“PhotoSeed is a labor of love by David Spencer, a passionate and leading collector of vintage fine-art photography. The site, comprised of his personal collection, was populated in his free time and includes his detailed backgrounds for many of the works. 

Defined by the depth of the collection and content, it’s a tool for new users and the curious, as well as scholarly researchers.”

So big congratulations to David for making it happen and a bigger thank you for sharing with the community the elusive information that you have tirelessly and diligently collected.

Check out some of these sales results:

Paul Strand, Camera Work XLVIII 1916

Sotheby’s Sale N08730 April 6, 2011

Lot 33 Paul Strand, selected images from Camera Work 48. $31,250

Lot 36 Alfred Stieglitz The Steerage (Large-format photogravure on tissue). $34,375

Swann Sale 2240 March 24, 2011

Lot 69 Camera Work Numbers 12 through 21 & 38.  $43,200

Lot 70 Alvin Langdon Coburn, London. $10,800

Lot 93 Alvin Langdon Coburn, New York (inscribed). $45,600

AIPAD March 17 – 20, 2011

Alvin Langdon Coburn, New York (w/ rare Dust Jacket). $75,000

Paul Strand, Photographs of Mexico (1940). $22,500

Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage (small format). $9,500

It is a stunning and surprisingly modern original-negative, hand-pulled, dust grained Talbot Kilc photogravure by Frank Eugene, which appeared in Stieglitz’s Camera Work 30 in 1910 – one hundred years ago.  The artist and the image are both icons in the history of photography. The image is held in the collections of the most prestigious photography museums in the world and there are fewer than 200 copies in private collections.  So how was it possible that I purchased this rare vintage print, beautifully framed, for only $250? It was not damaged, faded or in any way compromised.

The Ebay seller told me she spent over $250 to frame it.

The photographer, Frank Eugene (1865-1936) is regarded as one of the most significant figures of the Pictorialist movement at the turn of the century and is mentioned in almost every anthology written on the history of photography.   His revolutionary work incorporated a synthesis of painting, etching and photography and was often the subject of heated debates over weather or not a photograph should/could be ‘manipulated’ in order to achieve an artistic effect.

Borrowing from his experience as a painter, Eugene aggressively scratched on his negatives to remove or reduce unwanted details and to enhance the expressive characteristics of an image.

“What made Eugene so attractive not only to his contemporaries but also to Stieglitz was his totally unorthodox method

of rubbing oil onto the negatives and adding cross hatching with an etching needle sometimes leaving only small portions

of a picture recognizably photographic.” Naef  p.96

Critic Charles Caffin, who authored the landmark book Photography as a Fine Art (1901), also validated Eugene’s technique …

“only a trained and gifted photographer was in the position to create such delicate images and alter their power of

expression so masterfully by manipulating them… The print, printed as it is on Japan paper, conveys every impression

of an etching, having the beautiful characteristics that one looks for therein: spontaneousness of execution, vigorous and

pregnant suggestiveness, velvety color, and delightful evidence of the personal touch. The art is still in the womb of time,

its possibilities becoming wider and more appreciated; being new, one learns that the old standards and points of view

do not necessarily apply to it, and more and more realize the need for an open mind”

The publishers of Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888-1918 felt it deserving of one of the few two-page spreads in its 350 page publication.

Eugene’s unorthodox methods were controversial to say the least, and struck a nerve in the American ‘photography as art’ movement of the day amplifying the ongoing debate over weather manipulating a photograph to make it art is acceptable and justifiable.

In Eugene’s own words…

“It has often been said that the [Horse] photograph was reminiscent of an etching.  But that was in no way intended.

The banal surroundings which were inessential and disruptive to the photograph as a whole were removed from the

negative with a retouching knife, but nothing else was changed, neither the light nor the shadows, nor the form and line

of the animal’s body.”

Eugene’s aim was to suppress the inessential in favor of the essential.

Very little of Eugene’s work survives today – a typical fate of much that has to do with the history of photography and an indication of how little is known about the medium and how low esteem that part of our cultural heritage is held.

If interested in this image, I will be donating it to the 2011 George Eastman House Benefit Auction and hopefully there it will command a price more in line with its pedigree.

Reference:

Caffin, Charles H. Photography as a Fine Art: The Achievements and Possibilities of Photographic Art in America.  New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1901

Naef, Weston. The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz – Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography. New York: The Viking Press, 1978

Pohlmann, Ulrich.  Frank Eugene: The Dream of Beauty. Munich: Nazraeli Press 1995

Prodger, Phillip. The Impressionist Camera: Pictorial Photography in Europe, 1888 – 1918.  Merrell and the Saint Louis Art Museum, 2006

The Pictorialists were a loose confederation that encouraged artists to be subjective with their cameras. Impressionist suggestion was preferred over clinical frankness, allegory to journalism. Prints visibly altered by the hand of the photographer were judged to be the most beautiful prints.

Stieglitz’s gradual disgust with this creed and his conversion to the idea that “objectivity is of the very essence of photography”—announced in a 1917 article—slammed shut the pre-World War I chapter of his past. Thereafter, the superiority of sharply focused images and “straight” printing became fundamental for his league of followers and for modernists everywhere.

“TruthBeauty” illustrates what must have been obvious, most of all to Stieglitz: Modernist photographers owed a lot to their despised predecessors, and the line between them was fuzzier than the triumphant upstarts later wanted to admit.

Read the Review

Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Tunnel Builders, New York 1913

Annie Brigman, "The Bubble" variant poses

The Gorge Eastman House has recently launched Notes On Photographs which aims to compile and illustrate relevant information that characterizes a photographer’s work. It intends to be used as a reference database for illustrating key attributes documented by conservators, curators, collectors and scholars dedicated to the study and observation of photographs. The capabilities of the wiki system allow for the resource to be a stage of discussion on meaningful information in better understanding fine photographs. There is currently a demonstrated need for a greater sophistication in the study of photographs. This is due essentially to three aspects: the rise in market value of these objects, the lack of reference resources for works of masters, and the closure of chemical imaging that is leading to a need for re-reading the history of photography. Curators and collectors have been calling upon conservators to answer questions relating to issues of authenticity and understanding of photographs–authorship, photographic processing, dating and provenance. Conservators, who have the tools and knowledge to analyze photographic materials, have in recent years directed the research focus towards characterization protocols. In order to compile and surpass platforms of knowledge it is important to create reference resources. Newly developed imaging and information tools allow for the creation of such a resource using the wiki system that will be added to and serve conservators, curators, registrars, catalogers, and all those involved in the study, observation and valuation of photographs.  Visit the site.

Wet Day on the Boulevard, 1894, Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz: In-Sight Evenings: Looking Deeper and Differently at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum @ 485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138

In 1969 the Fogg Museum received a selection of photogravures by the legendary impresario of American modernism, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Drawn from the artist’s first portfolio of his own work, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies (1897), the images signaled a critical sea change in Stieglitz’s approach to the fine art of photography, while their acquisition marked the advent of a new direction in collecting for Harvard’s art museums.

This In-Sight Evenings series features a talk by Deborah Martin Kao, Chief Curator; Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography; Acting Head, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums on Stieglitz and his seminal work.

Wed. September 22, 2010, 6 pm – 8pm.

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum

Tickets are $25.

Space is limited and registration is encouraged. For a full listing of member discounts, to register, or to request an In-Sight brochure, call 617-495-0534 or email artmuseum_membership@harvard.edu.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

March 16 – June 20, 2010

From the museum’s website…..

In 1895, only ten years after abandoning medicine to take up photography, Peter Henry Emerson published Marsh Leaves, his last illustrated book. Today it is difficult to imagine the feelings these landscapes inspired in readers of the time – images as uncontrived and evanescent as those in his first collection, Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads published in 1886, were a concentrated representation of rural life.

There was a clear development between the two books from the pictorial model of Jean-François Millet to a style influenced by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Japanese art, from a documentary approach to pure poetry. Although we in the 21st century can immediately appreciate the formal radicalism that Emerson finally achieved, it is more difficult for us to imagine the fierce aesthetic debates that his first masterstroke aroused at the time.
His writings, as well as formulating Naturalistic photography, are a reminder that below the calm waters of this timeless vision of rural England lurked one of the most virulent polemicists in the history of photography.

Two color photogravure, 11” x 11”. Courtesy of Moeller Fine Art, NY.

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS ANNOUNCES 2010 ART AWARD WINNERS
New York, March 25, 2010 — The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the eight artists who
will receive its 2010 awards in art. The awards will be presented in New York City in May at the Academy’s
annual Ceremonial. The art prizes, totaling $62,500, honor both established and emerging artists. The award
winners were chosen from a group of 37 artists who had been invited to participate in the Invitational Exhibition of
Visual Arts, which opened on March 11, 2010. The Invitational Exhibition continues through April 11, 2010, and
features over 120 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper. The members of this year’s award
selection committee were: William Bailey, Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Jane Freilicher, Judy Pfaff, Martin Puryear,
Robert Ryman, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Five Academy Awards in Art of $7500 each are given  to honor exceptional accomplishment and to encourage creative work.  This year’s winners include:
GABRIELLE BAKKER
LOTHAR OSTERBURG
JULIANNE SWARTZ
TOM UTTECH
STANLEY WHITNEY

Brassai, Open Gutter from "Paris by Night" 1933

Brassai’s Paris de Nuit is highlighted in Andrew Roth’s 101 Best Photography Books, “The photogravures are so rich that the sooty blacks still look like they’ll rub off the page… Brassai became a master of drawing luminosity from the darkness.”

Was Roth correct in referring to the images in this book as photogravures?  Just what does the term ‘photogravure’ really mean? Truth of the matter is that while the images in Paris de Nuit are by strict definition photogravures, they are ’sheet-fed’ photogravures which cannot really be compared in quality or craftsmanship to ‘hand-pulled’ photogravures.

Sheet fed photogravures were printed by relatively high volume presses and are typically found on relatively low-quality paper. Production efficiency and automation trumping aesthetics, the ink was thinned with solvents in order to be able to be applied mechanically.  The ink was also applied thinly to aid in quick drying.  Further compromising quality, a grid like screen was used to generate the gradation of tone rather the more organic and time-consuming aquatint dust used in the hand-pulled photogravure process.  So while sheet fed photogravures did reproduce images in ink with an intaglio plate, that’s where the comparison ends.

The photogravures highlighted on this site are all handmade.  They are old school. The tone defining grain is organic rather than a screen. The ink is thick and rubbed deep into the plate by hand.  The plate is run through the press slowly, one sheet at a time, to insure the complete transfer of the pockets of ink deep into the oftentimes hand handmade tissue or paper.

It is no wonder photogravure is so misunderstood (translate: undervalued.) If the same word is used throughout the photography collecting community to describe both something that is machine made AND something that is hand-made, who wouldn’t be confused?

Roger Fenton, Water Gate, Raglan Castle, 1856

Google alerts are great if you are searching for information on obscure subjects.  That is exactly how I discovered Paul Morgan.  Paul was offering a talk at the National Media Museum entitled ‘Paul Pretsch and Photogalvanography 1850 – 1870′.  Surprised not only to find someone interested in the subject but also to see one of photography’s most prestigious institutions offering a talk on photogralvonagraphy, I emailed Paul to introduce myself and see if he would let me read his lecture.

Paul and I have since had in depth correspondence about Pretsch.  He has provided me with a plethora of images and text regarding Pretsch, photogalvanography and Fenton.  Eventually,  I asked for Paul’s bio.  Expecting to see something like Professor of Art History – Oxford, I was surprised to see that he is a layperson with a passion for creating, learning and writing — rendering his work on Pretsch all the more impressive.

From Paul’s bio….”I was educated at Rossall, then took a degree in Communication Studies at Aston in Birmingham. Have been through quite a variety of jobs, but the main spell was living and working with profoundly handicapped youngsters. Have always been involved in the arts, my own output including painting, drawing, photography, poetry, drama, and prose. Usually occupied in writing of some variety, in latter years mainly odd articles, covering subjects from local history to Captain Morgan the pirate.  My interest in Pretsch came about from finding some photogalvanographic prints, but very little information about them.  I ended up spending a decade intermittently pursuing the full story. Now have turned my attention to an investigation of the Battle of Loos in 1915, where my maternal Grandfather died.”

Paul has generously agreed to let me publish his work on Pretsch in the text section of the site.  It is as comprehensive essay on Photogalvanography you’ll find, celebrating the forgotten innovation that lead to the first published photographic art portfolio in ink – Photographic Art Treasures.

Thank you Paul.

Swann Galleries Photographs and Photographic Literature

Sale 2191, October 22, 2009

Camera Work made a strong showing at Swann last month. While many lots in the sale passed or sold within or below their estimates, seven of the ten Camera Work lots commanded prices that exceeded their high estimates (including buyer’s premium.)

Numbers 2 & 19 $5,280
Numbers 7 & 8 $3,360
Numbers 13 & 15 $6,960
Numbers 16, 17 & 18 $4,560
Number 22 $3,360
Numbers 25 & 31 $6,480
Number 27 $4,560

To learn more about Camera Work pricing, visit Photogravure Gallery.

This summer Eric Lutz, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs for the St. Louis Art Museum, asked me to give a talk to the museum’s Friends of Photography collectors group. It was my first opportunity to present my research to a captive audience. I was concerned that it might be hard to fill the 90 minutes with relevant information, so I edited together a Keynote presentation complete with video clips, sound bites and fancy graphics.

The problem was, I never timed it. Well best laid plans…turns out the talk I prepared would have taken 90 hours! I shifted from plan A to just winging it and the 90 minutes went by in a flash and resulted in just a brief overview. The good news is everybody not only stayed awake, but also left excited about photogravure. Eric later said it was some of the best group energy he had seen at a Friends talk.

The experience was an affirmation that the topic is broad, relevant, rich in detail and able to be appreciated by a wide audience.

Thanks to David Spencer forh is help and for supplying this image of Karl Klic’s first published photogravure.

“There is a sense of panic out there…” were the words of Dick Sullivan, proprietor of Bostick-Sullivan. “Without it, photogravure in its present form will cease to exist. End of story,” were Craig Zammiello’s words. ”This is very big!!!! and harrowing!” said Jon Goodman.

What is all the fuss about? Well it appears as though Autotype, the only manufacturer of pigmented gelatin tissue, a material critical to the photogravure process, has decided to cease production… “It is with sadness that after 100 years of supply, MacDermid Autotype is now forced to discontinue the manufacture of Gravure Pigment Papers and films due to the withdrawal of two unique raw materials.”

Without this material, practicing photogravure ateliers have two choices – make their own gelatin tissue (a laborious and unpredictable prospect) or practice polymer photogravure – a distant second choice and not an option for purists.

Hopefully Richard Sullivan will come to the rescue. He is versed in manufacturing carbon tissue and is working diligently to save photogravure. Talking with him today, it appears as though he is making positive strides toward a product that might just be better than Artotype’s (thicker – allowing more depth in the etch). Too complicated for this layperson, the status of the situation can be followed on Richard’s forum, which – if you take the time to read it, illustrates just how complex this process is.

By the way, I must admit I was pleased to hear Richard, a legend in the world of alternative process, tell me that photogravure was among his top top three of all photographic processes when it comes to beauty.

Robert Adams

James Craig Annan is under recognized in today’s photography scene. He was not, however, overlooked by Stieglitz during the peak years of the Photo-Secession and the publication of Camera Work.  Just a year before Stieglitz introduced Paul Strand in Camera Work 48, he devoted an entire issue to Annan’s photographs from Spain. This somber, quiet, introspective body of work was born out of the most ordinary subject matter. It is reticent, reserved and tenderly beautiful.  The signed prints are from the collection of Raimondi Antonio who died shortly after World War I.

Mrs. N. Gray Bartlett distinguished herself as an amateur photographer at a time when relatively few women were involved in the art. An active member of the Chicago Camera Club, she displayed her work in several exhibitions, receiving recognition for idealized and sentimental imagery of women and children posed in outdoor settings… Her books, printed in high-quality tissue photogravure, combined photographs, fanciful lettering and whimsical drawings and exemplify the creative opportunity that photogravure offered to combine photography and illustration (GEH, Imagining Paradise, White, From the mundane to the magical, 65) Find here examples from  A Girl I Know.

George Davison’s innovative impressionist photographs turned the heads of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in the 1890’s. Davison’s use of a pinhole lens resulted in photographs that were difficult to distinguish from paintings.  And although this particular photographic technique came to represent all that was wrong with photography’s struggle to be recognized as art, it has found its place in history as a distinctive early phase of the pictorial movement. A signed photogravure from this period is rare  – especially one originally in the collection of Margaret Harker and published in her book, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892 – 1910, London: Heinemann, 1979

Die Kunst in der Photographie.  These two images, one by Constance Puyo and the other by Ernest Ashton, exemplify photogravure’s capacity to offer a quality of print that is uniquely beautiful.  Although historically forgotten, they will always remain highlights of this collection.

Peter Henry Emerson’s most distinguished and most impressionistic work is considered Marsh Leaves, his last published book and one of only two in which the photogravures were printed by Emerson himself. This may be the earliest body of photographic work to show Japanese influence. The misty quality he achieves in these landscapes is also strongly reminiscent of Whistler’s ‘Nocturnes’. (Life and Landscape: P.H. Emerson Art & Photography in East Anglia 1885-1900, p. 39) This collection of prints was exhibited by the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and Chrysler Museum of Art between 2006 and 2008.

Roger Fenton is relevant in the study of the history of photogravure from at least two perspectives.  He has been credited with the birth of photojournalism when in 1855, The Illustrated London News published examples from The Exhibition of Photographic Pictures Taken in the Crimea (Farber, Great News Photos and the Stories Behind Them, pp. 12-13) And in 1856 Fenton managed the Photographic Department and photographed for the Photo-Galvanographic Company in London, which published, “Photographic Art Treasures” – the first periodical devoted to artistic photographic reproduction illustrated by photomechanical process. The published photogalvanographs were strongly criticized in the photographic press for their heavy retouching. Today not only are they charming, but also are rare examples from the evolution of photomechanical reproduction and photogravure. (Eder, 582)

J Dudley Johnston, elected to the Linked Ring in 1907, was twice president of the Royal Photographic Society where he played a key role in starting the Society’s permanent collection.  Johnston became one of the earliest photographic historians and his awareness of the history of the emergence of photography doubtlessly influenced his own photographic work. Margaret Harker in her The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892 – 1910, considered Johnston a leading Secessionist… ‘The more adventurous of the Secessionists explored the visual world afresh, breaking away from what had become established forms of picture making by photography.’ Most of Johnston’s work is to be found in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society, now at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television Bradford.  It is rare to find examples on the market.  This photogravure from one of Johnston’s most famous images was purchased from the collection of Margaret Harker and happens to represent its commencement, for it is notated on the back “No.1 – the first photograph in the Harker collection.”

Unai San Martin has won accolades as one of Spain’s most accomplished printmakers (Premio Nacional de Grabado, 2002; Joan Miro Foundation, Mallorca.) Experiencing one of his photogravures in person leaves little doubt why.  His work is ethereal and mysteriously beautiful.  And his craftsmanship when it comes to photogravure is non-pareil.

Man Ray was one of the few American artists involved in the international movements of Dada and Surrealism during the first half of the twentieth century. Published in 1931 and commissioned by a French electric company to promote the use of electricity, Électricité is a prime example of Ray’s experimental style and consists of 10 rayograms all related to uses of electricity and printed in photogravure. 
Electricite la Ville, illuminated by Fernand Jacopozzi’s fanciful lighting design, explodes with an overlay of neon advertisements in Man Ray’s dynamic, multiple-exposure print. Fragments of words float through the photograph like bits of overheard conversations.

The turn of the century saw the establishment of an ‘international style’ in photography, laying claim to the medium’s recognition as a fine art. An additional goal of the Pictorialist movement was modernity; in contrast to the medium’s commercial and private uses, art photographers aspired to transform reality. By adapting the subjects of Symbolism, art nouveau’s awareness of form, and the craftsmanship of the Arts and Crafts Movement, they participated in the artistic avant-garde of fin de siècle Modernism and conveyed a very clear message: Photography is art.

Rather than being obvious or shocking, this modernity was hidden within individual aesthetic expression and in the art object’s sumptuous materiality. Numerous photography clubs, magazines, and museum exhibitions provided art photographers with a forum for critical recognition. The movement’s important centers included Vienna, Hamburg, and London, and it found its most important champion in the American Alfred Stieglitz, who published the magazine Camera Work.

Study, Heinrich Kuehn, photogravure 1911

Exotic techniques such as gum bichromate printing, pigment printing, and platinum printing made possible the felicitous translation of painterly and graphic impressions into Pictorialist photography. The eye and hand of the artists were evident throughout, in the prints’ refined compositions as well as their elaborate printing methods. Thus did the camera’s mechanical coldness seem to be surmounted. Like Impressionism, Pictorialism was an art of atmosphere, one that privileged the ’subjective eye’ (Augeneindruck – Hans Watzek).
Through the deliberate use of soft focus – its best known stylistic device – it drew the viewer’s attention toward the formative power of light.

Heinrich Kühn, more than any other, was masterful at harnassing the effects of light for his photographs. The palpably light-filled atmospheres of his careful, intentionally simple compositions emphasized the essence of his respective subjects. Kühn, born in Dresden and based in Innsbruck from the 1890s on, formed the group Trifolium – cloverleaf – together with Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg, two friends from the Wiener Camera-Club (Vienna Camera Club). Between 1897 and 1903 the three artist travelled and exhibited together, signing their works with the three-leaf clover motif. It is Henneberg who taught the gum bichromate printing technique to his comrades, a method that Kühn would bring to perfection in the following years.

Both Kühn and Henneberg would exert a lasting influence over Rudolf Koppitz. His Hungrige Raben (Hungry Ravens – before 1914), which brings to mind a Japanese woodcut, derives its modern quality from the high contrast of black and white as well as from the abstracting effect of the bromoil printing process. The Dresden court photographer Erwin Raupp was meanwhile putting his own interpretations of landscapes into practice in large-format gum bichromate prints.

A key figure of British Pictorialism was the Scotsman James Craig Annan. Son of the early photographer Thomas Annan, a member of the Linked Ring, and the first president of the International Society of Pictorial Photographers, he and his father learned the technique of photogravure in Vienna from its founder Karl Klíc. Annan would perfect it, as well as such specialized printing methods as the carbon print, in his genre scenes and portraits.

Gertrude Käsebier, one of Pictorialism’s most influential woman photographers, opened her own studio in New York in 1897 after studying painting in New York and photography and photochemistry in Berlin. The evocative atmosphere of her portraits, particularly of women and children, and of her landscapes, is a hallmark of her work. Among the exhibition’s new discoveries is the photographic oeuvre of the painter Elise Mahler, who found the subjects for her landscapes in the course of extensive travels in Italy and elsewhere.
A limited-edition catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Lavishly designed and produced, in cooperation with Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna, it contains contributions by Monika Faber and Wilfried Wiegand plus more than forty images in four-color printing.