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Robert Mottar

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Robert Mottar (1909-1967) was an American industrial and magazine photographer, active 1950s-1960s.[1]

Career

Robert Mottar, often credited as 'Robert M. Mottar', began his career as a staff photographer for The Baltimore Sun in the 1940s, before graduating to business magazines including Fortune. Mottar produced photographs of major building projects, technology and industry and made portraits of major players. In 1959, in a $10,000 photo-shoot he documented the building of the Chase Manhattan Bank,[2] at one point assembling all of the construction workers for a multi-storey vertical panorama in which the grid structure of the steel and reinforced concrete facade of the skyscraper forms dozens of frames, each containing twenty or so cheering workers.[3][4][5]

His near-silhouette against blank sky of a dogman standing on a girder being lifted by a crane featured in the world-touring The Family of Man,  cropped to a tight vertical mounted floor-to-ceiling and occupying an entire structural column in the exhibition space at the Museum of Modern Art showing January 24–May 8, 1955.[6] The show was seen by 9 million visitors worldwide and is now on show in perpetuity at Clervaux Castle in Luxembourg. He was represented in two additional exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art;[7] MoMA; Photographs from the Museum Collection, November 26, 1958–January 18, 1959; and 70 Photographers Look at New York, November 27, 1957–April 15, 1958. He was also commissioned for stories on celebrities for mass-circulation magazines such as LIFE.[8][9]

Photography for universities

Mottar's portraits preserve the appearance of many American academics and intellectuals, and some from Europe.

Mottar’s photographs of inventors and entrepreneurs, especially in the television industry, are preserved in the collection of Johns Hopkins University[10] where he also photographed academics, campus views and student life, production of JHU Science Review, and on one occasion, scenes of sixth-grade students using a mock-up television studio.

His portraits made at Johns Hopkins include John Allen Austin, Harold Ingle, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, Leo Spitzer, Alex Quiroga, Ferdinand J. Hamburger, James William Perry Jr., Ben Wolfe, Alphonse Chapanis, Henry Carrington Lancaster, Ernst Cloys Laurence Hall Fowler, Robert Lowell and Lowell Jacob Reed, Sheldon Keith Spalding (1957), Lyn D. Poole (1957), William Bennett Kouwenhoven (1950), Frank Vigor Morley (1953), William Moore Passano (1956), Edward Russel Hawkins (1950), Alexander Graham Christie (1950), Leo Orville Forkey (1950), George Friederic Wislicenus (1950), Francis Henry Horn (1950), Robert Freedman (1956), Franco Dino Rasetti (1953), Eben Francis Perkins III (1956), Theodore McKeldin (1956), Audrey Smid (1956), Sidney Painter (1954), John Charles Hubbard (1952), Ronald Taylor  Abercrombie (1952), Ralph Knieriem Witt (1951), Robert Fenwick (1951), John Lehman (1951), and Lowell Jacob Reed on his farm in New Hampshire (1953).

In 1952 Mottar made portraits of alumni emeritus professors at Princeton University in their academic environments: Henry Norris Russell, Astronomy; Charles Rufus Morey, Art and Archaeology; Robert Russell Wicks, Dean of the University Chapel, Arthur Maurice Greene, Dean of Engineering; William Starr Myers, Politics; Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Belles Lettres; Frank Jewett Mather Jr., Art and Archaeology; Gordon Hall Gerould, Belles Lettres; Edward Samuel Corwin, Jurisprudence; Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, American History; George Wicker Elederkin, Art and Archaeology; Gilbert Chinard, French Literature; George Harrison Shull, Botany and Genetics.[11]

During the 1950s, Mottar accompanied University of Arkansas folklorist Mary Celestia Parler undertaking the Folklore Research Project (1949-1965).  The photographs feature Mary Celestia Parler and others active in collecting folklore, as well as the subjects of Ozark folklore studies.[12]

Overseas commissions

Overseas Mottar worked between Oregeval, Paris and New York where he was represented by Scope Associates.[13] There, Mottar photographed Andre Gustave Parodi at the Swiss embassy in Rome, Russell Baker in London (1953), Mark R. Lazarus in Oxford (1953), Ulrich Ernst Von Gienanth in Eisenberg (1954), John Richard Cary in Munich (1954), Francis Torrance Wiliamson in the US embassy, Rome (1954), Ludwig Edelstein in Oxford (1954), Tom Edward Davis and Thomas Southcliffe Ashton at the London School of Economics (1953), Thomas Watkins McElhiney in Berlin (1954), Arthur Kurtz Myers in Geneva (1953), Frank Vigor Morley in London (1953).

Mottar was an ASMP member.[14]

References

  1. ^ Harrison, Cherl T; Doren, Arnold, 1935-2003 (2015), Doren and photography (1st ed.), High Point, North Carolina Barsina Publishing, ISBN 978-0-9906948-0-9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ 'Anchoring a Skyscraper: Photographs by Robert M. Mottar'. In SPAN, July 1961, 48-49.
  3. ^ Foner, Philip S. (Philip Sheldon); Schultz, Reinhard; Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst; Elefanten Press (1985), The Other America : art and the labour movement in the United States (Shortened ed ed.), Journeyman ; USA : Flatiron Book Distributors, ISBN 978-0-904526-94-3 {{citation}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  4. ^ Speaking of Pictures: The Model Fee-$10,000, In LIFE, 1 Jun 1959, p.14-15, Vol. 46, No. 22, ISSN 0024-3019, Published by Time Inc
  5. ^ Foner, Philip S. (Philip Sheldon); Schultz, Reinhard; Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst; Elefanten Press (1985), The Other America : art and the labour movement in the United States (Shortened ed ed.), Journeyman ; USA : Flatiron Book Distributors, ISBN 978-0-904526-94-3 {{citation}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  6. ^ [1] Installation photograph at the Museum of Modern Art archive]
  7. ^ Robert M. Mottar biographical file in MoMA Database, n.d.
  8. ^ LIFE, 16 Oct 1964, p.133-146,Vol. 57, No. 16, ISSN 0024-3019, Published by Time Inc.
  9. ^ “Seven Top Photojournalists: How They Think About the Picture Story." Popular Photography, vol. 44, no. 6 (June 1959), pp. 50-53, 105, 106, 123, 125. 7 portraits.
  10. ^ [https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/discover?rpp=10&etal=0&query=Mottar&scope=1774.2/46193&group_by=none&page=22 John Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries[
  11. ^ Princeton Alumni Weekly, Volume LII, No. 23, April 25, 1952
  12. ^ [libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/findingaids/parler.html Mary C. Parler Photographs Collection (MC896), part of the Arkansas Folklore Collection at the University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections.
  13. ^ Bonner-Ganter, Deanna (2016), Kosti Ruohomaa : the photographer poet, Camden, Maine Down East Books, an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc, ISBN 978-1-60893-495-9
  14. ^ American Society of Magazine Photographers. (1957). ASMP picture annual. Simon and Schuster.
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