A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana - (Page 74)
natural landscape, such as mysterious and unpopulated cypress swamps that deflected from rather than confronted the harsh economic and social realities that prevailed. More than ever, painting in this milieu would veer away from realistic and documentary depictions now conceded to photography, but alternatively it would be propelled into the idealization of the pastoral and the past. In Louisiana, William Aiken Walker’s peaceful, if not actually caricatured, paintings of African Americans are representative of this tendency in such works as his wharf worker posed contentedly in front of bales of cotton in New Orleans or Sharecropper on a Mule, as are other idealized landscapes such as Bror Anders Wikstrom’s Louisiana Farm. Not all romanticizing responses, however, were purely pastoral in mode in the American context; there was, for instance, the urban romance fostered during this period by Horatio Alger whose young heroes rose with alacrity up the ladder of success in an urban milieu. But for some members of the literate class this particular genre could not have been satisfactory, and indeed Horatio Alger’s novels come to us pejoratively labeled by critics as mere “popular literature.” For while these books manifested the desire to escape the realities of the present, they too patently distorted the known facts. One had only to walk in the streets of the dynamic and seething cities to encounter the disproof. The evasion of contemporary reality so blatantly manifested by these romances was not, to people of intelligence or conscience, acceptable. It demanded all too much willing suspension of disbelief in a fiercely materialistic and pragmatic age. Even American literary realism in the late nineteenth century, however, rarely ever came to grips with industrial or urban conditions. A modern reader fruitlessly scans the literature of the period (though there are a few exceptions such as Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, first published in 1893) for graphic descriptions of tenements or mills, immigrants, or workers. The primary concern of the authors of the literate class, as Frederick Law Olmstead pointed out, is the literate class itself, but in the process of writing about their own class, they reveal much about the social matrix in which they lived. The larger social conditions, particularly the role of the other classes, are revealed peripherally for they lie outside their immediate concern, but details of these conditions are scattered profusely through the texts, indicating an intense awareness of the radical social and cultural metamorphosis in process. This same evasiveness was generally true in the visual arts, with the notable exception of photography, no doubt due to the inherently documentary character of the genre, but there emerged only about a half dozen significant photographers in Louisiana during these decades. Unlike the painters whose medium allowed a greater range of interpretive and emotional shading, the photographers of the era literally focused on documenting the reality of the evolving cities, civic constructions, architecture, and landscapes of Louisiana. Prior to the Civil War, there were only three photographers listed in the city directory, including
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CIVIL WAR THROUGH THE NEW CENTURY
Jay Dearborn Edwards, who began documenting views of New Orleans and its burgeoning industry and commerce on the wharves. He anticipated by a couple of decades the powerful and copious work of Theodore Lilienthal, who though he also photographed during the Civil War period, reached his peak from 1875 to 1885. Prussianborn Theodore Lilienthal was among the earliest major photographers to establish a thriving photography business in New Orleans, initially among the substantial German immigrant population, first producing daguerreotypes but then following the succeeding advances in photographic processes and techniques. With his innovative creation of a peripatetic darkroom wagon, Lilienthal set the standard for documentation of the evolving urban landscape for photographers who followed. He was an avid follower of technological developments, even to the point of placing himself and his studio in fiscal jeopardy in pursuit of the latest technology. Lilienthal’s work was more a business than strictly speaking an art form allowing for individual expression; one commission, documenting scores of public buildings and street scenes, was used in 1873 to market New Orleans to potential investors. Numerous photographers found Louisiana a compelling subject. Shortly after Lilienthal arrived in New Orleans, and just in time to document the occupation by Union troops early in the Civil War, Ohio-born Andrew David Lytle began his photographic career upriver in Baton Rouge. Like Lilienthal, he worked well beyond the war and Reconstruction. Lytle recorded the civic growth of his adopted city, including major projects such as the construction of levees and the penitentiary. Another photographer, Samuel T. Blessing, benefited from the introduction of the wetplate process, which enabled printing of finer details, and also the stereographic photograph. Along with lighter and more compact cameras in the 1880s, these technologies allowed Blessing to expand from studio photography to more expansive panoramic views of the city of New Orleans, especially its public buildings. As a result of these advances in photographic processes and equipment Blessing provided an invaluable series documenting the growth and expansion of the city and adjacent countryside. Just after the Civil War, in 1869, Morgan Whitney studied painting in Paris, but he gained greater recognition for his photography, especially his distinctive, generally unpeopled architectural portraits and urban and country landscapes. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and crossing into the twentieth, photographer George Francois Mugnier was perhaps the most relentless in documentation of the widest range of society, from sharecroppers and field hands in the countryside to
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana
A Unique Slant of Light: The Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana
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