BIO
Josephine Givodan

Joséphine Givodan is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University. Her research - conducted under her advisor Professor Michel Poivert - focuses on abstract photography in the Post-War United States. She has written a master’s thesis on photographer Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988) entitled Carlotta Corpron: from Texas to Chicago. The story of an encounter with abstract photography (1942-1953).

PROJECT
Carlotta Corpron: from Texas to Chicago. The story of an encounter with abstract photography (1942-1953).
2016

Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988), Woven Light, 1944, gelatin silver print, Fort Worth, The Amon Carter Museum of American Art. © The Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

The grant support I received from the Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research partly financed a research trip in the footsteps of Texan photographer Carlotta Corpron. In Dallas, Denton, Fort Worth, Houston, Chicago, and New York. I met dealers, collectors, curators, scholars and former friends of the late Carlotta Corpron and was able to study numerous photographs and archives.

My thesis - a copy of which is available at the Palmquist Archive of the Beinecke Library at Yale University - analyzes the development of Corpron’s photographic work, putting it into perspective with her contemporaries’. The text deliberately adopts the tone of the biographical narrative to revive anew the memory of this important artist whose historiographical omission was mainly due to her precocious ambition to experiment with abstract photography.

Corpron’s early work was influenced by the avant-garde aesthetic of Hungarian photographers László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes, both teachers at the New Bauhaus. After meeting with Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen and exhibiting at New York MoMA and Chicago Art Institute, she was able to successfully give her photographs a style of their own: abstract and spontaneous, fluid and bright.

Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988), Suspended Glass Cubes, circa 1945, gelatin silver print, Chicago, The Art Institute. © The Art Institute of Chicago.

Carlotta Corpron (1901-1988), Fluid Light Design – Fluid Rhythm, circa 1946, gelatin silver print, New York, The Museum of Modern Art (study collection). © The Museum of Modern Art