The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (98 page)

In Paris a celebrated caricaturist and balloonist, the flamboyant “Nadar” (Gaspard Félix Tournachon, 1820–1910), created his own photographic pantheon with portraits of Balzac, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Daumier, Wagner, Rossini, and others. “Photography,” he declared, “is a marvellous discovery, a science that has attracted the greatest intellects, an art that excites the most astute minds—and one that can be practiced by any imbecile.
… But what cannot be taught is the feeling for light.… It is how light lies on the face that you as artists must capture.” On the Isle of Wight, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), wife of a British civil servant who at forty-eight received a gift of photographic apparatus from her family, made unexcelled portraits of her famous visitors—Herschel, Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Browning, Longfellow, and many others. She also used her camera for “out of focus” fantasies in the Pre-Raphaelite painterly style, illustrations for Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
, children posed as angels or as “Venus chiding Cupid and removing his wings.” Women seizing the opportunity for liberation of their talents would be among the best and the boldest photographers. But like Julia Cameron, other photographers vacillated between being scientist and artist, between naturalism and sentimentality.

The new freedom of the photographer to take natural images—call it science or art as you wish—came from a simple radical improvement in technique. The hectic wet-plate process had tied the photographer to his darkroom, where he could prepare and quickly develop his pictures. The long exposures required a tripod to hold the camera steady and keep it focused on the subject. And the wet-plate camera, like the muzzle-loading musket, had to be reloaded after each shot. Then the photographer had to hasten to his darkroom to develop his picture within ten minutes, before the image disappeared. In a whole day a wet-plate photographer in the field might make no more than six plates. Dry-plate photography would liberate the photographer to wander out of doors much as the oil paint in tubes had freed painters to go out into nature. An English amateur experimented with dry plates, and by 1878 they were on the market. Within twenty years they had transformed photography. The photographer now could take pictures as fast as he could load the plateholders, and he could develop them at leisure in his darkroom back home. The speedier dry plates made it possible to dispense with the tripod and to photograph moving objects and people on the landscape. But it was the first hand-held cameras, called “detective” cameras from their ability to take pictures without a conspicuous tripod attached, that really opened the world to photography and photography to the world. Now, an advertisement for a hand-held camera explained, “a lady might without attracting any attention go upon Broadway and take a series of photographs.”

Photography beckoned to amateurs. Instead of laboriously aiming for a perfect shot, amateurs could shoot at random, hoping for a good one in the lot. In wet-plate photography, each photographer had prepared his own plates at the site of the photograph. While the new dry-plate technique much simplified the taking of pictures, it left the preparation of the plates to professional companies.

Still, none of this might have created a nation of photographers without
the practical imagination and merchandising genius of George Eastman (1854–1932). Son of a teacher of penmanship who had established Rochester’s first commercial college, he had only seven years of schooling before becoming bookkeeper in a bank. As an early amateur photographer he had made his own wet plates. When he learned of the new dry plates, he saw their commercial promise and invented and patented a coating machine. Quitting his job at the bank, he invested his savings of three thousand dollars in the business, and at twenty-six he was on his way to making photography the American national hobby. Since glass plates had to be loaded one at a time, Eastman imagined the advantages of a flexible negative that could be rolled like a window shade past the focal plane. He first tried paper, then used celluloid. In 1888 his first “Kodak,” a box camera with a fixed focus, holding a roll with one hundred negatives, was on the market. It sold for twenty-five dollars, including the processing of the first roll, which the photographer sent back to Rochester, where the camera was refilled with film and returned. Soon the photographer received his neatly mounted contact prints.

Eastman also had a talent for words. His slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest” enticed thousands of amateurs and entered American folklore. He had invented the word “Kodak,” he explained, with K, “a strong incisive sort of letter, at both ends.” It signaled his hope for a world market, since Kodak could be easily pronounced in any language that used the Roman alphabet. A new vocabulary proclaimed the new photographable world. “Snapshot,” originally a hunter’s term for a hurried shot fired without taking careful aim, was applied to photography by Herschel, and now described pictures taken by the Kodak, which at first had no finder and was simply pointed in the direction of the object. “Photography,” Eastman boasted, “is thus brought within reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees.”

But was it art? “If you cannot see at a glance,” with his genius for overstatement, George Bernard Shaw declared in 1901, “that the old game is up, that the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint-brush as an instrument of artistic representation, then you will never make a true critic: you are only like most critics, a picture fancier.… Some day the camera will do all the work of Velasquez and Peter de Hooghe, colour and all.” Photographers and their critics never ceased to be haunted by this question. Everybody knew that an art had to be difficult. With its increasing ease and universality, how could photography be an art? Photographers, conceived in a chemist’s laboratory, envied the mystique of the artist’s studio.

The most influential answer to the photographers’ troubling question was offered by Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Photographers aspiring to be artists
had understandably imitated painting, to give the newest of the graphic arts the prestige of one of the oldest. Stieglitz took the opposite tack. He became the apostle of photography as a unique art, and of America as its testing place.

Although Stieglitz boasted of his Americanness, his education was mostly European. Born in Hoboken in 1864 to a retired prosperous German-Jewish woolen merchant of broad culture, he attended the New York public schools and the City College. For their education his father moved the family of six children to Europe in 1881. In Berlin Stieglitz entered the Polytechnic for mechanical engineering, enjoyed the friendship of painters, and frequented theater and opera. In 1883, five years before Eastman’s first Kodak, Stieglitz saw a little black-box camera on a tripod in a Berlin shop window.

Stieglitz shifted his course to photochemistry, bought another camera, took up the new dry-plate techniques, and began experiments of his own. At home he improvised a darkroom by swinging a door back to the wall and covering the space with a blanket. In one of his first efforts to test the limits of the new art, he took his camera down to the cellar to test the proposition that photographs required sunlight. And with an exposure of twenty-four hours to a primitive electric lamp he made a perfect negative.

There in Berlin, Stieglitz, not yet twenty, started his crusade to have photography recognized as an art comparable to painting. His own photographs, for which he set the highest standard, were his best argument. In 1890, when he returned to the United States, he had charted the course of life from which he never deviated. A “born revolutionist,” he found photography an ideal laboratory.

In 1892–93 he made his early classic photographs of New York in winter,
The Car Horses at the Terminal
, and
Winter Fifth Avenue
, which remained
among his most celebrated work. He soon made history with the first successful photographs in rain, in snow, and at night. Among these his photograph of the new Flatiron Building in a heavy snowstorm celebrated the skyscraper like “the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.”

At first he saw the hand-held camera as a menace to the art of photography. “It is amusing to watch the majority of hand-camera workers shooting off a ton of plates helter-skelter, taking their chances as to the ultimate result.” But by 1897 he applauded its new possibilities. In principle he opposed the awarding of medals in photographic competitions, but he submitted his own works and by 1910 had won more than 150 for himself. He was classified as an exponent of “straight photography,” which meant not retouching or tinting but “working in the open air, with rapid exposures, leaving his models to pose themselves, and relying for results on means strictly photographic.”

Uncomfortable in other people’s organizations, in 1902 he founded his own group, which he called the Photo-Secession, after the German Secessionist painters who had revolted against academic art when the paintings of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863–1944) were rejected by a Berlin exhibition (1892). Urged on by his friend Edward Steichen, in 1905 Stieglitz set up the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue. Three rooms, the largest only fifteen by seventeen feet, provided Stieglitz with a showcase for whatever was new in the visual arts. He quickly became a prophet of modern art in America. In the five years before the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, Stieglitz showed Americans the works of Rodin, Cézanne, Matisse, Brancusi, Braque, and Picasso. He also showed African sculpture. He displayed living American painters—John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Timid fellow photographers protested his enthusiasm for modern painting, but he defended “291” as “a laboratory, an experimental station.”

He was especially pleased that Picasso, then painting his
Demoiselles d’Avignon
, liked his photograph
The Steerage
, which he had made on the inspiration of the moment on an eastward sea voyage in 1907. Composed spontaneously, this became Stieglitz’s own favorite picture—“a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.” As a child he had enjoyed reading about the American Revolution, but George Washington was too conventional for his taste. He preferred Nathanael Greene, “who would make the English come after him, and then he would retreat. So that the English, without knowing it, would lose ground … whereas Greene would win while retreating. There was a sense of humour in his strategy.”

When the Armory Show opened he urged all to see this, “The First Great Clinic to Revitalize Art.” At the same time in “291” he put on an exhibit
of his own photographs in an effort to show what painting was not. Years before, in Berlin his painter friends would humor him by saying “Of course, this is not art, but we would like to paint the way you photograph.” And Stieglitz would firmly reply, “I don’t know anything about art, but for some reason or other I have never wanted to photograph the way you paint.” Stieglitz celebrated the uniqueness of both painting and photography with 175 exhibitions at “291” (1905–17), The Intimate Gallery, and An American Place (1929–46). And he documented his photographic faith in
Camera Notes
and the fifty numbers of
Camera Work
(1902–17).

The two arts of photography and painting met in 1924, when Stieglitz, at the age of sixty, married Georgia O’Keeffe, then thirty-seven. She became the subject for one of his two masterworks. “To demand
the
portrait,” he explains, “that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.” So his “composite portrait” of Georgia O’Keeffe, made over many years, included more than four hundred photographs, “heads and ears—toes—hands—torsos,” revealing every sort of expression against varied backgrounds. “When I photograph,” Stieglitz said, “I make love.” But Stieglitz never limited his lovemaking to his camera. He had a stormy career as lover, not only of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Stieglitz was prodded to his other great series, some four hundred photographs of clouds, by two disturbing comments. As he explained in 1923, a friend had written that much of the power of Stieglitz’s photographs came from his influence over his sitters. And his brother-in-law asked how a person as musical as Stieglitz could get along without a piano. Stieglitz answered both questions at the same time.

He began with a sample, which he called “Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs,” reminiscent of Monet’s series. And he was delighted when the composer Ernest Bloch (1880–1959), seeing them, exclaimed “Music!” and was inspired to write a symphony.