Courtesy of Bloomberg Muse. For more information, please go to Bloomberg Muse.

In Winter Scene, Guy carefully delineated Brooklyn’s busy intersections and distinctive architecture, as well as the diversity of its inhabitants. While this reportorial approach suggests a local focus, the paintings participate in broader artistic trends that distinguished American scenery as a source of aesthetic beauty and national pride. Guy’s representation of the Brooklyn community comprises a range of professional, social, and ethnic groups and testifies to a Brooklyn that was marked by diversity then, as it is now.

Courtesy of Bloomberg Muse. For more information, please go to Bloomberg Muse.

Courtesy of Bloomberg Muse. For more information, please go to Bloomberg Muse.

Contention particularly surrounds the legal power of eminent domain, or the taking of private property for public use: at the core of the debate is the definition of “public use” and concern that the word “public” has become a euphemism to disguise what are essentially private investments.

As the proposed regulations on photographing in New York City illustrate, photography is often subject to such private/public complications. Indeed, issues of privacy and image rights have troubled photography throughout its history; with the shift to digital media and the increasing regulation of public space (both literal and virtual), these issues are becoming even more complex. A photograph, after all, is a transaction between the private and the public that is negotiated through the taking of an image—a kind of eminent domain of the visual realm. By its very nature, then, photography poses questions that resonate with current debates about the reorganized urban landscape and the consequent shifting of public and private space, whether through gentrification, globalization, or the suburbanization of the city.

Eminent Domain, based on a New York Public Library exhibition of the same title (on view May 2–August 29, 2008, at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street), presents selections from the work of five New York–based artists who have recently created large photographic projects that take on the theme of the modern city. While none of the artists’ works specifically addresses the law of eminent domain, all of the projects deal in different ways, and to varying degrees, with the changing nature of space in New York City today.

During the period that Ames was working in Evans, there was little precedent for portraits in wood. Rare examples were carved in a classical style by some talented shipcarvers, but Ames’s veristic life-size bust-, waist-, and full-length portraits have few antecedents in American folk sculpture. One of the most intriguing artworks is a startling waist-length carving of a little girl in a pleated red dress with phrenological markings on her head, but the images that come most readily to mind are sensitive carvings of actual children that seem to embody a state of childhood innocence.

The individuation and ethereal solemnity of the carvings derive from sculptural traditions with a long lineage, from Roman portrait busts to marble statuary associated with the rural cemetery movement that was burgeoning in the 1840s. Ames’s sense of himself as an artist may be implied in the Federal Census of 1850, in which his occupation is listed as “sculpturing.” Details of Ames’s own history remain shrouded in shadow, but the work of his hands illuminates the meaningful and personal nature of the lives he captured so beautifully in wood.

Asa Ames: Occupation Sculpturing is on view at the American Folk Art Museum.