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The Asheville Art Museum is currently presenting a fascinating landmark exhibition of early 20th century photography, "Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901," which includes a partial reconstruction of an exhibition held in Paris at the turn of the century. The exhibition runs through July 20, 2003. The original exhibition, held at the Universal Exposition of 1900 in Paris, presented over 150 photographs by 31 American photographers and was organized in just six weeks by the pioneering photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston. It was a groundbreaking exhibition with an unprecedented focus on woman photographers at a time when women were just beginning to break into the art world and the professional world. In addition, it was one of the first large European exhibitions of American photography. Johnston was a pioneering photographer among whose many accomplishments was one of the first photographic surveys of North Carolina architecture. The primary focus of "Ambassadors of Progress," however, is the tremendous contribution of American women photographers to the international pictorialist movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. Pictorialism, an attempt to make photography closer to painting, is characterized by careful composition, the use of exotic photographic papers, manipulation of the negative, and other techniques which produced soft focused, haunting, painterly images. Although not all the photographers included in the exhibition worked in the pictorialist style, it is the dominant theme of the exhibition.
Photography, unlike other artistic pursuits at the turn of the century, was considered a proper occupation or pastime for American women, as it allowed them to document the life of the family, long considered a female province. Photography companies such as Kodak capitalized on this trend with pamphlets aggressively selling photography as an easy home-based business. Women in large numbers responded to these advertisements and brochures, and there were a surprising number of professional women photographers at the turn of the century. Twenty-nine artists, including such well-known figures as Gertruede Kasebier, Amelia Van Buren, and Zaida Ben-Yusuf, are represented in this partial reconstruction of the historic exhibition including 77 breathtaking works drawn from the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collections at the Library of Congress and the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. The subjects include landscapes, portraiture, genre scenes, and still-lifes, all of which are evocatively composed and delicately toned using a variety of photographic techniques. Other supporting materials, including books, albums, letters, and manuscripts, will also be displayed. A testament to the strong commitment of female artists to pictorialist photographic aesthetics and virtually unknown to scholars, "Ambassadors of Progress" represents a significant contribution to photographic history. The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to be one of only four US venues for "Ambassadors of Progress." The Asheville Art Museum is open 10 AM - 5 PM, Tuesday through Saturday, and 1 - 5 PM on Sunday. The Museum is open every Friday until 8 PM. The museum is located in the Pack Place Education, Arts and Science Center, 2 South Pack Square, in downtown Asheville. Admission to the museum is $6 for adults and $5 for seniors, students with ID, and for children 4-15; children age 3 and younger are admitted free. Members are admitted free to the museum. For more information, please call the Asheville Art Museum at 828-253-3227, or visit their web site, www.ashevilleart.org.
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Photography, still relatively new at the turn of the century, was often viewed as a peculiarly American art form, with its emphasis on technology and modernity. The United States was just entering the world arena as a major power both politically and culturally, and world's fairs, like the Universal Exposition, served as a propagandizing tool of State. The United States spend a staggering $1.3 million on displays at the Universal Exposition, which was truly a world's fair on a grand scale - it occupied 270 acres and encompassed nearly 83,000 official exhibitors and 25,000 to 30,000 exhibitions. The New World represented modernism and progress, and exhibitions like "Ambassadors of Progress" emphasized both American primacy in this field and reinforced photography's place as a viable art form, not simply a technological tool.