Finding words. Looking back. Celebrating life. Of the canine type. In the end, all we can hope to attain.

Recently, I posted three vintage, gelatin-silver photographs taken by Anne Brigman, (1869-1950) one of the very few west-coast members of the American Photo-Secession. Not less than 24 hours later I was contacted by James Rhem, an independent scholar in the History of Photography and the published author of monographs on Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Aaron Siskind.

James informed me he had been researching and writing a book about Brigman for some time. Like any scholar worth his salt, he was inquiring about further insight from my photographs. He wrote:

 
The mystery of the child model had interested me naturally as has the mystery of the male model (though I think I have solved that). My research has built up quite a web of names of friends and connections for Brigman and I wonder if I knew that name of the descendent (or his/her ancestor) if I could then make the connection?

Before James had contacted me, I had done some basic genealogical research for the subject in these photographs and had become intrigued when stumbling upon an image by Brigman titled “The Fawn“. This photograph, sold at auction in 2001, carried the same date, 1921, as two of the photographs in my collection. I wondered, could the young model in my photographs be the same subject depicted in “The Fawn“?

As a collector, I typically seek out provenance details on material I purchase for this archive, and in this case I was ready: I already had a name of the young boy featured in the three photographs I had purchased from his distant family member. But now, with this inquiry from James, I was spurred to do more in order to hopefully expand Brigman scholarship in general. The former owner of the three works, who will remain anonymous, had told me:

 
We think the person in the photos is my husband’s grandfather Jan Law.  My husband says he thinks the photos were probably taken in the San Francisco area.

Connecting dots and/or figuring out what dots to follow in the first place in collaboration with others like James are all important goals for PhotoSeed in determining photography’s lost and hidden history. In a back and forth via email,  James commented further on the child model’s identity in my 3 photographs after I speculated a bit further and asked if he might be the same model depicted in “The Wondrous Globe“, a photograph appearing in Camera Work 38, published in 1912:

 
I don’t believe there are other images in the three issues of Camera Work in which AB has work that feature this model, but he is used in other images that I have never seen printed. Some interesting negatives I’ve examined at Eastman House have him in them with wings actually etched into the negative!

The images I recall were made up in the mountains which raised the question for me about who this might be  .  . a child of the guide? Someone who lived in the area? Family friend? I’m not sure you’d notice these in the online view. They had not come to my notice until I was actually there going through negatives.

Another query to my California contact while this was all going on with James set the record straight for me, however. This person helpfully confirmed the dates for Jan Law I was able to find online from multiples sources of the U.S. Census. Eleven years old in 1920, Jan Law was born on January 25, 1908 (originally his name was listed as John in the 1910 Census and living in Seattle, WA) and living in San Francisco along with his mother Cora (Wilcox) Law, who is listed as a widow. The 1910 census also listed Jan as having an older brother named George (born around 1905).  Law died on January 27, 1994 in Orange, California.

Now, with the confirmed dates for Law and some additional research, I can say confidently he was not the subject of “The Fawn“, otherwise titled “The Faun“, according to the George Eastman House online archive. This is because the Eastman version, a variant full-frame example of this image, carries the date of 1913 as well as their full-frame copy negative of it titled: “The Faun First Edition (Not So Good) 1913“. (It comes from the series title: “Book 2, Anne Brigman“) Explaining the previous 1921 date now seemed easy enough. For some reason, perhaps to use in a future publishing project, Brigman chose to copyright this particular image eight years after she had taken it. The only Law family connection in my mind with “The Faun” would be if Jan Law’s older brother George had been used as the subject. In this case he would have been around eight years old when it was taken, but he appears much older in this photograph, in my estimation. My research also brings into play the possibility a young man photographed in 1915 by Brigman, which can be seen in the online collection of the Oakland Museum in California, could have been the subject of “The Faun“. Or not. Maybe you might know. I’ll conclude this post by letting James Rhem have the final word on this, with his cautionary insight and expertise, in my mind the principals guiding future Brigman legacy scholarship:

 
Yes, it is unlikely we shall ever know with certainty the names of these male sitters. She did call upon her sister Elizabeth’s husband for a couple of photographs, but the male children remain a bit of a mystery. Your investigation of the Law images helps create more plausible speculation about the identity. By that I mean the images I have written to you about that place the child in mountain settings far from Oakland are most likely of children who went along on these camping trips rather than locals. These trips (which I have replicated with a photographer friend in the last several years) went to remote locations in the Sierras, but they often involved groups of woman friends and sisters. So, if one were able to establish more about the degree of friendship with Mrs. Law for example it would strengthen the speculation.

…What is (to me) interesting about all of this (since establishing the identity of the boy in her art photographs is only a matter of curiosity, not important interest) is that it establishes the fact Brigman did lots of commission work. Because her life is often seized upon as an example of noble, unfettered feminist freedom, you will sometimes find it written as fact that she never did commercial — i.e. for money — work. This is absolutely not true and I have known it for years. The only thing that’s troubling about this is what a narrow and ideologically skewed idea of biography and feminist freedom it reflects. Brigman was a very free figure and very free in her enjoyment of and expression of feminine energies, but she also had a practical side and had to make a living. Also, I think in many of the examples I have seen she certainly did not feel that her portrait work was entirely divorced from her artistic work, again, especially in her photographic portraits of women.

An objective reviewer I am not when it comes to photographers considered major figures in the emerging artistic aesthetic movement from the beginning of the 20th century.

Instead, shameless promoter would perhaps better describe my enthusiasm for Austrian Heinrich Kühn, (1866-1944) the subject of a museum exhibition now taking place in New York City. And with that,  I heartily recommend a visit to:

Heinrich Kuehn and his American Circle: Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen

now on view at the Neue Galerie through August 27th.

It was exhilarating to be back in New York so soon after my attendance at the Webby awards, but this was a working trip for PhotoSeed, with the first half of the day spent uptown at the Neue Galerie and the rest spent downtown working on an upcoming post on the history of The Photographic Times. 

 After emerging from the subway at 86th street from Grand Central and walking towards Fifth Ave.,  I spied a lamppost promotional banner for the show, complete with a readymade arranged beneath it: a toilet bowl cast off near the curb and the activity of the street all around it. For those game enough, New York is the kind of place where street photography could easily supplant any type of planned tourist activities, and so my inner muse, taken with the scene, made a few quick frames before venturing a short distance to the entrance of the impressive pile located at 1048 Fifth avenue-a New York landmark completed in 1914 by Carrère & Hastings– the same architectural firm that built the New York Public Library.

The converted Georgian-style townhouse was originally built for industrialist William Starr Miller II (1856-1935) and purchased in 1994 by art dealer and museum exhibition organizer Serge Sabarsky and businessman, cosmetics heir and art collector Ronald Lauder. German for “New Gallery”, the Neue Galerie is a museum featuring early 20th century German and Austrian art and design, which recently celebrated it’s 10th anniversary in November, 2011.

In doing background for this post, I learned from The New York Times that the current Kühn exhibit is only the 2nd show of photography to be featured at the museum, and is curated by Kühn scholar Dr. Monika Faber, a champion for his and other work from this period, and currently the Director of the Photoinstitut Bonartes in Vienna.

A contributor to and co-editor of the essential 2010 volume “Heinrich Kühn: The Perfect Photograph,” Faber can be seen in this video describing Kühn’s role in the development of artistic photography as well as his relationships with Alfred Stieglitz, who he first met in 1904 (Stieglitz had known of Kühn since 1894) and Edward Steichen in 1907, whose atmospheric work, we learn in the video, was inspired by some of Kühn’s massive (for the time) gum-bichromate photographs featuring sweeping and expansive Tyrolean landscapes.

Not surprisingly, I soon discovered taking pictures is off-limits in the second and third floor exhibition rooms of the museum, which made it easier for me to scribble notes and not worry about the supplemental visuals for this post, most of which I’ve pulled from the PhotoSeed Archive. Emerging on the third floor, I first ducked into gallery 5 to take in a video narrated by Neue Galerie director Renée Price on Kühn’s pioneering 1907 involvement, along with Stieglitz and Steichen, with color Autochrome Lumière plates. I talked with the guard near the entrance who smiled when I asked how many times he had already seen it. Needless to say, he probably will not take the bait to see it again here on his day off, but you of course should.

The show is arranged in five galleries, with a total of 105 vintage photographs in a variety of photographic media. In addition to the aforementioned work by Stieglitz and Steichen, Kühn’s fellow Viennese Trifolium partners Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg are also included, as well as select examples by Photo-Secession members Frank Eugene, Gertrude Kasebier, George Seeley and Clarence White.

The two galleries I found most fascinating were the 4th gallery, which the museum assigns the collective title “Family Drama” and the 2nd gallery, called “Early Success”. In Family Drama, a massive, dark cherry-stained wood lattice panel forms the backdrop along one wall which has been installed specially for this exhibit. According to a museum guard, the panel blocks large windows overlooking Fifth Ave. The prop is a subtle and welcome touch for those familiar with some of Kühn’s portrait work, which often balances expanses of dark (the paneled background) with select highlights for the figure posed in front of it.

According to a caption in this gallery, these panels were originally intended to be moved around as part of a photographic studio, and were (presumably) designed by Wiener Werkstätte founders Josef Hoffman and Koloman Moser for Kühn’s Innsbruck home located on Richard Wagner Street, where he lived with his children and English nanny Mary Warner from 1906-1919 (another studio in the home featured white paneling).  Kühn’s ability to move the panels depending on exterior lighting conditions-from windows, skylights, and reflected means-were a way of giving his portrait backdrops a distinctive style.  A means to an end in order for him to maintain fastidious control of his pictorial output.

Speaking of control, another photographic caption in this gallery stated Kühn went so far as to have special clothing tailored in hues of black, white and gray for his children to wear while they posed for these portraits. Later, this also applied after 1907, but with colored clothing worn by them as well as Mary Warner while he made some of his most famous images in outdoor settings using the brand-new Autochrome Lumière plates.

Walking over to the adjoining 2nd gallery, Early Success, the idea of gallery repetition is repeated along the long dimension of the space. Here, the idea of the famous Stieglitz “291” gallery is hinted at, with pleated, olive-drab fabric lining the lower portion of the wall while early 20th century reproduction period spotlights are aimed toward massive examples of colored and monochrome gum-bichromate prints.

As I counted 29 framed prints in this room alone, the 291 wall is intended to showcase an approximation of the actual work (loaned from the Stieglitz bequeath at the Metropolitan as well as other institutional and private collections) from Viennese Trifolium members Kühn, Henneberg and Watzek. It was truly an extraordinary moment to be able to see these large-scale photographs up close, further elucidated on for their time as follows in a gallery caption:

The scale of the prints themselves may have convinced a broader public that photographs might be an artistic medium in its own right.

Kühn of course was the star in this room, with some of his earlier successes shown dating to the mid 1890’s. The cloverleaf Trifolium ceased to exist after 1903, once Watzek died and Henneberg soon turned his attention to etching.

Finally, in the third gallery, a bridge for how Kühn and his contemporaries were embraced and given credibility in the form of 12 select images from the Alfred Stieglitz journal Camera Work are shown. The small room is further anchored on one side by a large gum-bichromate print titled Anna with Mirror, a 1902 genre study by Kühn showing a young woman from behind fixing her hair while reflected in a mirror.

Reproduced by Stieglitz as a photogravure in Camera Work in 1906, the Neue Galerie chose to include a reproduction of it, along with five of Kühn’s other photographs, in an affordable set of greeting cards sold in their first floor gift shop: a nice memento and excuse for future correspondence procured by this visitor on my way out to Fifth Ave.

I wanted to give it a little time before commenting here on my recent trip to New York City to attend The Year Distilled-otherwise known as the Annual Webby Awards. PhotoSeed had previously been named the Webby winner in the Art category on May 1st of the year, thanks to the efforts of Jay David and Tyler Craft (formerly) of the TOKY agency of St. Louis; who, unbeknownst to this blissfully ignorant site owner, had entered it for consideration in the 16th annual installment of the award.

Of course, “giving it a little time” puts me at a seeming disadvantage when it comes to our lovable information superhighway. Speed is the thing they say: something I’m uncomfortable with when it comes to dealing with nuance in the form of the photographic heritage that will continue to evolve from here.

Even as a nominee for the award, an online editor in Spain asked if I had a press kit–an idea foreign to my way of thinking, but perhaps an essential component for those wanting a more concise definition of who and what we are. And so, from gray to black and white: the following a quote from the release later cobbled together courtesy of my wife, the friendly interrogator:

What’s your motivation?

I’ve always loved art in all its many forms, which is the foundation for the entire site. Photography was always one of those arts. I was lucky as a child to be exposed to all types of art—museums, music, drama, dance. In my teens, I became interested in photography. As a lover of art, I see beauty in the world. One of the most important elements of this site is for people to leave it with a renewed sense of the beauty that’s in our world. In some respects, the site is a keyhole to the past that doesn’t exist any longer on many levels.

The trip to New York was icing on the cake: a celebrity and bling-fueled feeding frenzy for those connected or in the know for all-things internet. Like the majority of winners, however, PhotoSeed didn’t enter the live-streaming conversation hosted by comic and actor Patton Oswalt, but took on the form of hand shakes and raised glasses among friends, just what I expected and cherish the most.  I would not have missed it. My wife’s observation before the show that several Hollywood movie stars were in attendance several feet from our conversation seemed most unconvincing to me, until TOKY owner Eric Thoelke mentioned one–Juliette Lewis (a Webby winner)–had played opposite Robert De Niro in the 1991 remake of Cape Fear. The other, an actress wearing a simple dress, only confirmed by me several days later when I saw her official red carpet photo, struck me as a “normal” looking person, and reminded me of those photographs I’ve seen of HM Queen Elizabeth II wearing a raincoat while blending in with the crowd.

Oswalt’s tongue-in-cheek opening monologue was spot on: especially the following observations:

This is the night when the best and brightest on the internet meet face to face…look at each other…and all say…you are not what I expected either…at all.  But the Webbys have brought us all together tonight to celebrate the thing that keeps us all apart. As well as also we are going to be celebrating the 5% of the internet that is not porn. So..really…that’s… kind of important. That’s right.

His middle thought bubble about the web keeping us apart seems especially acute today, and perhaps reason for alarm in terms of keeping humankind’s social construct going forward.

My eagerness to connect at the show resulted in one slightly ill-informed blog post several days after the fact, with the writer’s assessment of PhotoSeed being no more than a “fancy Flickr account for old-assed photos.” A good lesson in humility for me. It further reminded me critics will always exist, and looking back over 100 years, proof that history repeats. Even Alfred Stieglitz reprinted mocking reviews from the New York press in his journal Camera Work after his gallery, 291, mounted shows of art and photography that radically stirred the pot of public discourse. Ego aside, the journalist in me liked the ideas in this blogger’s writing anyway. Thank goodness someone is still willing to go out on a limb and call it as they see fit.

As for the show itself, which began outside the Manhattan Center on a drizzly, early New York City evening, the literal stars in Lou Reed’s lyrical song to Andy Warhol could be seen on the red-carpet and later in the house. Well before comic Louis CK wrapped it up several hours later by giving his five word Webby speech (“When I die, bye bye”), Apple’s founding icon, Steve Jobs, was memorialized by U.S. Presidents, Bono, and introduced by actor and activist Richard Dreyfuss. A man whose feisty demeanor has apparently continued unabated since his role in the 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” which finds him rearranging his living room into a mock-up of a Martian landing space.

But the biggest star on this night?  Photography itself. Those nicely dressed folks dishing out snappy five-word acceptance speeches on the Hammerstein Ballroom stage surely owed it big time, and so do I. Webby Breakout of the year Instagram, a social media app that, according to the breathless prose of the official awards booklet, was, among other things, responsible for “furthering the democratization of photography on the Web” was preceded by a lip-synced video spoofing so called “food porn” photography.

“Eat It Don’t Tweet It” by American Hipster + Key of Awesome makes fun of smart phone photographers who insist on photographing everything they eat and posting it to social outlets. Sung by three band members, one being an ordinary looking bloke as well as two keyboard players dressed as a cupcake and the other sporting a lobster suit, lyrics include more photographic references: “you are pathetic we’re not photogenic” and the real compliment if you are a photographer famous enough: “a gastronomic Annie Leibovitz.” The last two photographic highlights for the night I’ll mention are 1. inspiring and 2. weird.

In the inspiring category was the image of Holocaust survivor Tibor Sands, who stood on stage and accepted two Webby awards on behalf of the Remember Me? project done by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-voted best cultural institution on the web. But what sealed it was a simple portrait photograph projected behind him. Most in the crowd, myself included, may have mistaken it for a Nazi evidentiary photograph at first glance. But with a few keystrokes searching the Web, a happier background for it emerged, showing again photography’s importance as the ultimate documentarian. It turned out to be a passport photograph of a very young Tibor Munkácsi- taken in Germany’s Kloster Indersdorf near Dachau right after World War II by an American GI. As of this writing, 330 Holocaust survivors have been identified by means of anonymous photographs like this one because of the Remember Me? project.  Munkácsi, it turned out, was heading for a new life in England and eventually to the United States, where he changed his last name to Sands and became a cinematographer in Los Angeles. No wonder he can be seen with a slight smile on his face in the picture.

Finally, a dictator gets his due, sort of, and a great example of how photography can cut two ways. When he was alive, the official ministry of North Korean public relations-if there is such a place- periodically issued “official” photographs of their “dear leader”, better known as Kim Jong-il.

Enter Lisbon-based João Rocha to re-appropriate history in a most cunning and amusing way. What to do with this plethora of propaganda relating to photographs of Kim Jong-il in the blogosphere? Why, a dictator in a stiff suit, shades and void of all expression makes for the perfect aggregation target and voila, a new star of sorts in the form of a Tumblr blog called Kim Jong-il Looking at Things. Live on the Web since 2010, the site was awarded a Webby People’s Voice award, inducing no further comment other than the following observations from Rocha, who succinctly states his motivation thusly:

 “the dear leader liked to look at things.”
 “why is it so funny? i have no idea either”.

If you ever wanted to learn about the importance assigned or excitement surrounding the discovery of the X-Ray, look no further than any photographic journal published the world over between 1896-1897. Chronicled in breathless detail within their many pages, this new and miraculous revelation was aided by photography’s very ability to record the see-through results of these “mysterious rays” on a myriad of materials.

And so this new victory was shouted far and wide: the symbolic Iron Heel of Progress, represented by the dual disciplines of scientific investigation and photography coming together, marched forward. In my own convoluted way of thinking, the splendid specimen of shoe including said iron-studded heel protecting a foot within makes perfect sense, literally and perhaps symbolically making a full-page debut along with other objects in the July, 1896 issue of The Photographic Times.

The reason for all this excitement was the official announcement late the year before: German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923) had “produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays”. (1.) For his efforts, Röntgen in 1901 was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics.

I will be the first to admit scientific photography is not a collecting focus for the PhotoSeed archive, however, the possession of a postal cover and several pages from a hand-written letter by Photographic Times editor Walter E. Woodbury (1865-1905) posted to this site was reason enough to visually explore X-Ray photography in this space as the profound discovery it remains even today. On May 22nd, while working in advance of the July issue, Woodbury penned a short missive to America’s equivalent of Röntgen: University of Pennsylvania physics professor Arthur Willis Goodspeed. (1860-1943) Radiography and its Application was the name of the article he had already written, dated April 30th and eventually published. But at the time, working more than a month in advance, editor Woodbury was willing to hold up publication of his journal until he could secure the necessary photographs showing the dry-plate, x-ray-effected negatives he knew would cause a stir, and thus providing proof for and generating interest in Goodspeed’s article.

Goodspeed was no stranger to photographic experimentation. In the mid 1880’s he had witnessed and assisted the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) while he conducted the now famous Animal Locomotion studies under the support of the University of Pennsylvania and more unbelievably, had made by accident along with British photographer William Jennings, the first known X-Ray photograph in the physical lecture room at the school on February 22, 1890 . A centennial  remembrance written by TL Walden Jr. for the journal Radiology in 1991 partly states:

On that evening, Goodspeed and Jennings had been making brush electrographs of coins and brass weights. After they finished their experiments, Jennings stacked all of the photographic plates; two coins–either left from the experiments or Jennings’ trolley fare–were placed on top of the plates. Goodspeed then demonstrated to Jennings the university’s collection of Crookes tubes, with the idea of photographing the glow from the tube. While the two men were talking, however, the Crookes tube was emitting x radiation that affected the nearby plates. After the plates were developed, Jennings noted that one had the shadow(s) of a disk(s) on it; neither man could explain the image. (2.)

The photographic holdup for Woodbury was worth it. Englishman John Carbutt, (1832-1905) who had first made a name for himself in America by taking stereoscopic landscape photographs as well as running a Chicago portrait studio in the 1860’s, had become an important collaborator in the late 1890’s with Goodspeed in Philadelphia. Carbutt’s invention of specialized glass dry plates sensitive to the newly identified x-rays were provided to Goodspeed for research purposes; the same year his article appeared in The Photographic Times.  Carbutt’s role as well as the importance of these plates was acknowledged in it:

With a view to developing the sensitive plate to produce the best results possible, Mr. John Carbutt has given untiring attention and made many experiments. The Carbutt plates have most of them been tested by the writer in comparison with other makes, and those now in use give by far the best results of any yet tried. The negatives from which the illustrations accompanying this article have been reproduced are samples of the plates referred to.  (3.)

In closing, and with a nod to collectors like myself seeking out the ultimate published examples of Röntgen, or X-Ray scientific photographs, I suggest a further investigation of the 15 oversized, hand-pulled photogravure plates published in 1896 under the direction of Austrian photo-chemists Josef Maria Eder and Eduard Valenta. Containing magnificent studies of human bones, various small animals as well as man-made objects including a set of lockets, this portfolio, titled Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen, features as its’ final plate the now iconic coiled snake titled Aesculap-Schlange. First taken by Eder and Valenta and presented to members of the Viennese Photographic Society in January of 1896, (4.) these photographs have long ago entered the canon of modern photographic art, a scant two months after Röntgen’s initial discovery shook the world.

1. Wilhelm Röntgen: from: Wikipedia: accessed: 2012
2. excerpt: The first radiation accident in America: a centennial account of the x-ray photograph made in 1890: TL Walden Jr.:in: Radiology: December, 1991: pp. 635-639
3. excerpt: Radiography and its Application: A.W. Goodspeed: in: The Photographic Times: New York: July, 1896: pp. 308-309
4. from: Beauty of Another Order-Photography in Science: Ann Thomas: Yale University Press: New Haven and London, in association with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; 1997

 I’ve never bought into the hokum that “a photograph is worth a thousand words”. I’ve always thought the medium was bigger, believing the phrase has been overused in popular culture to the point it has cheapened the very essence of Photography as Memory.

This might not be earth-shattering news to the picture-taking masses, so I’ll just reiterate my feeling that any photograph-new or very old- has the ability and inner life to prove incalculable worth and embody pure memory, especially for you, if you happened to take it. Photographs are simply the personification of Memory made real. It matters little if today’s memories are in digital form, or of the vintage paper variety accompanying this post, made over 100 years ago.

When we receive sad news, shock and tears always come first. And then memories. In this case, always good ones, and then the photographs already taken invariably retrieved and revisited. This is how it went yesterday when my wife and I belatedly learned a dear friend had passed on. Georgia native Kim McCoy was a young woman who was passionate, funny, articulate: a writer with a voice that could deliver in public as well as a former journalist of conviction who used her own professional gift of words to give life and context back to her own loving family.

As is Life, intent and chance mysteriously came together, and my next post in this space would feature a preview of flower studies which will soon find their way to the site dating to 1904 taken by American photographer Louise Birt Baynes. (1876-1958) After acquiring them, I had struggled for almost a year trying to learn the identity of their maker, with chance granting me success only last week after Golden rod was found with proper attribution in a photographic journal. Several of these photographs have the added bonus of hand-written poetry on their mounts. And so for Kim, some words penned a century ago and recited anew to your memory of a life cut short at 33. One to celebrate as fully as is Nature’s own beautiful Closed Gentian, a flower that never fully opens:

“It never opened someone said,
The strange, fair, bud was all,
a bright hope only half interpreted,
and shriveling to its fall.”