The Art of Photography: Exploring the Work of Richard Petraitis Dart

Richard Petraitis Dart is a photographer whose work has gone largely unnoticed by the art world until recently. However, his contribution to the history of photography, particularly during the 1940s through 1970s in New York, is significant and worthy of attention. This article will delve into Dart's life and work, exploring how he fits into the larger narrative of American art during this period.

Dart's relationship with other artists, including Saul Leiter, provides valuable insight into his artistic process and influences. The two were friends and colleagues, and their work often intersected in interesting ways. This connection highlights the importance of considering lesser-known figures in the history of photography. By exploring Dart's body of work and its connections to that of other artists, we can gain a deeper understanding of the era and its artistic movements.

One of the most striking aspects of Dart's work is its use of layers and abstraction. His color slides feature visually complex compositions, often created using reflections, shadows, and natural patterns found in street scenes and storefronts. These techniques were innovative for their time, demonstrating Dart's ability to think creatively about photography. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who relied on multiple exposures, Dart employed a different approach, one that added depth and visual interest to his images.

The significance of Dart's work lies not only in its technical innovation but also in its contribution to the broader art historical narrative. The 1940s through 1970s was a pivotal period for American art, marked by experimentation and pushing boundaries. During this time, many artists began to question traditional approaches to photography, seeking new ways to express themselves creatively. Dart's work, although lesser-known today, represents an important chapter in this era of artistic innovation.

Dart's connection to other notable photographers, such as Saul Leiter, underscores the importance of considering the broader context in which his work was created. By exploring these relationships and influences, we can gain a deeper understanding of Dart's artistic process and the cultural currents that shaped his work. This approach also highlights the value of lesser-known figures like Dart, whose contributions often fly under the radar.

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Conclusion

Richard Petraitis Dart's work represents an important chapter in the history of American photography, particularly during the 1940s through 1970s in New York. His innovative use of layers and abstraction, combined with his connections to other notable photographers like Saul Leiter, demonstrate a unique artistic voice that deserves recognition.

By exploring Dart's work in more depth and considering his contributions within the broader context of American art during this period, we can gain a deeper appreciation for his significance. This article has aimed to shed light on Dart's life and work, highlighting the importance of lesser-known figures in the history of photography.

As an artist or small business owner, it is essential to have the right tools to manage finances effectively. QuickBooks offers a comprehensive solution for freelancers and small business owners, providing a platform to track income, sort expenses, and invoice clients directly from the software. With its user-friendly interface and features, QuickBooks can help artists stay organized and focused on producing high-quality work.

By combining a deeper understanding of Dart's work with access to essential tools like QuickBooks, viewers can gain valuable insights into the world of American photography during this pivotal period. The connection between art and finance is intricate, but with the right tools and knowledge, creatives can manage their businesses more effectively and focus on producing innovative work that resonates with audiences.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhis photography is as you're going to see in a second is a lot of multi-layered images uh using multiple exposures kind of this soft printing technique and then his paintings um I probably said best is as pet Dart used to say that that you know images are all made up of little points of light and when you look at his paintings there's a lot of them have this wonderful polistic quality where he was literally dabbing the paint on in these thousands of dots that would make up the larger image so I think it's really interesting to see the possibility of Photography inspiring and influencing him both as a photographer but also as a painter anyway none of this means anything if we don't go look at some work so without further Ado let's go over and take a look at the work of Richard pet Dart as I mentioned earlier Richard pet Dart is primarily known for his painting So finding a photography resource just on his photographs is a little bit difficult but there is one book that I found that I really like I'll put a link to this in the show notes but I got this on Amazon for about $32 um this is absence presence Richard pet Dart as photographer and this is absolutely wonderful um very well priced this was a catalog that was done for an exhibition of the photographs at the mson Williams Proctor art institute and it's quite good and so we're going to use this today and I'm actually going to start um towards the end of the book and go a little bit out of order here but uh pet Dart his uh photography work is mainly centered around two types of subjects we have these nature studies which include everything from like these Botanical photograms that he did pretty early on I think these are the earliest photographs in the book from the 1930s encompasses these to uh there's some some abstracts that are done with ice and then on the other end of the spectrum he did portraits and I'm going to start with kind of these nature studies first because I think these are really wonderful um they're not as Cutting Edge as some of the portrait work is however they are quite good and I really do find it interesting that there is this pictorial pictorialist element to his work um one of the things I think we do um with History A lot of times particularly art history is we like to put things into little boxes so everything is either black or white and I think it is very interesting that we have an artist here who is a very Progressive abstract painter in New York who's doing photography that is largely influenced by pictorialism which is something you think that an abstract painter would be trying to get away from but I find it interesting that you know when an artist has that kind of sensibility to involve a lot of those things in their work and let it influence them um some really wonderful things can come out I mean they're not entirely pictoris they are blurry in spots and the focus is very selective but they're very beautiful pictures just the same um these are the ice abstracts and this is an ice study from the mid1 1950s and it's interesting because these to me definitely seem more what you would expect somebody doing photography who's also an abstract painter to do but at the same time uh it's it's really interesting to me to see how somebody uh goes at portraying abstraction in photography because photography is obviously a medium where we are reproducing light via a lens and it by nature is not abstract and we have to make it so the other interesting thing is that these bring to mind the work of wi Bullock which would have been a little bit later but not too far from the same period of time when was in California and was a member of the school of artists known for doing straight photography at the time which meant a divorce from pictorialism so you do see an overlap there and W was extremely interesting too and very Progressive and these remind me a lot of the color light studies that we've talked about on this show before and I'll link these up as well if you're not familiar with those um he was using not I but he was using honey uh glass uh he was using uh transparency paper that was colored but to a very similar effect that you're seeing in these and I think they're absolutely wonderful and there's more nature studies in here too some of them do become quite abstract uh this is a flower closeup from the mid 1950s that really portrays some of that and some of them are slightly more conventional in terms of what you would expect to see Botanical photography be uh but very nicely done just the same and uh his body work here is very good but where pet Dart really starts to excel are in the portraits and we're going to ease into this I'm going to go back um and we start with this one which is not really that abstract or Progressive but it is a very significant portrait just the same this is Joanna with cat from 1952 this is his daughter Joanna who you probably well you wouldn't recognize CU it's the back of her head but Joanna is also portrayed in sa lighter's book early black and white and this is one of my favorite sa lighter just canid portraits um the pet Dart family appears quite a bit in this book there's several portraits of Richard there there are several pictures of he and his wife Evelyn and Joanna as well and the two were very close friends and we see that not only were they uh very close as friends but I think artistically they were very you know influenced by one another as well we also see in the pet Dart book this is a portrait of Saul lighter from 1947 now the interesting story about Saul if you're not familiar with it um Saul grew up in a pretty traditional Jewish upbringing and his parents actually wanted him to become a rabbi and he was interested in that he went to theology school for a while but he was also interested in art and by the time he became an adult he was really struggling with this and really wanted to be an artist and I think you know Saul kind of declined in later interviews to go too deep into his relationship with his parents but I think the home situation was at a point where you know as Legend has he just jumped on a bus one night and moved to New York um fairly shortly after moving to New York in 1946 he did meet uh Richard pet Dart the two became very close friends as evidenced in portraits that you see back and forth in these two books and I think it's it's it's extremely significant it's also interesting because Saul came to New York as a painter and that's what he wanted to do I think he probably was familiar with photography and had an interest but he wasn't doing that at the time uh Richard pet Dart Len him aica and it was through the urging of pet Dart and also their mutual friend W Eugene Smith that Saul actually start pursuing photography and take it seriously and of course the rest is history and we have this wonderful contribution um of Saul's work that that I believe has a lot of influence um from Richard's work within it and we'll come back to that a little bit in a second uh back to the Joanna with cat photo the other interesting thing about this photo even though it's it's lacking a lot of the progressive elements that we're going to see later is that this image was actually selected by photography magazine in one of their International Photo Awards it won third place it was published widely and pet Dart started receiving phone calls for assignment work as a photographer now for somebody who is trying to become a painter in New York in the you know 1940s 1950s I mean this is a godsend to have an assignment based photography business that you're able to do as well interestingly though uh pant Dart didn't accept every assignment that came his way he was very selective in what he did and wanted to keep everything within the art realm so you see a lot of portraits of jazz musicians classical musicians other artists um you know and that's that's kind of how he rolled in those terms um now where you do start to see the progressive portraiture come out and I think this is the highlight of the photography works that you're going to see from pet Dart and we start to see it here with Robert flattery and this you're you're going to see elements of pictorialism in these images but almost this layer of kind of this smoke that comes in the way the light is is probably reflecting in the lens and this was done intentionally um to start giving a layer of abstraction between uh the viewer and the portrait and I think this is quite interesting um another one this is uh series of images of Betty Parsons and this is her with a mask um African mask over on the side and these images are quite Progressive as well because we're starting to see him play with multiple exposures and one of the things that Saul um went on to State later in interviews that he was very impressed when he first met uh pet Dart because he said he was doing these beautifully um enlarged soft printing techniques using multiple exposures that had this quirky nod to pictorialism and you do see that and the multiple exposures I think are what are key here and make this work pretty significantly interesting the other interesting thing about this image of Betty and this is in 1948 and I don't know if you're with who Betty Parsons was she was a painter and a sculptor and was most known for starting this Art Gallery called Betty Parsons Gallery it was on 57th Street in New York for a number of years from the I don't remember when it started but probably the 40s through I think the early ' 80s is when it closed and she's a very significant um maybe not so much instrumentally but she was one of the major Advocates of abstract expressionism and Painters uh and getting their work out there you know this is a time when American art is really not taken as serious ly is European art even in the United States and through the her gallery and several others she started to represent artists and really catapulted them into that sphere and she represented some very big names not only um Richard bent Dart but also uh people like Vim de coning uh Mark Rothco Jackson Pollock um there were quite a few what who are today very big names that she represented so in November of 1948 she did a solo show of Richard pet dart's work and and these were all photographs the show was called brasses and photographs and they were mostly comprised of photographs of people like her there's also um some other artists that are represented here as well interesting things like I love what he's done with the background here and that you start to see um I don't know if it was something he did with developer but but these abstractions that come in that make it quite interesting and the whole thing is in very much soft focus um here's a close-up of her eye for instance um but you're going to also start to see multiple exposures overlaid um is William cogden uh where you have what appears to be some trees that are overlaid in the exposure as well so multiple exposures is what we're working with here but also straight photography as well U this is Brasso from 1950 and uh it was probably not included in that show as it was a little bit too late uh all we looked at earlier and uh this is another abex artist um this is theodoros Stamos who was a Greek artist and I love the fact that these much like what we see in Saul's work as well is there is an informality to some of these portraits um that is really beautiful and so the work kind of blurs this line between formal and formal posing uh and and really has just a beautiful nature to it I think the best of the best is the series that he did of Mark rco and it's not it doesn't feel to me like just you know layered exposures it seems to me like it is more composed um wonderful picture of Mark rotho smoking a cigarette and you see the two exposures and how they play together um it's very mature work it's very I think Progressive U especially when you consider this is 1950 and there's just a a beautiful quality um to these pictures that I think is just absolutely stunning um even with that nod to pictorialism um he continued to photograph later even though I think painting started to consume most of his career and I think that's what he was probably the most serious about uh but you do have evidenced um you know 50s and the 60s moving in the 70s later photographs and you know these were done with a lot with the subjects being friends um more assignment based um but he would do thing you know this is obviously a violinist he's overlaid a violin in the background it doesn't quite capture the maturity of some of those early images but still is quite good this is an image of his son uh Jonathan pet Dart who is a musician who coincidentally has a YouTube channel and has some wonderful interviews with his father um that he's posted on there and uh this was an image that was done in 1971 and then finally another one that I think is up there with the Rothco and this is a self-portrait from 1948 which I believe was in the brasses and photo photograph show that was done at Betty Parson's gallery and you know what we're looking at here is somebody who wasn't really a photographer they of course was very special to them um his energy and emotions went into his painting Works um but there is Left Behind um a small chunk of Photography that I think is extremely important extremely interesting and you know if you compare what was going on here and and when I really came to when most of this work came to my attention is when I was researching for Sal lighter when you see the influence of what goes back and forth here and being a very important photographer with a small body of work on that New York scene sa lighter was shooting what were most unknown to most people until he presented them to Howard Greenberg in the 1990s but these color slides they also have these layers of abstraction that we see on there his are not layered with multiple exposure but they are layered uh you know visually using Reflections using Shadows uh using just natural patterns that you see in Street Scenes Windows um whether they be with cars or on storefronts and it's really interesting to see these two in their relationship being friends with one another and what an inspiration that Richard was to Saul and I think this is particularly uh interesting uh because this is a significant body of work that kind of went on very quietly and until recently has not been very much known to us I think in the art world and I think it's absolutely fantastic anyway this is a great book we didn't even begin to crack the surface there's some beautiful images in here again I will link this in the show notes but this is the work of Richard pet Dart I want to take a second and give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at quickbooks.com if you are a small business owner like I am or if you're a freelancer then you probably know just how much fun taxes can be at the end of the year and you know that it's important to track all of your expenses and your income so that you're ready when it's time to file the most important thing that you can do is use the right tools for the job and if you've ever heard of QuickBooks you know they are one of the industry leaders in finance accounting software and they now have plans that are tailored specifically to Freelancers and small business owners for a low monthly fee you can track all of your income sort your expenses between personal and business related and depending on your plan you can even invo clients right from QuickBooks having the right tool is essential to make your work easier when tax time comes around and now you can try QuickBooks absolutely free they have a deal for Art of Photography viewers right now that will give you 30 days to check out QuickBooks and see if it's right for you just head over to trm employed.com aop and start your free trial today that link once again is TR selfemployed docomo and I want to give a special shout out and thanks once again to the folks at QuickBooks for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography Richard pet Dart is a really interesting figure in the history of American art and although he's not a very big name or not renowned as one of these great figures in photography his work represents a really interesting and I think very important contribution to what we see is the history of photography particularly that time period in New York of the 40s through '70s where you know a lot of experimental stuff was happening uh this was post World War II and American art at that point hadn't been taken very seriously my by museums and this represented a shift by the creative output that was coming out of New York at that time um anyway I will admit that I really was not familiar with the with the body of Photography work that Richard pet Dart did until I started researching Saul lighter and had gotten into to it what's really interesting to me is that the way we kind of consume history in general but definitely the history of photography the history of art is you know you start with the big important names and for me where it really gets interesting is when you start drilling down and there's some lesser figures that do some really important work and when you start to see those tie-ins of how they relate to each other not only as friends but also as colleagues and the way their work starts to tie into each other I think it's really interesting and this is something we're going to be doing more on the show uh in the coming months because kind of a lot of the research that I'm doing right now is really digging into just cuz I'm so interested in it um that period of history in New York from really I think you could push it up and say the late 30s through the 60s cuz it's such an important time in photography and history and what was being done and there's a lot of names that are really important and really fascinating and just brilliant artists that are part of that that we don't recognize today anyway so more of that to come anyway as always if you enjoyed this video please remember to hit the like button and share it with your friends and remember to subscribe to get all the latest and greatest updates free of charge delivered directly to you so hit that subscribe button it helps us helps the channel and we're going to provide more cool stuff for you as the weeks come anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video laterhis photography is as you're going to see in a second is a lot of multi-layered images uh using multiple exposures kind of this soft printing technique and then his paintings um I probably said best is as pet Dart used to say that that you know images are all made up of little points of light and when you look at his paintings there's a lot of them have this wonderful polistic quality where he was literally dabbing the paint on in these thousands of dots that would make up the larger image so I think it's really interesting to see the possibility of Photography inspiring and influencing him both as a photographer but also as a painter anyway none of this means anything if we don't go look at some work so without further Ado let's go over and take a look at the work of Richard pet Dart as I mentioned earlier Richard pet Dart is primarily known for his painting So finding a photography resource just on his photographs is a little bit difficult but there is one book that I found that I really like I'll put a link to this in the show notes but I got this on Amazon for about $32 um this is absence presence Richard pet Dart as photographer and this is absolutely wonderful um very well priced this was a catalog that was done for an exhibition of the photographs at the mson Williams Proctor art institute and it's quite good and so we're going to use this today and I'm actually going to start um towards the end of the book and go a little bit out of order here but uh pet Dart his uh photography work is mainly centered around two types of subjects we have these nature studies which include everything from like these Botanical photograms that he did pretty early on I think these are the earliest photographs in the book from the 1930s encompasses these to uh there's some some abstracts that are done with ice and then on the other end of the spectrum he did portraits and I'm going to start with kind of these nature studies first because I think these are really wonderful um they're not as Cutting Edge as some of the portrait work is however they are quite good and I really do find it interesting that there is this pictorial pictorialist element to his work um one of the things I think we do um with History A lot of times particularly art history is we like to put things into little boxes so everything is either black or white and I think it is very interesting that we have an artist here who is a very Progressive abstract painter in New York who's doing photography that is largely influenced by pictorialism which is something you think that an abstract painter would be trying to get away from but I find it interesting that you know when an artist has that kind of sensibility to involve a lot of those things in their work and let it influence them um some really wonderful things can come out I mean they're not entirely pictoris they are blurry in spots and the focus is very selective but they're very beautiful pictures just the same um these are the ice abstracts and this is an ice study from the mid1 1950s and it's interesting because these to me definitely seem more what you would expect somebody doing photography who's also an abstract painter to do but at the same time uh it's it's really interesting to me to see how somebody uh goes at portraying abstraction in photography because photography is obviously a medium where we are reproducing light via a lens and it by nature is not abstract and we have to make it so the other interesting thing is that these bring to mind the work of wi Bullock which would have been a little bit later but not too far from the same period of time when was in California and was a member of the school of artists known for doing straight photography at the time which meant a divorce from pictorialism so you do see an overlap there and W was extremely interesting too and very Progressive and these remind me a lot of the color light studies that we've talked about on this show before and I'll link these up as well if you're not familiar with those um he was using not I but he was using honey uh glass uh he was using uh transparency paper that was colored but to a very similar effect that you're seeing in these and I think they're absolutely wonderful and there's more nature studies in here too some of them do become quite abstract uh this is a flower closeup from the mid 1950s that really portrays some of that and some of them are slightly more conventional in terms of what you would expect to see Botanical photography be uh but very nicely done just the same and uh his body work here is very good but where pet Dart really starts to excel are in the portraits and we're going to ease into this I'm going to go back um and we start with this one which is not really that abstract or Progressive but it is a very significant portrait just the same this is Joanna with cat from 1952 this is his daughter Joanna who you probably well you wouldn't recognize CU it's the back of her head but Joanna is also portrayed in sa lighter's book early black and white and this is one of my favorite sa lighter just canid portraits um the pet Dart family appears quite a bit in this book there's several portraits of Richard there there are several pictures of he and his wife Evelyn and Joanna as well and the two were very close friends and we see that not only were they uh very close as friends but I think artistically they were very you know influenced by one another as well we also see in the pet Dart book this is a portrait of Saul lighter from 1947 now the interesting story about Saul if you're not familiar with it um Saul grew up in a pretty traditional Jewish upbringing and his parents actually wanted him to become a rabbi and he was interested in that he went to theology school for a while but he was also interested in art and by the time he became an adult he was really struggling with this and really wanted to be an artist and I think you know Saul kind of declined in later interviews to go too deep into his relationship with his parents but I think the home situation was at a point where you know as Legend has he just jumped on a bus one night and moved to New York um fairly shortly after moving to New York in 1946 he did meet uh Richard pet Dart the two became very close friends as evidenced in portraits that you see back and forth in these two books and I think it's it's it's extremely significant it's also interesting because Saul came to New York as a painter and that's what he wanted to do I think he probably was familiar with photography and had an interest but he wasn't doing that at the time uh Richard pet Dart Len him aica and it was through the urging of pet Dart and also their mutual friend W Eugene Smith that Saul actually start pursuing photography and take it seriously and of course the rest is history and we have this wonderful contribution um of Saul's work that that I believe has a lot of influence um from Richard's work within it and we'll come back to that a little bit in a second uh back to the Joanna with cat photo the other interesting thing about this photo even though it's it's lacking a lot of the progressive elements that we're going to see later is that this image was actually selected by photography magazine in one of their International Photo Awards it won third place it was published widely and pet Dart started receiving phone calls for assignment work as a photographer now for somebody who is trying to become a painter in New York in the you know 1940s 1950s I mean this is a godsend to have an assignment based photography business that you're able to do as well interestingly though uh pant Dart didn't accept every assignment that came his way he was very selective in what he did and wanted to keep everything within the art realm so you see a lot of portraits of jazz musicians classical musicians other artists um you know and that's that's kind of how he rolled in those terms um now where you do start to see the progressive portraiture come out and I think this is the highlight of the photography works that you're going to see from pet Dart and we start to see it here with Robert flattery and this you're you're going to see elements of pictorialism in these images but almost this layer of kind of this smoke that comes in the way the light is is probably reflecting in the lens and this was done intentionally um to start giving a layer of abstraction between uh the viewer and the portrait and I think this is quite interesting um another one this is uh series of images of Betty Parsons and this is her with a mask um African mask over on the side and these images are quite Progressive as well because we're starting to see him play with multiple exposures and one of the things that Saul um went on to State later in interviews that he was very impressed when he first met uh pet Dart because he said he was doing these beautifully um enlarged soft printing techniques using multiple exposures that had this quirky nod to pictorialism and you do see that and the multiple exposures I think are what are key here and make this work pretty significantly interesting the other interesting thing about this image of Betty and this is in 1948 and I don't know if you're with who Betty Parsons was she was a painter and a sculptor and was most known for starting this Art Gallery called Betty Parsons Gallery it was on 57th Street in New York for a number of years from the I don't remember when it started but probably the 40s through I think the early ' 80s is when it closed and she's a very significant um maybe not so much instrumentally but she was one of the major Advocates of abstract expressionism and Painters uh and getting their work out there you know this is a time when American art is really not taken as serious ly is European art even in the United States and through the her gallery and several others she started to represent artists and really catapulted them into that sphere and she represented some very big names not only um Richard bent Dart but also uh people like Vim de coning uh Mark Rothco Jackson Pollock um there were quite a few what who are today very big names that she represented so in November of 1948 she did a solo show of Richard pet dart's work and and these were all photographs the show was called brasses and photographs and they were mostly comprised of photographs of people like her there's also um some other artists that are represented here as well interesting things like I love what he's done with the background here and that you start to see um I don't know if it was something he did with developer but but these abstractions that come in that make it quite interesting and the whole thing is in very much soft focus um here's a close-up of her eye for instance um but you're going to also start to see multiple exposures overlaid um is William cogden uh where you have what appears to be some trees that are overlaid in the exposure as well so multiple exposures is what we're working with here but also straight photography as well U this is Brasso from 1950 and uh it was probably not included in that show as it was a little bit too late uh all we looked at earlier and uh this is another abex artist um this is theodoros Stamos who was a Greek artist and I love the fact that these much like what we see in Saul's work as well is there is an informality to some of these portraits um that is really beautiful and so the work kind of blurs this line between formal and formal posing uh and and really has just a beautiful nature to it I think the best of the best is the series that he did of Mark rco and it's not it doesn't feel to me like just you know layered exposures it seems to me like it is more composed um wonderful picture of Mark rotho smoking a cigarette and you see the two exposures and how they play together um it's very mature work it's very I think Progressive U especially when you consider this is 1950 and there's just a a beautiful quality um to these pictures that I think is just absolutely stunning um even with that nod to pictorialism um he continued to photograph later even though I think painting started to consume most of his career and I think that's what he was probably the most serious about uh but you do have evidenced um you know 50s and the 60s moving in the 70s later photographs and you know these were done with a lot with the subjects being friends um more assignment based um but he would do thing you know this is obviously a violinist he's overlaid a violin in the background it doesn't quite capture the maturity of some of those early images but still is quite good this is an image of his son uh Jonathan pet Dart who is a musician who coincidentally has a YouTube channel and has some wonderful interviews with his father um that he's posted on there and uh this was an image that was done in 1971 and then finally another one that I think is up there with the Rothco and this is a self-portrait from 1948 which I believe was in the brasses and photo photograph show that was done at Betty Parson's gallery and you know what we're looking at here is somebody who wasn't really a photographer they of course was very special to them um his energy and emotions went into his painting Works um but there is Left Behind um a small chunk of Photography that I think is extremely important extremely interesting and you know if you compare what was going on here and and when I really came to when most of this work came to my attention is when I was researching for Sal lighter when you see the influence of what goes back and forth here and being a very important photographer with a small body of work on that New York scene sa lighter was shooting what were most unknown to most people until he presented them to Howard Greenberg in the 1990s but these color slides they also have these layers of abstraction that we see on there his are not layered with multiple exposure but they are layered uh you know visually using Reflections using Shadows uh using just natural patterns that you see in Street Scenes Windows um whether they be with cars or on storefronts and it's really interesting to see these two in their relationship being friends with one another and what an inspiration that Richard was to Saul and I think this is particularly uh interesting uh because this is a significant body of work that kind of went on very quietly and until recently has not been very much known to us I think in the art world and I think it's absolutely fantastic anyway this is a great book we didn't even begin to crack the surface there's some beautiful images in here again I will link this in the show notes but this is the work of Richard pet Dart I want to take a second and give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at quickbooks.com if you are a small business owner like I am or if you're a freelancer then you probably know just how much fun taxes can be at the end of the year and you know that it's important to track all of your expenses and your income so that you're ready when it's time to file the most important thing that you can do is use the right tools for the job and if you've ever heard of QuickBooks you know they are one of the industry leaders in finance accounting software and they now have plans that are tailored specifically to Freelancers and small business owners for a low monthly fee you can track all of your income sort your expenses between personal and business related and depending on your plan you can even invo clients right from QuickBooks having the right tool is essential to make your work easier when tax time comes around and now you can try QuickBooks absolutely free they have a deal for Art of Photography viewers right now that will give you 30 days to check out QuickBooks and see if it's right for you just head over to trm employed.com aop and start your free trial today that link once again is TR selfemployed docomo and I want to give a special shout out and thanks once again to the folks at QuickBooks for sponsoring another episode of The Art of Photography Richard pet Dart is a really interesting figure in the history of American art and although he's not a very big name or not renowned as one of these great figures in photography his work represents a really interesting and I think very important contribution to what we see is the history of photography particularly that time period in New York of the 40s through '70s where you know a lot of experimental stuff was happening uh this was post World War II and American art at that point hadn't been taken very seriously my by museums and this represented a shift by the creative output that was coming out of New York at that time um anyway I will admit that I really was not familiar with the with the body of Photography work that Richard pet Dart did until I started researching Saul lighter and had gotten into to it what's really interesting to me is that the way we kind of consume history in general but definitely the history of photography the history of art is you know you start with the big important names and for me where it really gets interesting is when you start drilling down and there's some lesser figures that do some really important work and when you start to see those tie-ins of how they relate to each other not only as friends but also as colleagues and the way their work starts to tie into each other I think it's really interesting and this is something we're going to be doing more on the show uh in the coming months because kind of a lot of the research that I'm doing right now is really digging into just cuz I'm so interested in it um that period of history in New York from really I think you could push it up and say the late 30s through the 60s cuz it's such an important time in photography and history and what was being done and there's a lot of names that are really important and really fascinating and just brilliant artists that are part of that that we don't recognize today anyway so more of that to come anyway as always if you enjoyed this video please remember to hit the like button and share it with your friends and remember to subscribe to get all the latest and greatest updates free of charge delivered directly to you so hit that subscribe button it helps us helps the channel and we're going to provide more cool stuff for you as the weeks come anyway once again guys this has been another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"