Church v. Soth: A Niagara Falls smackdown

See Monday for why I'm talking about Niagara Falls this week.

I was also interested in this Soth photograph, Falls 26. It's the most painterly of all Soth's photographs of Niagara Falls. (You can see a larger version here.) The water in the foreground look more like ribbons of oil paint than like flowing water.  

Many of Soth's shots of the Falls seem indebted to painters, Hudson River school types or others. Falls 17 is a photographer's version of a Whistler Nocturne painting. Falls 11 recalls Luminism. 

Of Soth's photographs of he Falls, only Falls 08 explicitly rejects art historical references: it shows Niagara Falls' hotel-dominated skyline through mist kicked up by the falling water. That's strangely appropriate too. When I think of casinos I think of the western frontier, Las Vegas. In the mid-19thC western New York was part of the western frontier... and now the Canadian side of Niagara Falls is a casino town.

Falls 26 doesn't just refer to painters in the way Soth captures water. To take this photograph he had to be standing on the Canadian side of the Falls, just a few feet from where Frederic Edwin Church painted his thundering Niagara, now in the Corcoran's collection.

Soth's picture is hardly a direct crib from Church. The painting was made in the late afternoon or in the early evening. The photograph was taken earlier in the day. In the foreground of the painting Church emphasizes the Falls' drop, while Soth prefers to emphasize the milky blueness of the water. Church builds in some Luminist tricks, like the treacly rainbow that cuts through the dark clouds and into the white light that bounces off of the crashing Falls.

(One other differences: Soth does not charge twenty-five cents a head to see his photograph as Church did his painting.)

Related: Check out Bierstadt's 1869 Niagara and compare it to the Soth that the Des Moines Art Center bought.