Artist of the Month: Arnold Genthe

Arnold Genthe was born in Germany in 1869 and traveled to San Francisco in 1895 to work as a tutor. He was supposed to remain in the United States for two years, but quickly decided to establish himself in California.

Genthe was an amateur photographer and frequently photographed life in San Francisco’s Chinatown. His photos were well received by publishers, and he decided to open a studio and make a go as a professional. Though the earthquake and fire of 1906 destroyed his studio and many of his negatives, Genthe re-established himself after the disaster and continued his successful career as a portraitist. In 1908, he spent six months in Japan taking photographs of that country, his first foray into travel photography.

In 1911, Genthe moved to New York for professional reasons and picked up right where he had left off in San Francisco. From the beginning of his career, Genthe had believed in the creation of a new kind of photography, one that favored the spontaneous over the pose. He felt that a sitter’s true personality was more likely to be revealed if they were captured unaware; the pose is artifice.

Genthe was also one of the first photographers to fully appreciate the potential of color and was an early user of the Lumière brothers’ Autochrome plates. (His color work, along with the rest of his remaining archive, was purchased by the Library of Congress, making up their Genthe collection.) His pioneering use of color and devotion to his techniques preceded his arrival in New York and insured his commercial success in the publishing capital of the world.

Portrait of Emerson Whithorne by Arnold Genthe.

A lifelong bachelor, Genthe considered himself a true bohemian and had the friends to prove it. In particular, he was friendly with many of the early icons of modern dance, such as Anna Duncan and the other Isadora Duncan dancers. Keeping in line with his artistic philosophy, Genthe preferred to capture dancers improvising as opposed to performing choreographed works. Photography’s technical limitations at the time hindered Genthe’s ability to truly capture movement, so he employed draped and diaphanous clothing to create the illusion of movement.

Arnold Genthe was an unabashedly commercial photographer who was able to successfully incorporate the classic style of the Pictorialists with forward-thinking concepts and his embrace of state-of-the-art-technology. His first photograph was published in Vanity Fair in March 1915. By the time the magazine closed, more than 20 years later, Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield had published more than 100 of Genthe’s portraits and dance and travel photographs. Below is a very small selection from this interesting photographer.

To view the images featured in this post, visit the Conde Nast Store’s Genthe collection.

Click here to view these Arnold Genthe photographs separately.