Wing and Wing

“Wing and Wing means two sails are set, jib and main sail, one to port and the other to starboard. This is one of the most beautiful looking and peaceful feeling points of sail, but it is also the slowest.” —Curt von Diest ( PhotoSeed on Facebook, 2012)

American photographer Henry Greenwood Peabody, (1855-1951) “considered to be among the best yachting photographers of the time”, (1.) used an 8 x 10 inch glass dry plate to photograph the cutter yachts Beetle, left, and Rosalind on June 18, 1888 somewhere off the coast of Maine. (2.) At the time, the work was titled by Peabody as Wing and Wing, referring to a sailing term where a sailboat …”running with the jib to windward is known as…wing and wing”. (3.) Three years later, when Peabody copyrighted the work in 1891, he used the title A Drifting Match, Rosalind and Beetle, on behalf of the Detroit Photographic Publishing Company, which licensed it for resale prints. From this new title, we understand the two cutters are both engaged in a race, although it is a very slow race indeed-the opposite of how Peabody typically photographed sailboats running full out on the high seas.

Peabody biography: Lee Gallery website: Winchester, MA: site accessed: 2012
Yachting and Marine Views : Detroit Publishing Co. no. 05676: from: Scenic, Architectural and Marine Views: Catalogue F.: Detroit Photographic Company: Detroit, MI: 1899: p. 229
Points of sail: Wikipedia: accessed: 2012

Henry Greenwood Peabody: 1855-1951

Excerpt: Historical/Biographical Note, courtesy of Historic New England:

Henry Greenwood Peabody (1855-1951), photographer, lecturer, and publisher of educational slides and films, enjoyed a remarkable career spanning nearly sixty years. Peabody produced thousands of photographs, slides, and films documenting the American landscape, worked in virtually every photographic process, delivered lectures describing the scenery that he so lovingly photographed, and published books that visually described the landscapes and scenery in which he specialized.Peabody was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of a minister. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, the Pennsylvania Military Academy, and Dartmouth College, where he graduated in 1876. It was while a senior at Dartmouth that Peabody first became interested in photography, producing views of the Dartmouth campus and scenes along the New England coast. After graduation, Peabody spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying architecture, electricity, and physics. He then went to work briefly as an engineer for the Western Electric Company in Chicago and New York. Henry G. Peabody was a partner with J. A. French in the photographic firm Peabody & French, around 1875. The firm issued a series of stereographs of interiors at Dartmouth College.In 1879 Peabody set up a studio with Alexander Hesler in Chicago. While there, he met and married Dora Phelps, and the two relocated to Boston where Peabody opened a studio in 1886. He specialized in marine, landscape and architectural photography. He also served as the official photographer for the Boston and Maine Railroad and the Great Northern Railway, photographed the America’s Cup races, and published “Representative American Yachts and The Coast of Maine”. (continues)

Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical

“Within the covers of Sun and Shade…We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases,”—Ernest Edwards, president & publisher, 1889

In July, 1888, the first issue of Sun & Shade: A Photographic Record of Events, was published in New York City by The Photo-Gravure Company. Essentially a high-class art periodical, each issue featured eight or more beautiful hand-pulled photogravures as well as plates printed in photogelatine, (collotype) and halftone. These were collected within a stapled, folio-sized magazine issued monthly. The subject matter included the work of leading amateur and professional photographers, as well as works of art—many from the galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The December issue—Christmas themed—featured a specially designed cover printed in green ink. Success was swift. The first issue sold 1000 copies “in a fortnight”. (1.) Within the first year, Sun & Shade quickly increased circulation to 4000 copies a month. With a public demand for reprinting earlier issues, this success lead to a rebranding, after which, beginning with the September, 1889 issue, the magazine was renamed Sun & Shade: An Artistic Periodical. The final issue was March, 1896, when financial issues to the parent company, spurred by the eventual May, 1896 bankruptcy of the N.Y. Photo-Gravure Company, forced its closure.

Sun & Shade would become the ultimate statement of the many skills and inquisitive mind of Englishman Ernest Edwards. (1836-1903) Essentially his own printed passion project, the magazine was fueled by his ongoing love of photography in the field (issues featured many plates by him over the years) and a deeply scientific mind which pushed the advancement of the state of photo-mechanical reproduction and fine printing.

The son of a clergyman from Bloomsbury in London, he initially made a name for himself taking photographic portraits of eminent people in his Baker Street gallery. (Charles Darwin sat for him several times) His love of the outdoors also bore fruit and he became an accomplished alpine photographer. But his real interest centered around photo-mechanical reproduction. In 1869, he took out a patent in England for his own rudimentary collotype process called heliotype. In the Fall of 1872, he moved across the pond along with his wife Charlotte, and became superintendent of Boston’s Heliotype Printing Company after selling the American rights to American publisher James Ripley Osgood. (1836–1892) Edwards ran the Heliotype Printing Co. there until the end of 1884. The following year the James R. Osgood & Co. went bankrupt, although not a result of the heliotype division.

Growing restless in Boston, he then moved to New York City, where he established a new firm in March, 1885: The Photo-Gravure Company, (subsequently renamed The New York Photo-Gravure Company) with offices in Manhattan and a leased printing factory in Brooklyn. In 1887, his company received perhaps the one commission it’s best known for today: the printing of 781 collotypes, which Edwards called photogelatine plates, making up the monumental publication:

Animal Locomotion. An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872-1885, with the landmark sequenced motion study photographs taken by British photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

Restructured in 1891 as the New York Photogravure Co., Ernest Edwards continued to advance the state of photo-mechanical printing during his final decade, with Sun & Shade publishing some of the earliest examples of his own invention by 1894: plates printed in a three-color process called chrome-gelatine, a variation of his heliotype process.

Quality Rather than Quantity

Even though it survived less than eight years in print, describing Sun & Shade in Ernest Edward’s own words is perhaps the best posterity for this important photographic periodical with an artistic heart. One year after its’ debut, he wrote the following, published in The Photographic Times for August 2, 1889:

“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade, a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.

“In our rapid growth the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class–always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.

*Our efforts shall be directed in the future to make Sun and Shade an artistic periodical which shall be not only pleasing but educational in its broadest sense, Some of our plans may be briefly referred to.

“We shall reproduce the leading pictures in the great collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Within the covers of Sun and Shade will be found from time to time, reproductions of the works of American artists. We shall especially endeavor to encourage the artistic side of direct photography in all its phases, And we shall supplement these special features with examples of sculpture, architecture, and industrial art. If in the future we receive as hearty a response to our efforts as we have received in the past, our task will be indeed pleasant and our road to success a royal one.” (p. 394)