The Photographic Images in the Works of William Carlos Williams and Charles Sheeler

As representative artists in the “machine age” of America, both Williams and Sheeler markedly refer to the importance of photography. For them, photography as a new technology of seeing becomes an essential medium to reconcile the boundaries between art and technology. Significantly, they recognize that the “precise” description of photography best reflects “modern, technical, objective, hard-edged” characteristics of Precisionism. Precisionism can be defined as an art reflecting the machine age aesthetics because of its “precise” description and the mechanical, technological, and industrial subject matter. Above all, Williams and Sheeler sharply recognize that there is a “machine aesthetic” at the heart of Precisionism. Through his lifelong interest in visual arts and close friendship with Sheeler, Williams could develop his own Precisionist aesthetic. Obviously, Williams’ poems such as “Sketch for a Portrait of Henry Ford” and “Classic Scene” are the achievements derived from Sheeler’s works such as Stamping Press, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, and Classic Landscape. Particularly, Williams’ “Classic Scene” reveals his understanding of Precisionist aesthetic in Sheeler’s Classic Landscape, which increasingly goes toward the reconciliation between the concrete and abstract. By increasingly extending the aesthetic arising from the essential role of photography, Williams and Sheeler could ultimately reach their full-blown Precisionism.