Winslow Homer And The Camera

A revelatory exploration of Winslow Homer’s engagement with photography, shedding new light on his celebrated paintings and works on paper One of the greatest American painters of the 19th century, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) also maintained a deep engagement with photography throughout his career. Focusing on the important, yet often-overlooked, role that photography played in Homer’s art, this volume exposes Homer’s own experiments with the camera (he first bought one in 1882). It also explores how the medium of photography and the larger visual economy influenced his work as a painter, watercolorist, and printmaker at a moment when new print technologies inundated the public with images. Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and 'The Life Line,' Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 22, 2012-December 16, 201

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This is a new release of the original 1961 edition.

From her appearance as a provocative young artist in Alfred Stieglitz's photographs to her depiction as a grande dame of the art world in silkscreens by Andy Warhol, Georgia O'Keeffe captivated the media with her image of a woman as bold as her art. This beautifully illustrated book tells the stories behind the portraits of one of the 20th century's foremost American painters. O'Keeffe's professional and personal relationships with the leading photographers of her time come to light, as does her ability to shape public perceptions of her career. Stieglitz first created photographs of his protegee posing in front of her abstract artworks as a manifestation of a sexually liberated woman. O'Keeffe later redefined her image, sometimes working with photographers at her homes in New Mexico, where she emerged as a rugged individualist among the animal bones and gnarled trees that she often painted. This publication brings together for the first time, photographs by Stieglitz, Newman, Loengard, Webb, and others--many of which probe fascinating tensions between abstractionism and realism in O'Keeffe's art. In addition, a selection of O'Keeffe's works chronicles the span of her long career.

The author examines the ways in which artists and critics sought to construct a new identity in American art during the Gilded Age.

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career. Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.

Published to coincide with the 150th anniverary of the battle of Gettysburg, features both familiar and rarely seen Civil War images from such photographers as George Barnard, Mathew Brady, and Timothy O'Sullivan.