America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.

“Every age manifests itself by some external evidence,” wrote Charles Sheeler in 1937. In the years following World War I, industry and mechanization came to define life in the United States no less than religion had in Medieval Europe. Now, Sheeler mused, “It may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.”

As smokestacks, silos, and skyscrapers transformed the American landscape, many artists seized on the emblems and even the industrial materials of the Machine Age. Some, such as Sheeler, Elsie Driggs, and Charles Demuth, depicted grandly scaled industrial subjects in a pristine, seemingly objective manner, which minimized evidence of their hands just as new modes of manufacture supplanted traditional craftsmanship. Variously dubbed Immaculates or Precisionists, these artists might be understood to revel in the effects of industrialization or to critique the sense of alienation it could provoke. During this time, print and photography, with their crisp surfaces and mechanized processes, proved perfectly suited to describing the stark geometries and assembly line production of the modern world. Some artists even shuttled freely between the realms of art and commerce. Toyo Miyatake ran a commercial portrait studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo community, while Edward Steichen created advertisements for the products of America’s booming corporate concerns.

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Toyo Miyatake began his photography career in 1909, shortly after immigrating to Los Angeles from Japan. He first studied under pictorial photographer Harry Shigeta and later Edward Weston, with whom he developed a close friendship. Miyatake shared with Weston an interest in Japanese woodblock printing and European Modernism—sources that would influence his approach toward form and composition. In 1923 Miyatake established his own studio and began making portraits in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, capturing figures such as the painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa, novelist Thomas Mann, and modern dancer Michio Ito, who made Miyatake his company photographer. The artist’s photographs from this period range from intimate portraits of the dancer to abstract studies of motion, light, and shadow.

In 1942, following Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war on Japan, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were relocated to internment camps. Miyatake and his family were forced from their home and taken to a camp in Manzanar, California, a remote outpost in the desert. As photography was outlawed in the camp, Miyatake smuggled in a lens, built a makeshift box camera, and began surreptitiously documenting life at Manzanar. He was eventually discovered but allowed to continue shooting, in part because of support from his friend Ansel Adams, who had photographed the camp as a visitor. Miyatake’s photos are among the most poignant traces of this historical episode.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 268. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Machine Ornament

5

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Self Portrait, 1932

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Machine Ornament

5

Toyo Miyatake (1895–1979), Self Portrait, 1932

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection