| | | | The Gernsheim Collection
Introduction
When The University of Texas at Austin purchased the Gernsheim collection in 1963 it was the largest, and arguably finest, collection of photographs held in private hands, made up of some 35,000 photographs taken by several hundred different artists. The collection’s encyclopedic scope—as well as the expertise with which Helmut and Alison Gernsheim assembled it—makes the collection one of the world’s premier sources for the study and appreciation of photography.
Helmut and Alison Gernsheim were also pioneering historians of photography, writing more than 30 books and 200 articles based on their collection. The Gernsheims, therefore, not only built their collection upon the foundations of the medium’s history, the images also served as the touchstone from which they wrote some of the first histories of photography prior to the explosion of the photography market and the establishment of the history of photography as an academic discipline.
This exhibition is made up of two complementary and interweaving narratives—the history of photography as told through the photographs themselves and the history of the Gernsheims’ formation of their collection. The collection’s most notable strength is its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, but the exhibition features masterpieces from photography’s first 150 years, as well as many lesser known images that are seminal to its history.
Helmut and Alison Gernsheim
Helmut Gernsheim was born in Munich in 1913. Of Jewish ancestry, he needed to leave Nazi Germany in the 1930s, so he trained as a professional photographer. In 1937, he received approval to travel to Paris to mount a photographic exhibition and then to London to photograph works in London’s National Gallery.
Gernsheim settled in London and was granted status as a “friendly enemy alien.” Despite securing several photographic commissions, he was deported in 1940 to an internment camp in Australia for 16 months. Lectures he gave there on the technique, history, and aesthetics of photography formed the basis of his first book, New Photo Vision (1942), a work promoting photography’s creative status and decrying the stale and sentimental conventions of British pictorialist photography.
Gernsheim’s advocacy for photography became his lifelong passion. During the next two decades Gernsheim built a historically based collection that had no peer. His wife, Alison, shared writing credit on a number of their publications and also wrote a book herself on photography. In 1955 they published the first comprehensive history of Western photography in English.
In the early 1950s the Gernsheims began to campaign for the creation of a museum devoted to photography to be based upon their collection. When an arrangement with a private corporation in Detroit fell through in 1962, Harry Ransom, then Chancellor of The University of Texas System, agreed to purchase the Gernsheims’ collection for approximately half its appraised value. Because of their uniqueness and significance, Nicéphore Niépce’s First Photograph, his photo-etching of Cardinal d’Amboise, and the two copies of his Notice sur l’heliographie were donated with the collection.
The Gernsheim Collection
In conjunction with the exhibition Discovering the Language of Photography: The Gernsheim Collection, the Ransom Center and University of Texas Press will publish The Gernsheim Collection, a catalog of the exhibition. The following excerpt is from an introduction by Roy Flukinger, the book's editor and Senior Research Curator at the Ransom Center.
When Helmut and Alison Gernsheim began assembling their collection in January 1945, they were part of a small minority that believed in the art of photography and the significance of its history. Two years later, their commitment would be such that they would both leave their other careers behind and set about the brave task of becoming independent full-time historians and collectors. And it would also be at this time that they would come to believe fully in the significance of the collection they were building and in the necessity of one day finding it a public home in which it could be perpetuated and grow.
The statistics they produced by the end of that campaign are impressive indeed. When The University of Texas at Austin purchased the Gernsheim collection in the summer of 1963, it consisted of approximately 35,000 original photographs; a research library of some 3,600 books, journals, and published articles; about 250 autographed letters and manuscripts; more than 200 pieces of early photographic apparatus; and miscellaneous materials and artifacts relating to the medium’s early history. Equally impressive and prodigious was the work of the Gernsheims themselves, for in the same period of less than 20 years of collection-building, they had produced some 30 books and catalogs and well over 200 published articles—estimated by Helmut to comprise more than a million words—about photography.
While the Gernsheims were engaged in building their collection from the 1940s through the 1960s, this same era was witnessing a dominant change in photography's influence and acceptance. Over the course of that single generation, photography would make inroads into many more major art museum exhibitions, while photographic publications would begin the gradual transformation from technical manuals into reflections of the medium's artistry and history. And while the Gernsheims may have played only one part in that transformative era, their roles—as historians, authors, exhibitors, educators, curators, and promoters—were critical and ongoing.
By the twentieth century's end, the change that they and others effected was profound and continues to resonate among us today. The campaign for the acceptance of photography as an art form—with a vibrant history, a rich range of expression and ideas, and a preponderance of educational and professional opportunities—continues to enrich the worldwide impact of the camera image and the passionate eye.
Regardless of the changes of time, technology, style, criticism, and taste, what does continue to persist brilliantly into modern times is the Gernsheim collection itself. Helmut and Alison would often speak of the collection materials as the "children" that they elected never to have. For the Gernsheims, nonetheless, what began as a labor of love became the foundation for their work and their lives. To both of them it remained a working collection, always capable of shaping, revising, and enriching knowledge and learning. Their firm belief was that "without any enthusiasm[,] depositories for huge photographic collections simply [existed] because there was no other place, [and] this has only led to dead departments. Photographs must be exhibited, researched on, written and lectured about, and made easily available to the public, other wise [sic] their whole purpose is lost." With the Gernsheim collection's final institutionalization at The University of Texas at Austin, it continues decisively to meet this endless challenge.
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