A milestone has been reached, of sorts, with a current exhibition of photographs now on display in a Massachusetts custom frame store and gallery. Camera Work Portraits: Objects and Souls, featuring mostly photogravure plates from this revolutionary arts magazine founded by Alfred Stieglitz, are now at Hudson Art and Framing through September 30. I’m proud of this first first public exhibit featuring work from the PhotoSeed Archive, and hope to feature vintage work in other future venues.

Many a museum show has featured plates from Camera Work, the mouthpiece and journal of the American Photo-Secession published between 1903-17. In fact, should you find yourself at the Museum of Modern Art right now, a visit to the ongoing A Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession exhibit in gallery #504 includes original photographs by American Photo-Secession members and full issues of Camera Work opened within a large display case.

With a nod to photographs showing interior views of The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession published in Camera Work XIV, (1906) the light-filled gallery space of Brian Dean’s Hudson Art and Framing already replicates the minimalist look of Edward Steichen’s spaces featured in the inaugural New York show at 291 Fifth Ave., which ran November 24, 1905 – January 5, 1906. To top it off, Brian custom built some lovely frames featuring black painted wood moulding in an understated rustic look to compliment cream colored mats I supplied.

Again: not the typical exhibit one encounters in an American custom framing store/gallery. The plates on display—mostly gravures— are the unsung heroes of the photographic collecting field in that they were printed from copper plates made from the original negative, and therefore considered original prints in the marketplace. Museum of Modern Art conservator Lee Ann Daffner elucidates further: “… issues of Camera Work were also impeccably produced: Stieglitz and the Photo-Secessionists aimed to disseminate reproductions that were faithful to the original photographs. So much attention was lavished on choosing the best materials, achieving optimal printing, and the careful mounting. Stieglitz retouched any flaws, in every single print, himself. Truly, they are as precious as the original photographs on the wall.”

Photographic degrees of separation are something this site prides itself on. When Brian Dean told me Boston-based tintype photographer Bruce Wahl would also be setting up his darkroom on site during the recent Hudson show opening, the association of the Stieglitz journal plates on the walls inside and tintypes being made outside the gallery doors was an uncanny 21st Century development for modern day practitioners keeping the past alive.

Specifically, it was an itinerant tintype and commercial photographer by the name of George S. Irish (1847-1920) who had a profound influence on a nine-year child by the name of Alfred Stieglitz. From Richard Whelan’s 1995 book Alfred Stieglitz, A Biography: 

“In the summer of 1873, accompanied by several friends, he took his collection of lead horses to be photographed by Mr. Irish, the tintyper in Caldwell. Alfred carefully arranged his models on a cloth and, after the exposure was made, was granted permission to follow Mr. Irish into his darkroom. It was not the first time Alfred had entered such a sanctum, for the previous year he had been allowed into the darkroom when his mother had taken him and his brothers and sisters to be photographed by the fashionable Abraham Bogardus, in New York. “I was far less interested in the pictures than in going into darkrooms, recalled Stieglitz. “I wanted to know what went on in those mysterious places. … Alfred would simply drop in to chat with the friendly photographer and watch him work. He was fascinated by the skill with which Mr. Irish directed his portrait subjects, and he was opinionated about at least one of his friend’s practices, that of touching up the cheeks of his portraits with carmine. Mr. Irish said it made the pictures look “more natural, but Alfred disagreed. In a late version of the story, he claimed already to have an intuition that the integrity of the photographic image should be respected. More likely, he simply thought that the incongruously rouged cheeks looked silly.”  (pp. 40-41)

Turns out, even the bones are photographic. When I asked Brian about the history of his building, he showed me faded newspaper clippings and explained it was generally known in Hudson as Odd Fellows Hall. Located at 18 Main Street at the Hudson rotary, It was built by commercial photographer Russell Burnap Lewis (1835-1924) in 1894 after a major fire devastated the downtown area. Lewis, a shoemaker and Civil War veteran turned photographer, had moved to what became Hudson in 1864 and opened his studio in a wood building that did not survive the fire. Lewis was a very successful businessman. In addition to a thriving studio, in 1876, he had made a small fortune selling thousands of stereographs featuring 12 babies entitled “The Morning Glories” (1.) he had copyrighted in 1874 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

The Lewis studio was located on the second floor of his new 1894 building, (2.) (perhaps he took advantage of the large windows on the third floor as a “skylight” studio, common to that era) his major tenant being druggist L.D. Carpenter on the first floor. (3.) A vintage postcard postmarked 1908 reveals the Lewis surname and year 1894 above the entrance near the roofline. Today, this three-story, curving brick structure is one of the finest buildings in a downtown of fine buildings, the curving front facade giving off ever so faint vibes of New York City’s later Flat Iron building.

With his own building acting as the historical template for ongoing commerce and a robust venue for over three decades as a gallery spurring on artistic debate, I’ll conclude this post with part of Brian Dean’s Camera Work exhibition essay:

“These photographers and artists took a modernist view of art and the world, always seeking, “to help the modern tendencies to come to the front, to show the public what was being done, and not what had been done; to make people look, not to the past, but to the future” (Paul Haviland, January 1909 Camera Work). 

The world would see great changes during this time period through industrialization, urban sprawl, technological progress and eventually devastating war. Modernism was the artist’s way of reacting to these changes, rejecting the ideas of classical and realistic art to focus on Surrealism, Impressionism, or Pictorialism. These portraits, even though created with a camera, do not focus on the act of representation through pure likeness. Instead they aim to , “reveal(s) a definite state of sensibility. To invent a portrait is to conse­crate the liberation of a living and thinking being to isolate, not man, but one man, to realize all the distinctive features of his physiognomy, discern and register them; it is in fact an act of freedom.” (Waldemar George).

In our current time we face our own great changes – the AI boom, data economy, and the digitization of every aspect of our lives. This show is a way of remembering that through these great changes we can react in our own way. We can create objects, art and ideas that help us move forward while discerning what is the true soul of what we seek. For just as these plates were created to be, “an object of great beauty and superb quality” we too can create our own objects of beauty and quality. 

1. See: Paula Richardson Fleming: R. B. Lewis’ Morning Glories, in Stereo World, January/February 2017, p. 4
2. Lewis Halprin and the Hudson Historical Society, Hudson: Postcard History Series, 2008, Arcadia Publishing.
3. The Wheeler pharmacy then occupied this first floor space now occupied by Hudson Art and Framing. It was initially rented out after the new building was completed in 1894 by druggist Lewis Dutch Carpenter. (1854-1906) Pharmacist Carlton B. Wheeler, (1879-1934) who worked for Carpenter beginning in 1897, earned his doctor of pharmacy degree from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and later purchased the business from the Carpenter family after Carpenter’s death in the Spring of 1906.