Results by title

Francis Watts Lee and his family hold a special place in the history of American photography. F. Holland Day completed a series of remarkable photographs of Lee's daughter Peggy, and the striking portrait of the child and her mother titled Blessed Art Thou among Women is one of Gertrude Käsebier's most iconic compositions. In Artful Lives, Patricia J. Fanning uses these and other significant images as guideposts to explore the Lee family and the art and culture of their age.

A social reform advocate, Francis Watts Lee was an artistic photographer and a talented printer, part of the circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who formed Boston's bohemia. He married twice, first Agnes Rand, an award-winning poet and children's book author, and later, after their divorce, Marion Lewis Chamberlain, a librarian and MIT-trained architect. Francis and Agnes's eldest daughter, Peggy, who was so integral to the work of pioneer Pictorialists, died at age seven of juvenile diabetes. Her sister, Alice, who lost her hearing in infancy, became a wood carver and sculptor.

Utilizing previously unknown family archives and institutional sources, Fanning traces the Lee family's story in the context of major artistic, political, social, and religious trends, including the Arts and Crafts movement, Christian Socialism, and Aestheticism, while also showing how their experiences reflected the national culture's evolving conceptions of family, gender, childhood, medicine, deaf education, and mourning. This richly drawn and gracefully written account of one family informs our understanding of this vibrant era, in Boston and well beyond.

Living off the land—hunting, fishing, and farming, along with a range of specialized crafts that provided barter or cash income—was a way of life that persisted well into the twentieth century in the Big Thicket of southeast Texas. Before this way of life ended with World War II, professional photographer Larry Jene Fisher spent a decade between the 1930s and 1940s photographing Big Thicket people living and working in the old ways. His photographs, the only known collection on this subject, constitute an irreplaceable record of lifeways that first took root in the southeastern woodlands of the colonial United States and eventually spread all across the Southern frontier.

Big Thicket People presents Fisher's photographs in suites that document a wide slice of Big Thicket life-people, dogs, camps, deer hunts, farming, syrup mills, rooter hogs and stock raising, railroad tie making, barrel stave making, chimney building, peckerwood sawmills, logging, turpentining, town life, church services and picnics, funerals and golden weddings, and dances and other amusements. Accompanying each suite of images is a cultural essay by Thad Sitton, who also introduces the book with a historical overview of life in the Big Thicket. C. E. Hunt provides an informative biography of Larry Jene Fisher.

Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U.S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.

Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado, 1945–1995 is the first detailed account of the state’s history of post–World War II expressive photography. The title “Outside Influence” alludes to the historic presence of the natural landscape as subject and to the transformative impact of out-of-state artists and educators. Their arrival in Colorado beginning in the 1960s galvanized interpretive photography by introducing innovative concepts, nontraditional materials, and emergent digital technologies to students, peers, and their audience-at-large.

Throughout the book’s nine chapters, Rupert Jenkins contextualizes Colorado photography’s postwar development with a social, political, and cultural abstract that encompasses national events and trends, the emerging presence of women and photographers of color, and institutional leadership. Drawing from more than 120 personal interviews, he identifies the medium’s principal in-state creators, mentors, and advocates from the modernist era of film processing to the emergence of interdisciplinary digital practice. Jenkins answers fundamental questions about the people and work of this era: Who generated this significant body of innovative, noncommercial photographic work? Where did they come from? Who inspired them, and who in turn did they inspire?

As Eric Paddock, curator of photography at the Denver Art Museum, discusses in his foreword, by looking at the schools, workshops, galleries, and museums that supported these artists, Jenkins stresses the importance of collaboration and community to any successful venture. Crucially, in examining the lives and careers of photographers like Robert Adams, Walter Chappell, Albert Chong, Cherie Hiser, Barbara Houghton, Winter Prather, Mark Sink, Melanie Walker, Myron Wood, and numerous others, Outside Influence seeks to affirm the medium’s legacy within Colorado’s fine arts canon.

A landmark study of vernacular and professional photography, from 1839 to 1941, that frames Alabama’s history through its images.  

Shot in Alabama by Frances Osborn Robb is a visual and textual narrative of Alabama’s photographic history from 1839 to 1941. It describes the phenomenon of photography as practiced in Alabama as a major cultural force, paying close attention to the particular contexts from which each image emerges and the fragments of microhistory that each image documents.

Presented chronologically—from the very first photograph ever taken in the state to the appearance of cameras as commonplace possessions in mid-twentieth-century households—Robb draws into sharp relief the eras of daguerreotypes, Civil War photography, photographic portraiture at the end of the nineteenth century, urban and rural photography in the early twentieth century, WPA photography during the Great Depression, postcards and tourist photography, and pre–World War II illustrated books and art photographs. Robb also examines a wide spectrum of vernacular photography: Alabama-made photographs of everyday people and places, the photographs that fill dresser drawers and shoeboxes, a vast array of unusual images against which Alabama’s more typical iconography can be measured.

She also chronicles the work of hundreds of photographers—black and white, amateur and professional, women and men—some little-known outside their communities, some of them the medium’s most important practitioners. “Who Shot Alabama?” is an accompanying appendix that includes 1,400 photographers by name, working dates, and location—a resource that will help countless individuals, families, and archives identify the specific Alabama photographers whose names appear on family photographs or those in institutional collections.

Shot in Alabama is an insightful document of photography as both a communicator and creator of social, cultural, economic, and visual history. It highlights the very personal worlds rendered by individual photographs as well as the larger panorama of Alabama history as seen through the photographs collectively. A landmark work of research, curation, and scholarship, it fills the void of published history on Alabama photography and is an invaluable resource for historians, archivists, librarians, collectors, hobbyists, and readers with an interest in Alabama history or historic photography. Shot in Alabama is a book that all Alabamians will want on their coffee tables.

An illustrated account of the life and work of the pioneering photographer

The Photographic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) draws on original papers and photographs from the Library of Congress to document the extraordinary life and nearly seventy-year career of this pioneering photographer. Maria Elizabeth Ausherman illuminates the early origins of Johnston’s style and vision, and her attempts to change society through her art. One of the first women to work in an emerging field dominated by men, Johnston achieved acclaim as an accomplished photographer and photojournalist.

As the official White House photographer for five administrations, she was instrumental in defining the medium and inspiring women to train in and appreciate photography. But it is her monumental nine-state survey of southern American architecture that stands as her most significant contribution to the history and development of photography both as art and as documentary. Through her photography, Johnston showed reverence for the beautiful historic buildings she appreciated and also helped shape architectural and photographic preservation in the United States.
 

Situated in the South Texas borderlands some fifty miles west of Corpus Christi, San Diego was a thriving town already a hundred years old at the turn of the twentieth century. With a population that was 90 percent Mexican or Mexican American and 10 percent Anglo, the bicultural community was the seat of Duval County and a prosperous town of lumberyards, banks, mercantile stores, and cotton gins, which also supplied the needs of area ranchers and farmers. Though Anglos dominated its economic and political life, San Diego was culturally Mexican, and Mexican Americans as well as Anglos built successful businesses and made fortunes.

This collection of nearly one hundred photographs from the estate of amateur photographer William Hoffman captures the cosmopolitan town of San Diego at a vibrant moment in its history between 1898 and 1909. Grouped into the categories women and their jobs, local homes, men and their businesses, children at school and church, families and friends, and entertainment about town, the photos offer an immediate visual understanding of the cultural and economic life of the community, enhanced by detailed captions that identify the subjects and circumstances of the photos. An introductory historical chapter constitutes the first published history of Duval County, which was one of the most important areas of South Texas in the early twentieth century.