Over email, curator Herb Tam explained the exhibition’s philosophy and themes. Click through the following slide show for a glimpse of the show’s photography.

Where did you get the idea for this exhibition, and why did you choose to put it together now?

The idea for the show came from exploring our collection and noticing how varied and idiosyncratic the photographs in our collection are. Looking at them made me think of the enthusiasm for photography that a lot of Chinese have, and how there’s a stereotype of Chinese as crass tourists constantly taking pictures of ourselves in foreign places. There’s been a growing interest in China and Chinese culture lately, and I wanted to show the Chinese perspective on the idea of America — how we actually see this country, how we picture it now that China is rising, and as America’s global position has become more precarious.

What do these photographs tell us about the Chinese-American experience?

These photos show a palpable tension between the spaces we inhabit and our own understanding of ourselves (identity) — that we’re still in the process of figuring out how we exist here as we move further and further away from urban Chinatowns.

In terms of photography, what types of themes, subjects and situations is the “Chinese lens” most sensitive to?

I tried to cover a range of photographic themes, but one motif that stands out is the automobile, and to me this is an apt symbol of America’s ethos of social mobility and a Chinese sense of class consciousness. New cars represented a step taken towards the American dream, and there are a lot of snapshots in our collection of people posed in front of their gleaming new cars.

To give us some sense of the range of the exhibition, can you describe two photos that sit at opposite extremes in terms of what the show covers?

First of all, there are photographs of poetic absurdity, like Yan Deng’s photograph of two young men with their dress shirts and pants on backwards and their backs facing towards the camera on a generic-looking suburban street [slide 9]. Then contrast that with a photograph from our collection of an unknown couple, probably from the ’50s, standing awkwardly in front of what looks to be their new suburban home [slide 3]. There’s a narrative in the connection between those photographs that speaks to the hopes and idealism of Chinese people as they began moving into the suburbs — and then the realization after a while that the suburban space in America is not just idyllic, but may also be threatening and absurd.

What are the most significant changes you notice in the style or content of the photographs over time? What are the most significant continuities?

Chinese artists who use photography now don’t seem as likely to photograph “about” their cultural identity as they were in the ’80s, when someone like Tseng Kwong Chi was photographing himself in Mao suits in various American tourist locales. Talking about one’s struggles with ethnicity fell out of favor, and we see it in how Chinese artists have photographed themselves in relation to their spaces. Artists don’t take oppositional positions now; in general they are more critically concerned with forms, subjects and processes of art-making.

It was important to me that the artists and photographers, as a group, reflected the diverse backgrounds of Chinese in America. Julie Quon grew up in New York’s Chinatown her whole life; her family is Cantonese. Arthur Ou and Amy Yao were born in Taiwan and grew up in California. Hai Zhang and Yan Deng were new immigrants coming over for college and career opportunities (Zhang decided to stay in America; Deng moved back to Beijing after studying at Parsons The New School for Design). Chien An Yuan and Wing Young Huie were born in and have grown up in the middle of the country. We also feature artists who visit America, but who haven’t established roots here, like Jiajia Zhang, who lives in Switzerland. This shows that the Chinese experience here isn’t a singular one, but that it’s multidimensional and ever evolving.

“America Through a Chinese Lens” will be on display at the Museum of Chinese in America, in New York City, from April 26 through Sept. 10, 2012.

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Over the phone, curators Juliette Bianco (from the Hood Museum) and Pieter Broucke (from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where the show will travel next year) spoke to me about the themes of Burtynsky’s work, and the added context this particular exhibition brings. Click through the following slide show for a preview.

How did this exhibition come about? How many of these photographs have been exhibited before?

Pieter Broucke: I became aware of Burtynsky’s photographs by way of a friend of mine, Raphael Bernstein, who owns a number of the photographer’s works. [Bernstein] actually ended up loaning a number of photographs for the show. They’re absolutely amazing photographs. And since we are — I am, at least — at Middlebury College, here in Vermont, we thought it was worthwhile to look at the photographs that Burtynsky took of Vermont quarries, in a scholarly context. …

In a sense you could say that it’s here in Vermont that Burtynsky became Burtynsky — the internationally known artist who’s [recognized] for his environmental commentary through his photography. … Burtynsky came to Vermont six times — first in the fall of 1991, and then also in 1992. Over the course of these trips, you can see how his emphasis shifts from a formal approach — interest in the spectacular forms of the quarry space — toward the inclusion of an environmental commentary. Burtynsky increasingly looks at quarries as ecological scars, you could say.

As to the number of photographs that are new, I think it’s seven.

Juliette Bianco: And two of those show underground marble quarries [Slide 7] that we didn’t even know Burtynsky had photographed until Pieter and I were up at his studio about a year ago. Burtynsky had a chance to revisit all of his negatives with us, and we got the idea to present these underground quarries. Many people don’t even know they exist — and yet I think they’re the most expansive underground quarries in the world.

PB: They’re not open to the public. It’s the first time that I’ve seen any images of them — and what images they are, are absolutely otherworldly. Of the two that are included in the show, one evokes Piranesi — this cavernous, endless, very dramatic space — and the other looks like a scene from a science fiction film. They’re very powerful images.

The exhibition touches on the geological background to Burtynsky’s work — but it also examines the social and cultural history of the quarry workers who came to Vermont from Italy. Can you tell me a little about them?

JB: … [W]e saw Burtynsky’s photographs as a launching pad for looking at what else was happening in the region when Burtynsky captured this moment in time. Whose histories and what histories are embedded [here]? Of course, one of the most fascinating stories is that of these immigrants who came over at the turn of the last century — and how they helped transform this industry in Vermont.

PB: The first Italians who came to work in the marble industry were actually headhunted in Carrara, through a connection that Redfield Proctor, who was the director of the Vermont Marble Co., had in England.

Proctor was able to headhunt four initial Italian stone-carvers. They came to Vermont, but initially they didn’t plan to stay; they were just going to come and teach their skills and then go back. They did end up staying, though — and many, many Italians came in their wake.

[It's] remarkable that those Italians were headhunted. Unlike most of the Italians who migrated to the United States — [many of whom] came from the South, from Sicily, and were basically unschooled — the people who came to Vermont to work in the Italian stone industry came with very, very high prestige; they came with a very much sought-after set of skills, and also with very strong political convictions. All these things combined to form a strong Italian social/cultural presence in Vermont — around Rutland, and perhaps even more in Barre, where the granite quarries were.

Many of these people also migrated within Vermont; many Italians migrated from the marble industry to the granite industry. This was partly because of the way the industries were organized: It was very paternalistic in the marble industry, because Redfield Proctor controlled everything — whereas in Barre there were more individual workshops, and there were many more foreigners. [Barre] was really a multi-ethnic boom town for a while, and it became the de facto capital of anarchism in the U.S. between about 1915 and 1925 or so.

This was a very different kind of a migration experience for the Italians — because they were headhunted, they were wanted, they were desired, and they came with a sense of labor organization that they brought with them from Carrara, that goes back to the Middle Ages … Barre has an opera house; many small towns — small villages, even — in Vermont have opera houses; that’s because of the Italians, and the high prestige with which they came. To this day they celebrate the first of May in Barre — a holiday that is not celebrated (as far as I know) widely anywhere else in the United States.

JB: One of the nice things about this exhibition is that this history keeps wrapping around itself. When Burtynsky came to start photographing quarries in 1991, and he started talking with the quarry owners and the quarry workers and taking these photographs, they said, “Well, if you want to see really big, vast quarries, you have to go to Carrara, Italy.” So he did a reverse trip — his first trip outside of North America for his photography was to Carrara, because he was sent there by these quarry workers. This history profoundly affected Burtynsky’s own history of his photographic process — because once he went to Carrara, he wondered where else in the world he would see these quarries, and he wound up creating his first conceptual photography series, “Quarries.” He’s gone on to be internationally recognized for his conceptual work around other big industries, like oil and mining and manufacturing in China, etc.

One of the themes here does seem to be Burtynsky’s observation of industry interacting with the natural world.

JB: Burtynsky started with this impulse to photograph nature, but then tried to think about what his voice was going to be — what he was going to say. He chanced upon a coal mine in Pennsylvania, and started thinking about the relationship between industry and people and the industrial impact on our environment, based on consumerism. So even though photographs have been depicting the industrial landscape for over a century, and an art historian in our catalog talks about that history, it’s not really the social concerns or the labor concerns or the celebration of technology that were driving a lot of that earlier photography … There’s this consumer consciousness bent, then, to the photographs that Burtynsky takes subsequently.

PB: I think what sets Burtynsky apart from any other photographers who have taken photographs of quarries, and of nature, for that matter, is that he really works as a conceptual artist … [He started this project by looking] for what he called “inverted skyscrapers.” He said that for any skyscraper that is out in the city, there’s got to be a hole somewhere in the ground that is negative, downwards — a space rather than a mass — that more or less fits that shape. (This is not to be taken literally — but you see what he means.) He started going around in Canada, which is where he’s from, looking at all these quarries, and he got very frustrated, because nowhere did he find scenes that would allow him to take photographs that fit what he saw in his mind’s eye. It was actually a quarry man in Quebec who told him he should go to Barre. And so then he came, in the fall of ’91, and indeed, that was it. He came back five more times.

There’s a very strong conceptual component to his work. And I think this is what makes these photographs such strong works of art.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

PB: We’re both at educational institutions. Of course, these photographs have been shown widely — or at least the work of Burtynsky [has]. This exhibition looks at these photographs within the context of his career; the photographs of the quarries of Vermont really have a pivotal position within the evolution of Burtynsky’s development as an artist. The images themselves are worth examining … in the context of migration, social history, geology, things like that. So in addition to the photographs themselves, the exhibition also has a small section on geology, with chunks of granite, chunks of marble and a geological map; we also have two cases of vintage photographs that beautifully comment upon the social history [of Barre]. Not to compete with the images of Burtynsky, but really to enrich them. This is also why there are photographs from Carrara included in the exhibition [e.g., Slide 8].

JB: Yes. You can tell the story visually, as well as through all these words that we just used!

“Nature Transformed: Edward Burtynsky’s Vermont Quarry Photographs in Context” will be on display at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art, in Hanover, N.H.,  from April 21 through Aug. 19. It will be on display at the Middlebury College Museum of Art, in Middlebury, Vt., from Feb. 8 through April 21, 2013.

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The houses to which this photographer’s sensitive eye was drawn (over a period of two years) sleep in various stages of decay, with books, tools and religious icons scattered liberally across their abandoned surfaces. The agents of all this quiet chaos — the homes’ former inhabitants — are conspicuously absent, but their lives can sometimes be pieced together, their belongings used as clues.

Over the phone, Creedon told me how a project born of serendipity (he stumbled on one remarkable abandoned home by accident, then quickly discovered many more) became an internationally exhibited endeavor, and talked about the significance of emigration to the Irish collective conscience. The following slide show offers a preview of Creedon’s work (with captions in his own words).

How long did this project take you, from start to finish?

I started in about April 2005, and I spent two years working on it. When I had the first few images done, someone saw them and offered to exhibit them. We opened in Chicago in October 2006, and I think there hasn’t been a month gone by since then that they haven’t been exhibited somewhere in the world.

How much research do you do about each individual house?

It’s very, very difficult to find individuals who are still living who know anything about the people who used to live [in these houses]. Some of these houses are really very isolated, and it was only by going through papers and letters that were lying around that I was able to get a profile of the people who once lived there.

There was a house in west Cork that I photographed; it’s the one that’s on the cover. The house was extremely dark, but when I went in, there were these vibrant colors in every different room. The calendar said 1978. There was a book of the American Constitution lying around, and there was also [a book about John F. Kennedy]. When I went upstairs, the American flag was hanging at a 45-degree angle on the landing, and it reminded me of that famous old photograph of the soldiers putting up the flag at Iwo Jima.

When I went into the next room, there was an old shipping trunk [with labels identifying its owner as a woman called Mary Sullivan]. Doing research, I discovered that Mary Sullivan had traveled to New York in 1940 on a White Star liner out of Queenstown. When she arrived at Ellis Island, she had $15. But when you opened up the case, inside there were ladies’ nylon stockings still in their original packaging — and there was also a bank book. Mary Sullivan had saved $8,000 while in New York. $8,000 is a lot of money still today — but in 1949, it must have been absolutely amazing. Inside that case, there were letters from home, and there were receipts from the local church where she would have given donations, and hanging behind the door was a dress that still had the purchase labels of the shop where she bought it. I think she came home to die, actually, to be honest with you.

Have there been efforts to revitalize any of these houses?

Well, that’s a question in itself. In Ireland, in the 1950s, there was mass emigration. Just to give you an idea, 80 percent of people born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 emigrated in the 1950s. That’s a huge amount. And by the middle of the 1950s, the population had fallen to 2.8 million, which was the lowest that was ever recorded. Even if you were to go back 100 years prior to that, to the 1850s, the population stood at 9 million. So this was a huge drop.

In Ireland in the 1950s, there was very high unemployment. [In certain regions,] a small rural farm couldn’t support a family of five. Most of the children would emigrate; there might be one who’d stay behind, and that person would look after the farm, but in later years would end up looking after his parents. But because they had no money, the person who stayed behind couldn’t afford to buy or build his own house, so he couldn’t get married (no woman would ever want a second woman under the roof). So there was a huge population increase in bachelor farmers, and when they started dying off, in probably the ’80s or ’90s, the title of their property went to, let’s say, a brother or sister in England or in America — who, at this point, could also be dead. That’s really how the properties became empty. And they just got forgotten about, you know?

So they’ll stay like this indefinitely?

They’ll just fall down the way they are now. And that’ll be it. Nobody will go in and take over the houses, because they don’t own them. They wouldn’t have title on them. Somebody somewhere owns those houses, you know. But who they are, or where they are, I don’t know.

Would you say that emigration is somehow key to the Irish cultural identity?

Ireland has always been a country that emigrated. Between about 1990 and 2005 there was [very little] emigration; people were coming in, because there were jobs. And then you had the banking crisis — so we’re back emigrating again. But in reality, Ireland has always been an emigrant society — since the [mid-19th century], if not before. We’ve gone to Australia, America, England — the Irish are all over the world, really. I think it’s always been part of our psyche, that emigration is an option for us. I know a lot of kids now who are at college, and all they’re talking about is emigrating when they get their degree.

“Ghosts of the Faithful Departed” by David Creedon is published by The Collins Press. It is available in North America from Dufour Editions.

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Curator Ann Shumard spoke to me about Warnecke’s long career and complicated photographic technique. Click through the slide show that follows for face time with some of the early 20th century’s most magnetic characters.

I’ll start with a very basic question: Who was Harry Warnecke?

Harry Warnecke isn’t someone we have a great deal of biographical information for. What we really know about is his career. He joined the New York Daily News just two years after its founding; the newspaper was established in 1919, and in 1921 Warnecke was hired as a staff photographer.

The Daily News was the first tabloid in New York, and it envisioned itself right from the start as a very picture-heavy newspaper. Even at the very beginning, the logo for the newspaper had an image of a camera in it. There was no question that photographic images were going to be privileged in this particular publication, so being a photographer for the Daily News meant you were right at the center of the newspaper’s mission.

Warnecke did black-and-white pictures for the paper; he was kind of a roving cameraman, and caught a number of on-the-spot images. But by the mid-1930s, he had been bitten by the color bug. He was very intrigued with the idea of setting up a color studio at the newspaper — and that’s really when his career took a transformative step, because he established one of the first explicitly color studios in publishing.

He stayed with the New York Daily News right up until he retired in 1970, so he was there for 49 years. During that period of time, he was really the dean of the color photography studio. He worked with a number of assistants, and they got credit along with him (which is interesting, because oftentimes the assistants don’t); over time they took on the same role that he had in terms of doing quite a bit of the color photography.

During the course of his time at the Daily News, in addition to producing the images that were reproduced in the Sunday magazine section, Warnecke was also making exhibition prints that could be entered in various contests — and he certainly won awards along the way.

Warnecke died in 1984. He did periodically have a little column in the Daily News, and would talk about camera techniques and pointers for amateur photographers, but beyond that, he hasn’t been the subject of any kind of serious study. I think if you were to conjure him up and have a conversation with him, he certainly wouldn’t claim to have been a fine art photographer. He was a news photographer. He enjoyed his role in capturing the major personalities of the day — whether they were Hollywood folks or athletes or World War II generals.

Can you describe the technique he used to make these color photos? Was it very uncommon for the time?

At this point, in the mid-1930s, color film as we know it had not yet emerged. Hollywood films were in black-and-white; there were just a couple of experimental uses of color technology in Hollywood film … What Warnecke was working with was an earlier process that involved the use of what was called a one-shot camera. A one-shot camera simultaneously exposed three black-and-white negatives, each through a different-colored filter (the filters were red, green and blue). Those black-and-white negatives were processed and printed to create bromide prints, and the bromide prints were placed in contact with pigmented gelatin tissue … They were then placed in contact with tissues that carried complementary colors … There’s basically a reaction that happens when these are placed together; you ultimately end up with pigmented tissues that carry the primary colors that are needed to create a three-color assembly print.

It’s a very time-consuming process, and certainly not one that the amateur could do; this was really only something that you could do in a studio that was fully set up to do this. After the tissues had been washed and dried, they had to then be assembled on a matrix in order to get the perfect registration, so that you didn’t have any blurring, or funny off-register color.

The color carbro process is definitely a complicated one. It yields really richly-hued prints, because the color actually derives from pigment that is suspended in the gelatin, rather than from color dyes. That’s one of the reasons that the color carbro prints from the ’30s and ’40s still have this wonderful, vivid color; it’s unlike the dye-based color processes that we’re familiar with. Even if you look at a family snapshot that was taken in the ’60s or ’70s, oftentimes the dyes have shifted and the color is no longer true to the original. That’s what differentiates the color carbro process from these later, dye-based color processes: It is so much more stable, and the colors really retain that wonderful rich saturation that makes them so appealing.

When these appeared in the New York Daily News, did they appear alone, as photo features? Or did they normally accompany full, written profiles?

Sometimes they were part of a story; other times they were simply cover images. The photo of “Babe” Didrikson [slide 2], for example, was part of a series of pictures of her in action on the golf course — and there was a story that went with that. But more often than not, there was simply a caption that would appear in the main part of the newspaper that would draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the photo was in what they called the “Coloroto” section of the paper. For instance, the caption for the W.C. Fields portrait [slide 11] said, “W.C. Fields is on the cover of today’s ‘Coloroto’ section. His remarkable nose wears its usual rosy glow, and his right elbow is in its natural bent position.” And of course, he’s shown hoisting this frothy mug of something (obviously not real beer). Clearly, the color was part of the story — the idea that he had a fondness for drink, and the rosy glow of his complexion as a result.

What’s interesting is that the photographers were always identified at the bottom of the captions. So for the picture of W.C. Fields, at the bottom, in bold italic type, it says, “This News color photo, made in Hollywood by Warnecke-Elkins” — Elkins was one of Warnecke’s colleagues and assistants — “is another in a series of color portraits of stage, screen and radio celebrities. Next Sunday, Carole Lombard.” Unfortunately, we don’t have the Carole Lombard portrait.

How did these photographs become part of the museum’s permanent collection?

The photographs have come to us from a variety of sources. The first one to enter the museum’s collection was a wonderful photograph of Edgar Bergen [slide 5] … that was purchased at a public auction in New York, back in 1992. Our curator of photography at that time was totally captivated by the picture — as were all of us on the staff. She was very interested in trying to find out more about the maker of the picture, and if there were more of them somewhere. Her search ultimately led her to Harry Warnecke’s widow, Elsie, who still had a cache of the photographs that he had made for exhibition purposes and for the various News photography contests. And so it was from her that a number of the Warnecke pictures came to us; she made a gift to the museum’s collection. Since that time, additional images have periodically surfaced, both at auction and also in the hands of private dealers. When an interesting image has come up that enhances our collection and represents someone that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to show in this particular medium, then we have acquired it.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

[I want people] to understand what a remarkable thing it was to have a color image in a newspaper in the 1930s. I think that, in a way, black-and-white has become the novelty today that color was in the ’30s. Now we’re just completely surrounded by color, everywhere we turn, and when something’s in black-and-white, it sort of startles us and really captures our attention, because it’s so different from what we’re used to. In the 1930s, everyone was just used to black and white. So this burst of color — and the richness of it — I think was startling, and tremendously attractive.

“In Vibrant Color: Vintage Celebrity Portraits from the Harry Warnecke Studio” will be on display at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., from March 2 through Sept. 3, 2012.

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Truth is, Feininger didn’t even pick up a camera until 1928, when he was in his late 50s and had fallen under the influence of his sons Andreas and T. Lux and, primarily, of fellow Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy. And he considered his photographing to be more of an experimental – and inspirational – means to a painterly end. But a recent exhibition has shed new light on this practically unknown aspect of his already formidable career.

Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928 – 1939 debuted last year in Germany, where he first established his reputation. It opened at the Getty Center in late October, and will run until March 11 before it travels to the Harvard Art Museums. And as part of the program, critic Niklas Maak will deliver a talk titled “Bauhaus Reconsidered: When Collectivity Becomes Form” at the Getty on Thursday evening, Feb. 16. Maak will reevaluate the school’s relevance, back then as well as today.

Laura Muir, assistant curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, put together the show and authored a companion book about Feininger’s mysterious and melancholy photos. Below is our conversation about this creative medium of his that’s been hidden … until now.

left: Untitled (Bölbergasse, Halle), probably 1929. Black crayon on paper, 6 1/2 x 3 3/4 in. Credit: Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, gift of Julia Feininger. right: Untitled (Bölbergasse, Halle), 1929 -1930. Gelatin silver print, 2 3/8 x 1 3/4 in. Credit: Stiftung Moritzburg - Kunstmuseum des Landes Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Untitled (Street Scene, Double Exposure, Halle), 1929 - 1930. Gelatin silver print, 15 1/8 x 19 1/8 x 7/8 in. Credit: gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Michael Dooley: What’s been the feedback on the show so far?

Laura Muir: The overwhelming response has been excitement about discovering a completely new aspect of an artist who is otherwise very well known. People may be familiar with Andreas Feininger or T. Lux Feininger’s photography, but they associate Lyonel Feininger with painting and printmaking. The fact that photography was more than just a casual hobby – that he was working so intensively with the medium and experimenting in pretty adventurous ways – comes as a surprise.

Untitled (Night View of Trees and Streetlamp, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau), 1928. Gelatin silver print, 6 15/16 x 9 5/16 in. Credit: gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

What aspects of Feininger’s photos compelled you to write your book and to curate this exhibition?

I was intrigued by the fact that this fascinating body of work by one of modernism’s key figures existed yet had gone virtually unnoticed. I was interested in the connection between his photography and work in other media, how his work related to other photography at the Bauhaus and German modernist photography in general, and how he was using the medium to explore, in new ways, his longtime artistic interests in night imagery, light and shadow, reflections and transparency.

"Moholy's Studio Window" around 10 p.m., 1928. Gelatin silver print, 7 x 5 1/16 in. Credit: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

How might Feininger’s photos of the Bauhaus campus reflect his feelings about the school?

In contrast to most other photographs of Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus building, which were made during the day when the campus was bustling with activity and filled with students, Feininger’s photographs were made after dark, when it was deserted. They are more contemplative than celebratory in tone. They also suggest the fact that by 1929, when he made these photographs, he was somewhat estranged from the daily life of the Bauhaus.

Although Feininger retained the title of Bauhaus Master after the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, he no longer taught or was connected with any of the school’s workshops. These photographs were made after Gropius’ departure in 1928, and might also be seen as a meditation on the architect’s utopian aspirations for the school and the building that symbolized them – perhaps a kind of coda to the woodcut of a cathedral that Feininger made in 1919 to illustrate the Bauhaus manifesto.

And what might graphic designers learn from these photos?

I think it is instructive to consider how Feininger took his interests in the inversion of values and the expressive use of light and dark and translated them through the medium of photography into negatives prints and night photographs. These works reflect the spirit of experimentation and fascination with technology that characterized the Dessau Bauhaus and are among Feininger’s most innovative and successful works within the photographic medium.

Drunk with Beauty, 1932. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/16 x 9 7/16 in. Credit: gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Finally, what contemporary artists do you see as sharing Feininger’s sensibilities?

The San Franciso-based artist Todd Hido approaches night imagery in a very similar way to Feininger – photographing after dark in suburban neighborhoods and using a tripod and long exposures to capture the effects of fog, street lamps and lighted windows. Although larger in format and in color, the effect is strikingly similar to the atmospheric photographs that Feininger made around the neighborhood where the Bauhaus masters’ houses were located.

Laurie Simmons’ interest in staging scenes for the camera and creating small, self-contained worlds was shared by Feininger, who extensively photographed model yachts, wooden toys and mannequins in shop windows.

And Vera Lutter’s extended engagement with the negative image resonates with Feininger’s exploration of the dramatic contrasts and otherworldly effects of the negative print, which he began at the Bauhaus in the late 1920s.

Each of these artists will be speaking about their work at the Harvard Art Museums this spring in connection with the Feininger exhibition.

Untitled (Train Station, Dessau), 1928 - 1929. Gelatin silver print, 6 15/16 x 9 5/16 in. Credit: gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University. © Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Next on Imprint: I’ll cover the part of this exhibition that deals with Bauhaus’ students, their jazz band and their beach partying.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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