Outside the Box

Early 20th-century modernist photographers played with vantage point, cropping and printing, as seen in the Princeton University Art Museum’s ‘Abstract Photography’ show.

By: Ilene Dube

An example of radical cropping in early 20th-century modernist photography is "Martha Graham – EKSTASIS" (1935) by Barbara Morgan, above.

   "Why, I ask you earnestly, need we go on making commonplace little exposures that may be sorted into groups of landscapes, portraits and figure studies?" wrote photographer and American expatriate Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966). "Think of the joy of doing something which it would be impossible to classify, or to tell which was top and which was bottom!…. I do not think we have even begun to realize the possibilities of the camera."
   Mr. Coburn’s words serve as introduction to Seeing the Unseen: Abstract Photography, 1900-1940, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum through March 23.
   "Photography was initially invented, in part, to allow the exact recording of the way the world and its objects looked to a sharp-sighted observer," writes Anne McCauley, the new David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. (The position was previously held by Peter C. Bunnell.) Abstract Photography was put together for Professor McCauley’s class, "Masters and Movements of Twentieth-Century Photography."
   "The awareness that camera-generated images and human perception were different reinforced what physiologists and philosophers had already begun to argue: that conventional visual reality was a construct, an artifice of the brain that had as much or as little validity as the hallucinations of the opium eater," she continues.
   The exhibit includes works from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as advertising and magazine design Dr. McCauley pulled together. Photograms, or cameraless images made by placing the object on light-sensitive paper, first developed by Fox Talbot, were rediscovered after World War I and used as modern abstraction.

	TimeOFF/Mark Czajkowski
	Anne McCauley, above, stands alongside Karl Blossfeldt’s "Meadow Saxifrage."

   "‘Vogue’ used ads that were made up of photograms, which were immediately coded as modernism. Modernity sells, even today. It’s jazzy and it sells products," says Dr. McCauley, offering a lively discussion of the show between classes. Having recently broken her foot while walking on campus, she did not let her crutches hamper her energy or enthusiasm, gallantly making her way toward the exhibition cases of magazines using Man Ray’s photograms.
   There also is a connection between modernist photography and cinema: The formal techniques of close-up, montage, juxtaposing time and "radical vantage points" — a bird’s eye-view, for example, or shooting from the ground up — are shared by both abstract photography and cinema. Obstructed foregrounds, used in the films of Sergei Eisenstein and Russian experimental cinematographers, appear in an image by Ralston Crawford, where a balcony breaks up the foreground into fragmented shapes, like cubism.
   Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose words introduce the exhibit, made vortographs, a term coined by his good friend Ezra Pound. "Ezra Pound was doing in poetry what Coburn was doing in photography," says Dr. McCauley. "Vorticists apply the principles of cubism and fragmentation to machine subjects.

"Under the Brooklyn Bridge" (1917), by Paul L. Anderson, above.

   "Photography is a medium that allows you to see," continues Dr. McCauley. "What you see with the eye is not necessarily reality. There is an integration of spirituality with retinal vision, recording the light in different ways."
   Both fine artists and commercial photographers used these techniques, and many art photographers earned a living doing commercial work. "Man Ray was making his funky abstract Rayograms while taking fashion photographs for ‘Vogue,’" says Dr. McCauley. "Before ‘Life’ magazine, ‘Fortune’ was very successful, using graphic imagery. Photo advertising and picture magazines both took off after World War I, where the picture tells the story. As a result, there was a crossover from art and the literary press into the commercial world.
   "New York was a great subject, the jazzy fragmented city," says Dr. McCauley, indicating a radical vantage point of twinkling skyscrapers made by Berenice Abbott.
   An example of radical cropping is Barbara Morgan’s truncated view of Martha Graham, wearing a body sock and shown from ankle to shoulders.

	Above, "Equivalent" (1926), an abstracted view of the night sky by Alfred Stieglitz; below, an untitled photogram (1923) by László Moholy-Nagy.

   Karl Blossfeldt, whose "Meadow Saxifrage" is featured, photographed close-ups of plants for a practical purpose — industrial designers used them for art nouveau ornamentation, particularly metal sculptural work.
   Dr. McCauley never set out to be a photo historian. In fact, the field barely existed in the years she first pondered her life’s goals.
   Professor McCauley’s father was a Burlington, N.C., Daily News photographer who learned his skills taking aerial photos during World War I. "My father never taught me; I never printed but watched him in the darkroom," says Dr. McCauley, who went on to study chemistry at Wellesley College "because I thought it was the hardest thing in high school."
   A professor urged her to take an introductory survey in art history. "I didn’t even know art history existed," says Dr. McCauley, adding, "I had never been north of Washington, D.C." She studied 19th-century European art and decided to major in the field by her sophomore year.
   Going on to earn a doctorate in 19th-century French art at Yale, she admits, "I never took a photographic history class in my life."
   After Yale, Dr. McCauley went to Europe to study theories of gesture and facial expression and their influence on painting and caricature in the second empire, including Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Honoré Daumier. "Painting was trying to become more naturalistic, and artists were studying 18th-century treatises on how to depict expression such as happiness and sadness."
   Dr. McCauley observed that early portrait photographs didn’t look lifelike either. "I got interested in early French portrait photography."
   After a year in Paris, her dissertation topic shifted to the first inexpensive commercial studio portraits called carts de visite, which were the size of French calling cards. "Photographic history was very new in the 1970s. The Bibliothèque National held its first show in 1977," she says.
   At Princeton, Dr. McCauley teaches 19th- and 20th-century painting, integrating it with photography and other "visual culture."
   "I’m here to teach photography but I can’t teach one without looking at the sociology of art history, the embeddedness of art in culture — politics, economics and philosophy."
   Edward Ranney Photographs: The John B. Elliott Collection is simultaneously on view in adjacent galleries. It includes many of Mr. Ranney’s landscapes of the American Southwest, as well as some from Machu Picchu in Peru.
   Peter C. Bunnell, faculty curator of photography emeritus, writes, "Ranney’s photographs reflect his realization that surfaces can reveal inner states, that through the careful presentation of facts, spirit may be revealed, and that with dedication and respect, the character of a place may be shown in its essence."
Seeing the Unseen: Abstract Photography, 1900-1940 is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton University campus through March 23. During construction, enter through the west side of the building, across the green from Dod Hall. Edward Ranney Photographs: The John B. Elliott Collection is on view through June 7. Mr. Ranney will speak about Space and Place April 9, 4:30 p.m., McCormick 106. Museum hours: Tues.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 1-5 p.m. For information, call (609) 258-3788. On the Web: www.princetonartmuseum.org