klint chair is turned away, as though its owner had little further use for the Moderne. At the same time, the painting offers a determined presentation of Sheeler's new artistic credo. By about 1930, many artists who in the 1910s and early 1920s employed an abstract style had turned to realism. The precise drawing and taut geometries of View of New York demonstrate Sheeler's mastery of this new mode. For Halpert's part, the recommendation that Sheeler focus on painting was both self-serving and protective. In order to promote him as a painter, she needed something to promote. During the years he worked for Cond Nast, his painting output had been small, as he acknowledged in a 1928 letter to Walter Arensberg: "I continue in my dual role of photographing much and painting now and then."35 Of equal concern was the perception that activity in one medium contaminated the production in the other. Increasingly, Sheeler's paintings drew criticism for being overly literal and-because he often used his photographs to plan compositions in other mediainappropriately dependent on his photography.36 To forestall this sort of criticism, which demeaned his work in both media, Halpert urged Sheeler to focus on his paintings and minimize the public display of his photographs. As she recalled,

[I was] upset about the possibility of reorienting Charles's reputation as a painter by focusing so much attention on the photographs, which relate so closely to the paintings which followed. It took me years and years to change the public attitude which was built up so many years ago, indicating that he merely transferred one medium to the other.37 In the mid-1920s, when a reviewer of Sheeler's show at J. B. Neumann's gallery found his paintings, with their "cool delicacy and immaculate purity," to he overrelined,38 this liability was not yet blamed on the influence ofphotography. Rut by 1930 and the debut of Upper Deck, the "old quarrel of painting and photography,"39 as one critic would call it, became explicit. The suggestion that Sheeler's paintings were little more than tinted photographs grew out of the skepticism about the artistic value of photography that had long dogged the medium. Beaumont Newhall, in an eloquent defense of the relation between painting and photography, lamented the prejudice against their interaction: "There is hardly an artist practicing today who does not consider the photograph a mechanical debasement of his art-anti-art-void of all creativeness."40 Even those who admired Sheeler's work leveled this charge against him. Samuel Kootz, in his book Modern American Painters (1930), worried about the "peculiar primness and bridled quality" of Sheeler's recent paintings (he reproduced Upper Deck). This he blamed on "the cameraman's care for detail . . . for an eager exactness," which yielded works that he found "too coldly scientific."41 In View of New York, Sheeler tackled this issue head on. The painting, which on first impression seems precise and descriptive, is in fact an ingenious combination of the romantic and the unsettling. The space, so carefully calibrated, is in fact neither navigable nor functional.42 Hemmed in on all sides, with every object cropped, the studio barely admits the viewer. No room is left behind the camera stand for the photographer; beneath the black cloth, the camera has been stripped of its lens (Fig. 7).43 The pale gray square hovering on the wall beneath the window has no apparent meaning-unless you refer to the photograph that preceded this painting (Fig. 8), a photograph that Sheeler did not show. The disconcerting relations between the hulking camera and the oddly diminutive chair, between the cramped interior space and the limitless, Magritte-inflected sky imbue the painting with a touch of the surreal that belies Kootz's earlier charge of "eager exactness." View of New York was Sheeler's largest, most graphically powerful oil to date, as well as his most forward-looking. Beneath its realism and its rigorous structure lay an imaginative evocation of disjunction and longing that connects with the new Surrealist aesthetic just then appearing in New York. It is no accident that the year after Kootz published Modern American Painters, he chose View of New York for Twenty Modern American Pictures, an exhibition he organized for New York's Demotte Gallery that also included such paintings as Peter Blume's Surrealist masterpiece Parade (1930, Museum of Modern Art) and Georgia O'Keeffe's haunting Ranches Church, Taos (1929, Phillips Collection).

After its debut at the Demotte Gallery, View of New York was shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art and, in the fall of 1931, at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. At the same time, the Downtown Gallery held a group show that included several of Sheeler's watercolors. On November 18, Sheeler's first solo exhibition in five years opened at Downtown. The New York Times reviewer noted that the artist had gathered together "only six paintings and as many drawings-an exhibition as impressive in quality as it is lacking in quantity."44 A number of those six paintings became among Sheeler's most famous: Classic Landscape (Fig. 9); Americana; Home, Sweet Home; and American Landscape (View of New York was not in the show; it had already been sent to the Carnegie International). Sheeler's redirected artistic energies produced tangible results. The market responded to his new paintings and drawings with enthusiasm. Halpert had already brokered the sale of American Landscape to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller; several other pictures in the show would sell-and for handsome prices-within the next year or two.45 The subject matter of the paintings and drawings shown at Downtown, unlike that of the Chartres photographs, harmonized perfectly with the spirit of the times. All portrayed American subjects, either the new industrial landscape or cozy interiors furnished with unprepossessing American antiques. The paintings themselves were complex and subtle, but their titles could be interpreted as expressing the kind of sentimental nationalism invoked by many to bolster Depression-era spirits. Critics expressed enthusiasm about the work as well. Whereas Sheeler's last major exhibition of paintings, in 1926, had elicited the fear that he might "settle down to the role of the perfect minor painter, irreproachable but unexciting,"46 the Downtown Gallery show was seen as "suggesting a new possibility of realism for painting."47 The issue of the relation between Sheeler's paintings and his photographs was inevitably raised in reviews, as it would be for the rest of his career.48 But for the moment, at least, the paintings and drawings on view at the Downtown Gallery seemed immune from the charge of being merely painted copies of photographs, perhaps in part because the photographs that stimulated them had not been seen. One reviewer went so far as to praise their creative adaptation of a photographic vision: "Mr. Sheeler has brought to his canvases the photographer's eye for light and for masses, together with an extraordinarily sensitive photographic conception of line and shadow."49 Ironically, Sheeler's paintings exhibition opened a few days before the closing of a landmark photography show at Julien Levy's gallery, one of a number in the early 1930s that signaled an improvement in the visibility and status ofphotography. Beginning about 1930, Delphic Studios, Weyhe Gallery, the John Becker Gallery, the Legatt Studio Galleries, and Levy's gallery all committed at least some of their program to the medium. Art periodicals began paying more attention to

modern photography. Prime among them was Creative Art, which, under the editorship of Lee Simonson and then Henry McBride, profiled Strand, Atget, Weston, Evans, Steiner, and Outerbridge. Samuel Kootz wrote an admiring essay on Sheeler's Ford photographs for the April 1931 issue. Other essays and illustrations of photographywould appear in Parnassus, Transition, and Hound and Horn, Harvard University's prescient literary magazine. By the early 1930s, even Art News started to devote a few column inches to contemporary photography. And while it favored exhibitions of celebrity photography (it covered the January 1931 Cecil Beaton show at Delphic Studios in depth), it soon became more adventurous, sending a critic to review the John Becker Gallery's April 1931 exhibition of Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Steiner, and Walker Evans. As an additional measure of the medium's increasing status, in the early 1930s museums became more actively involved with avant-garde photography. In 1933, the Metropolitan Museum of Art accepted Stieglitz's gift of more than four hundred photographs (including three by Sheeler-probably the first of his photographs to enter a museum collection). Institutions began hosting photography exhibitions beyond the Camera Club Annuals and Pictorialist Photographers of America shows that had been their way of representing the medium in the 1920s. Important group exhibitions took place at the Wadsworth Atheneum (1930), the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo (1932), and the Brooklyn Museum (1932). The critical event in advancing the cause of photography in these years was the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in November 1929. Although its young director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., failed to persuade his board to represent the medium among the curatorial departments at the museum,50 he promoted photography actively with exhibitions and acquisitions. Murals by American Painters and Photographers, held in the spring and summer of 1932, included photographs by Berenice Abbott, George Platt Lynes, Steichen, and Sheeler, among others. The next year, the Museum of Modern Art accepted its first gift of photographs, one hundred views of nineteenth-century houses by Walker Evans, presented by Lincoln Kirstein. About forty of these were displayed in November 1933 in the museum's first exhibition devoted entirely to photography and perhaps the first solo show ever given by a museum to an American photographer. Lincoln Kirstein, the donor of the Evans photographs and organizer of both exhibitions, had begun to emerge as one of the leading impresarios of the arts in the 1930s. A recent Harvard graduate, he had been a founder of the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, which produced an extraordinary series of exhibitions of avant-garde art. One of his earliest efforts for the society was International Photography in November 1929. The show, which traveled to Hartford, featured a truly international roster of photographers, including Stieglitz and Strand, Abbott and Evans, Tina Modotti

and Weston, Bruehl, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray. Sheeler was represented by ten photographs. Beyond presenting photography as a valid and exciting art form, Kirstein aimed to show it as a diverse one. In that spirit, he added fashion photography, astronomical and aerial views, news photographs, and X-rays. Stieglitz's pure artistic photographs and some utilitarian works from the Steichen camp constituted just two voices among many.51 Kirstein continued to champion photography over the next several years. Under his direction, Hound and Horn not only published photographs by leading American artists, it also printed occasional commentaries on the medium, such as Walker Evans's "The Reappearance of Photography" in 1931. Kirstein contributed the script for "Photography in the United Suites," one of a series of radio broadcasts entitled Art in America in Modern Times, organized in 1934-35 by Barr and the Museum of Modern Art's exhibitions director Holger Cahill. A book based on the broadcasts was issued at the same time.52 Kirstein's essay, by appearing alongside accounts of American painting, sculpture, and architecture, underscored the artistic significance of photography. It was also one of the first published histories of the medium in the United States. Beginning with Mathew Brady and including Weston, Steichen, and Steiner, Kirstein's roster of important photogmpheers and uses of the medium profiled a diversity similar to his Harvard show. The penultimate photograph illustrated in the book was Sheeler's Pulverizer Bulding-Ford Plant from 1927 (Fig. 10). The final photograph, representing the present and future ofphotography, was by Walker Evans (Fig. 11). Kirstein's conviction about the proper direction for contemporary photography (and his respectful view of Sheeler's place within the medium's development) was shared by the young art dealer Julien Levy. In November 1931, having organized a show of Eugne Atget's work at Weyhe Gallery the year before, Levy opened his own gallery, dedicated to photography-but not just Stieglitz's kind of straight photography, which for Levy by this time had come to appear classic, a part of history. He focused on the new avant-garde, some of it based on a European Surrealist aesthetic, and some based on what he would term "ambivalent, anti-plastic, accidental photography."53 His first show, American Photography-Retrospective Exhibition, included a roster that anticipated the contents of Kirstein's radio show, but without its final chapter: Brady, Gertrude Ksebier, Stieglitz, Steichen, White, Strand, and Sheeler (though not Steiner or Evans). Its emphasis was deliberately historical. As Levy noted, "In view of the multiplicity of direction in modern photography, it appears logical . . . that the first exhibition by a gallery forphotography should present the antecedents."54 Levy's show was one of five photography exhibitions around town that month, whose diversity and quality caused New York Times critic Katharine Grant Sterne to comment, "Photography, long a parvenu among the fine arts, seems at last to have received the accolade." Levy represented Sheeler's

career with several photographs from the Doylestown and the Rouge series, but Sterne seemed most fascinated by "the latest portrait of a typewriter," "done" (as she remarked in another review of the show) "for a magazine ad" (Fig. 12). Presumably, she found this the most modern of the photographs, the one that best substantiated her thesis that "Photography is the machine-age art par excellence."55 It is not likely to have been Sheeler's favorite among his works displayed. Levy followed this successful show with exhibitions dedicated to Nadar and Atget (December 1931), Evans and Lynes (February 1932), modern European photography (February-March 1932), and Man Ray (April 1932), a program that alternated works past and present, European and American. Then in May 1932 he mounted an exhibition that in essence brought up to the present the survey of American photography begun with his Retrospective Exhibition. Photographs of New York by New York Photographers included recent work by Abbott, Bourke-White, Bruehl, Evans, Lynes, and Steiner, among others, but not the artists long associated with emblematic images of New York. These artists Levy later identified as "the photo gods, my gods too, the purists, the three great S's-Stieglitz, Strand, Sheeler."56 The exhibitions at Levy's gallery must have been disconcerting experiences for Sheeler. The first show lionized him as part of photography's distinguished history; critics consistently viewed him as the most modern of the old guard.57 Nonetheless, inclusion in Levy's Retrospective Exhibition but not in his show of New York photographers implied that Sheeler was part of the past, not the future, of American photography. As Sterne noted in her laudatory review of the former show, "Charles Sheeler . . . is no longer news."58 Levy and Kirstein's shows served as bellwethers, signaling a change in the prevailing aesthetic, one that ran counter to Sheeler's beliefs and practices. Sheeler had from the beginning upheld the ideal of purephotography; with Stieglitz and Strand, he believed that retouching and other "tricks of process or manipulation" constituted a violation of that ideal. Stieglitz and Strand insisted on the sanctity of the full image, Stieglitz in particular encouraging the belief that he was unwilling to "cut [even] a quarter of an inch off a frame." Similarly, Strand insisted, "of course I never manipulate my prints." But both of them did. The key set of Stieglitz's photographs (the artist's own archive of his photographic work, now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) reveals many variant images and photographs before and after critical quarters of an inch have been trimmed, removing extraneous detail in the quest for the iconic image. As for Strand, he went on to say, "Except that I recoat my papers with a second platinum solution. . . . My richer darks must be reinforced, but that isn't manipulation in any tricky sense. . . ."59

In fact, the photographer who remained most faithful to the idea of the sanctity of the negative, the one who maintained the most rigorous self-discipline in this matter, was Sheeler. Critic Gilles Mora perceptively notes that for the first several decades of Sheeler's photographic career, he seldom manipulated his work in the darkroom. His "cropping" of the image was achieved for the most part by altering his mats' window sixes.60 This was not simply a procedural control but an aesthetic choice. As William Carlos Williams said of Sheeler, his gift was "to see and keep what the understanding touches intact."61 For Sheeler, perhaps even more than for Stieglitz, Strand, and others, photography was a socially uncommitted art, whose purpose was to seek and reveal expressive form. This sort of ideal photography-striving for purity of vision through purity of method-seemed less vital to the new generation of photographers and their supporters. The 1930s was a documentary era, its truths increasingly found at street level. Photographic images were charged with social documentation, even with social engagement.62 As Kirstein wrote in 1933 about Evans's photographs of Victorian architecture, "Photography is . . . a stationary magic that fixes a second from time's passage on a single plane. Its greatest service is documentaiy."63 The practitioners of this new style of photography-among them, Evans, Abbott, Steiner, and Bourke-White-were less concerned with the appreciation of the sensuous beauty of the individual print than with the impact of the image: as Evans said, "[Print quality] is very important [but] it should be hidden."64 While some interaction occurred between the Stieglitz community and the younger photographers (they exhibited in some of the same group shows, for example), the new generation regarded Stieglity as "somebody to work against. He was artistic and romantic. It gave me an esthetic to sharpen my own against-a counteresthetic."65 By the 1930s, photographers were working with small, hand-held cameras as well as with large, cumbersome view cameras (which present the subject upside down, thus emphasizing considerations of design rather than of reportage). The hand-held camera enabled them to take pictures unobserved and on the run. Their views of New York tended to be made from the ground up (Fig. 13), not from the upper stories of a skyscraper, as many of Sheeler's and Strand's from the 1920s had been. They generally selected unprepossessing architectural subjects. And whereas Evans's images of ordinaiy nineteenth-century architecture (and Abbott's series of antebellum houses), like Sheeler's Doylestown photographs, paid homage to the vernacular past, the resonances found in Sheeler's pure, exquisite formal relations, relations that revealed the modernity of the past, gave way to a poignancy-what Kirstein termed "tender cruelty"-that lay just beneath the surface of the "moral virtues of patience, surgical accuracy and self-effacement" of Evans's style.66

The documentary aesthetic lent itself to the popularization of photography at all levels. The new picture magazines, such as Life, founded in 1986, employed a number of the new photographers, whose images fed the enthusiasm for "putting American life on record."67 They not incidentally introduced hundreds of thousands to the new documentary aesthetic (just as Steichen's ads had popularized modernism in the 1920s). Photographic picture books, illustrating New York and other subjects, proliferated; a number of these featured the work of the new documentary photographers. For example, This Is New York, published in 1934, included photographs by Abbott, Bourke-White, Steiner, and Evans. The documentary aesthetic encouraged amateur photographers because to them, it demystified the process of making photographs. They did not have to discover a "beauty spot" or design an evocative arrangement of objects to create an "artistic" photograph: "there was excitement in catching characteristic glimpses even of the superficially ugly manifestations of life."68 The documentary aesthetic also (it in with the 1930s drive for practical solutions and, in an era when so many organizations and institutions were perceived as no longer functioning, for things that worked. Unlike the decorative sentimentality of pictorialism or the abstract formalism of much of classic straight photography, in the 1930s documentary photography seemed to perform a real function, to make a demonstrable social contribution.69 From most of these developments of the early to mid1930s, Sheeler kept apart. He apparently accepted, with characteristic diffidence and grace, a kind of emeritus status. Although he did not withdraw entirely, his presence on thephotography scene became more discreet than it had been previously. Sheeler did not contribute to the illustrated magazines or to the picture books about New York. He declined photographic commissions and solo exhibitions during the early 1930s, even when proposed by friends or kindred spirits.70 The covered view camera in View of New York not only indicates his stepping back from photographybut also acknowledges the supplanting of the view camera aesthetic by the aesthetic of the hand-held camera.71 Sheeler quietly maintained his ties to the photographic community, at least with those artists who shared his views. He became a member of the New York Camera Club in the mid-1930s and, at the invitation of his old friend Steichen, served on the judging committee for some of the first issues of the U.S. Camera Annual, which published a cross section of American photography. He sent a few of his photographs to the 1934 exhibition Machine Art at the Museum of Modern Art, and four, two of them new pictures, to the same museum's landmark exhibition Photography 1839-1937. He had little use, however, for the new generation of documentary photographers, whose detachment, irony, and seeming lack of interest in the beautiful offended his romantic sensibilities. As he wrote to Weston, he preferred photographs of the United States that were not "all wooden Gothic and sordid squalor" (Fig. 14).72 But, in general, throughout this period he poured his creative energies into his paintings and

drawings, which found a ready market and critical approbation, thus validating both the pragmatic and aesthetic motivations for his career shift.73 At the time of this career shift-around 1930, when Sheeler began View of New York-the role and nature of his own photography changed, not to accommodate the documentary aesthetic but rather to serve his paintings. Although he made a number of photographs whose abstract beauty and rich, sensuous surfaces rival his work from the 1910s, increasingly in the 1930s photographs functioned as his first drafts, his vehicles for compositional exploration for works in other media. In photographs such as Studio Interior (Fig. 8), which was part of his preparation for View of New York, the lamp, the camera and stand, and the shadows they cast were all determined with care, yet the final selection of details-the removal of most shadows to give the image a more timeless look, the cranking up of the camera stand to lend the camera a more significant presence, the substitution of the modernist chair for a simple wooden table-occurred in the painting. As an image, the photograph is straightforward, frontal, and relatively matter-of-fact-an inventory of the interior of Sheeler's studio-while the strong lighting articulated every detail. View of New York, far more than Studio Interior, exhibits the same kind of subtlety and formal perfection characteristic of his earlier photographs. It is in the painting that Sheeler arrived at the flawless balance of shapes, the alternating rhythms of light and dark forms and of silhouettes and delicately modulated surfaces. The care that Sheeler poured into crafting his Doylestown and River Rouge photographs, which yielded velvety blacks and soft, silvery grays extraordinary in their rich tactility, he here expended on the painted surface.74 The concern for purity of vision and practice that had previously governed his photographs, he transferred to his paintings: whereas his earlier oils were "rather loosely woven in the manner of [their] execution . . . painted in the course of three or Tour sittings, without preliminary planning," by the time of View of New York "it became my custom to build up gradually a mental image of the picture before the actual work of putting it down [on canvas] began."75 View of New York was conceived with a photographer's eye and a photographer's vision, yet with an extraordinary eloquence of touch. At the same time, the painting's title requires us to understand it as a view of New York. As such, it suggests not only a different vision of the city than the one Sheeler presented in Skyscrapers (Fig. 3) and other paintings and drawings from the early 1920s, but also one different from that offered by the picture books and popular magazines, the one depicted by the new generation of photographers, who recorded the city's timeworn facades, its evocative fragments and fleeting moments, its patterned detritus. It is nonetheless remarkably contemporary. The view of New York that Sheeler proposes is of a pictorial uncertainty, an anxious indefiniteness-one not out of step with the mood of the Depression, and tinged with a surrealist sensibility. The interior space is tight, even claustrophobic; the inconsistent scale of objects in the picture is unnerving; the chair is placed at an incomprehensible,

inhospitable angle; the camera, a human surrogate, is shrouded and its lens has been removed. Thinking about View of New York retrospectively, Sheeler described it to his biographer Constance Rourke as "uncompromising . . . the most severe picture I ever painted."76 From that distance it may well have seemed so, for it bids farewell to an aesthetic that he had championed and perfected, signaling the end of a brilliant, chapter in Sheder's artistic life. Yet the pressures that brought him to this point also impelled him to lind a new method, a new outlet for his creativity, and this, too, is reflected in the painting. View of New York essays a newly evocative kind of painterly realism. By following Halpert's recommendation and suspending his activity as a photographer in order to channel his creative energy into painting, Sheeler attained that rare thing: a career with a second act. Sidebar View of New York, Sheeler's 1931 depiction of his photography studio, reflects a pivolal moment in the artist's career, the moment when he decided to subordinate his work in photography to his ambitions as a painter. The painting also points to a critical moment in the history of American photography, in which Sheeler's personally expressive style began to be supplanted by a documentary aesthetic. The shift in stains, leadership, and taste in American photography provides a revealing context for evaluating Sheeler's paintings and photographs from this period and for understanding the career change immorlalized in View of New York. Footnote Notes This essay grew out of a presentation at the symposium held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in October 2002 in conjunction with the exhibition The Photography of Charles Sheeler, American Modernist. I am grateful to Karen Haas for inviting me to participate in that gathering, for looking with me at Sheeler's photographs in the Lane Collection, and for many wise comments on this essay. Wanda Corn was also a careful, perceptive, and supportive reader, whose observations greatly improved my arguments. Greg Heins shared his extensive knowledge of cameras and photographic practice, as well as insights on the painting itself. I appreciate the though tfulness with which Marc Gotlieb and The Art Bulletin's anonymous readers approached my text. Above all, I have benefited from the generosity and enthusiasm of Saundra B. Lane, who has continued to welcome my meditations on Sheeler. 1. As discussed by Edith Halpert in correspondence with Museum of Fine Arts director George H. Edgell, Feb. 28, 1935, painting files, Department of Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

2. D.A. [Dorothy Adlow], "Museum Acquisitions," Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 8, 1985, clipping in painting files, Department of Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 3. Wanda Corn, "Home, Sweet Home," in The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 336. Corn used this perceptive phrase to describe Home, Sweet Home (1931, Detroit Institute of Arts), a "portrait" of a room in Sheeler's South Salem, New York, home. 4. Sheeler had addressed the theme of the studio portrait as self-portrait on several previous occasions, for example, his Stairway to the Studio (1924, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and his image of himself at a table, Self-Portrait (1923, Museum of Modern Art, New York). A number of his mentorsnotably, William Merritt Chase and Edward Steichen-had used images of their studios as a form of self-advertisement, promoting their accomplishments through carefully calculated arrangements of props, furnishings, and artistic equipment. While Sheeler's strategy is similar here, his conclusion-of redirected artistic practice-is quite different. For a fuller discussion of the antecedents of View of Neu) York and its function as an autobiographical statement, see Carol Troyen, "The Open Window and the Empty Chair: Charles Sheeler's View of New York," American Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1986): 24-41, reprinted in Readings in American Art, ed. Marianne Doezma and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 371-86. 5. As is made clear in the frequently quoted story about his purchase of a Lincoln Continental in 1929. A delighted Sheeler wrote to Walter Arensberg about a commission to shoot an automobile show, "most of the work being the photographing of the new Lincolns before the New York show. May I say that one of them never did get to the show-it moved up to South Salem!!!" (Sheeler to Arensberg, Feb. 6, 1929, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Sheeler's purchase was a substantial one. In 1929, Lincolns ranged in price from about $3,500 to $7,400. A four-door sedan, one of the most popular models, bore a factory price of $5,100; Ron Kowalke, ed., Standard Catalogue of Ford 1903-1998, 2nd ed. (Iola, Wis.: Krause Publications, 1998), 62. In the same year, 78 percent of all Americans had family incomes of less than $3,000; those who considered themselves "comparatively well-todo" earned about $5,000 a year. Frederick Lewis Alien, Since Yesterday: The Nineleen-Thirties in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 14, 61. 6. Sheeler's mixed feelings about his commercial jobs are expressed in a letter to Walter Arensberg in which his disdain for the Cond Nast assignments is tempered by his relative pleasure in his work for advertising agencies, "which comes nearer being of interest than whether they are wearing the bow on the right or left side this season" (Sheeler to Arensberg, Oct. 25, 1927, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

7. While Sheeler does not comment directly on the Depression's effect ou his income, the pattern of his production for Cond Nast publications is revealing: in 1926, he published fifty-three photographs in Vogue and Vanity Fair; in 1927, fifty-seven, and in 1928, twenty-three. Between 1929 and 1931, however, he published only two (Archives, Cond Nast, Inc.; Karen Haas graciously shared this information with me). Furthermore, his friend Vaughn Flannery, the art director of N. W. Ayer and Sons, who was the source of the River Rouge commission, left the company in 1930. Presumably, Flannery's departure reduced the likelihood of Sheeler's obtaining further work from Ayer (see Obituary of Vaughn Flannery, New York Times, Dec. 28, 1955, 24). In June 1933, after the death of his wife Katharine, Sheeler wrote to Walter Arensberg that his dealer Edith Halpert, "probably with an idea of giving me something tangible to work for," scheduled a show of his cont crayon drawings for the fall. "With this in view I must try to add to those which I already have. I must keep in mind the making of a living and of eventually overtaking my debts" (Sheeler to Arensberg, Ridgefield, Conn., June 27, 1933, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art). In a subsequent letter to Arensberg he talks about "trying my hand at designing fabrics for women's sport clothes. I enjoy it . . . if the returns justify it I hope to continue" (Sheeler to Arensberg, Ridgefield, Aug. 21, 1933, Arensberg Archives). Clearly, at this time Sheeler's financial obligations were greater than his income, yet commercial photography did not seem to be an option for "overtaking my debts." 8. Although Sheeler's fees are not known, Steichen's provide something of a barometer. At the height of his activity, Steichen was paid between $500 and $1,000 per published photograph, and in 1928 he earned an annual salary of $40,000 from the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. See Michelle H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 201; and Barbara Haskell, Edward Steichen, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2000, 50. 9. The often-quoted "Trinity of Photography" comment comes from W. G. Fitz's somewhat ironic review of the Thirteenth Annual Exhibition of Photographers in Camera; "A Few Thoughts on the Wanamaker Exhibition," Camera 22 (Apr. 1918): 205. In that show Sheeler was awarded the $100 first prize for "Bucks County House" (Daylestown House, Open Window) as well as fourth prize. During this period he was in close contact with Alfred Stieglitz and Marius de Zayas, showing his photographs on several occasions at de Zayas's Modern Gallery and later at his De Zayas Gallery. He sold significant groups of photographs to Agnes Meyer, John Quinn, and other adventurous collectors, and in the early 1920s published photographs of Constantin Brancusi's sculpture and works in Albert Barnes's collection, among other subjects, in the Arts. For an account of the energy surrounding the display, discussion, promotion, and publication of photography in the late 1910s and early 1920s, see Maria Morris Hambourg, "From 291 to the Museum of Modern Art: Photography in New York, 1910-

37," in The, New Vision: Photography between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989, 16-35. 10. The major museums occasionally hosted photography exhibitions in these years, but these tended to be surveys of work in the earlier pictorialist style (for example, the Thirty-ninth Annual Exhibition of PictorialistPhotography, held at the Brooklyn Museum in March 1929) or local Camera Club displays (First International Photographic Salon, sponsored by the Chicago Camera Club and held at the Art Institute in May 1929), which tended to include a little of everything: amateur and professional work, pictorialist images and straightphotography. 11. On the Art Center, see Bogart (as in n. 8), 133, 1.55, 188. 12. The Beautiful Hands exhibition was held at the Art Center in February-March 1929. 13. John Szarkowski, introduction to Callahan (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture Book in association with the Museum of Modern Art, 1976), 10. 14. "Sheeler, Buzan, Sarka: The Art Center," Exhibitions in New York, Art News 24 (Feb. 13, 1926): 8. 15. There was almost nothing published on contemporary photography until the late 1920s, when Creative Art printed excerpts from Edward Weston's Daybooks (illustrated with seven of his photographs) and articles by Berenice Abbott on Eugene Atget and Harold Clurman on Paul Strand. Creative Art 3 (Aug. 1928): xxixff; and 5 (1929): 651-56 and 735-38. 16. Responding to a show at the Daniel Gallery, the New York Times s critic had measured Sheeler's photographs against his drawings and paintings and found them wanting. "With the drawings are several photographs which are the last word in selective tact and the subordination of the machine, but these should have been shown separately. They stiffen and appear elaborate in the presence of the drawings." "Charles Sheeler," New York Times, Apr. 9, 1922, sec. 8, 8. The reviewer for Art News, while more accepting, still held up another medium as the standard against which a photograph should be measured: "Charles Sheeler is showing . . . seven of his very remarkable photographs, one of which, a view of an old barn, is extraordinarily like a fine pencil drawing." "Paintings and Drawings by Charles Sheeler," Current Shows in New York Galleries, American Art News 20 (Apr. 1, 1922): 6. 17. A. Everett Austin, Hartford Times, Dec. 13, 1930, quoted in Eugene R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 141.

18. Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen and. Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 28. 19. For the debate between photography as a personally expressive art versus one directed toward reproduction, see Hambourg (as in n. 9), 32-33. Although there were other points of view in this period-for example, Clarence White's emphasis on design as the key photographic principle-the argument between Stieglitz and Steichen, once close friends, was particularly well known in art circles as it was conducted in the press, and with vituperative language. Steichen argued that "the great art in any period was produced in collaboration with the particular commercialism of that period-or by revolutionists . . . who fought it tooth and nail," and condemned the "'art for art's sake' school" as "stillborn." Paul Strand, speaking for the Stieglitz camp, retorted snidely, "This indeed is a startlingly revolutionary prophetic argument, a real contribution to aesthetics. At last the long-sought-for much needed measuring stick: great art seeks to destroy or ties up with big business; all other is 'art for art's sake . . . still-born.' " Steichen, quoted in Carl Sandburg, Steichen: The Photographer (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 55; and Strand, "Steichen and Commercial Art," New Republic 62 (Feb. 19, 1930): 21. 20. Alfred Stieglitz, "The Hand Camera-Its Present Importance," American Annual of Photography and Photographic Times Almanac for 1897 (New York, 1896), 19-27, quoted in Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set; The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), vol. 1, 49. Stieglitz's purity was an ideal he could not always attain. As Greenough's catalogue shows, his exquisite prints resulted not simply from waiting for the right view but also from considerable work in the darkroom. Nonetheless, this extraordinary righteousness of vision was a logical-and essential-component of his advocacy of photography as an art form: something that resides in the sensibility, not in the mechanical process. see also Greenough's essay, "The Key Set," xii. 21. Edward Steichen, quoted in Sandburg (as in n. 19), 55. 22. See, for example, Steichen's photograph for a Kodak Verichrome Film advertisement (the caption reads, "Oh, Ted, we must never lose this snapshot") published in the Ladies' Home Journal, June 1934, reproduced in Johnston (as in n. 18), 136, pl. 2. As Bogart (as in n. 8), 151, 155, notes, the economic slump made advertisers more cautious, and they began to favor realism-what a 1935 viewer survey identified as "old-fashioned sentimentality and readable illustration"-over the "modernistic" styles associated with high art. Nonetheless, Steichen continued to make occasional modernistic advertising photographs through the 1930s. And, whereas a few of Sheeler's modernistic photographs of commercial products postdate his trip to Europe (of particular interest in this regard is his

photograph of a teaspoon and salt-and pepper shakers he designed in the mid-1930s, gelatin silver print, Museum of Modern Art), he never attempted the storytelling style, either from lack of interest or lack of opportunity. 23. Their falling-out was precipitated by Sheeler's review in the May 1923 issue of the Arts of Stieglitz'sphotography show at Anderson Galleries. In the review, which was generally laudatory, Sheeler attributed to Stieglitz's platimum prints a "material preciousness comparable to Italian goldground paintings." Both the notion of preciousness and the association with paintings infuriated Stieglitz; his allies, notably Strand, published emphatic rebuttals and broke their connections with Sheeler. See Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Norman Keyes Jr., Charles Sheeler; The Photographs, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1987, 22. 24. Szarkowski (as in n. 13), 10. 25. See Susan Fillin-Yeh, "Charles Shecler: Industry, Fashion, and the Vanguard," Arts Magazine 54 (Feb. 1980): 56. Sheeler's success in bringing together high art and mass communication is made clear in the response to the photographs. His depiction of aspects of the Ford factory (but not his views of the great Gothic cathedral that Followed them) inspired an almost religious reverence (CrissCrossed Convenors was reproduced in the February 1928 issue of Vanity Fair the quasi-biblical caption, "By Their Works Shall Ye Know Them"). They were illustrated in such art periodicals and highculture magazines as Transition, Creative Art, and the French journal Arts et Mtiers graphiues, as well as in the popular, fashionable Vanity Fair-and, of course, in Ford publications as well. 26. Sheeler, quoted in Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, Artist in the American Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 129-30. 27. See Stebbins and Keyes (as in n. 23), 37. Sheeler apparently made twenty-one negatives at Chartres, from which he printed fifteen, and he designated fourteen of those as the set. 28. Sheeler to Arensberg, Aug. 14, 1929, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 29. Most of this work seems to have been done in the 1930s, even when-as in the case of Side of White barn-the negative was made much earlier. Sheeler printed other negatives in this large size. among them, Williamsburg Kitchen (1935-36), Blue Ridge (1937), and Aunt Mary (1936). 30. There is no indication that Sheeler attempted to "spot" the larger prints, that is, to remove dust, imperfections, and so forth, as he would do for prints he planned to exhibit and sell.

31. The Chartres photographs led to at least one work in another medium, a cont crayon drawing called Flying Buttresses (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). 32. Whereas the Rouge photographs were published almost immediately afrer Sheeler's return from Michigan, the Chartres photographs seem not to have been reproduced until 1937, when one was illustrated in Beaumont Newhall's catalogue for the 1937 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photography 1839-1917. 33. As Walker Evans noted, "I know now is the lime for picture books. An American city is best, Pittsburgh better than Washington." Evans to Lippincott editor Ernestine Evans, Feb. 1934, quoted in Jeff L. Rosenheim, "'The Cruel Radiance of What Is': Walker Evans and the South," in Walker Evans, by Maria Morris Hambourg et al., exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000, 57. 34. "The American scene is perfectly produced by the camera." Guy Pne du Bois, "The Palette Knife: America's Curious Predicament in Art," Creative Art 7 (Sept. 1930): 33. Sheeler later acknowledged the difficulties inherent in working with non-American subject matter at this time: "Even though I have so profound an admiration for the beauty of Chartres, I realize it belongs to a culture, a tradition, and a people of which I am not a part. I revere this supreme expression without having derived from the source which brought it into being. It seems to be a persistent necessity for me to feel a sense of derivation from the country in which I live and work." Sheeler, quoted in Rourke (as in n. 26), 130. 35. Sheeler to Arensberg, Dec. 10, 1928, Arensberg Archives, Philadelphia Museum of Art. 36. This was not an issue for Sheeler alone. Ben Shahn (another of Halpert's artists) was cautioned against showing his paintings together with the photographs they were based on; see Karen E. Haas, "'Opening the Other Eye': Charles Sheeler and the Uses of Photography," in The Photography of Charles Sheeler, American Modernist, by Theodore F. Slebbins Jr., Gilles Mora, and Karen K. Haas (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2002), 138 n. 54. This prejudice affected the reputation of past masters as well. When Lloyd Goodrich began his work on the biography of Thomas Eakins in the late 1920s, the artist's widow, Susan Eakins, otherwise cooperative, suppressed his photographs because of the stigma against their use by "fine" artists. The perception that using photographs is somewhat dishonest, or that their use somehow covers up for an inability to draw Freehand or to create an original image persists today, as is indicated by the Hurry of articles, symposia, and protests accompanying the discovery of Lakins's use of photographs and the publication of David Hockney's Secret Knowledge; Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (New York: Viking Studio, 2001).

37. Edith Halpert to Musya Sheeler, Apr. 11, 1967, Downtown Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 38. "Charles Sheeler: New An Circle," Exhibitions in New York, Art News 24 (Jan. 23, 1926): 7. 39. H.V.D., "Art: Charles Sheeler's Exhibition," New York Times, Nov. 19, 1931, 32. 40. Beaumont Newhall, "Photography and the Artist," Parnassus 6 (Oct. 1934): 24. 41. Samuel M. Kootz, Modern American Painters (New York: Brewer and Warren, 1930), 51-52. 42. Karen Lucie, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 130, comments perceptively on the ambiguity of space in this picture and the resulting unnerving quality. She notes, "The top transom recedes into space, indicating that the window is open. But the bottom transom lies parallel to the sill, revealing that the window is closed. Therefore a fundamental contradiction exists in the window's structure. How could it be open and closed at the same time.?" 43. This becomes apparent when the painting is compared with Sheeler's photograph of his studio (Fig. 8), in which the lens clearly protrudes from beneath the cloth. The sexual implication of this change-if the camera is the photographer's surrogate, in the painting it becomes an emasculated oneadds another surreal touch. 44. H.V.D. (as in n. 39), 32. 45. Halpert's prices were bold. The oils included in that show were priced between $2,200 and $2,500, drawings ranged from $200 to $500, and watercolors between $350 and $600. The actual selling prices often ended up less, particularly if a museum was the buyer. Nonetheless, Halpert's ability to place Sheeler's pictures in prestigious collections during the Depression was astonishing. 46. "Charles Sheeler: New Art Circle" (as in n. 38), 7. 47. H.V.D. (as in n. 30), 32. 48. The most dramatic-and damaging-response to the intersection of Sheeler's painting and pholographv was prompted by his 1939 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, in which the two media were displayed together. Whereas some reviewers admired the photographs ("The photographs are simply magnificent") and noted with regret that some of the oils "resemble tinted photographs," others were more brutal in their condemnation of the relation between the two, which, they found, resulted in the "eliminat[ion of] . . . the human element." Edward Alden Jewell, "Sheeler in

Retrospect," New York Times, Oct. 8, 1939, sec. 9, 9; and Emily Genauer, "Charles Sheeler in One Man Show," New York World Telegram, Oct. 7, 1939, 34. 49. H.V.D. (as in n. 39), 32. 50. According to Julien Levy. "The only set-back [to showing the newly discovered photographs by Eugne Alget at the museum in 1930] being that the Trustees of the great Museum of Modern Art have refusedphotography in general as art." Levy to Mina Loy, Sept. 22, 1930, in Julien Levy: Portrait of an Art Gallery, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Lisa Jacobs (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 28. 51. The show's emphasis on diversity in photography reflected the program at Film und Folo, a landmark international exhibition of film and photography held in Stuttgart in 1929. It became a model for group exhibitions thereafter, as, for example, the show held at the Brooklyn Museum in March 1932. 52. Holger Cahill and Alfred H. Barr Jr., eds., Art in America in Modern Times (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1934). 53. Julien Levy, Memoir of an Art Gallery (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1977), 49. 54. Julien Levy's exhibition announcement, ''American Photography-Retrospective Exhibition: Ksebier, Sheeler, Steichen, Stieglitz, Strand, and White, November 2, 1931," quoted in Hambourg (as in n. 9), 283 n. 196. 55. Katharine Gram Sterne, "The Camera: Five Exhibitions of Photography," New York Times, Dec. 6, 1931, sec. 9, 18; and idem. "In the New York Galleries," Parnassus 3 (Nov. 1931): 8. 56. Levy (as in n. 53), 48. 57. As Walter Knowlton wrote in his review of Levy's 1931 exhibition, "It is not until we get to the prints of Sheeler that one comes to photography conceived as a new plastic art. . . ." Knowlton, "Around the Galleries," Creative Art 9 (Dee. 1931): 491. 58. Sterne, "In the New York Galleries" (as in n. 55). 8. 59. Paul Strand, "Photography," Camera Work, June 1917, quoted in Gilles Mora, "Charles Sheeler: A Radical Modernism," in Slebbins et al. (as in n. 30), 92 n. 53: Walker Evans on Stieglitz, quoted in Leslie Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," Art in America 59 (Mar.-Apr. 1971): 86; and Strand, quoted in Levy (as in n. 53), 19-50.

60. In the early 1920s, with his New York photographs, Sheeler experimented with a method of excerpting additional, and very different, images from a single negative. This was not a subtle editing of the image but a radical approach to picture making thai nonetheless maintained the purity of the artistic vision. See Mora (as in n. 59), 86. Mora compares Sheeler's dramatic cropping of the negativesometimes eliminating as much as two-thirds of it-wilh Walker Kvans's similar practice a decade or so later. However, Evans was after a more effective image (as he put it, "I would cut any number of inches off my frames in order to get a better picture"); Sheeler was after a different picture altogether. Evans, quoted in Katz (as in n. 59), 80. 61. William Carlos Williams, introduction to Charles Sheeler, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1939, 8. 62. As early as 1931, for example, poet Kenneth Rexroth counseled Edward Weston that his an would not be meaningful until it became engaged with class struggle. See Szarkowski (as in n. 13), 9. I am grateful to Karen Haas for this reference. 63. Lincoln Kirstein, "Walker Evans' Photographs of Victorian Architecture." Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 1, no. 4 (Dec. 1, 1933): n.p. 64. Walker Evans, quoted in Maria Morris Hambourg, "A Portrait of the Artist," in Hambourg et al. (as in n. 33), 25. 65. Walker Evans, quoted in Katz (as in n. 59), 85. 66. Kirstein (as in n. 63), n.p. 67. Allen (as in n. 5), 262. 68. Ibid., 265. 69. As such, sonic found it even more straightforward, direct, and insightful than social realist painting. As one critic said of Berenice Abbott's 1934-35 exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, "Here indeed is the American Scene more authentically recorded than it has ever been by that school of painters whose tiresome formula is Fourteenth Street + Italian Renaissance technique American art." P.S., "Current Exhibitions," Parnassus 7 (Jan. 1935): 25. 70. In 1933, Ansel Adams offered him a solo show in his San Francisco gallery, which he declined. The next year, Edith Halpert turned down on his behalf a commission from Edsel Ford to produce a

photomural for the Ford Pavilion at the Century of Progress Exhibition. See Stebbins and Keyes (as in n. 23), 40. And when Halpert needed a photographer to take pictures of the folk art she was selling in her gallery, she turned not to Sheeler, who had a great deal of experience with that kind of work, but to Walker Evans. See Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 77. 71. Sheeler experimented briefly with a 35mm camera himself during this period. About 1932, he purchased a Contax camera, manufactured by the German company Zeiss Ikon, and used it and other small cameras for about five years. See Stebbins and Keyes (as in n. 23), 41. 72. Sheeler to Weston, Jan. 27, [1939], Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, quoted in Hambourg (as in n. 9), 284 n. 234. 73. By the mid-1930s, more than a dozen of Sheeler's paintings and a number of drawings were in public collections, sold by Halpert for as much as several thousand dollars. In contrast, as noted above, Sheeler priced his Chartres photographs at $25.00. The younger generation of photographers fared little better. In 1938, for example, at Berenice Abbott's show at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery in New York, photographs were priced between $7.50 and $25.00. Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, exh. cat., Museum of the City of New York, 1997, 34 n. 72. 74. The quiet variations in facture in View of New York-the relatively loosely rendered sky, the suppressed brushwork of the camera cover and stand, and the oddly shimmering surface of the wall behind the stand-that subtly underscore the painting's meaning are, ironically, completely lost in reproduction, in which the painting generally appears only sleek and modernistic. 75. "Excerpts from Charles Sheeler's 1937 Unpublished 'Autobiography,'" Sheeler Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reprinted in Stebbins et al. (as in n. 36), 191. 76. Sheeler, quoted in Rourke (as in n. 26), 156. AuthorAffiliation Carol Troyen is John Moors Cabot Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her recent publications include essays on John Singer Sargent's murals for the Museum of Fine Arts, the development of Thomas Eakins's reputation in the 1930s, and Marsden Hartley's late work [Department of Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, Mass., 02115, ctroyen@mfa.org].

Copyright College Art Association of America Dec 2004

Abstract (summary)
TranslateAbstract While those of us who study nineteenth-century fiction have been turning to the period's photography for insight into the real life of Victorians and the realism practiced by many of their novelists, Daniel Novak has developed a counter-approach-arguing that photography can also be said to represent what is not real and that literary realism itself relies as much on typicality as on particularity and individuality. Novak concludes his study by referencing the work of pioneer Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who exalted montage as the basis of cinematography (indeed, in Kuleshov's view, of all art), and by extension Novak urges us to consider how contemporary technological discourse-particularly with respect to the internet-recalls the tropes of exchangeability and anonymity he has been exploring.

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TranslateFull text Turn on search term navigation Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, by Daniel A. Novak; pp. xv + 222. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 50.00, $95.00. While those of us who study nineteenth-century fiction have been turning to the period's photography for insight into the real life of Victorians and the realism practiced by many of their novelists, Daniel Novak has developed a counter-approach-arguing that photography can also be said to represent what is not real and that literary realism itself relies as much on typicality as on particularity and individuality. Novak starts out by asking the leading question, "what if we read photography and its interchangeable subjects as a 'model' for how we read character and identity in the realist novel?" (6), and he finds answers by looking especially at the composite or art photography of pioneer photographers Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustav Rejlander. There he uncovers instances of how they manipulated their composite images to construct what (for them) was more true than real, in a manner akin to the project of the realist novelist. The "erasure of identity and particularity" made possible by the "openness of the photographic frame" (21) thus exposes an "unlimited source for production of novel bodies and photographic narrative" (29). Novak's text unfolds through a series of chapters focused on reading the fictions of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde against an intriguing selection of photographs, concluding with an "after-image" or coda entitled "Surviving the Photograph."

Chapter 2, "Composing the Model Body: Re-membering the Body and the Text in Little Dorrit," builds upon links that Novak elucidates among photographic aesthetics, Karl Marx's theory of commodity production, and Dickens's notion of the artist's model articulated in his essays in Household Words. Utilizing Little Dorrit (1855-57), with supporting evidence from Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), this chapter seeks to establish the proposition that "what photography and realism shared was not necessarily their fidelity to detail but rather their inability to present these details in any coherent form" (63). In this respect, Little Dorrit's recurring supplication, "Do Not Forget," invokes dismemberment and abstraction as models for how the novel's fragmentation can transform into a whole-or how, from another angle, the reader's "serial amnesia" can translate into a comprehensible reading. By demonstrating that we forget in order to remember, Novak overtly recalls Roland Barthes's observation in S/Z (1970; trans. Richard Miller, 1974), "it is precisely because I forget that I read" (qtd. in Novak 71), recommending as well the ideal reader that Walter Benjamin describes as deriving from distraction the solution to the text's meaning. Novak's next chapter, "A Model Jew: 'Literary Photographs' and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda," lies at the center of his argument. In an earlier incarnation in Representations, this chapter has already had an impact on Eliotian criticism and theories of race. Here, Novak examines the composite photography Francis Galton employed to create a science of race typology, finding Galton's technique analogous to Eliot's depiction of her eponymous protagonist. One persistent critique of Daniel is that he seems more like a disembodied type than a realistic character, but Novak argues that this is precisely the point: "the more alienated and emaciated, spectral and disembodied, the more substantial and authentic the Eliot subject can become" (110). In the case of Daniel and the abstract notion of Jewish nationalism-both historically and in an indeterminate future- individuality and type conjoin to imagine a composite national body. Idealized yet typical, Daniel's sympathy may be, as the novel calls it, both "too reflective and diffuse" (qtd. in Novak 111), but as Novak contends, "this sympathetic flexibility, this 'negative capability' is the condition of possibility for Eliot's model of racial identity in the novel" (92). The fourth chapter, "Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Wilde, Photography, and Identity," juxtaposes two trials occasioned by Wilde's celebrity, ultimately showing how his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) foregrounds and allegorizes key issues raised and problematized by the legal system in both the United States and Great Britain. In 1883, the American photographer Napoleon Sarony successfully sued a lithographic company for copyright infringement, claiming that not only one of his photographs of Wilde but the pose itself was the photographer's (notably not the subject's) original property. Novak contrasts that trial with Wilde's 1895 libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, in which the prosecuting counsel tried to turn Wilde's fictional accounting in

The Picture of Dorian Gray back onto its author as proof of his homosexuality. Paradox, reversal, inversion-all play their part in Novak's intertextualization of identity, authorship, and technological reproduction in Wilde's life and work. It should come as no surprise, then, that Novak asserts that instability and recomposition serve both to critique and to celebrate aestheticism. At this point, we are being asked to acknowledge the interchangeability of picture and portrait, to agree with Novak that "for Wilde, photographic 'portraits' are 'pictures'-a form of literature and a form of fiction" (137). Novak concludes his study by referencing the work of pioneer Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, who exalted montage as the basis of cinematography (indeed, in Kuleshov's view, of all art), and by extension Novak urges us to consider how contemporary technological discourse-particularly with respect to the internet-recalls the tropes of exchangeability and anonymity he has been exploring. His final sentence reads, "paradoxically, then, it is precisely as this 'equivocal being'"-that is, Jacques Derrida's insistence on the perennial specter of the past-"that Victorian photography and its body have survived and continue to survive into our culture and its future" (151). As should be apparent by now, Novak frequently expects the reader to go through the mental gymnastics of conceding to a paradoxical line of reasoning or accepting an analogy that initially seems counter-intuitive. Read in succession, Novak's arguments are mind-boggling yet convincing, but re-entering such a dense text is a heady experience until the reader once again feels comfortable with its shifting mindset. Taken out of context, many of the assertions of Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth- Century Fiction risk seeming illogical, perhaps even perverse. Yet ultimately Novak has produced the kind of tour-de-force that rewards the diligent reader's trust. It is now our task to re-read previous studies like Jennifer Green-Lewis's Framing the Victorians (1996) and Nancy Armstrong's Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999) in dialogue with Novak's insights, and to explore the implications of Novak's discoveries for new undertakings such as Ruth Bernard Yeazell's Art of the Everyday (2008) as they enter our critical terrain. AuthorAffiliation CAROL HANBERY MACKAY is Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Soliloquy in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1987) and Creative Negativity: Four Victorian Exemplars of the Female Quest (2001), as well as editor of The Two Thackerays (1988), Dramatic Dickens (1989), and Annie Besant's Autobiographical Sketches (2009). AuthorAffiliation CAROL HANBERY MACKAY

The University of Texas at Austin Word count: 1147 Copyright Indiana University Press Autumn 2008 "Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography" by Patricia Johnston is reviewed.

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TranslateFull text Turn on search term navigation Patricia Johnston, REAL FANTASIES: EDWARD STEICHEN'S ADVERTISING PHOTOGRAPHY. Berkeley California: University of California Press, 1997: pp. xxii + 351, $55.00 hardcover. Edward Steichen inarguably holds a place in the pantheon of American photography. Steichen's abilities and background as a portrait artist gained him entry and respect into the developing scene of American artphotography that was dominated by Alfred Steiglitz. As Steiglitz's collaborator, Steichen was instrumental in establishing Gallery 291 (formally known as the Little Galleries of the PhotoSecession), where Steiglitz first exhibited works by Georgia O'Keefe, and was involved in the creation of Camera Work. Farther from Steiglitz's shadow, Steichen is, perhaps, best known as the curator for the massive populist photography exhibition of the Cold War, The Family of Man. Yet, for his accomplishments, Steichen's camera work remains relatively unexamined compared to other early twentieth century photographers of note. Patricia Johnston's Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen 's Advertising Photography helps renovate this neglect. While Steichen's skills as a fine artist served him in formal portraiture, he also worked in advertising for much of his photographic career, an endeavor that brought some measure of disapproval from his contemporaries. Advertising also remains stigmatized in critical scholarship. As visual communication scholar Paul Messaris has noted, the perception of advertising as a "malignant cultural force" affects underlying attitudes toward its academic examination. Fortunately, Johnston is unpersuaded by this bias. Perhaps just as fortunately, Johnston's credentials as an art history professor (at Salem State College) lend credence to her project. Recognizing that photography's cultural status is a hierarchy devised more from its uses and applications than its intrinsic qualities, she provides a compelling critical examination of issues of visual depiction and modernism in this informed and surprisingly wideranging book. Thus, Real Fantasies is of interest not only to scholars and students of advertising per se, using Steichen's work as a case study, but of the history of photography. Along the way, Johnston provides arguments regarding gender, culture, and class representations in the media and the development of visual culture in the 20th century.

Johnston begins by outlining one of the little-known facts of Steichen's early career-his contributions to the Army Air Service Photographic Section in World War I. There, Steichen's work transcended image-making, as he presided over the aerial photography division, supervising production of reconnaissance images, training the military bureaucracy in reading aerial photos, initiating the adoption of new forms and technological advances, and advocating for the value of photography in the war effort. In her account of this stage of Steichen's career, Johnston sees a parallel to the rationale for his work in advertising. "In a comment surprisingly prescient of his advertising work, Steichen referred to military photography as 'a commodity without enough customers'" (20). Steichen's mission was to secure those customers. Johnston implies interesting parallels between photography as document in the Army Air Service Photographic Section and the more familiar documentary work which later emanated from Federal agencies such as the WPA. At the same time, a picture emerges of Steichen as capable of bending arguments about photographic value to whatever particular view serves his current purpose. For Steichen, the value of aerial photographs resided variously in their documentary objectivity, their emotive power, and their aesthetic form. Steichen's sometimes contradictory views may be a reflection of the state of thinking about photography as representation. Johnston capably charts the many discursive trajectories around the form and its uses in mass media. Interestingly, Steichen himself acknowledged the bias against advertising as a tainted artistic endeavor, arguing that commercial art was analogous to the historically accepted practice of patronage, through which no less an artist than Michelangelo created masterworks. Although not intended as a biography, Real Fantasies provides background on Steichen that establishes him as a model of corporate artistic service as opposed to individual artistic vision, laying out the context for a multi-dimensional discussion of his advertising endeavors and accomplishments in subsequent chapters, and how those accomplishments were woven into the transitions of advertising modes.Johnston begins with Steichen's documentary-like images of housewives' working hands that illustrated the "reason-why" advertising campaign for Jergen's hand lotion. Johnston's selection of illustrative material enhances her analysis of how Steichen's photographs developed a visual narrative with its implied promise of social mobility. A particularly interesting point in this discussion, one relevant to advertising studies, is how Johnston charts the relationship between visual depiction and written copy. The overwhelming reliance on visual imagery in contemporary advertising is so commonplace; it's almost startling to realize that the visual was routinely sub sumed by a preoccupation with concerns about advertising copy. Similarly, ambivalencies and tensions existed between photography and drawing as the appropriate visual mode. Johnston's comparative examples of the "duel" between these two graphic expressions in various campaigns provide intelligent dimensions to the discussion of visual imagery in general. "In the 1920s," Johnston relates, "art directors typically expressed two overgeneralized positions: that drawing encouraged imagination and

identification, and that photography excelled in naturalistic depiction. A Thompson art director . . . summarized the first view,point when he proposed that a drawing should be employed to sell `an idea' while photographs are most useful to sell `merchandise"' (66-67) . The reported attitudes of advertising professionals towards the "half-sitted literalness" of photography seem arcane in comparison to today's image-driven ad environment. A noteworthy subtext in the chapter on the Jergens lotion campaign is how the presumptive individual artistic vision of photographic work is routinely compromised and altered by selection, cropping, and contextualization. One of the more compelling aspects of Johnston's analysis concerns the relationship bet veen Steichen's images and extant imaging in other formats. In charting how Jergens and other product campaigns expressed invisible ideologies of a rising, class-linked consumer culture in their appeals to those who could afford to be consumers, Johnston argues that the visual objectification of women was based on cinematic conventions, both formal and narrative. "Advertising borrowed from popular cinema the use of sequential stills to suggest closely spaced moments in time.... [and] convince the viewer that the product can transform an everyday life into one worthy of the movies" (147). Here, as elsewhere, her argument is bolstered by access to written documents over observations of the photographs, but the numerous illustrations support the point capably. The strategy of cinematic appropriation marked a deliberate shift from the documentary style of "reason-why advertising" to a more romantic and emotional image, although Steichen had previously employed narrative techniques. More obviously, other photographs were patterned after Madonna and Child images, reinforcing other traditional expressions of feminine essentialism. Although Johnston herself does not make the connection, Steichen's scenes of domestic life evoke the sentimental paintings of America's best-known Impressionist, Mary Cassatt. In Johnston's analysis of the campaign for Pond's beauty products she moves from an emphasis on gender ideals to class distinction, responding to Steichen's portraiture of society women offering testimonials. Here, explicit role models of consumerism offer a false consciousness of class equality "achieved through trivial acts of consumption" such as sharing easily achieved beauty routines-use Pond's. Testimonials offered by women of European royalty were particularly effective in the Ponds campaign due to an intriguing relationship between elitism and equality represented by the royals. As America's fascination with royals continues to this day, Johnston's theory is thought provoking. The beguiling quality of royalty is its members very ordinariness. Their status is conferred by birth. Royals do not necessarily possess greater intelligence, talent, athletic prowess, or business acumen than others, and thus in a way they represent the masses of people who are not special. Yet because they claim an elite position in a fixed hierarchy, they reinforce class structure.... Royals represent an

elite yet are ordinary enough to stand in for the consumer. The privileges of life at the top and the myth of a society of equals are reinforced simultaneously. ( 172) Although Steichen's special skills as a portrait photographer contributed to the successful creation of desirable images of women, here, Johnston's analysis focuses first on cultural matters, then discusses the move of a modernist visual vocabulary into advertising. Before moving into a discussion of color photography within the context of Steichen's later work, Johnston concludes the gender-based chapters that form the centerpiece of the book with a provocative essay in Chapter Eight on female spectatorship and advertisements. She proposes that the use of female nudity in ads for Cannon towels complicates the tensions between identification and objectification involved in spectatorship. Rather than follow the implication of passivity in spectatorship, Johnston argues for a reading of the Cannon towel and Woodbury soap ads that removes the female reader from a position of passive consumption. Rather, Johnston proposes "an awareness on the part of the viewer that she is seeing a socially determined image, and yet she makes a decision to engage with the fiction as if reading a novel" (209). In this more active and knowing frame of view, what Johnston refers to as "skeptical reading," women could view the nude images "as the latest in the display of women's bodies in the Western tradition, as examples of ideal beauty, as great appreciations of the female form, as evidence of the audience's sophistication as spectators" (209). Johnston's view is aided bv the fact that the nudes in the Cannon campaign were targeted to a more upper-class audience who read Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, rather than the more domestic Ladies Home Journal. In some ways, Johnston's general arguments about gender are familiar, especially with regard to gender stereotyping and advertising's promotion of upper class ideology. Johnston's strength is in the way she deals elegantly with these subjects and in the visual evidence provided. The many reproductions are technically excellent and visually compelling. The focus on images from an earlier era provides a potential counterpoint to the usual examples of female ideals presented by ads from the latter half of this century, and would be useful pedagogical materials in discussions of advertising and images of class and gender. One problem with the chronological presentation of Steichen's work in advertising is that the final chapter-part of the discussion on color imagery-returns to a theme consistent with issues of class and gender representation. In Chapter Ten Johnston discusses how ethnography is represented in travel ads that feature exotic female beauty and offer "a soothing reassurance of the Western worldview" and contribute to Hawaii's growing mythic lore in American popular culture (251). Here again, the themes are familiar, evoking issues of cultural hegemony, Otherness, and fantasy. But the discussion's

grounding in visual imagery, expands its value; but it seems out of context in the book in terms of representation of the feminine. The strengths of Johnston's work are twofold. Real Fantasies is a detailed, well-researched, splendidly illustrated examination of advertising photography as it relates to the work of its most esteemed practitioner. As such, its art historical approach serves to illuminate areas of advertising history and theory. In addition, the discussion has value for other arenas of scholarship, particularly visual and feminist studies, in the presentation of compelling images. JANIS L. EDWARDS Western Illinois University Word count: 1840 Copyright Southern States Communication Association Summer 1999

Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites
Helsinger, Elizabeth K . Victorian Studies 40.2 (Winter 1997): 345-347.
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TranslateAbstract Helsinger reviews "Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites" by Lindsay Smith.

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TranslateFull text Turn on search term navigation Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the PreRaphaelites, by Lindsay Smith; pp. xiv + 245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, L30.00, $49.95. The second half of this book's title gives a better account of its contents than the first. While one would like to hear that "the hugely influential discourse of photography" is indeed the key that will explain John Ruskin's aesthetics and William Morris's poems in a new way-and no doubt the book will be widely read and reviewed because it wants to show just that-it falls very much short of fulfilling its bolder claims (2). It does give us a good account, particularly in Chapters Two, Three, and Six, of various ways in which Ruskin and Morris use problems of visual representation-in particular, how to represent the eyes' variable focus on objects at different distances and the effects of intervening space

on the perception of light and color-to trouble or productively reconfigure the epistemological certainties of "sight" or "vision," producing what was widely perceived by Morris's early readers as an obsessively visual, highly colored, and oddly detailed "PreRaphaelite" practice. There is, however, a large gap between Lindsay Smith's repeated assertions that it is photography(and sometimes, the stereoscope) that raised these problems of perception and its representation for Victorians, and her nuanced and sometimes suggestive accounts of how the Ruskinian grotesque or the poems of The Defence of Guenevere (1858) explore them. Much Victorian writing thematized both physiological and psychological perception as untrustworthy or creative responses to external stimuli. That these preoccupations follow new accounts of the physiology of vision and accompany the growing popularity of a number of apparently more trustworthy mechanical optical devices is the argument of Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (1990) and several essays in Carol T. Christ and John 0. Jordan's collection, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995). Smith's book joins these recent accounts, carefully noting the evidence that Ruskin and Morris were aware of photography (though she does not uncover much that is new here). This evidence alone, however, does not convincingly establish the centrality of photography or its "discourse" for either writer, as a more rigorous argument showing the parallels and differences-at conceptual, visual, and verbal levelsmight begin to do. Such an argument probably would need to draw more on what was said and written about photography at the time or on a closer analysis of the way it was used. The recurrence of common terms or visual examples in discussions of or experiments in photography and in Ruskin's or Morris's writing about the visual might demonstrate a shared discourse and more clearly distinguish the links withphotography (compared to other innovations) in Ruskin's theories of the grotesque or Pre-Raphaelite practices. To make the kinds of arguments she wants to make, Smith would also need to correct her tendency to make key terms of words that she uses imprecisely, inconsistently, or just inaccurately (for example, "aberrant," "communal," "politics"). The book that addressed the claims Smith advances convincingly would be an important undertaking, though difficult to research and write. The achievements of this book are more modest. They can better be appreciated if one ignores the attempts to link them all to an overarching argument about the revolutionary effect of photography that the essays here do not effectively make. For Smith, as for Isobel Armstrong (Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics [1993]), Ruskin's theories of the true grotesque (which both critics treat somewhat freely as another term for the "gothic" in his writings) are the most productive and characteristic contribution of his aesthetics, particularly for their influence on Morris. Smith's interest in the visual resonances of a Ruskinian grotesque is quite different from Armstrong's focus on it as the aesthetic expression, potentially a critique, of the social relations of production past and present with which Ruskin is concerned in "The Nature of Gothic" chapter of The Stones of Venice (1851-53). For Smith the Ruskinian grotesque

points to "gaps" between what can be visually represented and what remains unrepresented by focusing on a detail that appears strange or distorted. Ruskin's account registers his awareness of the flawed and limited, yet potentially creative aspects of ordinary sight, particularly if the perceiver can be freed from learned conventions of visual interpretation to notice detail that is usually screened out in perception or conventional representations of the visible. Smith seizes on the grotesque as Ruskin's crucial figure for vision because it serves her as an analogue to the way the mid-Victorian photograph, she argues, similarly draws attention to what it can and cannot represent. To achieve a newly precise record of details made visible under the right conditions of light (for example, of foliage or architectural sculpture) it was necessary to sacrifice other visual information which the eyes might see or the painter might reveal at the extremes of bright light or deep shadow, or in the nuances of color. But the camera could, within limits, record details that the ordinary perceiver had learned not to notice and that were omitted from representations of the visible that looked more "realistic. " In the argument from analogy of function which Smith is building (she does not describe it this way), PreRaphaelite hyperclarity of foreground detail and attention to color can also force recognition of the limitations of human perception at a given cultural moment: of what the eye can accurately register, what the mind has learned to select from that visual data, and what the artist conventionally represents. Hence Victorian photography and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry (Morris's anyway), like Ruskin's gothic-grotesque, might be said to argue for changing the conventions of visual representation and affirming the power of the mind to imagine more or differently than what can be mentally grasped or literally seen. This cannot really be said to "lend to [Ruskin's] writing a distinctive and a post-photographically authorised status" (66). I am not convinced by what Smith presents that Ruskin's grotesque either draws centrally on photography for its ideas, as she sometimes implies, or receives from it, retrospectively, its authority. But the analogies she sets up creatively adapt Ruskin's ideas in a way that might serve as a stimulus to further work on both Victorian photography and PreRaphaelite practices. Smith's short chapter on William Holman Hunt and the "combination photograph" offers a different way to think about Hunt's literalizing symbolism. Her third chapter on Morris includes some locally very perceptive readings of poems from The Defence of Guenevere. (The first, like her first chapter on Ruskin, is more dutiful than illuminating; both could have been greatly condensed and folded into subsequent chapters, especially since they recapitulate at length arguments she wants to use or modify made elsewhere by other scholars.) Smith's observations of the way color, perspective, focal length, and depth of field are embedded in the formal and conceptual structures of Morris's poems lead us to try to work out anew their meanings and effects, even when Smith does not always push through to such interpretations herself. Though one could wish this were a better book, its intuitions of

similarities among photography, painting, poetry, and aesthetic theory in mid-Victorian Britain may prove fruitful, if not quite in the ways Smith claims. AuthorAffiliation ELIZABETH K. HELSINGER University of Chicago Word count: 1213 Copyright Indiana University Press Winter 1997

FICTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY: CONSTRUCTIVISM IN THE NOVEL

Shapter, Michael. Afterimage 35.6 (May/Jun 2008): 19-23.
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TranslateAbstract [...] despite the quality of the writing, the authenticity of the storyline, the veracity of events, or the likely longevity of the novel over time and its consequent place in modern literature, or because of these,photography lingers as a trope and the Constructivist characteristics that are applied to the structure of the writing, knowingly or not, can be viewed as significant contributing factors to the twenty-first century novel - and those that predate them.

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TranslateFull text Turn on search term navigation Constructivism in relation to artistic and architectural movements commenced in Russia before the time of the October Revolution in 1 9 1 7 and became most influential afterward. The movement dismissed "pure" art in favor of art used as an instrument for social purposes, specifically the construction of a socialist system, and it encouraged mechanical art as a new dynamic. Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934 when it fused with Dadaism and other styles, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere and influencing the Bauhaus movement. In art and architecture, the important features of Constructivism included geometric abstraction and bold graphic design. It eschewed mysticism and held that art should celebrate technology. Photomontage dominated in photography and the movement is associated with Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo MoholyNagy, and Man Ray. The motifs of Constructivism have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.

One of its dominant themes was propaganda, which might be construed as myth-making, changing reality, or altering facts to suit a new end. Certainly in photomontage this is the case, where elements were taken from different sources and combined to give new results in order to encourage alternative ideas. Another characteristic of Constructivism in art, which shows itself to the viewer, is that some part of the process is visible in the picture. In photography, for example, the edge sprocket holes of the film might appear in the final print, a reflection of the photographer might be included in the subject matter, or a shadow of the photographer holding the camera might stretch toward the center of the picture. So in arguing that Constructivism can be applied to literature, it could be said that novels that feature such characteristics as providing multiple representations of reality, representing the natural complexity of the real world differently, and providing multiple perspectives and representations of concepts and content - all of which are characteristics of Constructivism in art - are Constructivist novels. The aspect of Constructivism that shows its process in the end product is seen in some novels as well. To expand diis characteristic to Constructivist literature, we might say we can see where the author has been influenced by something in history, for example, and as in the case at hand, from one of photography's histories. The most obvious example of this is the inclusion of photographer EJ. Bellocq in several novels set in New Orieans at the turn of the twentiedi century. ' The astute reader, aware of Bellocq's work and Mark Holborn's 1 996 monograph, will detect its influence on several novels including David Fulmer's Chasing ihe Devil's Tail (200 1 ) and Rampart Street (2006) and Friedrich Turner's Redemption (2006). This part review, part analysis of the use of photography as a trope and a theme in novels seeks to expand the work already achieved by others.2 Arguably, after painting, the next oldest art form to influence our culture is fiction writing, following logically from the oral tradition the pre-dated it. Widlin the many genres of fiction available in the twenty-first century (crime, romance, thriller, and so on) there are references to various features of photography in many books. Herein is an evaluation of the subject matter of sixty novels where the story encompasses at least some aspect of photography. These aspects include a major or minor character as a photographer, the placement of a photograph or set of photographs as a narrative device to drive the plot; and/or the subject of photographyin general, aestiietic, or esoteric terms. The importance of the photography, or aspects of photography, the do appear in the stories ranges, and in some cases is quite trivial. As with many subjects used by fiction writers, there are levels of accuracy in descriptions of photography in novels. With regard to diose aspects of the practice shrouded in debate, such as verisimilitude, opinions vary. With regard to diose aspects of the practice based in fact, there are inconsistencies related to the facts; the is to say, there are errors in facts ofphotography that are indisputable.

This study is about the way autfiors of fiction borrow from the reality of life to lend airs or authority to their stories and in doing so, show those features mat likens this writing process to Constructivism. With the authority that comes from being a novelist comes responsibility. Even though fictitious, novels bear an aura of authenticity. Readers experience a real world and a worid widlin a novel. They can usually differentiate between the two. Both worlds are experienced primarily through the visual senses but the real world contains, as well, noise, odor, taste, and haptic surfaces. Seeing is a passive activity, taking a photograph is active; making a photograph, particularly with darkroom work but also digitally with a computer, is even more active but this is the part of photography less known to everyone who takes photographs. When photographic processing forms part of the narrative of a novel the reader may be receiving new information with which they construct their knowledge. This is all very well when the information passed to the reader is accurate. However, inaccurate information sometimes leads to misunderstanding The novel does not allow the knowledge-giver an opportunity to assess and correct any misconceptions derived during the exchange of knowledge. It should be incumbent upon the novelist to respect the reader and give accurate information. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in novels featuring photography. Photography - its producers, its productions, its product - has its place in the past 150 years of fiction writing The first mention of photography comes in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables, which features a daguerreotypist and contains commentary on the daguerreotype. But I want to concentrate this analysis on recent literature; focusing mainly on the period around the year 2000, the is, the period just before and after the turn of the twenty-first century. There are several types of stories that feature photography. Roughly broken down into categories, for easier assessment, they are typically: 1 . the story about a photographer, either: a) real (e.g, August Sander in Richard Powers's 1984 Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance or LJ.M. Daguerre in Domine Smith's 2006 The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre) yet fictionalized because these are not biographies; or b) partly fictitious (e.g, Robert Kincaid in Robert James Waller's 1992 Bridges of Madison County and EJ. Bellocq in Rampart Street) both of whom did actually exist but almost nothing is known about their lives; or c) wholly fictitious (e.g, Charley Payne in Marcus Wynne's 2002 Warriors in the Shadows, Phillip Nore in Dick Francis's 1980 Reflex);

2. the story about a photograph either: a) real (e.g., Michael Ondaatje's 1976 Coming Through Slaughter, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance) or b) fictitious (e.g, Virginia Ellis's 2003 The Photograph, James Hall's 1 998 Body Language); 3. the story with photography itself - either still pictures or movies, or both- (e.g, Candida Baker's 2000 The Hidden, Rodney Hall's 2000 The Day We Had Hitler Home, Hesper Anderson's 2005 MacDougal Street Ghosts) as a theme; or 4. the story with merely the mention of photography, a photographer or photographs (e.g, Nelson Algren's 1956 A Walk on the Wild Side, Jim Winton's 1994 The Riders, Michael Shea's 1997 State of TheMation, Robert Drewe's 2005 Grace, Christopher Wilson's 2005 77k Ballad of Lee Cotton) but with some significance; or 5. the story with passing references to photography as it is daily experienced in western society (e.g, Peter Temple's 2005 The Broken Shore, Talitha Stevenson's 2005 Exposure). Like the in autobiography, too much of the photography in fiction is one-dimensional and added selfconsciously to strengthen, divert, or deepen the plot and/or a character. Sometimes the complex nature ofphotography is developed successfully, but too often, even when an author is capable of describing characters with some insight, the inclusion of the photographic aspects of the character falls short. Of course, there are exceptions in the better novels like The Day We Had Hitler Home, Bridges of Madison County, and The Broken Shore. The expounding of photography generally depends on the author's understanding of the subject or their ability to interpret the ideas of their expert adviser (not always credited in the acknowledgments). The individual photograph fairs better in the descriptions, presumably because the authors have had, like all of us, extensive exposure to abundant photographs in their everyday lives. As in the past, the modern novel uses photography as a metaphor for time, and occasionally as a reference to societal condition. The wealthy, for example, will possess plenty of photographs, the poor might have one special photograph that is much treasured. These tropes add to the richness of knowledge available to the reader. However, there is sometimes only incidental mention of photographic activities to give depth to a character and this can appear gratuitous. The more interesting novels find an occurrence of photography to tell a story about photography generally or about a particular photographer, or a photograph specifically.

Stories are set in the three ages of photography - wet process, dry plate, and digital (although the latter is not yet frequent), and can embrace more than one age. In many novels the relevance of a) a character being a photographer, b) the subject of, and overall, photographs, and c) photography (generally and specifically) diminishes as the plot develops. Occasionally that relevance returns later as the plots conclude. Sometimes it is the very presence of photography in our lives that triggers references to the art or craft ofphotography. The Broken Shore for instance, provides many everyday uses of photography while not really mentioning photography in any depth. The first dip into the water is the mention of a photographer friend of a minor character. Further mentions include a media scrum outside a courthouse including "camera flashes and the shiny black eyes of television cameras,"3 a newspaper photographer, an affair between someone's wife and a cameraman, an incriminating photograph used to fire someone, old photographs of a house to be used for restoration purposes, still digital and digital video cameras to record pornography, and 8x1 0-inch prints found in old files. All are casual references made in passing; - not crucial, just descriptive, mundane, mainstream uses of aspects of photography from everyday life as important to the story, or not, as buying a newspaper or filling the car with fuel. Sometimes, photography in a novel fares better on an aesthetic level where the motivation of photographers, the meaning of photographs, and the esoteric or aesthetics of photography are more keenly addressed than are the facts or steps of photography. In most cases when the steps or facts of photography are presented in fiction they are not accurate or complete (e.g., Exposure, David Hunt's 1 997 The Magician's Tale). Several novels handle the aesthetics well as in Delia Falconer's 1997 The Service of Clouds. In this particular novel, when Harry Kitchings arrives in the Blue Mountains district of New South Wales, Australia, in 1907, he "felt his spine fill with air, and gave himself up to the madness of photography."4 Harry's grandfather was a daguerreotypist, and the author describes the formation of a daguerreotype and its presence as a photographic item. The novel is steeped in "being photographic." For example, Harry's grandmother is described as emulating "the posture of a lady... and holding that pose until her death."5 Mentions of being or looking silver occur throughout. Harry's uncle takes up photography where his father (Harry's grandfather) leaves off, but proceeds to the newer dry processes using glass plates. The author describes, with some accuracy, the dangers and dangerous chemicals these processes involve. The uncle's sister, Harry's aunt, was also a photographer travelling the worid, a suffragette who was to the in an English jail. The being photographic-ness of the story is shown when the author uses such language as "He depressed the shutter and extinguished time"6; "His eyes were as sensitive as a photographic plate"7; "A photograph, he said, holding my hands around his camera, is always taken in the space between two

breaths"8; and "He thought of [the emulsion] as a supple skin which held in the juices of the light until he used his chemicals to release them in the darkroom. Like skin it was a substance which was sensitive to damp and heat."9 The theme running through the novel is that as well as scenes landscapes and portraits Harry photographs clouds in his attempt to photograph God. On the other hand, of the many novels featuring photography, one stands out for its gross inaccuracy, Michael Symmons Roberts's Patrick's Alphabet (2006). Throughout the book, whenever the photographer goes into the darkroom, there is never a clue given to processing film before printing begins. That initial part of the process is not even hinted at even though the author describes the darkroom procedures for photographic printmaking with some verisimilitude. The absence of information about film processing in this novel is notable because it is a gross neglect of a vital step in the process. Photographs are seen by many as the acquisitive gaze, in the sense that what I see, I own - a phenomenon familiar to those who contend there is such a thing as the male gaze. In this regard, the photographer is an acceptable voyeur and photograph-viewing is condoned voyeurism. When applied to the novel there are ramifications of social commentary in this aspect of the broad subject. In Robert Anthony Siegel's 2007 All Will Be Revealed, for example, Augustus Auerbach, a millionaire pornographer, directs the photography of camera operator Elijah Grapes by instructing the models on how to pose. The pornographic photography is made into prints for stereoscopic views. The aesthetics of photography are well described and reflect the general public's beliefs and understandings of photography of that (New York in the 1890s) era. "Men will look and yearn but will never be able to enter"10 the room with the naked woman, Auerbach suggests while contemplating the photographic image. It is only Auerbach who, despite his handicaps, sees himself as a photographer who philosophizes about photographs as "moments ... of time preserved..."" Other photographers in the story are Leopold Swann, who makes spirit photographs at his sister-in-law's sances, and Horatio Portus, an Arctic expedition photographer. By way of commentary on photography, the author has Auerbach recognize Joseph Nipce as the inventor of photography, who because of poverty had to sell his methods to Daguerre, who then claimed all the credit. Another example of the acquisitive gaze (in this case, the male gaze) is Joseph T. Klempler's Irreparable Damage (2002). In this story a writer and his six-year-old daughter live together after his divorce. He picks up his battered Nikon 35mm film camera and takes some pictures of her hair she has formed into a "unicord's horn" [sic] with shampoo while in the bath. She wants to look at her efforts in the mirror and is slightly peeved her father is wasting time with photography and so "moons" him in the last frame on the roll. The film processing machine operator at the local drug store

sees this last image as pornographic and notifies the police. This one misguided decision coupled with several wrong follow-up assumptions by the authorities leads inevitably to bad judgements. This is the story of an overreaction that sees an innocent photographic occasion turned into a child sexual abuse and child pornography legal case. The story is set in the United States, where a real-life debate continues among the neoconservatives and the wider community about the photographs of Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, and others, and the function of their photographs as either fine art or pornography. Similar incidents as described in this story are known to have occurred in the United Kingdom, where similar laws are enacted, and this sort of depiction describes a world, all too familiar to practicing photographers, that is out of touch with community. Contemporarily, a new community is established wherein narrowmindedness is encouraged in public officials, bigotry and prejudice is tolerated - even envied - in figures of authority, and liberal-mindedness is seen as radical. This novel also demonstrates how so-called experts can be self-absorbed to the point of corruption. From a Constructivist point of view it expands on several themes to create an uber event, but one not too far removed from reality. One novel that borrows heavily from a Constructivist style is Powers's Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. The novel not only takes its tide from the tide of a photograph by August Sander but connects three stories related to the subjects in the photograph. The first is that of the author who researches the photographer and the three men in the photograph. The second is constructed from the content of the photograph and is about the farmers and their lives during the Great War in Europe. The third is about the character in the novel, Peter Mays, who discovers a connection between himself and one of the men in the picture. Such myth-making, reality changing, or adaptations from reality are typical of Constructivism in art. There are many more novels featuring photography already published than this short survey indicates. A random selection of fiction books will come up with a similar percentage of stories that will contain a reference to photography and like any random sampling of fiction, this selection has a wide range of qualities of writing From the crisp and assured to the plodding and weak; some well structured, others not; some with tight plots, some that ramble so limply as to be in danger of drifting nowhere. A few offer descriptions of place that reach forward in time to bring the reader back to the story long after the reading is ended. The characters from some of these novels linger in memory, but in most both character and place are replaceable, interchangeable, or nearly invisible. In many, events depicted blur from story to story. Some take the tenor of contemporary life while others plod through a sloshy history. Specificity is not always clear and can be neglected, even negated, by other forces. The reader can easily miss something important if the focus doesn't match throughout, especially

where photography is used as a means to give rise to a flashback or a description of an ancestor or a situation from the past. But despite the quality of the writing, the authenticity of the storyline, the veracity of events, or the likely longevity of the novel over time and its consequent place in modern literature, or because of these,photography lingers as a trope and the Constructivist characteristics that are applied to the structure of the writing, knowingly or not, can be viewed as significant contributing factors to the twenty-first century novel - and those that predate them. Sidebar NOVELS FEATURING PHOTOGRAPHY (lN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) Nathaniel Hawthorne The House of ihe Seven Gables ( 1 85 1 ) Nelson Algren A Walkon the Wild Sa (1956) Michael Ondaatje Coming Though Slaughter ( 1 976) Dick Francis Refiex(9tf0) Gerald Mumane The Plains (1982) Richard ftjwers Three formers on Their Way to a Dance (1984) Robert Barnard Rodies (1986) Rodney Hall Captive (1988) Graham Swift Out of This World (1988) William Bayer Blind Side (1989) Ann Bearne Puturing Will (1989)

Michael Cadnum Nightlight (1990) Rodney Hall The Second Bridegroom (1991) John Loveday Halo (1992) Linda Barnes Snapshot (1992) Robert James Waller The Brulges of Maoism Coumy(992) Kathryn Harrison issare (1993) Iiam Davison Scwuhngs (99Z) Jonellen Heckler Circumstances Unknown (1993) Rodney Hall The Grisly Wfe (1993) Brenda Walker One More River (1993) Tim Winton The Riders (1994) Audrey Schulman The Cage (1994) Christopher Koch Highways to a War (1995) PaulWatkins Archangel (i 995) Robert Drewe The Drowner (1996) Delia Falconer The Service of CUmIs (1997) Banrie Roberts The Victory Snapshot (1997) Michael Shea Stateof ihe Nahm (1997) David Hunt The Magician's Tale (1997) James Hall Body Language (1998) J. Wallis Martin The M Yard (99&)

Kate Grenville The Idea of Perfection (1999) James Bradley The Deep Field (1999) Richard S. Wheeler Aftershocks (999) Mark Z. Danielewski Houses of Leaves (2000) Simone Lazaroo The Australia Rand (2000) Candida Baker The Hidden (2000) Alan Watt Diamond Dogs (2000) Rodney HaU The Day We Had Hitler Home (2000) Rachel Seiffert The Dark Pam (2001) Ross Gilfillan The Edge of the Crowd '(200I) David Fulmer Chasing the Deal's TaU(200i) Marcus Wynne Warriors in the Shadows (2002) Joseph T. Klempner Irreparable Damage (2002) Jeffrey Ford TheftrtmitofMrs. Owabuque (2002) Susan Ford Double Exposure (2002) Virginia Ellis The Photograph (2003) NoahHawley Other hopk's Weddings (2004) TimLaHaye Ome Spring (2005) Hesper Anderson MacDougal Street Ghosts (2005) Robert Drewe GW (2005) Christopher Wilson The Ballad of lie Cotton (2005)

JohnDamton The Darwin Conspiracy (2005) Talitha Stevenson Etposure (2005) Peter Temple The Broken Shore (2005) Michael Symmons Roberts Patrias Alphabet (2006) Dominic Smith The Mercury Visions Of Louis Daguerre (2006) Frederick Turner Redemption (2006) David Fulmer Rampart Street (2006) Robert Anthony Siegel All Will Be Revelad (200T) Judith Henry Wall Family Secrets (2007) Footnote NOTES 1. Mark Holbom, ed., Bellocq: Photographs from Storyville, The Red Light District of New Orleans (London: Random House, 1996). 2. See Timothy H Adams, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel HiU, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). and Paul Genom, "The photographic eye: the camera in recent Australian fiction" at http://espace.lis.curtm.edu.an/anhwe/00000009/01/anhpoaes.pdf. 3. Peter Temple, The Broken Shore (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005), 108. 4. Delia Falconer, The Service of Clouds (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1997), 3. 5. Ibid., 28. S. Ibid., 57. 7. Ibid., 78. 8. Ibid., 153. 9. Ibid., 169. 10. Robert Anthony Siegal, All Will Be Revealed (San Francisco: MacAdam Cage, 2007), 21. 11. Ibid., 89. AuthorAffiliation MICHAEL SHAPTER is an Australian fine-art photographer completing his doctoral degree after twentyfive years working as a medical photographer. Word count: 3657 Copyright Visual Studies Workshop, Inc. May/Jun 2008