The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year: New York, 1949-50

The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year: New York, 1949-50

This stunning volume represents a major photo-historical discovery: it is the first book on Homer Page (1918–1985), a brilliant but overlooked photographer active in the late 1940s and 50s. It focuses on his previously unpublished photographs of New York taken while a Guggenheim Fellow from 1949 to 1950. First recognized by Ansel Adams in 1944, California-born Page exhibited in a major show of young artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. Four years later, he was invited to participate in MoMA’s seminal photography symposium, alongside 10 other prominent photographers, including Walker Evans, Irving Penn, and Aaron Siskind. In photographs that echo those of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, Page uniquely synthesized documentary and artistic concerns. His work as a Guggenheim Fellow––which depicts pedestrians in motion, friends and family members conversing, commuters, children playing, political rallies and protests, and isolated figures resting and watching––offers a fascinating look at New York during the late 1940s and represents the culmination of Page’s most important work. The Photographs of Homer Page features a plate section of these compelling and often poignant images together with texts by the artist, a bibliography, and an essay by noted scholar Keith F. Davis examining Page’s life and career–– including his connections with Lange, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, and Edouard Steichen. Distributed for The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (February 14–June 7, 2009) *Starred Review* Photography curator Davis reintroduces a talent rated highly enough to be one of 10 participants in the landmark 1950 Museum of Modern Art symposium “What Is Modern Photography?” The others are household words among photography mavens, but not Homer Page (1918–85). This album makes the injustice of that blazingly obvious. The results of a Guggenheim fellowship, these are images of city life as vital and complex as the best of an era, the middle of the twentieth century, that now seems the halcyon days of New York photography. A follower (and friend) of premier documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, Page was less and more sociological than she, striving to capture both discrete persons in particular socioeconomic conditions (Lange’s forte) and the relations between the person and those conditions. So he shoots groups in which African Americans appear, dressed and postured like everybody else; people shoulder-to-shoulder but isolated by journeys to and from separate workplaces; children playing with the stuff of the city as much as one another; and the class and status statements made by clothing and gesture. Davis makes us exquisitely aware of those ponderable qualities of the pictures and relates how Page thereafter enjoyed a peripatetic freelance career before turning to a late life of environmental writing and activism. He never voiced disappointment that these photos were neglected. They should not be ever again. --Ray Olson Keith F. Davis is curator of photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He is the author of An American Century of Photography: From Dry-Plate to Digital, The Hallmark Photographic Collection (1999) along with The Art of Frederick Sommer: Photography, Drawing, Collage (2005) and The Origins of American Photography: From Daguerreotype to Dry-Plate, 1839–1885: The Hallmark Photographic Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (2007), both published by Yale.