On November 10, 1860, Harper’s Weekly, A Journal of Civilization put the image of the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, on its cover. Tiny print below the image reads “Photographed by Brady.” But what the magazine’s readers saw there was not a reproduction of the photographer’s portrait of the beardless Lincoln, but a wood engraving by Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
During the two decades since the late 1830s when the first commercially produced cameras were manufactured in France, the photographic image had established its authority, even if the operation of a camera was cumbersome at best. When Lincoln posed for his portrait, the slow emulsion on the glass plate required his motionlessness for nearly a full minute. Nevertheless, the camera, or perhaps the novel idea of a captured reality, offered a new perspective to every aspect of life. “What had formerly been the province of the fine arts was now the business and interest of everyone,” wrote Philip C. Beam in Winslow Homer’s Magazine Engravings (1979). “The demand for a visual account became voracious.”
In Winslow Homer and the Camera, Dana Byrd and Frank Goodyear illuminate Homer’s position and endeavors during a turbulent period of technological and cultural transition. Goodyear, a co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, writes, “Relying at times upon borrowed images, Homer developed an artistic practice that was less conventional and more interconnected with the larger visual culture than that of many of his contemporaries.”
After an apprenticeship in Boston where he designed sheet music, Homer went to Harper’s Weekly just as the country rushed to war with itself. Dispatched in 1862 as an artist-correspondent to the Union’s Peninsula Campaign in Virginia, Homer produced engravings depicting the fighting and life behind the front line. Matthew Brady’s war photos may be what we now regard as the war’s defining images, but Harper’s audience peered at Homer’s work. “It was during the period immediately following Homer’s return from the front that he started to paint in earnest,” says Goodyear. Significantly, his “first painting, Sharpshooter, grew out of his recent experience at Yorktown.” The hand and eye of the documentarian, challenged by the looming potential of the camera and attuned to his audience, had made a truly modern leap into painting.
Art historians still debate how “realistic” Homer’s paintings are. When I look at his work, I see an artist far less concerned with details than his avowed realist contemporaries. In a manner unique to his psyche, he integrated the care of the illustrator with the inner vision of the dreamer. The anecdotal merged with the archetypal — “reality” was slightly smudged, as if lightly shaken out of register (left, see “The Veteran in a New Field,” 1865). While photographers set up their bulky apparatus to take pictures of corpses and underscore the nation’s vast tragedy, Homer explored “the larger psychologically charged experiences and issues of the conflict.” He sometimes referred to photos, not to copy them “but rather to be a source from which he might draw ideas and learn certain lessons.” In the authors’ take on Homer’s career and life, the camera is never far from Homer’s reach or consideration — but they are not on a mission to persuade us that the camera profoundly influenced the painter. Their measured, nuanced approach provides the pleasures of their text — though at times both Goodyear and Byrd strain to keep photography’s relevance within their narrative. 
In his mid-40s, Homer acquired two cameras while traveling abroad in the early 1880s. The first was an English-made Marion and Company “Academy” miniature camera that could fit in one’s pocket. The other camera, a Mawson & Swan (see right), produced larger images of 3-by-4 inches. These cameras represented the first wave of amateur photography – and Homer qualified as such. Rather than using photography to replicate images in paintings, Homer “became more concerned with its unique visual effects … photography reinvigorated his work and initiated a wider dialogue about the nature of representation … a site for experimentation and a tool that complemented and expanded his practice and that of others.”
Goodyear’s incisive 64-page essay is followed by Byrd’s equally fluent chapter on “Trouble In Paradise? Homer in the Bahamas, Cuba, and Florida, 1884-1886.” While offering us plenty to look at, the authors assiduously cover Homer’s activity and influences – where he was, what he was observing, and so forth. The “trouble” in Byrd’s chapter title refers to what has been termed by Krista Thompson as “tropicalization” – the production of island imagery for tourists’ consumption – in this case, portraying black Bahamians “as picturesque and harmless.” Half of Homer’s 1884 paintings depicted such figures. A professor of art history at Bowdoin, Byrd suggests that Homer was influenced by photographic materials for tourists. One assumes as well that Homer’s camera shutter was happily clicking away.
Clearly, Homer was quite comfortable both behind and in front of the camera. The book includes several striking photographs of him. Also, in the 1880s Homer commissioned photographers to take pictures of his paintings. Sometimes, he would even sign the reproductions and have them hung on display.
Just a few years after Homer bought his cameras from the English, the Americans revolutionized the medium in 1888 when the Eastman Company introduced its Kodak No. 1. Action could now be captured with much greater speed, yet the camera was light in weight, designed for the itinerant artist and the avid amateur. Homer bought one and enjoyed making images as he traveled to the tropics. Some of his watercolors of the 1890s bear a resemblance to those images, but Homer’s paintings are hardly derivative. At least, this is the main point that the authors want us to take away regarding how to assess Homer’s relationship to the camera. Other critics have claimed that only Thomas Eakins used the camera more deliberately than Homer.
But Goodyear persuades me – if only by noting how Homer the illustrator adapted Brady’s photo of Lincoln. “Homer did change the image not insignificantly,” he writes. “In addition to reducing the size of his subject’s ears and lessening the shrunken quality of his cheeks, the artist introduced an imaginary backdrop not present in Brady’s photograph.” Harper’s had endorsed the Lincoln candidacy. The prerogatives of business and the advance of technology incited the transformative imagination of the artist.
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[Published by Bowdoin College Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, July 10, 2018. 208 pages, 138 color illustration, $35.00 hardcover]
Below: Winslow Homer with his painting “The Gulf Stream,” circa 1900
Below: Winslow Homer (on left), Charles S. Homer, Sr., and Sam at Prout’s Neck, Maine, 1884
