Communicating Arts - Main Web Site"Nearly forty years ago, Lange's work revealed the synergy between what had seemed, in my own life, to be conflicting interests--the study of art and the making of art, the observing and portraying of the world and acting to change it. In Lange I found an ethnographer's eye, a writer's ear, an artist's vision. In Lange, the word and the image, the documentary and the work of art, are one. She inspired me to integrate my own passions rather than to elect one and exclude others, and I moved from art history to landscape architecture, a profession that gave scope to history, ecology, and anthropology, to design, planning, and photography, and to practice as well as scholarship."
Quoted: Anne Whiston Spirn, Professor, Landscape Architecture and Planning, MIT.
"My most famed photograph . . . I made . . . on the first day (in 1933). (I) went out in an area where people said, "Oh, don't go there." . . . I made the old man with the tin cup first, but that was life . . . . I saw something, and I encompassed it, and I had it . . . . I put it on the wall of my studio, and customers . . . I was making portraits of would come in and just glance at it. The only comment I ever got was, "What are you going to do with this kind of thing? what do you want to do this for?" . . . That was the question I couldn't answer. I didn't know. . . . But I knew my picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing." Dorothea Lange, as quoted by Anne Whiston Spirn in her book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Above: the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, located in City Park, Hagerstown, Maryland.
Landscape architect George E. Burnap, the designer of at least two Washington, D.C. parks (West Potomac and Meridian Hill) under the Taft and Wilson administrations, embarked on the beautification and design of Cty Park, a drained swamp, in 1921. He had traveled the world with a camera in search of what he felt were the best examples of the design of public space, and not a few photographs made it into his 1916 book, Parks: Their Design, Equipment, and Use, which now has a life online in, among other modes, PDF and Flash "flip-book" form--http://www.archive.org/stream/parkstheirdesign00burn.
From 1907 to 1908, Burnap worked for Olmsted Associates, the name familiar to those who know the history of Central Park and many others across the United States.
The academic year 1910 found Burnap instructing in the Rural Art Department of Cornell University (as George Alberton Burnap, according to a Cornell database--in that I haven't yet seen an online snit about George Burnap, Landscape Architect, middle initial "A" or "E", I am calling the two the same. A simple inflection in speech and clerical hearing could account for the difference).
By the summer of 1910, through an appointment by the Secretary of War, Burnap had found work in Washington, D.C. with the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds. His tenure there was suspended in 1915, but his replacement would not come on board until 1917. He was not a happy camper as regards the dismissal, and the matter wound up in court, not to be heard or resolved until 1920, possibly freeing him to engage in work with the City of Hagerstown in 1921.
In the between time of the decade, 1910-1920, Burnap had published his book, in which introduction, Richard B. Watrous, Secretary of the American Civic Association, had to say of him, "With a view toward discovering the best things that can and should be done for all parks, to increase their effectiveness both as service parks and as decorative areas, Mr. Burnap has widely travelled in this country and abroad. With an open mind, he has caught with his camera, now here and now there, examples of the best things in many lands."
For the gratuitous tie-in with my interests in the Islamic Small Wars:
"We have had many walks in the Common which they call Pennsylvania Avenue. Mizra, whose appetite is failing, crosses the Common twice before breakfast, and finds the exercise an unusual stimulus. Mustapha has tried to follow his example, but finds the exercise too great; once across and back again exhausts him. It is, indeed, a monstrously wide Commons; why call it an Avenue?"
The reference cited in the text of Burnap's book: "Washington From a Mohammedan Point of View." By a Very Obscure Member of the Turkish Admiral's Suite. Source: Harper's Weekly, April 10, 1858.
While Olmsted Associates, the firm devoted to landscape architecture (a very good advertising and public relations firm in Flint, Michegan now carries the name) established its brand across the country, Burnap seems to have been a lone ranger, a solitary traveling with a camera in search of the beautiful and strong in the concrete part of designed public mise en scene, an artist--architect, designer, gardener, photographer, writer--who got his chance to influence or set a few stages in nature and open space for others: in Washington, D.C., West Potomac Park and Meridian Hill Park; here in Hagerstown, Maryland, City Park--where else, I don't know.
There's a career story, for sure, lurking just back of Burnap's participation in projects under his aegis. In the Meridian Hill Park story, for example, the National Park Service has been careful to give him his due:
"Before coming to Washington, Burnap was a professor at Cornell University, where he became acquainted with and ultimately had a great influence on his student, Horace Peaslee. When Burnap left Cornell to join the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds and head the design for Meridian Hill Park, Peaslee accompanied him and received an appointment as Landscape Designer in that office.
"Burnap’s conceptual design for the park was approved by the Commission of Fine Arts in 1914, at which time it was presented to Congress1. Even though components of the Burnap plan were subsequently changed, it was important because it established the framework for the park design."
In many ways, I appreciate Burnap's obscurity as much as I do his quest.
Perhaps his story helps those of use working out of our own remote corners garner a little more time for dreaming.
According to the National Park Service, "In 1914, Peaslee accompanied Burnap and members of the Commission of Fine Arts on a trip to Spain, France, Switzerland, and most importantly, Italy, to study the European gardens that became the inspiration for Meridian Hill Park. While in Europe, Peaslee sketched and photographed walls, ornaments, and water features that influenced his 1917 and 1920 plans."
It would seem Burnap had worked his camera throughout that tour as well--there's his 1916 book for proof, but as instructor and student were destined to perhap compete, Burnap disappears from the Federal scene. As in life, so on the web: contrary to what I've found elsewhere, the Park Service claims Burnap resigned from his Washington position in 1917 in advance of the First World War--Peaslee takes over the Meridian Park project.
Now there's a mystery--what happened between George Burnap and Horace Peaslee on the Meridian Hill Park project, and what became of George Burnap in the years after his work on City Park?--all the more reason to take an interest in George Burnap.
When questions come up about educations in the arts or photography, about aesthetic experience and careers, and so on, my own small accumulation of books, native curiosity, affinity for all who work in and around the arts, and enjoyment of online resources produces an increasingly rich experience: a photographer shoots landscapes; the landscape architect studies photographs to produce new landscapes; another photographer shoots that, and so on, producing a progressive and robust generational transmission of capabilties, concepts, and values to inspire the next round of informed art making and scholarship.
I love this sort of thing and wished only to share it with you.
References
Burnap, George. Parks: Their Design, Equipment, and Use. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott Company, 1916.
City of Hagerstown. Hagerstown City Home Page, "City Park / History".
Cornell University. Cornell University Information Database.
Ledvina, Paul D. (Susie H. Moody, Karen Stuart, Joseph Sullivan; Michael Spangler, Patrick Kerwin). "Olmsted Associates: A Register of Its Records in the Library of Congress." Washington, D.C.: Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, 2000.
National First Ladies Library. "First Lady Biography: Helen Taft".
National Park Service. "George Burnap". Meridian Hill Park web site.
National Park Service. "Horace Peaslee". Meridian Hill Park web site.
Olmsted Associates. Omsted Associates. Contemporary namesake web site.
Spirn, Anne Whiston. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
U.S. Supreme Court."BURNAP v. UNITED STATES". No. 228. Argued March 12, 1920. Decided April 19, 1920. Caselaw database.
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