Charles Sheeler: The Photographer's Career and Significance

As we move into the 40s, it becomes increasingly interesting to explore Charles Sheeler's work as a photographer. Working for a period of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Sheeler was tasked with photographing their collection, including reliefs, statues, and sculptures. While some of these pieces were well-lit, others are placed in settings that suggest they may not have been intended to be displayed in such a manner. It is clear that Sheeler's work in this department showcases his unique perspective on art and photography.

Sheeler's interest in photography is notable, as he did not produce as much output as some of his contemporaries. However, the photographs he did create are stunning, showcasing his ability to capture high-quality images. As we move into the 1950s, it becomes clear that Sheeler's style changed significantly, and he began to focus more on painting.

Sheeler's photography is often overlooked in favor of other artists, but a closer examination reveals a highly skilled photographer who was producing work of exceptional quality alongside some of the most prominent artists of his time. His ability to capture the essence of American culture and identity is evident in much of his work, particularly during the 1920s and onward.

One reason Sheeler's work may not be as well-known as it deserves to be is due to his extensive commercial work. As a photographer, Fine Art often views commercial work with skepticism, and this may contribute to Sheeler's relative lack of recognition. Additionally, his second career as a painter has led some to view him as being primarily a visual artist rather than a photographer.

Historically, the 1920s and 1930s were marked by a significant void in American cultural identity. Following World War I and the Great Depression, America was struggling to define itself creatively. This void is reflected in the art of the time, with American folk art experiencing a resurgence and architecture playing a significant role in shaping visual identity.

Sheeler's work, particularly during this period, is deeply connected to the changing landscape of American culture. His photography captures the essence of modernity and industrialization, reflecting the rapid changes taking place across the country. His ability to capture this identity and translate it into images is remarkable, and his work continues to be relevant today.

As we move forward in time, Sheeler's contributions to American art become increasingly evident. The rise of power and productivity following World War II had a profound impact on American culture, but Sheeler's early work predates this shift. His photography and painting styles are distinct, yet both contribute to the rich tapestry of American artistic identity.

Charles Sheeler is an artist whose body of work deserves more recognition. While he may not be as widely recognized as some of his contemporaries, his contribution to American art is undeniable. As we look to the future, it is essential that we acknowledge and celebrate the work of artists like Sheeler who continue to shape our understanding of American culture.

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday I've got a real treat for you I want to talk about a photographer who is a very well-known photographer but I think he gets overlooked for a couple reasons and of course I'm referring to Charles Sheeler and I'm going to be using this book today which is Charles Sheeler the photographs and if you're not familiar with Sheeler he represents the early 1920s in American art and he was part of a group of people that were really giving an identity culturally to what was going on in the United States during that time sheer was amazingly talented uh he had a two careers one as a photographer and another second career as a painter extremely talented individual and today we're going to be looking at the photographs and that side of things um this book coincidentally is part of our Twitter giveaways that we're doing our Twitter photo challengebook giveaways and if you're interested in how you could possibly win a copy of this book um I'll put link it up in the show notes below we have a whole show dedicated to it and people have been participating on Twitter and we've had a lot of fun with that but anyway without further Ado I think it's important to go look at the works of Charles sheer Charles Sheeler was an American Artist and major figure in the precisionist movement he was a significant artist of the early 20th century and represents a wide Talent range having created major works as both a painter and a photographer Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia in 1883 he studied at the school of industrial art in 1900 majoring in industrial drawing and applied Arts he rounded out his training by studying traditional drawing and painting under the tutelage of the American impressionist painter William Merritt chase a significant impact on his development was a series of trips that he made to Europe first as a student and second after finishing College he was greatly inspired by the late middle-age Italian painters such as gato and Pierro DEA Francesca he was also largely inspired by the Cub style that was new to the art world after meeting Michael and Sarah Stein early patrons of Picasso and Brock he was in inspired to start working in the Cuba style himself in 1910 sheer became interested in photography he was living with fellow artist and friend Morton shamberg in a rented 18th century ston housee in Doylestown Pennsylvania as his interest in photography increased he began making a notable series of photographs of the house Interiors work during this period also included vernacular objects such as Barns and other local rural architecture sheer had an affinity and admiration for the straightforward design stating that found beauty in the existing simple functionality as sheeler's portfolio grew he began meeting several important figures in New York namely Alfred stiglets and gallery owner Marius deas who helped make it possible for sheer to start selling his work he began participating in group shows and eventually moved to New York in 1919 around this time he began using his own photographs as Source material for his paintings and when the move to New York City came his subject matter turned from the rural subjects of Pennsylvania to the modern skyscraper in industrial Landscapes the following year he collaborated on a film project with Paul strand titled Manata this collaboration aligned with Sheila's changing style as manhatt explored New York City as an urban landscape the tone was set with the influence of 1920s architecture with its clean lines monolithic presence layered geometry Gothic detail and early Deco styling sheer became associated with what we know today as the precisionist style an American art movement borrowing freely from various European movements including the order of purism the technology of futurism the geometry of cubism and in some cases the non-traditional relationships of dataism precisionist artists most frequently use the urban landscape as their main subject cityscapes modern architecture suspension bridges and industrial factories and complexes were at the heart of the style these elements essentially shaped a national identity to the postor War I and Great Depression United States this was also seen in the Revival of of American folk art after a major exhibition in 1922 Sheila was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to photograph a series of images as part of the promotional campaign for the release of the model a sheer spent 6 weeks documenting the plant's massive Machinery largely leaving out the presence of human labor these images were representational of the aesthetic at the time of the mechanical age of power and productivity in 1926 sheer began working as a freelance photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair he led a diverse career photographing commissions from both private and Commercial institutions for clients such as Fortune Magazine and even a commission by Abby Rockefeller to photograph Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia from 1942 to 1945 he worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Department of Publications photographing works from their collection sheer continued to work until 1959 when he suffered a stroke he died in 1965 leaving behind an enormous Legacy and bodies of work both as a painter and as a photographer his work is associated with a particular period of American history as he was one of the key artists who shaped the American esthetic of the early 20th century so we're going to look at some work by Charles sheer here and I've got Charles sheer the photographs and this is a wonderful book it's got some wonderful essays on sheer and his work uh throughout his career and this is a collection only of photographs so there are no paintings in here so if you're just interested in the photo work this is an excellent place to start and I'm going to start with this set of images and as I mentioned in the bio early on in sheeler's career he decided he was interested in photography and he was living in a 18th Century ston House in the doston house in Pennsylvania and very beautiful place obviously and he started experimenting shoot teaching himself how to shoot and that's where these series of images came from uh he was simply shooting basically still lives of the Interiors of the house so this is some of his first architecture work work that he was doing what you're going to see that's really interesting is this play on light that goes on and this is something that you're probably familiar with probably more in the work of Paul strand if you're not familiar with Sheila the two were very close they were friends um but this is some of the earliest examples of this work I love this one in the staircase with the soft light as it gets darker and contrast as it goes up but just simple things like these little turns and you know angles and corners of the house and and he spoke very fondly of the house and and you know obviously it was it was a muse to him to shoot here and uh some really interesting early photos um a lot of the things that Sheila was interested in were uh Simplicity in basically rural architecture so you have things like the shot of this barn and the fascination was is that it was a beautiful object because uh form followed function that it's a simple structure that's designed to do one thing either house livestock or Machinery of some type and that it was beautiful because it was set up to do that and I think that's a really interesting uh noteworthy uh thing as far as sheer goes what you're also starting to see with a lot of the stuff that Sheila was doing was this shift of Americana so this influence of uh probably shaker style or American folk art and what we're seeing basically coming out of the teens and the 20s in America and what Sheila will become known with uh was this precisionist movement which honestly nobody was calling the precisionist movement the uh director of Moma named it in the 30s um they had other names for what they were doing but um it was representational of the shift of power from this folk style of Americana into what we see in the 20s is the symbols uh namely in the United States of wealth and power um proficiency uh efficiency types of things like that productivity I love this shot of this uh it's a buggy if you've ever been up to Amish Country you see these all the time it's a buggy and a barn and it's just a really beautiful uh quiet shot the other thing you're going to notice is the absence of well other than the buggy but the you're seeing the absence of people in all of these but even the absence of objects that people would could use or associate with tools Furniture functional objects things like that with the exception of the buggy so it's it's really interesting to see that shift um there's some other images there's some figure studies he did of his wife Katherine that are in here that are pretty uh but I want to move up to the New York ear and what we're seeing here is a set of Stills and these are Stills that were taken from the film manhat and Manata was a film that he produced with Paul Strand and it's interesting film because it really is showing you know via moving images uh really iconic shots of this time stylistically uh we're looking at heavy Shadows um you know the the high contrast nature the image uh people uh uniformity structure uh as we move into kind of these symbols of power and wealth uh the famous image that Paul strand did of Wall Street is actually reproduced in this film uh they have a motion version of it and it's not well and this is my personal opinion but it's not really up to the quality of their their actual photographs but manhatt is an important short film I'll link up to it you can find it on YouTube It's A Silent Film but it's it's kind of interesting to see what these guys were working on uh around this time with this move to New York um you know sheer actually started Living in New York at this time he was associated with stets and a few of gallery owners before that were allowing him to produce work um but this was when he was really um ins sconed in the culture so to speak and a lot of this was was fairly new in America at that time it was a you know growing city um you know a lot of these types of architecture uh bumping up just a little bit here is the series of photographs that he produced and this is probably what sheer is best known for this was his tour to force if you will uh that really defined it set him apart from the the Paul strand look of the early work uh it was a maturing of style but anyway he was commissioned to go up to the Ford plant and this was the the the production facility um up in Michigan and Ford Was preparing for the release of the model A and they as sheer to come up and commission him to do a series of photos and he was up there for about 6 weeks and these are amazing if you're into factories or industry or you know a lot of what we do now is abandoned buildings of of this nature of what these things once were um but these are really beautiful um I think this is probably sheeler's um you know his Shining Moment this is his Crown Jewel it's just such a beautiful image when you look at the way the Smoke Stacks work these diagonal lines with the way the conveyor belts come across um they called cross conveyors is the name of the shot crisscross conveyors uh the detail that's in here the smoke coming out uh again that whole element of Industry you see it again on this this image on the left um really really interesting uh beautiful stuff you know very much symbolism of power and and structure and and I remember the first time I saw these and thought Oh my gosh this is amazing his paintings fall in this nature as well he he kind of had a similar aesthetic to both what's interesting though as you're looking through these images and these are all the Ford plant um you are completely void of any humans or any kind of suggestion of Labor Force that's going on and that was definitely intentional um I I think it was a look they were going for on this something was very stately it was this kind of uh you know respect for the industry that was doing so well and and it's interesting because obviously as we curtale into the World War II years um the ideas of this change and this actually has a very negative uh look and feel to it at that point but other than this one shot with this one human being in it and I think he's included probably for scale on this um you don't see a lot of workers um in these shots and they're absolutely amazing uh these long halls and they're almost like these industrial cathedrals in a sense um if you've ever been to up near Pennsylvania uh which I realize is not exactly Michigan but uh a lot of the steel mills that are abandoned now now that you can find ways to get into like Bethlehem and some of those uh they're like this these furnaces that they have inside and and what these people were able to accomplish on an industrial level was pretty amazing and and these shots are amazing there's there's a ton of them he spent like I said about six weeks up there shooting and they're absolutely beautiful and with you know few exceptions and again I think these people are included for scale reasons in here for the most part maybe not this one with the workers but uh they are largely devoid of humans um as we move up a little bit too you're going to see some images in here in Virginia and these are some Shaker Village shots and again there's kind of you know this was another commission project but these were a little bit of a throwback to what he was doing with the Interiors in the home he was living in where you have these large spaces and it's really capturing that element of the space but it's interesting to see that these were 1935 so they were much later so it's a more mature style that Sheila was shooting in uh these are great too these are uh of Boulder Dam and these were taken in 1939 so they were a little bit later uh you have a similar aesthetic that's applied to you know the grounds of a dam this is another one of his famous shots here I really love this of this locomotive uh wheel and engine here that's going on um as we move into the 40s here and I find this really interesting that sheer worked for a period of time at uh the met in New York City and he worked in the Publications department and he was photographing uh their collection and pieces of it a lot of these are reliefs they're statues sculptures of that nature and I'd be curious to know more and I could not find much more on what exactly the parameters around this job were if it was something he took because they were just wanted a big name to photograph their collection or as you can see in some of these they're actually placed so they're not uh having worked in an art museum myself I can tell you that normally when the collection is being photographed uh they're looking for just very well-lit images that show off the object you don't place them in a setting necessarily and I think it's really interesting some of the work he did but anyway this is a wonderful book um it his interest in photography uh you just don't see as many as much output I mean there's still some building shots as we get into the 1950s but it's much different and his painting style changed quite a bit too and you know as we kind of have a move over to that and success came and of course he passed away not too long after this but but the meat of his career was really this earlier stuff uh leading up to the the Ford commission and sheer is an amazing photographer and I think very highly of him I think that you know he's a no name so I wouldn't say he's under rated but I think that photographers forget about him sometimes and I think that that's unfortunate because he does some absolutely stunning work in here so once again this has been uh Charles Sheeler the photographs what's interesting to me about Charles Sheeler is that I think that he gets overlooked somewhat I mean he is a big name and I think he has his place historically but as a photographer you know he was right up there shooting alongside guys like Paul Strand and he was producing work that was a high quality level and a really big part of American culture and I'll get to that in a second I think some of the reasons that maybe he doesn't get the do he's deserved sometimes is one he had a lot of commercial work that he did which of course the Fine Art World tends to look down on and I think also because he had a whole second career as a painter and I think sometimes as a culture we like to put things in their little boxes and we like to Define people as being one specific thing and Charles sheer clearly had a wide range of talent um a very clear vision and a clear style of what he wanted to do which really shaped what was going on in America really in the 1920s and onward and what's interesting is I think you know historically you can look at why things are a certain way and there was a real void um culturally in America is terms of identity or cultural identity I want to say that occurred you know post World War I post the Great Depression where I think people were trying to figure out where we were artistically and culturally and I think that you know that's when you see American folk art have a Resurgence and then also you know just post this Industrial Age there's this kind of you know visual identity that comes from a lot of the architecture that was being built uh early New York coming up and those things were reflected in the art that that people like Sheila and Paul stren were producing and they really became identified with a lot of that of course a lot of this changed later when we get into World War II in the age of the atomic bomb and and what was known as as power and and um uh confidence and productivity is now looked at slightly different but I think in its place in time the work that you see people like Charles sheer producing is is extremely important particularly in the history of American art so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this episode if you liked it remember to hit the thumbs up and share it with your friends and always remember to subscribe to the channel for the latest and greatest videos we're doing three a week now which is a lot but I'm having a lot of fun doing it and also remember to head over to our website the artof photography. TV where you can sign up for our mailing list we're about to do a major website relaunch it is imminent it is coming in the next couple months here and there's going to be a lot of cool stuff on there and things that will extend naturally from the show so once again guys I want to thank you for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later are you going to nap there you haven't taken down the Christmas tree yet do you realize it's Februarytoday I've got a real treat for you I want to talk about a photographer who is a very well-known photographer but I think he gets overlooked for a couple reasons and of course I'm referring to Charles Sheeler and I'm going to be using this book today which is Charles Sheeler the photographs and if you're not familiar with Sheeler he represents the early 1920s in American art and he was part of a group of people that were really giving an identity culturally to what was going on in the United States during that time sheer was amazingly talented uh he had a two careers one as a photographer and another second career as a painter extremely talented individual and today we're going to be looking at the photographs and that side of things um this book coincidentally is part of our Twitter giveaways that we're doing our Twitter photo challengebook giveaways and if you're interested in how you could possibly win a copy of this book um I'll put link it up in the show notes below we have a whole show dedicated to it and people have been participating on Twitter and we've had a lot of fun with that but anyway without further Ado I think it's important to go look at the works of Charles sheer Charles Sheeler was an American Artist and major figure in the precisionist movement he was a significant artist of the early 20th century and represents a wide Talent range having created major works as both a painter and a photographer Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia in 1883 he studied at the school of industrial art in 1900 majoring in industrial drawing and applied Arts he rounded out his training by studying traditional drawing and painting under the tutelage of the American impressionist painter William Merritt chase a significant impact on his development was a series of trips that he made to Europe first as a student and second after finishing College he was greatly inspired by the late middle-age Italian painters such as gato and Pierro DEA Francesca he was also largely inspired by the Cub style that was new to the art world after meeting Michael and Sarah Stein early patrons of Picasso and Brock he was in inspired to start working in the Cuba style himself in 1910 sheer became interested in photography he was living with fellow artist and friend Morton shamberg in a rented 18th century ston housee in Doylestown Pennsylvania as his interest in photography increased he began making a notable series of photographs of the house Interiors work during this period also included vernacular objects such as Barns and other local rural architecture sheer had an affinity and admiration for the straightforward design stating that found beauty in the existing simple functionality as sheeler's portfolio grew he began meeting several important figures in New York namely Alfred stiglets and gallery owner Marius deas who helped make it possible for sheer to start selling his work he began participating in group shows and eventually moved to New York in 1919 around this time he began using his own photographs as Source material for his paintings and when the move to New York City came his subject matter turned from the rural subjects of Pennsylvania to the modern skyscraper in industrial Landscapes the following year he collaborated on a film project with Paul strand titled Manata this collaboration aligned with Sheila's changing style as manhatt explored New York City as an urban landscape the tone was set with the influence of 1920s architecture with its clean lines monolithic presence layered geometry Gothic detail and early Deco styling sheer became associated with what we know today as the precisionist style an American art movement borrowing freely from various European movements including the order of purism the technology of futurism the geometry of cubism and in some cases the non-traditional relationships of dataism precisionist artists most frequently use the urban landscape as their main subject cityscapes modern architecture suspension bridges and industrial factories and complexes were at the heart of the style these elements essentially shaped a national identity to the postor War I and Great Depression United States this was also seen in the Revival of of American folk art after a major exhibition in 1922 Sheila was commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to photograph a series of images as part of the promotional campaign for the release of the model a sheer spent 6 weeks documenting the plant's massive Machinery largely leaving out the presence of human labor these images were representational of the aesthetic at the time of the mechanical age of power and productivity in 1926 sheer began working as a freelance photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair he led a diverse career photographing commissions from both private and Commercial institutions for clients such as Fortune Magazine and even a commission by Abby Rockefeller to photograph Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia from 1942 to 1945 he worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Department of Publications photographing works from their collection sheer continued to work until 1959 when he suffered a stroke he died in 1965 leaving behind an enormous Legacy and bodies of work both as a painter and as a photographer his work is associated with a particular period of American history as he was one of the key artists who shaped the American esthetic of the early 20th century so we're going to look at some work by Charles sheer here and I've got Charles sheer the photographs and this is a wonderful book it's got some wonderful essays on sheer and his work uh throughout his career and this is a collection only of photographs so there are no paintings in here so if you're just interested in the photo work this is an excellent place to start and I'm going to start with this set of images and as I mentioned in the bio early on in sheeler's career he decided he was interested in photography and he was living in a 18th Century ston House in the doston house in Pennsylvania and very beautiful place obviously and he started experimenting shoot teaching himself how to shoot and that's where these series of images came from uh he was simply shooting basically still lives of the Interiors of the house so this is some of his first architecture work work that he was doing what you're going to see that's really interesting is this play on light that goes on and this is something that you're probably familiar with probably more in the work of Paul strand if you're not familiar with Sheila the two were very close they were friends um but this is some of the earliest examples of this work I love this one in the staircase with the soft light as it gets darker and contrast as it goes up but just simple things like these little turns and you know angles and corners of the house and and he spoke very fondly of the house and and you know obviously it was it was a muse to him to shoot here and uh some really interesting early photos um a lot of the things that Sheila was interested in were uh Simplicity in basically rural architecture so you have things like the shot of this barn and the fascination was is that it was a beautiful object because uh form followed function that it's a simple structure that's designed to do one thing either house livestock or Machinery of some type and that it was beautiful because it was set up to do that and I think that's a really interesting uh noteworthy uh thing as far as sheer goes what you're also starting to see with a lot of the stuff that Sheila was doing was this shift of Americana so this influence of uh probably shaker style or American folk art and what we're seeing basically coming out of the teens and the 20s in America and what Sheila will become known with uh was this precisionist movement which honestly nobody was calling the precisionist movement the uh director of Moma named it in the 30s um they had other names for what they were doing but um it was representational of the shift of power from this folk style of Americana into what we see in the 20s is the symbols uh namely in the United States of wealth and power um proficiency uh efficiency types of things like that productivity I love this shot of this uh it's a buggy if you've ever been up to Amish Country you see these all the time it's a buggy and a barn and it's just a really beautiful uh quiet shot the other thing you're going to notice is the absence of well other than the buggy but the you're seeing the absence of people in all of these but even the absence of objects that people would could use or associate with tools Furniture functional objects things like that with the exception of the buggy so it's it's really interesting to see that shift um there's some other images there's some figure studies he did of his wife Katherine that are in here that are pretty uh but I want to move up to the New York ear and what we're seeing here is a set of Stills and these are Stills that were taken from the film manhat and Manata was a film that he produced with Paul Strand and it's interesting film because it really is showing you know via moving images uh really iconic shots of this time stylistically uh we're looking at heavy Shadows um you know the the high contrast nature the image uh people uh uniformity structure uh as we move into kind of these symbols of power and wealth uh the famous image that Paul strand did of Wall Street is actually reproduced in this film uh they have a motion version of it and it's not well and this is my personal opinion but it's not really up to the quality of their their actual photographs but manhatt is an important short film I'll link up to it you can find it on YouTube It's A Silent Film but it's it's kind of interesting to see what these guys were working on uh around this time with this move to New York um you know sheer actually started Living in New York at this time he was associated with stets and a few of gallery owners before that were allowing him to produce work um but this was when he was really um ins sconed in the culture so to speak and a lot of this was was fairly new in America at that time it was a you know growing city um you know a lot of these types of architecture uh bumping up just a little bit here is the series of photographs that he produced and this is probably what sheer is best known for this was his tour to force if you will uh that really defined it set him apart from the the Paul strand look of the early work uh it was a maturing of style but anyway he was commissioned to go up to the Ford plant and this was the the the production facility um up in Michigan and Ford Was preparing for the release of the model A and they as sheer to come up and commission him to do a series of photos and he was up there for about 6 weeks and these are amazing if you're into factories or industry or you know a lot of what we do now is abandoned buildings of of this nature of what these things once were um but these are really beautiful um I think this is probably sheeler's um you know his Shining Moment this is his Crown Jewel it's just such a beautiful image when you look at the way the Smoke Stacks work these diagonal lines with the way the conveyor belts come across um they called cross conveyors is the name of the shot crisscross conveyors uh the detail that's in here the smoke coming out uh again that whole element of Industry you see it again on this this image on the left um really really interesting uh beautiful stuff you know very much symbolism of power and and structure and and I remember the first time I saw these and thought Oh my gosh this is amazing his paintings fall in this nature as well he he kind of had a similar aesthetic to both what's interesting though as you're looking through these images and these are all the Ford plant um you are completely void of any humans or any kind of suggestion of Labor Force that's going on and that was definitely intentional um I I think it was a look they were going for on this something was very stately it was this kind of uh you know respect for the industry that was doing so well and and it's interesting because obviously as we curtale into the World War II years um the ideas of this change and this actually has a very negative uh look and feel to it at that point but other than this one shot with this one human being in it and I think he's included probably for scale on this um you don't see a lot of workers um in these shots and they're absolutely amazing uh these long halls and they're almost like these industrial cathedrals in a sense um if you've ever been to up near Pennsylvania uh which I realize is not exactly Michigan but uh a lot of the steel mills that are abandoned now now that you can find ways to get into like Bethlehem and some of those uh they're like this these furnaces that they have inside and and what these people were able to accomplish on an industrial level was pretty amazing and and these shots are amazing there's there's a ton of them he spent like I said about six weeks up there shooting and they're absolutely beautiful and with you know few exceptions and again I think these people are included for scale reasons in here for the most part maybe not this one with the workers but uh they are largely devoid of humans um as we move up a little bit too you're going to see some images in here in Virginia and these are some Shaker Village shots and again there's kind of you know this was another commission project but these were a little bit of a throwback to what he was doing with the Interiors in the home he was living in where you have these large spaces and it's really capturing that element of the space but it's interesting to see that these were 1935 so they were much later so it's a more mature style that Sheila was shooting in uh these are great too these are uh of Boulder Dam and these were taken in 1939 so they were a little bit later uh you have a similar aesthetic that's applied to you know the grounds of a dam this is another one of his famous shots here I really love this of this locomotive uh wheel and engine here that's going on um as we move into the 40s here and I find this really interesting that sheer worked for a period of time at uh the met in New York City and he worked in the Publications department and he was photographing uh their collection and pieces of it a lot of these are reliefs they're statues sculptures of that nature and I'd be curious to know more and I could not find much more on what exactly the parameters around this job were if it was something he took because they were just wanted a big name to photograph their collection or as you can see in some of these they're actually placed so they're not uh having worked in an art museum myself I can tell you that normally when the collection is being photographed uh they're looking for just very well-lit images that show off the object you don't place them in a setting necessarily and I think it's really interesting some of the work he did but anyway this is a wonderful book um it his interest in photography uh you just don't see as many as much output I mean there's still some building shots as we get into the 1950s but it's much different and his painting style changed quite a bit too and you know as we kind of have a move over to that and success came and of course he passed away not too long after this but but the meat of his career was really this earlier stuff uh leading up to the the Ford commission and sheer is an amazing photographer and I think very highly of him I think that you know he's a no name so I wouldn't say he's under rated but I think that photographers forget about him sometimes and I think that that's unfortunate because he does some absolutely stunning work in here so once again this has been uh Charles Sheeler the photographs what's interesting to me about Charles Sheeler is that I think that he gets overlooked somewhat I mean he is a big name and I think he has his place historically but as a photographer you know he was right up there shooting alongside guys like Paul Strand and he was producing work that was a high quality level and a really big part of American culture and I'll get to that in a second I think some of the reasons that maybe he doesn't get the do he's deserved sometimes is one he had a lot of commercial work that he did which of course the Fine Art World tends to look down on and I think also because he had a whole second career as a painter and I think sometimes as a culture we like to put things in their little boxes and we like to Define people as being one specific thing and Charles sheer clearly had a wide range of talent um a very clear vision and a clear style of what he wanted to do which really shaped what was going on in America really in the 1920s and onward and what's interesting is I think you know historically you can look at why things are a certain way and there was a real void um culturally in America is terms of identity or cultural identity I want to say that occurred you know post World War I post the Great Depression where I think people were trying to figure out where we were artistically and culturally and I think that you know that's when you see American folk art have a Resurgence and then also you know just post this Industrial Age there's this kind of you know visual identity that comes from a lot of the architecture that was being built uh early New York coming up and those things were reflected in the art that that people like Sheila and Paul stren were producing and they really became identified with a lot of that of course a lot of this changed later when we get into World War II in the age of the atomic bomb and and what was known as as power and and um uh confidence and productivity is now looked at slightly different but I think in its place in time the work that you see people like Charles sheer producing is is extremely important particularly in the history of American art so anyway I hope you guys enjoyed this episode if you liked it remember to hit the thumbs up and share it with your friends and always remember to subscribe to the channel for the latest and greatest videos we're doing three a week now which is a lot but I'm having a lot of fun doing it and also remember to head over to our website the artof photography. TV where you can sign up for our mailing list we're about to do a major website relaunch it is imminent it is coming in the next couple months here and there's going to be a lot of cool stuff on there and things that will extend naturally from the show so once again guys I want to thank you for watching another episode of The Art of Photography I'll see you guys in the next video later are you going to nap there you haven't taken down the Christmas tree yet do you realize it's February\n"