19th CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHERS

Photography became a serious art form in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries.  Photography was the perfect media for illustrating the natural energy of modern cities such as New York.  Fortunately, there was an abundance of early photographers living in New York City who creatively captured the city of their time in dramatic black and white photographs.  These photographers saw and photographed New York City through different lens and from many contrasting perspectives and points of view.   

Albert Stieglitz (1854 - 1946) was one of the most important photographers of his era.  Stieglitz formed the organization, Photo Secession, and published the magazine, Camera Notes, to promote photography as an art form.  He also owned the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession which exhibited the works of photographers and introduced works of Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Auguste Rodin and many others to American audiences.  The gallery was at 291 Fifth Avenue and became known as "291."  In The Unfinished City New York and The Metropolitan Idea, Thomas Bender observes that the Alfred Stieglitz circle of photographers saw the City as "a place of visual delight, not a place of working, living, and laughing; nor a place of active public life, of people enjoying the streets or using them for formal rituals of self-representations."  Stieglitz's vision of the City was in contrast to others, such as painter John Sloan, whose works focused on working class people and people's activities and Jacob Riis (1849 - 1914) and Lewis Hine (1874 -1940) who were social commentators.  

Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant who was once homeless himself, became known for documenting the lives of immigrants on the Lower East Side.  The new invention of flash photography permitted Riis to photograph immigrants at night, on the streets, in dark alleys and courtyards and to expose their horrific living conditions.  His book, How the Other Half Lives, shocked New Yorkers and led then New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, to fight for the passing of laws to improve conditions in immigrant neighborhoods.  Lewis Hine's series of photographs on children working in factories and on American workmen also brought reform.   Today, both Riis, also a crime photographer, and Lewis would be called photojournalists.  

Berenice Abbott (1886 - 1983) and Paul Strand (1898 -1976) used documentary photography to document the social struggles in America.  Abbott photographed much of New York City for a Federal Act project.  Her photography focused on street life, architecture and reflected the power of the city.  She captured the beauty of the original, and now demolished, Penn Station in exquisite photographs that became some of her best known works and were collected in a book, Changing New York.

The Photo League, established in 1936 in New York by Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand,promoted documentary photography of social causes, working class families, and political and trade union activities.  In addition to Abbott and Strand,  photographers in this group included:  Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Lewis Hine, Ruth Orkin, Ralph Steiner, Weegee, Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, and others.  The very progressive group was eventually investigated by the House Committee of UnAmerican Activities and blacklisted on December 5, 1947.

For over 50 years James Van Der Zee (1870 - 1942), an African-American photographer with his own studio in Harlem, took beautiful portraits of Harlem residents and others who passed through Harlem.  

Alice Austin (1866 - 1952) was a wealthy and independent woman who did photography as a hobby.  A lesbian, she did portaits of Victorian women in intimate relationships and non-traditional lifestyles.  She also photographed working-class people on Manhattan's streets.  Her home on Staten Island is now a museum.  

The first woman photojournalist in America was the lesser known, Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870 - 1941).  Beals was a Canadian who began her work in Buffalo, New York.  She later moved to New York City and photographed Greenwich Village.

Artists such as John Sloan (1871 – 1951) and Edward Hopper (1882 – 1967) painted city neighborhoods.  Sloan's work in the early 1900's concentrates on Greenwich Village and Chelsea and includes paintings of Jefferson Market Courthouse, Backyards Greenwich Village, Six O'Clock, the Flatiron Building, McSorley's Bar, the Sixth Avenue Elevated subway trains, The Coffee Line, The Haymarket (1907), and the Wake of the Ferry.  

Hopper's most famous painting, Nighthawks -- of customers sitting at the counter of a Greenwich Village all-night diner -- portrays the moody, dark side of the City.  The subject of Hopper's paintings focused on ordinary scenes or indistinctive buildings:  New York Corner, The Roofs of Washington Square, Drug Store, Morning Sun, Night Windows, or People in a Park.