Ralph Steiner collection

This collection consists mainly of motion picture material in the form of 16mm camera originals, prints, A and B rolls, negatives, magnetic tracks, optical tracks, and 1/4 in. magnetic tracks (audiotapes). Steiner's early films — H2O (1929), The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), The City (1939), and others — are not represented in this collection. The films that make up this collection all date after 1960 and represent his experimental films that examined the motions and rhythms of the natural world. These films are all part of The Joy of Seeing series.

Also included in this collection are outtakes of original and print film which, for Steiner, represented footage not suitable for inclusion in the collection. It was Steiner's hope that these materials would be accessible to qualified film students at the university for use as creative editing projects. There are 90 reels of outtakes varying in length from 100 to 900 ft.

There is a letter from Ansel Adams to Steiner, in which Adams comments on Fred Picker, the zone system, and photographic previsualization. There are tearsheets (in very fragile condition) from PM magazine which document Steiner's tenure as picture editor in the early 1940s.

The collection also contains black-and-white negatives and color transparencies made over the course of Steiner's career. The negatives exist in a variety of formats, including 8x10, 6½x8½, 5x7, 4x5-inch and smaller sheet film, and 6x6cm and 4.5x6cm and 35mm roll film. For the most part these are identified with captions or titles, but few are dated. Many negative sleeves have Steiner's printing instructions inscribed on them.

Of particular interest are negatives made by Steiner as a student at Dartmouth College, circa 1919-1921; negatives from class projects at the Clarence White School of Photography, 1921-1922; work from the summer of 1929 which Steiner spent at Yaddo, the artists' and writers' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York; fragments of Steiner's film Café Universal (1934), made with members of the Group Theater; stills from the making of The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936); and stills by Marion Post Wolcott of Steiner at work on The People of the Cumberland (1937). The bulk of the roll film negatives are from Steiner's later photographic projects and include negatives of clouds, trees, grasses, etc. The cloud photographs were published in the book In Pursuit of Clouds (1985).

The majority of the negatives are original, but there are also many copy negatives and some enlarged cloud negatives. The roll film negatives are generally numbered and lettered, apparently to correspond to various series of images and to give each negative a unique identifying number. Steiner does not seem, however, to have been consistent in his use of these numbering schemes. Negatives that Steiner selected for printing often have their corners cut or their edges notched.

There are a small number of proof prints included in the collection [see Appendix B for a list]. These are primarily on unfixed printing out paper and so are ephemeral. A few of the proofs are on conventional developing out papers.