Forest fairies, feminism and the portrait of Maxim Gorky: The works of the first famous US photo artist

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Ghostly images, naked sorceresses on the shores of mystical lakes, Victorian near the harp, fairy children, and among them - exquisite portraits of contemporaries … One of the first women photographers, Alice Boughton achieved recognition during her lifetime, the ability to create what she likes, but at the peak fame destroyed thousands of her works and stopped communicating with the public …

At the turn of the century, along with social and cultural changes, the lives of women also changed. In a society historically dominated by men, women have managed to push the boundaries of what is permitted, overcome stereotypes, and find their place in the sun. If in the past years the works created by women were considered inferior, fake, unworthy of the public's attention, now, thanks to perseverance and mutual support, women have paved the way for art. In 1894, writer Sarah Grand coined the term "new woman" to describe independent, creative, and active contemporaries. Art people have done a lot to promote the image of the "new woman", and by no means only portraying her in their work. Artists like Alice Boughton have exemplified what women can achieve.

Alice Boughton was born into the family of a New York lawyer. In the 1880s, she began her studies at the Pratt School of Art and Design, where she specialized in photography. There she met Gertrude Kasebier, an equally bright and emancipated woman who had already founded her own photography studio. Boughton joined Casebir in her work. They worked so successfully that in 1890 Alice was already able to open her own portrait studio in New York, which became the meaning of her life for the next forty years. It is known, however, that in those same years, Alice worked in another studio - in a letter to playwright William Butler Yeats, a different address is indicated than the address of her first studio. In the 1900s, Alice decided to move on. She was good at creating photographic portraits, but the shoots of Art Nouveau penetrated the United States, and Alice wanted to understand how she could work in this style using photographic equipment.

She went to Rome to study art, and then moved to Paris, where she again met Gertrude Casebier and studied at her summer creative studio. Alice's efforts bore fruit - in 1902, at the Turin International Exhibition of Decorative and Applied Arts, her photographs were awarded an honorary award. Alfred Stieglitz, the famous American philanthropist and popularizer of photography, the greatest master of pictorialism and literally the founding father of photography as an art form, was delighted from the works of Boughton. The date of their meeting is unknown, but in 1902 he was already promoting her work at a photo exhibition in New York.

And four years later, Stieglitz appointed Alice a member of the board of the Photo Secession, a movement of American photographers based on the ideals of Art Nouveau. In addition, Stieglitz insisted that Alice also study the theory of photography - her essay "Photography as a Means of Expression", along with six very unusual photographs at that time, appeared in the journal founded by Stieglitz.

With the support of the Photo-Secession Society, Alice has presented her work at exhibitions around the world. London, Paris. Vienna, The Hague … Boughton is one of the few women artists of the early 20th century who gained fame and recognition during her lifetime, and not posthumously.

Boughton was primarily known as a portraitist. In the lens of her camera were the Nobel laureate in literature William Yates, the poet J. Drinkwater, the artist Albert Ryder, the artist Roger Fry, who introduced the concept of "post-impressionism", Maxim Gorky with his adopted son.

However, portraying Boughton's work was not limited to, on the contrary, her most outstanding works exclude a direct collision with nature, do not reveal her personality.

She shot many landscapes, some of her still lifes are known - simple, laconic, filled with light. Boughton had a chance to shoot at the famous Rockefeller estate.

Now, years later, many of her photographs seem, if not frightening, then imbued with deep mysticism. Nude - those six photographs in Stieglitz's magazine - taken in the open air, as if dissolving in the air, avoiding the viewer.

Boughton's naked heroines seem to perform witchcraft rituals or do not belong to the human world at all. Alice was interested in the interaction of the human body and wildlife with its changeability and grandeur.

A few years ago, the fact that a woman artist paints nude shocked a respectable audience, but now a woman photographer published pictures of nude women and received well-deserved recognition. However, other works by Boughton can shock the modern viewer, because now the images of children in the nude genre cause alarm and rejection. But in those years, a different meaning was put into such photos - nude children's photos were considered decent, unlike women, because children are innocent and devoid of sexuality.

Children in Boughton's work are like changeling faeries, filmed from strange angles that make them particularly fragile or disproportionate.

And even taking pictures of dressed children, Alice, using only means of artistic expression - composition, framing, light - seems to be telling an eerie fairy tale.

Alice was distinguished by soft, gentle, melting shooting, low contrast of tones, a desire for mystery.

Very little is known about Boughton's personal life. The main and only - or the only one whose name we know - her companion was the artist and art teacher Ida Haskell. They met in Pratt, where Boughton studied and Haskell taught. Since at least 1920, women have constantly lived and traveled together. On a trip to Europe in 1926, they visited several European countries together.

In 1931, Alice Boughton abruptly closes her studio and, for some unknown reason, destroys several thousand of her works. For the next thirteen years, until her death, she lived with Ida Haskell in a house on Long Island.