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James Craig Annan (1864-1946)


James Craig Annan, 1864-1946
The Dark Mountains | Camera Work | 15 x 20.2 cm | 1904





James Craig Annan, 1864-1946
Prof. John Young of Glasgow University | Camera Work | 19.9 x 15.5 cm | 1904






James Craig Annan, 1864-1946
 Gitana - Granada | Camera Work | 19.5 x 13.7 cm | 1914
 

 



JAMES CRAIG ANNAN was a master photogravure printer and a leading pictorialist photographer around the turn of the twentieth century. He produced most of his own work as well as that of others in the photogravure process, which he learned from its inventor, Karl Klíc.


Annan was the son of photographer Thomas Annan, known for his early documentation of the slums of Glasgow. He joined his father's business at a young age and began assisting in studio portraiture and photographic reproductions of artwork. In 1883, he and his father traveled to Vienna to study with Klíc, T. & R. Annan and Sons of Glasgow soon became Britain's foremost gravure printing establishments.


Annan became popular as a professional portrait photographer but also produced personal work, primarily portraits and genre scenes. In 1894 he was elected to The Linked Ring, England's most prestigious group of creative photographers. A few years later he published a limited-edition portfolio of his work, Venice and Lombardy: A Series of Original Photogravues. He exhibited widely, at such venues as the London salon, the 1901 Glasgow international Exhibition, Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Galleries, the Paris salon and the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo. In 1900, Annan was given a one-person retrospective at the Royal Photographic Society, which subsequently awarded him an honorary fellowship, its highest membership level. (read more)







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