Hans Namuth's Photographs of Jackson Pollock as Art Historical Documentation

Abstract

Hans Namuth's photographs and films of Jackson Pollock document the physical environment and painting technique of one of America's most famous and controversial artists at the peak of his career: 1950 to 1956. Just as Daguerre's famous 1839 view of a boulevard in Paris documents facts about early 19th-century chimney pots, roof carpentry, and shoeshine boys before it assumes its status as a turning point in Western visual culture, Namuth's images of Pollock are visual records before they are works of art. What a photograph says in itself and what others can say about it produces a subtle triangulation between 1) the physical record of what light etched at a given moment on a given chemical emulsion, 2) the meaning of that data relative to an art historian's inevitably selective and usually subjective purpose, and 3) the role of the image as a cultural “icon.” It is a tribute to the strength of Namuth's technical and visual sensibility that his images of Jackson Pollock not only record the artist at work but, in certain instances, have come to symbolize the aesthetic roots of an entire school of American painting.