The Creative Eye at Newport Art Museum

Photography fan at Cushing Gallery

Black and white photography created a spell, taking its viewers back to an earlier time. And it was another time in Rhode Island. as seen by NewportSeen at the Newport Art Museum’s Cushing Gallery, The diverse imagery of four American photographers who worked in Rhode Island at different times between 1899 and the 1970s, is featured in a current exhibition that is a socially conscious documentary approaching the work of the great Walker Evans' depiction of the Great Depression.

Ellen Barnes viewing a Rogers painting

At the opening reception, which featured paintings by Rita Rogers and quirky, interesting constructions by Douglas Bosch in the main museum, the" buzz" was mostly about the photographs, which elicited memories and emotions from the viewers. "Focus on Four" highlights the photographers' different approaches, intentions, techniques and levels of critical success, while drawing attention to links between past and present; society and art. Museum Curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell is to be congratulated.

Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) was a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's society of pictorial photographers, Photo-Secession, and a successful portrait photographer with a studio in New York City. She spent the summers of 1899 and 1903 in a rural part of Newport, Rhode Island near the area known as "Paradise Valley." In letters, she described the region as "a veritable garden of Eden" and her photographs of family, friends and storybook settings evoke the romance of those summer months. Käsebier is now recognized as the most important woman of the pictorialist movement, which realized photography as a fine art, and by formal means, sought to make photographs that resembled paintings.

Lewis Hine (1874-1940) worked in Rhode Island briefly in 1909 and in 1912 under the auspices of the National Child Labor Committee and the Consumers' League of Rhode Island, reporting on child labor and conditions in New England textile mills. Hine was adamantly against the pictorialist movement in photography, which depicted a pretty world without poverty and the realities of labor. To Hine the camera was not a creative tool-not a paintbrush-but an instrument of truth that could reform society's ills.

Charlotte Estey, a native of Westerly, Rhode Island, began to work as a photojournalist in Providence in the 1930s. "Focus on Four" features work from Estey's three-part series for the Providence Journal's Rhode Islander about the South Main Street community of Providence in 1952. At the time, the area was about to undergo the upheaval of urban renewal.

Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) came to the Rhode Island School of Design to teach in 1971 after an illustrious twenty-year career teaching at the Chicago Institute of Design. Siskind had broken from documentary photography in the late 1930s, formulating his belief that photography was about abstract concerns, turning recognizable objects into symbolic or metaphorical ones, re-interpreting three-dimensional everyday forms on a two-dimensional surface. His photographs from this era reveal a growing interest in spatial relationships-between dark space and light, horizontal and vertical.

Seen by Newport Seen at the opening were devotees Bob Sinclair, Ellen Barnes, Genna Macomber, Nancy Barr, as well as artists Rita Rogers and Douglas Bosch.

"Focus on Four: Rhode Island Photographs by Gertrude Käsebier, Lewis Hine, Charlotte Estey and Aaron Siskind" runs through January 18, 2010.