AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

Karl Struss (1886-1981) first took up photography in 1906 "in self-defense" against long, tedious hours of work in his father's New York City factory. During his first decade as a photographer, Struss was a dedicated Pictorialist with an eye for modern compositions, choosing platinum as his preferred method of printing. But in a series of seven prints titled "New Hampshire Landscape," Struss diverged from the Pictorialist aesthetic employed in his typical platinum photographs of New York and Europe. Struss executed these experimental and intentionally abstracted photographs between 1907 and 1910, during the time he was enrolled in courses with Clarence White at Columbia University's Teachers College. Printed from the same negative, these photographs have been catalogued using enigmatic terms likely coined by Struss himself; descriptions such as "multiple platinum print" and "hand-stippled gum print" hint at the sophistication of Struss' manipulation of a variety of photographic processes. Access to the artist's original negatives and archives in the holdings of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art has revealed a more complete story behind these seven prints. This project investigates both the prints and the chronology of negatives and interpositives in the Carter's collection which relate to Struss' seven New Hampshire Landscape photographs, utilizing XRF and the Carter's newly acquired VSC8000 forensic imaging tool to reveal evidence for Struss' choices of negative and printing processes for his experiments.