John Forrest Harding (born 1940) is a San Francisco–based photographer best known for the color street photography that he has pursued for four decades. Harding is the author of several photography books, and has taught courses on photography at
City College of San Francisco and
College of Marin.
Separately from the work he was assigned to do,[3] Harding long photographed for his own interest. From 1975 to 1976, he made black and white portraits of adult brothers and sisters in the US.[2]: 235 Thanks in part to an
NEA grant,[7] the series was published in 1982 in the photobooks Geschwister and Siblings; in 2016, he published a supplement, also titled Siblings.
Harding started to work in color in 1977.[2]: 235 Writing in 2011, Stacen Berg described him as having photographed on the street "[n]early every day for over 30 years" (and still using color
35 mm film in a
Leica camera).[8]
In 1989, Susan Kismaric could write that
street photography, "so prominent in the history of [photography], is practically nonexistent in California": as its exponents there, she could only name Harding, Wessel and
Bill Dane in San Francisco, and
Anthony Hernandez on
Rodeo Drive.[9]
Harding's street photography of the 1980s was sampled in the 1987 book American Independents. Its editor, Sally Eauclaire, wrote that Harding's photographs had the objective of "[deriving] poetic fancy from prosaic fact", that "Their kaleidoscopically shifting shapes and colors reveal much about the jostle of humanity as well as trends in fashion and social and sexual mores." Eauclaire praised Harding's achievement of "[pushing] realism into the realm of surrealism", attained via devices of isolation within crowds, of reflections, "helterskelter highlighting, and hedonistic jostlings of color". Yet Harding managed to declare "solidity, permanence, and the possibility of definition".[2]: 79–80
A larger collection did not appear in print until the 2011 publication (in Japan) of Harding's photobook Analog Days, which had photographs taken from 1979 to 2009, and about which Stan Banos writes:
One sees much street photography that relies on a single formula, Harding's work mixes it up, with content, composition and yes, color, all vying and battling it out for domination, or the creation of some tenuous, dynamic coexistence. It draws you in, excites you and keeps you interested.[10]
In a foreword to Analog Days,
Sandra S. Phillips writes that its photographs "are so direct, and so marvelously natural, that for a moment we forget that they were framed and 'taken' by someone." She concludes that "Street photography has the potential to reveal our social selves to us, and as Harding's viewfinder shows, it can also provide a particular gracefulness and wonder."
Harding's next full-scale book was Streets of Discontent, published in a small edition in 2018. Again collecting color views of the streets of San Francisco, but this time consisting of very recent work, its subtlety is praised by Corey Keller, who also points out that:
[This work] coincides with a moment in which [San Francisco] seems to teeter on the brink as the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens daily into a chasm. The splendor of the city's soaring new buildings is matched only by the wretchedness of those who live on its streets. Harding's pictures neither elevate nor condemn. They just ask us to notice.[11]
10 x 10 x 10: An Invitational Exhibition.San Francisco City Hall, July–September 2009. Ten photographers – Harding, and Chris McCaw, Jesse Schlesinger, Daniel Grant, Alexander Martinez, Mark McKnight, Ken Botto, Mary Parisi, Lucy Goodhart, Eric Percher – each exhibited ten works.[20][21] "Stacen Berg chose John Harding for his careful compositions of people who are 'entirely distanced from their public environment'."[22][23]
The Anniversary Show. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009–2011.[24]
Hamburger Eyes presents: Casual Abyss. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, San Francisco, May–July 2010.[25]
San Francisco Days: Documentary Photographs Spanning 30 Years. Rayko Photo Center, January–February 2013. With
Janet Delaney,
Lou Dematteis, Gabriela Hasbun, André Hermann,
Michael Jang,
Mimi Plumb, and Andrei Riskin.[26]
3@6×6 face/people/action. Photo, Oakland, CA, March 2015. With Michael Jang and Hiroyo Kaneko.[27]
Publications
Books and booklets by Harding
From left to right: Trees Places and People, Siblings (1982), Analog Days, Streets of Discontent, Siblings (2016)
Siblings. Frankfurt am Main: Dieter Fricke, 1982.
ISBN3-88184-052-4. Captions (one sentence or a little more per photograph, uttered by a sibling at the time) in both German and English; other text in English only.
Trees Places and People. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2015. Photographs taken in San Francisco, 2013–2015. Edition of 50.[n 5]
The Attraction of Strangers. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], Hannah Louise Schuster, Mūnbeibī Design Studio [2016].
OCLC957364259. With text by Katya Kallsen. Edition of 10. On the first page: "On New Year's Day 1992, I divided a map of San Francisco into thirty three squares and put the pieces into a small green bag. I resolved once a week to draw a square from the bag and drive to that part of the city to look for a stranger who I might want to photograph. I asked Katya to join me to write about these encounters. These words and photographs tell and show where we went and who we found"
San Francisco Four × Five. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], Hannah Louise Schuster, Mūnbeibī Design Studio [2016].
OCLC957361870. Edition of 10. On the first page: "The 4x5 photographs of San Francisco in this book were taken between 2002 and 2004."
Siblings. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2016.
OCLC957298471.[n 6] On the very first (but unnumbered) page: "These thirty-three photographs were taken in the late 1970s on an NEA Grant for a Siblings project, which resulted in a book published in Germany in 1982. In retrospect these photographs seem just as interesting as those in the first book, and this was done to catalogue the remainder of the work."
Seeing Things. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2016.
OCLC1002262328. On the first page: "The photographs in this book were made between 1977 and 1982. Most of them were taken in 1981 along the coast of California."
Streets of Discontent. [San Francisco]: [John Harding], 2018.
ISBN978-0-692-09513-3. Edited by Henry Wessel; introduction by Corey Keller; afterword by Jack von Euw. Edition of 50. On the title page: "The photographs in this book were made primarily in San Francisco and some in Los Angeles in 2017 and 2018."[n 7][n 8]
Chuck Mobley, ed. An Autobiography of the San Francisco Bay Area, Part 1: San Francisco Plays Itself. San Francisco: SF Camerawork, 2010.
ISBN9780984303809.[n 9]
^Description of Trees Places and People from the Sokyu-sha bookstore. (Although this says that the edition is of 30, copies have numbers out of 50 handwritten on the back.)
^
abc"Pop Photo Snapshots", Popular Photography, July 1983, p. 156.
Here at Google Books.
^"
John Harding", Photography Department, City College of San Francisco, as archived by the
Wayback Machine on June 16, 2012. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
^John Harding, Siblings (1982), last (unnumbered) page.
^Stacen Berg, "Introduction: The man who is not there"; within John Harding, Analog Days.
^Susan Kismaric, California Photography: Remaking Make-Believe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989;
ISBN0-87070-183-5), p. 15. Available
here on the MoMA website. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
^Corey Keller, introduction to Streets of Discontent.
^"National recipients: National Endowment for the Arts: Visual Artists' Fellowships 1967–1995", pp. 208–239 within A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program, 1966–1995 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001;
ISBN0-8109-4170-8). Available
here at the
Internet Archive. (The entry for Harding is on
p. 220.) Retrieved February 12, 2019.
^"
John Harding", John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
^Ari Messer, "On location", San Francisco Bay Guardian, August 5, 2009. Available
here within the Guardian Archive 1966–2014. Retrieved February 5, 2019.
^
abcdefgAndrew H. Eskind, ed, Index to American Photographic Collections, 3rd ed (New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall, 1995;
ISBN0-7838-2149-2).
^"Photography: Gifts of museum donors", On the Go: A Look at SFMOMA: July 1, 2012 – June 30, 2014 (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2015), p. 125. Available
here (Amazon Web Services) as a PDF file. Retrieved February 6, 2019.
^John Harding at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
^Search results for "John Harding", Princeton University Art Museum. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
^Search results for the artist "John Harding", MFAH. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
^John Harding in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
^Search results for chromogenic prints or photographs by John Harding, Metropolitan Museum. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
^"
John Harding", Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved February 8, 2019.
^Search results for "Harding, John" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved February 3, 2019.
ジョンハーディング氏、印刷立合いに来られました! (SunM Color, October 22, 2011): The company that printed Analog Days reports on Harding and Michitaka Ōta's visit to supervise printing.