Pattern vs. passion: the legacy of the Clarence H. White School of Photography

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 1996 by Barbara L. Michaels

Blessed Art Though Among Women depicts Agnes Lee, a poet, and her daughter, Peggy, at home in Boston. The average viewer can see that mother and daughter echo forms in the picture behind them - a lithographed Annunciation scene by the English Arts and Crafts artist, Selwyn Image. But Kasebier's chose colleagues would have known that the lithograph also stood for the husband and father, Francis Watts Lee, a photographer who was devoted to the Arts and Crafts movement and to Christianity.(19)

As pictures of figures in doorways, Georgia Engelhard and Blessed Art Thou Among Women are similar in format, although Kasebier's is cropped to a narrow, aestheticized, Whistlerian vertical. It is more accurate to say that Stieglitz has conflated the mother and daughter in Kasebier's picture into one than to say he has eliminated a figure. Engelhard is midway in age between the Lee mother and daughter and shares characteristics of both. Like the little girl, Engelhard faces us wearing short, youthful garments. But, while Peggy Lee had not crossed the threshold of youth, Engelhard, standing before a closed door on the front edge of the threshold, seems to have left childhood behind her. The slight turn in her torso, the bent knee and her lithe arms recall Agnes Lee, who is similarly dressed in white, posing gracefully against a mostly white background. As much as Engelhard's outstretched right arm suggests Stieglitz's O'Keeffe portraits (as Szarkowski noted in Looking at Photographs), it harks back to Lee's gesture in Blessed Art Thou Among Women - to the spread thumb and forefinger of her right hand.

In each photograph a rectangular form behind a figure evokes someone outside the picture: Mr. Lee in Blessed Art Thou Among Women, Stieglitz himself in Georgia Engelhard. The reflection in the doorway, forecasting the cloud pictures that Stieglitz would begin a year later and which he sometimes claimed as surrogates for his emotions, seems emblematic of his affection for this niece who later became a photographer and to whom he felt closer than his own daughter.

By couching his sharply focused, full-frame image as a snapshot, and by catching his niece in a taut, angular pose, Stieglitz made his photograph bespeak modernity, rather than turn-of-the-century sentimentality. Whether deliberate or inadvertent, this updated version of a picture he had long admired can be read as both an homage to - and rejection of - Kasebier and the pictorial past.

In 1930, some dozen years after she left the White School, Gilpin returned to a theme she might have been assigned there: A Problem for Students To Make a Still Life of a Pair of Scissors, Two Books, and a Ball of String, as she titled the photograph.(20) Others might have visualized the topic as a conventional domestic vignette, but Gilpin used her imagination and created a curious geometric composition that is far from still. The scissors stand splayed: a giant "X." Behind them, two books tilt, forming a triangular space. String drapes over both scissors and books. Backlighting enhances the web of string and turns the thinning ball of twine into latticework.