Chauncey Hare Resources
Last revised 2020-06-08
Chauncey Hare
1934—May 12, 2019
"An engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester"
From the moment I first saw Chauncey Hare's Protest Photographs, I felt to have encountered a most extraordinary body of work. When I learned about his death and wanted to study his work more closely, I became aware of how little it is known. So as a first step, I started to compile this directory of material on and by Chauncey Hare. It is meant as a research aid and starting point for own explorations.
Chauncey Hare
Archives
Message from Jack von Euw
Publication and Exhibition Requirements
Shows
— Solo Shows – USA
— Group Shows – USA
— Group Shows – Europe
Publications by Chauncey Hare
— Photo Books
— Text Books and Articles
— Other
Publications by Others
— Papers
— Articles and Reviews
— Books and Catalogs
This Resource
Changelog
Chauncey Hare
"Chauncey Hare does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. Funded by three Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment Fellowships, he spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. In 2000, distrusting art museums, Hare donated all of his photographs and negatives to the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley. He has an engineering degree from Columbia University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Masters Degree in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, and a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Sierra University. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet – minimize the abuse they suffer as workers in their corporate and government jobs." – Back cover text of Protest Photographs, 2009
Biography at The Bancroft Library
CH's late self description
Archives
CH stopped making photographs in 1985 and donated all photographs, prints and negatives to The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. The Online Archive of California has published a detailed finding aid (full text, PDF) and 201 digitized photographs from the collection online. Many of them are not included in the books.
Message from Jack von Euw
Message from Jack von Euw, Curator of The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, to this resource:
"Even though Chauncey's involvement with photography comprised a relatively short period in his life, Chauncey Hare's work, to my mind, is as groundbreaking and socially relevant as that of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Robert Frank.
Chauncey's steadfast adherence to his moral code, his respect for the people he photographed, his protest against alienation, the loneliness of the human heart, the impoverished lives led in servitude to society's elite, and the soul crushing corporate juggernaut endure in his work. Globalization and the late stages of cruel capitalism give Chauncey's photographs ever more relevance.
I had the privilege of spending some time with Chauncey and I am exceedingly grateful that Chauncey and Judy chose to donate his entire photograph archive to The Bancroft Library. Chauncey's archive is one of the most significant in Bancroft and certainly the most significant addition to the Pictorial Collection during my tenure as pictorial curator."
— Jack von Euw, Curator of The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection
Publication and Exhibition Requirements
CH made it a requirement that all "original photographic prints and original negatives shall remain on the premises of The Bancroft Library" and that copies may be published or exhibited only with the following sentences in place:
For his landscape photographs, 1962 to 1966: "These photographs were (or 'this photograph was') made by Chauncey Hare in the evenings and on weekends as a relief from the interpersonal abuse he experienced on his engineering job; the skills he learned making these pictures he later used to make social documents to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers."
For his social situation photographs, 1967 to 1985: "These photographs were (or 'this photograph was') made by Chauncey Hare to protest and warn against the growing domination of working people by multi-national corporations and their elite owners and managers."
Shows
Solo Shows – USA
1977, MoMA, New York: Photographs by Chauncey Hare, directed by Johzarkowski, with 48 photos (PDF) lent by CH "of public and private interiors, generally with their inhabitants. The photographs were made in California (1968-70) where Hare has worked as a petroleum engineer for 20 years, and in the upper Ohio Valley (1971-72) where Hare's father's family lived for seven generations. This work is part of a continuing project documenting the impact of technology on the individual"(!), source, PDF. "The Guggenheim [stipend] for me was the end of thirty-five years of the unconscious death: I had one year of life", source, PDF.
1971, SFMOMA, San Francisco: Interior America. In the chronology he provided the Bancroft Library with, CH placed this show in 1970. Both the SFMOMA Exhibition Records Finding Aid (PDF) and SFMOMA Finding Aid to the Publicity Department Records (PDF) list it as a 1971 show, May 18 to June 13.
Group Shows – USA
2018, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago: Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980. CH is not mentioned in the show announcement or press release, but one source lists him as participating artist.
2012, P!, New York: Process 01: Joy, inaugural exhibition on "labor, alienation, and the love of work". Presented "are multiple copies of Hare’s published books, as well as archival and reproduced materials and photographs. Every day at 6pm, as if at the punching of a timeclock, the pages of the books on view will be turned to reveal new configurations of images and texts that reflect on the shifting pressures of life and work." Press with CH mentioned, all 2012: Artforum: "Hare is out of the art world completely, but a letter (on view here) to a critic he hoped would review one of his books is a devastating reminder of the work that matters, artwork and otherwise", Yale Daily News: CH "frequently refuses interviews with journalists regarding his art", New York Oberserver: "aggressively heartbreaking social photography", The New Yorker, print Artforum 10/2012, Abitare (PDF), Design Observer.
2011, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco: Here with five photos by CH, installation shown on page 52 of the catalog and online catalog
2011, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, "the most comprehensive survey exhibition to date to examine the exceptional fertility and diversity of art practice in California between 1974 and 1980, a unique period in American history when the political and social roles of artists, the authority of institutions, and the "objecthood" of art were all being questioned". "Immediately on entering the museum, standing in the middle of the Geffen Contemporary's raised landing, viewers are caught between South America Triangle, 1981, a hanging sculpture by Bruce Nauman dealing with political torture, and a selection from Chauncey Hare's series "This Was Corporate America," 1976-77, black-and-white photographs of slack-faced, lower-management drones working for the likes of Standard Oil." - from the Artforum 02/2012 review (excerpt). CHs contribution is also mentioned in the Sept. 18, 2011, LA Times article Lesser-known artists are poised for a breakthrough: chief curator, Paul "Schimmel also expects growing interest in Chauncey Hare - 'not an artist I’d ever heard of before working on this show.'". Jonathan Griffin review. Catalog.
2009, SF Camerawork: An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself, catalog
2001, MoMA, New York: Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen
2009, MoMA, New York: Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, catalog
1978, MoMA, New York: Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, featuring the MoMA purchase Escalon Hotel Before Demolishment, San Joaquin Valley. 1968, reproduced on page 125 of the exhibition catalog (PDF). "This exhibition of approximately 200 prints attempts to provide a critical overview of the new American photography of the past two decades. The central thesis of the exhibition claims that the basic dichotomy in contemporary photography distinguishes those who think of photography fundamentally as a means of self-expression from those who think of it as a method of exploration." This was a travelling exhibition, also shown at: Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Walker Art Center Minneapolis, J.B. Speed Art Museum Louisville, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of Illinois Krannert Art Museum Champaign, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Richmond (all 1979), Milwaukee Art Center (1980). At the opening in San Francisco, CH handed leaflets to the attendants of a lecture by the show's curator, John Szarkowski, protesting Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the show and the inclusion of his photo in it.
1971, MoMA, New York: Steichen Gallery Reinstallation, featuring the MoMA purchase Escalon Hotel Before Demolishment, San Joaquin Valley. 1968
1970, MoMA, New York: Photography: New Acquisitions, featuring the MoMA purchases Escalon Hotel Before Demolishment, San Joaquin Valley. 1968 and Kitchen, Kensington, California. 1968
CH isn't mentioned in the press releases of any of the MoMA group shows.
"A Study of Standard Oil Company Employees" was to be included in an exhibition called "Impact of Technology" at the SFMOMA in the form of a slide show and audio presentation. The exhibition was cancelled in November 1987. (Source)
1966, The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco: Utah and the Four Corners (landscape photographs). "Made these photographs during two vacation trips."
1965, SFMOMA, San Francisco: Hills of California (landscape photographs)
Group Shows – Europe
2015, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid: Not Yet - On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, original title Aún no - Sobre la reinvención del documental y la crítica de la modernidad, "on the reframing of documentary culture in the 1970s and 1980s", brochure (PDF), catalog. Alan Sekula's 1978 essay Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary, in which Sekula discussed CH's work, is quoted as a key element of this show's programming.
2010, Le Bal, Paris: Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film, L’ Amerique Sans Nom: Photographie et Cinema, inaugural show at Le Bal and CH's first overseas show, co-curated by Diane Dufour and David Campany. "Through photographs, books, magazines, film and video Anonymes considers America’s long history of depicting and celebrating the anonymous citizen, against its cult of celebrity, fame and individuality." Book produced by LE BAL - Steidl with a text by David Campany and at least two photographs by CH, 96 pages, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86930-215-7. From the Frieze review: CH's photographs "are also ‘protocol-informed’ documents; they occupy the territory where documentary photography, despite its somewhat naïve or literal relation to content, verges on a sort of proto-Conceptualism."
Publications by Chauncey Hare
Photo Books
2009: Protest Photographs. Göttingen: Steidl, ISBN 978-3-86521-495-9, with an introduction by CH, a foreword by his wife Judy Wyatt, and an afterword by Jack von Euw, curator of the Pictorial Collection at the Bancroft Library, 373 pages 245 x 300 mm in hardcover with 170 tritone plates, edited by Steven Kasher and Jack von Euw. Book design by Steven Kasher and Bernard Fischer, closely mirroring the Interior America design. The photo-eye Best Books of 2009 page shows a different cover design, perhaps a dummy version.
1984: This Was Corporate America. Boston: Institute for Contemporary Arts, ISBN 978-0910663403, 94 pages
1978: Interior America. New York City: Aperture, ISBN 9780893810283, with an introduction by CH, 150 photographs on 174 pages 240 x 295 mm in hardcover under dust jacket. Designed by Marvin Israel and Kate Morgan. Included in Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History - Volume 2, p.23.
Back cover text of both Interior America and Protest Photographs: "Chauncey Hare captures the terrifying, claustrophobic ordinariness of the real America that lives out its bewildered days behind the slap-happy myth of progress, the facade of affluence. It is the America where cracks in the plaster, dishes in the sink, stains on the linoleum are the hieroglyphics of despair. His photographs are trial wasteland of modern life like a gathering death wish. After reading the personal statement Hare has attached to this book, I can see that these are not simply photographs of America's interior, but of his own inner being. He has lived he estrangement and desperation of these images. - Theodore Roszak".
Title lines: "For those who are awakening to their own authority" (Interior America), "For all working people" (Protest Photographs)
Text Books and Articles
1997: Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It, Rochester: Schenkman Books. With Judith Wyatt. "Chapter 5 of this book gives a vignette of 'Charles' which is Hare’s actual experience as a collaborative group leader at Chevron ('Vyrol Company' in the vignette)." (Source)
Other
1986: Making it real: a bottom-to top change project in a regional office of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, study, Pepperdine University
1978: The case for Orville England, "promotional pamphlet related to the oral and photographic study of Standard Oil employees and working conditions done in 1976-1977 by Chauncey Hare and Don Thompson", 22 pages
Publications by Others
Papers
2019, Camille Balenieri: L’art de résister. Chauncey Hare, photographe politique aux États-Unis, des années 1950 à nos jours. Doctoral thesis at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, defended December 7th, 2019. It "aims to deconstruct the myth that has been built around the photographer and reintegrate the work into its various networks (institutional, intellectual, human)", drawing on "the study of CH's archives as well as extensive interviews with him and other cultural actors in the San Francisco Bay Area" conducted under a 2018 travel grant.
Articles and Reviews
2019, Isabella Seniuta: The death of Chauncey Hare (1934-2019), an unsung pioneer of photography, first published as Photographer Chauncey Hare (1934-2019), a precursor, is dead, in l'Œil de la Photographie. Archived version at Wayback Machine.
2019, Camille Balenieri: Chauncey Hare, une conscience radicale. Documentaire social et mysticisme. Transbordeur. Photographie histoire société ("Câble, copie, code. Photographie et technologies de l’information"), Paris, Macula, no 3, 2019, pp. 160-173. Abstract in English: Interior America is "marked by a fundamental ambivalence of spiritual origin", and Balenieri "demonstrates the seamless fit between her subject’s oeuvre and the political and social protests in and around San Francisco" in the 1960s.
2019, Laura Smith: A Cube with No View - Photographer Chauncey Hare trained his lens on the modern corporate hellscape, in California Magazine, Cal Alumni Association, Fall 2019 issue, published September 11, 2019 according to Isabella Seniuta in her l'Œil de la Photographie article, with possibly the first permanent mention of CH's death.
2019, Wikipedia: In possibly the first mention of CH's death, user Rncooper added CH's exact date of death to CH's Wikipedia page at 01h10, May 15, 2019. User Lopifalko undid this change on the same day at 08h45: "Unsourced and I cannot find a source for it". This can be retraced in the page's revision history. CH's death was added again on Dec 4, 2019 by an anonymous user, citing just "May 2019". On Dec 5, 2019, user Lopifalko added Isabella Seniuta's article in l'Œil de la Photographie as source.
2018, August Kleinzahler: Chauncey Hare, poem, London Review of Books, Vol. 40 No. 2, 25 January 2018.
2017, Jörg Colberg: A Second Look: Chauncey Hare’s Interior America, written on occasion of the Bengal Aperture text: "Here is a man who deeply believed in what he was doing in and with his photographs, […] career consequences be damned."
2017, Rebecca Bengal: Chauncy Hare's Protest. A trenchant view of 1970s America. "An accomplished photographer-and former Standard Oil Engineer-becomes an advocate for the working class", in Aperture Magazine 226, Spring 2017 - American Destiny, pp. 72-79.
2015, California Office of Historic Preservation: "The noted photographer Chauncey Hare" is listed in the Statement of Significance in the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (PDF) for the San Francisco Art Institute.
2012, Douglas Harper: Visual Sociology, Routledge textbook. CH is mentioned on page 36 in the section Documentary Photography: CH "photographed the routines of life in corporate America before leaving his engineering job; his visual ethnography of bureaucracy shows the ordinariness of cubicles, files in boxes and workers dwarfed by their habitat. Because of these and other similar books, there was a growing idea that culture—whether found in suburbia, corporate cubicles, hippie communes or biker bars—is visual and that it can be photographed. For many young sociologists (myself included) this became the critical backdrop for a visual sociology that laid the groundwork for what we hoped would be progressive change. This view seems naïve several decades later."
2012, Jared Robert Radin: Living the Dream, honors thesis, pp. 50-54. Radin introduces CH in the chapter "Alienated Fictions" of the theoretical part of his thesis.
2012, Eric Xiao: Eli opens doors of new NYC gallery, Yale Daily News review of the P! show: "Hare declined an interview - the photographer frequently refuses interviews with journalists regarding his art".
2012, Will Heinrich: Controlled Experiments, New York Oberserver review of the P! show: "aggressively heartbreaking social photography".
2012, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie: Process 01: Joy, Artforum review of the P! show: "Hare is out of the art world completely, but a letter (on view here) to a critic he hoped would review one of his books is a devastating reminder of the work that matters, artwork and otherwise".
2012, Abitare: Joy in New York, with an exterior view of the space the P! show was held in. English version as PDF.
2012, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy lists the P! exhibition in her Artforum 10/2012 show recommendations.
2012, The New Yorker: Galleries-Downtown, listing of the P! show with CH mentioned.
2012, Jan Tumlir: "Under the Big Black Sun", Artforum 02/2012 review of the Geffen show, excerpt.
2011, Jonathan Griffin: California über alles, review of the Geffen show, full text on his blog: "In the cases of Hare and Sekula, their images seem rather co-opted into telling socio-political stories […] at the expense of their reflections on the nature of their own medium."
2011, Jori Finkel: Lesser-known artists are poised for a breakthrough, Los Angeles Times review of the Geffen show
2011, Kristine Stiles: Negative Affirmative: San Francisco Bay Area Art, 1974-1981, in: Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, edited by Paul Schimmel, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011, pp. 27–43, catalog of the Geffen show: "Hare’s determined approach to art and his observation about truth and spirit capture the intrinsically candid critical qualities of San Francisco Bay Area art during an expansive but elusive artistic period: 1974 to 1981." PDF.
2011, Mike Sperlinger: Two Slight Returns: Chauncey Hare and Marianne Wex, in Afterall: "If individual artworks or bodies of work are ‘orphaned’ by artists’ later life choices, then they pass down to us with a set of perplexingly familiar but intractable questions: about life and work, intention and history."
2010, Sheila Newbery: Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, with a few remarks on the work of Chauncey Hare, on her blog I/Eye: On Photography.
2010, Ken Grant: Protest Photographs, review, in: Foto8, issue 27, March 1, 2010: Crosscurrent, pp. 154-163, with the reproduction of six double-spreads from Protest Photographs: CH's work is "among the most important American photographic projects of the last century" and "a protest that is as emotionally open as any I have understood in the medium." Online version. Also in Landscape Stories: Dream Books.
2010: Frieze: The Inaugural Exhibition at Le Bal, Paris Celebrates Anonymous Americans, review of the Le Bal show: CH's photographs "are also ‘protocol-informed’ documents; they occupy the territory where documentary photography, despite its somewhat naïve or literal relation to content, verges on a sort of proto-Conceptualism."
2009, Alec Soth: Photobooks of 2009 - "I haven’t had time to wrap my head around this tome, but it only takes a quick glance to know that this book is a killer." This accurately reflects the start of my own history with CH's work.
2009, Rémi Coignet: Chauncey Hare: Protest Photographs, book review and mostly recapitulation of CH's history in the Le Monde blog Des livres et des photos: "Hare's radicalism alienated him from the art world and contributed to his relative oblivion. Protest Photographs thus makes it possible to rediscover a photograph that is emblematic of the 1970s, both in terms of what we see in it and the political framework in which it is set."
2009, 5B4 Photography and Books: Protest Photographs by Chauncey Hare: "Protest Photographs is a more direct title for the work. Hare's response to the claustrophobic atmosphere and spiritual desolation in the workers lives (and his own) is its driving force and his main concern. It is his vision of what could be extraordinary lives dulled by joyless routine and loss of personal meaning - anesthetized cogs in a machine."
2008, posting on the photo.net forum thread Thinking About Chauncey Hare by Mike Scheurich who claims to have been "good friend of Chauncey at Chevron Research".
2008, Britt Salvesen: This is Corporate America: The Intertwined Histories of Photography and the Office, in The Believer, issue 58: "Hare gave up on art’s potential to effect change, and his arresting photographs are little known. But with the just-released Protest Photographs (Steidl), Hare reiterates his demand that society pay attention to the working people and conditions he depicted so mercilessly. This may well be his final statement as a photographer"
1995, Miles Orvell: After the Machine. Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries, University Press of Mississippi. CH is mentioned in chapter 4, Don't Think of It as Art: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on p. 66: CH "(in his 1978 volume, Interior America), has seemed to model himself on Evans' direct meeting with his subjects, though in Hare's case his ironic use of the individual's surrounding environment has often been at the latter's expense."
1986, Martha Langford: Donigan Cumming: Crossing Photography’s Chalk Lines, in: Donigan Cumming - Reality and motive in documentary photography, Ottawa 1986, ISBN 0888845529. CH and Janet Malcolm's 1979 review are referenced by Langford in her text on Cumming's photography.
1985, David C. Wigglesworth: This Was Corporate America (PDF), review, in: Training & Development Journal, vol. 39 (1985-06-01), nr. 6, p. 84: "That change within institutions can and must come from us, is an overpowering message that eminates from this work."
1980, Günter Liehr, Jan Thorn-Prikker: Container: Ex Interieur Bilder vom Wohnen in Amerika Zu den Bildern von Chauncey Hare, in Kunstforum Bd. 41, 1980: Dokumentarfotografie. An 8,000 word essay on the incursion of consumer capitalism into the private quarters of wage earners and photography as "one of the most advanced ways of representing and reflecting on everyday life": "Der Wohnung wird der Stempel der am Ich vollzogenen Zurichtung aufgedrückt. […] Schäbigkeit und Nachlässigkeit zeigen einen resignativen Gestus: Das lohnt die Mühe nicht mehr. Aber man kann neben der Resignation auch eine Spur von Hoffnung aus ihnen herauslesen. Hier ist eine Grenze erreicht, ein Punkt, über den die Zurichtung der Menschen nicht mehr hinausgehen kann. Schon wird durch die hervorbrechende Häßlichkeit die unterstellte Reibungslosigkeit der Moderne denunziert."
1980, Jules Lubbock: Hare, Chauncey: Interior America. - Millerton, 1978., review, in: The Architectural Review, 168/1980 (source).
1980, Ingrid Sischy: Self-Portraits in Photography, The Print Collector's Newsletter, vol. 10, no. 6, January/February 1980, pp. 189–193: "Robert Frank’s bitter, personal view of America during the Eisenhower years gave Americans The Americans, a view, it seems, shared by very few and most were not ready to see. […] Hare's work is perhaps a more militant 1970's echo of Frank's lonelier, equally alienated vision." And: "More recently, Chauncey Hare made a portrait of Interior America, pictures of neglected hearths, the hearts of seldom noticed communities, those shadowed by mines, mills, and refineries. Interior America is dedicated "For those who are awakening to their own authority." Also in Barrow, Thomas F, Shelley Armitage, and William E. Tydeman. Reading into Photography: Selected Essays, 1959-1980. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.
1979, Janet Malcolm: Slouching Towards Bethlehem, PA, The New Yorker, 6 August 1979, also in Malcolm's 1997 book Diana and Nikon (review): CH "enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield to interpretation", but "it is too early to tell about Hare’s place in photography".
1979, Vicki Goldberg: Chauncey Hare, in: American Photo magazine, reprinted in: Vicki Goldberg: Light Matters: Writings on Photography, Aperture, 2005, ISBN 9781931788632, and Aperture, 2010, 9781597111652.
1979, Carter Ratcliff: Hare, Chauncey: Interior America. - Millerton, 1978., review, in: Art in America, 67/1979, pp. 13-16 (source).
1978, Leo Rubinfien: Chauncey Hare at the Museum of Modern Art, review, in: Art in America, 66/1978, pp. 110-111 (source, source (PDF)). Rubinfien is represented by Steven Kasher, editor of Protest Photographs.
1978, Allan Sekula: Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation) (PDF), The Massachusetts Review 19:4, Dec 1978, pp 859-883; repr. in Photography, Current Perspectives, ed. Jerome Liebling, Light Impressions, 1978, pp 231-255; repr. in Photography Against the Grain, 1984, pp 53-75, and 2016: "The radicalism of Hare's work lies in his choice of a terrain and his identification with its inhabitants." This article is mainly on "A Study of Standard Oil Company Employees (1976-77)" that CH produced on his third Guggenheim Fellowship. "During his wanderings in this familiar territory, Hare photographed and interviewed at every level of the corporate hierarchy, ranging from refinery operators, maintenance workers and headquarters key-punch operators, to supervisors and executive engineers. His photographs form a kind of metonymic map of an abstract bureaucratic structure. Each portrait suggests a life and a position. One sees evidence of the elaborately coded privileges and humiliations of autocratically managed large enterprises. […] Hare brings an engineer’s knowledge, coupled with an ethical integration of 'fact' and 'value,' to his critique of the petrochemical industry. And yet he sees in the refinery workers an image of his own, previously unacknowledged, proletarianization. He overcomes the contempt commonly felt by professional and technical staff for the people who actually run the everyday operations of a large refinery complex." Sekula also remarked that "it is unlikely that this work will ever be exhibited at the Rockefeller-backed Museum osf Modern Art, which is, after all, a cultural edifice built on Standard Oil profits, notwithstanding the 'relative autonomy' of John Szarkowski’s curatorial decisions". This essay is quoted as a key element of the programming of the 2015 Madrid show Not Yet which also included work by CH.
1977, Gene Thornton, NYT: American Popular Taste, Viewed With Rage, review of CHs MoMA solo show: "Chauncey Hare's horror show (as I am tempted to call the exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art through October 23) is a group of photographs documenting in lavish and ghastly detail the kind of places certain people make for themselves to live in." The reviewer finds that CH "looks down on" on his subject as he "seems to be in a rage against the taste of his sitters", but his main problem is "to see these documents of vulgar popular taste in the very citadel of modern good taste", "a double shock".
Books and Catalogs
2015, MoMA: Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now, ISBN 0870709690. MoMA's CH purchase "Southern Pacific Station, Oakland. 1967" is reproduced on page 42 as part of the chapter "New Documents and Beyond": PDF preview.
2015, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía: Not yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism - Essays and Documents [1972-1991] - catalog of the Madrid show.
2011, Pier 24 Photography: Here, catalog of the Pier 24 show, CH's photos on page 52, online version
2011, Lisa Gabrielle Mark and Paul Schimmel: Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974-1981, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011, TOC (PDF), catalog of the Geffen show, including the Stiles essay.
2010, Le Bal: Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film, catalog of the Le Bal show with a text by David Campany and at least two photographs by CH, 96 pages, 2010, ISBN 978-3-86930-215-7.
2010, SF Camerawork: An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself, catalog of the 2009 SF Camerawork show
2006, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History - Volume 2
2002, Peter Galassi: Walker Evans & Company, MoMA New York. Catalog of the group show, 2000 at MoMA New York, in the series Making Choices, and 2001 at Getty Los Angeles. The MoMA purchase Escalon Hotel Before Demolishment, San Joaquin Valley. 1968 is reproduced on a double page spread next to photos of Michael Schmidt and Laurenz Berges. Hare is not mentioned in the show's press releases.
1991, James Guimond: American Photography and the American Dream The University of North Carolina Press, Google Books excerpts, review (PDF). CH is one of four photographers discussed in the chapter "After the Fall" on documentary photography in the 1970s across several pages, citing Interior America and This Was Corporate America.
1978, John Szarkowski: Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 (PDF), MoMA New York, 152 pages, catalog of the MoMA group show. The MoMA purchase Escalon Hotel Before Demolishment, San Joaquin Valley. 1968, is reproduced on page 125.
This Resource
This list of Chauncey Hare resources is meant as a research aid.
It is compiled by Haiko Hebig.
First published: 2019-12-05
Revision: 2020-06-08
The self portrait with camera was taken 1968. Captions taken from the finding aid. All photos: Chauncey Hare Photograph Archive, BANC PIC 2000.012, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Please send additions and corrections to my email address:
haiko@hebig.org
Changelog
Revision 2020-06-08
- Added: 2012 Douglas Harper book
- Added: 1995 Miles Orvell book
Revision 2020-06-02
- Added: 2002 catalog Walker Evans & Company
Revision 2019-12-21
- Added: Dec 20, 2019 message from Jack von Euw, Curator of The Bancroft Library Pictorial Collection, to this website
Regision 2019-12-20
- Added: 2019 edit history of CH's Wikipedia article
- Added: 2009 Coignet review
- Expanded: 2019 Seniuta article
- Expanded: 1978 MoMA show
- Expanded: 1971 SFMOMA show
Revision 2019-12-19
- Added: 2011 Griffin text
- Added: 2010 Newbery blog post
- Added: 1985 Wigglesworth review
- Added: 1980 Sischy essay
Revision 2019-12-18
- Added: 2018 Chicago show
- Added: 2015 Madrid show and catalog
- Added: 2015 Historic Places Registration Form
- Expanded: 1978 Sekula essay
- Expanded: 1970 SFMOMA show
Revision 2019-12-17-3
- Added: 2011 Stiles text
- Added: 2011 Geffen catalog
- Added: 2008 Scheurich forum posting
- Corrected and expanded: 2011 Geffen show
- Expanded: 1978 MoMA show
Revision 2019-12-17-2
- Added: Changelog
Revision 2019-12-17-1
- Added: 2012 P! group show and related press
- Added: 2018 Kleinzahler poem
- Expanded: 2011 Geffen show, reviews added
- Expanded: 1978 MoMA show, catalog added
Revision 2019-12-15
- Added: 2015 MoMA book
- Added: 2012 Radin honors thesis
- Added: 1986 Langford text
- Added: 1980 Architectural Review added
- Added: 1979 Goldberg text and books
- Added: 1979 Ratcliff review
- Added: 1978 Rubinfien review
- Expanded: 2017 Bengal Aperture article
- Expanded: 2010 Grant review, original source added
- Expanded: 1991 Guimond book, excerpt added