Philip Trager

Philip Trager

“Noted for his seemingly antithetical architecture and outdoor dance photography, Trager has spent more than 40 years making photographs that transform our physical world into moments of clarity and brightness unique to the medium.”

Philip Trager is among the foremost American art photographers of the last third of the twentieth century and the first third of the twenty-first. His monographs, the first of which was published in 1972, are highly admired both for the photographs they contain and the art of bookmaking they represent. As of 2015, ten volumes have been published by the likes of New York Graphic Society; Little, Brown; Wesleyan University Press; and, Steidl, the German publisher of fine art photography books, which is in the process of releasing two more slated for publication in 2015 and 2016.

The transfer of Trager’s archive of photographic prints, negatives, and marked proofs to the Library of Congress began in 2006. Once complete, “this exceptional trove of artistic images will be available to scholars, photographers, and the public for generations to come.”

Biography

Born in 1935 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Trager attended Central High School and, upon graduating in 1952, began his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University, where he earned his degree in history. (Wesleyan University conferred upon Trager an honorary Doctor of Arts degree in 2008.) He next attended Columbia University School of Law in New York. After passing the bar, he and his father formed Trager and Trager, a law firm in Connecticut. In 1992, Trager retired from law to permit himself to pursue photography exclusively.

Trager lives in Connecticut, his home for most of his life, with his wife, Ina.

Photography

Trager’s formative concerns in making photographs center on buildings and their settings, but less from the viewpoint of architect or engineer than from one more akin to a portrait photographer. These early images value the individuality of the built environment and present that viewpoint with an often startling clarity. Whether an anonymous house in rural Connecticut, a household-name skyscraper in New York City, a centuries-old palazzo in the Veneto, or the arc of a bridge over the Seine, Trager’s images allow their “sitters” their own individual expression and an intimacy seldom seen in contemporary architectural photography.

In 1987, Trager published what probably is his best-known book, Villas of Palladio (New York Graphic Society), which cemented his place as a photographer of built structures. About this body of work, Peter Schjeldahl wrote that, “the place-portraiture of Philip Trager’s Palladian villas [is] . . . as beautiful, it seems to me, as any photographs I have ever seen.” Shortly after its publication, however, at the same time that the book was garnering admiring reviews and prominence, Trager was devoting himself to making images of modern dancers in motion. At first, some thought this to be an enormous departure from his images of architecture—human flesh rather than stone and concrete; figures grabbed in midflight as opposed to monolithic structures in stasis—but once his book Dancers was published in 1992, it became clear how the two very different types of subjects could be complementarily understood when filtered through the artist’s sensibilities.

These images of one or more dancers in mid-dance speak to the performer’s experience of movement. Trager has never had an interest in using stop-action strobes, a photographic device that was popular with dance photographers at that time. Instead, his images of the likes of Mark Morris, Eiko & Koma, David Parsons, Bill T. Jones, and dancers in Merce Cunningham’s company show them soaring through space or sagging heavily to the ground. Pictures of the few performers who pose close in reveal that their latent energy won’t permit such stillness for long. Trager made almost all of these dance images outdoors, using an endless sky, a dark and shadowy forest, or acres of pastureland as unlikely backgrounds against which bodies make indelible impressions. This is not the work of the dance documentarist trying to capture specific choreography with stills, but a collaborative process in which the photographer became part of the movement.

Returning to architecture in the mid-1990s, Trager began work on a collection of photographs of the built environment bordering the Seine in Paris. Like his buildings in New York and the Veneto, these images convey a clear sense of place, but they are far from brightly colored, tourist-oriented pictures. These black-and-white photographs reach into the past to ground their trajectory into the present, often revealing the complementary—sometimes uneasy—intersection of centuries and architectural styles. For example, in one picture, the vast precincts of the Cour Napoléon embraced on three sides by the Louvre are pierced from below by the jutting shards of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramids. Training his lens on a bridge’s river-facing facade, Trager reveals its sculptural ornamentation with an intimacy unlikely to be enjoyed by the river-borne travelers passing beneath. A quiet corner in a contemporary park overlooked by travel guides gives as deep a sense of its landscape architecture as the more inclusive image that follows. Paris takes on an unexpected kind of splendor apparently derived from the earth rather than from light descending from the sky or emerging from inside a building. A few “usual suspects” appear (e.g., Nôtre Dame, the Eiffel Tower), but even these take their places as part of a mise en scène rather than as stars dwarfing their fellow players.

From the start, Trager has devoted himself to using large-format view cameras (particularly 4 x 5 and 5 x 7, occasionally 11 x 14) for his images of architecture. His process is imbued with great patience, both as he sets up a shot and as he waits for the moment when all the necessary elements have coalesced to produce the photograph he wants. During a 2005 interview with Stephanie Wiles, then director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, Trager said, “I happen to be a Type-A personality and quick by nature, and with the view camera somehow you have to slow down. The dance photographs, of course, were totally different.”

To communicate the photographer’s vision fully and accurately, Trager believes that each photograph must be processed and printed as precisely as possible. He printed his own gelatin silver prints and relies on a master photographic-printmaker for the palladium and platinum prints often seen in exhibitions. He devotes just as exacting an eye and skill to creating the monographs of his work that are among the most beautifully produced photography books published since the 1970s.

As Jeremy Adamson, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, wrote: “[Trager’s] keen eye for expressive form and shape, his emotional sensitivity to the effects of light and atmosphere, his intellectual appreciation of the dynamics of structures, both architectural and human, and his command of the temporal moment have resulted in extraordinarily evocative compositions.”

Monographs

Trager’s photographs are found in numerous publications that deal with the art of photography, architecture, and dance, but he is best known for meticulously prepared and produced monographs of his black-and-white photographs. In retrospect, Echoes of Silence (1972), the first of these, demonstrates immediately ways he grappled with the work of other artists whom he admires, but the book’s images are anything but derivative. The probing, expressive eye informing his later photographs of architecture is already fully in evidence, with the common point with his predecessors’ work simply the subjects.

Many of Trager’s early architectural images were collected in two subsequent monographs: Philip Trager: New York (1988) and Photographs of Architecture (1977), in the introduction to which art historian Samuel M. Green II situates Trager among photography’s masters, saying: “The success of these photographs…derives from the penetration of [Trager’s] vision, his ability to state the quintessential.”

His next publication was The Villas of Palladio (1987), which reveals Trager’s perception and understanding of the extant buildings of Andrea Palladio, the sixteenth-century Venetian master architect, as well as his sense of a particular region and time. In Progressive Architecture, John DiGregorio wrote: “With this volume Trager has done something extraordinary—he has managed to transcend the boundary between the use of the photographic image as visual documentation and its use as a vehicle for artistic expression.”

Changing Paris: A Tour along the Seine (2000), Trager’s eighth monograph was the last to be published by a United States-based publisher. In 2005, the German firm Steidl published Faces, which kicked off an important collaboration between photographer and publisher. The timing was perfect, because the following year, the major traveling retrospective exhibition of Trager’s work that opened was accompanied by a catalogue produced by Steidl (2006), which is also publishing New York in the 1970s (2015) and Photographing Ina (2016). The latter is a dual volume contrasting a group of black-and-white portraits of Ina Trager, the photographer’s wife, with a group of images in color. The latter group represents two firsts for the photographer: forays into making color images and working with digital photographic processes.

Bibliography of monographs

Photographing Ina. Foreword by Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, [forthcoming 2016].

New York in the 1970s. Foreword by Steven C. Pinson. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, [forthcoming 2015].

Philip Trager [retrospective]. Essays by Barbara L. Michaels, Norton Owen, Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, and John Wood; interview by Stephanie Wiles. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006.

Faces. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2005.

Changing Paris: A Tour along the Seine. Architectural commentary by Thomas Mellins; foreword by Pierre Borhan; introduction by Diane Johnson. Santa Fe, NM: Arena Editions, 2000.

Persephone. Poems by Eavan Boland and Rita Dove; text by Ralph Lemon and Andrew Szegedy-Maszak. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, with New England Foundation for the Arts, 1996.

Dancers. Foreword by Bill T. Jones; essays by Joan Acocella and David Freedberg; afterword by Mark Morris. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1992.

The Villas of Palladio. Text by Vincent Scully; foreword by Renato Cevese; introduction by Michael Graves. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1986.

Wesleyan Photographs. Foreword by Paul Horgan; text by Vincent Scully, Eve Blau, and Samuel M. Green II. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982.

Philip Trager: New York. Foreword by Louis Auchincloss. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1980.

Photographs of Architecture. Introduction by Samuel M. Green II. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977.

Echoes of Silence. Danbury, CT: Scroll Press, 1972.

Museum and Library Collections

The definitive collection of Trager’s photographs is owned by the Library of Congress, Washington, DC). A partial list of other North American collections with holdings of his photographs include: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College (Oberlin, OH)

The Art Gallery, University of Maryland (Baltimore)

Baltimore Museum of Art

Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal, Québec)

Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, AZ)

Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut (Storrs)

Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT)

George Eastman House International Museum of Photography (Rochester, NY)

Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York)

Museum of the City of New York

Museum of Modern Art (New York)

National Building Museum (Washington, DC)

National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection (Washington D.C.)

National Museum of American History (Smithsonian Institution; Washington, DC)

New York Public Library

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Phillips Collection (Washington, DC)

Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, MA)

Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT)

In Europe, Trager’s photographs are in the collections of: Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris)

Galeries Fnac (Paris)

Musée Carnavalet (Paris)

Musée de l’Elysée Lausanne (Switzerland)

External Links

Philip Trager’s website www.philiptrager.com/

Library of Congress http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2012/09/13/early-work-photographer-philip-trager-be-display-exhibition-echoes-si

National Building Museum www.nbm.org/about-us/national-building-museum-online/trager-presence-and-flow.html

New York Public Library http://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/2012/09/13/early-work-photographer-philip-trager-be-display-exhibition-echoes-si

Artnetnews https://news.artnet.com/art-world/philip-trager-photographs-at-the-new-york-public-library-30452

Luminous Lint www.luminous-lint.com/app/photographer/Philip__Trager/ABCDEF/

iPhoto Central www.iphotocentral.com/collecting/article-view.php/17/26/1

artbook www.artbook.com/9780935640977.html