Johan Hagemeyer, A Pictorial Interpretation    Sep 9 - Nov 3, 2009

Formally trained as a horticulturalist, Johan Hagemeyer (1884, Amsterdam, the Netherlands - 1962, Berkeley, California) is remembered for being an early 20th century photographer, artistic intellectual, close friend and important early influence in the career of Edward Weston.

Hagemeyer emigrated to southern California in 1911 to grow fruit trees with his brothers, but it was a trip to Washington D.C. and a visit to the Library of Congress where he encountered Alfred Stieglitz's seminal publication, Camera Work. The following year in 1916 an afternoon with Stieglitz at Gallery 291 in New York City convinced him to devote his life to the then emerging world of artistic photography.

Returning to California with an introduction to Anne Brigman he took up residence in San Francisco, attending photography exhibitions and apprenticing with a portrait photographer. But it was a visit in 1917 to Edward Weston's Tropico, California studio that proved to be beneficial for both young photographers. They immediately forged a friendship and working partnership that would have a profound and lasting influence on each others' artistic development.

In 1923 he opened a portrait studio in San Francisco and also built a summer studio in Carmel, California which soon became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, that included Imogen Cunningham, Roi Partridge, Tina Modotti, and Edward Weston. Inspired by Stieglitz's Gallery 291, Hagemeyer's studio exhibited paintings, sculpture, as well as photographs. Specializing in portraiture, Hagemeyer photographed many prominent figures of the day, especially in the arts, literature, and sciences, including Albert Einstein, Robinson Jeffers and Salvador Dali.

Although Hagemeyer had an intensly intellectual influence on Edward Weston, a divide emerged over their developing and divergent styles. When Weston organized Group f/64, Hagmeyer refused to adapt the theories of straight, unmanipulated photography. His modern compositions embodied a pictorial, soft focus with quiet tonalities. The images in this exhibition are striking for their soft-focus renderings of figures, urban and industrial landscapes, organic forms, like flowers, hands and still lifes.

His 1938 one man exhibition of over 100 photographs at the DeYoung Museum prompted San Francisco Chronicle citric, Alfred Frankenstein to write, "His textures and colors run, rather, to dark-toned richness, but never, and rather miraculously, to the loss of clarity in the representation. In short, the man behind the camera has a painter's sense of the picture surface and a modern photographer's sense of the living, characteristic, unposed moment in the subject's life".

By 1947 disenchanted with its commercialism he left Carmel and returned to San Francisco, photographing the city from his studio on Telegraph Hill. By 1952 he had settled in Berkeley, where he would spend his remaining years in the company of a few friends from the academic world. He died on May 20, 1962 poor and virtually forgotten at age 78.

For more information or images please call the gallery at 415 788 4641 or email at info@scottnicholsgallery.com. Gallery hours are Tues-Sat, 11am-5:30pm, and by appointment.