Unearthing the Treasures of Photographer, Thomas Bouchard

From today’s perspective and the proliferation of extraordinary dance photographers, it is remarkable to look back at the few who were instrumental in promoting modern dance as a new art form in the United States. Throughout the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties, Thomas Bouchard (1895-1984) followed in the footsteps of Arnold Genthe, the White Studio, Soichi Sunami and several others, to become one of the most prominent “stop-motion” chroniclers of the emerging dance concert scene.  Known for his photographs in dance publications such as Dance Observer and seminal texts such as John Martin’s American Dancing (1936) and Margaret Lloyd’s Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (1949), his photographs have become an invaluable record, along with those of Barbara Morgan, of the budding era of modern dance in America. 

While George Platt Lynes concentrated on Balanchine’s ballet images from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties, Bouchard was documenting leaders of modern dance in their prime. Among his subjects were Carmen Amaya, William Bales, Merce Cunningham, Jean Erdman, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, Hanya Holm, Louis Horst, Esther Junger, Eleanor King, Louise Kloepper, Pauline Koner, José Limón, Katherine Litz, Helen Tamiris, Charles Weidman, and others. His photographs of Graham’s Primitive Mysteries, Hanya Holm’s Trend and Quest, and early stills of Helen Tamiris, for example, are irreplaceable. 

Thomas Bouchard’s photographs and papers have resurfaced through the estate of his daughter Diane, after her death. These materials were sold to Harvard University and are now housed at the Houghton Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

I became involved with the Bouchard collection as consultant to appraiser, Brian Christopher Cummings of the Winston Art group and assisted in the identification and itemization process for Bouchard’s estate before the Harvard acquisition. Its executor, Carolyn Sprogell soon became an invaluable source of information, renewing my belief in the importance of Bouchard’s photography and film documentation.  Carolyn was intimately connected to the Bouchards. Her grandmother, Adele Scott Saul, once a trustee at Bennington College, maintained a life long friendship with Thomas after meeting him at La Colombe d’Or in Saint Paul-de-Vance, France where he was a resident photographer in 1932. Carolyn and Diane remained intimate friends throughout their lives, spending many vacations and summers together. As her closest friend, Sprogell became Diane’s executor.

When Bouchard moved his studio and archives to Brewster, Massachusetts on Cape Cod in 1970, Diane continued to care for her father until his death in 1984. Once alone, she became more and more reclusive, sorting and cataloging her father’s enormous collection and ardently protecting his legacy. If his prints gradually trickled into library collections through donations, gaining permission to reproduce them was another story. Diane religiously guarded the thousands of original negatives, contact sheets, proofs, films, and prints, and grew more and more distressed as unauthorized reproductions were published without permission, compensation, or properly identified. But without doubt, her increasing protectiveness placed Bouchard’s legacy into near obscurity.

My first association with Diane Bouchard began when I asked for permission to reproduce a rare Bouchard image of Martha Hill, Bennington Summer School of Dance’s founder and director and the subject of my biography, Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance, published in 2009. In our conversations, she shared information about her father’s accomplishments and the scope of the collection kept under lock and key.  From my previous research I knew that Martha Hill considered Thomas Bouchard a ‘friend of dance’ and that she gave him free reign at the Bennington Summer School of the Dance in the summer of 1937 and again at Mills College in 1939. 

Bouchard’s photographs were among the few of Martha Hill dancing, taken at Bennington on her way to teach a composition class in 1936 and were part of Hill’s personal collection, generously gifted to her by Bouchard in appreciation for his “hire” to photograph the next summer’s activities. During that impromptu session on the campus tennis court, she moved for Bouchard through lunges and spirals and then positioned on the bleacher steps.  Out-of-doors with wind bellowing her long jersey dance skirt, he snapped a series of stills with his hand-held Leica, and then switched to his movie camera, capturing those same actions from other angles. He then followed her into the campus’s “barn studio” to photograph her composition class. There he played with ways to capture her students as they explored patterns crossing the floor with Hill sitting on the floor to give the lens a clearer path. (Future first lady, Betty Ford was one of those students improvising.)  Hill also hired Bouchard to photograph her New York University dance classes, with Ruth and Norman Lloyd at the keyboard for another session during that same period. Martha again gave the photographer free reign to move around the studio, capturing enthusiastic jumps of the young dancers. This time, Martha Hill looks beautifully professorial, dressed in street clothes and heels, directing from the sidelines, as he worked with low-level lighting, and avoiding flash by “doing tricks to his film in the dark room.” These photographs revealed a wealth of information for me and I am positive that the availability of this vast collection at Harvard’s Houghton Library will make an enormous contribution to future scholars in the arts. 

Thomas Bouchard’s background was a fascinating one, revealed to me through documents in the multitude of boxes holding the collection, telephone interviews with Diane Bouchard and Carolyn Sprogell, as well as other sources such as obituary notices and the Autumn 1961 issue of Dance Perspectives #12 devoted entirely to Bouchard’s work.  Born in Jerusalem (Palestine) in 1895 as Thomas Toumayan, at the age of thirteen, he was smuggled onto a boat to Paris, dressed as a girl to avoid the military draft.  There he changing his name to Thomas Bouchard and worked as an usher in a movie theater, perhaps a precursor to his passion for the moving image. At sixteen, he went to Canada to find an aunt who unfortunately had died, then worked with a lumber company as a sapper. In 1916, he traveled to Texas to open a photo studio and worked as a free-lance sports photographer for the Houston Chronicle.  Having found success at chasing images, “being there” at games to catch the action was a necessary prerogative. It was the same with photographing moving dancers and visual artists, he later deducted. 

At 24, Bouchard moved to Los Angeles, opening a studio at Hollywood and Vine where he photographed a bevy of starlets.  One was Louise Froelich, with whom he had a daughter, Diane, two years later. Before she was born, Thomas left Louise and moved on to Santa Barbara. Serendipitously, he met and photographed the Denishawn Company on the beach, kindling his attraction to the capture of movement with his camera.  

Bouchard then moved back to Paris befriending artists Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger (whose produced and directed the futuristic influenced film, Ballet Mécanique in 1924, using the repeated rhythms of human activities and machines.) Joan Miró and composer, Edgard Varèse among them. Incidentally, during this time, Bouchard photographed Josephine Baker in her famous banana tutu. In 1930, his first one-man show of photography was held in Paris’s Zborowsky Galerie. He returned to the States in 1932 and soon established a studio at 80 West 40 Street in Manhattan. His friend, Varèse took him to a studio dance rehearsal of Integrales, Martha Graham’s group work to the composer’s score.  Afterward, he began photographing Graham and others, experimenting with ways to capture dance in movement.  By 1936, he was exhibiting his dance subjects at the Delphic Studios, and at the First National Dance Congress and Festival galleries. The next year, Bouchard exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts and the International Dance Festival at Rockefeller Plaza, before taking up residence at Bennington in 1937 and returning to the transplanted Bennington program at Mills College in 1939.

In a strange twist, Bouchard first met his daughter in 1936 at age 13, when she arrived at his doorstep.  Thomas soon became the young woman’s custodian. (After her mother’s early death, Diane had reportedly traveled around the country alone scouting for stables for her aunt’s racehorses.) They lived in the Chelsea during the Sixties, befriending numerous artist types that inhabited the hotel. In 1970, they moved to Brewster, Massachusetts on Cape Cod when Thomas’s eyesight was beginning to fail. Ten years later, he was bedridden, dying in 1984.

If my personal interest is more concerned with the person being photographed then the technical details of f-stops and shutter speeds, it is hard to ignore a discussion of the cameras Bouchard used.  Some recall that he always wished for better equipment beyond his faithful Leica, that he could never afford.  He built his own dark room spaces, jimmy-rigged in a closet at Bennington and at the Chelsea, and finally, in the cranberry bog shed he turned into his studio in Brewster.  His prints were often underexposed due to these temporary quarters, and pressured from dancers and newspaper reporters, in a hurry for press shots. His work begs comparison to that of Barbara Morgan, the other photographer ‘in residence’ during the famed Bennington summers who studied each movement phrase assiduously, then set up poses in a calculated fashion. She had access to state-of-the-art Leica and Graflex cameras with multiple lens, her husband Willard’s expertise, and advice from Ansel Adams among her colleagues. Bouchard, with less to work with, was more apt to “let the camera see it “ to capture images usually from a low angle and often in dance studios on location. 

As with the proliferation of photography studios opening on Broadway, having a working space in midtown Manhattan gave Bouchard close proximity to the center of dance activity at the time. He was an “action” photographer and filmmaker in tandem with the “action” painters of his generation, sometimes purposely shadowing, blurring, or double-imaging his photographs to create movement. Using the camera as intermediary was as engrossing to him as the early stage of ‘electronic’ composing was to Varèse. Transposing the image of the flute that delivered the composition “Density 21.5,” made sense to Bouchard. Similarly, Bouchard began filming the process of an artist’s strokes as a painting revealing a painting as it comes to fruition.

Beyond the immense collection of dance photographs that have become available to researchers, access to Bouchard’s invaluable dance and experimental art films is more problematic and their whereabouts are still a mystery because they were evidently sold separately. They include Doris Humphrey’s Shakers, José Limón performing a solo at Mills College in 1939, Hanya Holm’s 1940 The Golden Fleece, and Ozark Suite (with Alwin Nikolais dancing in the group), and Eleanor King’s Roads to Hell, a 22 minute solo, as well as her Moon Dances filmed in 1949.  Too, Bouchard’s experiments with artists Alexander Calder (himself fascinated with moving objects and sometimes around the Bennington crowd) and with artists Joan Miró, and Fernand Léger are also important to the world of the arts.  Drawing on the major collection of paintings in the Bouchard estate (pulled from storage after fifty years) Miró’s “Sans titre,” signed and dedicated “Pour Diane et Thomas Bouchard de tout Coeur,” sold at auction for $8,005,000 (hammer price with buyer’s premium) at Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art evening on May 7, 2014.  This sale brought forth a rediscovered 1947 Bouchard documentary film, Miró at Work in 16-mm. color of the artist painting that exact canvas while discussing his technique with the filmmaker. A videotape of the film was shown at Sotheby’s as provenance before the sale took place.  Other films that were separated out from the collection and not given to Harvard, according to their records are his Fernand Léger in America––His New Realism with music by Varèse that premiered at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1946 and then was shown in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1947.  Bouchard’s 1951 film, Joan Miró Makes a Color Print, as well as one on Varèse, contribute to his extraordinary legacy.   It appears that they were sold separately by the executor in settling the Bouchard estate.  As yet, I have not tracked them down. 

The Bouchard collection of photographs and papers is now housed in 62 boxes at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. His films are located in Harvard library’s film archives.  Although not fully processed, but what is available at this point will begin to illuminate Bouchard’s important contribution to dance history of the 1930’s to the 1950’s. At last, researchers can begin to comb through Thomas Bouchard’s amazing contribution documenting American dance and its allied arts.

1 See Gerald Ackerman’s article on Soichi Sunami for Ballet Review 12, Summer 1984.

2 For an overview, see: John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution. A Cultural History of 

Thirties Photography, University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago, 2006.

3 Carolyn Sprogell to the author, telephone interviews, March––September, 2014.

4 Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2009, 91-92, 112, 118.

5 Diane Bouchard to the author, telephone conversations, 1990––1992. 

6 (Forward by John Martin). Most of these materials are now available for research at the Harvard Library.

7  Harvard University’s Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. Hollis Classic on-line, MS

 Thr 1049.

This paper has not been previously published. Photographs available.