The new photography exhibit at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, of photographs collected by its former curator Sam Wagstaff, is called “The Thrill of the Chase.”
“It was a thrill for him. He was caught up in the excitement of collecting. It became an obsession,” said Paul Martineau of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which owns Wagstaff’s 26,000-piece photo collection.
Photography is becoming a bit of an obsession with Connecticut curators, too. Photography exhibits are popping up everywhere. Bruce Museum in Greenwich has “Science in Motion,” an exhibit of scientific photography by Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton and Berenice Abbott. Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts in Middletown has an exhibit of photographs taken by New Yorkers on and after Sept. 11, 2001, and an exhibit opening this week of William Earle Williams’ photos of African American historical sites. Coming Oct. 1 to the Florence Griswold Museum is “In Place: Contemporary Photographers Envision a Museum,” a show of photographers’ visions of that Old Lyme art space.
“The Thrill of the Chase” is the Athenum’s first major photographic survey in 27 years. Another Hartford art space, Real Art Ways, just opened an exhibit of vintage photos. The Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London also is riding the photo wave, with two very different photography exhibits shining a light on the human condition.
Wadsworth Atheneum
The first thing visitors to “The Thrill of the Chase” see is a photo of Wagstaff himself, in his Fifth Avenue penthouse, taken by Arnold Newman. He is surrounded by photos, among them the famous Patti Smith “Horses” shot by Wagstaff’s lover, Robert Mapplethorpe. The photos are collected in random jumbles: stacked on chairs, dropped on the floor, framed and leaning against the wall in bunches.
“He never hung art in his apartment. He thought they’d be better held in his hands, so he could have an intimate exchange with the work,” said Martineau during a recent Atheneum visit. That intimate relationship ended in 1984 when Wagstaff, diagnosed with AIDS and needing money for medical bills, sold his collection to the Getty.
One hundred meticulously curated items from Wagstaff’s collection make up the show. The gallery is designed to replicate Wagstaff’s white modernist cube of a penthouse, including ficus trees in chrome planters and an elaborate silver ice bowl and spoon once owned by Wagstaff. The only difference is, at the Atheneum the photos are hung on the walls. They represent a history lesson from 1843 to 1981, with prints of salted paper, albumen silver, platinum, palladium, gelatin silver, three-color carbro, dye transfer and chromogenic.
The salted-paper process was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot to compete with the metal-printed daguerreotype. Daguerreotypes produced sharper details, winning over the scientific community. Paper produced softer images, preferred by the artistic community. In the end, paper won out because the images were reproducible.
An 1843 image of Paris by Talbot opens the show, with other early experimentation with salted-paper — Bisson Freres 1857 church interior is a standout, as is Roger Fenton’s haunting 1855 image of a Crimean War battlefield — and albumen silver, including Louis-Antoine Froissart’s surreal 1856 “A Flood in Lyon” and Horatio Ross’ self-portrait, taken while he was working in his photo studio.
Gustave Le Gray’s albumen silver print “The Great Wave” illustrates an early glitch in the photographic process: the difficulty of showing both sea (or land) and sky to equally dramatic effect, due to varying exposure times. Photographers of Le Gray’s era believed he had solved the problem, but he cheated, using different negatives for sea and the sky and reproducing them both on the same print. He was caught because he used the same sky negatives over and over.
Two pieces by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) represent a turning point in Wagstaff’s reputation. In 1974, he tried to buy a full album of Cameron’s work but was stopped by guardians of Britain’s cultural legacy, who afterward sought his council. “His failure to buy the album established Sam as a superstar in the collection of photography,” Martineau said. “[The dispute] convinced Sotheby’s to have regular photo sales.”
Several late-19th- and early-20th-century examples show photographers pushing photography closer to art. Frederick H. Hollyer’s 1885 “Lilies,” printed on platinum, could be confused for a pencil sketch. Thomas Eakins’ 1893 images of naked boys plunging into water was used as a study for Eakins’ later painting. Edward S. Curtis’ shadowy “Eclipse Dance” shows Native Americans performing a ritual.
Abstractions by Man Ray, Paul Outerbridge, Edward Weston, Francis Bruguiere and László Moholy-Nagy hang alongside images of glamorous women — Gloria Swanson, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich — favored by Wagstaff. “His mother was sort of unattainable. He had this desire to be with beautiful and intelligent women and be accepted by them,” Martineau said.
An abstracted aerial photograph taken in 1975 by William A. Garnett hangs near its logical progression: a photo taken on the moon, of an astronaut.
Real Art Ways
Wagstaff collected photos by some of history’s greatest photographers. Michael Shortell collects photos taken by nobody-knows-who, featuring everyday people whose names have been forgotten. Wagstaff collected beautiful images. Not Shortell.
“I don’t know if beautiful is what they are,” he said of his acquisitions. “They’re historical and interesting and unusual and poignant.”
About 200 of Shortell’s collection of about 3,000 “vernacular photos” — taken by average people or itinerant professionals — are on exhibit at Real Art Ways.
Shortell, who owns Shortell Framing in Hartford, also began collecting in the 1970s. But while Wagstaff and his ilk occupied what Shortell called “the high end of the food chain” of collectors, Shortell manned the lowest rung. “I couldn’t have bought a Stieglitz photo,” he said. “I collected from the bottom. But in the ’70s, collecting photos was so unusual that everything was cheap.”
He bought daguerreotypes, tintypes, cheesy carnival souvenir snaps, photo-booth strips, prom pictures, girls in first Communion dresses, families goofing off, kids playing, grown-ups showing off bicycles or driving buckboards, little children posing for portraits with dolls, a child on Christmas morning, a girl at her birthday party, a silly couple pretending to be outlaws, a fisherman showing off his catch.
Shortell said despite being “vernacular,” sometimes his photos call to mind the work of great photographers. He used as an example a photo of a boy playing in a pond. “This makes me think of Sally Mann. These are two photographers, a generation apart, and they had similar ideas about photographing children,” he said.
He is especially fond of a series of photos of the same woman, taken over the course of several decades, striking similar poses in each snap. “She is moving through life and still has a sense of herself that hasn’t changed,” he said. “She started out young, and got older, but you know inside she’s the same woman.”
The photos may not be beautiful, but they are relatable. Every visitor will find something reminiscent of a snapshot from the family photo album. “All of these harken back to American times and American ways,” he said. “Photography is an important part of our lives.”
The exhibit features a “selfie booth.” Visitors can take selfies, print them out in the gallery and hang them on the walls to join the show.
Lyman Allyn
Two photography exhibits at Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London focus on faces.
“The Distance Between Us” is a chronicle by Milford-based photojournalist Christopher Capozziello of the life of his brother Nick, who has cerebral palsy. Capozziello’s exhibit is equal parts gritty depiction of living with a physical disability and tender observation of the ways in which an otherwise average guy passes the time: singing karaoke, snuggling his hamster, sharing a cigarette with a young woman. Capozziello, in words and pictures, describes the emotional roller coaster of being responsible for a twin “who struggles through life in ways that I do not,” and whose disability is the only factor that makes them different. The exhibit began as a book, which can be viewed in the gallery.
Upstairs, Joe Standart presents “The New London Project 10th Anniversary Portraits,” a decade-later followup to his 2006 “New London Project: Portrait of a City.” For that earlier enterprise, Standart literally pulled people off the downtown New London streets — “cops, moms with kids, homeless people,” Standart said, as well as civic leaders — and took top-quality portraits of them. It resulted in 120 photos exhibited in the train station and other outdoor places downtown. For the updated project, Standart tracked down 35 of his earlier subjects and photographed them again.
“In a lot of ways people don’t change,” Standart said. “That may seem obvious, but it’s good to pay attention to how lives’ trajectories just continue.”
The charming exhibit shows families in transition. One little girl wears a Cinderella dress in her 2006 portrait. In 2016, she’s a grown woman. In 2006, a mother, surrounded by two small boys, shows off a baby in a stroller. In the 2016 portrait, that baby is a pretty blonde girl and her brothers tower over her. One woman with flaming-red hair in 2006 is fully gray now. Young men seemingly far away from fatherhood in 2006 pose with their children in 2016.
Others show some people willfully refusing to change: wearing identical clothes, holding the same bags or purses, posing with the same dog. More than any other posers, the elders have an air of ease about them.
“With the older ones, there’s a sense of wisdom and perspective,” Standart said. “They seem to be more at home with themselves.”
THE THRILL OF THE CHASE: THE WAGSTAFF COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AT THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM is at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until Dec. 11. thewadsworth.org.
AND HOW THEY GOT THAT WAY is at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St. in Hartford, until Oct. 21. realartways.org.
THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US is at Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 625 Williams St. in New London, until Oct. 2. “The New London project 10th Anniversary Portraits” will be up until Jan. 22, 2017. lymanallyn.org.
