Karl Struss is a pivotal figure in the history of photography, though his most active involvement in the field spanned less than a decade.¹ In 1908, at the age of twenty-two, he adopted Pictorialism at the very moment that Alfred Stieglitz and many of his colleagues were moving away from soft-focus imagery and manipulated prints toward the precision and clarity of "straight" photography. Struss claimed, later in life, that he had taken up the camera mainly "in self defense," because the alternative was to continue working ten-hour days in his father's bonnet-wire factory.² His early platinum photographs were shown to Stieglitz by Struss's mentor, Clarence H. White, with whom he took night classes at Columbia University Teachers College in New York between 1908 and 1912. Stieglitz admired Struss's rich, velvety prints, many of which combined pictorialist techniques and contemporary, urban subjects, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Pennsylvania Station, as well as elevated trolleys, skyscrapers, and bustling city streets. In fact, Stieglitz told him, "You and Mr. [Paul] Haviland, and one or two others, are the only photographers of the younger generation in this country who seem to have anything to say.”³ In 1910 a dozen of Struss's works were featured in the "International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography," organized by Stieglitz for the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, and two years later Stieglitz published eight photogravures by Struss in Camera Work, the magazine of the Photo-Secession.

Unlike many of his fellow Pictorialists, Struss was not a wealthy amateur dabbling in the field as a hobby; his circumstances required that he work for a living. It is not surprising, then, that he made many of his photographs while on vacation—in the summer of 1909, for example, when he traveled with two of his sisters to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and in 1910 and 1911 during sojourns in Nova Scotia.⁴ Struss first visited the island of Bermuda the following year, and wrote to Stieglitz that it was "probably the most beautiful, charming and quaint place I have ever visited, and as for color there is nothing like it anywhere in Europe. I hope to go again someday and will not forget to take along a few autochromes.”⁵ True to his word, Struss returned to Bermuda in 1913 and, inspired by its balmy climate and tropical scenery, documented the island's distinctive architecture, narrow streets, and beautiful beaches, in both platinum prints and autochromes.

The following spring Struss was commissioned by the Bermuda Trade Development Board to do a series of photographs to illustrate the tourist guide Bermuda: Nature's Fairyland.⁶ Struss seems to have temporarily set aside his view camera and autochrome plates for this project, experimenting instead with a 35mm tourist camera that used motion-picture film and only had to be reloaded every 750 exposures. He used up his supply of this film much too quickly, however, and had to resort to using the "short ends" left over from a documentary film company's production elsewhere on the island⁷ The Addison's photograph of Bermuda by Struss is a variant of one that appears in the guidebook and is typical of the subjects featured in it, in this case, a row of spectators leaning over a railing at the island's famed Princess Hotel, looking out across Hamilton Harbor. The sharp diagonal of dark figures intersects two bodies of water—the broad expanse of ocean on one side and the hotel's tiled pool, with its lone swimmer, on the other. Looming on the horizon is a large ocean liner entering the bay, one of the celebrated "floating palaces" that regularly made the short trip between the United States and the British colony. Images such as this, along with the brochure's accompanying text, promoted American tourism to Bermuda in much the same way that Mark Twain's writings had in the late nineteenth century, by focusing on what Twain described as the island's "tranquil and contenting" aspects.⁸

Over the course of his career, Struss made several other photographs in which figures with their backs to the camera look out across watery vistas, as in, for example, his early Balcony, Sorrento of 1909 and several of his views of the boardwalk at Arverne, Long Island, of around 1909-11; it was one of the photographer's favorite motifs, and such pictures reflect his mastery of carefully balanced compositions—what Struss liked to call "the art of space filling."⁹ His inventive use of contrasting geometric shapes and decorative patterns of light and shadow was greatly influenced by Clarence White's teachings and, through him, the design theories espoused by Arthur Wesley Dow, director of Fine Arts at Columbia University Teachers College. Their shared enthusiasm for the art of James McNeill Whistler and the compositional devices in Japanese prints inspired Struss to experiment with long focal length lenses in order to create pared-down images such as this Bermuda view, in which the dark forms of the figures and the ship are abstracted, the picture's center is an empty void, and the water reads as a flat expanse, steeply raking toward the sky. Struss felt that the longer lens helped him capture the essence of such scenes by simplifying them—what he described as getting the "heart" out of a picture—and allowed him to visualize an image in advance, rather than cropping it during printing.¹⁰

Karen E. Haas, Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years, A Selective Catalogue (Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1996), pp. 477-78; revised by Kelley Tialiou, Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Assistant | Librarian | Archivist


1. Struss's most productive years in still photography were 1908 to 1917. In 1914 he took over Clarence White's studio on 31st Street in New York, where he did mostly commercial work until military service in World War I intervened. After the war Struss went to Hollywood and began a second career as a cinematographer.

2. Susan and John Harvith, Karl Struss: Man with a Camera (Bloomfield Hills, Michigan: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1976), p. 1. Struss worked for his father for eleven years in all, from 1903 to 1914, beginning at the age of sixteen.

3. Alfred Stieglitz to Karl Struss, 14 June 1912, quoted in William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983), pp. 149, 151. In 1912, Struss had the dubious distinction of being the last person invited to join the Photo-Secession group before it disbanded.

4. Among the three other images—all platinum prints—by Struss in the Addison's collection is a photograph that dates from 1911, taken during the photographer's second visit to the artists' colony of Chester, Nova Scotia. The soft-focus image is untitled, but its subject is a group of small figures walking among tall, windblown trees. I am indebted to Barbara McCandless, associate curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, for the invaluable information that she gave us on these two photographs by Struss.

5. Struss to Stieglitz, 13 June 1912, quoted in Barbara McCandless and Bonnie Yochelson et al., New York to Hollywood, The Photography of Karl Struss (Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum, 1995), p. 28. The autochrome process was the earliest commercially available method for creating color images and was eagerly experimented with by members of the Photo-Secession group, but the resulting glass-plate positives were unwieldy to look at and display, and had to be viewed through a special mirrored device.

6. This was Struss's first such commercial assignment, and it gave him the confidence finally to give up the job he had in his father's factory and go out on his own. An advertisement for the Bermuda guidebook reads: "The Favorite Winter Resort of Thousands of Americans / Glorious Climate, Delightful Social Life, Unequalled Scenic Charm, All Land and Water Sports / Average
Yearly Temp. 70°"; ibid., pp. 28-30.

7. Ibid., p. 29. Struss's enterprising use of motion-picture film on this occasion is especially interesting in light of his later career making Hollywood films under Cecil B. de Mille and D. W. Griffith among others.

8. Quoted in Eleanor Early, Ports of the Sun: A Guide to the Caribbean, Bermuda, Nassau, Havana, and Panama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 4.

9. For a discussion of Struss's approach to composition and the influence of White and Dow, see Toby A. Jurovics, "Karl Struss Composing New York," History of Photography 17 (Summer 1993), pp. 196-97. According to Bonnie Yochelson the term "space filling" was, in fact, first coined by Struss's friend, the painter Max Weber, in an essay he wrote for the second issue of the pictorialist journal, Platinum Print, in December 1913; see McCandless and Yochelson et al., pp. 93-94.

10. Quoted from a 1976 interview with Struss; see Harvith, p. 10. Struss, in fact, developed his own long focal length, single element lens in 1909, which he began marketing in 1914 as the Struss Pictorial Lens.