Lot Essay
Hagemeyer often reused mounts; the reverse of this mount is signed, titled Pines, Carmel, and dated 1939.
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PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF CHARLOTTE LOEB
'A picture in order to deserve that name must be a product of art, a product of an impulse to create, and creating is giving out something of yourself, so that product must of necessity show the essence of the producer, his or her individuality.
'So, let us make the camera the medium of our own ideas, of imagination, of vision, of feeling, of inner relation upon things in the outer world... Set your own personal standard. Do not follow, try and lead' ('Pictorial Interpretation', Camera Craft, August 8, 1922, reprinted in Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Johan Hagemeyer Collection, Guide Series, No. 11, 1985, p. 7).
Born in Amsterdam in 1894, Hagemeyer emigrated to the United States in 1911, eventually settling in San Francisco, where he worked initially as a horticulturalist. During a visit to Washington, D.C., Hagemeyer contracted pneumonia and spent much of his recuperation in the Library of Congress, where he encountered Camera Work. Already a keen amateur photographer and further inspired by the periodical, Hagemeyer traveled to New York to visit Alfred Stieglitz, who provided introductions to a number of photographers on both east and west coasts. Edward Weston in particular became the pivotal influence in Hagemeyer's development as a photographer. Hagemeyer sought him out at his Tropico (Glendale) studio in 1918 and, although they always held very different views about photographic form and function, Hagemeyer became Weston's informal 'pupil'. By 1921, he was proficient enough to begin exhibiting his own work and in 1924 purchased a lot in Carmel-by-the-Sea, a growing intellectual and artistic colony, south of San Francisco, where his studio quickly became a lively forum for artistic gatherings and exhibitions.
The early 1930s proved rather lean years for Hagemeyer, although he had a part-time position as a staff photographer for the San Franciscan, and occasionally collaborated with Weston. Both his portrait studio ventures in Pasadena and Hollywood, foundered. By 1932 he was obliged to return to Carmel and remained there until 1947 when the town's post-war commercialization drove him back to San Francisco and on to Berkeley, where he died in 1962.
Despite the extraordinary vitality and variety of his work, Hagemeyer's name is virtually unknown today. While he exhibited over one hundred prints at the De Young Museum in San Franscico in 1938 and was given a small solo show by the Oakland Museum in 1955, he always remained out-of-step with contemporary Modernist dictat. It was not until 1982 that the Center for Creative Photography organized a retrospective exhibition of his work, with much of the loan material coming from the Loeb Collection.
Lots 151-158, spanning almost three decades of Hagemeyer's career, formed part of this collection. Dr. Leonard Loeb (1891-1978), an eminent Berkeley physicist, was a patron and friend of Hagemeyer from the 1920s and a talented amateur-photographer in his own right who created interesting, Modernist-influenced images such as lot 155, his portrait of a characteristically volatile Hagemeyer.
JOHAN HAGEMEYER (1884-1962)
Cypresses on Telegraph Hill, 1925
Details
JOHAN HAGEMEYER (1884-1962)
Cypresses on Telegraph Hill, 1925
gelatin silver print, printed c. 1948
signed, dated in pencil (on the mount); 'Filbert Street, San Francisco' credit stamp (on the verso)
3 7/8 x 2 7/8in. (9.8 x 7.3cm.)
Cypresses on Telegraph Hill, 1925
gelatin silver print, printed c. 1948
signed, dated in pencil (on the mount); 'Filbert Street, San Francisco' credit stamp (on the verso)
3 7/8 x 2 7/8in. (9.8 x 7.3cm.)
Literature
'Johan Hagemeyer,' The Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Research Series, No. 16, June 1982, pl. 28, there (mis)titled Pines, Carmel.