Loss of Vision: How Early 20th century Photography Was Misjudged by Critics and How Archives Obscure the Image exposure magazine Follow Jun 18, 2018 · 19 min read

Double portrait of an unidentified woman, courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

While both historical archives and museums collect photography, they approach it in different ways. Whereas museums collect a few pieces, a historical archive which has photographs in the millions may take the photographer’s entire body of work. I have been working with large collections of photography for 35 years now in my job as the Visual Materials Curator/archivist. Such collections which may range from 10,000 to 100,000 images allow you to see their work in a way that viewing just a few pieces of a photographer’s work can never match.

Having worked with many collections of early commercial photography, I become particularly interested in the misinterpretations of commercial photography by modern critics and art historians who judge it using incorrect standards, and I also became interested in how the photographic document can be obscured by both photographers themselves and by archival practice. First I am going to discuss how photography critics, can misjudge the work of commercial photographers due to their lack of understanding the social milieu and the working methodology of the commercial photographer. A great example of this is in Max Kozloff’s 2007 book Theater of the Face: Portrait Photography Since 1900. Kozloff is a historian and art critic and has written numerous books and articles on art and photography.

Photograph by E.J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In Theater of the Face, Kozloff discusses a photograph by E.J. Bellocq, a turn of the century New Orleans photographer. Bellocq worked as a professional photographer recording landmarks, ships, and machinery for various clients in the New Orleans area. Little is known about him; after his death his work was destroyed. Eighty-nine negatives of prostitutes in the Storyville area of New Orleans made in about 1912 were found and later in 1966 were purchased by the art photographer, Lee Friedlander. Friedlander printed the 8x10 negatives on gold toned printing out paper (to emulate how he thought Bellocq might have printed) and a show of the work was hung at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970. Several books of the photographs have been published based on the prints made by Lee Friedlander. There are no Bellocq prints of the Storyville prostitutes but recently, some examples of his regular work came to light. They are typical commercial work of the time.

Photograph by E.J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

In discussing this Storyville prostitute photograph, Kozloff says in rebuttal to Lee Friedlander’s praise of Bellocq as a worker of exceptional skill:

Rather than being the work of an accomplished or knowledgeable artist, however, Bellocq’s pictures in truth betray a real lack of command over their material. The young women are sometimes posed before back sheets whose edges show…figures are swallowed up by inexplicable shadows. One fashionably dressed lady seems unaware of the laundry on a line behind her….Bellocq took little care — or had no idea how — to frame his sitters in any accord with their presentation of self. This makeshift exposition is so blatant that one almost pities it.

The first sentence of Kozloff’s statement shows that he is not aware of Bellocq’s motivations for making the image. He says, “Rather than being the work of an accomplished or knowledgeable artist…” Well, to understand the basis on which Kozloff is judging this image we should add the words “late 20th century” to make his statement read, “Rather than being the work of an accomplished or knowledgeable [late 20th century] artist…” Kozloff is apparently unaware that the product of the commercial photographer in 1912 is far different than an artist’s presentation of an image for exhibit in an art museum in the 1970s.

Kozloff observes that the photograph shows the laundry behind the woman and feels that this proves Bellocq’s “real lack of command over the material.” However, while Lee Friedlander attempted to emulate the papers of Bellocq’s the time period, the way the images were presented to the public was accordance with a late 20th century art photographer’s aesthetic and not in the manner in which they were intended for Bellocq’s clients in 1912. Friedlander made contact prints of the negatives and they were displayed showing the entire image all the way to the edges, a practice, which was not done until late 20th century art photographers, took it up. In Bellocq’s time, they didn’t worry about composing to the edges of the negative; his composition was refined afterwards when he cropped out the extra image area he didn’t need.

Portrait of Chief Joseph, 1901 © Lee Moorhouse , courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

In the above portrait of Chief Joseph, we can observe that photographic strategies such as hanging up a blanket as a backdrop was a common practice. Many itinerant photographers or those working outside the formal studio used this method. Often photographers did not have more than one or two lenses and therefore did not have the option of controlling composition by changing lenses. They worked with what they had on hand. Commercial studio photographers also didn’t bother to worry about the edges of the image.

Portrait of Dee Wallace, Junction City Kansas, 1897, © Joseph Pennell Collection, Kansas Collection, courtesy Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.

This view of Dee Wallace, by Joseph Pennell showing the entire negative, is a wonderful record because it allows the modern viewer to see what his studio was like. However, when the photograph was printed by Pennell, it was most likely cropped to be a small oval of face and upper body. This is born out by many vintage portraits printed by Pennell. Throughout Pennell’s collection of 30,000 negatives, it is common to see the backdrop and props appear in the pictures because he never intended the edges of the image to be seen.

Tintype from 1880s of Mabel and Grace Thomason with Spencer Frederick Butler, with oval showing where the mat was laid over the image. Photograph by Joseph Pennell, courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

The above tintype showing the backdrop and studio beyond also shows that the photographer presented the finished image with an oval mat. The uneven cut of the tintype and the extra studio edge shows that the photographer didn’t worry about a tight composition to the edges of the image.

Photograph by E.J. Bellocq © Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Kozloff mentions the darkness of the shadows; this is hard to discuss looking at a reproduction which can’t show all the detail of Friedlander’s print. However, one reason a modern print would look darker than a vintage print of the time is that glass plate negatives were printed with papers at the time that rendered more of the tones of the glass negative. It is difficult to print glass plates with modern papers which have less tonal range.

John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art curator, who put on the 1970 Bellocq show, said, “It is possible that the pictures were made as a commercial assignment, but this seems unlikely; they have about them a variety of conception and a sense of leisure in the making that identify them as work done for love,” [Looking at Photographs] I would disagree with this statement because Bellocq made his living as a commercial photographer and most likely the prostitutes like everyone else wanted personal photographs for themselves along with marketing photographs.