Page 97 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 97/146
The rich American artist Bruguière studied art (painting) in Europe, where he met and was befriended by Alfred Steiglitz - the founder of the American Photo-Secession movement of pictorialist photo- graphers. Pictorialism had been revived by 20th century photographers excited by the new develop- ments in visual art sparked by the Cubists, the Fauves, Expressionists, Futurists (etc), and wanted to claim the same freedom of expression and innovation for photographers. We’ve already seen how Alvin Langdon Coburn had created his Vortograph portrait of Ezra Pound (1917), So Bruguiere, work- ing in the cusp of Modernism, with the influence of these modernist movements in his conscious- ness, experiments with these multi-perspective, multi-exposure portraits of his wife - the British act- ress Rosalinde Fuller. The pictorialist photographers introduced us all to the idea of abstract photo- graphy - and with these experiments with neo-abstractionism. The painter-photographer Bruguière also delved into film, photographically story-boarding a project called The Way in 1929.
Francis Bruguière: Still ‘storyboard’ image from The Way - a film project 1929 http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/36824/francis-bruguiere-rosalinde-fuller-in-the-film-the-way-