INSIDE THE BOX: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE PORTFOLIO FORMAT by Molly Kalkstein Master of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Montréal, QC 2005 Bachelor of Arts, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, 2001 A thesis presented to Ryerson University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Program of Photographic Preservation and Collections Management Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2013 © Molly Kalkstein 2013 AUTHOR'S DECLARATION FOR ELECTRONIC SUBMISSION OF A THESIS I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I authorize Ryerson University to lend this thesis to other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. Molly Kalkstein I further authorize Ryerson University to reproduce this thesis by photocopying or by other means, in total or in part, at the request of other institutions or individuals for the purpose of scholarly research. Molly Kalkstein I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Inside the Box: Photography and the Portfolio Format Molly Kalkstein Master of Arts in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management Ryerson University, 2013 ABSTRACT Photography portfolios—published sets of loose photographs housed in a folder or box—have been produced continuously since at least the 1850s, but have rarely received serious critical attention as a distinct format. This thesis focuses on mid-twentieth-century limited edition portfolios and argues that they were informed by, and have contributed to, developments in photography more broadly. It provides a historical survey of the photography portfolio; considers its material, expressive, and commercial qualities, particularly in comparison to the photography book; and presents five case studies comprising eight portfolios produced between 1940 and 1972: Paul Strand’s Photographs of Mexico (1940) and The Mexican Portfolio (1967); Ansel Adams’s Portfolio One (1948); Berenice Abbott’s 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget 1856–1927 (1956); Lee Friedlander and Jim Dine’s Photographs & Etchings (1969); and Les Krims’s The Deerslayers, The Little People of America 1971, and The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (1972). iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I must thank first and foremost my advisor and first reader David Harris, without whose enthusiasm, wide-ranging knowledge and curiosity, and fine eye for detail, this project would have been but a shadow of itself, had it existed at all. Thanks are also due to the generosity and expertise of the following people, who were instrumental in making this an alive and exciting process: Leslie K. Brown, Britt Salvesen (Curator of Photography and Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Jess Mackta, Jill Quasha, and Julia Van Haaften were all kind enough to provide me access to their own meticulous and enormously valuable research and writing. Andrew Eskind and Jessica McDonald (Chief Curator of Photography, Harry Ransom Center) went above and beyond as my eyes in the field, continually turning up new resources on portfolios. A. D. Coleman, Ann Thomas and Lori Pauli (Curator and Associate Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Canada, respectively), and Sophie Hackett (Associate Curator of Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario, and my hawk-eyed second reader) spoke to or corresponded with me on a number of occasions, sharing their extensive professional experience and insight into this topic. Leslie Squyres (Archivist and Head of Research Services, Center for Creative Photography) proved an invaluable aid in mining the archives at the CCP for a wealth of unpublished material on portfolios and the photographers who made them. Les Krims was incredibly forthcoming and generous with his time, granting me the kind of first-person insight into his work that I could never have found elsewhere. I would finally like to thank the Canadian Centre for Architecture, George Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Ryerson Image Centre for allowing me access to their collections over the course of my research. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Author’s Declaration…………………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………..iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………..iv List of Illustrations…………………………………………………….…………………………vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 1. Literature Survey………………………………………………………………………………5 2. A Brief History of the Photography Portfolio………………………………………………11 3. Photography Books and Portfolios………….…………………………………………...…20 4. Case Studies of Selected Twentieth-Century Portfolios……………………………..……30 4.1 Paul Strand: Photographs of Mexico (1940) and The Mexican Portfolio (1967)………….………………………………………………………………………..33 4.2 Ansel Adams: Portfolio One (1948)………………………………………………47 4.3 Berenice Abbott: 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget 1856-1927 (1956)……..…54 4.4 Lee Friedlander and Jim Dine: Photographs & Etchings (1969)…………...……64 4.5 Les Krims: The Deerslayers, The Little People of America 1971, and The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (1972)…….………………………69 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...82 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….84 v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Paul Strand: Photographs of Mexico (1940) and The Mexican Portfolio (1967)…………………………………………………………………………………...35 Illustrations include portfolio cover and twenty photogravures, of Photographs of Mexico only. 2. Ansel Adams: Portfolio One (1948)…………………………………………………………. Illustrations include portfolio cover, text folio cover, and twelve gelatin silver prints. (Not included in the electronic version of this thesis.) 3. Berenice Abbott: 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget 1856-1927 (1956)…………………56 Illustrations include portfolio cover, text folio cover, and twenty gelatin silver prints. 4. Lee Friedlander and Jim Dine: Photographs & Etchings (1969)……………………….….. Illustrations include preface sheet, colophon, and sixteen sheets each containing one gelatin silver print and one etching. (Not included in the electronic version of this thesis.) 5. Les Krims: The Deerslayers, The Little People of America 1971, and The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (1972)………………………….…70 Illustrations include portfolio covers, introduction sheets, and 23, 24, and 10 offset- printed photographs, respectively. vi vii Introduction Since photography was introduced in the nineteenth century, photographs have been primarily presented and understood not as isolated images, but in groups and sets.1 From William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800–1877) The Pencil of Nature (1844-46) onward, photographs have been selected, assembled, and published to illustrate and distill complex ideas—scientific, architectural, documentary, artistic, or otherwise—more completely than any single image would be able to do alone. Groups of photographs have been compiled and disseminated through a number of physical formats, including handmade albums and mass-produced publications, as well as the curated collections of original prints that appear on exhibition walls. Among these formats is the photography portfolio. The Oxford English Dictionary defines portfolio as a folder or case for holding individual works on paper, such as prints or maps, while an additional usage—which first appeared a century later—applies the term directly to the group of works so contained.2 By extension, a photography portfolio is a collection of loose photographs gathered in an enclosure of some kind. The history of the photography portfolio stretches back to the nineteenth century, when, taking a cue from portfolios of more traditional prints such as etchings and engravings, the format was used alongside albums and books to compile and distribute groups of images, most frequently architectural or travel views, or reproductions                                                                                                                 1 The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a group as “an assemblage of persons, animals, or material things, standing near together, so as to form a collective unity,” adding, “In early use the word often conveys a notion of confused aggregation, which in recent use is not implied.” A set, meanwhile, is defined as “a number of things grouped together according to a system of classification or conceived as forming a whole.” The key difference, then, seems to be one of origins: a group can be any miscellaneous assemblage of things unified by virtue of proximity, whereas the components of a set inherently belong to the same category, or were produced as parts of a whole. Thus any group of photographs might be selected to make up a portfolio, and this selection process, as made by explicit by the unifying framework of the enclosure, will make of them a set. Some portfolios, however, will also be seen to contain a set of photographs allied by more inherent characteristics as well—an artist’s extended exploration of a given subject or theme, for example. 2 The OED dates the earliest use of the term to 1713, as Porto Folio. Its first use to indicate the actual selection of compiled art works appears in 1813, by then written simply as portfolio. 1 of works of art.3 In many cases, the images contained in such portfolios were bound later at the discretion of the purchaser. In the twentieth century, however, photography portfolios began to take on a life of their own, developing into a distinctive mode of presenting groups of photographs, and specifically groups of photographs issued in editions. For the purpose of this thesis, I am restricting my discussion to published, limited edition photography portfolios, presented in cases or boxes—usually purpose-made—and often accompanied by an explanatory text. In the majority of instances, photography portfolios contain original photographic prints, but I will also be dealing with examples that contain photomechanical reproductions, such as photogravures. Because I am specifically looking at limited edition examples, I will furthermore be focusing on portfolios produced in the twentieth century, when editioning first took hold as a photographic art practice.4 At the present time, the photography portfolio remains a much overlooked and undervalued entity in the history of photography. As demonstrated in my literature survey, the photography portfolio has rarely been written about as a specific, definable format, and what writing does exist focuses almost exclusively on the proliferation of portfolios as a vehicle for selling photographs in the burgeoning photography market of the 1970s. Meanwhile, photographically illustrated books—a related but distinct mode of organizing and presenting photographs—have received more attention, particularly in recent years. Furthermore, photography books have been increasingly recognized as possessing inherent historical significance and artistic merit as a way for photographers to not only disseminate but also to interpret and enrich discrete bodies of work and conceptual                                                                                                                 3 See Anthony Hamber, “Facsimile, Scholarship, and Commerce: Aspects of the Photographically Illustrated Art Book (1839–1880),” in Art and the Early Photographic Album, ed. Stephen Bann (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2011): 127 and 133. 4 I am referring here to the practice of creating limited editions, in which an artist or photographer promises to produce only a specific number of copies of a given work. Typically, these copies are numbered, a practice that, in photography, began in the twentieth century, and remained relatively rare until the 1960s and 1970s. The history of creating limited editions is somewhat longer in more traditional forms of printmaking, apparently beginning with the so-called etching revival in Great Britain. One early example of a signed limited edition of etchings, a version of Grey’s Elegy published by the Etching Club, appeared in 1847, but the practice remained scarce until the 1880s. See Emma Chambers, “Objects of Desire: Etching and Print Collecting,” in An Indolent and Blundering Art?: The Etching Revival and the Redefinition of Etching in England (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999), 63–87. 2 projects. I will argue that the photography portfolio has a similar significance and merit in addition to (though never entirely separate from) its more workaday marketing function. For this reason, my thesis will be concerned specifically with portfolios conceived and created by individual photographers, rather than those produced—especially posthumously—by third parties such as galleries, a common practice particularly from the 1970s onward. After the literature survey, which follows this introduction, my thesis is divided into three main sections. First, I sketch out a brief historical overview of the photography portfolio; a comprehensive timeline of the format remains absent from the literature to date, and my own overview remains necessarily provisional, given the limited scope of this paper. Second, I turn to writing about photography books to suggest a kind of formal and historical family tree for the photography portfolio, and a means by which they can be understood as distinctive photographic objects. Finally, in order to further explore some of the specific characteristics of this format, I provide an in-depth examination of eight portfolios: Photographs of Mexico (1940) and its reprint, The Mexican Portfolio (1967), by Paul Strand (1890–1976); Portfolio One (1948) by Ansel Adams (1902–1984); 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget, 1856–1927 (1956) printed by Berenice Abbott (1898– 1991); Photographs & Etchings (1969) by Lee Friedlander (b. 1934) and Jim Dine (b. 1935); The Deerslayers, The Little People of America 1971, and The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (all 1972) by Les Krims (b. 1942). My selections date from the 1940s through the early 1970s, and will thus highlight some of the ways that the format has been used in the mid-twentieth century—particularly prior to its meteoric rise in popularity as a marketing tool—as well as demonstrate that the portfolio has been employed by photographers in ways that reflect its particular physical characteristics and expressive potential. Given the enormous number of extant portfolios from the nineteenth century through the present day, my selection of eight objects is clearly limited and will do no more than scratch the surface. However, I believe that this selection raises a number of central issues in terms of how portfolios have been used by photographers during a crucial period in the development of the medium. Through this paper, I aim to lay the groundwork for further study of this neglected format, and to 3