Philip Trager

Philip Trager, an important American art photographer, is known principally for his photographs of architecture and of modern dance. His monographs, the first of which was published in 1972, are collected both for the photographs they contain and because they exemplify the art of contemporary bookmaking. As of 2015, ten volumes have been published by houses such as 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 Trager publications 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.”^[1]

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. (His alma mater also conferred an honorary Doctor of Arts degree upon Trager 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 centered 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 elements in the built environment and present that viewpoint with a frequently noted visual directness: “Trager has spent more than 40 years making photographs that transform our physical world into moments of clarity and brightness unique to the medium.”^[2] 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, a photograph by Trager permits its “sitter” its own individual expression, thereby conveying an intimacy seldom attributed to 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 specific body of Trager's 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.”^[3] By the time this book was released, however, Trager was already devoting himself to making images of modern dancers in motion. At first, some critics found this to be an unprecedented jump away from 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 complementary the two very different types of subjects became once 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 could be said to pose reveal that their latent energy won’t permit them such stillness for long. Trager made almost all of these dance images outdoors, using an endless sky; a dark, shadowy forest; acres of pastureland; or a beach as the unlikely backgrounds against which bodies make indelible impressions. This is not the work of a 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 black-and-white images convey a clear sense of place. By reaching back to the past, they ground the buildings' trajectory into the present, often revealing a 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 revealed the structure's sculptural ornamentation with an intimacy unlikely to have been experienced by the travelers cruising on the river beneath. Trager's photographs of "the City of Light" appear to derive an atypical splendor that emanates from the earth rather than being bathed in illumination descending from the sky or emerging from inside a building.

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. This kind of equipment requires the photographer to have great patience. Part of Trager's appreciation of this process stems from the discipline needed to watch and wait, both when setting up the shot and then while watching for the moment when all the necessary elements coalesce into the photograph he anticipated. 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.”^[4]

To communicate his vision fully and accurately, Trager believes that each photograph must be processed and printed as precisely as possible. He personally prints all his gelatin silver prints and relies on a master photographic-printmaker for the palladium and platinum prints often seen in exhibitions. 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.”^[1]

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 the first of these, Echoes of Silence (1972), 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.”^[5]

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.”^[6]

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 Stephen 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)

References

^ ^a ^b [Jeremy Adamson, “Foreword” to Philip Trager. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, p. 7.]
^ [Debora Miller, “Philip Trager” [review]. Library Journal, December 2006, p. 121.]
^ [[[Peter Schjeldahl]], “The Instant Age,” in Legacy of Light, ed. Constance Sullivan. New York: Knopf, 1987, p. 13.]
^ [Philip Trager. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, p. 25.]
^ [Quoted in “Light and Line: Lawyer Makes His Mark as Art Photographer.” ABA Journal 70 (November 1984), p. 37.]
^ [John DiGregorio, “The Villas of Palladio” [review]. Progressive Architecture 68 (August 1987), p. 115.]