PHOTOS BY CROZE A Private Collection
Harvey Croze, Photographer 1904-1977 A tribute to a father from his son, and a memento for his grandchildren.
Photos by Croze â—? Photography as Art My father was a photographer. He was also a jack of all trades and master of quite a few: have a look at the lists of his work experience in the Backmatter press clips. A year after I was born in 1942 he got a job as resident photographer with the Cranbrook Foundation in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It was a wonderful opportunity for us all, living, working and studying in the cloistered, landscaped Cranbrook grounds. My mother, Isabel, learned weaving and pottery and went back to work as Dad's administrator and photo retoucher. I got to go through the superlative primary and secondary schools, Brookside and Cranbrook School for Boys. And Harvey Snr. got to do pretty much what he wanted to. Although Dad was primarily a photographer throughout his life, he was also a inveterate fiddler. He painted in oil and acrylic (another volume perhaps); he made jewelry from silver and copper wire and bits and pieces of plastic; he built a frame and made a series of silkscreen prints (mainly fanciful fish, I recall). He went through a period of songwriting, during which his habitual early-morning wandering would take him downstairs to a little four-octave foot-pedal organ on which he tapped out and transcribed the tune that had came to him in the night. He loved gadgets as much as the rest of the Croze males. In the early 50s, we got one of the first Motorola TVs, black and white with a 5-ince screen. He had the only wire recorder I ever saw then or since. He graduated to magnetic tape as soon as it became commercially available and recorded boxes and boxes full of classical music directly from the FM radio speakers. He devised a simple pulley system that allowed him to turn down the TV volume during commercials without having to stir from his Charles Eames chair. He produced and directed a short movie based on the life of Christ. He collected Things That Might Come In Useful One Day. I loved to rummage through his drawers. And, of course, he took photos, thousands and thousands of them. Dad considered himself a pictoralist and a contemporary journeyman photographer (see the Backmatter). Mom wrote on the back of one of his press cuttings: "Harvey was very ahead of his time as a photographer and fought any and all to prove 'Photography as Art'. Now I understand the museums all around the world have come to accept this premise and collect fine photographs." Throughout our Cranbrook years until Dad retired in 1970 he dutifully recorded every aspect of campus and academy life: sports events, and art exhibitions, plays and concerts, class photos and graduation portraits. He loved what he did and did what he liked: creating beautiful images well beyond the workaday requirements of the institution. His fascination with form and figures and faces, light and shadow, texture and technique is evident in the portfolio of black and white salon prints that he produced over the years. I still have the scent of hypo in my nose and boxes of Dad's prints in the cupboard, so thought I would put some together as a tribute to him and a gift for the grandkids, all of whom share his sense of humor and delight in beauty. To any disciplined archivists reading this far, I apologize for the lack of meta-data attendant to the book's collection of photos: names and places, dates, dimensions and technical notes are rather scarce. I've provided what I could remember or find on the back of the photos as captions or notes in the Backmatter section. I actually have the original dimensions of the prints, but if I include them, I'll run out of space and have to sacrifice a photo, which I don't want to do. To the family and friends who receive the book, I'll leave my passwords somewhere so you can do the same for me one day. Harvey Croze (Jnr) October 2009
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SCENES
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FIGURES
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EVENTS
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ABSTRACTS
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PORTRAITS
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BACKMATTER & COLOR SECTION
96
from the Detroit News, circa 1960
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HARVEY CROZE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Born Houghton, Michigan, 1904. Married Isabel née Brazas ca. 1929. Died Harrison, Michigan, 1977. EDUCATION. Detroit School of Applied Art, Chicago Institute of Design, Cranbrook Art Academy; studied with Nicholas Haz in New York and Ansel Adams in Detroit. EMPLOYMENT. Photographer in residence, Cranbrook Foundation, 1943-1970. (See also notes in press-cuttings on previous pages.) AFFILIATIONS. Contemporary Photographic Society of Michigan, Bloomfield Hills Camera club, Photographic Association of America, Photographic Guild of America, Detroit Camera Club, Bloomfield Art Association, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
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PHOTO EXHIBITIONS. Pannet Art Gallery, Whitby, UK, 1939; Dunedin Society, New Zealand, 1940; New York World's Fair, 1940; Western Ontario Salon, 1940; Denmark International Photo Exhibition, 1951; Pacific National Exhibit, Vancouver, 1951; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 1957. PHOTO AWARDS. Graphlex Golden Anniversary Merit Award, 1940; San Francisco International Color Award, 1945; Annual Award, Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, 1950; 1950 International Gold Medal, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Foto Klubb Award, Jonkopings, Sweden, 1951; Photographic Society of America Hournal Award, 1951; Zeiss International Award, 1955; Silver Medal, Greater Detroit Camera Club Council, 1957. PAINTING EXHIBITIONS. 1965: One-man Show, Kingswood School, Cranbrook; Detroit International Festival; Michigan Academy International. 1966: 1st Annual Psychiatric Benefit. 1967: Wayne State University Invitational Show; 26th Annual Michigan Academy. 1968: P.S.A. 19th Annual Exhibition. 1969: 2nd Annual Psychiatric Benefit. 1970: One-man Exhibition, Cranbrook Art Academy, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
BOOK PRODUCTION NOTES The original photos were re-photographed in RAW format with a Canon 40D using a 28-200 mm lens (keeping around 55 mm as much as possible) in available shaded daylight. The RAWs were opened from iPhoto into Adobe CS4 Photoshop and all treated in more or less the same sequence: transformed/ skewed to square up keystone effects; cropped to edge and rotated as necessary; de-colored to b/w with a high-contrast red filter preset; re-sized to 300 dpi with a maximum height to match the book formate (26 cm); levels adjusted to whiteblack max-min values and tuned by eye (screen Gamma 1.8, neutral white D65 color profile); inspected at high magnification, scratches and dustspots stamped out as required; smart-sharpened (1 pixel, 50-100%) as required; saved as Photoshop image in case necessary to revisit and as jpg at maximum quality in baseline ("standard") format; reimported to iPhoto for book layout. In the processing, some original toning was lost when the images were rendered to black and white. In some cases (pages 35, 45, 49 and 91) I have left more or less the original 'satin stain' duotone effect beside the b/w image. In others (pages 4, 6, 19, 39, 44, 45, 52, 72 and 73) I increased the contrast. HC may have dimmed them for effect (if so, sorry, Dad!) or they may have just faded with age. The photos have been re-sized to fit into the book. The original sizes were constrained by available photo paper size, the largest, page 64, is 37 by 51 cm. The smallest in the collection, page 39, is 10 by 21 cm in the original. The typeface is Centruy Gothic, the closest I could find to remind me of the Cranbrook signature font in the 40s and 50s. All images © Harvey Croze, except those on pages 52-54, 58. 59, 62, 63, 79 and 81, which are © Cranbrook Foundation. No reproduction without expressed permission, please.
CONTENT NOTES COVER
Front: Orpheus Fountain 'Ice Maidens', Cranbrook Art Museum Inside front: HC in his studio, circa 1949 Inside back: HC Jnr, 2006 Back: HC self-portrait
SCENES
3 Carl Milles' Orpheus Fountain in hazy sun 4 Abandoned copper mine, Upper Peninsula, Michigan 5 At the horse races, Detroit 6 & 7 Orpheus Fountain studies: left, reflection in pond; right, in mist 8 ‘Lost Leaves’, published in Popular Photography magazine, ?1953 9 Birches near Cranbrook Lake 10 Cranbrook School by moonlight 11 Shadows in Cranbrook Art Museum entrance 12 Orpheus fountain from the roof of the Cranbrook Art Museum 13 Cranbrook Art Museum from the air 14 Landscape; location unknown, possibly Quebec 15 Boats on the Thames, Oxford 16 & 17 Paris street scenes 18 Boy (me) fishing; photo treated for painting effect 19 Jonah Fountain, Cranbrook; photo treated for craqueleur effect 20 Carl Milles' statue of discus thrower, Cranbrook School 21 Snow scene, Cranbrook Lake shore: sluice mechanism 22 & 23 Ditto: tree; Kingswood Dancing Girls; wrought iron bridge 24 Orpheus Fountain details 25 Left: Orpheus Fountain detail. Far right: multiple exposure of dancer 26 & 27 Cranbrook Lake scenes: boathouse; swans 28 Windmill with sheep; location unknown 29 Winter scene with boy (guess who?)
FIGURES
31 Reclining nude; model unknown (as with most of the studies,) 32 Bea Grayson in Michigan lake 33 Rose Nahabedian 34 Nude with distorted neck 35, 39 & 49 Solarized nudes. 39 labelled 'Stain color from solarization' 36 & 37 Solarized nude studies 38 Life classes at Cranbrook Academy of Art 40 & 41 Two classic studies 42 & 43, 46-48 Solarized studies 44 & 45 Double exposures
EVENTS
51 Kingswood School girls running after graduation 52 Supporters at Cranbrook School football game 53 Outdoor carol service, Christ Church Cranbrook (note middle choirboy) 54 & 58 Leaping Kingswood cheerleaders 55 Dancers waiting in wings at Cranbrook Summer Theater 56 Becky DeWitt doing The Charleston 57 Boy (me) in winter doorway 59 Kingswood cheerleaders laughing 60 Two little girls and -- you guessed it! -- me. 61 Girls appreciating modern art, Cranbrook Art Museum 62 & 63 Cranbrook School basketball game 64 HC clowning with (?) Jean Kimbler. He's pencilled in at bottom ;'REHEARSAL' 65 Two ballerinas at Cranbrook Summer Theater 66 Ice-cutters on Detroit River (from HC's early scrapbooks, 1930s) 67 Croze family ready for Halloween party, circa 1948
ABSTRACTS
69 Collage and lightplay 70 & 71 Stylized montage of birch tree branches (a guess) 72 Pendulum light pattern 73 Car bumper and headlight 74 Fabric and light 75 Maple leaf montage 76 Collages. Left: torn photos. Right: two women. Lower right is Isabel 77 'Duck Pins' montage
PORTRAITS
79 General Douglas MacArthur 80 Toddler (me) with clock 81 Carl Milles, 1945 82 & 83 Two Asian portraits. Dad wrote 'Mari' on back of left one 84 & 85 Two portraits: unknown boxer and young lady 86 Native American (Frederick Dockstader, Cranbrook Inst. of Science) 87 Solarized Liz Ilku, harpist for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1950s 88 Isabel (right) and cousin Helen Kedian, circa 1925 89 Mantlepiece portraits of HC and Isabel, circa 1949 90 Montage portrait of actor Basil Rathbone 91 Unknown bearded man, stain color original 92 Clown (dimly recall the name MacAfferty) 93 HC self-portrait
BACKMATTER & COLOR SECTION
95 Exhibition stickers on back of 'Mari' portrait (see p. 82) 96 & 97 Two articles about and by HC from Detroit News, circa 1960 100 Boy (me) studying shell
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A life without beauty is only half lived. George Gaugh Booth