Johan Hagemeyer 1884-1962

Theodore Stebbins, Jr., Karen E. Quinn, and Leslie Furth, Edward Weston: Photography and Modernism (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1999), fig. 13 (this print)

Another print of this image:

CCP Guide Series: Johan Hagemeyer Collection (Center for Creative Photography, 1985), p. 23, 81:111:104

Photographs Originally from the Collection of Richard Lorenz

The photographs in Lots 144 to 151 come originally from the collection of Richard A. Lorenz (1952 – 2001), the writer, conservator, and photographs historian.  A native of Pennsylvania, Richard attended Muhlenberg College in Allentown, initially planning to study medicine.  As editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, he became involved in the arts and subsequently changed the direction of his career.  After graduating from Muhlenberg in 1974, he moved to San Francisco, where he became a well-known curator, archivist, photographs conservator, and author.

Richard’s special interest was in California photography from the first decades of the twentieth century, and his subjects included California Pictorialism, Margrethe Mather, Johan Hagemeyer, and especially Imogen Cunningham.  It was as a Cunningham scholar that he was best known, serving as a trustee of the Imogen Cunningham Trust, curating exhibitions, and publishing both scholarly and popular volumes, including Imogen Cunningham: Ideas without End (1993) and a three-volume series of Cunningham’s work, Flora (1996), Portraiture (1997), and On the Body (1998).

As the photographs offered here will confirm, however, Richard’s taste and broad knowledge in the history of the medium ranged far beyond the photographers whose careers he chronicled.   It may come as a surprise to some that his unerring eye extended to European as well as American modernism, but no surprise that the photographs he chose were of such beauty and significance.   

At the time of this writing, only two other prints of this image have been located, one in the Hagemeyer Collection at the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and one in the Mills College Art Museum.

In 1917, Hagemeyer settled in San Francisco, where he operated a succession of successful portrait studios.  In the early 1920s, Hagemeyer continued his use of the Pictorialist's soft-focus lens, but he began to favor more modernist subjects--the San Francisco cityscape, industrial scenes, mechanization--and he employed interesting visual order and aerial views in the interplay of light and shadow, patterns, and geometric shapes.