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Jasper Wood (photographer)

September 01, 2023

Jasper Wood (January 2, 1921 – June 7, 2002) was an American self-taught writer, photographer active 1945–1960, and free-speech activist.

Biography Edit

Jasper Wood was born in Wilmington, North Carolina,[1] son of Attorney Lehman Wood.[2] In 1936 his family moved to Cleveland. He attended Cleveland Heights High School and in 1938, as a 17-year-old senior he acquired rights to publish Ernest Hemingway’s film script[3] for his narration of The Spanish Earth on the Spanish Civil War,[4] which Wood promoted in his introduction as Hemingway’s greatest contribution,[5] though they had a disagreement[2] when the author insisted on a disclaimer on the title page of the book.[6] Film critic W. Ward Marsh wrote a vehement defence of Wood in Cleveland's The Plain Dealer.[2]

Wood enrolled at Cleveland College in 1939, where he continued his interest in writing as assistant editor of Sky Line, the school's literary magazine. He wrote poetry and a play, and was the local jazz critic for DownBeat magazine in the 1940s.[7] He survived by taking short-term jobs and in 1943 was employed in the advertising department of The Plain Dealer.

Photographer Edit

Through a colleague, in 1944 Jasper met Nancy Manning, daughter of artist Wray Manning and co-director of the 1030 Gallery. They had their first child, Denis, in 1945 and the family traveled to Mexico while Wood worked on his first novel, and entranced by the indigenous tribes in the small villages surrounding Acapulco, Cuernavaca and San Cristóbal de las Casas, he took his first photos.[8] The next year Wood purchased a 35 mm Contax II rangefinder camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Ohio's Amish country.[9]

“It is only of the poor of the slums or of the far away primitive that I can get the photographs I want. These people have a rhythmic quality which the rest of us have lost.”[10]

Recognition Edit

He first exhibited his work in 1947[11] at the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual May Show, the first of subsequent May show awards;  in 1949, 1951, 1953 and two honourable mentions in 1947, 1952.[12]  In the meantime Wood began writing reviews of local jazz musicians for the Cleveland Press and Downbeat Magazine, and made a regular income as an advertising agent.

Curator Edward Steichen chose Wood’s photograph of a pensive barefoot Mexican girl hurrying with her empty basket past a wooden door for the 1955 world-touring the Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors.[13] Woods had been included in a previous MoMA show Photographs by 51 Photographers August 1 to September 17, 1950.

The Scovill photographs Edit

Around 1949 Wood and his young family moved to 1294 Spruce Court in the Lakeview Terrace, one of the nation’s first federally funded housing projects, and in the 1950s Wood had several one-man and two-man shows of imagery made in the neighbourhood. His principal subjects were inhabitants of the Scovill Avenue area of Cleveland, familiar to him from his visits to jazz clubs in the neighbourhood in the late 1930s and early 1940s.[14] Exhibition venues included Image Gallery (New York City), the San Francisco Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum and an exhibition of Scovill photographs at the 1030 Gallery in Cleveland from February 19-March 11, 1950.[15] His Girl with Doll, part of the Scovill series, won first place in the 1951 American Photography magazine annual contest. Also that year, the Akron Art Museum held a joint show by Jasper Wood and friend Harry Schulke who were each asked to invite 13 photographers to exhibit work alongside theirs.  Wood invited Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, and Bernice Abbott.[16]

In 1953, Wood also ventured into film with a 15-minute short Streetcar,[17] which provides a cross-section of life in Cleveland by depicting passengers traveling the tramway in the early 1950s, just before it stopped running in Cleveland in 1954.[18]

Wood’s motivation in making photographs and film was existential and humanist, and he was not interested in deriving profit from or making a career of a creative medium which he regarded as a means to connect with his subject and to capture what he called the ‘felt moment seen’,[19] in his paraphrase of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’. For a living, he and partner Carl Malmquist established Malmquist and Wood advertising art studio in 1955, a concern profitable enough that the family no longer qualified to live in the housing project where they had built a modest life and they relocated to a three-bedroom apartment in Cleveland Heights where they lived a more privileged existence.[19]

Later career Edit

Wood’s interest in photography wavered but his love of art continued, bringing him success as an art dealer. A film society he’d founded screened others' works at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Masonic Temple.

When his friend Nico Jacobellis was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 for showing Louis Malle’s The Lovers at the Heights Art Theater, Wood founded 'Citizens for Freedom of the Mind'. Through it he raised funds for the defence of bookseller James Lowell and counterculture poet D. A. Levy against charges of obscenity corrupting a minor during their poetry reading on November 15, 1966.[1]

Wood had stopped taking photographs altogether by 1960 and his last show was in Image Gallery (New York City) that year.[20] By 1970 he had closed Malmquist and Wood for an early retirement[21] and he and Manning married and purchased a house in San Cristobal, living in Mexico until 1973 when Wood returned to work as an advertising agent, relocating to Raleigh, North Carolina, to be near his eldest son.

Wood died in 2002, survived by his sons Denis,[22] Chris, and Peter and his wife, who died in 2008.

The Jasper Wood Collection, consisting of all extant photographic negatives by Jasper Wood, a collection of photographic prints by Wood, an original 16mm copy of Wood's short film Streetcar, and biographical information is held in the Cleveland Public Library. The collection is available online on the library's Digital Gallery.

Exhibitions Edit

  • Annual May Show, Cleveland Museum of Art, 1947,[11] 1949, 1951,[15] 1952,[12] 1953.
  • 1030 Gallery, Cleveland, February 19–March 11, 1950[1]
  • Photographs by 51 Photographers, Museum of Modern Art, 1 August–17 September 1950[23]
  • Photographs by Jasper Wood, San Francisco Museum April 2, 1952 – May 11, 1952[24]
  • Los Angeles County Museum[1]
  • The Family of Man, Museum of Modern Art, 24 January–8 May 1955 with world tour until 1960.
  • Image Gallery (New York City) 1960[20]

Posthumous exhibitions Edit

  • The Image Gallery: Redux 1959-1962, Howard Greenberg Gallery, February 15–22, 2014[25]
  • Jasper Wood’s Cleveland, Cleveland Public Library, October 28–November 14, 2016[26]

Bibliography Edit

  • Gray, Arthur, 1884-1976; Barnhill, Wm. A; Wood, Jasper; Borowiec, Andrew, 1956-; Dean, Sharon E., 1959-; Busta, William; Cleveland Artists Foundation; Cleveland Public Library (2007), Visions of a city with a soul : four photographers in Cleveland, 1925-2005, [Cleveland, OH] Cleveland Artsist Foundation and Cleveland Public Library, ISBN 978-0-9716009-9-7{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

References Edit

  1. ^ a b c d Biography in The Jasper Wood Collection OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository
  2. ^ a b c W. Ward Marsh "Clevelander publishes Hemingway volume. Jasper Wood gets 'Spanish Earth' rights. Hemingway complains; Volume is praised." in "One Moment, Please!" column, The Plain Dealer, Sunday July 24, 1938 Plain Dealer, page 9-B
  3. ^ Hemingway, Ernest; Wood, Jasper; Russell, Frederick K, (illus.); Herman Finkelstein Collection (Library of Congress) (1938), The Spanish earth, The J.B. Savage company{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ Guill, Stacey (2011-09-22), "Hemingway's Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War.(Book review)", The Hemingway Review, Ernest Hemingway Foundation, 31 (1): 128(3), ISSN 0276-3362
  5. ^ Valis, N. (2017). ‘From the Face of My Memory’: How American Women Journalists Covered the Spanish Civil War. Society, 54(6), 549-559.
  6. ^ Davison, R. (1988). "The Publication of Hemingway's "The Spanish Earth": An Untold Story". Hemingway Review, 7(2), 122.
  7. ^ Hodes, Art, 1904-1993; Hansen, Chadwick, 1926- (1977), Selections from the gutter : jazz portraits from "The Jazz record", University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-02999-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ Hopkinson, A. (2001). ‘Mediated Worlds’: Latin American Photography. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 20(4), 520-527.
  9. ^ In a June 24, 1951 letter to the American writer and editor for Carrefour Press, Michael Fraenkel (1896-1957) he writes: "I have been doing a great deal of photography. Enclosed is the announcement for a show I had in the winter [...] Won first award at Cleveland Museum of Art for group of three negro photographs. Have also been photographing an ana-baptist sect [...] the amish [...] They are shrewd, hard, tight, hypocritical as any people ever were [...] yet with a strange beauty in their children, and a clean hardness about their lives which is most attractive [...] But when a people use their religious people use their orthodox beliefs as a shield against the encroachment of the material world, they are already in defeat"
  10. ^ Interview of Wood in The Plain Dealer newspaper, 1949
  11. ^ a b Francis, H. S., & Milliken, W. M. (1947). Review of the Exhibition. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 34(5), 80-107.
  12. ^ a b Francis, H. S., & Milliken, W. M. (1952). Review of the Exhibition. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 39(5), 80-115.
  13. ^ Steichen, Edward; Steichen, Edward, 1879-1973, (organizer.); Sandburg, Carl, 1878-1967, (writer of foreword.); Norman, Dorothy, 1905-1997, (writer of added text.); Lionni, Leo, 1910-1999, (book designer.); Mason, Jerry, (editor.); Stoller, Ezra, (photographer.); Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (1955). The family of man : the photographic exhibition. Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with the Maco Magazine Corporation. {{cite book}}: |author6= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  14. ^ Counterpoint, Volume 17, Issue 5, 1952 Stanley Associates, p.25
  15. ^ a b Milliken, W. M. (1951). Review of the Exhibition. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, 38(5), 84-123.
  16. ^ American Photography July 1951: pages 420-423
  17. ^ Belton, J. (Ed.). (1996). Movies and mass culture. Rutgers University Press.
  18. ^ Erick Trickey '"Streetcar" by Jasper Wood', Cleveland Magazine blog Sunday, September 7, 2008
  19. ^ a b James Bigley II (2016) The Lost Art of Jasper Wood, Cleveland Magazine, Saturday, October 01, 2016
  20. ^ a b Jacob Deschin (1960) 'Wide Range Shown By Seven Exhibits'. In The New York Times, March 13, 1960
  21. ^ Interview in The Plain Dealer, Aug. 2, 1970
  22. ^ "Denis Wood, Biography".
  23. ^ Museum of Modern Art Calendar of Exhibitions online
  24. ^ SFMOMA Exhibition Inventory 1935–1991
  25. ^ Information on and images from The Image Gallery: Redux 1959-1962 at Howard Greenberg Gallery exhibition archive on their website
  26. ^ Cleveland Public Library Press Release

September 01, 2023
jasper, wood, photographer, jasper, wood, january, 1921, june, 2002, american, self, taught, writer, photographer, active, 1945, 1960, free, speech, activist, contents, biography, photographer, recognition, scovill, photographs, later, career, exhibitions, pos. Jasper Wood January 2 1921 June 7 2002 was an American self taught writer photographer active 1945 1960 and free speech activist Contents 1 Biography 2 Photographer 3 Recognition 4 The Scovill photographs 5 Later career 6 Exhibitions 6 1 Posthumous exhibitions 7 Bibliography 8 ReferencesBiography EditJasper Wood was born in Wilmington North Carolina 1 son of Attorney Lehman Wood 2 In 1936 his family moved to Cleveland He attended Cleveland Heights High School and in 1938 as a 17 year old senior he acquired rights to publish Ernest Hemingway s film script 3 for his narration of The Spanish Earth on the Spanish Civil War 4 which Wood promoted in his introduction as Hemingway s greatest contribution 5 though they had a disagreement 2 when the author insisted on a disclaimer on the title page of the book 6 Film critic W Ward Marsh wrote a vehement defence of Wood in Cleveland s The Plain Dealer 2 Wood enrolled at Cleveland College in 1939 where he continued his interest in writing as assistant editor of Sky Line the school s literary magazine He wrote poetry and a play and was the local jazz critic for DownBeat magazine in the 1940s 7 He survived by taking short term jobs and in 1943 was employed in the advertising department of The Plain Dealer Photographer EditThrough a colleague in 1944 Jasper met Nancy Manning daughter of artist Wray Manning and co director of the 1030 Gallery They had their first child Denis in 1945 and the family traveled to Mexico while Wood worked on his first novel and entranced by the indigenous tribes in the small villages surrounding Acapulco Cuernavaca and San Cristobal de las Casas he took his first photos 8 The next year Wood purchased a 35 mm Contax II rangefinder camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Ohio s Amish country 9 It is only of the poor of the slums or of the far away primitive that I can get the photographs I want These people have a rhythmic quality which the rest of us have lost 10 Recognition EditHe first exhibited his work in 1947 11 at the Cleveland Museum of Art s annual May Show the first of subsequent May show awards in 1949 1951 1953 and two honourable mentions in 1947 1952 12 In the meantime Wood began writing reviews of local jazz musicians for the Cleveland Press and Downbeat Magazine and made a regular income as an advertising agent Curator Edward Steichen chose Wood s photograph of a pensive barefoot Mexican girl hurrying with her empty basket past a wooden door for the 1955 world touring the Museum of Modern Art exhibit The Family of Man seen by 9 million visitors 13 Woods had been included in a previous MoMA show Photographs by 51 Photographers August 1 to September 17 1950 The Scovill photographs EditAround 1949 Wood and his young family moved to 1294 Spruce Court in the Lakeview Terrace one of the nation s first federally funded housing projects and in the 1950s Wood had several one man and two man shows of imagery made in the neighbourhood His principal subjects were inhabitants of the Scovill Avenue area of Cleveland familiar to him from his visits to jazz clubs in the neighbourhood in the late 1930s and early 1940s 14 Exhibition venues included Image Gallery New York City the San Francisco Museum the Los Angeles County Museum and an exhibition of Scovill photographs at the 1030 Gallery in Cleveland from February 19 March 11 1950 15 His Girl with Doll part of the Scovill series won first place in the 1951 American Photography magazine annual contest Also that year the Akron Art Museum held a joint show by Jasper Wood and friend Harry Schulke who were each asked to invite 13 photographers to exhibit work alongside theirs Wood invited Ben Shahn Walker Evans Ansel Adams Edward Steichen and Bernice Abbott 16 In 1953 Wood also ventured into film with a 15 minute short Streetcar 17 which provides a cross section of life in Cleveland by depicting passengers traveling the tramway in the early 1950s just before it stopped running in Cleveland in 1954 18 Wood s motivation in making photographs and film was existential and humanist and he was not interested in deriving profit from or making a career of a creative medium which he regarded as a means to connect with his subject and to capture what he called the felt moment seen 19 in his paraphrase of Henri Cartier Bresson s decisive moment For a living he and partner Carl Malmquist established Malmquist and Wood advertising art studio in 1955 a concern profitable enough that the family no longer qualified to live in the housing project where they had built a modest life and they relocated to a three bedroom apartment in Cleveland Heights where they lived a more privileged existence 19 Later career EditWood s interest in photography wavered but his love of art continued bringing him success as an art dealer A film society he d founded screened others works at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Masonic Temple When his friend Nico Jacobellis was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 for showing Louis Malle s The Lovers at the Heights Art Theater Wood founded Citizens for Freedom of the Mind Through it he raised funds for the defence of bookseller James Lowell and counterculture poet D A Levy against charges of obscenity corrupting a minor during their poetry reading on November 15 1966 1 Wood had stopped taking photographs altogether by 1960 and his last show was in Image Gallery New York City that year 20 By 1970 he had closed Malmquist and Wood for an early retirement 21 and he and Manning married and purchased a house in San Cristobal living in Mexico until 1973 when Wood returned to work as an advertising agent relocating to Raleigh North Carolina to be near his eldest son Wood died in 2002 survived by his sons Denis 22 Chris and Peter and his wife who died in 2008 The Jasper Wood Collection consisting of all extant photographic negatives by Jasper Wood a collection of photographic prints by Wood an original 16mm copy of Wood s short film Streetcar and biographical information is held in the Cleveland Public Library The collection is available online on the library s Digital Gallery Exhibitions EditAnnual May Show Cleveland Museum of Art 1947 11 1949 1951 15 1952 12 1953 1030 Gallery Cleveland February 19 March 11 1950 1 Photographs by 51 Photographers Museum of Modern Art 1 August 17 September 1950 23 Photographs by Jasper Wood San Francisco Museum April 2 1952 May 11 1952 24 Los Angeles County Museum 1 The Family of Man Museum of Modern Art 24 January 8 May 1955 with world tour until 1960 Image Gallery New York City 1960 20 Posthumous exhibitions Edit The Image Gallery Redux 1959 1962 Howard Greenberg Gallery February 15 22 2014 25 Jasper Wood s Cleveland Cleveland Public Library October 28 November 14 2016 26 Bibliography EditGray Arthur 1884 1976 Barnhill Wm A Wood Jasper Borowiec Andrew 1956 Dean Sharon E 1959 Busta William Cleveland Artists Foundation Cleveland Public Library 2007 Visions of a city with a soul four photographers in Cleveland 1925 2005 Cleveland OH Cleveland Artsist Foundation and Cleveland Public Library ISBN 978 0 9716009 9 7 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link References Edit a b c d Biography in The Jasper Wood Collection OhioLINK Finding Aid Repository a b c W Ward Marsh Clevelander publishes Hemingway volume Jasper Wood gets Spanish Earth rights Hemingway complains Volume is praised in One Moment Please column The Plain Dealer Sunday July 24 1938 Plain Dealer page 9 B Hemingway Ernest Wood Jasper Russell Frederick K illus Herman Finkelstein Collection Library of Congress 1938 The Spanish earth The J B Savage company a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Guill Stacey 2011 09 22 Hemingway s Second War Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War Book review The Hemingway Review Ernest Hemingway Foundation 31 1 128 3 ISSN 0276 3362 Valis N 2017 From the Face of My Memory How American Women Journalists Covered the Spanish Civil War Society 54 6 549 559 Davison R 1988 The Publication of Hemingway s The Spanish Earth An Untold Story Hemingway Review 7 2 122 Hodes Art 1904 1993 Hansen Chadwick 1926 1977 Selections from the gutter jazz portraits from The Jazz record University of California Press ISBN 978 0 520 02999 6 a href Template Citation html title Template Citation citation a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Hopkinson A 2001 Mediated Worlds Latin American Photography Bulletin of Latin American Research 20 4 520 527 In a June 24 1951 letter to the American writer and editor for Carrefour Press Michael Fraenkel 1896 1957 he writes I have been doing a great deal of photography Enclosed is the announcement for a show I had in the winter Won first award at Cleveland Museum of Art for group of three negro photographs Have also been photographing an ana baptist sect the amish They are shrewd hard tight hypocritical as any people ever were yet with a strange beauty in their children and a clean hardness about their lives which is most attractive But when a people use their religious people use their orthodox beliefs as a shield against the encroachment of the material world they are already in defeat Interview of Wood in The Plain Dealer newspaper 1949 a b Francis H S amp Milliken W M 1947 Review of the Exhibition The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 34 5 80 107 a b Francis H S amp Milliken W M 1952 Review of the Exhibition The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 39 5 80 115 Steichen Edward Steichen Edward 1879 1973 organizer Sandburg Carl 1878 1967 writer of foreword Norman Dorothy 1905 1997 writer of added text Lionni Leo 1910 1999 book designer Mason Jerry editor Stoller Ezra photographer Museum of Modern Art New York N Y 1955 The family of man the photographic exhibition Published for the Museum of Modern Art by Simon and Schuster in collaboration with the Maco Magazine Corporation a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a author6 has generic name help CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Counterpoint Volume 17 Issue 5 1952 Stanley Associates p 25 a b Milliken W M 1951 Review of the Exhibition The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 38 5 84 123 American Photography July 1951 pages 420 423 Belton J Ed 1996 Movies and mass culture Rutgers University Press Erick Trickey Streetcar by Jasper Wood Cleveland Magazine blog Sunday September 7 2008 a b James Bigley II 2016 The Lost Art of Jasper Wood Cleveland Magazine Saturday October 01 2016 a b Jacob Deschin 1960 Wide Range Shown By Seven Exhibits In The New York Times March 13 1960 Interview in The Plain Dealer Aug 2 1970 Denis Wood Biography Museum of Modern Art Calendar of Exhibitions online SFMOMA Exhibition Inventory 1935 1991 Information on and images from The Image Gallery Redux 1959 1962 at Howard Greenberg Gallery exhibition archive on their website Cleveland Public Library Press Release Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Jasper Wood photographer amp oldid 1049885005, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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