Sadakichi Hartmann and Straight Photography.
The birth of the bitter rivalry between Stieglitz and Hartmann.
Alfred Stieglitz, Five Points, New York, 1893.
An irony has driven my fascination with early modern art: the chief exponent of modernist painting in America was a photographer—Alfred Stieglitz. The magazine devoted to modernist sculpture, painting, and theory, was called Camera Work. The irony of the magazine’s title was finally resolved in its successor publication, simply 291, but the tension between photography and traditional media is propulsive. It prefigures the day when mass media would dominate the arts—a huge premonition in itself. But from an aesthetic theory standpoint, that tension also prefigured the debate about appropriate use of media—one that would become the famous territory of the AbEx-era critic Clement Greenberg.1 But in 1898, the theory that each medium should do exactly and only what that medium does best—this was almost a shared secret in America between two huge personalities: Stieglitz, and Sadakichi Hartmann.
II. Sadakichi.
Carl Sadakichi Hartmann’s Japanese mother died shortly after his birth in Nagasaki in 1867; his father, a German businessman, brought Sadakichi to Philadelphia as a teenager, and by the turn of the century he had insinuated himself into the fabric of the avant garde as a critic and poet. He was close friends with the great symbolist poets—Whitman, Pound, Mallarmé—as well as the anarchists Emma Goldman and Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin: his circle was international, radical, and pluralist. As an immigrant of mixed heritage, his working life spanned two points of acute conflict with American immigration policy. Hartmann was a near-perfect contemporary of Stieglitz’s—Stieglitz was born three years before and died two years after Hartmann—but Stieglitz never had to naturalize nor fear internment during World War II. The US began regulating immigration in 1891, and Hartmann became a citizen shortly thereafter2; his strange and wonderful career brought him to Hollywood, where he was living with his daughter when the US started rounding up Japanese-Americans in 1942. Nonetheless, their intellectual journeys aligned for several stretches, beginning in 1897 with Stieglitz’s Picturesque Bits of New York.
III. Picturesque bits.
Stieglitz was trying to elevate “straight” photography, and with his portfolio of unposed images of New York, he found a friend in Hartmann. Hartmann praised Stieglitz’s work in an 1898 review of the medium, and went further: if photography would stop trying to be painterly, deploying “its means according to its purposes, then the way is open for raising it from an amusement for dilettantes to a self-sufficient art.”3 No touch-ups, no posed photographs—just the camera doing its work, receiving the beauty of the world.
Concurrently with this photography-for-photography’s sake, in both Hartmann and Stieglitz, was the idea that real life was the proper subject matter for photography. Art historian Lauren Kroiz has written compellingly of the connection between Hartmann’s medium-specificity to his pluralist politics.4 Along with his international social circle, Hartmann reveled in exploring the ethnic conclaves of New York: here was a city of immigrant communities, not without their challenges, but whole and healthy in their civic constitutions.
Certainly Stieglitz shared the sentiment—his 1893 photograph, Five Points is an exemplar case—until he didn’t. As the photographer was building out his own aesthetic, he was also publishing and producing exhibitions of other photographers’ work, and the syrupy confections of Gertrude Käsebier proved a wedge between the two men. Käsebier studied painting under Frank DuMond5 and it showed in her photography. Soft-focused, gauzy, theatrical—Stieglitz praised them as “straight” for their lack of touch-ups, but Hartmann recoiled at their posed, studio quality. “Such people as Mrs. Käsebier depicts are very scarce on our streets, and whenever they appear they do it to the great sorrow of the rest of humanity. Why should a respectable citizen be transformed into an eye sore?”6
Ouch. Worse to come: Stieglitz doubled down on Käsebier, publishing three such “eyesores” in the first issue of Camera Work—along with an even more troubling image—The Red Man, a studio portrait of a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. The language with which Käsebier described her sitter is even more problematic than the title of the published work— “full of unconscious condescension” according to Laura Wexler and constrained by a very conscious nostalgia for the Indian Wars of Käsebier’s youth. Yuck.7
Hartmann stuck to his guns; Stieglitz, ever mercurial, wandered in his philosophy but never in his petulance. The two most natural of allies in the making of modern fine art photography began the twentieth century as the bitterest of enemies.
Thanks for reading—but of course the story of Hartmann and Stieglitz isn’t over. We’ll explore the mending of their rupture in next week’s “The Steerage: What is Modernism Capable of?” Join us in seven short days,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Our article on Greenberg’s formalist philosophy here.
In 1894.
As quoted by Lauren Kroiz in Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle, 2012, p. 37.
Kroiz traces the analogy of pluralist art-making to pluralist demography back to the beginning: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön; this is why I’m mainlining Kroiz right now.
Read our article on DuMond here.
Kroiz, p. 37.
Käsebier was born in Des Moines, her family dragging her west to Colorado territory when she was 8 years old, in 1859. Her four years in contested territory entitled her, she felt, to describe herself as “an old friend of their tribe” (see Kroiz pp. 34-36). It’s a very parallel vision to that of James Earl Fraser, whom we profiled here.