This is the third installment of a series in which David Vestal gives insight into historic photographs selected from Great Photographs from Daguerre to the Great Depression, a book and CD-ROM published by Dover Publications and used with their permission.
089. Mission, Santa Clara Pueblo, by Adam Clark Vroman, 1899. Probably a dry plate. The slanting sunlight says morning or afternoon, I can’t tell which. This is an admirable photograph by a man well known for his photographs of the Hopi people, which are well worth seeing. There’s at least one very good book of his work.
- 095. Portrait—Miss N. (Evelyn Nesbit), 1902, by Gertrude Käsebier.
095. Miss N. [Evelyn Nesbit], by Gertrude Käsebier, 1902. Miss N. was a famous beauty, and Käsebier was one of New York’s great portrait photographers, well known for her exquisite use of soft-focus lenses and her sense of shimmering light.
This portrait isn’t typical: it is sharper than much of her work, and doesn’t shimmer.
