Sunday, December 17, 2023

Visual Relics (1959-1961)

Minor White
Eugene Saunders, Rochester
1959
gelatin silver print
Princeton University Art Museum

Bruce Davidson
Untitled
1959
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Roger Mayne
Untitled
ca. 1959
gelatin silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Albert Renger-Patzsch
Black Spruce
ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Marc Riboud
Ovaltine Advertisement, Ghana
1960
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Leon Levinstein
Untitled (crossed arms on beach)
ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
Milwaukee Art Museum

Wynn Bullock
Untitled (#4244)
ca. 1960
dye imbibition print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Roloff Beny
Cristiana Brandolini d'Adda,
Contessa di Valmareno (née Agnelli)
in Palazzo Brandolini, Venice

ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Anonymous Photographer
Portrait of photographer Robert Gene Wilcox
ca. 1960
gelatin silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art

Paul Caponigro
Dolls on Wooden Horse
1960
gelatin silver print
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

René Burri
Carnival, Heidelberg University
1960
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

Robert Brownjohn
Antiques
1961
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Robert Brownjohn
Entertainment
1961
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Robert Brownjohn
Fenwick
1961
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Robert Brownjohn
Land and Estate Agents
1961
gelatin silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Esther Bubley
Coit Family (at the grocery store)
1961
gelatin silver print
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

from Symptoms of Poetic Power

It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or, lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit.

                  Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.

In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem:

                  Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bowed
                  Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book on topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

                  Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
                  By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
                  From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
                  Streaming before them. 

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1817)