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gallery
GRAPHICS EDITOR'S NOTE
LAST SPRING, for our April 2008 Gallery, we asked two historians to interpret the same image of a nineteenth-century bank note from South Carolina. In the issue's Gallery we undertake a variant on that experiment. Rather than having a pair of scholars write dueling essays on the same image, we have asked two historians to write about the same historic moment, yet through quite different photographs.
While Progressive-era photography is most often associated with men such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the following two essays by Kevin Armitage and Kim Little explore photos taken and published during the same period by women. The female progressives examined in these two essays used photography not only to reform the American city, much as Riis and Hine had done, but also to promote change in the countryside. By turning their historic lens toward these lesser-known women, Armitage and Little expose the role that gender may have played in forging links between urban and rural reform during the Progressive era.
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NEIL M. MAHER
Kevin Armitage
On Gene Stratton Porter's Conservation Aesthetic
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| CAN A SIMPLE PICTURE of birds embody a complex philosophy of conservation? Consider the photo of a pair of cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) that the photographer and conservationist Gene Stratton Porter (August 17, 1863-December 6, 1924) labeled "entreaty." The picture puts the viewer in close contact with the subject. The direct gaze of the cardinals toward the camera establishes a close connection between the subject of the photo and its viewer. Indeed, the photo is emotionally charged: the immediacy of the cardinals and their orientation toward the camera draws the viewer into their world. Yet the emotional potency of the photograph does not derive from grandeur or sublimity, but instead from its emphasis on closely rendered everyday experience. When the photo draws the viewer into its, world it emphasizes that people share the world with avian life. |
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Figure 1. "Entreaty."
Gene Stratton Porter, "Entreaty," The American Annual of Photography, ed. W. I. Lincoln Adams and Spencer Hord (New York: Styles and Cash, 1905), 29.
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Birds are important as a subject because as garden animals most people encounter them daily—they are part of routine, every day, domestic life, and thus are encountered within the realm of experience often gendered female. Because of its "domestic" setting, the image demonstrates the application of presumably feminine qualities to the interpretation of nature. By embracing close depictions of common birds as her subject, Stratton Porter used ostensibly feminine qualities—patience, sympathy, intimacy, and emotional connectedness—to help produce her detailed depictions of avian life. Indeed, she described her photographic method as turning "child's play into women's work."1 Nature as experienced through this image is unremarkable because of its regularity and domesticity; yet it is urgent and new because the photo reveals that vitality can be found within customary encounters with nature. Stratton Porter's goal was to expose the magnificent within the routine, and her work was indeed an attempt at turning child's playthe wondrous fascination with which children view the worldinto women's work, mastery of the domestic realm. |
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