PHO150 Digital Photography: Charles Sheeler

Focusing on the complex, often paradoxical, relationships among photography, film, drawing, printmaking, and painting that were central to Sheeler's art, this pathbreaking book traces critical points in Sheeler's trajectory, beginning with a small selection of Sheeler's seminal photographs, circa 1917, of the interior of an eighteenth-century Quaker fieldstone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sections are also devoted to the 1920 film Manhatta, made in collaboration with Paul Strand; a series of commercial photographs of the Ford Motor Company's River Rogue factory (1927); the enigmatic painting The Artist Looks at Nature (1943) and its related works; and finally a group of mill subjects from the 1940s and 1950s that experiments with photomontage.

Questions the view of American photographer and painter Sheeler (1886-1965) as a champion of the Machine Age, accepted by his contemporaries and by subsequent critics. Lucic (art, Vassar College) investigates his life, work, and values, and argues that he was ambivalent about machines. Includes nearly 70 good reproductions, some in color.

Considered one of the most significant painters of the period between the two world wars and founder of the precisionist school, Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was also one of the pivotal photgraphers of the modernist movement in America. His direct style can be likened to that of his contemporaries Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Edward Steichen and he is probably best known for documenting the transformation of the American urban landscape (in both his photos and paintings), and for an early series of photos that pay homage to his 19th-century farmhouse in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Walker Evans & Company focuses on Evans as a central figure in the arts of the 1920s and 30s, and includes works in photography and other mediums that influenced Evans or were influenced by him, or which resonate in a significant way with aspects of his imagery, sensibility and style. Among the other artists whose work is featured are: Eugene Atget, Mathew Brady, Stuart Davis, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Edward Hopper, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, August Sander, Andy Warhol and Edward Weston.

American photography from the turn of the century through the mid-1960s offers one of the richest and most coherent traditions in the history of the medium. This book explores that tradition in depth through superb reproductions of 183 photographs from the outstanding collection of The Museum of Modern Art." Major figures, such as Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, and Robert Frank, are each represented by six or more photographs. Dozens of other distinguished photographers are included as well, and many remarkable but unfamiliar pictures join the landmark works.