Boots

Boots

Watson-Schutze, Eva Lawrence;

photographer

1867-1935

American

ca. 1905

photograph; platinum print

work

2007.040.067

2007.040.067

2007.040.067.jpg

To request permission to publish or reproduce this work, please contact the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

Although known primarily as a photographer, who in 1901 was instrumental in founding the radical Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz, Eva Watson Schütze was a painter as well as a photographer. Born in Jersey City, Eva Watson was fifteen when she began studying painting with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She remained there for six years. Then for seven years she ran a photoreproduction studio with her friend Amelia Van Buren before setting up her own photographic studio in 1897. The next year she began exhibiting her photographs at the Philadelphia Salon, and in 1899 she was elected to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia. Soon a split developed within the Society between those who wanted photography to be factual and documentary and those who felt it should aim for higher artistic ideals. Watson was strongly on the side of the latter, along with Stieglitz, and suggested he form a separate organization. Early in 1902 he began the Photo-Secession, a group that included the major art photographers of the time, who tended to work in a soft-focus, aestheticized style. Eva Watson’s connection to the organization changed after she married Martin Schütze in 1901. Schütze was a professor of German at the University of Chicago, and Eva moved to Chicago to be with him. Although she was one of its thirteen founders, her ties with the Photo-Secession loosened. In Chicago she and Martin found a new group of friends, humanitarian idealists such as Jane Addams and John Dewey. This circle had close connections with the Byrdcliffe art colony in Woodstock, New York. The Schützes began visiting Woodstock in 1902. They bought land and built a hillside house which they named Hohenwiesen (high meadows). Watson Schütze often spent half the year there, using the Byrdcliffe darkroom to make portraits of her Woodstock associates. The great majority of Watson Schütze’s photographs are portraits of people she liked and admired.

Woodstock Artists Association. Woodstock's Art Heritage: the Permanent Collection of the Woodstock Artists Association with a Historical Survey by Tom Wolf. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. 1987

Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. State University of New York at New Paltz (New Paltz, New York, United States)

Photography Collection. Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art

http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/77

platinum (metal)

photographic paper

platinum process

13.34 x 8.57 cm (5 1/4 x 3 3/8 inches)

Photo-Secession

http://hvvacc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/sdma/id/77