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Fitz. W. Guerin (geb. 17. März 1846[1] in New York, gestorben 1903 in St. Louis), war ein US-amerikanischer Fotograf. Er kämpfte als Soldat im US-amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg und betrieb später ein Fotoatelier in St. Louis.

Lebensweg

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Rohstoffe, Zettelkasten

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Englischer Wikiperdia-Eintrag zu Fitz. W. Guerin

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Fitz W. Guerin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitz_W._Guerin

broadway.cas.sc.edu

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Fitz W. Guerin (1846-1903) Time Period: 1876-1900 Location: St. Louis

Biography:

One of the significant society and celebrity photographers of St. Louis, F.W. Guerin was born in New York City in 1846. At age thirteen he left his family, heading westward for employment. Energetic and intelligent with a lively interest in new technology, he worked at the Merrill Drug Company in St. Louis and at Western Union before enlisting as a teenage infantryman in the Union Army. He fought under Generals Sherman, Lyon, and Grant and won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in combat on April 28 & 29, 1863. During the war he came into contact with photographers and developed a fascination with the art.

Upon his discharge, F.W. Guerin attached himself to a St. Louis photographic gallery doing menial jobs in order to learn the chemistry and technique. Poor pay drove him into railroading where he strung telegraph wires and briefly served as conductor of freight trains. The danger of the newly laid western rails encouraged his return to photography, when he entered into a partnership to establish Remington, Guerin, and Mills Gallery in Otummwa, Iowa. After five months his partners bought him out; Guerin used the money to return to St. Louis where he worked as camera man and retoucher in the galleries of three established photographers, J.H. Fitzgibbon, John A. Sholton, and G. Cramer. While in their employ, Guerin spent his time learning each man’s methods and techniques.

During this period, Guerin also refined his skills as a draughtsman, engraver, and painter—necessary adjuncts to developing in portrait work. In 1876 he set up as an independent camera artist, capitalized to the amount of $50, at 906 N. Sixth Street. He enjoyed little local success until 1878 when pictures submitted to the photo salon of the World Exposition in Paris won a medal for excellence. Instantly his business transformed, with sitters clamoring for his services and his reputation enabling him to secure sittings with stage performers and other celebrities. His gallery and staff expanded, requiring several relocations to larger buildings—627 Oliver Street, 1137 Washington Street, and finally, in 1891, in St. Louis's West End. He enjoyed repeated success in international exhibitions, particularly for his portraits, but Guerin believed that photographers, like graphic artists, had to cultivate the public, so he prepared many genre scenes—humorous or sentimental—for sale in his gallery to visitors.

He photographed portraits using natural light, a J.C. Summerville #3, D lens, and two large mirrors used as refractors. He experimented with wide-angle lenses and rapid shutter releases. After the invention of the flash light system of illumination, Guerin became an adherent and the most accomplished practitioner in the Midwest during the 1890s. He published a manual about the use of flash light photography for advertising, one of the rarest of American photographic imprints. In 1900 he opened the Guerin College of Photography in St. Louis. The College did not long survive his death in 1903.

NOTES: An appreciation of Guerin's genre work appears at: http://www.stlmag.com/St-Louis-Magazine/March-2009/Midwestern-Fantasia/ David S. Shields/ALS

Specialty:

During the quarter century of Guerin's time in business, the majority of his income came from society portraiture. He and J.C. Strauss dominated the St. Louis market. Celebrity portraiture was a sidelight to his business and an opportunity to experiment with posing. Because of the survival of trove of Guerin's popular genre images in the Library of Congress, however, this component of his business has recently taken on a particular importance among historians of photography.

Quelle: https://www.broadway.cas.sc.edu/content/fitz-w-guerin

LoC: Fotografien von Fitz W. Guerin

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F.W. Guerin, photographer, No. 627 Olive St., St. Louis. Photograph shows portrait of Mary ("Mamie") Craig Lawton as a girl. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015650746/ https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=contributor:guerin,+f.+w.+%28fitz+w.%29

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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FW-guerin.png

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As a young man, Sponagle had gone off to the American mid-west where he attended the Guerin School of Photography in St. Louis, Missouri. Fitz W. Guerin is still a controversial figure in the history of photography – having produced elaborate genre-photographs which today seem heavily Victorian, filled with drama and bathos and innocent erotica. Just what a young boy from Nova Scotia took away from his experience with Guerin might be a mystery, but Sponagle came back a dedicated photographer. He returned home and set up Sponagle’s Studio in Truro, which he operated for 50 years.

Quelle: Friday, September 3, 2010, Nova Scotia Connections -- Picture Worth A Thousand Words, http://elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com/2010/09/nova-scotia-connections-picture-worth.html


How F. W. “Fitz” Guerin Created His Illustrations by Robert Lansdale A related article by Robert Lansdale, “F.W. ‘Fitz’ Guerin and Flash Photography,” appears in Photographic Canadiana, Vol. 35, No. 4, Feb.-Mar.- Apr. 2010, 18-20. – Ed. One of the photographers who caught my eye while searching through photography journals of the 1880s was F.W. “Fitz” Guerin of St. Louis, Missouri. A number of his illustrations showed his capability of stopping action in studio-created tableaux. His creative artistry in genre scenes and allegorical pictures led to a public demand for enlarged prints that could be framed and sold for Cascade Panorama - Reunion Issue 17 October 2010 home and office decor. To achieve the necessary high quality and sharpness for such enlargements required shooting with a large negative (8x10 or bigger) and it also required that the lens be closed down to a small f. stop in order to gain sufficient depth of field. This would result in long exposures, possibly 15 seconds to several minutes. Well, his stop-action pictures certainly said that he was not following that path for his images (Figures 1 - 3). Figure 1. Guerin gained much attention for the quality of his creative photography and for his finished images. He was noted for his pleasing child studies which became best sellers by the art dealers. Note: Illustrations are from Portraits in Photography by the Aid of Flash Light. Figure 2. Caption is with Figure 3 below. Figure 3. Other samples of Guerin’s genre illustrations which won public approval. Born in 1846 in New York, Guerin (Figure 4) served with distinction in the Union army during the American Civil War. With peace, he took to working in a gallery, then for the railroads and Figure 4. Portrait of photographer F.W. “Fitz” Guerin of St. Louis, Missouri. even became an itinerant photographer before serving as an operator for J.H. Fitzgibbon in St. Louis who became editor of the St. Louis Practical Photographer. In 1876 Guerin opened his own gallery, worked hard and became a success. Guerin was a great supporter of the fledgling Photographers Association of America, founded in 1880, serving on committees and becoming President in 1899. In the association’s annual photo competitions he soon was garnering top prizes with subsequent reproduction of his images in the pages of the photo magazines. It was there that he gained most recognition. He was a master of lighting; he won over twenty medals. Some 350 of his pictures are preserved in the Library of Congress. By chance I stumbled upon his thin little book entitled Portraits in Photography by the Aid of Flash Light. Published in 1898 at the request of prominent members of the photographic fraternity, it set down Guerin’s methods and secrets with simplest explanation. Fitz explains in the opening chapter of his book that some 15 years before he started to make large photographs, he had a very large Hermatage portrait lens which allowed him to make (what he considered at the time) very short exposures of three to four seconds at the largest opening. Being worked at full opening, the diffusion was too great in the majority of instances to make good negatives, and with enough sharpness to be enlarged for wall display. As Fitz says, “Many large plates and much time was wasted with the old method of daylight and time exposures. And many of the best pictures were lacking in action, a feature most essential in attracting interest for the picture. My brain was inventive but many of my best ideas had but short lives. When the flashlight machine first made its appearance I was amongst the foremost to investigate its claims. I found very few that I considered good – or produced images that matched the appearance of being made by daylight. After many experiments in my spare time, I came to the conclusion that to succeed I must follow the same method in lighting by the aid of flashlight as I had previously done in my efforts with daylight. To this I began new trials and experiments.” There had been innumerable injuries and deaths from the use of magnesium for flash photography. The common method of operation was to blow a quantity of magnesium powder through a burning gas flame or to burn a length of magnesium ribbon. But such did not produce an instantaneous exposure. Cascade Panorama - Reunion Issue 18 October 2010 Improvements were made to devise powders of magnesium mixed with potassium chlorate plus other chemicals. Such mixtures were explosive if blown through a flame so it was essential that they be ignited by applying a light. From 1893 through to 1896 there were a number of improvements in equipment to make them safer and to create bigger- broader lighting systems. S.M. Williams and J.A. Shepard in September 1893 secured British patent 17,091 for a monster flash holding a total of 36 cup holders (Figures 5 and 6). They had already given demonstrations in their Figure 5. An advertisement for the Improved Williams Flash Machine in Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin of December 1895. home town of San Francisco (Pacific Coast Photographer, January 1892). Six cup holders were mounted along each of six rods which combined both “burner arm” and “powder cup arm.” At the appropriate moment the cups simultaneously dumped their powder into the gas flame of the burner arm. A screen was placed over each flame to spread the powder. This was combined with a device to simultaneously open the shutter. A safer system was offered by M.W. Newcomb in British patent 9496 of May 1895. At the back of each shelf holding flash powder in 25 cups, there Figure 6. A close detail of the Williams Flash Machine showing 36 cups spread over six different arms. Pneumatic controls activated everything at the same time. was a matching spirit or gas flame into which a wire loop was constantly immersed to make it red hot. At the moment for exposure the wire loops swung forward to make contact with the powder and produce the flash. The movement of loops was effected simultaneously over the whole stand by a pneumatic piston. There were other styles offered with the Clifford flash-light machine (18 cups) on a tripod stand, being touted as the “most simple and practical.” (Figure 7) Figure 7. The Clifford Flash Machine was promoted as being safest and more portable. It had 18 flash cup holders for broad illumination. Cascade Panorama - Reunion Issue 19 October 2010 So Guerin pursued the avenue of lighting his studio sets with the largest of flash equipment which, with its broadness, gave equivalent lighting as he achieved by daylight studio windows (Figure 8). Figure 8. The setting of background and flash rack for the image of the child in a wagon. He suggested setting up the scene with the available window light, then place the flash machine between windows and model, about 8 to 10 feet away (Figure 9). Figure 9. The studio setting during the exposure for a Cavelier & Lover illustration. Note the position of the flash rack above and to the side of the models while white walls acted as reflectors to lighten the shadows. The volume of light allowed him to stop down the lens for greatest sharpness (Figure 10). Figure 10. The studio setting showing camera, flash rack, the milk-maid and the photographer. It would appear that Guerin was shooting on 16x20 inch plates. But there was something else in his pictures that defied explanation. Surely the flash could not stop all fast action that he portrayed. His detail was infinite. Guerin explained his “secret” in the book. His technique was to alter the angle of his studio set-up so that everything was on a tilt of many degrees. For “The Dizzy Whirl” of the dancer (Figure 11), Figure 11. The stop-action of a ballet pirouette was simulated by the model lying on a board supported by bars coming from the background. The flying hair and dress are hanging down motionless. Cascade Panorama - Reunion Issue 20 October 2010 the background was laid 90 degrees over on its side while the model reclined full-length on a board held in position by an iron rod which protruded through the background. One side of her hair and dress hung down naturally while the other side of the dress was suspended by the subject. In actual fact there was no action by the dancer. Additional ploys were used to create illusions. The lady cyclist (Figure 12) was also lying on a board Figure 12. Action galore as this young lady peddled her bicycle into the wind. Turn the picture sideways to see the actual studio setup as the young lady lies on her back with the bike wheel tied to the ceiling. Wheel spokes were later retouched from the negative. while the front wheel was wired to the ceiling. Weights in the back of the dress caused it to flare in the “wind.” Later the spokes of the wheels were removed by the retoucher. Similarly the “Nymph” (Figure 13) was reclining on her back with the harp wired to the ceiling. So you can’t believe everything you see ... even back in the late nineteenth century! Cascade Panorama - Reunion Issue 21 October 2010 Figure 13. A “Nymph” posed classically on a rock, won awards and much attention by the public. Here again the model reclined on her back while holding the harp which was wired to the ceiling.

Quelle: http://phsc.ca/camera/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/CascadePanoramaReunionIssue.pdf

Veröffentlichungen von Fitz. W. Guerin

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  • Portraits in photography by the aid of flash light by F. W Guerin, 2 editions published in 1898 in English

Fotos von Fitz. W. Guerin

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Personen-Normdaten etc.

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Einzelnachweise

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  1. ↑ Rijksmuseum, RKD Artists, „Fitz.W. Guerin“, https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/artists/418480
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