About This Image

Artist's credit stamped on verso. Negative number on verso. A wonderful shot of the performer in silhouette doing a handstand while balancing with a chair. It resembles an oriental ideogram.Philadelphia-born Edward Quigley (January 3, 1898-April 6,1977) was a modernist photographer, who became known in the 1930s for his pioneering experiments with light abstractions and documentation of the Philadelphia area.A self-taught photographer, Quigley became interested in the medium as a child, taking his first photographs with a Brownie camera around 1910. In 1918 he embarked on a professional career and in 1930 opened a commercial studio in Philadelphia.During the 1930s-40s he produced innovative advertising and editorial photographs for clients ranging from Wanamaker's department store, Frances Denney Cosmetics, and S.K.F. Industries to Harper's Bazaar and the Farm Journal.In the early 1930s Quigley undertook a number of photographic experiments. He created pure, projected light abstractions (which he called "light forms") as well as abstract images produced using raking light and cutout cardboard constructions. He also experimented with photograms (cameraless photographs). During this period Quigley showed his work in many exhibitions and photographic salons. In 1932 his light abstractions were featured in a one-person show at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and two years later he took part in the First Salon of Pure Photography at the Adams-Danysh Galleries in San Francisco (juried by, among others, Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston).That same year Quigley had another one-person show, Designs with Light, at the Delphic Studios in New York and participated in an exhibition of modernist photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art that also included works by Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Ralph Steiner, and Weston.In 1938 Quigley organized two exhibitions for the Photographic Society of Philadelphia (of which he had been a member since 1929), one featuring the photographs of Weston and the other the work of László Moholy-Nagy.Although Quigley did not participate in many exhibitions after the 1930s, he continued his commercial work during the 1940s and early 1950s and also began writing technical articles for such journals as American Photography, The Camera, and Good Photography.He died April 6, 1977.

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