San Francisco Visual Creative Community 1945 to 1970
Click on an image for a larger view and the artist’s gallery
Homer Page
(1918 – 1985)
Homer Page was born in Oakland, California and studied art and social psychology at the University of California from 1936 — 1940. His neighbor and mentor, Dorothea Lange, encouraged him to take up photography in 1944. By ’47 he was featured in a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Page received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 and he took the opportunity to document his interest in modern culture primarily by photographing people on the streets of New York City. He was easy and sly in his craft. Mostly his subjects seem unaware of his presence, but the tension of the ’40’s is clearly visible.
The fellowship allowed Page to focus on his photography for a year. While he was widely recognized for this work, he transitioned into a professional career as a magazine photographer. Few of his photographs were in private hands and his work was largely forgotten by the time of his death in 1985.
A brilliant but overlooked photographer active in the late 1940s and 50s. It focuses on his previously unpublished photographs of New York taken while a Guggenheim Fellow from 1949 to 1950. First recognized by Ansel Adams in 1944, California-born Page exhibited in a major show of young artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. Four years later, he was invited to participate in MoMA’s seminal photography symposium, alongside 10 other prominent photographers, including Walker Evans, Irving Penn, and Aaron Siskind.
In photographs that echo those of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank, Page uniquely synthesized documentary and artistic concerns. His work as a Guggenheim Fellow – – which depicts pedestrians in motion, friends and family members conversing, commuters, children playing, political rallies and protests, and isolated figures resting and watching – – offers a fascinating look at New York during the late 1940s and represents the culmination of Page’s most important work.
“We are not sure of war or peace, prosperity or recession; not sure what balance to strike between our freedom and our security, either as a nation or as individuals. The fundamental issues are clouded and almost certainly in transition. This makes any attempt to record conditions extremely difficult.” — Homer Page
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