Art historian Kolya Rice will present The Triumph of Purism and the Fate of William Mortensen. An American glamour photographer, William Herbert Mortensen was primarily known for his Hollywood portraits in the 1920s–1940s.  In contrast to the photographic “purists”, Mortensen produced highly manipulated, dramatic photographs of often macabre subjects that were highly popular with the general public, but often sneered at by fellow photographers and art critics. 

Ansel Adams called him, more than once, “the antichrist” and publicly declared he should be written out of history, which until recently, he largely was. Among other topics, this lecture will explore the aesthetic philosophy of Mortensen in relation to pure or “straight” photographers of the time, and how the later were supported by formalist criticism and the parallel rise of high modernist abstraction in painting and sculpture, cementing their place in the history of photography.

Kolya Rice was awarded a Ph.C. (all but dissertation) in modern and contemporary art history and criticism from the University of Washington and received his M.A. from Rice University. He has taught a wide range of courses on art, theory and criticism, including History and Theories of Photography, at the UW, Seattle University, and the University of Puget Sound over the last decade and is currently an Associate Teaching Professor in the UW’s Art History Department and an Associate Professor at Cascadia College.