Arnold Genthe

Arnold Genthe was born in Germany, and came to the United States in 1895 to work as a tutor in San Francisco. He began taking photographs of Chinatown in his leisure time, publishing some of these works in local magazines. He established his own portrait studio in the city, where he photographed prominent local citizens and celebrities, but most of his works were destroyed by the 1909 fire that swept through San Francisco (his views of Chinatown survived, thus becoming a vital record of that area after its destruction during the fire). In 1911, Genthe moved to New York City, where he continued his portraiture and became a pioneering photographer of dance. In addition to Bloch, Genthe made hundreds of images of such prominent figure as Isadora Duncan and her company, the Anita Zahn Dancers, Martha Graham and Ruth St. Denis. His delicate and soft-focus, Pictorialist style (evident in our portrait of Bloch) lent itself to the lyrical subject matter. Throughout his long career, Genthe also travelled extensively, photographing in Europe (Greece and Spain), Morocco, Japan, the American South and Southwest, the Caribbean and Central America. Genthe was also one of the first photographers to use the autochrome process for color photography, producing around 500 autochrome plates of landscapes throughout the United States between 1906 and the 1930s.