Although once considered to be a leading modernist artist / photographer, much about Florence Henri's life remains unknown. It is generally agreed that she was born in New York in 1893 to a French father, and a German mother, who died when she was two. Her father, a director of an international petroleum company, took her to live in Europe but his job required frequent travelling and Henri often accompanied him, exposing her to contemporary European culture from a very young age.

Her father died when she was 15 years old and Henri went to live in Rome with her uncle, a poet and a participant in the Italian Futurist movement. As a child she had become an accomplished pianist but, under the influence of this new social circle, which wished to glorify life and the new era of machinery and speed, and featured such notable figures as F T Marinetti, Luigi Russolo and Luciano Folgore, she eventually turned instead to painting. She later attended the Académie Moderne in Paris, and also studied for a time in Berlin.

In 1927, aged 34, she enrolled in a summer class at the famous and influential Bauhaus art school in Dessau, an institution which sought to integrate art, engineering and economics. She studied under the instruction of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, who, along with his wife Lucia, became a close friend. During this time she experienced difficulty in painting and instead, with the encouragement of her tutors, began to experiment with collages and photography. Upon her return to Paris, she decided to focus entirely on photography, a medium in which she found new ways of expression. Her work readily found success, she became well known in Parisian cultural circles and she befriended many leading figures such as Piet Mondrian and Enrico Prampolini, with whom she shared a studio. Her work was also regularly featured in influential magazines and displayed at international exhibitions.

Despite these achievements, world depression was affecting her finances and to supplement her income Henri started a commercial photographic studio, began taking pupils and also stepped into the world of advertising photography. Her work continued to receive great acclaim and publicity throughout the 1930's. In 1940 however, she was forced to stop her photographic pursuits as not only were materials scarce but the occupying Nazi forces had forbidden most forms of photography. After the cessation of war she rarely returned to the activity, and instead chose to renew her interest in painting and European travel. There was a short-lived revival of critical interest in her photographs throughout the 1970's to which she responded by reprinting and enlarging her most well known works, but this interest petered out and she was left as we find her today, almost twenty five years after her death - largely unheard of and brushed aside to make way for the more familiar and popular artists of the period, despite the quantity, quality and variety of her outstanding work.

Henri's creations spanned many genres, but the two that attract me the most are her street scenes and her early Cubist photographs, which took advantage of the use of mirrors. These two themes appear to be quite distinct from each other - one leaves much to chance where as the other required great forethought and planning, every possible aspect was controlled before the camera shutter was released. I plan to analyse examples of her work from each genre to discover the extent to which this initial observation is accurate. The mirror photographs I will discuss were all created between 1928 and 1931 and are those titled Still Life Composition (also known as Mirror, Balls and Grate), Still Life Composition (Leaves, Rose, Mirror and Envelope) and Jeanne Lanvin Perfume. The street scenes I have chosen to discuss are Abstract Composition (also known as Handrail), Window Composition and Bridge Along the Seine. These were created between 1930 and anywhere up to 1935; exact dates are not known.

The foreground of the image features the top end of a metallic handrail, which is curved round to create a spiral. Behind this can be seen an identical handrail, and some steps lay between the two. In the background is a steep, sloping concrete wall, with what appears to be some water at its base. It can be assumed then that the steps and their handrails lead down to the edge of some water, though there are no clues to inform us of which kind of body of water it is. Interestingly, although the front handrail takes up a large proportion of the image, it is not entirely in focus but is slightly blurred. The top two steps and the gravel and stones that sit upon them are the sharpest items in view.

The composition itself is a peaceful one. The handrails appear to flow downwards, to the left of the shot, but at a gentle angle. There is no clutter in the background of the image, leaving the eye to focus almost solely on the handrail. The light is also gentle, which provides soft shadows. There are no indications of artistic manipulation; it is unlikely that Henri commissioned a metalworker to create this handrail solely for the photograph, so the only feasible artistic control over the shot is ensuring that the background remained clutter-free and that enough light was present in image.

From behind the safety of what appears to be a set of slatted blinds, the exterior of a domestic window can be seen, belonging to the house across the street from where this photograph was taken. In the bottom of half of the shot, an exterior blind belonging to another window is in view, so we know that the point of focus in the image is an upper floor window. The rest of the house is hidden from the viewer though, obscured by the blinds. No detail can be seen through the window glass, but due to its position it is most likely to be a bedroom window. This brings connotations of sex and passion, and as we see the window from an obscured position, there is the suggestion of infidelity, voyeurism, spying and furtiveness. Interestingly, the edges of the space in the blinds through which we can see the window create a reverse silhouette of a woman's body seen in profile. The left hand outline features a small outward curve, a long inwards curve, and a second outwards one, which imitates the curves of breasts, stomach and hips. The corresponding right hand outline only has one long, inwards curve, like that of a back. When we look at the photograph keeping these arcs in mind, there seems to be little room for dispute that Henri created them to reinforce the mood she was attempting to create. This does seem to be the sole example of artistic manipulation though.

From behind a balustrade can be seen an iron bridge and the river it crosses. The bridge stretches from the left of the foreground to a distant shore in the middle of the image, obscured by one of the boulders. The river, which, if the title of the photograph is to be trusted, is the Seine, flows horizontally from the left of the shot to the right. Gentle sunlight, which seems to be coming from almost directly above, is catching some of the ripples on the water's surface, and an unseen building is reflected near the right edge of the image, as is the bridge, on the left. In the bottom right hand corner is a man, silhouetted, stood on the stone-paved path that runs adjacent to the river. He is facing the bridge, and appears to be watching the water emerge beneath it. None of his features can be distinguished, but it can be clearly seen that he is wearing a bowler hat and an overcoat. Thus we can presume he is a businessman of some sort and that the weather is mostly likely winter. There seems to be a feeling of loss, introspection and unspoken emotion; the man stops to watch the flowing water and faces away from the camera, but he is alone, and probably cold. We do not know of his importance, or his reason for stopping here, but he is critical to the photograph as he balances out the composition. His placing at the bottom right hand corner of the image almost mirrors the bridge's location at the top left. We can follow his sightline to the bridge, and thus our gaze is drawn to it. Without him, our eyes wander across the image, lost, looking for something to rest upon. We cannot be sure of whether he was placed there deliberately or was merely passing at the relevant moment, but if he was there by Henri's instruction, it is the only part of the image which was controlled by her - it is certain she did not order the bridge to built and placed where it is.

A ball sits on a horizontal mirror, reflected in a second mirror that is at ninety degrees to the first. Against the ball lies a grate, which is slanted towards the mirrors' joining point. In addition, a second grate stands vertically to the side of the described arrangement, only half of which can be seen in the vertical mirror as it extends beyond the mirror's boundaries. Reflected In the background can be seen an uneven but indiscernible landscape. It consists of a thin strip of a dark coloured expanse, with a lighter, thicker band above it, possibly some ground or grass, topped with sky. There is a very flat, stable feeling to the photograph, as most of the items pictured are horizontal or have horizontal lines. The exceptions are the ball and the slanted grate, which causes confusion. I am unable to interpret what Henri wished to express with this photograph, it appears impenetrable and complex beyond its apparently simple form. However, perhaps this is actually the intended reaction, and Henri did not want to convey a thought or scene, but instead to stimulate an emotion.

A dark, almost spherical, bottle of perfume lays on its side with its emblem clearly on view. Its cap, also like a gently squashed sphere, touches its reflection in a mirror that is propped vertically against a wall. A second mirror has been placed behind the bottle at such an angle so that in the first, a curved chain of bottles is created, which resembles a large string of expensive beads. These beads would extend forever but Henri has chosen to terminate them after the fifth reflection. Perhaps this was an attempt to echo the original bottle, of which we cannot see the bottom, as the slanting mirror obscures it. This image is completely fabricated - there are no "natural" elements in it.

A rose is seated on an unfolded, blank piece of paper. Next to it, a birch twig with four leaves sits on the underside of an open, blank envelope. It is not clear if these items have been received or are about to be sent to another person. Beside the greenery is a mirror in which we can see into the folds of the rose, and part of one birch leaf. Bunches of gypsophilia flowers, also known as "baby's breath" and said to signify innocence, frame the composition at the top left and bottom right corners of the picture. All the items are seated on a wooden table with the grain running in the opposite direction to the way the items are placed on it. It could be inferred that as the page that the rose, the most notorious of love symbols, is on is blank, the rose is expressing what words can, or should, not. However, it is also feasible that the blank page symbolises pure intentions, a theory which is echoed by the innocence represented by the gypsophilia and birch leaves; birch is a tree that is often associated with purity. When we look on the photograph as a whole, keeping this information in mind, it seems quite clear Henri was attempting to express a childlike and innocent love. Another theory is that the rose symbolises a lustful passion, which, when seen in the context of sitting amidst the innocence of gypsophilia and birch, is unrequited.

Through a simple analysis of these images, it becomes apparent that my initial observation of their diversity stands true. Whilst it is feasible that Henri commissioned the handrail, bridge and window that are seen in her photographs, it is not very realistic, especially considering her limited income. She had complete artistic control over her Cubist photographs however, which, when combined with her imagination and her fine art training, which had taught her the fundamental principles of scene composition, she managed to break down established boundaries and to create genuinely original pieces.

Her interest in the Cubist movement and its application to photography was crucial to her work. One of the underpinning beliefs of Cubism is that to capture the true essence of an object, it needs to be viewed simultaneously from all possible angles. It is clear why mirrors played such a large role in Henri's photographs - they permitted her to defy natural laws and let us see what we should not be able to. They also created a space to encourage the viewer to re-evaluate their preconceptions about and to question the role of the reflected objects. These objects are often very ordinary, everyday items, such as writing paper (Leaves, Rose, Mirror and Envelope) or metallic balls (Mirror, Balls and Grate). They could also be identified by their physical simplicity - they tend to be very unsophisticated in form, a defining feature of Cubist works of art. Henri was clearly implementing Cézanne's advice of treating nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone."

"Florence Henri, Artist-photographer of the Avant-garde", Du Pont, Diana C; San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1990.
"Twentieth Century Photography", Museum Ludwig Cologne; Taschen, 1996.
"Women Photographers", Sullivan, Constance (ed); Virago, 1990.
"A New History of Photography", Frizot, Michel (ed); Konëman, 1998.

Regarding Florence Henri:
http://www.museumofnewmexico.org/mfa/ideaphotographic/artists_henri.html
http://dsc.gc.cuny.edu/part/part8/articles/davis.html

Regarding the Bauhaus:
http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhausarchiv/
http://people.ucsc.edu/~gflores/bauhaus/b1.html

Regarding Cubism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism/

Regarding the symbolism behind flowers and trees:
http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/tfl.mythbirch.html
http://www.newcastleflower.co.uk/flowers.htm
http://www.mtycounty.com/pgs-magik/flower_sym.html

Regarding Jeanne Lanvin and her perfume:
http://www.toutenparfum.com/historique/lanvin/lanvin.en.php

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