Invocation of Beauty: The Life and Photography of Soichi Sunami - Couverture rigide

Martin, David F.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0998911216 ISBN 13 : 9780998911212

Editeur : Cascadia Art Museum, 2018

Synopsis

Invocation of Beauty accompanies the first full-scale exhibition of this important American photographer. Drawing almost exclusively from the family archives, the book includes many images that have been previously unpublished.

Soichi Sunami was born in Okayama, Japan in 1885 and immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty and arrived in Seattle in 1907. Initially aspiring to be a painter and sculptor, he studied with local artist Fokko Tadama and became part of the Seattle art community. During this time, he became seriously interested in photography and apprenticed with important local figures such as Wayne Albee and Frank Asakichi Kunishige. He soon found employment in the photography studio of Ella McBride, who became associated with Seattle's Cornish School in its early years. Important modern dancers such as Anna Pavlova and Ted Shawn performed in Seattle and were photographed by the McBride Studio through Nellie Cornish's connections. Many were or became major figures of modern dance.

When Sunami moved to New York in 1922, he attended the Art Students League to advance his art training. He met numerous visual artists who posed in his studio and employed him to photograph their works. Retaining his interest in modern dance from his connections in Seattle, Sunami soon began a collaboration with Martha Graham, producing some of the most iconic images of her dance performances. In 1930, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. asked him to become staff photographer at the new Museum of Modern Art. During the next thirty-eight years he produced more than twenty thousand large-format negatives for the MoMA archive and independently created an important body of work in the field of modern dance photography.

The book includes Sunami's rare, early pictorialist images of the Northwest landscape and follows his journey to the east coast where he became internationally recognized for his brilliant studies of dancers and cultural figures of the era.

This publication is distributed for Cascadia Art Museum.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

David F. Martin is an independent arts researcher, writer, curator and historian who has documented the art history of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest since 1986 as well as Western New York State since 1981. He is the leading authority on early Washington State art and artist's. Many of the artists he has chosen to focus on are women, Japanese and Chinese Americans, Gay & Lesbian and other minorities who had established national and international reputations during the period 1890-1960.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Cascadia Art Museum
• Date d'édition: 2018
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0998911216
• ISBN 13: 9780998911212
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 144
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible