Rangefinder Magazine
October 2005

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Profile: Victor Schragerby Peter Skinner
Fine Art and Commercial Photographer
Specializing in Still Lifes

How many people can look at a book and in their minds’ eyes conceive a stunning visual that transforms that book from an everyday object into a work of art that begs for closer scrutiny and admiration? Among those few with the vision and technical skill to do just that is New York still life specialist Victor Schrager, who for the past 20 years or more has photographed books both as principal subject and as backdrops for other subjects.

Of his unique approach to creating fine art images of books, Schrager comments on both the books’ necessity and irrelevance within the photograph. Perhaps most striking to the viewer is the simple elegance that results from his careful lighting, composition and craftsmanship. Schrager, a Harvard graduate, has been in and around fine art photography for many years, and his work is now featured by numerous acclaimed galleries and is contained in prestigious collections. At one stage in his career, in the mid-1970s, Schrager was a director of a leading New York gallery, thus having the opportunity to immerse himself in the work of other fine art luminaries.

All Images Copyright © Victor Schrager

Schrager is also a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacDowell Colony Resident Fellowship. His work has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan over the past 20 years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Polaroid International Collection; the International Center of Photography, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and various private collections.

It was at the venerable Harvard College that Schrager embarked on what was to become a remarkable career as a still life and fine art photographer. “I took what photography courses there were to take at Harvard, then fell into the very good company of Robert Fichter, Eileen Cowin, Charles Traub, Robert Heinecken, Ellen Brooks, Michael Bishop, and others at workshops at Franconia College in New Hampshire,” he says. “I then followed Robert Fichter to Tallahassee, Florida, where I took an MFA at Florida State. I was ‘drafted’ out of FSU by Harold Jones, director of Light Gallery in New York City, to come and work there, where I subsequently became director from 1975 through 1978.”

While director of Light Gallery, Schrager represented a remarkable array of photographers from Paul Strand, Minor White, Harry Callahan, Frederick Sommer, Aaron Siskind, to Robert Heinecken, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Linda Connor, Emmet Gowin, Paul Berger, Nick Nixon, Stephen Shore and many others. “When I left Light Gallery, I was strongly influenced by the still life/collage work of Frederick Sommer and Emmet Gowin. Since then I have enjoyed thinking about Irving Penn, Jan Groover, Jed Devine, James Nasmyth, Josef Sudek, Bernd and Hilla Becher, among others,” he says.

Currently, Schrager’s personal work is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City and the renowned HackelBury gallery in Kensington, England. When you consider that Edwynn Houk includes in its collection the images of celebrated artists such as Berenice Abbott, Annie Leibovitz, Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, Walker Evans, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and others, you get an appreciation for Schrager’s standing in his field. And London’s HackelBury exhibits both established 20th century and young photographers of the 21st century. It is, in their own words, “a carefully selected stable of artists, founded on the shared expertise, passion and experience of Sascha Hackel and Marcus Bury, dealers and curators of fine art photography since 1990.”

Schrager’s unique style of imagemaking has also found favor in commercial spheres: His studio is represented by New Yorkbased Faucher Artists (www.faucherartists. com), and over the years he has been commissioned for assignments on location and in his New York studio for Town & Country, House & Garden, Martha Stewart Living, Neiman Marcus, Aveda, Estée Lauder, and other commercial and corporate clients. His commercial work runs the gamut of beauty, accessories, home products and furnishings, nature, and food, and each image in his portfolio is rich in the distinctive lighting, composition and interplay of light and shadow that are hallmarks of Schrager’s style. His artistic treatment of fruits and vegetables are typical of the groundbreaking photography for which Schrager has made a reputation; we see these objects as intriguing works of art, not things destined for the dining table.

Above all else, Victor Schrager is a still life photographer, and from 1980 to 1990 produced a body of still life images encompassing a diversity of material strong in cultural reference, such as reproductions of works of art, books and small objects adorned with decoration and information. Many of his photographs from that period were included in the exhibition “Fabricated to Be Photographed” at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Art and in the first photography section of the Whitney Biennial in 1981.

His more recent series, which opened to high praise in Edwynn Houk Gallery, is titled “Composition as Explanation” and, according to its accompanying promotional information, is inspired by a more diverse range of subject matter: parts of certain paintings, changes in weather, aspects of architecture, natural specimens and fashion photographs. It is primarily a coincidence that books, for so long a subject or staging element in other kinds of pictures he has made, are the apparent subjects of these images. There is an irony in picturing the bearers of very specific information (on a variety of subjects including literature, history, botany, medicine and romance), only to purposefully suppress that information—but this is just a by-product of the process. The books are chosen only for their color and volume; solid, everyday objects intended to point elsewhere—to space, to experience to knowledge.

Of the books he so evocatively photographs, Schrager says: “The books are as necessary and irrelevant as Morandi’s pitchers, Stieglitz’ clouds, Cezanne’s fruit, Weston’s peppers, or Penn’s frozen food. The real purpose in making these photographs is addressing the box of space that sits in front of me and seeing if it is once again possible to pull a compelling picture out of it—again and again, until the activity transcends the environment in which it takes place. Everything is surrendered to the visual. Elements are placed where they are most urgently needed. There is a horizon. There is gravity. Shadows are tangible. There is no one else in the room.”

“Composition as Explanation” went on tour to Sun Valley, Boston, Toronto, London and Washington, D.C. Recently, Schrager collaborated with master digital printmaker Donald Adamson to produce a series of 44x55-inch digital pigment prints for an exhibit scheduled to open in Paris in May and then to be traveled internationally throughout 2006.

The meticulously crafted fine art photographs that Schrager creates are the product of careful planning, a prerequisite for the large-format equipment that he mastered early in his career and which he used for a series published in a unique compilation of bird photographs. The Bird Hand Book (Graphis: ISBN 193124104-X; out of print) is a far cry from a standard bird book. Rather than simply portraying birds as wildlife subjects viewed through telephoto lenses or spotting telescopes, Schrager captured the interplay between birds and humans in a striking and touching way that is definitely not typical nature photography. While this particular series is intriguing, Schrager emphasizes, that nature or wildlife photography in the true sense are definitely not among his specialties. Most of his work, as highlighted previously, is closely linked with still lifes. “I have not done any of what most would regard as ‘nature’ photography. Having had the luxury of such up close intimate contact with the birds—I have said that I photographed the birds at the same distance that one reads a book—I would not want to participate in the illusion of intimacy that long lenses, binoculars—the traditional access to the subject—provides,” he says.

In fact, rather than crouching in a blind using a 600mm lens, as a typical nature shooter might, Schrager used equipment that would deter most other photographers: a Deardorff 8x10 field camera with a 10-inch or 14-inch Goerz Dagor lens and Tri-X film. “This is a perversely difficult and inefficient way to go about a project like this, but it provides an interesting discipline and unique results,” says Schrager. However, the photography did have one thing in common with much other nature work. All the photographs were made out-of-doors and with natural light, not in the confines of a studio with artificial lighting. This project took about seven years to complete.

The bird photographs were made with natural light; however, Schrager is skilled at harnessing artificial light sources, as evidenced by the range of stunning photographs that grace his portfolio. Within the controlled environment of his studio his subjects are illuminated in style and intensity ranging from mysterious and moody to romantic and dramatic. All are imbued with a painterly touch; typically the lighting is subtle and understated, drawing the viewer’s attention to the subject and not to the illumination. And although a master of traditional large format equipment, he is not bound by tradition— his studio uses both film and/or digital imaging for commercial assignments.

It’s a fact that there are many fine art photographers pursuing their dreams in crowded market. And it’s also a harsh truth that there are probably nearly as many for whom the actual profession of fine art photography remains just that, a dream. And then there are those who for one reason or another (thanks largely to talent, hard work, and grasping opportunity while remaining true to themselves) have won themselves a place in the small group of elite photographers who are recognized internationally for their contributions to fine art photography. Still life photographer Victor Schrager is both a member of that group and a successful commercial studio photographer to boot.

To see more of Victor Schrager’s images: visit www. victorschrager.com/.