‘BY FAR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL PHOTOGRAPHIC MAGAZINES’
STIEGLITZ, Alfred, editor.
James Craig ANNAN, after David Octavius HILL and Robert ADAMSON. Camera Work. A Photographic Quarterly. Number XXXVII, MDCCCCXII.
New York, A. Stieglitz, 1912.
4to, pp. 48, [12 (advertisements)], with 8 photogravures; text mostly unopened (all plates opened); some offsetting to adjacent blanks, hinges cracked in two instances, a faint dampstain to foot of inner hinge corner throughout, but generally a very good copy; in the original grey printed paper wrappers; edges creased and chipped, foot of spine chipped.
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James Craig ANNAN, after David Octavius HILL and Robert ADAMSON. Camera Work. A Photographic Quarterly. Number XXXVII, MDCCCCXII.
The 1909 issue of Alfred Stieglitz’s seminal quarterly journal of photography, Camera Work, intended to establish photography as a fine art and called ‘by far the most beautiful of all photographic magazines’ (Whelan).
Camera Work was published between 1903 and 1917 during which time fifty issues were made. Through Camera Work, Steiglitz brought together photographers from America and Europe, an endeavour he viewed as ‘the logical outcome of the evolution of the photographic art’ (Stieglitz, ‘An Apology’, Camera Work (1903)).
The nine photogravures on Japan tissue were made by the Scottish photographer James Craig Annan (1864–1946) from works by Hill & Adamson: Principal Haldane; The Marquis of Northampton; Handyside Ritchie and Wm. Henning; Sir Francis Grant, P. R. A.; Mrs. Anna Brownell Jameson; Lady in Black; Lady in Flowered Dress; Girl in Straw Hat; and Mr. Rintoul, Editor “Spectator”. Photogravures after David Octavius Hill had been published in Camera Work numbers XI and XXVIII, also made by Annan from the original paper negatives. The photogravures are accompanied by short pieces on, inter alia, modernity and decadence (Benjamin de Casseres), on photography (George Bernard Shaw), and a note on an exhibition of Arthur B. Carles’ work by Paul Haviland.
Annan had caught Stieglitz’s attention in 1896 in The Amateur Photographer, where he gave advice on using the new hand camera, which did not make use of a tripod. Stieglitz later drew upon Annan’s writing in The American Annual of Photography the following year, in which he agreed that the photographer must set up the composition, then wait for the right moment to capture. In this number of Camera Work, Annan is also praised: ‘It is also rare good fortune that Mr. Annan, while himself one of the pioneers of pictorial photography and second to none in his admiration of Hill’s work, is also a master of the photogravure process’.
See Buchanan, The Art of the Photographer, J. Craig Annan 1864–1946 (1992); Whelan, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography (1995).
