Blogs and Podcasts

Nice story on KERA this week about the Carter’s exhibition, The Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art: Works on Paper, which is on view here until August 23.

Ron Adams (b. 1934), Blackburn, 2002, Courtesy Landau Traveling Exhibitions

Our current hot weather is the inspiration for Photo of the Week. What better antidote to a blistering hot Texas summer than a shot of a lovely ice cave? This photograph comes from one of Eliot Porter’s trips to Antarctica aboard the National Science Foundation’s research vessel, the Hero, in the mid-1970s when Porter was in his mid-70s.

Eliot Porter, Ice Cave, Scott Base, Ross Island, Antarctica, December 7, 1975, dye transfer print

This week marks my seventh anniversary at the Carter, so our Photo of the Week comes from an exhibition that was installed when I first arrived here in the summer of 2002, Out of the Blue: Cyanotypes from the Permanent Collection.

Cyanotype is a process that basically produces a monochromatic image like any other black-and-white photograph, but the chemicals used in the process produce a blue-and-white photograph. The process was invented in the 1840s and was used for certain applications, such as blueprints, for the next century because the process was cheap and easy – only requiring sunlight, water, and two chemicals. You can make your own cyanotypes quite easily by purchasing pre-treated photosensitive paper or fabric from art supply stores, or making your own. I’ve used the pre-treated fabric to make photograms in the backyard and can attest that it’s pretty fun.

Without further ado, one of the 102 cyanotypes in the Carter’s permanent collection:

Frederick A. Greenleaf, [Men in wagon fording stream running between low hills], cyanotype, 1877-1885

This installment of Photo of the Week features photographer Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990), who would have turned 99 this week. Wolcott is best known for her body of work created for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. Her sister, Helen Post (1907-1979), was also a photographer whose archive of 11,000 prints and negatives is here at the Carter!

Now on to the photo…

Marion Post Wolcott, Winter Tourists Picnicking on Beach near Sarasota, Fla., 1941, gelatin silver print, Gift of Dr. John Wolcott, Los Alamos, New Mexico

The painter Robert Colescott passed away last week at age 83. Although I was exposed to Colescott’s work in college, I didn’t know until I read the his obituary in the New York Times that he studied with Fernand Leger and represented the US at the 1997 Venice Biennale. A Colescott lithograph from the Harmon and Harriet Kelley Collection of African-American Art will be on view in the Carter’s special exhibition galleries through August 23.

Edited to add: More info on Robert Colescott over at Time Magazine’s Looking Around blog.

The Carter has five photographs in MOMA’s current exhibition Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, which closes June 8. If you’re going to be in NYC, stop and check them out.

White Birch, one of the Carter’s six paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, is also currently on view at SFMOMA until September as part of the exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities.

This week’s photo brings some levity back to the blog. The image is actually a 100-year-old postcard that was included in the Carter’s 2004 exhibition, Wish You Were Here! Early Postcards from the Collection. I like this photo not only because it’s funny, but it reminds me of one of my favorite (completely ridiculous) horror movies, Night of the Lepus.

William H. Martin, [Lassoing a rabbit], gelatin silver print (postcard), 1909

I’ve been tinkering with the digital macro feature on my own camera this week, so I thought Photo of the Week would be a great opportunity to show off a couple of close-ups from the Carter’s photography collection.

Edward Weston, No. 10–Pepper, gelatin silver print, 1930, ©1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Willard Van Dyke, Mushrooms, ca. 1934, gelatin silver print 1977, © 1934 Barbara M. Van Dyke

This Monday would have been the 157th birthday of photographer Gertrude Käsebier, the subject of week’s photo of the week post.

Käsebier was very influential in the early 20th century, not just for her pictorialist portrait photography, but also for her independence and efforts to promote women in photography.

Clara Sipprell, Gertrude Käsebier, Photographer, platinum print, ca. 1910-1911

Käsebier didn’t attend art school until her late 30s, and didn’t try photography until her early 40s. A few years later, she was already taking her famous portraits of Native Americans touring with wild west shows through New York and was included in Alfred Stieglitz’s photography magazine, Camera Notes. She was one of the first women members of the Linked Ring and a founding member of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession group. The first issue of Stieglitz’s influential photography magazine, Camera Work, was dedicated exclusively to Käsebier’s work.

For photo of the week, here are a few of Käsebier’s photographs from the Carter’s copy of the inaugural January 1903 issue of Camera Work.

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women, photogravure

Gertrude Käsebier, Portrait (Miss N.), photogravure

Gertrude Käsebier, The Red Man, photogravure

Interesting post today on the Smithsonian’s photo blog about the photographer Thomas Smillie. I had seen his name quite a bit in the Carter’s collection of photographs from the Bureau of American Ethnology, but was not aware that he was also the Smithsonian’s first staff photographer and photography curator. He even acquired the first American daguerreotype equipment for the Smithsonian for a whopping $23 in 1896 (that’s less than $600 adjusted for 2009 inflation!).

Here are a couple of our Thomas Smillie portraits of Native Americans, and you can see a lot more over of the Smithsonian’s Smillie collection on Flickr Commons.

Thomas Smillie, Eagle Chief, collodion silver chloride print, 1905

Thomas Smillie, His Hoop or Canhdeska, albumen silver print, 1904