The Henry Holmes Smith Archive
All images property of the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana UniversityLauren Richman is the Assistant Curator of Photography at the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, where she oversees the Henry Holmes Smith Archive. Her dissertation, “‘Silent Salesmen,’ Skeptical Consumers: American Images in a Divided Berlin, 1949–67,” analyzes how lens-based media—through U.S. government–sponsored photography exhibitions, film initiatives, and mass-media image circulation—became entangled with and impacted Germany’s redeveloping visual arts communities. Richman’s research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Dallas Museum of Art. Prior to joining the staff of the Eskenazi Museum, she held curatorial and research positions at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art. She has also held academic residencies at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art and Berlin’s Freie and Humboldt Universities. Richman earned a BA in art history from Vanderbilt University, and an MA and PhD in art history from Southern Methodist University. (from Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University website)
Michael Rippy: What are your earliest memories of photography, and how did your early involvement with the medium propel you toward working as a curator of photography?
Lauren Richman: My earliest memories are of being surrounded by photographs at home in a northern Chicago suburb. My father considers himself an amateur photographer and has a particular affinity for the medium. I grew up surrounded by images: things that he collected, made by artisans and other amateur photographers, though it wasn’t a major collection of fine art photography.
The other part came through home movies. I was always drawn to revisiting memories and the photographic medium mediated that for me. I never knew my maternal grandparents. Photography became a medium that allowed me to get to know that side of my family without ever meeting them. I think I carried that through.
It was during my undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University that I took my first analog photography classes. I found that I really loved being in the dark room, using all of my senses. Listening to the water trickling and bubbling, smelling the chemistry, all in darkness, was very meditative.
That being said, I quickly realized that I didn't want to be an artist. I much preferred reading about art and learning about their historical contexts. It was always the little anecdotes about making that I thought about when standing in front of a work of art. I started to pursue art history as a major and then took a wonderful seminar on surrealism during which I focused on the photography of Hans Bellmer. With the encouragement of my advisor, who happened to be the professor of that course, I ended up applying to graduate school in my senior year of college and went straight into a master's program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Once there, I continued pursuing photography as my area of expertise, continuing into their PhD program. I spent a semester in London at the Courtauld Institute of Art and worked with the photo historian Julian Stallabrass. There, I learned more about East German documentary photography, later inspiring my doctoral research. My dissertation examined how the US government sponsored particular exhibitions, film initiatives, and forms of mass media image circulation to, in their words, “reeducate” the German public. I also analyzed very specific East and West German responses to those exhibitions, films, and publications. That is obviously very different from what I have been working on at the Eskenazi Museum.
MR: Were you always interested in abstract photography? How did you move from your dissertation research to where you are now, working on the Henry Holmes Smith Archive at the Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University?
LR: I spent time as a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, allowing me to conduct research at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and finish my dissertation. As I finalized that chapter and graduated, of course, I started applying for jobs.
Admittedly, I had no idea who Henry Holmes Smith was when I found this job announcement. As I looked into his work, I was really blown away by his use of color. I think that's what initially attracted me to his work. Secondarily, it was his interest in abstraction and shift away from representation. Honestly, it felt different enough from what I had been focusing on for the past few years, almost like a break. It also presented a new challenge to understand more about the technical aspects of the photographic medium, especially color photography.
Smith was keen on the dye transfer printing process, which is very complex and labor intensive. Graduate school coursework doesn’t often tackle the technical side of photography. Wrapping my mind around all of the subtleties of the chemistry, thinking about how development really works, and different color processes was a new challenge for me. Smith used what he called synthetic color. Rather than using color in representational ways, in true to life or realistic applications, he wanted to use color differently to surprise and shock viewers.
So, I thought it was worthwhile to reinvigorate interest in Smith's work. As I started my research here at IU and learned more about him, I learned how invested he was in photographic education and teaching. He was so dedicated to his students and notably did not want to mold them to mimic his work. He wanted to push them to think outside the boundaries of what they knew and understood about photography.
That meant thinking about what photographs are and how we read them. Most importantly to Smith, what do viewers bring to the table when standing in front of a photograph? How does our interpretation change over time? I think that's what he was getting at with his abstract works, which sometimes have titles relating to mythology, psychoanalysis and family structures—with many representational references. When you look at the actual motifs, they are abstract in nature but also border slightly on figuration. There's a really nice balance.
Smith was born in the Midwest and enjoyed a modest childhood. He studied at Illinois State University in Normal, where his earliest introduction to fine art was through drawing and cartoons. At the same time, he was taking personal photographs and learning the basics of the medium. The Smith archive here at IU has a large collection of family photographs as well as portraits of Smith from when he was a baby to the end of his life.
In the early 1930s he discovered László Moholy-Nagy's The New Vision, which had just been translated to English. He was really blown away by the Bauhausian interest in abstraction and new approaches towards photography. That was the initial catalyst, I think, for his more abstract explorations and thinking about using light as a subject, rather than a tool—or rather, in using it as a tool, making the focus of the image light, form, and volume.
The mythology of Henry Holmes Smith is quite charming and seems unreal in our world today. After devouring Moholy-Nagy’s book, he attended one of his lectures in Chicago. Soon after, he wrote a letter essentially saying, "I love your work. I read your book. I heard you lecture. I'm also making color photographs." Wouldn't you know, one day while Smith was working as a technician at Marshall Field's color photo lab, Moholy-Nagy just showed up?! He asked Smith if he would be interested in teaching the first light workshop at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. It was as if his hero had just dropped into his life and asked him for this favor. Of course, Smith took him up on the offer and taught at the New Bauhaus, which had been founded in 1937, for one year.
MR: How long had Moholy-Nagy been making abstract work before his book was published and it reached Henry Holmes Smith?
LR: I would say at least 10-15 years. It was actually his friend, Erzsébet Landau, and his first wife, Lucia Schulz, who introduced him to photography and photograms, respectively…though neither woman is commonly afforded this credit. Later, he participated in an exhibition in Berlin, which served as his introduction to Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. Their holistic approach towards art and commercial design--and the integration of those disciplines as both functional and visually appealing--propelled his interest in reevaluating the photographic medium.
MR: In thinking about Henry Holmes Smith and what is recorded in the Smith Archive, can you see a clear shift in how he was making photography after he was exposed to Moholy-Nagy, or were there inklings of his later developments that precede his knowledge of Moholy-Nagy? In other words, was he already experimenting with abstract photography and then, when he saw Moholy-Nagy, immediately identified, "This is it." How did that happen? I’m interested in how the archive is able to tell that story.
LR: That's a really great question. In the ‘20s Smith was, like many, making representational photographs. That being said, he was also focusing on what could be called environmental abstractions. For example, rather than photographing an entire barn door, focusing on a subtley or detail: how the wood grain or distressed surface characteristics might construct an image of some kind. It was likely after Smith discovered Moholy-Nagy's work that his harder geometric abstractions appeared: the photograms dominated by patterns, materials and textiles, etc.
His early interest in color can be traced back to his drawings and watercolors from the ‘30s. He was a very prolific watercolorist and often turned to vibrant, almost fauvist colors, like magentas, oranges, yellows,and cyans. He began experimenting with color photography as early as the mid-'30s and then really dove into the dye transfer process throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.
MR: It seems that there is sometimes a distinction that is made between photographers and other artists. You'll find a lot of visual artists working in various media; they will make sculpture, painting, watercolor, printmaking, and more. They may also work in photography, but it seems that art photographers are pigeonholed into very narrowly making photography.
I find that when you come across an artist/photographer that works in watercolor, who is truly a visual artist, that quality comes through in every media that they work with because they're always playing with how to make something. It doesn't necessarily have to be a photograph. As you said, it could be a watercolor, it could be a drawing, it could be a painting. How much of that breadth of understanding of visual arts do you think allowed Henry Holmes Smith to be open to the idea of abstract photography?
LR: I think it certainly helped a lot. He experimented with cartoons and caricatures, comic strips, and watercolors. He also submitted a lot of cartoons to his university newspapers, as well as the New Yorker, the Chicagoan, [U1] and other similar publications. However, it is interesting that photographers are usually considered just photographers.
It’s a strange inclination, but one that I think has a lot to do with photography's history: its early associations with science, then commercial advertising, and later acceptance into the realm of the visual arts. Given its reproducibility, photography was valued as lesser than, say, painting or sculpture. In fact, most museums didn't start collecting photography until the '60s and '70s.
On top of that, color photography was relegated to advertising and more commercial use for decades. For Smith to be joining color and abstraction in the '30s is pretty wild.
MR: As well as creating dye transfer prints. His use of a technical process that requires a lot of skill—it’s not like simply taking a cibachrome—to fulfill his artistic vision illustrates how well he balanced his artistic side with straight photography.
LR: Yes—it’s a super complex and lengthy process. There are hundreds and hundreds of color variations of single images in the Smith Archive . Considering the amount of time required to make just one dye transfer print, I am blown away. He must have been spending so much time in his lab. Curiously, Smith had periods of really high activity and then periods of no activity. His dye transfer prints were often completed in short spurts.
MR: You said earlier that Henry Holmes Smith has not received a lot of attention. How would you asses his artistic legacy? Who has he influenced, and has his work been associated with any art movements?
LR: Given his dedication to photo education, Smith had many close, and significant colleagues. He knew all of the major figures of American modernism: Minor White, Aaron Siskind, Clarence John Laughlin, Harry Callahan. He served as professor to several photographers who achieved more notoriety than Smith ever did—Betty Hahn, Jerry Uelsmann, Jack Welpott. Notably, their work looks very different from Smith's andI think that was crucial to Smith's methodology.
In speaking to Betty Hahn last year, she told me that Henry never even showed his students his work. It's begun to feel like he was a bit reclusive with regards to his own practice. I think it has something to do with why it didn't receive much attention[U2] . I’m also sure that being in the Midwest, in Southern Indiana, posed some challenges for networking and connecting with other artists, curators, and institutions. On top of that, there were very few galleries dedicated to photography.
That being said, Henry did participate in two shows on abstraction in photography mounted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’ve never seen any other mention of the titles of the photographs that he included in that exhibition in the archive or literature. His only remaining living son has no idea what those photographs might have been. It’s a mystery I would love to solve.
Though perhaps geographically isolated, Smith had a lot to say about photographic theory, and he was very vocal through his writing. He published in Aperture and in College Art Association publications. When I read these articles, I noted a real sense of resentment toward photography’s status quo of that era, which elevated a more purist approach.
MR: Living in the Midwest, specifically Southern Indiana, and teaching there for so long, how did Smith connect with other artists? He had connections with people in Chicago and the New Bauhaus there, and with a few other contemporaries, but how isolated was he? How many art photography instructors were there in Indiana?
He could possibly have been the only one in a four or five-state area. I can certainly see how that would've impacted him. Beyond Chicago, he may have had no ability to have conversations about the medium. I have had conversations with working art photographers who are in teaching but have no outlet to discuss art photography because they're surrounded by ceramicists. An art department may have two ceramicists or three painters. It's odd that art photography continues to be a very small niche considering the impact photography has had.
LR: Yes, definitely. Smith was responsible for conceptualizing one of the first masters in fine arts in photography programs in the United States. He was also one of the first to conceptualize a history of photography course in the United States. He was at the forefront of elevating photography to be seen as both an academic and artistic medium.
To return to isolation: one thing that Smith did that was instrumental to testing out his pedagogy and an attempt to attract photographers to the Midwest was to host photography workshops at IU. The first was in 1956 and the second was in 1962. Many well-known photographers were in attendance and gave seminars at these workshops. Students were also invited to sit in on the discussions. These forums were about discussing the potential of the medium, including how to read and interpret photographs, producing photographs on site, and performing group studies. Smith believed in pushing boundaries and encouraging reactions like “I didn’t know that was possible” or “I didn’t know photographs could say that!”
The Henry Holmes Smith archive holds over 6000 objects. The majority of those are works by Smith, but there are also works by his contemporaries, students, and other peers, as well as some 19th century cased photographs and exhibition ephemera . There is an upcoming exhibition at the Eskenazi Museum that I am curating on contemporary cameraless photography, which grows out of my research on Smith.The exhibition, which is called Direct Contact Cameraless Photography Now, will be on view February 16 through July 9, 2023. It brings together recent work by over 40 intergenerational, global artists working with cameraless processes.My hope is that visitors might be surprised by photography’s physical, material, and tactile aspects. With so many voices represented, it will be a really exciting show for our museum and the larger region.