Sadakichi Hartmann

Scion of a German father and a Japanese mother, Sadakichi Hartmann was born on an island in Nagasaki harbor. His mother died in childbirth, and he and his older brother were taken to Hamburg, Germany, and raised in luxury. By the age of 9 he'd reportedly read all of Goethe and Schiller. At the age of 13 he was placed in military school but rebelled against the discipline there and ran away to Paris. His angry father shipped him off to America to live with an uncle here. He arrived in 1882, found work in in printing and engraving shops, and educated himself by reading at night in Philadelphia's excellent free Mercantile Library.

Drawn to the arts, Hartmann befriended Walt Whitman, for whom he did occasional translation of German correspondence. He recorded his visits to the aged poet in Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895). He made his way to Europe and the U.K. four times to further his knowledge of theater, literature, and visual art, managing to meet Swinburne, the Rossettis, MallarmŽ, and Liszt, among other notables. (He corresponded with MallarmŽ through 1897.)

He began his work as an art critic for Philadelphia newspapers in the 1880s, and subsidized his travel to Europe in 1891 by going as a foreign correspondent for the McClure Syndicate, as a result of which he interviewed many of the major creative artists and writers of the time. His first commentaries on photography came circa 1893, his last around 1920. During that period, in addition to writing extensively about the medium for a wide range of periodicals, he lectured widely on the subject and juried countless exhibitions of photography across the U.S.

In 1892 he became a staff writer for a Boston publication, and in 1893 founded a short-lived avant-garde art magazine, The Art Critic, which lasted a mere four issues. He then relocated to New York and strode through the streets of Greenwich Village with long, flowing dark hair, wearing a cape -- a flamboyant figure, the self-styled "king of Bohemia" (though he called himself "a bread-and-butter writer" because he wrote for a living). He had many talents, many of them not fully realized during his lifetime. Edward Weston, who saw him perform at a party when Hartmann was in his sixties, once described him as the finest interpretive male dancer he'd ever seen, an opinion shared by many.

A poet, playwright, author of short fiction, and graphic artist, as well as a critic of art and photography, Hartmann also published under various pseudonyms, the most frequent of which was Sidney Allan. He began to engage with photography at the moment when Alfred Stieglitz and others commenced their push for its recognition as an art form. Along with Charles Caffin, he became something of a "house critic" for Camera Notes during Stieglitz's editorship thereof and then for Camera Work, the journal founded by Stieglitz in the early years of the twentieth century. He published well over 600 essays on photography during the course of his career, making him unquestionably the most prolific critic of the medium up until that point and for some decades thereafter. According to Harry W. Lawton and George Knox, "He was admired; he was feared; he was detested. Among the pioneers of photographic criticism in America none exerted such direct personal influence on so many photographers" as did Hartmann.

In 1923, having given up writing on art and photography, Hartmann moved to Hollywood, where he wrote the first film adaptation of Don Quixote (unproduced), played a bit part in The Thief of Baghdad, and hung out with John Barrymore and other luminaries. Toward the end of his life he resided on the Morongo Indian reservation in Banning, California, occupying a one-room shack he constructed himself. Just before his death in 1944 he traveled by bus to St. Petersburg, Florida, to visit one of his daughters, but died a few hours after his arrival there.

-- A. D. Coleman

For more on Hartmann, go to http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hartmann/life.htm.

In the Photography Criticism CyberArchive:

Critical Essays

"An Art Critic's Estimate of Alfred Stieglitz" (1898)
"Portrait Painting and Portrait Photography" (1899)
"Frank Eugene: Painter-Photographer" (1899)
"A Purist" [Zaida Ben-Y?suf] (1899)
"Clarence H. White" (1900)
"A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York" (1900)
"Random Thoughts on Criticism" (1900)
"On Plagiarism and Imitation" (1900)
"A Plea for Straight Photography" (1904)
"The Salon Club and the First American Photographic Salon at New York" (1904)
"Recent Conquests in Night Photography" (1909)
"What Remains" (1911)
"The Daguerreotype" (1912)

Profiles

"A Visit to Steichen's Studio" (1903)

Theory

"On Composition" (1901)
"A Photographic Enquete" (1902)
"On Genre" (1902)
"The Influence of Artistic Photography on Interior Decoration" (1903)
"Repetition with Slight Variation" (1903)

Fiction

"The Broken Plates" (1904)

Related Subjects

"The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture" (1912)

A Sadakichi Hartmann Bibliography

A comprehensive bibliography of Sadakichi Hartmann's writings on photography and related matters appears in the only published collection to date of those writings, The Valiant Knights of Daguerre: Selected Critical Essays on Photography and Profiles of Photographic Pioneers, edited by Harry W. Lawton and George Knox, in collaboration with Wistaria Hartmann Linton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
A partial bibliography of Sadakichi Hartmann's writings on all subjects appears online in conjunction with his entry in the Modern American Poetry site.

(Photo credit: Charles Fournier, Portrait of Sadakichi Hartmann, 1917.)