The Mystique of the Glass Globe in Pictorialist Photography

Beginning in the 1890s, Pictorialist photographers joined forces to promote photography as an acceptable artistic medium in America.  In addition to creating their own work, Alfred Stieglitz, F. Holland Day, and Clarence H. White, as leaders of the movement, organized exhibitions and promoted photography in journals and lectures. Although their subject matter, technique and photographic processes differed widely, a special accessory—a large glass globe or crystal ball—is seen in several photographic studies by these art photographers.  F. Holland Day and Clarence H. White, in particular, gave this mysterious orb special presence in their work.  In Day’s portrait of the Symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck, the ball appears prominently in the background.  Clarence H. White, a close colleague and friend of Day’s, frequently used the prop in landscape studies of his wife with their young sons. In addition, working in tandem with several models in a series of studies, White and Stieglitz produced Symbolism of Light, a work which features a model holding a camera and a glass globe prominently displayed in the foreground. This study will investigate the significance and symbolism of the glass ball in work of these major American Pictorialist photographers and its relationship to spiritual belief, nature, and light at the end of the nineteenth century.