Karl Struss American, 1886-1981

Karl Struss (1886–1981) occupies a singular position in the histories of both art photography and cinema. One of the leading Pictorialists of the years before the First World War, he went on to become a pioneering cinematographer in Hollywood. A Pictorialist by temperament and an illusionist by instinct, he was hailed as one of the great cameramen of the first quarter-century of filmmaking after The Birth of a Nation. He developed the soft-focus lens that bore his name, was published by Alfred Stieglitz in Camera Work, and won the first Academy Award for cinematography. Yet his achievements in film so overshadowed his still photography that the latter remained largely unrecognized until the final years of his life.

Born in New York, Struss turned to photography, by his own account, as a form of self-defense against the monotony of ten-hour working days in his father’s bonnet-wire factory. Beginning in 1908, he studied with Clarence H. White in the evening art-photography classes at Teachers College, Columbia University. He occasionally took over White’s teaching in his absence and, in 1914, assumed control of White’s New York studio, where he worked in portraiture, advertising and commercial photography. In 1916, he co-founded the Pictorial Photographers of America with White.

Stieglitz selected twelve of Struss’s photographs for the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1910, the final exhibition of the Photo-Secession, and subsequently elected him to the group. In April 1912, Camera Work devoted an issue to his work. Struss photographed New York from its rooftops and bridges, rendering the city in atmospheric, softly modulated tonalities. He refined a multilayered platinum-printing process and, at twenty-two, designed the Struss Pictorial Lens, which was quickly adopted by Pictorialist photographers. By 1916, it had entered the motion-picture industry, becoming the first soft-focus lens used in cinematography.

Briefly interned during the First World War because of his German name, Struss moved to Los Angeles in 1919 and joined Cecil B. DeMille. Over the following four decades, he photographed a succession of major films, including Ben-Hur, Sunrise, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Sign of the Cross, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Limelight, as well as television productions. For Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he achieved the celebrated transformation sequence in camera using colored filters. A founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he received four Academy Award nominations and won the first Oscar for cinematography, shared with Charles Rosher for F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise. Beginning in 1949, he was also among the early practitioners of stereoscopic cinematography.

Throughout his film career, Struss continued to photograph independently. His still photographs, made in New York, Hollywood, Bermuda and Italy, remained largely overlooked until an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a few years before his death. The Amon Carter Museum’s New York to Hollywood exhibition in 1995 subsequently brought the two dimensions of his career into focus, establishing their continuity as expressions of a single artistic vision.

Struss’s photographic work was presented in The Nudes of Karl Struss at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in 2004, the first exhibition devoted to his nudes as a distinct body of work.