Samuel Gottscho, Vintage Silver Gelatin Signed Photograph Samuel Gottscho Garden Flowers Photo NY, c.1960s

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Vintage hand signed and stamp signed with the photographer's stamp and numbered photo of starflower. Samuel Herman Gottscho (February 8, … Read more Vintage hand signed and stamp signed with the photographer's stamp and numbered photo of starflower. Samuel Herman Gottscho (February 8, 1875 - January 28, 1971) was an American architectural, landscape, and nature photographer. Samuel Gottscho was born in Brooklyn in New York City. He acquired his first camera in 1896 and took his first photograph at Coney Island. From 1896 to 1920 he photographed part-time, specializing in houses and gardens, as he particularly enjoyed nature, rural life, and landscapes. After attending several architectural photograph exhibitions, Gottscho decided to perfect and improve his own work and sought out several architects and landscape architects. After twenty-three years as a traveling lace and fabric salesman, at an age when most people would have given up their youthful dreams, Gottscho became a professional commercial photographer at the age of 50. His son-in-law William Schleisner joined Gottscho in his business in 1935. During this time his photographs appeared in and on the covers of American Architect and Architecture, Architectural Record. His portraits and architectural photography regularly appeared in articles in the New York Times. His photographs of private homes in the New York and Connecticut suburbs often appeared in home decoration magazines. From the early 1940s to the late 1960s, he was a regular contributor to the Times of illustrated articles on wildflowers. the meticulous, adoring pictures of New York City architecture and interiors that he took at his creative peak in the late 1920's and early 30's are finding a new audience, placing him more firmly in the ranks of the great architectural photographers of his day, like Ezra Stoller, Julius Shulman and Ken and Bill Hedrich. the Museum of the City of New York, which has one of the largest archives of Gottscho's work, showed about 150 of his best city scenes in an exhibition called "The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940," a collective portrait of an almost fantastical, alabaster New York as it was pushing ambitiously up and out. During his heyday, Gottscho was often grouped with the leading art photographers of the time. In 1932, his work was included in a show at the influential Julien Levy Gallery with that of Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott and Margaret Bourke-White. Even his admirers describe him not as a great photographer but as one who latched onto a great subject at a great time, when architects like Raymond Hood, the designer of the American Radiator Building and much of Rockefeller Center, sought him out. "The architects who commissioned him found in him an extraordinarily sensitive interpreter of the work of the time," said Jeff Rosenheim, an associate photography curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a fan of Gottscho's work. Gottscho believed he created some of his best work at the age of 70. In 1967, his botanical work won him the New York Botanical Garden's Distinguished Service Medal. He died in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Books: The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940, Donald Albrecht, Princeton 2005 New York: Capital of Photography, Max Kozloff, Yale 2002 Obituary Camera (English Edition) v. 50 (March 1971) The Man and the Myth by Donald Albrecht in Interior Design, NYC Select Exhibitions: “Image Building: How Photography Transforms Architecture,” at the Parrish and then the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville. curated by Therese Lichtenstein. The 57 photographs in the exhibition, spanning from the Depression to our own time, are by 19 artists, including Thomas Ruff, Berenice Abbott, Candida Höfer, Andreas Gursky and Samuel H. Gottscho. Many are in black and white, long a preferred choice for capturing the essentials of a structure. Publications Manhattan 1933 A pocket guide to wildflowers: How to identify and enjoy them 1951 Architectural and Decorative Features of St. Bartholomew's Church in the City of New York 1941 A portfolio of views of the New York World's Fair of 1939 1939 Wild-Flower Bounty from a L.I. Bog by Samuel H. Gottscho. New York Times: Jul 31, 1966 MAY GARDENS by Samuel H. Gottscho. New York Times: May 4, 1941 Approximately 29,000 of his images are held in the Gottscho-Schleisner collection at the U. S. Library of Congress. Additionally, over 40,000 are held by the Museum of the City of New York, where an exhibition of his work titled "The Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940," opened in November 2005. A third major archive of his work is held by Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. See less