By Conor Risch

The Photographs of Homer Page: The Guggenheim Year: New York, 1949-50
By Keith F. Davis
Hall Family Foundation
in association with
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Distributed by Yale University Press
Hardcover, $50
11 x 11, 144 pages
98 tritone plates

In his introduction to this volume, Keith F. Davis, curator of photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, writes that the rediscovery of the work of documentary photographer Homer Page “provides a previously unrecognized bridge between the artistic worlds of Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank.”
    
Davis begins his biographical essay on Page’s life by noting that Page was the youngest of ten photographers invited by Edward Steichen to speak at a Museum of Modern Art symposium, “What is Modern Photography,” in 1950. Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Gjon Mili, Lisette Model, Wright Morris, Irving Penn, Ben Shahn, Charles Sheeler and Aaron Siskind were the others. Steichen chose Page to speak about “new trends in documentary photography,” Davis notes. “In general, I think there has been a trend away from the old documentary standby of objective reporting toward a more intimate, personal, and subjective way of photographing,” Page told the packed house. Davis goes on to note that the other nine photographers at the symposium that day went on to join the “pantheon of twentieth-century photography.” Page obviously did not, and this book and the corresponding exhibition at The Nelson-Atkins Museum exist to correct that omission.
    
Page was born in Oakland in 1918 to a real estate developer and a “refined and proper woman.” He became interested in photography as an adolescent, and “like so many of his generation,” writes Davis, “felt little allegiance to the existing—and apparently failed—political and economic order,” which Davis considers a result of the Page family’s financial losses during the depression.
    
After enrolling at UCLA, transferring to Berkeley, and changing majors repeatedly, Page eventually settled on the study of art. He met Christina Gardner, a photography enthusiast, in late 1939 or early 1940, and married her a year later. Through Gardner he came to know Dorothea Lange, who was a family friend, and the couple and their newborn daughter even lived for a time in the garden cottage owned by Lange and her husband, Paul Schuster Taylor. Gardner also worked as Lange’s assistant for a number of years.
    
During WWII, Page made photographs on the streets of San Francisco with a Rolleiflex camera, around the shipyards where he worked during the War, unable to fight due to a punctured eardrum. Lange suggested he send photographs to Nancy Newhall at The Museum of Modern Art (She was filling in for Beaumont Newhall while he was at war), who invited him to send more work as he made it. Ansel Adams also wrote about one of his photographs in U.S. Camera magazine.
    
By 1944 Page was working full time as a professional photographer, and in 1947 he taught photography at what would become the San Francisco Art Institute, where Ansel Adams was director of the department of photography along with his assistant, Minor White.
    
Through Lange, Page came to know Edward Steichen, who had taken over the photography department at MoMA. Page was included in various exhibitions Steichen mounted at the museum. In 1948, having moved to New York, Page applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship with recommendations from Steichen, Lange and her husband, Taylor, and Beaumont Newhall. He was accepted and awarded $3000.
    
In his application, Page said his goal was to “photograph the qualities of the relationship between urban people and the cultural forces which surround them.” He also proposed creating a book of the work. Due to various circumstances, Page was never able to publish a book of the pictures he made during the year of his fellowship, and he soon left the fine-art world to travel and work as a successful photojournalist, even affiliating himself with Magnum for a short time, before settling in Connecticut later in life.
    
Page’s major—and heretofore uncelebrated—accomplishment, Davis argues, was his development of a visual language that combined both “documentary and artistic concerns.”
    
Davis argues, “Page’s achievement bears comparison to the finest work of his time.” His street photography can be “understood as an extension of the work of photographers such as [Helen] Levitt and [Sid] Grossman,” who preceded him in New York, and “some of his images” anticipate the work of Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand. “He understood the value of existing approaches while anticipating the key creative concerns of the generation to come,” writes Davis.
    
In his introduction Davis acknowledges, “This kind of retrospective ‘discovery’ presents a significant art-historical challenge. The stylistic trends Page anticipated are themselves, now history.” Whether or not this volume establishes the visual language created by Page as historically significant is for others to debate. But Page’s work and his exploration of the documentary idea as told by Davis, does tell an interesting story about a major transitional period in the practice of “documentary” photography—and indeed in American culture—as it was experienced by an accomplished artist and critical thinker. And it’s a story any photographer is likely to enjoy.