Ransom Center Magazine

Guide to the Windows

From the Outside In: Two portraits of James Joyce

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

The windows of the Harry Ransom Center show two drawings of James Joyce, one by Desmond Harmsworth and one by Wyndham Lewis, depicting very different sides of the famous writer. The Lewis drawing, dated 1920, shows a portrait of Joyce from the outside: head down, identifiable by the thick eyeglasses and small beard. Lewis was one of Joyce’s Modernist contemporaries—a novelist, experimental artist, and founder of the abstract art movement Vorticism. He was also a well-known curmudgeon and critic, and his sketch hints at the distance from which he approached his fellow artist. Harmsworth, in contrast, was one of Joyce’s publishers and enjoyed long evenings talking and drinking with the writer. His drawing expresses more of Joyce’s personal character.

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From the Outside In: Napoleon Sarony’s Portrait of Oscar Wilde, 1882

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

This image, one of a series of pictures of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) taken by Napoleon Sarony (1821–1896), depicts the young Irishman in January 1882, shortly after he arrived in New York City to begin his 1882 tour of North America. During this year, the last year prior to his marriage to Constance Lloyd, Wilde strongly influenced the costume and style of the European Aesthetic movement, and his unique style quickly spread to the burgeoning Greenwich Village subculture.

Napoleon Sarony, famous for his publicity images of some of the most popular literary and cultural figures of the time, was aware of Wilde’s notoriety, and the photographs from this session helped propel both men in their professions. Wilde was heralded with sudden fame in America, and the Sarony photographs were used to advertise his speaking appearances throughout the country. His tour would take him across the United States and Canada to deliver an estimated 150 lectures. Although his opening lecture in New York City was poorly received, and his style was ridiculed in print by The New York Times and the Boston Evening Transcript, his eye-catching fashion choices, seen here in his velvet suit and knee breeches, were soon adopted by his fans. Among the highlights of his North American tour was a meeting with the aging poet Walt Whitman, brokered by the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine, J. M. Stoddart. Later during Wilde’s visit, Stoddart arranged a dinner party, where he convinced Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle to submit stories to his magazine. This chance encounter would later result in Stoddart’s publication of Wilde’s controversial novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which ultimately led to Wilde’s public fall from grace in Great Britain.

Sarony, a celebrated figure in New York photography, would soon file an 1883 copyright infringement suit against the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company, spurred by their use of one of the prints from his sessions, Oscar Wilde No. 18, in an advertisement. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court, who, in 1884, established that Sarony was the author of “an original work of art” protected by copyright; in their unanimous decision, the Court extended copyright to photography, in line with the established protection for “all forms of writing, printing, engravings, etchings, etc., by which the ideas in the mind of the author are given visible expression.” Sarony later photographed the Supreme Court Justices who decided the case, as well as other Washington, D.C., political figures.

The Ransom Center holds extensive materials related to Wilde’s life and work, including drafts of many of his most important works, correspondence, and writings concerning Wilde by his friends. The Center also holds papers from Wilde’s companion, Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), which include correspondence and versions of several works about Wilde. The collection of Frank Harris (1856–1931), Wilde’s friend and biographer, contains significant correspondence from Robbie Ross, one of Wilde’s most loyal friends, and Vyvyan Holland, Wilde’s youngest son, as well as notes and fragments from Harris’s biography of Wilde. Among materials that the Center holds by Canadian-born Napoleon Sarony are photographic images of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Wilkie Collins.

Former Ransom Center volunteer Jessica Smith wrote this post.

From the Outside In: Film still from “West Side Story,” 1961

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

This image from West Side Story, contrasting dancers caught en point against a realistic New York street, was taken by photographer Jack Harris, who was brought in to capture the dance sequences during the making of the film. This 1961 film is an adaptation of the 1957 Broadway musical of the same name, which was itself based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The film is set in New York City in the mid-1950s, where two street gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, are fighting because of their different ethnic backgrounds. One night at a neighborhood dance, Tony, a former Jet, and Maria, the sister of the Shark leader, dance together and promptly fall in love. As a result, a deeper rift develops between the street gangs, and Maria and Tony must ultimately choose between their cultural connections and their love for one another.

Robert Wise was named director and producer of the film, but because he had no experience directing a musical, Jerome Robbins, who had directed the original Broadway production, was also brought in to provide assistance for the music and dance numbers. Wise and Robbins quickly became at odds with one another, and after the first day of filming, they were no longer on speaking terms. Robbins was soon fired, and the remaining musical numbers were directed by his assistants, but Robbins was still featured in the credits as a co-director of the film.

The film stars Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, who were cast as Tony and Maria. Richard Beymer secured the role of Tony over contenders such as Elvis Presley, Warren Beatty, and Burt Reynolds. Natalie Wood was not originally considered for the role of Maria, but she was romantically involved with Beatty when he performed his screen test for the role of Tony. Wood read opposite Beatty during the screen test, and the producers instantly became enamored with her as Maria.

West Side Story was released on October 18, 1961 and became the second highest grossing film of the year. Garnering significant praise from critics, the film went on to win awards in 10 of the 11 Academy Award categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Score, and Best Cinematography. To this day, West Side Story has won more Academy Awards than any other musical.

The Ransom Center holds the photographs of Jack Harris, who had a thriving career as a photographer of theater, dance, and music. Besides Harris’s stills for this film, the Center also holds photographs, programs, and published materials related to Harris’s work documenting dance performances, predominantly for the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. The Center also holds the papers of West Side Story screenwriter Ernest Lehman.

Former Ransom Center volunteer Amy Elms wrote this post.

From the Outside In: Elizabeth Taylor’s publicity photo for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

As Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Elizabeth Taylor was hateful, tragic, flirtatious, shrewd, and still beautiful enough to be considered a faded beauty. All of these qualities are apparent in this dramatic publicity photo—it is difficult to imagine many American actresses today who would allow themselves to be filmed in such a harsh and ungenerous light.

The first time I saw the film (adapted from the play by Edward Albee), I had never heard of the screenwriter Ernest Lehman, and the only thing I knew about Elizabeth Taylor was that she was friends with Michael Jackson. Even on my tiny TV screen, the film shocked me with its brutality and the vitriol of two couples tearing each other apart over the course of a drunken evening. I was particularly struck by Taylor’s unflinching lack of vanity in her portrayal of Martha, a role for which the luminous 34-year-old gained 30 pounds and appeared to age 20 years. Albee’s original choices for the marquee roles were Bette Davis and James Mason, but director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Ernest Lehman fought to preserve the casting of Taylor and her then-husband Richard Burton. Lehman’s refusal to tone down the profane and explicit dialog only added to the controversy surrounding the film.

Ernest Lehman’s archive resides at the Ransom Center and figured prominently in the 2010 Making Movies exhibition. Lehman also had a hand in many other classic films, including the original version of Sabrina, West Side Story, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and the masterful North by Northwest, which he had written as an original story and screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock. The 2,500 items contained in the Lehman archive showcase the meticulousness of his work. We see not just screenplays but outlines and personal letters, scrapbooks, revisions of revisions, forays into journalism, photographs of Mount Rushmore (among other film locations), and a 200,000-word diary created during the making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In addition, much of his work is handwritten, which provides a level of emotional access and authenticity for the reader that is not always afforded by typed manuscripts. Lehman’s decades-long career culminated in a 2001 honorary Academy Award (the first given to a screenwriter), but the richness of his creative process is what makes his archive a resource worth discovering.

Former Ransom Center volunteer Julie Liu wrote this post.

From the Outside In: Walker Evans’s Allie Mae Burroughs, 1936

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

The haunting eyes of Allie Mae Burroughs look straight at us in this photograph taken by Walker Evans in the summer of 1936. Her gaze has a certain resignation, and her mouth doesn’t quite smile. This is the face of a woman old before her time, who has known not only hard work but the realization that her children have gone to bed hungry. Allie Mae Burroughs was 27, a mother of four and the wife of Alabama sharecropper Floyd Burroughs, when Walker Evans photographed her for what would become an iconic image of the Great Depression in the United States. The Burroughs family’s life was chronicled in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans.

James Agee was a journalist working for Fortune magazine in 1936 when he was given an assignment to document the lives of poor white Southern farmers. At Agee’s insistence, photographer Walker Evans, finishing up his assignments as a Farm Security Administration photographer, accompanied him to Hale County, Alabama, in July and August of that year. Agee and Evans happened upon three men who had just been told that even under the New Deal programs designed to aid the poor, their families did not qualify for help. The journalists ended up spending weeks documenting the everyday lives of these men and their families through photographs, detailed lists of the contents of their homes, and a text miscellany that includes poems, long reflections, bits of dialog, and a survey response to the Partisan Review.

Agee created a portrait of life in the Depression that was too comprehensive for Fortune to publish, and he considered the story too important to be cut and rewritten in a manner that would suit the magazine. It took until 1941 for Agee’s notes and Evans’s photographs to be compiled into a manuscript that was accepted for publication. By that time, however, the war in Europe was reigniting the American economy, and the Depression was no longer a story that interested the public. The first printing of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold little more than 500 copies. Interest in the text was renewed in the 1960s, however, and today the book is considered not only a great work about the Depression but also a masterpiece of photography and writing.

Evans is a celebrated photographer known for the straight-forward elegance of his style and for his study of American culture from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In Looking at Photographs (1973), John Szarkowski, Director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, wrote: “Evans’s work… was puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual, qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeeper’s ledger than to art. But in time it became clear that [his art] constitutes a personal survey of the interior resources of the American tradition, a survey based on a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travelers had found only drab statistics or fairy tales.”

The Harry Ransom Center holds the James Agee collection, which includes an original typescript of the book and nearly 300 prints produced by Walker Evans over the course of this project.

Ransom Center volunteer Karen White wrote this post

From the Outside In: Fritz Henle’s Photograph, “Ruhr Miner,” 1967

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The atria on the first floor of the Ransom Center are surrounded by windows featuring etched reproductions of images from the collections. The windows offer visitors a hint of the cultural treasures to be discovered inside. From the Outside In is a series that highlights some of these images and their creators.

This photograph from the windows of the Harry Ransom Center shows a coal miner from the Ruhr Valley in Germany resting next to a window after a long shift. The sunlight from the window contrasts with the miner’s face and clothes, still blackened by coal dust. The white container in his hand holds a quart of cold milk, which each miner was required to drink after his shift was over. The image can be likened to Migrant Mother in the adjacent window, particularly in the expressions of rugged self-reliance and the excellent tonal reproduction on the faces.

Fritz Henle was born in 1909, the son of well-to-do Jewish parents. As a teenager he showed great interest in photography and built himself a darkroom in his parents’ basement. When he applied to attend photography school at the Bavarian Institute of Photography in Munich, the faculty were so impressed by the portfolio he brought along that they allowed him to join as a second-year student. He finished the program at the top of his class. He always used Rolleiflex cameras, which generate large, high-quality negatives, and his mastery of photo composition allowed him to take well-balanced pictures of any subject.

Henle established his career in pre–World War II Germany, but during the rise of the Nazi Party, he left the country for an assignment as a photojournalist in the United States and did not return. He rapidly established himself as a documentary photographer working for the U.S. Office of War Information during the difficult war years. He photographed mundane objects requested by his clients, but he composed them to produce attractive images, and his business grew. He established himself as an independent, commercial photographer after the war, produced thousands of images on numerous assignments, and became known as “the last classic freelance photographer.”

Ruhr Miner was taken late in his career. The light in the picture, apparently coming from an open window, is sufficiently diffused so that the shadows are not completely blacked out but greatly enhance the grimy atmosphere of the photo as a whole. For the best effect, this window should be viewed with as dark a background as possible.

Henle himself wrote 20 books on photography. Much of the information in this description has been drawn from book Fritz Henle: In Search of Beauty by the Ransom Center’s Senior Research Curator of Photography, Roy Flukinger.

Ransom Center volunteer Alan Herbert wrote this post.

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