History & Criticism - General & Miscellaneous Photography, Photographers - Biography, Individual Photographers & Professionals, Women Photographers, Artists - Women's Biography, 20th Century Photography - General & Miscellaneous
Marjorie Content
Ben Lifson and Richard Eldridge, and Eugenia Parry JanisLog in to track your reading progress.
Overview
The photographer Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was a modest and unpretentious woman who kept her work largely to herself. She rarely published and never exhibited. Among her close friends were a number of famous artists, including the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, the playwright Maxwell Anderson, and the novelist Kay Boyle. Although she never referred to herself as an artist, she worked steadily as an art photographer for fifteen years, unbeknownst to almost all of her artist friends. She was for much of her life more of a muse and source of encouragement to others, including her fourth husband, the writer Jean Toomer, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Jill Quasha became fascinated by Content's work years ago, and in this beautiful volume she presents both Content's photographs and biographical and critical essays by three distinguished writers.Editorials
Gretchen Garner
Marjorie Content, a well-bred, intelligent woman who moved in artistic circles that included Georgia O'Keeffe and Jean Toomer (her last and worst husband), produced a body of sensitive black-and-white photographs in the 1920s and 1930s that were little known then but may reach a wider audience now. Quasha gathers them and a biographical essay in a lovely, pocketable volume that is a pleasure for those weary from hefting usually much heavier photography tomes. The pictures themselves are of familiar, early modernist types: close-ups of calla lilies and other plants, head-only portraits, and city vignettes. Quasha writes, "The photographs will not change our sense of photographic history . . . [but] will add to our understanding of what photography is capable of, especially in the lyric mode." More interesting, perhaps, is that Content exemplifies the kind of woman (more common in the past) who gives of herself to others and doesn't take her own work seriously enough, in spite of which she left behind a few lovely things that photography collections will cherish.Book Details
Published
February 8, 1995
Publisher
New York : W.W. Norton, c1994.
Pages
160
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780393036824