FLORENCE HENRI
Jean-Michel Foray [Directeur]
Jean-Michel Foray [Directeur]: FLORENCE HENRI. Milan: Electa, 1995. First edition. Text in French and English. Quarto. Photo illustrated thick wrappers. 174 pp. 79 duotone plates. 35 black-and-white text illustrations. Wrappers lightly worn. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly fine copy.
8.25 x 11 soft cover book with 174 pages and 79 black-and-white plates and 35 black-and-white text illustrations. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name: Villa Aurélienne, Fréjus [July 8 – September 24, 1995]. Includes an essay by Catherine Pulfer, a Biography by Giovanni Batista Martini and Alberto Ronchetti, and a thorough bibliography and exhibition history.
Florence Henri's work occupied a central place in the world of avant-garde photography in the late 1920s and this survey pays homage to the artist's essential contribution. This volume offers an overview of Henri's work produced between 1927 and 1940, including her iconic self-portraits and still lifes as well as her lesser-known portraits of her contemporaries, photomontages, collages and documentary work. László Moholy-Nagy declared that 'with Florence Henri's photos, photographic practice enters a new phase-the scope of which would have been unimaginable before today. Above and beyond the precise and exact documentary composition of these highly defined photos, research into the effects of light is tackled not only through abstract photograms, but also in photos of real-life subjects Reflections and spatial relationships, superposition and intersections are just some of the areas explored from a totally new perspective....' Henri remains an inspiration for photographers, artists and design enthusiasts alike.
Excerpted from the website for the International Center for Photography: Born in New York in 1893, Florence Henri left the United States permanently at age two, following the death of her mother, and spent her childhood constantly traveling between maternal relatives in Silesia (then part of Germany), a convent school in Paris, and family homes in London and the Isle of Wight. Trained as a pianist, she studied music with Ferruccio Busoni in Rome and became acquainted with important figures in the Italian Futurist movement. She relocated to Berlin during World War I (working briefly as an accompanist for silent films), and abandoned her musical career to pursue painting. Denied entry into France in 1924 and declared “stateless,” Henri attained Swiss citizenship through a hasty marriage to a Swiss domestic servant. She moved to Paris by 1925, and began studying painting with André Lhote and Fernand Léger, working in the visual idiom of late cubism.
In 1927 (at age 34), Henri enrolled as a non-matriculating student at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where she studied photography for the first time with László Moholy-Nagy, developing a close friendship with Lucia Moholy, who strongly encouraged Henri’s experimentation with the camera. Henri’s manipulation of mirrors, prisms, and reflective objects to frame, isolate, double, and otherwise interact with her subjects–one of the most distinctive and adventurous features of her photographic work–often confounds viewers’ ability to distinguish between reality and reflection. Henri also experimented with photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing in her work, consistently constructing images that undermine the camera’s capacity for realism to create multifaceted, artificial, imagined spaces. The spatial and psychological ambiguity produced by Henri’s complex and disorienting compositions accounts not only for their status as virtuosic examples of the formal and technical experimentation of New Vision photography at the Bauhaus, but also for the currency of her work within discussions of Surrealism. Between 1928 and the late 1930s, Henri produced the work for which she is best known, including her mirror compositions, participating in the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. She opened a successful studio in Paris and took on advertising projects to supplement her income, continuing to feature mirrors and utilize photographic techniques promoted at the Bauhaus in her professional work. Henri renounced photography in the early 1960s, and lived in France until her death in 1982.—Anna Linehan