About Sadakichi Hartmann
Sadakichi Hartmann (November 8, 1867 – November 22, 1944) was an American art and photography critic and poet of German and Japanese descent. He was born on an island in Nagasaki Harbor in Japan, of a Japanese mother and German father. His father sent him to the U. S. in 1882, and he was naturalized in 1894. An early and important participant in modernism, Hartmann was a friend of figures as diverse as Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. His Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895) apparently grows out of meetings they had late in Whitman’s life. Hartmann wrote a number of verse and prose plays, as well as numerous poems that helped shape the imagist movement.His poetry, deeply influenced by the Symbolists as well as Orientalist literature, includes Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems (1904), My Rubaiyat (1913), and Japanese Rhythms (1915). His critical works include Shakespeare in Art (1901) and Japanese Art (1904). During the 1910s, Hartmann allowed himself to be crowned King of the Bohemians by Guido Bruno in New York's Greenwich Village. Hartmann wrote some of the first haiku in English. He was one of the first critics to write about photography, with regular essays in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Notes. Hartmann published reviews and organized lecture tours under the pseudonym “Sidney Allen.”
He made a brief appearance in Douglas Fairbanks' film The Thief of Baghdad as a court magician.
Browse all poems and texts published on Sadakichi Hartmann
There is no art which affords less opportunity to execute expression than photography. Everything is concentrated in a few seconds, when after perhaps an hours seeking, waiting, and hesitation, the photographer sees the realization of his inward vision, and in that moment he has one advantage over most arts - his medium is swift enough to record his momentary inspiration. Right at the start I must confess that I have never met such a spontaneity of judgment in a man, who was a competent character reader, artist, and photographer in one person.
