Charles Sheeler American, 1883-1965

Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) worked as a painter and photographer at the same level and refused to rank the two. He is generally associated with Precisionism, the American reduction of factories, barns and ships to flat planes and hard edges, but his photographs arrive at that geometry by a different route. Some became sources for paintings, and some did not, and he came to believe that a picture could carry the structural logic of abstraction while remaining wholly realistic in its presentation.

Born in Philadelphia in 1883, Sheeler trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and took up photography to earn a living, first photographing architecture and later works of art for dealers and collectors. Photographing objects from many cultures convinced him that all great art emerged from the same tradition. From a rented farmhouse in Doylestown, Bucks County, he made the photographs of Pennsylvania barns and bare interiors that established his early work, among them Side of White Barn (1915).

With Paul Strand, he made the short film Manhatta in 1920, filming lower Manhattan from steep angles, and immediately afterward photographed the city in much the same manner, using the images as source material for paintings. Edward Steichen hired him for Condé Nast in 1926, and he photographed fashion and celebrity portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair until 1931.

In 1927, the Ford Motor Company commissioned Sheeler to photograph its River Rouge plant in Dearborn for the launch of the Model A. He spent six weeks there, making thirty-two photographs of the machinery and architecture rather than the labor, producing what became the first sustained artistic series of industrial photographs. Within a year, European photographers were making similar pictures. Criss-Crossed Conveyors and his photographs of the open hearth and stamping press are among them, and the plant continued to provide material for his paintings and drawings for years afterward.

Sheeler moved to South Salem, New York, in 1927 and later to Dobbs Ferry. In 1931, he gave up commercial photography after Edith Halpert offered him exclusive representation at the Downtown Gallery. She advised him to photograph less and paint more and continued to show his paintings and drawings until 1966. By the late 1930s, photography had ceased to be an independent activity and had become part of a single practice in which the two media were folded together, as in the Power series of 1939, commissioned by Fortune.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of Halpert’s best customers, invited Sheeler to photograph the architecture of Colonial Williamsburg in 1935. He went on to photograph Chartres, the Shaker meetinghouse at Mount Lebanon, and the interiors of his own houses, with their Shaker furniture, which he collected. A stroke in 1959 left him unable to paint or photograph. He died in Dobbs Ferry in 1965, aged eighty-one.