John Harding (photographer)

John Forrest Harding (born 1940) is a San Francisco–based photographer best known for the color street photography that he has pursued for four decades. Harding is the author of several photography books, and has taught courses on photography at City College of San Francisco and College of Marin.

Life and career

John Harding[n 1] was born on August 6, 1940[1] in Washington, D.C.[2]:235 and grew up in Granite City, Illinois. He worked at Granite City Steel, studied at Southern Illinois University, took up photography after seeing the film Blow-up,[3] and studied at the San Francisco Art Institute[4] under Jack Fulton[n 2] and Henry Wessel, obtaining an MFA in 1976.[2]:235

Harding has worked on commercial and editorial assignments (for Fortune and elsewhere[2]:235), and has taught in the College of Marin[5] and the Photography Department of the City College of San Francisco.[4][5][6]

Separately from the work he was assigned to do,[3] Harding long photographed for his own interest. From 1975 to 1976, he made black and white portraits of adult brothers and sisters in the US.[2]:235 Thanks in part to an NEA grant,[7] the series was published in 1982 in the photobooks Geschwister and Siblings; in 2016, he published a supplement, also titled Siblings.

Harding started to work in color in 1977.[2]:235 Writing in 2011, Stacen Berg described him as having photographed on the street "[n]early every day for over 30 years" (and still using color 35 mm film in a Leica camera).[8]

In 1989, Susan Kismaric could write that street photography, "so prominent in the history of [photography], is practically nonexistent in California": as its exponents there, she could only name Harding, Wessel and Bill Dane in San Francisco, and Anthony Hernandez on Rodeo Drive.[9]

Harding's street photography of the 1980s was sampled in the 1987 book American Independents. Its editor, Sally Eauclaire, wrote that Harding's photographs had the objective of "[deriving] poetic fancy from prosaic fact", that "Their kaleidoscopically shifting shapes and colors reveal much about the jostle of humanity as well as trends in fashion and social and sexual mores." Eauclaire praised Harding's achievement of "[pushing] realism into the realm of surrealism", attained via devices of isolation within crowds, of reflections, "helterskelter highlighting, and hedonistic jostlings of color". Yet Harding managed to declare "solidity, permanence, and the possibility of definition".[2]:79–80

A larger collection did not appear in print until the 2011 publication (in Japan) of Harding's photobook Analog Days, which had photographs taken from 1979 to 2009, and about which Stan Banos writes:

One sees much street photography that relies on a single formula, Harding's work mixes it up, with content, composition and yes, color, all vying and battling it out for domination, or the creation of some tenuous, dynamic coexistence. It draws you in, excites you and keeps you interested.[10]

In a foreword to Analog Days, Sandra S. Phillips writes that its photographs "are so direct, and so marvelously natural, that for a moment we forget that they were framed and 'taken' by someone." She concludes that "Street photography has the potential to reveal our social selves to us, and as Harding's viewfinder shows, it can also provide a particular gracefulness and wonder."

Harding's next full-scale book was Streets of Discontent, published in a small edition in 2018. Again collecting color views of the streets of San Francisco, but this time consisting of very recent work, its subtlety is praised by Corey Keller, who also points out that:

[This work] coincides with a moment in which [San Francisco] seems to teeter on the brink as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens daily into a chasm. The splendor of the city's soaring new buildings is matched only by the wretchedness of those who live on its streets. Harding's pictures neither elevate nor condemn. They just ask us to notice.[11]

Awards

Exhibitions

Solo and two-person exhibitions
  • The Siblings. (With Laura Gilpin.) Focus Gallery, San Francisco, 1976.[2]:235[14]
  • Fifty-two Sittings. Canessa Gallery, San Francisco, 1977.[2]:235
  • Greece/Photographs. IVC Gallery, Novato, California, 1982.[2]:235
  • Pictures Seen/Fortunes Found: Color Photographs from San Francisco's Chinatown. Canessa Gallery, San Francisco, 1977.[2]:235
  • Two Views of Mallorca. (With Elena Sheehan.) Focus Gallery, San Francisco, 1985.[2]:235

Group exhibitions
  • Color in the Street. California Museum of Photography (UCR), March–April 1983.[2]:235 With Mark Cohen, Helen Levitt, Joel Meyerowitz, Leo Rubinfien, Stephen Scheer, Joel Sternfeld, Charles Traub, Robert Walker, Alex Webb.[15][16]
  • Exposed and Developed. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (traveling exhibition), 1984.[2]:235
  • Color Photographs: Recent Acquisitions. Museum of Modern Art, August–October 1984.[2]:235[17]
  • Cross Currents/Cross Country. Photographic Resource Center, Boston University, August–October 1988.[18]
  • Real Fictions: Recent Color Photographs by Bill Dane, John Harding and Larry Sultan. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1989. With Bill Dane and Larry Sultan, curated by Sandra S. Phillips.[19]
  • 10 x 10 x 10: An Invitational Exhibition. San Francisco City Hall, July–September 2009. Ten photographers – Harding, and Chris McCaw, Jesse Schlesinger, Daniel Grant, Alexander Martinez, Mark McKnight, Ken Botto, Mary Parisi, Lucy Goodhart, Eric Percher – each exhibited ten works.[20][21] "Stacen Berg chose John Harding for his careful compositions of people who are 'entirely distanced from their public environment'."[22][23]
  • The Anniversary Show. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009–2011.[24]
  • Hamburger Eyes presents: Casual Abyss. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, May–July 2010.[25]
  • San Francisco Days: Documentary Photographs Spanning 30 Years. Rayko Photo Center, January–February 2013. With Janet Delaney, Lou Dematteis, Gabriela Hasbun, André Hermann, Michael Jang, Mimi Plumb, and Andrei Riskin.[26]
  • 3@6×6 face/people/action. Photo, Oakland, CA, March 2015. With Michael Jang and Hiroyo Kaneko.[27]

Publications

Books and booklets by Harding
From left to right: Trees Places and People, Siblings (1982), Analog Days, Streets of Discontent, Siblings (2016)
  • Geschwister. Frankfurt am Main: Dieter Fricke, 1982. ISBN 3-88184-018-4. With text by Gabriele Wohmann.
  • Siblings. Frankfurt am Main: Dieter Fricke, 1982. ISBN 3-88184-052-4. Captions (one sentence or a little more per photograph, uttered by a sibling at the time) in both German and English; other text in English only.
  • Analog Days = アナログデイズ. Tokyo: Sokyu-sha, 2011. ISBN 978-0-615-46498-5. Edited by Henry Wessel; foreword by Sandra S. Phillips; introduction by Stacen Berg. In both English and Japanese. Edition of 500.[n 3][n 4]
  • Trees Places and People. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2015. Photographs taken in San Francisco, 2013–2015. Edition of 50.[n 5]
  • The Attraction of Strangers. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], Hannah Louise Schuster, Mūnbeibī Design Studio [2016]. OCLC 957364259. With text by Katya Kallsen. Edition of 10. On the first page: "On New Year's Day 1992, I divided a map of San Francisco into thirty three squares and put the pieces into a small green bag. I resolved once a week to draw a square from the bag and drive to that part of the city to look for a stranger who I might want to photograph. I asked Katya to join me to write about these encounters. These words and photographs tell and show where we went and who we found"
  • San Francisco Four × Five. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], Hannah Louise Schuster, Mūnbeibī Design Studio [2016]. OCLC 957361870. Edition of 10. On the first page: "The 4x5 photographs of San Francisco in this book were taken between 2002 and 2004."
  • Siblings. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2016. OCLC 957298471.[n 6] On the very first (but unnumbered) page: "These thirty-three photographs were taken in the late 1970s on an NEA Grant for a Siblings project, which resulted in a book published in Germany in 1982. In retrospect these photographs seem just as interesting as those in the first book, and this was done to catalogue the remainder of the work."
  • Seeing Things. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2016. OCLC 1002262328. On the first page: "The photographs in this book were made between 1977 and 1982. Most of them were taken in 1981 along the coast of California."
  • Streets of Discontent. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2018. ISBN 978-0-692-09513-3. Edited by Henry Wessel; introduction by Corey Keller; afterword by Jack von Euw. Edition of 50. On the title page: "The photographs in this book were made primarily in San Francisco and some in Los Angeles in 2017 and 2018."[n 7][n 8]

Books with contributions by Harding
  • Sally Eauclaire, ed. American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers. New York: Abbeville, 1987. ISBN 0-89659-666-4. Includes "Perfect Strangers" by Harding (eight plates, each "Untitled 1983–84"); and also work by Larry Babis, Jim Dow, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, David T. Hanson, Len Jenshel, Nancy Lloyd, Kenneth McGowan, Roger Mertin, Joel Meyerowitz, Richard Misrach, Joanne Mulberg, Stephen Scheer, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Jack D. Teemer, Jr., and Daniel S. Williams.
  • Chuck Mobley, ed. An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself. San Francisco: SF Camerawork, 2010. ISBN 9780984303809.[n 9]

Permanent collections

Archive

The Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley) acquired a large photographic archive (OCLC 521092126) from Harding in 2010; it has been supplemented several times since then.[1]

Notes
  1. Full name: John Forrest Harding. "John Harding", Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved February 8, 2019.
  2. Fulton's website is here.
  3. Description of Analog Days, Harding's website.
  4. Description of Analog Days, with sample page spreads, from the publisher's bookstore.
  5. Description of Trees Places and People from the Sokyu-sha bookstore. (Although this says that the edition is of 30, copies have numbers out of 50 handwritten on the back.)
  6. Description of Siblings, with sample page spreads, from the Sokyu-sha bookstore.
  7. Description of Streets of Discontent, with sample page spreads, from the Sokyu-sha bookstore.
  8. Description of Streets of Discontent, Harding's website.
  9. For a description of this book, see the SF Camerawork store.

References
  1. John Harding photograph archive catalog entry, OskiCat (University of California Berkeley library catalog). Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  2. Sally Eauclaire, ed, American Independents: Eighteen Color Photographers (New York: Abbeville, 1987; ISBN 0-89659-666-4.
  3. Blake Andrews, "Q&A with John Harding", B, January 31, 2019. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  4. Erika Gentry, "Prof. John Harding releases book Analog Days", CCSF Photography Department, May 18, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  5. "Pop Photo Snapshots", Popular Photography, July 1983, p. 156. Here at Google Books.
  6. "John Harding", Photography Department, City College of San Francisco, as archived by the Wayback Machine on June 16, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  7. John Harding, Siblings (1982), last (unnumbered) page.
  8. Stacen Berg, "Introduction: The man who is not there"; within John Harding, Analog Days.
  9. Susan Kismaric, California Photography: Remaking Make-Believe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989; ISBN 0-87070-183-5), p. 15. Available here on the MoMA website. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  10. Stan Banos, "Analog Days: John Harding", Reciprocity Failure, March 26, 2012; as archived by the Wayback Machine on February 13, 2019.
  11. Corey Keller, introduction to Streets of Discontent.
  12. "National recipients: National Endowment for the Arts: Visual Artists' Fellowships 1967–1995", pp. 208–239 within A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program, 1966–1995 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001; ISBN 0-8109-4170-8). Available here at the Internet Archive. (The entry for Harding is on p. 220.) Retrieved February 12, 2019.
  13. "John Harding", John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
  14. "Focus Gallery records, 1963–1987: Series 3: Exhibition files, 1966–1985, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
  15. "Color in the Street", UCR Arts. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  16. "Color in the Street" (PDF), Robert Walker's website. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  17. "Modern Museum plans color photograph show", New York Times, July 31, 1984.
  18. "Fall 1988 – summer 1989 exhibition program", Photographic Resource Center, Boston University. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  19. Museum History: Timeline", San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as retrieved by the Wayback Machine on October 22, 2008. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  20. "Press release: 10x10x10", San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries
  21. Kenneth Baker, "Intriguing mix in '10 x 10 x 10' exhibition", SF Gate, September 5, 2009. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  22. Ari Messer, "On location", San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 5, 2009. Available here within the Guardian Archive 1966–2014. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  23. "'10 x 10 x 10' isn't just by the numbers", San Francisco Chronicle, September 5, 2009. Retrieved February 11, 2019.
  24. Kenneth Baker, "SFMOMA opens 75th anniversary celebration", SF Gate, December 19, 2009. With various other artists. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  25. Exhibition notice for Casual Abyss, Artslant. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  26. Exhibition notice for San Francisco Days, Rayko Photo Center, June 13, 2013. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  27. 3@6×6 face/people/action", Photo Gallery Oakland. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  28. Andrew H. Eskind, ed, Index to American Photographic Collections, 3rd ed (New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1995; ISBN 0-7838-2149-2).
  29. "Photography: Gifts of museum donors", On the Go: A Look at SFMOMA: July 1, 2012 – June 30, 2014 (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2015), p. 125. Available here (Amazon Web Services) as a PDF file. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
  30. John Harding at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  31. Search results for "John Harding", Princeton University Art Museum. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
  32. Search results for the artist "John Harding", MFAH. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
  33. John Harding in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  34. Search results for chromogenic prints or photographs by John Harding, Metropolitan Museum. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  35. "John Harding", Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved February 8, 2019.
  36. Search results for "Harding, John" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
  37. "Focus Gallery records, 1963–1987", Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  38. "Focus Gallery records, 1963–1987: Series 3: Exhibition files, 1966–1985", Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
  39. John Harding at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
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