Ted Croner Ted Croner (American, b. December 5th, 1922 – d. August 15, 2005) was born in Baltimore, MD. and grew up in Charlotte, N.C. His interest in photography began as a boy and continued through college at University of North Carolina. After joining the army during World War II, he worked as an aerial photographer with the United States Army Air Corps stationed in the South Pacific. After the war, in 1946 , Croner went to New York where he and Bill Helburn, another former Air Corps photographer, used their G.I. Bill aid to open a small photography studio on West 57th street in Manhattan. Shortly after that, on a ski trip in Stowe, Vt., Croner met Fernand Fonssagrives, fashion photographer, who urged him to continue in this field and recommended that he enroll in Alexey Brodovitch’s photography class at the New School. Perhaps Croner’s best-known work , “Taxi – New York Night, 1947-48,” was taken while he was a student in Brodovitch’s legendary “design laboratory”. In producing this dazzling bold blur of an image, Croner took a leaf from his mentor’s book and went a few steps further. Brodovitch had created a book of photographs: “Ballet”, published in 1945, which captured the evanescent, elegant nature of dance. In 1948 Edward Steichen , then director of photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, chose to include Croner in two exhibitions at the Museum: “In and Out of Focus” and “Four Photographers” which included three other photographers: Bill Brandt, Harry Callahan and Lisette Model. Other exhibitions of Croner’s work followed over the years. As he continued to accept commercial work at magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue, Croner pursued his own photography, producing vigorously experimental, cinematic images of cafeterias, solitary diners and the city after dark. In later years he accepted commissions from large corporate clients such as Chase Manhattan Bank and Coca-Cola as well as several New York Times Magazine covers and editorial work. Interest in his work was revived with the publication of “The New York School , Photographs” by Jane Livingston in 1992 which followed the 1985 exhibition of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. For the cover of the book Ms. Livingston chose a picture by Croner “New York at Night, 1948″ which shows a Manhattan skyline reduced to abstract slashes of white light among black tall buildings against a gun-metal gray sky. Ms. Livingston wrote that images such as that “most quintessentially defined the New York School”. After the publication of the book, in 1995 the Howard Greenberg Gallery gave Croner a solo exhibition. This was followed by inclusion in the exhibition “By Night” at The Cartier Foundation in Paris in 1996 and the Whitney Museum’s 1999 exhibition “American Century Part II”. In 2002 he was included in the group show “New York Scene: Ted Croner, Sid Grossman, Saul Leiter and Leon Levinstein” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, in 2005 in the exhibition “At The Crossroads of Time: A Times Square Centennial” at the Axa Gallery in New York, as well as “Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography 1940-1959″ at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2010. Please contact Catherine Croner for more information at [email protected]
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 00:28:05 +0000