George H. Seeley (U.S., 1880-1955)

Still Life with Bowl and Flowers

Autochrome circa 1915, 5 x 7 inches

Seeley was just beginning his career as an art teacher in Stockbridge, Massachusetts in 1904 when his work was discovered by the photographer F. Holland Day. Thanks to Day’s influence, 14 of Seeley’s prints were exhibited in the First American Salon of Photography, where they created a sensation. Alfred Stieglitz invited Seeley– at the age of 24 — to become a member of the Photo-Secession, the legendary group of avant-garde photographers.

Still life compositions form an important branch of Seeley’s artistic work. In both black-and-white and Autochrome, they are often impressionistic images with muted lighting and layers of texture and tone. While many photographers sought to include brilliant colors into their Autochromes for dramatic effect, this example shows Seeley exploring the subtleties of the Lumiere plates. It is almost a display of restraint by the photographer: rather than jar the viewer with bold or garish colors, he intrigues us with the textures of flowers as they progress from sharpness in the foreground to a soft and delicate blur. Another glance, and we take note of the softly shimmering reflection on the back lip of the bowl. It is white and colorless, yet curiously important in the midst of a color photograph– a grace note in a picture that is more about light and tonality than it is about a bowl and some flowers.

In his later years, Seeley abandoned serious photography and turned to painting…concentrating on still life.

Photographic historian and curator George Dimock organized the first major museum exhibition of Seeley’s work in 1986. In the catalogue, Dimock comments, “His photographs are transpositions of the intimate, familiar, and local into the realm of aestheticism… Seeley raised the art of pictorial transformation to a very high level. His pictures possess authority, integrity, and coherence as superbly crafted artifacts of a passionate idealist and committed aesthete.”

–from Intimations and Imaginings, The Photographs of George H. Seeley (The Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts: 1986)

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