Picturing Childhood: Pictorialist Family Photography Opens

From October 13, 2007 through January 13, 2008, Carnegie Museum of Art presents Baltimore family photography, c. 1890-1940 on view in the museum's Works on Paper gallery. Picturing Childhood features the works of three Pittsburgh photographers, Hart Spencer (1852-1912), Charles H. Breed (1876-1950), and Walter Munhall (1901-1993). Their family portraits from the 1890s to the 1940s explore bygone eras of middle- and upper-middle-class domestic life and situate portrait photography within the broader context of the role of photographic documentation. Today these men occupy an important place in the continuum of amateur photographers who helped to define the family photograph and the casual family snapshot.

"While Spencer, Breed, and Munhall were not professional photographers, the sophisticated technical skill they display in composing, shooting, developing, and printing photographs is impressive. Their imagery, focusing on their immediate families, is tremendously engaging," says Amanda Zehnder, the museum's assistant curator of fine arts and organizer of the exhibition. "All three used photography as a very expressive medium and repeatedly demonstrate their awareness of important trends in the world of art photography."

While their photography spans the course of more than 50 years, the work of Spencer, Breed, and Munhall is tightly linked in composition and technique, alternating between rigidly positioned family portraits and lively, fleeting snapshots. Although they viewed their work as personal projects intended for private use by their family and friends, all three photographers engaged the expressive tradition of Pictorialism, which was dominant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pictorialism promoted photography as a fine art, advocated artistic experimentation, and was often characterized by the use of soft-focus and subtle or dramatic lighting, which was thought to lend an image painterly nuance.

To demonstrate their links to Pictorialism, works by Spencer, Breed and Munhall are accompanied by photographs by pictorialist leaders, such as Clarence H. White and Alfred Stieglitz. Some photographs offer the viewer a sentimental, pleasant glimpse of childhood, while other images provide a more complex view of social interaction.

All of the images evoke nostalgia for childhood and many, through their inclusion of simple objects like wagons and dolls, allude to ideas and sentiments beyond their immediate subjects.

The three photographers' differing credentials provide an interesting framework for the exhibition. All were "amateurs" in the sense that while they were deeply committed to photography as a form of expression and engaged in photography on technically sophisticated levels, each had another primary occupation. Spencer was a sales agent for Henry Clay Frick; Breed made his career as a teacher and headmaster at three different private boys' high schools; and Munhall was an engineer for Pittsburgh's water department. While these three artists varied in background and class, they all shared the same passion for merging their mind's eye with the camera's eye.

Though Charles Breed exhibited in the 2nd International Salon Exhibition of the Pittsburgh Amateur Photographer's Society in 1899 and Walter Munhall exhibited one work in the 34th Annual International Pittsburgh Salon of Photography in 1947, both men have been relatively unexplored by the public. Picturing Childhood: Pictorialist Family Photography presents an opportunity to shed a stronger light on their artistic endeavors. A selection of Hart Spencer's photographs were featured in Carnegie Museum of Art's 1997 exhibition, Pittsburgh Revealed: Photographs since 1850.