new york, night, and cultural mythmaking: the nocturne in photography, 1900-1925

The Smithsonian Institution

New York, Night, and Cultural Mythmaking: The Nocturne in Photography, 1900-1925Author(s): William SharpeSource: Smithsonian Studies in American Art, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 2-21Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108955 .

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New York, Night, and Cultural Mythmaking The Nocturne in Photography, 1900-1925

William Sharpe

Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1909 print from 1904 negative. Gum-bicbromate over gelatin silver, 18'3/,6 x 15'/8 in. The Met- ropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection

In 1912 Ezra Pound announced that New York after dark was "the most beautiful city in the world":

No urban nights are like the nights there. I have looked down across the city from high windows. It is then that the great buildings lose reality and take on their magical powers. They are immaterial; that is to say one sees but the lighted windows.

Squares after squares of flame, set and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.1

For most of the twentieth century, New York City has enjoyed the

reputation of being the Capital of the Night. Pound's glowing ap- praisal was echoed in 1939 by a French visitor who noted that the nocturnal city generated a "scintil- lation which has no equal in America or anywhere else in the world .... All around you is the apotheosis of electricity."2 Even amid the dimouts of World War II the city sparkled in the darkness, as contemporary photographs at- test.3 How did New York acquire preeminence as a city of night? A look at the ways in which turn-of- the-century photographers first ventured into the urban darkness can help answer this question, while illuminating a neglected side of modernist expression- the nocturne.

Only a hundred years ago, the glittering metropolis was quite different; in the 1880s and earlier,

New York's night life seemed less glamorous than notorious. Apart from the elegant balls and dinner parties of the upper class, the city's evening activities were char- acterized as evil, dangerous, im- moral. The dark streets of the Bowery spelled the end of Stephen Crane's Maggie, "a girl of the streets." Popular illustrated trav- elogues such as James McCabe's 1872 Lights and Shadows and photo-accompanied exposes like Helen Campbell's 1897 Darkness and Daylight document nocturnal vice, concentrating on urban hor- rors such as brothels and saloons, alcohol and opium, robbery, mayhem, and murder.4

The first sustained examination of New York night in photography grew partially out of this tradition of exploring the dark side of the urban landscape. In his 1890 pi- oneering work of social documen- tary, How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis (1849-1914) included photographs intended to en- courage slum reform by revealing the squalor of tenement life. Riis prowled the streets, dives, and flop- houses at night with tripod and camera ready to take "flashlight photos" such as Bayard St. Tene- ment-"5 Cents a Spot" (fig. 1). Riis's nocturnal interiors are brutal and direct, as was his photographic method: to take what were in effect the first successful flash pictures, Riis or an assistant fired an explosive round of magnesium- based lightning powder from a re-

3 Smithsonian Studies in American Art



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1 Jacob Rils, 5 Cents a Spot (Bayard Street Tenement), 1889. Museum of the City of New York, Jacob A Riis Collection

volver, jolting the subjects, garishly illuminating every speck of dirt and every crack in the wall-occa- sionally even setting the room on fire. Riis thought of his photographic expeditions in military metaphors: armed with flashpistols and police escort and forming "raiding parties" to invade the lower East Side, Riis perfected his own form of the new art-photography as blitzkrieg. "It was not too much to say," Riis recalled, "that our party carried terror wherever it went."'5

Riis's harsh subject matter and confrontational style would later return to public notice in the flashbulb glare of Weegee's crime photography of the 1930s and 1940s. But within fifteen years of Riis's explosive work another view of the nocturnal city had emerged-a vision as aesthetically meditated and arranged as Riis's was violent and spontaneous. Both styles were created by first- or second-generation Americans who were devoted to New York. But instead of assaulting viewers with the sudden illumination of tene-

ment interiors, pictorial photographers like Edward Steichen (1879- 1973) chose to charm their audi- ence with atmospheric time exposures of the city's most attractive public spaces. The one style regarded photography as a hard- edged social tool, the other as a soft-focus medium of individual expression, an art that existed for art's sake.

Why did this second style of nocturnal photography triumph at the start of the century, and what social and aesthetic changes made it possible? One important reason is the transformation of the city's nighttime activities and images. As Lewis A. Erenberg has shown, lobster-palace restaurants, caba- rets, dance halls, and vaudeville all conspired to overcome the stigma of vice and impropriety that the middle and upper classes attached to nighttime public entertain- ments. By fostering a more re- laxed and intimate atmosphere, these night spots helped under- mine formerly rigid divisions between the pastimes of different classes, sexes, and ethnic groups.

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Among middle-class women, going out on the town became almost as popular as an afternoon shopping

6 trip.6

Not only was there more to do in New York at night, there was more to see, thanks to the electric streetlights that illuminated most of the city by 1910. Lights blazed most brightly around the major hotels, theaters, and squares. The guidebooks of the period give in- creasing prominence to nightlife: Rand McNally's 1899 Fifty Photo- graphic Views of Greater New York offers no nighttime pictures or skyline views of the city, but the 1922 Rand McNally New York Guide to Places of Interest in the City and Environs shows scenes such as "Lower Manhattan at Night from the East River," "Luna Park, Coney Island, at Night," and "The Great White Way"-the last two with electric signs ablaze in sharp focus. The guidebook mentions tours that include Chinatown at night and recommends walks over the East River bridges for views of the skyline. By the time of the 1939 WPA Guide to New York Ciy, nocturnal views and activities had become one of the city's major at- tractions: there were evening Circle Line tours and boat trips to Coney Island, and the Empire State Building observation deck stayed open until 1:00 A.M. The guide also includes many illustra- tions by important contemporary artists of the most popular nighttime sights such as "Lower Man- hattan Seen Beneath Brooklyn Bridge," "Times Square," and "Central Park at Night."

In addition to the changing nature of after-dark activities there was also an important aesthetic impetus that helped produce the cultural myth of New York as a beckoning city of night. The pub- licity for New York Nocturnes, a recent book of photographs by Peter Fink, points directly to one

of the major ideas underlying the appeal of night scenes-that of transformation: The metropolis of seamy daytime reality that New Yorkers know too well... is banished by Mr. Fink's camera. Commonplace objects are metamorphosed and assume lives that are entirely their own. We are invited to wander through a city of dreams, of glowing towers surrounded by a velvety black sky... of light-spangled bridges mirrored in jeweled rivers.7 This passage strikingly echoes the unofficial manifesto of the nocturne, the "Ten O'Clock" lecture by James McNeill Whistler (1834- 1903). In 1885 Whistler pro- claimed that when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us-then ... Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone.8

The emphasis on metamor- phosis-the sordidness of daytime reality transformed by the power of the night and the romantic vision of the artist-survives re- markably intact from Whistler's provocative pronouncements of the 1880s to the ad copy of the 1980s. In Whistler's prose and paintings the effects of night and atmosphere turn commonplace urban subjects into an aesthetically appealing ensemble that is almost defiantly modern. Works such as Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge taught viewers to see the urban landscape in a new way, enhancing it with rain and mist without disguising its bold, distinctive architectural forms (fig. 2).

In celebrating nocturnal sub-




.



3 William Hyde, The Embankment at Night. Etching from London Impressions (1898)

2 James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, ca. 1872- 75. The Tate Gallery, London

jects Whistler was participating in a broader movement-the transition from romanticism to modernism, in which images of the night played a vital role. The term nocturne was originally given by John Field, Frederic Chopin, and others to a type of dreamy musical composition. Between 1840 and 1910, however, painters, poets, and photographers began to apply the word to atmospheric night scenes, usually of rivers flowing through darkened cities. Before Whistler had made the nocturne popular in painting, mid-century French poets such as Thdophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Tristan Corbibre, and Paul Verlaine had elaborated a "nocturne parisien" that described the effect of mist and lights on the Seine. Later, under the spell of Whistler and his French predeces- sors, English poets including Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, William Henley, and Alfred Douglas made the London nocturne one of the most characteristic expressions of the aesthetic movement of the eighties and nineties. Stressing the formal over the anecdotal, the urban world over the natural world, musical analogies over literary reference, abstraction over detail, and Japa- nese compositional devices over

Western perspective, Whistler's nocturnes dramatically anticipate the aesthetic values of modernism.9 As night transforms the city, so the nocturne altered ex- pectations about the kinds of truths art should reveal, subver- sively posing its delicate balance of romantic mystery and abstract form against the mainstream preoccupation with narrative and hard-edged mimeticism.

The liminality of the nocturne form situates it not only between nature and the city, romanticism and modernism, but also between art and photography. An etching by William Hyde, depicting the Thames Embankment at night, dis- plays the results of the Whistler- generated vogue for nocturnal Thames views (fig. 3).1? And it was apparently at this spot that Paul Martin, a professional photographer and illustrator who chroni- cled London street life, took the first outdoor nocturnal urban photographs in February 1896.11

Another photographer of the Embankment, Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), provides the clearest link between the Whis- tlerian nocturne and what became its New York counterpart.12 An ar- dent admirer of Whistler's atmospheric effects and the Japanese artistic sensibility underlying them,




4 Alvin Langdon Coburn, The Embankment, London, 1906 Photogravure, 71/4 x 6Y4 in. International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester,

New York

Coburn owned a reproduction of Whistler's Battersea Bridge, itself based on Hiroshige's Kyobashi Bridge from One Hundred Views of Edo (1858). In 1906 Coburn began collaborating with Arthur Symons on a book about London-Symons was to write rhapsodically about the Whis- tlerian sights that he, Coburn, had photographed.13 The project fell through, but the text that would have accompanied Coburn's The Embankment, London (fig. 4) reveals how thoroughly the artist's sensibility pervades views of the Thames at this time: "The English mist is always at work like a subtle painter, and London is a vast canvas prepared for the mist to work on .... When the mist collab- orates with night and rain, the masterpiece is created.'"14

In 1908 Coburn remarked that he saw Edward Steichen, Frank Eugene, and himself as the "Whistlers of photography":

What I try to do is to see the little piece that matters in the midst of nature's massiveness and... con- centrate the interest on that. That done, I use every inch of my knowledge to retain the purely photographic qualities. Of course, by 'photographic qualities" I don't mean hard pure lens work. I don't mean the sharp shrewish acidity of your ordinary cabinet photograph. I mean photographic in the sense that Whistler was photographic.

Whistler seemed photographic to Coburn because he eschewed the "hard pure lens work" of Victorian realism in favor of atmosphere and nuance; he was sensitive to the emotional and abstract qualities of ordinary urban scenes. Coburn concluded: "it's a pity ... that he [Whistler] didn't live long enough to use a camera, it would have saved him so much time.'"15 Once regarded by Ruskin and the British public as a slapdash

painter, Whistler seems to Coburn, only thirty years later, a photographic pioneer who had achieved his goals the hard way because of primitive equipment.

From 1902 to 1912, the period of his best urban photography, Coburn also studied Japanese de- sign and composition with one of America's leading art teachers, Arthur Wesley Dow. To photographers working in an urban environment dominated increasingly by rectilinear construction, Japa- nese prints and paintings proved instrumental in emphasizing the arrangement of forms in a vertically oriented, two-dimensional space. In nineteenth-century Japa- nese landscapes, distance is expressed by compressing the near and the far, not so much superim- posing objects as stacking them vertically, as though the viewer were looking through a telephoto lens. This emphasis on surface and pattern rather than on volume and depth suited the visual propensi- ties of photography, which tends to flatten the picture plane.16

Two photographs that appeared in Coburn's 1910 collection, New York, demonstrate how he applied this aesthetic to the American city at night. If he had imported from European sources the graceful vertical compositions, the patterns of light and dark, the echoing forms, and the soft focus, the objects Coburn portrays are indige- nous urban forms of American technology-tall buildings and electric lights. Although tempered by reminders of nature in the form of tree branches or mist and rain, it is the modern city that compels attention-its powerful allure, its capacity for beauty.

In the first photograph, The Singer Building, varied, layered tones mount gradually to the distinctive top of what was then the tallest building in the world (fig. 5). New York's verticality proves

8 Fall 1988



5 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Singer Building, 1910. Platinum print, 16'/2 x 83/4 in. Inter- national Museum of Photography at

George Eastman House, Rochester, New

York

6 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Broadway at Night, 1909. Photogravure, 84'2 x 64'8 in. Interna- tional Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York

particularly congenial to the Japa- nese aesthetic. Even when the eye is kept at street level, as in the second photograph, Broadway at Night, the streetlamps, the signs, even the reflections on the side- walk, all convey the insistent up- ward thrust of the city (fig. 6). For Coburn, as for Whistler, the night was a revelation: as he wrote in 1911, "it is only at twilight that the city reveals itself to me in the ful- ness of its beauty, when the arc lights on the Avenue click into being.'"17

Others had sensed this before Coburn. In 1896-97, after hearing of Paul Martin's experiments in London, Alfred Stieglitz (1864- 1946) began taking his own night

photographs of New York City. Re- flections, Night, New York depicts the plaza in front of the Savoy Hotel after a rainstorm (fig. 7). Stieglitz claimed that this was the "first night photograph made with the introduction of life" because the driver of one of the hansom cabs standing at the entrance is just visible.18 Painters such as Childe Hassam and Everett Shinn shared Stieglitz's interest in nighttime atmospheric effects.19 During January 1908, in fact, Ash Can School painters exhibited with Hassam and others at the National Arts Club in New York, alongside members of Stieglitz's group, the Photo-Secession. A reporter for the New York Times noted how




7 Alfred Stieglitz, Reflections: Night-New York, 1896. Photogravure, 14x 17 in. Phila- delphia Museum of Art, Dorothy Norman Collection

8 Edward Steichen, The Pond: Moonrise, 1903. Platinum print toned with yellow and blue-green, 505/8 x 19 in. The Metro- politan Museum of Art, Gift of Alfred Stieglitz

successfully this "expression of the spirit of modern times" set the photographs "on the same plane as paintings" for the first time in the United States.20 A few years later a critic even suggested that it was Stieglitz who had influenced the painters.21

Despite Stieglitz's importance

in the development of an urban artistic vision in America, it was his close compatriot in the strug- gle, Edward Steichen, who became the Photo-Secession's foremost night photographer. Steichen was influenced by Whistler early in his career; later he recalled that while learning photography in

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Permanent Exhibitions (Xovember, April) of Pictorial

Phot--rapks- American, Yieuese, (erman, French, Driish-es well as of Modem Art noti riypoogah at the

SOi 91 nue, New York City. Open week days 10-12 a~m. and 2.6 p.m. Visiting-

card admits

9 Edward Steichen, Photo-Secession An- nouncement, November 1905. Letterpress and gold leaf Private collection

Milwaukee as a teenager

the romantic and mysterious quality of moonlight, the lyric aspect of nature made the strongest appeal to me.... Because I found nature most beautiful in twilight and moonlight, all my efforts were directed toward finding a way of interpreting such moments.22

The Pond: Moonrise exemplifies his efforts to capture night effects in a non-urban setting (fig. 8).

Because he was also a painter, Steichen was not afraid to use a brush directly on a gum-bichromate print or to manipulate his prints in other ways. He per- formed many experiments, but was also helped by some creative accidents: when raindrops fell on the lens, "I saw that the whole scene had been transformed by general diffusion"; and when he accidentally kicked the tripod, making the camera vibrate, he found this to be a means of creating atmospheric effects.23 In 1908 he took his celebrated series of moonlight photographs of Rodin's statue of Balzac, working all night with exposures ranging from fifteen minutes to one hour. As Steichen's November 1905 Photo- Secession Announcement suggests, he regarded the photographer as a nocturnal animal, stalking his prey by the light of the moon (fig. 9).

Shortly after arriving in New York, Steichen began to substitute artificially lit urban subjects for rural moonlights in his work. The Flatiron-Evening is Steichen's most famous nocturnal scene (fig.

10).24 Although taken "from nature," the photograph is carefully composed. Steichen gently rural- izes his image so that the skyscraper appears through a delicate tracery of tree branches. Unlike Stieglitz's snowy daytime picture of the same subject (fig. 11), Steichen cuts off the top of the building, suggesting even greater

height and elongation, and he substitutes the fine lines of branches for the dark, firm outline of the tree trunk that dominates the right-hand side of Stieglitz's photograph. While the waiting cabmen could be construed as representing man's subservience to business and technology, the dim outlines, misty atmosphere, and shimmering reflections suggest that they, like the photographer and viewer, are enraptured by the mystery of the slim and in- tricate structure before them.

Thus The Flatiron brilliantly evokes the deeper meanings of the nocturne form. Night is a time of dreaming, of freeing repressed libidinal energies, and photographs such as this subtly exploit the suggestive properties of the urban landscape, using a symbolic language to disclose truths hidden at midday. Yet the more haunting the dream, the more difficult the interpretation. Does the building's dark, towering shape reveal the oppressive dominance of com- mercial interests---the city as it "really" is-or is this a landscape of phallic desire, of masculine wish fulfillment? The photograph seems designed to remain ambig- uous. For even as the nocturne poses potentially disturbing ques- tions, it harmonizes the psycho- logical landscape by aestheticizing the often-brutal forces of the city. Like an artistic safety valve, the dreamy nocturne releases the viewer's unconscious feelings and fears about the city, at the same time presenting the urban scene so seductively that we can only ac- cept it as desirable.

Steichen, like Coburn, was aware that his views of New York depended in part on foreign ways of seeing, but for him the very act of taking such pictures was a sign of a technological preference and of American artistic citizenship.25 As he departed for Paris to study




10 Edward Steichen, The Flatiron, 1909 print from 1904 negative. Gum-bichromate over gelatin silver, 1814/16 x 151/8 in. The Met- ropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection

11 Alfred Stieglitz, The Flatiron Building, 1903. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection

painting in 1900, Steichen swore to Stieglitz that he would never give up photography. In his life- long dedication to an art mediated by machine, he kept that vow and helped Stieglitz create a place in American photography for the newly visible beauties of the urban landscape.26

Apart from the skyscraper, the mightiest symbol in New York of America's technological prowess was the Brooklyn Bridge. In 1910 Coburn equated the photographer's vision with that of the bridge builder:

The one uses his brain to fashion a thing of steel girders, a spider's web of beauty to glisten in the sun, the other blends chemistry

and optics with personality in such a way as to produce a lasting impression of a beautiful fragment of nature. The work of both, the bridge-builder and the photographer, owes its existence to man's

27

conquest over nature.

A comparison of John Francis Strauss's The Bridge, published in Camera Work in 1903, with Steichen's Brooklyn Bridge from the same year, shows just what Coburn meant (figs. 12, 13). Al- though he produced an interesting photograph, Strauss replicated what others had done before him-lateral views of the entire bridge from a distance were common, dating back to its opening in 1883. But Steichen's

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12 John Francis Strauss, The Bridge. Published in Camera Work, July 1903

13 Edward Steichen, Brooklyn Bridge, 1903. Gelatin silver print, 17 x 14 in. Collection of the Exchange National Bank of Chicago

artistry in selecting the angle of vision that would best elicit the beauty and strength of the bridge's abstract form, and his technical skill in printing the negative, place him on the level of the master builder who created the span. Using the nocturne itself as a bridge between mimetic and abstract form, he shaped nature, in a lasting way, to his own ends.28

Although Steichen's visual imagination seemed as unlimited as the urban landscape his photographs transformed, the heyday of soft- focus pictorial photography was short. With the triumphant success of the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo in 1910, Stieglitz felt that the Photo-

Secession's work had been accom- plished, and the organization dis- solved just as it finally achieved public recognition for photography as a fine art. Their battle had been won at a cost: in the ef- fort to establish photography as an art independent from painting, pictorial photographers had imi- tated the very form they sought freedom from.29 After 1910 Stieglitz and his vanguard increasingly regarded pictorial photography as a mannered and lifeless style of the past.

The works of Karl Struss (born 1886), a second-generation mem- ber of the Photo-Secession, repre- sent the new direction urban photography and the New York




14 Karl Struss, Man's Construction, 1912. Plat- inum print. Collection of Kate and Kevin Grogan

15 Alfred Hewitt, In the Heart of Manhattan. Published in Harper's Magazine, February 1907

nocturne now took. His 1912 view of Brooklyn Bridge Man's Con- struction was influenced by Coburn's soft-focus urban scenes, but Struss shifted to hard edges and industrial subjects (fig. 14). Fascinated by the abstract forms of urban technology, such as Penn- sylvania Station and elevated trains, Struss anticipated the "straight" photography of Paul Strand (1890-1976). But in Struss's view of the bridge, romance gives way to technology as the structure appears not through a filigree of bare trees but between the freight cars and cranes of the dockyards.3?

Of course the hard edges have always been present in commer- cial and journalistic photography, and do not necessarily rule out

romance, as Alfred Hewitt's In the Heart of Manhattan shows (fig. 15). But the relatively even illumination and crisply glowing signs in Hewitt's picture suggest that the brightly lit city of night had its own special allure, quite different from that of the elegantly bal- anced, atmospheric nocturne. The tension between these two visions of the city is apparent in Edward

S. Martin's article "Manhattan Lights" that accompanied Hewitt's photograph in the February 1907 Harper's Magazine. With his pen- chant for reflected lights and moods of mellow detachment, Martin indicates the degree to which the pictorial aesthetic had taken hold: "Broadway has been so bejeweled with all manner of electrical contrivance" that "the result is somewhat blinding, but ... softened by due distance, it stirs the imagination and becomes even beautiful. '31 In contrast to Martin's preference for the tran- quil, contemplative distance of East River views, Hewitt is fascinated by electricity; his work looks ahead to the vibrant night images of the next two decades.

The brazen celebration of lights for their own sake is already apparent in a 1906 photograph by Samuel Gottscho titled Luna Park, Night View, and bursts blindingly in a 1913 painting by Joseph Stella (1877-1946) of a similar Coney Is- land view, Battle of Lights, Coney Island (figs. 16, 17). These glaring, clear-cut night scenes renounce dreamy impressionism for the ex-

14 Fall 1988



16 Samuel H Gottscho, Luna Park, Night View, 4 June 1906. Library of Congress

17 Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, 1913. Oil on canvas, 75? x 84 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Collection Socidtd Anonyme

citement, drama, and spectacle of a radiant city whose stark, vast forms are unsoftened by raindrops on the lens.32

Steichen had no trouble adapting this new style to express his continuing love of the city at

night. By 1925 he had left behind the intimate darkness of his earlier work. 40th Street, Sunday Night, one of a series of photographs taken from the window of his midtown studio, offers a lean, sharp-focused precisionist vision




.



19 Edward Steichen, Stars on Sixth Avenue, 1922. 11 x 14 in. (image). Collection Mr. Shirley C. Burden, Beverly Hills

18 Edward Steichen, Fortieth Street, Sunday Night, 1925. Gelatin silver print, 166/2 x 131/4 in. The Museum of Modern

Art, New York

of the city, as cool and austere as his earlier pictorial views were warm and emotive (fig. 18). In fact, as Stars on Sixth Avenue dem- onstrates, Steichen helped com- plete the shift in the iconography of nighttime New York from the misty romance of the fin de sikcle to the bright lights of the Roaring Twenties (fig. 19). In this photograph the lights themselves have become the subject, the stars of their own show.33 The urban environment once lit up by these arti- ficial stars has disappeared into their blinding glare, and hence- forth the light by which New York nocturnes are taken will be that of

electricity, not the heavens. Steichen's ability to change his

perception of the city reveals an aspect of the Photo-Secession and its 291 gallery that the intense arti- ness of the years just after 1900 has perhaps obscured: their efforts were dedicated not to a particular style but to creating a future for photography as an independent art form. As Steichen remarked in 1914, there was only "one element which has ever arrived oppor- tunely and kept '291' a living issue:--the great unforeseen."34 To keep the spirit of the Photo-Seces- sion alive its individual members had to move on to more intrin-




sically photographic challenges and away from an imitation of painting, which was becoming increasingly more abstract. Although Whistler's nocturnes had helped painting arrive at abstraction, the photographic nocturne, if it was to be true to its medium, would have to point the way toward a harder- edged style, one that recorded more precisely the harsh lights and sights of the darkened city.

Thus the seeds of the pictorial nocturne's demise were already sown in the soil of its revolu- tionary assumptions, and it inevi- tably faded along with the soft- focus vision that both derived from and sustained it. From the

point of view of American modernism, what is important is that Coburn, Steichen, and others brought the atmosphere of Whistler and the flattened two-di- mensionality of the Japanese aesthetic into photography at a cru- cial moment, in a way that suited both the burgeoning modern city and the evolving art of photography. As a transitional form par excellence, the nocturne acted as a bridge that insured its own passing. But by then it had played its part in changing the aesthetic perception of New York at night, transforming it into a place of romance and wonder whose spell, if often strained, has yet to be broken.

18 Fall 1988



Notes

1 Ezra Pound, Patria Mia in Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 107.

2 Odetta Keun, quoted in Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham: New York as Seen

by Contemporaries from Dutch Days to the Present (New York: New York

University Press, 1956), p. 323.

3 Ibid., photographs following p. 266.

4 Ministers as well as journalists participated in the vogue of slum

investigation, titillating middle-class audiences while censuring the

pastimes of the poor. See Rev. Thomas De Witt Talmage, The Night Side of City Life (Chicago: J. Fairbanks and

Co., 1878).

5 Quoted in Peter Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urban- ization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), p. 171.

My understanding of Riis owes much to Hales's analysis, pp. 162-217.

6 See Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transfor- mation of American Culture, 1890- 1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981). According to Erenberg, "nightlife in the first years of the twentieth century came to include more than entertainment; it became a

public social life outside the cloistered walls of home and business, and it

brought diverse elements of the urban

landscape into the same social arena" (p. xi).

7 "Publisher's Note," Peter Fink, New York Nocturnes: Eighty-Five After-Dark Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), n.p.

8 "Mr. Whistler's Ten O' Clock," The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London: W. Heinemann, 1890), p. 144.

9 The photography critic Sadakichi Hartman praised Whistler for adding to the Japanese aesthetic "light, atmosphere, distance, and mystery." Sadakichi Hartman, The Whistler Book

(Boston: L. C. Page and Company,

1910), p. 67.

10 The etching was done for a picture- book called London Impressions:

Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure by William Hyde and Essays by Alice

Meynell (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1898).

11 The Golden Age of British

Photography, 1839-1900, ed. Mark Haworth-Booth (New York: Aperture Inc., 1984), p. 184:

In February 1896, entranced by the reflections of streetlights on wet

pavement, he [Paul Martin] began to make experimental night photographs .... Martin's public success spelled the end of his night series- interested and impressed bystanders surrounded him when he went out with his camera-but Martin had

pioneered a subject that was to be

signal to the twentieth century-the city at night.

12 A photographic prodigy, Coburn studied briefly with Edward Steichen in Paris in 1901 and opened a studio in New York in 1902, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1903 at the

age of twenty. Later he had a solo exhibition at Stieglitz's 291 gallery in 1907, was featured in Camera Work in 1903, 1904, 1906, and 1908, and took the photographs for Henry James's New York Edition, 1907-17. By 1912 he had settled permanently in

England, and never returned to America again.

13 Symons's text appeared separately as London: A Book of Aspects (London, 1909) and Coburn's photographs as London (London, 1909).

14 Arthur Symons, London: A Book, p. 4.

Quoted in Mike Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Symbolist Photographer, 1882-1966: Beyond the Craft (New York: Aperture Inc., 1986), p. 34. My analysis of Coburn's urban photography owes much to Weaver's study.

15 Dixon Scott, "The Painter's New Rival: An Interview with Alvin Langdon Coburn," American Photography 2

(January 1908): 18-19. Coburn might also have been thinking of the careful

way in which Whistler composed his nocturnes by studying river scenes

intensely and then painting them from

memory in his studio the next day. Like the pictorial photographer who

painstakingly focuses and composes his shot for a long exposure, Whistler created his own "time-exposure" scenes in his mind, which he then

"printed" on canvas in a matter of minutes when he was ready.

16 See Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, p. 16. For an analysis of how Stieglitz,

for example, accentuated the arrangement of forms on the surface of his

photographs through a "network of horizontal, vertical and off-axis lines




that rarely lead the eye deep into the composition," see William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo- Secession (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983), pp. 155-57.

17 Alvin Langdon Coburn, "The Relation of Time to Art," Camera Work 36 (October 1911): 73. The passage continues: They begin somewhere about Twenty- sixth street, where it is darkest, and then gradually the great white globes glow one by one, up past the Waldorf and the new Library, like the stringing of pearls, until they burst out into a diamond pendant at the group of hotels at Fifty-ninth street.

18 Charles H. Caffin, Photography as Fine Art: The Achievements and Possibilities of Photographic Art in America (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901), p. 37, caption by Stieglitz; cited in Homer, Alfred Stieglitz, p. 25.

19 See Hassam's Winter Nightfall in the City (1889), Shinn's Sixth Avenue Elevated After Midnight (1899), and Shinn's The Lunch Car (1904). One should also mention James Alden Weir--his Queensboro, Nocturne (1910) is an almost perfect East River equivalent of Whistler's Thames scenes.

20 "Contemporary Art at National Club- Special Exhibition of the Works of Some Prominent American Painters Marked by Originality," New York Times, 5 January 1908, p. 9. Also Robert Doty, Photo-Secession: Stieglitz and the Fine-Art Movement in Photography (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), p. 46.

21 In 1911 J. Nilsen Luarvik wrote that "His [Stieglitz's] Winter--Fifth Avenue ... created a sensation, not only in photographic circles, but in the world of art, and blazed the way for a whole school of painters, who set themselves the task of depicting the streets and life of New York." "Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorial Photographer," The Inter- national Studio 44 (August 1911): 25.

22 Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (Garden City, NJ.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1963), n.p. One of Steichen's big disappointments was not being able to photograph Whistler on his first trip to Europe in 1900- 1902. Steichen absorbed the Whistlerian aesthetic through his study of Clarence White's photographs. White, an admirer of Whistler and

Japanese prints, was the first American to bring this new aesthetic into photography. Homer, Alfred Stieglitz, pp. 70-71.

23 Ibid., n.p. 24 Steichen's negative dates from 1904. In

1909 Coburn also took a soft-focus, daytime shot of the Flatiron Building without Stieglitz's snow or Steichen's night mist. Meanwhile the etcher and illustrator Joseph Pennell, Whistler's biographer and an anti-photography crusader, revealed in his own sketch of the Flatiron how much not only Whistler's nocturnes but Steichen's photograph had influenced him.

25 Later Paul Strand criticized the "Impressionistic" effects produced by this "Whistlerian" lens. Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 80.

26 If, as Peter Hales argues, "the single most important characteristic of American urban photography from its inception in 1839 until the transformation of the genre in the modernist era" was the belief that the "city was and would continue to be a comprehensible, controllable phenomenon," then the nocturne contributed to this tendency. Although it shares art photography's emphasis on personal expression and emotional effect, the nocturne also orders and tranquilizes the volatile urban environment, teaching the viewer to take pleasure in his surroundings. See Hales, Silver Cities, p. 287. See also Alan Tractenberg, "Image and Ideology: New York in the Photographer's Eye,"Journal of Urban History 10 (August 1984): 453-64.

27 A. L. Coburn, "Artists of the Lens: Review of the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo," Harper's Weekly (26 November 1910): 11.

28 Steichen's photo strikingly prefigures Walker Evan's representations of the same subject, which Hart Crane included as an integral part of his poem The Bridge when it was first published in 1930. One of Joseph Stella's paintings of the bridge at night was Crane's first choice for a frontispiece, but in his 1924 description of the Brooklyn Bridge from Columbia Heights it is clear that Crane, who knew the work of Stieglitz

20 Fall 1988



and the Photo-Secession, was at least as sensitive to Steichen's vision:

Everytime one looks at the harbor and the NY skyline across the river it is quite different, and the range of atmospheric effects is endless. But at twi'light on a foggy eveing.., it is beyond descn'ption. Gradually the lights in the enormously tall buildings begin to flicker through the

mist.... And up at the right Brooklyn Bridge, the most superb piece of construction in the modern world, I'm sure, with

strings of light crossing it like glowing worms as Ls [elevated trains] and surface cars pass each other going and coming.

Quoted in John Unterecker, Voyager: A Life of Hart Crane (London: Anthony Blond, 1969), p. 364.

29 Doty, Photo-Secession, p. 57, remarks:

Their preoccupation with emulating the suwface textures of brush techniques and pigments,

the use of soft focus and manipulation of prints, held back their realization of a broader view of photography as an

art, based on respect for the characteristics expressed by the photographic process

itself.

30 An analogue in painting is Joseph Stella's New York Interpreted (1922), in which he replaces the misty nocturnal bridge with a dynamic night

vision of hard-edged ray lines and brilliant lights.

31 Edward S. Martin, "Manhattan Lights," Harper's Monthly Magazine 114 (February 1907): 367.

32 The shift from soft- to hard-focus representations of the city parallels developments in painting, in which the atmospheric brushwork of John Sloan gives way to the hard edges of Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Stella. The Ash Can School's murky night scenes are more closely related to the misty nocturnes of the Photo- Secession than to the bright lights and dynamism of the succeeding era. In literature we can trace a similar transition as the impressionistic evocations of the city in Henry James and James Huneker yield to the crisp, machine-age images of Janet Flanner, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

33 Coburn had already anticipated Steichen's metaphor. Watching the illumination of the streetlamps progress up Fifth Avenue in 1911, he wrote: "Probably there is a man at a switchboard somewhere, but the effect is like destiny, and regularly each night; like the stars, we have the lighting up of the Avenue." Coburn, "The Relation of Time to Art," p. 73.

34 Edward Steichen, "291," Camera Work 47 (July 1914); quoted in Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, n.p.




new york, night, and cultural mythmaking: the nocturne in photography, 1900-1925

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