"Modernism and Advertising Photography 1920s - 1930s" Exhibition
L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
This event has ended.
Photography did not secure its place in printed page advertising until more than forty years after the invention of the halftone process which enabled photographs to be printed alongside text. Starting in the 1920s, advertising and public relations work provided a means of income for photographers and a number of schools in the US and Europe established departments to train students for commercial careers. Photographers were also granted wide creative margin to interpret the marketed products and services according to their own artistic standards and the lines between art and commercial photography were blurred. This window of freedom did not last long, however, and after the Great Depression clients and art directors increasingly imposed their own views of how an advertisement should appear. The outbreak of WWII further stifled imagination as patriotism exerted its influence.
The vintage prints selected for this exhibition represent prime examples of the experimental, bold and visionary work from this brief but fertile and dynamic era. Among those on view is Margaret Bourke-White's Mechanical Nuts, an icon of photographic modernism executed for Russell Birdsall & Ward. Anton Bruehl is represented by an image of a naked woman wrapped in yarn (designed for Bonwitt Teller's knitted-to-order-sport clothes) which won the 1932 Annual Advertising Art Award in photography and was exhibited the following year at the Chicago World's Fair. Along with Ilse Bing's elegant and haunting oversized print Salut de Schiaparelli, it shows a distinct surrealist influence. The still life photomontage by Claude Tolmer was included in Mise en Page; a book his father wrote and published in 1931 that continues to this day to serve as a reference for design and layout. Ralph Steiner's comical Ham and Eggs and Gordon Coster's image of a man's distorted head (likely created for a headache medicine) inject humor while light, reflections and shadows abstract Jaromir Funke's Styx Coty Perfume Bottle, René-Jacques' Lalique crystal, and Milos Dohnany's lens filters.
[Image: Margaret Bourke-While Mechanical Nuts, 1930]
Media
Schedule
from September 23, 2011 to December 17, 2011