Charles Sheeler is a painter and photographer born in Philadelphia, PA in 1883; he died May 1965 in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His education included the School of Industrial Art (1900-1903) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903-1906), studying with the William Merritt Chase. He left Chase when he noticed the paintings and artwork of the Italian Renaissance. At this time, in addition to painting Sheeler began working with commercial photography as a way to make money. His first camera was a $5.00 Brownie and the photography was self-taught. He called himself a precisionist because his work emphasized linear precision. Through his photography he landed a job with Ford Motor Company in 1927 to photograph the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant. Although he always regarded photography as secondary to his painting, it became important in his research for his paintings.
The photograph I was given was used for the cover of a book written by Karen Lucic, it is called - Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine. Here is an excerpt from the book; “At the dawn of the twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed that the machine was as central to our modem American culture as the Virgin was to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our ancestors worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up bridges, grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by these symbols of the Machine Age—from American presidents such as Calvin Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp. Charles Sheeler (1886–1965) was one of the most noted American painters and photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine. But was he high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production and technology that dominated his era?”
He is regarded as one of the pioneers of innovative American camera work as stated by Charles Millard in 1968 “Sheeler's “straight”, unsentimentalized, sharply focused pictures of urban and industrial life, so remarkable in an era steeped in pictorialism, helped shape the vision on which almost all the best contemporary photography is based.” He is famous for the photographs taken at River Rouge as well as those taken of Shaker architecture, buildings in New York and the Chartres Cathedral.
His work is significant because it is created in the industrial environment with dispassion. If there are people in the photos they are minimized so as to not allow personalization of the print. In the 1940’s he began using modified abstraction and double exposure to create new abstract forms. He utilized gelatin silver print to print his photos*.
He preferred using abstract subjects with geometric metal shapes along with American functionalism merged with Technological perfection and his goal was to have one viewing the pictures as if looking at a time of idealized present. No matter what the photo was, he wanted to create perfect harmony in the universe. He accomplished this by not putting storm clouds in a blue sky, no deterioration of buildings was allowed, barns were photographed to avoid sentimentalism and he made all fields green. As quoted on the webpage listed below it was stated “Yet for all his seemingly detached concern with the abstract purity of American rural architecture and industrial environment, Sheeler remained a highly introspective lyrical painter”.
*(Gelatin silver prints are the most usual means of making black and white prints from negatives. They are papers coated with a layer of gelatin which contains light sensitive silver salts. They were developed in the 1870's and by 1895 had generally replaced albumen prints because they were more stable, did not turn yellow and were simpler to produce. Gelatin silver prints remain the standard black and white print type).
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