Poetic Localities: Photographs of Adirondacks, Cambridge, Crete, Italy, Athens

by William James Stillman

Book by Stillman, William J.

126 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1988

About the author

William James Stillman was an American journalist, diplomat, author, historian, and photographer.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of 19 century photographs by William J. Stillman, the catalog of a 1988 exhibition at the International Center of Photography. The book contains numerous photographs from the 1850s through the 1880s, primarily of landscapes and architecture in the Adirondacks, Cambridge, Mass., Italy and Greece.

Stillman had an interesting, if tragic life - was associated with the pre-Raphaelite movement in England, and was prolific as an art critic. He was also something of an adventurer, but that might have been somewhat easier to be in the 19th C, when a trip to Crete meant a journey to an island beset by anti-Turkish insurrection, and even Cambridge, Mass., still had dirt roads, marshes, and bucolic vistas. Given the difficulty of transportation, most travel must have seemed an adventure.

Stillman, from upstate NY, originally had wanted to pursue a career as a fine artist but abandoned that after scathing criticism by Ruskin caused him to fall into a hysterical spell, including temporary loss of eyesight. He switched to photography - yet his painter's eye imbues or informs his very fine photographs. Stillman himself didn't consider photography on a par with fine art, and his photographs were sometimes published in albums as "travelogues" of sorts - records of journeys to areas that might have been considered dangerous or exotic in their time (before the era of mass travel). His photographs are fastidiously composed, and he took great care in selecting vantage points at which to set up his clunky photographic equipment - given that photography was still a nascent medium in his day.

The photos of the Athenian Acropolis - which he photographed twice within a 20 year period - are exceptional. The first set includes the Frankish tower, which was demolished in the 1870s. Stillman created the same photographs about 12 years later - both sets of photos were used in a published portfolio of Acropolis photographs. The interesting thing about these Acropolis photos is that the premises had apparently not yet been "cleaned up" that is, debris, parts of masonry, and sculpture, were still scattered about - probably exactly where they had been deposited after the Venetian bombardment of the hill in 1683. Who knows how many blocks, how much debris and/or sculpture fragments were carted off for recycling as building materials, once the Parthenon was blown up and then burnt? The remaining skeletal structure in these photos is still fire-blackened from the 17th C fire, that followed the explosion of the gunpowder that was stored in the Parthenon once it exploded following a direct hit by a Venetian shell. By the time the photos were taken, Elgin had already removed a major part of the Greek cultural patrimony from the hill, especially from the Parthenon - England's pillaging of the Acropolis, with the cooperation of the occupying Turks - had taken place in the first 20 years of the 19th C, 50 years before Stillman's initial set of Acropolis photographs (of 1869). http://ancient-greece.org/history/acr...

There are three interesting essays about Stillman and the photographs included in the volume; Stillman had a rather tumultuous life - probably the most interesting aspect of the essays are the critiques of the photos. These are photographs of timelessness - including the photos of landscapes and forests; even though there are photos of Rome and one or two photos of Cretan harbor scenes, there are usually churches, temples, or mosques in every photograph - except the American photographs, which are mostly of landscapes, with a series taken in Cambridge, Mass., that includes a photograph of Harvard Yard, and a couple of rural-looking mostly deserted Cambridge streets. These contemplative photographs obviously took a long time to plan and produce; at the dawn of photography, the photographic process perhaps led to careful planning and thinking about the recorded image, definitely the opposite of today's ubiquitous digital snap-shots/selfies/etc. Also, the black and white photos - which artificially constrict the range of tonality and perhaps enhance contrast, making for more striking "graphic" images - unless a photographer today deliberately seeks out and bucks the color photography norm, the velvety blackness of these photos, wherein green hillsides dotted with wildflowers appear as white stippled shades of black - themselves, as patterns of black and white, are powerful in and of themselves. Stillman obtained minute detail from the foreground into the distance - refracted through the gradations of black, white, and grey - the photos are both detailed historic records of 19th C scenes and monuments, they are also carefully composed works of art (despite what Stillman thought of photography).

I would recommend this book to anyone who may be interested in the history of photography as an art form (despite what Stillman himself thought of photography), anyone who is interested in Athens, the Acropolis, as well as landscape & architectural photography.