Napoleon Sarony’s living pictures: Photography, performance & American art, 1865-1900
Pauwels, Erin Kristl, «Napoleon Sarony’s living pictures: Photography, performance & American art, 1865-1900». Ph.D., Indiana University, Ann Arbor, United States 2015
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the complex artistic legacy of Napoleon Sarony, a pioneering figure in American photography. Based in Manhattan from 1866 until his death in 1896, Sarony was the most celebrated photographic portraitist of his era, known best for adapting the drama and fantasy of Gilded Age theatre to his construction of public images. Rather than creating straightforward likenesses of his subjects such as Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, Sarony used flamboyant pose and costume, elaborate set-pieces and skillful retouching to create what he called “Living Pictures”—expressive portraits that blurred the distinctions between painting and photography, between the realms of performance and everyday life. Drawing upon previously unexamined images and archival materials, this project focuses on four areas of innovation in Sarony’s practice—his use of role play, his artistic branding of his portrait studio, his orchestration of posed “motion” studies, and his exploitation of mixed media—in order to reveal the photographer’s largely overlooked role in shaping visual culture between 1865 and 1900. Previous scholarship has either concentrated primarily upon Sarony’s famous clients or compared him unfavorably with later generations of photographers due to the perceived staginess of his work. In contrast, this study examines Sarony’s photography and its critical reception within the specific context of late nineteenth-century art and media, arguing that the artifice of his portraiture did not preclude its artistic sincerity, but rather helped to define it for both the photographer and his contemporaries. Building upon recent scholarly studies of skeptical vision, Sarony’s staged portraiture is considered here as evidence that Gilded Age visual culture rewarded not only the critical identification of deception, but also and equally, the immersive pleasures allowed by a willing suspension of disbelief. Moreover, given the profound cultural significance of the theatre during this period, the study demonstrates how parallels between late nineteenth-century theories of acting, portraiture, personality and aesthetics might offer fuller understanding of the ways period vision and period art reception were informed by the illusive realisms of the contemporary stage.
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Number of pages: 347
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URL: https://search.proquest.com/docview/1719462894/abstract/F598EE20C04D4605PQ/14
Language: Inglese
key: U8K7UGP5