The Halsted Gallery - September News

THE HALSTED GALLERY is pleased to announce its representation of the Marion Post Wolcott Estate: Marion Post Wolcott was a Farm Administration Security photographer. Marion Post was born on June 7, 1910 in Mont Claire, NJ. She was the second daughter of Mrs. and Doctor Post. In her teen years her parents divorced and she and her sister were sent off to boarding school. It was at this time she developed a special relationship with her maid and housekeeper and a great empathy for the blacks that is so evident in her FSA photographs. On many of her vacations, she spent time with her mother, who was quite progressive for a woman of the time, as she set up birth control centers. It was in a village with her mother that she was introduced to dance and music. In 1932 Marion went to Paris to study dance. She then went to Vienna where her sister was studying and met Trude Fleishman who, after seeing her photographs, suggested she pursue photography. When she returned to New York, she joined and became active in the Camera Club. It was there she became friends with Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand. Steiner sent her portfolio to Roy Stryker who hired her for the Farm Security Administration from 1938-1941. In 1941 Marion married Lee Wolcott, the assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture. It was then she gave up photography to raise her family although she remained artistically active. Marion Post Wolcott died in 1990

Some interesting reading from the New York Times August 25, 2006:

A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If it’s a camera with film, a negative is made; if it’s a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.

In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the picture’s integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.

For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasn’t averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldn’t otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.

Read more in the August 25^th New York Times…..

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan