Sunday, November 26, 2023

Visual Relics (1905-1910)

James van der Zee
Mrs Turner, Lenox, Massachusetts
1905
gelatin silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Anonymous Photographer
Clarence H. White and Jean Reynolds
ca. 1906
cyanotype
Princeton University Art Museum

F. Holland Day
Portrait of photographer Clarence H. White
ca. 1906
platinum print
Princeton University Art Museum

F. Holland Day
Youth with Staff
1906
platinum print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Louis Fleckenstein
Florence
1906
gum bichromate print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Sidney Carter
The Sisters
ca. 1906
albumen print
Princeton University Art Museum

Edward Steichen
Portraits, Evening
1906
photogravure
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Edward Steichen
Rodin's Balzac by Moonlight
1908
gum bichromate print
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri

Alphonse Mucha
Tragédie
ca. 1908
gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Alphonse Mucha
Compositional Study of Draped Models
ca. 1910
gelatin silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A. Horsley Hinton
Landscape
1908
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Louis Lumière
Tea Room at Brides-les-Bain, Savoy
ca. 1907
autochrome
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Clarence H. White
Portrait of Mrs Harrington Mann
1908
photogravure
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Frank Eugene
Kitty Stieglitz in a Field with Blue Flowers
1907
autochrome
Art Institute of Chicago

Eugène Atget
Interior, rue Montaigne, Paris
1910
albumen print
Princeton University Art Museum

Eugène Atget
Masque Antique
1910
albumen silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

from Lines Written Near San Francisco

Every night, at the end of America
We taste our wine, looking at the Pacific. 
How sad it is, the end of America!

While we were waiting for the land
They'd finished it – with gas drums
On the hilltops, cheap housing in the valleys

Where lives are mean and wretched.
But the banks thrive and the realtors
Rejoice – they have their America.

Still, there is something unsettled in the air.
Out there on the Pacific
There's no America but the Marines.

Whitman was wrong about the People,
But right about himself. The land is within.
At the end of the open road we come to ourselves.

Though mad Columbus follows the sun
Into the sea, we cannot follow.
We must remain, to serve the returning sun,

And to set tables for death.
For we are the colonists of Death –
Not, as some think, of the English.

And we are preparing thrones for him to sit,
Poems to read, and beds
In which it may please him to rest.

This is the land
The pioneers looked for, shading their eyes
Against the sun – a murmur of serious life.

– Louis Simpson (At the End of the Open Road, 1963)