NEW YORK — Hans P. Kraus Jr. is pleased to present the gallery’s summer show, Trios of Photographs by H. Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Sugimoto and others. Three kindred photographs by each of the featured artists and more are on view. Affiliated by subject or location, the juxtaposed pictures emphasize the artist’s acclaimed vision recording a single theme.
Whether they are William Henry Fox Talbot’s photographs of his home at Lacock Abbey, Julia Margaret Cameron’s meditative evocations of legendary figures in her portraits of family and friends, displayed here to coincide with The Morgan Library’s remarkable Cameron exhibition, or Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields, inspired in part by Talbot’s research into static electricity, Trios focuses on the photographer’s evocation of a fascination with a theme to which he or she is repeatedly drawn.
Also on display are Charles Marville’s pictures of lampposts and streets of Paris, Louis-Emile Durandelle’s official views of Garnier’s new Paris Opera and John Payne Jennings’ series of waterfall views in England’s Lake District. Hugo van Werden’s triptych of targets from the 1870s promoting the accuracy of munitions made by the German manufacturer Krupp are arresting precursors of conceptual art. Finally, the Yosemite Valley is represented by three superb mammoth plate albumen prints. Charles Weed’s famous 1864 view is shown together with two landscapes made by Eadweard Muybridge. Weed, a pioneer of photographing American scenery for its own sake, was the first ever to photograph the Yosemite region.
William Henry Fox Talbot’s (1800-1877) Lacock Abbey, its grounds and architectural elements, is the subject of his earliest experiments and his greatest achievements. The Ladder, an especially rich 1844 salt print from a calotype negative, is one of Talbot’s most important images. Carefully composed to simulate live action, The Ladder is his first published photograph to include people. The Abbey’s south front and Sharington’s Tower are captured in two fine salt prints from calotype negatives. These views emphasize the personal stamp Talbot made to his ancestral home by remodeling the South front, alongside the Tower, to create an art gallery with its Oriel Window.
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) sought to record the qualities of innocence, wisdom, piety or passion through her portraiture. Long exposure times and a shallow depth of field give Cameron’s figures their sense of animation and almost brings them into the viewer’s presence. Cameron's "The Kiss of Peace" takes its inspiration from a Tennyson poem. The 1869 albumen print of this on display is a fine example of what Cameron declared to be "the most beautiful of all my photographs."
Made in 2009 from camera-less negatives, the capillary-like pathways of electrical current captured in Sugimoto’s (b. 1948) dynamic Lightning Fields were influenced by the electrical experiments of Ben Franklin, Michael Faraday and Talbot. Sugimoto’s striking gelatin silver prints are from negatives daringly made in his darkroom using a Van de Graaff generator to charge a metal wand with static. The “lightning field” is the spark created by Sugimoto once the electric charge reaches the desired strength, standing his hair on end.
Trios of Photographs by H. Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Sugimoto and others is on view at the gallery 9 June through 14 August 2025.