"James Wallace Pondelicek enjoyed a decade of national notice as a pictorialist figure photographer showing female-dryads in Greek dress or nude dancers cavorting on the Lake Michigan dunes. He identified himself with the self-conscious artistry of the Greek dance movement pioneered by Isadora Duncan, and generated as many images of barefoot ecstatic women embracing nature in the open air as Arnold Genthe did. The national magazines began embracing his work shortly after World War I, and in 1921, he formed a partnership--Pondelicek-Conklin--designed to supply template photographs for magazine illustrators. But he could perform as much aesthetic magic with his soft focus lens as an illustrator could with his brush on a photograph.  Pondelicek's love of beautiful women eventually proved his downfall. His wife abandoned him after an affair with a model. The model, too, would have nothing to do with him. In despair, he committed suicide, a victim of the libertarian impulses of the jazz age." © David S. Shields