Bernard Cone, continued
Dear Hugo,
I finally finished an essay, and even submitted it somewhere. It's a more refined version of my musings on the Bernard Cone Photograph Albums from a few newsletters ago.
The essay is still mostly about portraits, but I did veer off into a paragraph about modernism and machines and humans. My art history major is such a distant foggy memory at this point that I spent a fair amount of time just trying to recall concepts and artists I once knew, Googling phrases like "Italian futurism photography" or "modernist photo gears" and slowly circling closer to the dim image in my mind. Fortunately, if there is one college class I kinda remember, it's my Early 20th Century Avant Garde Art seminar. I love a good painting of industrial equipment. Charles Demuth's My Egypt is in my Top 5 Favorite Artworks list, for sure.
I finally found some Pictures of Gears to reference in my essay. Paul Strand was part of the New York modernist art crew along with Stieglitz and O'Keefe and Dove and Demuth (though Demuth never really moved away from Lancaster).
Paul Strand's early mentor was Lewis Hine, a sociologist-turned-photography-teacher at the Ethical Culture School in New York. Hine pioneered documentary photography, bringing his students on day trips to Ellis Island to take photos of the people arriving from old country to new.
Progressive-era reform organizations recognized the power of these documentary images as well. He took photos of steel workers for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. Then in 1908 the National Child Labor Committee hired him to photograph children working in textile mills, mostly in the Carolina Piedmont, to support their campaign to end the practice.
And so you have Bernard and Lewis taking pictures at roughly the same time, in roughly the same place, of roughly the same subject matter. But one is celebrating progress and industry; one is making a visual argument that the human cost of this progress is too high.
Can you tell the difference?
I'm not sure I can.
The Russell Sage Foundation, which hired Hine to take the steelworker photos in Pittsburgh, still exists. My office has submitted LOIs to them. It's not lost on me that my Bernard Cone essay came out with a lot of formal similarities to a grant proposal. I wrote about the imaginary exhibition I'd put on at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Bernard's photos supplementing the works in the Cone Collection there. All it needed was a budget spreadsheet.
Maybe it's ripe for creative exploration, the grant proposal. I could write a book of them, easy. All the things I'd do if I had money and time and institutional buy-in. All my unfunded dreams!
Love,
M.