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Helen Gory Galerie website

May

Review: ‘Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild’ at Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: aborigine, Australian artist, digital photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, painting, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, review, sculpture, space and time
Tags: Aboriginal name, Australian scenery, Bakhtin, Bakhtin carnivalesque, carnival, Carnivale, carnivalesque, cartes de visite, Coco Fusco, collage, Cradle Mountain, Dogboy of Gondwanan, exotic postcards, fantasy, God Rama, Goya Negro Returno, Helen Gory Galerie, identity, identity inversion, Jaara Long Gully region, Jacqui Stockdale, Jacqui Stockdale Dogboy of Gondwanan, Jacqui Stockdale Jaguar Hombre, Jacqui Stockdale Lagunta Man Leeawuleena, Jacqui Stockdale Les Jumeaux, Jacqui Stockdale Luchadora Botanica, Jacqui Stockdale Negro Returno, Jacqui Stockdale Negro Returno Long Gully, Jacqui Stockdale Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess, Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild, Jaguar Hombre, Joss paper, Lagunta, Lagunta Man, Lagunta Man Leeawuleena, Lake Saint Claire, Las Meninas, Leeawuleena, Les Jumeaux, Long Gully, Long Gully region, Luchadora Botanica, Major Arcana, masks, Mexican carnival, Mexican masks, Mikhail Bakhtin, Negro Returno, Negro Returno Long Gully, painting the body, painting the human subject, performance, photographic collages, Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess, ritual, ritual and performance, Tarot, Tasmanian Tiger, The Bodies That Were Not Ours, The Quiet Wild, Velasquez Las Meninas

Exhibition dates: 18th April – 19th May 2012

After a slow start to the season there has be a veritable feast of excellent photography exhibitions in Melbourne over the last month or so, including John Gollings and Jane Brown at Edmund Pearce Gallery, the Fred Kruger and Light Works exhibitions (at NGVA and NGVI respectively), Littoral by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory (the next local review after this one) and this exhibition, The Quiet Wild by Jacqui Stockdale at Helen Gory Galerie.

This is a very strong exhibition by Jacqui Stockdale, the metre tall colour prints (printed by the Colour Factory) displaying magnificently in the large gallery at Helen Gory. The photographs remind me of a perverse take on the ethnographic Cartes de visite that were produced during the colonial Victorian era in Australia, images of native peoples taken in studios with painted backdrops together with their cultural artefacts (which, coincidentally, can be seen in great detail and sadness in the Fred Kruger exhibition at NGVA). Drawing on personal places and stories, Mexican carnival and wrestlers masks, Indian masks, Aboriginal names and locations, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, the ghost of Frida Kahlo, rituals, gods (such as Rama) and deities, Australian scenery, performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creations “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorization and assimilation.

Stockdale’s performative tactics and multiple modes of address, her polyvocal subject if you like, may be said to be an effect of textuality: “a conscious recognition and pursuit of an altogether different set of values and historical and cultural trajectories.”1 Undeniably this performative act (this “ritual spectacle”2) has links to the Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm, which accords to certain patterns of play. Stockdale inverts cultural stereotypes (which embody elements of fixity, repetition, and ambivalence) located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary in order to subvert the collective memory of viewers that have been inscribed with a stereotypical collective vernacular: her work transgresses the fantasy that plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power.3

“Bakhtin likens the carnivalesque in literature to the type of activity that often takes place in the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival… social hierarchies of everyday life – their solemnities and pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths – are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).”4

In Stockdale’s world, a “world upside-down” (quite appropriate for Australia), “Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.” Another example of this inversion can be seen in the “branding” of her photographs. In colonial Cartes de visite the sitter is, more often than not, unknown – unless it is an important person. It is the photographer’s name which is printed on the front and back of the card. In these photographs the photographers name is an illegible signature at bottom left, while the title of the person in the photograph is stamped into the work at bottom right. Here Stockdale again inverts traditional textual readings, the titles of her “photographic portraits that embody a world of mystical characters in masquerade” indecipherable to the uninitiated: a coded language of identity and place - Lagunta Man, El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gondwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, ’Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region and ‘Gondwanan’ the name for the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) before the world split apart into the structure that we known today.

These are incredibly humorous, magical and symbolic photographs. A thought came into my mind when I was in the gallery surrounded by the work: for me they represented a vision of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (for example Jaguar Hombre could be seen as an inverted version of the Hanged Man with his foot in a figure four, the Hanged Man symbolising the need to just be in the world, yielding his mind and body to the Universal flow). The Major Arcana deal with the human condition, each card representing the joys and sorrows every man and woman can experience in a lifetime. In a way Stockdale offers us her own set of subversive Major Arcana, images that transgress the boundaries of the colonial vernacular, offering the viewer a chance to explore the heart of the quiet wild.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

Many thankx to Helen Gory Galerie for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Jacqui Stockdale
Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Les Jumeaux
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

“In this modern world of distractions there is a wild nature that stirs inside of us. A desire for transcendence, to become someone else, dance part naked and chant our lost songs so that they can be heard above the sounds of cities and mobile ring tones.

The Quiet Wild is a series of photographic portraits that embodies a world of mystical characters in masquerade set against hand-painted landscapes. The portraits playfully mimic the genre of exotic postcards and historical paintings where a fanciful subject is formally positioned within a make-believe landscape. The hand-painted settings in my photographs feature Australian scenery from places around Australia that have meaning to me including my mother’s property in Bendigo, the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and Lake Saint Claire in Tasmania.

I paint the models bodies and combine costumes and props including my own collection of rare masks originally used in dances of Mexican Carnival. This new work responds to established portrayals of human identity and masquerade informed by my research into different aspects of folk Carnivals where the masquerades are a fusion of clandestine voodoo, ancestral memory and personal revelation ritual and performance. Performance also plays a part in my photographic process where I interact with the models and allow the process to greatly determine the outcome. Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.

The difference between painting the human subject and taking their portrait with a camera it is that during a photo shoot there is more of an element of performance. The subject, over a period of many hours often becomes a new character, extending a side of them that is not prevalent in daily life or invents a new identity. This is brought about by what I dress them in and how I direct them, provoking certain ideas, strengths about an animal power or super natural deity. I begin with an idea of character and a selection of costumes and them work intuitively as though in the dark or with eyes part open. I rarely end up with what I first imagined and revel in the surprise or discovery of a combined effort.

The inspiration for this series of work has come from a unique, rich and beautiful form of human expression that is found in the ritual side of folk art in the cultures around the world but mostly in Mexico. The traditional dances of Mexican Carnival provide an opportunity to revive the primeval gods from the depths of our communal memory, since dance constitutes our remotest language and most primitive sacred offering. The masks I have used in this series are from these types of ritual dance. They are recontextualised and worn in the works Lagunta Man and El Gato, Les Jumeaux, Dogboy of Gonwanan, Infanta Shamanta and Carnival of the Night. Other influences come from images of Exotic Postcards, regarding the formal presentation of the models, the constructed settings and the borders and way of labeling the image. Luchadora Botanica was influenced by a Goya Painting, Negro Returno – I wanted to bring one of my recent collages to life, See ‘to return’.

What I have done is imagined my own family as part ritualistic characters, setting in them in a landscape that I have visited.”

Artist statement by Jacqui Stockdale 2012

Jacqui Stockdale
Jaguar Hombre
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

“The ghost of Frida Kahlo is a haunting one that permeates many artists consciousness bringing with it not just a tragic story but intoxicating aromas of Mexican exotic, masks, Voo-Doo, bloody Mayan rituals and Catholicism gone troppo.

This is clearly evidenced in Jacqui Stockdale’s latest exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie in works such as Negro-Returno, Long Gully. The white lacy heart-shaped overlay of ghostly trees conceals a part-portrait of Frida here depicted in front of Long Gully Bendigo, the Stockdale property, after the Black Saturday bush fire three years ago. This haunting shadowy backdrop appears again in Rama Jaara, The Royal Shepherdess, ‘Jaara’ being the Aboriginal name for the Long Gully region. It is a personal aside of something that obviously touched this artist deeply, one to which she has bought her troupe of tableau vivant players to. Here, a Mauritian girl called Mimi, standing at attention, arms akimbo, dressed in remnants of regal colonial attire. The pose reminiscent of that of the Infanta Margarita in Velasquez’s Las Meninas. The dog has moved from bottom right to bottom left, here a small spotted Chinese Joss paper effigy made for the journey to the afterlife, rather than a great bounding Spanish mastiff. Our young self-possessed Mimi stares directly out of the picture space not as an Infanta, but as one of nature’s children, a shepherdess, her hairstyle resembling a ram’s head, informing that part of the title, ‘Rama’ a play on words.

Both the artists brothers are also players in this tableau: the younger as Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena and the artist’s twin as El Gato, van Diemonia. ‘Lagunta’ is Aboriginal for Tasmanian Tiger and ‘Leeawuleena’ for the land around Cradle Mountain. ‘El Gato’ is the cat, and both carrying a filmic reference to the recent movie The Hunter, filmed around Cradle Mt in Northern Tasmania. While the compositional phrasing has more than a nostalgic whiff of 19th century still studio photography, seen here such staged manners marry well to popular cinematic culture.

As this exhibition unfolds certain characterising concerns appear and reappear. Decapitation, and cross-cultural iconography make this a lavish art dining at the high table of pictorial fusion cuisine. Mexican masks, Joss paper, skulls, rites of passage tit-bits mix it with popular culture on the shag pile to produce a totally new hybrid. Folk memories merge with diaristic experiences, found objects flirt with finely painted trompe-oeil effects in an almost self-regulating metamorphosis.

In this Stockdale becomes a sort of gatekeeper, a ring master choreographer who will both mystify and amaze you with her family carnivale. Picture by picture, costume by costume, the staged imagined and the real, combine into a most fascinating enticement I find impossible to resist.”

Catalogue essay by Jeff Makin, 2012

Jacqui Stockdale
Dogboy of Gondwanan
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Negro Returno, Long Gully
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

Jacqui Stockdale
Luchadora Botanica
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm

1. Fisher, Jean. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 227 – 228.

2. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (trans. Helene Iswolsky). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968, p.5.

3. “According to Bhabha, stereotypes are located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary. He suggests that fantasy plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power. Bhabha describes the mechanism of cultural stereotypes as embodying elements of fixity, repetition, fantasy, and ambivalence, and suggests that if certain types of images are constantly presented in a range of different contexts, they will become imprinted onto the collective memory of viewers and inscribed within a collective vernacular.”

Vercoe, Caroline. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, p.240.

4. Anon. “Carnivalesque,” on Wikipedia. [Online] Cited 13/05/2012. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivalesque

Helen Gory Galerie
25 St Edmonds Rd
Prahran VIC 3181
T: +61 3 9525 2808

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11am – 5pm

The Currier Museum of Art website

May

Exhibition: ‘A New Vision: Modernist Photography’ at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: (Untitled) Branches and Snow, (Untitled) Fremont Bridge Portland, (Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp, 10 Years of Soviet Photography, 1935 Exhibition of the Work of the Masters of Soviet Photography, A New Vision, A New Vision: Modernist Photography, American society, arts, Boris Ignatovich, Boris Ignatovich Tramway Handles, Branches and Snow, brett weston, Brett Weston (Untitled) Branches and Snow, Brett Weston (Untitled) Fremont Bridge, Brett Weston (Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp, Brett Weston Branches and Snow, Brett Weston Fremont Bridge, Brett Weston Tide Pool and Kelp, Currier Museum of Art, formalist photography, Helmar Lerski, Helmar Lerski Metamorphosis through Light #587, Ignatovich Brigade, Imre Kinszki, indexicality, John Tagg The Burden of Representation, Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White Turbine Niagara Falls Power Co, metamorphoses, Metamorphosis through Light, Metamorphosis through Light #587, Michel Foucault, modernism, Modernist photographers, Modernist Photography, New Hampshire, New Topographics, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, October group, Paul Caponigro, Paul Caponigro Two Pears, photography and representation, photography and truth, photography with mirrors, politics, Portland, Rodchenko, Russian avant-garde, Soviet photographer, Soyuzfoto, The Burden of Representation, Theories of Photographic Meaning, Tide Pool and Kelp, Tramway Handles, Transformation Through Light, truth in photography, Turbine Niagara Falls Power Co, Two Pears Cushing ME, USSR In Construction

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 13th May 2012

The conceptual idea of Modernist photography is “look at this,” look at how photography interprets the world: through light, lens, glass, film, paper, brain and eye. Early Modernist photography occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century (through the vision of Alfred Steiglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Steichen et al) before it was even named “Modernism” and led to radically different forms of artistic expression that broke the pictorialist conventions of the era. Gritty realism was the order of the day, clean lines, repetition of form, strange viewpoints where the photographers observation of the subject is as important as the subject itself. Look at how I, and the camera, see the world: that is all there is, the indexical relation to the word of truth.

“Artists and photographers began looking at the photographs used in mass culture, to develop an aesthetic true to the intrinsic qualities of photographic materials: the accurate rendition of visible reality; framing that crops into a larger spatial and temporal context; viewpoints and perspectives generated by modern lenses and typically modern spatial organizations (for example, tall buildings); and sharp, black-and-white images. This objective, mechanized vision became art by foregrounding not its subject matter, but its formal structure as an image.” (Patrizia di Bello. Modernsim and Photography on Answers.com)

Steiglitz and Strand, “often abstracted reality by eliminating social or spatial context; by using viewpoints that flattened pictorial space, acknowledging the flatness of the picture plane; and by emphasizing shape and tonal rendition in highlights and shadows as much as in the actual subject matter.” (Ibid.,) Such use of highlights and shadows can be seen in the most famous work by the photographer Helmar Lerski, Transformation Through Light (1937), a photograph of which is presented below. Have a look on Google Images to see the changes wrought on the same face just through the use of light.

It is interesting to note the inclusion of photographers such as Paul Caponigro and Brett Weston in this exhibition as later examples of artists influenced by language of Modernism. While this may be partially true by the mid-1970s the mechanized vision of early Modernism (with its link to the indexicality of the image, its documentary authority and ability to express the individuality of the artist) had dissipated with the advent of the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, 1975). “The pictures were stripped of any artistic frills and reduced to an essentially topographic state, conveying substantial amounts of visual information but eschewing entirely the aspects of beauty, emotion and opinion.” These typologies, often shown in grids, “depicted urban or suburban realities under changes in an allegedly detached approach… casting a somewhat ironic or critical eye on what American society had become.” (Wikipedia) While the photographs by Weston and Caponigro do show some allegiance to Modernist Photography they are of an altogether different order of things, one that is not predicated on what the object is or what the artist says it is (its reality), but also, what else it can be.

Of course, this leads into more critical readings on the meaning of photographs that emerged in the late 1970s – 80s. As Patrizia di Bello has insightfully written,

“John Tagg, in ‘The Burden of Representation’ (1988), argues that the indexical nature of the photograph does not explain its meanings. ‘What makes the link between the pre-photographic referent and the sign is a discriminatory technical, cultural and historical process in which particular optical and chemical devices are set to work to organise experience and desire and produce a new reality – the paper image which, through further processes, may become meaningful in all sorts of ways.’ Rather than being a guarantor of realism, the camera is itself an ideological construct, producing an all-seeing spectator and effacing the means of its production. Analyses of who has possessed the means to represent and who has been represented reveal that photography has been profoundly implicated in issues of political, cultural, and sexual domination. This area of investigation has especially drawn upon Michel Foucault’s (1926-84) reflections on the emergence of forms of knowledge; on the modern notion of the subject; and on practices of power which produce subjects actively participating in the dominant disciplinary order. Particularly influential have been his rejection of the notion of a pre-given self or human nature, and his insistence that every system of power and knowledge also creates possibilities of resistance. The role of critics then becomes the deconstruction of dominant assumptions within and about representations, to identify works embodying the possibility of resistance.” (Patrizia di Bello. Theories of Photographic Meaning on Answers.com)

The camera as ideological construct. Photography as profoundly implicated in issues of political, cultural, and sexual domination. In other words who is looking, at what, what is being pictured or excluded, who has control over that image (and access to it), who understands the language of that representation and controls its meaning (this picturing of a version of reality), and who resists the dominant assumptions within and about its representations.

Modernist Photography does indeed have a lot to answer for.

Many thankx to the Currier Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Paul Caponigro
Two Pears, Cushing, ME
1999
Gelatin silver print
7 9/16 in. x 9 11/16 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Gift of Paul Caponigro, photographer

Brett Weston
(Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp
c. 1980
Gelatin silver print
10 9/16 in. x 13 11/16 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston
(Untitled) Branches and Snow
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print
12 3/4 in. x 10 5/8 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Helmar Lerski
Metamorphosis through Light #587
1935-36
Vintage gelatin silver print
11 1/2 in. x 9 1/4 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire

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Helmar Lerski (18 February 1871, Strasbourg – 19 September 1956, Zürich) was a photographer who laid some of the important foundations of modern photography. He focused mainly on portraits and the technique of photography with mirrors. Lerski concentrated on archetypal characteristics rather than on individual features, favouring extreme close-ups and tight cropping, and he became renowned for his experiments with multiple light sources.

Lerski was involved concurrently in the two major, emergent mediums of his time: film and photography. Born in Alsace in the then German city of Strausburg, he became involved in the theater and, in 1896, moved to New York to pursue a career in acting, eventually working at the Irving Place Theater and later the German Pabst Theater. It was in this setting that Lerski first became aware of the unique visual effects achievable with stage lighting. Drawing from his acting experience, he began investigating photography as an artistic medium after meeting his wife, also a photographer. While photographing their colleagues, Lerski experimented with a series of portraits that severely manipulated the lighting effects. The resulting images formed a base for his later success in both commercial and art photography… This body of work upholds the artist’s declaration that “in every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on.”

In 1937 he created his masterpiece, Transformation Through Light, on a rooftop terrace in Tel Aviv, in which he projected 175 different images of a single model, altered using multiple mirrors to direct intense sunlight towards his face at various angles and intensities. Siegfried Kracauer wrote about this series in his Theory of Film (Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 162):

“His model, he [Lerski] told me in Paris, was a young man with a nondescript face who posed on the roof of a house. Lerski took over a hundred pictures of that face from a very short distance, each time subtly changing the light with the aid of screens. Big close-ups, these pictures detailed the texture of the skin so that cheeks and brows turned into a maze of inscrutable runes reminiscent of soil formations, as they appear from an airplane. The result was amazing. None of the photographs recalled the model; and all of them differed from each other…

Out of the original face there arose, evoked by the varying lights, a hundred different faces, among them those of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman, a monk. Did these portraits, if portraits they were, anticipate the metamorphoses which the young man would undergo in the future? Or were they just plays of light whimsically projecting on his face dreams and experiences forever alien to him? Proust would have been delighted in Lerski’s experiment with its unfathomable implications.”

Text from Wikipedia, Weimar Blog and Articles and Texticles websites

Margaret Bourke-White
Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co.,
1928
Gelatin silver print
13 1/2 in. x 9 1/2 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

“The Currier Museum of Art’s latest special exhibition traces the development of the modernist movement from the 1920s to its impact on artists today. Featuring more than 150 works displayed in three expansive galleries, A New Vision: Modernist Photography reflects the international nature of modernism, and includes American photographers such as Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, Man Ray and Charles Sheeler, as well as European artists including Lotte Jacobi, László Moholy-Nagy, Helmar Lerski and Imre Kinszki…

[Marcus: Imre Kinszki (1901 - 1944) was a pioneer of modernist photography in Hungary, and a founder member of the group called Modern Hungarian Photographers. His son died in Buchenwald while he died on a death march to Sachsenhausen in 1944. See a moving video on YouTube where his daughter, who survived the ghetto, Judit Kinszki Talks About Her Father. For more images by Imre Kinszik please see the Articles and Texticles website from which this heartbreaking text is taken. It makes me very angry and very sad.

"In the ghetto we didn’t know anything about Auschwitz and what happened to those in forced labor service. It didn’t even occur to us that my father might not be alive. My mother and I went every day to the Keleti railroad station and went up to everybody who got off and asked them. Once my mother found a man who had been in the same group, and he remembered my father. He said that their car had been unhooked and the train went on towards Germany. They got off somewhere and went on foot towards Sachsenhausen – this was a death march. They spent the night on a German farm, in a barn on straw, and the man [who came back] said his legs had been so full of injuries that he couldn’t go on, and had decided that he would take his chances: he wormed himself into the straw. He did it, they didn’t find him, and that’s how he survived. He didn’t know about the others. We never found anyone else but this single man. So it’s clear that somewhere between this farm and Sachsenhausen everyone had been shot. But we interpreted this news in such a way that all we knew about him was that he would arrive sometime soon. We didn’t have news of my brother for a long time, then my mother found a young man who had worked with my brother. He told us that when they arrived in Buchenwald in winter, they were driven out of the wagon, and asked them what kind of qualifications they had. My brother told them that he was a student. This young man told us that the Germans immediately tied him up, it was a December morning, and they hosed him down with water just to watch him freeze to death. Those who didn’t have a trade were stripped of their clothes and hosed with cold water until they froze. I think that at that moment something broke in my mother. She was always waiting for my father, she refused to declare him dead even though she would have been eligible for a widow’s pension. But she waited for my father until the day she died. She couldn’t wait for my brother, because she had to believe what she had heard. Why would that young man have said otherwise?”]

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Boris Ignatovich’s 1930s Tramway Handles and Margaret Bourke-White’s 1928 photo Turbine, Niagara Falls Power Co. [see below] showcase modernist images of isolated elements from the manmade world. While close-ups of nature, such as Brett Weston’s 1980 (Untitled) Tide Pool and Kelp, reveal striking abstract compositions that emphasize the repetition of patterns and dramatic contrast of light and shade. This new vision shared by modernist photographers makes form and composition as important as subject matter in their photographs.

“This exhibition illustrates the diversity of the modernist movement and its important contribution to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Kurt Sundstrom, curator of the exhibition. Adding, “Modernist photographers expanded the visual vocabulary of art – making everyday objects – from grass, drying laundry, machinery and lumber to details of the human body – subjects worthy of artistic interest.”

Contemporary New England photographers are still building upon the artistic language that their predecessors developed. Paul Caponigro, who lives in Cushing, Maine, Carl Hyatt of Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Arno Minkkinen of Andover, MA all clearly connect to modernism and are part of A New Vision.

A New Vision also explores the reciprocal influences among all media that shaped the modern art movement. Artists in the varied media shared a common vision; to illustrate this interconnectedness, paintings by Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Childe Hassam are paired with photographs in this exhibition.”

Press release from the Currier Museum of Art website

Boris Ignatovich
Tramway Handles
1930s (printed 1955)
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 in. x 6 3/8 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire
Art © Estate of Boris Ignatovich/RAO, Moscow/VAGA, New York.

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Boris Ignatovich, born in Lutsk, Ukraine in 1899, was a Soviet photographer and a member of the Russian avant-garde movement. Ignatovich began his career in 1918, first working as a journalist and a newspaper editor before taking up photography in 1923. In the early 1920s he worked for a number of publications, most notably, Bednota (Poverty), Krasnaya Niva (Red Field) and Ogonyok. Ignatovich’s first photographic success was a documentary series about villagers in the Ramenskoe’s Workers’ settlement, which coincided with the first 5-year plan after Stalin’s victory. Ignatovich tried to alter the traditional format of documentary photography by using very low and very high unconventional angles, developing new perspectives, and including birds-eye constructions, which rendered the landscape as an abstract composition. In 1926 Ignatovich participated at the exhibition of the Association of Moscow Photo-Correspondents, and later became one of its leaders. In 1927, he photographed power plants and factories for Bednota and developed close association with Alexander Rodchenko, as they photographed for Dajosch together. Ignatovich’s famous photo stories also included the first American tractors in the USSR and aerial photographs of Leningrad and Moscow. In 1928, Ignatovich participated in the exhibition 10 Years of Soviet Photography, in Moscow and Leningrad, which was organized by the State Academy of Artistic Sciences. Due to his companionship with Rodchenko, Ignatovich was greatly influenced by his style and unconventional techniques. Both became members of the distinguished Oktiabr, the October group, which was a union of artists, architects, film directors, and photographers. In February of 1930, a photographic section of the October group was organized. Rodchenko was the head of the section and wrote its program. Other members include Dmitrii Debabov; Boris, Ol’ga, and Elizaveta Ignatovich; Vladimir Griuntal’; Roman Karmen; Eleazar Langman; Moriakin; Abram Shterenberg; and Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi. The October group, whose styles favored fragmentary techniques and the distortion of images in an avant-garde manner, captured the idea of a world in dynamic form and rhythms.

First general October exhibition opened at Gorky Park, a park of culture and rest named after Gorky in Moscow. The photography section, organized by Rodchenko and Stepanova, includes the magazine Radioslushatel, designed by Stepanova and illustrated with photographs by Griuntal, Ignatovich, and Rodchenko. When Rodchenko was expelled from the October group for his formalist photography, Ignatovich took over as head of the photographic section of the group until the group was dissolved in 1932 by governmental decree. Apart from October, Ignatovich worked on documentary films from 1930 to 1932. As a movie cameraman, Ignatovich worked on the first sound film, Olympiada of the Arts. After 1932 he began to pioneer ideas such as the theory of collectivism in photojournalism at the Soyuzfoto agency where he developed specific rules and laws of photography, so much so that the photographers working under him were obliged to follow and jointly credit their work to Ignatovich by signing their photographs “Ignatovich Brigade.” Ignatovich participated in 1935 Exhibition of the Work of the Masters of Soviet Photography as well as the All-Union Exhibition of Soviet photography at the State Pushkin Museum in 1937. During the 1930s, Ignatovich also contributed photographs to the USSR In Construction, and in 1941, worked as a war photo correspondent on the front. After the War, Ignatovich concentrated on landscape and portraiture, experimenting with the use of symbols, picture captions, and ideas of collectivism, particularly at the Soyuzfoto agency where he continued to work as a photojournalist until he died in 1976.

Text from the Nailya Alexander Gallery website

Brett Weston
(Untitled) Fremont Bridge, Portland
1971
Gelatin silver print
13 1/4 in. x 10 1/2 in.
Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire. Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Currier Museum of Art
150 Ash Street, Manchester
New Hampshire 03104
T: 603.669.6144

Opening hours:
Sunday, Monday, Wednesday – Friday 11am – 5pm
Saturday 10am – 5pm

Edmund Pearce Gallery website

May

Review: ‘Jane Brown / Australian Gothic’ at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian artist, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, photographic series, photography, psychological, quotation, reality, review, sculpture, space and time
Tags: Australian bushfires, Australian Gothic, bushfires, Captain’s Flat Hotel, convict women’s prison, Edmund Pearce Gallery, film noir, French Island, Hobart, Jane Brown, Jane Brown Adelong, Jane Brown Australian Gothic, Jane Brown Big Trout, Jane Brown Bushfire Landscape I, Jane Brown Bushfire Landscape II, Jane Brown Captain’s Flat Hotel, Jane Brown Lathamstowe, Jane Brown One Way, Jane Brown The Female Factory (convict women’s prison), Jane Brown Tumbarumba, Jane Brown Unheimlich, Lake Mountain, Lathamstowe, New South Wales, Ross, tasmania, The Female Factory, The Female Factory (convict women’s prison), The Handbook to Gothic Literature, unheimlich, Victoria

Exhibition dates: 25th April – 12th May 2012

As you should know by now, this blog tries to promote the work of less well known artists and subject matter. So instead of concentrating on the wonderful aerial bushfire photographs of the well-known artist John Gollings (showing in the same gallery in different spaces with the work of Michael Norton) I have decided to do a posting on the exhibition Australian Gothic by Jane Brown.

This is a good exhibition of small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs, beautifully hung in the small gallery at Edmund Pearce and lit in the requisite, ambient manner. There are some outstanding photographs in the exhibition. The strongest works are the surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form. Less successful in this quest are the bushfire landscapes. I feel these add little to the narrative thread of the exhibition and could have easily been left out in a judicious cull of the photographs. This would have made the overarching story line stronger still.

One of the best photographs in the exhibition is Lathamstowe (2011, below). This dark, brooding, intense photograph is a beautifully realised visualisation, one that balances scale, tone, light, form and darkness to create a haunting image that stays with you a long time after you have seen it. This one images says it all: the artist has talent. More please!

Many thankx to Edmund Pearce Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Jane Brown
Big Trout, New South Wales
2010
Museo silver rag print
59 x 46 cm

Jane Brown
Bushfire Landscape I
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 20.5 cm

Jane Brown
Bushfire Landscape II, Lake Mountain, Victoria
2010
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5 cm

Jane Brown
The Female Factory (convict women’s prison), Ross, Tasmania
2009
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
15.8 x 19.5 cm

Jane Brown
Lathamstowe
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 16.5 cm

“I find it interesting how monochrome is used to differentiate the living and the dead, the past and the present. It has an ability to transcend the constraints of time, memory and death. I examine this a lot in my work – landscapes seem to have vestiges or traces of past life and memorials become otherworldly.”

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Jane Brown. Weekend Australian Review, August 2011

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“The antipodes was seen as a world of reversals, the dark subconscious of Britain. It was for all intents and purposes Gothic par excellence.”

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Gary Turcotte. “Australian Gothic,” in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The Handbook to Gothic Literature. 1998.

Comprising photographs taken in rural New South Wales, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania, this exhibition takes its cue from the gothic imaginings of colonial Australia. We see images of a convict past, the bush Christmas, unforgiving landscapes and melancholic hotels. It carries echoes of the cinema of Wake in Fright (1971) and the Cars that Ate Paris (1974). Rendering visible the themes of the melancholic and the uncanny, Australian Gothic manifests itself in rural isolation – where the homely becomes unhomely (or unheimlich) and where nature is out of kilter.

Jane Brown
Adelong, New South Wales
2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 20.5 cm

Jane Brown
Tumbarumba, New South Wales
2012
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5 cm

Jane Brown
One Way, Hobart, Tasmania
2009
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 19.5 cm

Jane Brown
Unheimlich, French Island, Victoria
2010
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
19 x 16 cm

Jane Brown
Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales
2012
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
21.5 x 17.5 cm

Edmund Pearce Gallery
Level 2, Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street (corner Flinders Lane)
Melbourne Victoria 3000

Opening hours:
Wed – Sat 11 – 5

May

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945 – 1980′ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, Australian artist, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, quotation, space, street photography and time
Tags: American landscape, Americurbana, Anthony Friedkin, Anthony Friedkin Clockwork Malibu, Anthony Friedkin Film Can Library, Anthony Hernandez, Anthony Hernandez Automotive Landscapes #5, Anthony Hernandez Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles, Anthony Hernandez Los Angeles #3, arts, automotive landscapes, Automotive Landscapes #5, Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles, California, cars, Clockwork Malibu, Cocktails with Heinecken, Darryl Curran, Darryl J. Curran Cocktails with Heinecken, Diamond Bar, downtown Los Angeles, Film Can Library Universal Studios, Gary Winogrand, Gary Winogrand Los Angeles, Grant Mudford, Grant Mudford Los Angeles, Grant Mudford Los Angeles (US 257/10a), Henry Wessel, Henry Wessel Jr. Los Angeles, j. paul getty museum, Joe Deal, Joe Deal Backyard Diamond Bar, julius shulman, Lakewood, los angeles, Los Angeles #3, Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood, Man-Altered Landscape, New Topographics, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, Rick Dano, Robert Heinecken, Southern California, Southern California coastline, suburb of Lakewood, surfer Rick Dano, transportation, travel, Universal Studios, urban America, William A. Garnett, William A. Garnett Finished Housing

Exhibition dates: 20th December 2011 – 6th May 2012

I have never particularly liked Los Angeles as a city. There seems to be something unappealing about the place, some energy lurking just beneath the surface that you can’t quite put your finger on. Maybe it is the comparison with the vivacious San Francisco just up the coast, the awful public transport or, more spookily, the lack of people on the street. People never walk anywhere in LA, it’s a car town. When I did walk on the street I felt vulnerable and surveyed with suspicion by people in cars, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

These photographs confirm this feeling. Unlike the visual acoustics of the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman (photographs that mythologised this urban metropolis and then exported that idealised presence and Californian mid-century design to the rest of the world) these photographs have an unbelievably desolatory nature to them. They seem to be joyless and sorrowful, devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope – as though the human and the city were separated, as if we are separated from a loved one.

The row after row of tinderbox houses, the ubiquitous cars, the sense of emptiness, hopelessness and menace (see Gary Winogrand Los Angeles 1964, below – if looks could kill this would be it, the bandaged broken nose just perfect for the photograph) all paint a picture of despair. Even the supposedly quiet, anticipatory harmony of the photograph of surfer Rick Dano by Anthony Friedkin (1978, below top) is, to me, full of unresolved tension. The mist in the background hanging over the rocks, blocking out the view, the filthy hands and the bandaged little finger of the right hand, the downcast eyes, the impossibly long cigarette handing from his lips and most importantly the empty distance between the figure and the safety of the automobile. The tension in that distance and the downcast eyes says nothing to me of harmony but of isolation, sadness and regret.

Los Angeles is not my favourite city but it is a fascinating place none the less, as these photographs do attest.

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anthony Friedkin
Clockwork Malibu
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 15/16 x 18 5/16 in
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

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While Anthony Friedkin has documented subjects as diverse as the marginalized gay community of San Francisco, convicts at Folsom Prison, and brothels in New York, it is the Southern California coastline that has remained a recurrent theme throughout his forty-five-year career. The Los Angeles native took up photography about the same time he learned to surf. His images of waves deftly communicate the primordial power and elusive mysteries that he ascribes to the ocean. This photograph of surfer Rick Dano on an early morning drive up the coast conveys a mood of quiet, anticipatory harmony.

Anthony Hernandez
Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 3/4 x 17 1/8 in
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Anthony Hernandez

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Hernandez started photographing what he refers to as “automotive landscapes” in 1977, using a 35mm camera until he realized that a large-format camera loaded with 5 x 7-inch negative film would provide the detail he desired. Taken from a slightly elevated vantage point, Hernandez’s image of an immobilized truck and its lone mechanic in front of a repair shop presents a sobering view of Los Angeles’s car-dominant culture.

Anthony Hernandez
Los Angeles #3
1971
Gelatin silver print
7 3/4 x 11 13/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Anthony Hernandez

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Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. For this image, he preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat. A native of Los Angeles, Hernandez has continued to photograph the city, addressing issues of community, shelter, and survival in his work.

Gary Winogrand
Los Angeles
1964
Gelatin silver print
9 x 13 7:16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1984 The Estate of Gary Winogrand

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This image of a couple seated in a parked convertible in front of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard simultaneously captures the glamour and seediness associated with Hollywood. Evoking a 1940s or ’50s film noir crime drama, a seeming tough guy and femme fatale continue their heated conversation, apparently oblivious to the traffic around them – and to the photographer observing them. A native of New York City, Winogrand studied painting at Columbia University and photography at the New School for Social Research before doing freelance commercial work. He photographed incessantly, using a 35mm camera to create wide-angled or tilted shots that are densely composed and layered with meaning. More than 2,500 rolls of film remained undeveloped at the time of his death in 1984.

“As part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 initiative, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945 – 1980, an exhibition of photographs from the permanent collection made by artists whose time in Los Angeles inspired them to create memorable images of the city, on view at the Getty Center from December 20, 2011 – May 6, 2012.

“This exhibition features both iconic and relatively unknown work by artists whose careers are defined by their association with Los Angeles, who may have lived in the city for a few influential years, or who might have visited only briefly,” said Virginia Heckert, curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.

The photographs are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industry. Works featured in the exhibition are from artists such as Jo Ann Callis, Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, and Max Yavno. Two of the works in the exhibition by Anthony Hernandez and Henry Wessel Jr. were acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions inspired by the Pacific Standard Time initiative, the exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a broad range of approaches to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to the photographic medium itself.

One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Garry Winogrand’s photograph of two women walking towards the landmark theme building designed by Charles Luckman and William Pereira that has come to symbolize both Los Angeles International Airport and mid-century modern architecture in popular culture. Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand made some of his most memorable photographs in Los Angeles, where he chose to settle in the final years of his life. Also included in the exhibition is Diane Arbus’ dreamily lit photograph of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland park in Anaheim. Although technically not located in either the city or the county of Los Angeles, Disneyland – and Arbus’ photograph – continues to capture the notion of entertainment and fantasy that has come to be so intrinsically associated with the city.

Other photographers in the In Focus: Los Angeles exhibition who produced the majority of their most creative work in the city include Edmund Teske, with his experimentation in the darkroom and his complex double solarization process; Robert Heinecken, with images that are equally complex but often incorporate existing printed materials, such as negatives; Anthony Hernandez, whose portraits of Angelenos on the street emphasize the isolation of the individual in an urban environment; and Anthony Friedkin, who combines his passions for surfing and the Southland beaches in his photographs. The inclusion of three photographs from Judy Fiskin’s earliest photographic series, Stucco (1973 – 76), provided the impetus for a monographic presentation of the artist’s complete photographic work by Getty Publications. Entitled Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin and featuring an introductory essay by curator Virginia Heckert, the book will be published concurrently with this exhibition.”

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Grant Mudford
Los Angeles (US 257/10a)
negative, 1976; print, 1980
Gelatin silver print
19 1/4 x 13 1/8 in
© Grant Mudford

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After working for ten years as a commercial photographer, Sydney native Grant Mudford received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, enabling him to travel throughout the United States to pursue personal work. Mudford’s love of architecture – particularly the vernacular, often anonymous structures of urban America – is evident in the photographs he produced. His head-on depictions of the façades of simple commercial buildings are enlivened by signage, the play of light and shade, the placement of doors and windows, or, as in this image, the rich variety of textures.

Joe Deal
Backyard, Diamond Bar, California
1980
Gelatin silver print
11 3/16 x 11 1/4 in
© Joe Deal

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Joe Deal rose to prominence in the mid-1970s when work he made as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico was included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). From 1976 to 1989, he taught photography at the University of California, Riverside, where he was instrumental in establishing a photography program and developing the university-affiliated California Museum of Photography. His photographs of Diamond Bar feature backyards of this primarily residential suburb located at the junction of the Pomona and Orange freeways in eastern Los Angeles County. Deal’s implementation of a slightly elevated perspective that eliminates the horizon line and provides a view into neighboring yards effectively conveys the close quarters of life in a master-planned community.

Anthony Friedkin
Film Can Library, Universal Studios
1978
Gelatin silver print
12 x 17 11/16 in
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

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Anthony Friedkin began taking photographs at a young age and had already published his work by the time he was 16. He nonetheless found it important to study photography seriously and did so at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. Employment as a still photographer for motion pictures beginning in 1975 undoubtedly prepared him to create a portfolio of images of Universal Studios a few years later. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology. Friedkin’s continued commitment to shooting black-and-white film that he develops and prints in his own darkroom has become increasingly rare.

Darryl J. Curran
Cocktails with Heinecken
about 1974
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 14 in
Gift of Darryl J. Curran
© Darryl J. Curran

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After completing his undergraduate degree in design at the University of California, Los Angeles, Darryl Curran entered the school’s newly established photography program, studying with Robert Heinecken, who is positioned toward the center of this image in a black turtleneck. The repeated printing of two frames is typical of Curran’s approach to the photographic medium and the ease with which he employs techniques and strategies derived from his background in printmaking and design. Another form of “mirroring” occurs in the placement of a Heineken beer bottle opposite Heinecken the artist. Curran founded the Department of Photography at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught from 1967 to 2001.

William A. Garnett
Finished Housing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in
© Estate of William A. Garnett

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The reduced scale and regular spacing of shapes lend a toy-like quality to Garnett’s suite of prints depicting construction phases of tract housing in the Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood. The deep shadows, overall patterning, and dramatic diagonals that slice through each composition introduce a sophisticated sense of design and abstraction. After studying photography at Art Center College of Design and military service during World War II, William Garnett learned to fly so that he could photograph his subjects from his Cessna 170-B airplane. Although he was hired by developers to document the construction of 17,500 affordable single-family residences in Lakewood, the majority of his aerial photographs depict the beauty of America’s landscape.

Henry Wessel Jr.
Los Angeles
1971
Gelatin silver on Dupont Veragam paper print
7 15/16 x 11 7/8 in
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Henry Wessel

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Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organized in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography. In this image, electrical and telephone lines tether a row of modest residences to a single utility pole.

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Tues – Friday 10 – 5.30pm
Saturday 10 – 9pm
Sunday 10 – 9pm
Monday closed

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg website

May

Exhibition: ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson. The Geometry of the Moment “Landscapes’” at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Exhibition dates: 3rd September 2011 – 13th May 2012

Many thankx to the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It’s a way of life.

To take a photograph is to hold one’s breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeting reality.

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Henri Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson
FRANCE. Brie. 1968
1968
© Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson
SOVIET UNION. Armenia. Visitors at village on the Lake Sevan. 1972.
1972
© Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson
FRANCE. Alpes de Haute-Provence. Near Cereste. 1999.
1999
© Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos

“Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the most accomplished and influential photographers of the 20th century; he was the acknowledged ‘master of the moment’, and many of his images are veritable masterpieces of photographic history. With this exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is featuring another pioneering figure in its series of shows on great modernist photographers, which has to date included Brassaï (2004), Lee Miller (2006) and Edward Steichen (2008). The around 100 exhibits included in this very personal exhibition were originally compiled by Henri Cartier-Bresson, who died in 2004, under the heading of Paysages (Landscapes). His widow, the photographer Martine Franck, has also agreed to lend a rare group of seven lithographs from her private collection exclusively for this presentation.

Born in 1908 in Chanteloup, near Paris, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s original ambition was to be a painter, but he abandoned his art studies after only a short time. In 1930 he decided to concentrate on photography. He later worked as second assistant to the film director Jean Renoir and also directed a number of his own documentary films. After escaping from a German prisoner-of-war camp on his third attempt in 1943 he joined the French Resistance, and in 1947 he founded the now world-famous Magnum photo agency with four colleagues.

During his photographic career Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled widely through Europe, Mexico, India, China, Indonesia, the United States of America and the former Soviet Union. He always used an inconspicuous Leica rangefinder camera, and it was on these travels between 1933 and 1999 that the black-and-white landscape photographs were created. The impressive simplicity and precise composition of these images give them a meditative quality, and also show how strongly Cartier-Bresson’s photographic practice was influenced and inspired by Far Eastern philosophical concepts. In the mid-1960s Georges Braque had given him the book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel; for Cartier-Bresson, this short monograph contained all the fundamental elements upon which his photographic aesthetic was based, above all because it described actual experience and dealt with every aspect of human life. It was the chronicle of a learning process, a questioning of the self, the pursuit of inner perfection and the achievement of harmony with the world.

All of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs have a black border around them [Marcus: not all!]. This characteristic feature is an explicit reference to the extreme precision of the photographer’s method, as it tells the viewer that the final image is exactly the same as the negative and has therefore not been cropped. The image was mentally ‘edited’ by the photographer as he took the picture – at the very moment when the shutter opened. His photographs contain all the key components: light and shadow, rigorous composition, the golden section, the element of chance. Using this ‘geometry of the moment’, he combined planes and lines, people and situations into a perfect arrangement.

The exhibition is arranged and constructed according to the principle of geometric composition. The Kunstmuseum commissioned the photo artist Frauke Eigen to design a concept for the presentation of the works. Past Cartier-Bresson exhibitions have always been arranged chronologically, thematically and geographically. Frauke Eigen has developed an innovative installation concept that shows the inner connection between the pictures through formal correspondences for the first time. Over and above the individual picture, the visitor becomes aware of how a design principles returns in the next picture in a modified fashion. The viewer can thus trace an abstract story of vivid forms from the first to last photograph, experiencing in the process something about the unique language of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

As a photographer, Cartier-Bresson’s style was marked by discretion and extreme sensitivity. He was also an incredibly self-effacing person: he rarely gave interviews and hated being photographed. In 1947, the Museum of Modern Art in New York even planned a large posthumous retrospective of his work, as they believed that he had been killed in the war. When Cartier-Bresson heard about this he decided to travel to the United States, and the exhibition was subsequently held with the artist present. The Frenchman loved stories like this.

Around 1973, at the height of his fame, Henri Cartier-Bresson abandoned photography and from then on only picked up his camera on rare occasions. Returning to his artistic roots, he devoted his time and energy to drawing, concentrating mainly on landscapes. He regarded this as merely a change in terms of ‘technique’, as his drawings were created with the same eye, the same sense of form and geometry as his photographs. For him, photography was an immediate action, whereas drawing was a form of meditation.

Sam Szafran, a painter and friend of Cartier-Bresson’s, once said to him: “In order to go fast you have to proceed very slowly. You have to observe, see how things occur, understand them, feel them, otherwise you will run into danger…”

In this sense, the exhibition The Geometry of the Moment, which has been organized in cooperation with the photo agency Magnum Photos, Paris and with the foundation HCB, Paris, forms the perfect complement to the large-scale thematic display The Art of Deceleration. Motion and Rest in Art from Caspar David Friedrich to Ai Weiwei, which will be shown in a parallel presentation at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg from 12 November 2011 onwards.”

Press release from the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg website

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Serbia. Bass player on the road Belgrade-Kraljevo, to play at a village festival near Rudnick
Yugoslavia 1965
© Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos

Henri Cartier-Bresson
ITALY. Tuscany. Sienna. 1933.
1933
© Henri Cartier-Bresson /Magnum Photos

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“I was visiting the museum and happened to look out of an upstairs window, and saw this empty marketplace, stark in its lack of activity.”

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Abteilung Kommunikation
Hollerplatz 1 38440
Wolfsburg
T: +49 (0)5361 2669 69

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Tuesday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Monday closed

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Polixeni Papapetrou: The Dreamkeepers’ at Stills Gallery, Sydney

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 28th March – 5th May 2012

I absolutely love these. The colours, the spaces, the ambiguous vistas, the fantastical archetypes, the fables. What springs to mind, with the use of masks to disguise youth positioned within the decorous landscape, is the notion of “passing”. Passing on (as in dying), passing through (as in travelling), in passing (as in an aside) and just “passing” (passing yourself off as someone or something else) to hide your true character or feelings. Gay men did this in the 1950s and 60s all the better to fit into society, for if it was found that you were homosexual you could loose your job, your apartment and even your life. Of course, there is also the passing of time, the longing for misspent youth in these masked ephebes and adolescent women. Age shall not weary them…

Wandering, dreaming, remembering, keeping, collecting, counting. These neophytes on the path of life, both old/wise, young/hidden pass through (into?) our dreams. Papapetrou creates visions that elude the senses, visions that slip between dreaming and waking, between conscious and subconscious realms. As John Berger and Jean Mohr have observed,

“Cameras are boxes for transporting appearances. Are the appearances which a camera transports a construction, a man-made cultural artefact, or are they, like a footprint in the sand, a trace naturally left by something that has passed? The photographer choses the events he photographs. This choice can be thought of as a cultural construction. The space for this construction is, as it were, cleared by his rejection of what he did not choose to photograph.”1

As an artist Papapetrou has the intelligence to leave this nature/nurture question open in her photographs. Her skill as an artist is in choosing the right things to photograph. This enables her creatures to pass through liminal spaces, the space of our consciousness. Through this process a trace will always be left with us, for this is a strong body of work, well realised, in passing.

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Many thankx to Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Wanderer No. 3
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Wave Counter
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Lantern Keeper
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

“These transitional places in one’s life are often the most creative, and as we grapple for answers and clarity what is often realized is ambiguity and confusion that reigns supreme. Like fairy stories, Papapetrou uses absurdity to make symbolic sense of world she struggles to understand.”

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Susan Bright. Between Worlds catalogue 2009

In Polixeni Papapetrou’s work there is identification with the world of children that is rare and remarkable. She sees children themselves as ‘between worlds’, between infancy and adulthood. Yet she does more than identify, creating fantastical worlds that only adults can truly understand and relate to.

A man in blue striped pyjamas stands on a rock by the sea, leaning into the wind. His body seems young yet he supports himself with a walking frame. His face is old, oversized, a little grotesque. He is The Wavecounter. Like the other characters in Polixeni Papapetrou’s series The Dreamkeepers, he is lithe in body yet gnarly of physiognomy, both young and old. Gazing out in contemplation these dream keepers look with anticipation to the future, or is it with nostalgia to the past? The timeless backdrops of shoreline or hilltop reflect this ambiguity, echoing through landscape the collapsing of thresholds and blurring of boundaries.

Papapetrou’s art practice has involved collaboration with her children and their friends for over 10 years. As they have grown and transformed so too have the roles they perform and spaces they inhabit. It is the awkward evolution of adolescence that informs the in-between space of The Dreamkeepers. To parallel the cripplingly self-conscious yet powerfully self-realising period of our lives, Papapetrou engages part reality, part fantasy from which a space of unreality emerges, the space of archetype. Here the anonymity afforded by masks separates her adolescent actors from who they really are, and allows them to stand in for us all. In this way, Papapetrou asks us to consider how masks, whether symbolic or literal, not only conceal identity, but also expand and transform it.

The aged masks do so in The Dreamkeepers by confounding adolescence, as the characters exude a quiet lack of self-consciousness, despite their disturbing appearance. They arouse a gentle pathos, reminding us of our own shapeshifting, of time playing out on our bodies and minds. The abstract meeting of these two ages may indicate the latent wisdom and self-acceptance that only realises with maturity, or the cyclical nature of our life spans that inevitably brings us back to the vulnerability of youth. In either case the work is a powerful testament to the surrendering of childhood.

Also on exhibition is a small selection of works from Papapetrou’s current work in progress. Using ghillie suits, she transforms her actors into animate objects – rocks with life and seaweed with attitude.”

Press release from the Stills Gallery website

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Holiday Makers
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Joy Pedlars
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Shell Collectors
2012
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

Polixeni Papapetrou
The Lighthouse Keepers
2011
from The Dreamkeepers
Pigment print
105 x 105cm

1. Berger, John and Mohr, Jean. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, pp.92-93.

Stills Gallery
36 Gosbell Street
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia
T: 61 2 9331 7775

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11.00 am – 6.00 pm

Stills Gallery website

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Gerhard Richter. Atlas’ at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Exhibition dates: 4th February – 22nd April 2012

“I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,”

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Gerhard Richter, 1986

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“If the grids of art are about arrangement, synchronic vision, connections and knowledge, a standing back to grasp a pattern, then the grids of life are just as much about chance, disconnections among the connections, and the inability of the elements within the grid to perceive, and know, the larger patterns of which they are a part, so that it is only a ‘higher’ consciousness standing outside the grid that will be able to see it all (with or without understanding it). How you know and form a grid depends on whether you are inside or outside it. You can ‘form’ a grid both actively and passively, wittingly and unwittingly – either by simply being part of a grid or by actually assembling one… The grid becomes a potentially totalizing system with which reality (the real of experience as well as the real of the mind), another totalizing system, must endlessly play its games of elusiveness and containment, chaos and order, freedom and necessity.”

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Aveek Sen. “The Grid and More,” on Still Searching: An Online Discourse on Photography. 7th April 2012

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Meaning arises out of context – or the lack of it. Unlike the grids of the Bechers which promote multiple ways of seeing and construct narrative tension these images do not increase the photographic narrative. They are like the parrots, finches or scarab beetles in a display case at a natural history museum - part of a taxonomic classification system, where one out of a thousand is the most impressive beetle, the bird with the brightest plumage, where the composition is the most surprising. Multiples as collected here are fascinating but emerge from a slightly obsessive mind (which any collectors mind is!)

This photomontage of impressions, ground and movement blurs the history and memory embedded in each photograph. The assemblage of all these visions ranges far and wide but ultimately collapses time and space into one huge universal snapshot. As in advertising imagery the individual documentary-style images mean relatively little – it is the overall impression that impinges on the consciousness. If you watch MTV and stop to analyse the individual images in a pop video you soon acknowledge their vacuousness. The context of the singular image is lost. In this display the grid controls the photographs position relative to each other and the viewer – a compositional design matrix that has a symbolic function. The grid both decontextualises and recontextualises the floating signifier.

Richter obviously uses them as an aide-memoire. Some remind me of the folded photographs found in Francis Bacon’s studio; others Bacon’s portraits of blurred bodies; yet more, ethnographic mappings of Indigenous bodies or criminals cut out of newspapers. Others remind me of Surrealist experiments and the colour photographs the paintings of Gerhard Richter. Funny about that…

They may be the source material of a great artist but in this regimented form of prosaic knowledge they become like bugs caught in amber.

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Many thankx to the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Installation photograph of Gerhard Richter. Atlas
Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau
Photograph: David Brandt, 2012
© Gerhard Richter Archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

Gerhard Richter
Atlas. Plate 68. Photo experiment
1969
© Gerhard Richter 2011

Portrait of Gerhard Richter
1966
© Gerhard Richter, Köln 2012

“In celebration of Gerhard Richter’s 80th birthday, the Gerhard Richter Archive of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden presents the ATLAS of the artist in the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau. The ATLAS takes a prominent role in the oeuvre of Gerhard Richter. It is the basis of many of his paintings just as it is an artwork in its own right. The ATLAS consists of approximately 800 framed panels with more than 15,000 photographs, newspaper clippings, sketches and designs, which Richter had accumulated for work in his studio from the early 1960s onwards. In 1972, he ordered and arranged the collection on boards and presented it under the title ATLAS for the first time. Ever since then, he has continuously added new material. The conceptual character of the ATLAS offers unique insights into the mindset of the artist, into the development of some ideas for works as well as into the creational process of several of his paintings.

Gerhard Richter’s ATLAS merits a special place within his oeuvre as a whole. It not only forms the basis of his entire work as a painter but is also an autonomous artwork in its own right. Born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, Richter has been constantly revising and augmenting this “work in progress” for more than four decades.

ATLAS may be seen as an accompaniment, commentary and extension of the entire oeuvre of Gerhard Richter, for it also develops its own perspectives and poses its own questions. ATLAS is Richter’s reflection not only on his own work but also on the everyday world of images that he himself has documented photographically in their thousands. “I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph,” Richter wrote in 1986. This photographed, yet and seemingly inexhaustible flood of images has afforded Richter a concentrated, ready accessibility of motifs for his future works. Indeed, for some of his paintings, he has been able to draw upon old motifs in his ATLAS, some of them dating back more than a decade.

The accompanying artist’s book “ATLAS” is not just intended as a means of documenting the exhibition. Gerhard Richter sees it as an alternative presentation to the exhibited panels, one that permits an additional, different, non-linear approach to the material. By 1964, Richter had collected a vast amount of pictorial source material for his painting, first keeping it in drawers and portfolios. Five years later he began to sift through this material with a critical eye, grouping the individual photographs, reproductions and sketches into different themes and pasting them onto separate panels. Richter then soon recognized the intrinsic artistic quality of these collections of source material and, in 1972, framed the panels and exhibited them at the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title ATLAS. Meanwhile this repository of source material has grown from its original 343 panels to its present 783, with more than 8,000 individual motifs.”

Press release from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Residenzschloss Taschenberg 2
01067 Dresden Germany

Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau opening hours:

10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Mondays

The Queen’s Gallery website

Apr

Exhibition: ‘The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography’ at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, London, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: Antarctic, Antarctic exploration, Antarctic Photography, Antarctica, bravery, British Antarctic Expedition, Buckingham Palace, Captain Lawrence Oates, Captain Lawrence Oates and Siberian ponies on board Terra Nova, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Captain Scott, Elephant Island, Endurance, English artist, English photographer, exploration, Frank Hurley, Frank Hurley Sir Ernest Shackleton arrives at Elephant Island to take off marooned men, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Herbert Ponting, Herbert Ponting Captain Lawrence Oates and Siberian ponies on board 'Terra Nova', Herbert Ponting Captain Scott, Herbert Ponting Grotto in an iceberg, Herbert Ponting The ramparts of Mount Erebus, heroism, Mount Erebus, nature, Queen Alexandra, queen elizabeth ii, Scott, Scott of the Antarctic, Shackleton, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography, Siberian ponies, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Sir Ernest Shackleton arrives at Elephant Island to take off marooned men, South Pole, Terra Nova, The Heart of the Great Alone, The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, The Queen's Gallery, The ramparts of Mount Erebus, The Royal Collection, tragedy, travel, union jack, Union Jack taken by Scott to the South Pole

Exhibition dates: 21st October 2011 – 15th April 2012

Continuing my fascination with all things Antarctic, here are more photographs from the Scott and Shackleton expeditions. The photograph Captain Lawrence Oates and Siberian ponies on board ‘Terra Nova’ by Herbert Ponting (1910, see below) is simply breathtaking.

Many thankx to The Royal Collection for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Herbert Ponting
Captain Lawrence Oates and Siberian ponies on board ‘Terra Nova’
1910
© 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Frank Hurley
Sir Ernest Shackleton arrives at Elephant Island to take off marooned men
30 August 1916
© 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

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This photograph was actually taken at the time of the ‘James Caird’s’ departure on 24 April. Hurley has altered it to represent the moment of rescue, with the arrival of Shackleton on the ‘Yelcho’. The actual rescue was not photographed.

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This Union Jack was given to Scott by the recently widowed Queen Alexandra on 25 June 1910 for him to plant at the South Pole. The flag was recovered with Scott’s body and returned to the queen by his wife, Kathleen, on 12 July 1913

“The photographs of Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley may be stencilled into the collective memory after nearly a century of over-exposure. But it’s not often you get to see them away from the printed page, and they certainly bring out fresh depths and new perspectives…

It turns out to be highly instructive seeing Hurley and Ponting hung in neighbouring rooms. I’ve always taken Ponting to be somehow the lesser snapper. Hurley had the greatest photostory ever captured land in his lap when Shackleton’s ship the Endurance was trapped in ice floes and held fast for months before pressure ridges eventually crushed it like a dry autumn leaf. Like a good journalist Hurley recorded these traumas and more while also taking the chance to experiment with the strange light and baroque shapes supplied by his surroundings.

Ponting’s story was different. Four or so years earlier, and on the other side of the Antarctic land mass, he didn’t stray far from the expedition base, and indeed was left on the Terra Nova while Scott’s polar party were still out on the ice, trudging balefully towards immortality. There’s something about Ponting’s floridly unmodern moustache which sets him apart from the clean-shaven younger men in either expedition, as if he never quite left the studio behind.

But the photographs are astonishing… The story here is the unequal battle between man and ice, the castellations and ramparts of bergs dwarfing explorers with dogs and sledges placed at their foot to give a sense of scale. Ponting also has a beautiful eye for filigree detail, never more than in one picture of long spindly icicles echoing the adjacent rigging of the Terra Nova.

One of the revelations is that the originals play up the drama of Ponting’s work much more than Hurley’s, which are printed at half the size. For all the astonishing pictures – a field of ice flowers, the masts of the Endurance all but shrouded by Brobdingnagian ice clumps – the final impact of Hurley’s collection lies in the fact that they exist at all… That is partly why Ponting trumps Hurley in this show. His pictures of Scott’s men have never felt more immediate.”

Rees, Jasper. Review of “The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic Photography, Queen’s Gallery” on the Arts Desk website. Thursday, 27 October 2011 [Online] Cited 06/04/2012.

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Mount Erebus, an active volcano on Ross Island which last erupted in 2008, was first climbed in 1908 by members of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition. Ponting has contrasted the overwhelming size of the natural world against the tiny human figure pulling a sledge, in the lower left corner of the photograph.

“It is a story of heroism and bravery, and ultimately of tragedy, that has mesmerised generations. One hundred years on from their epic voyages to the very limits of the Earth, and of man’s endurance, the legends of Scott and Shackleton live on.

To mark the centenary of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, the Royal Collection brings together, for the first time, a collection of the photographs presented to King George V by the official photographers from Scott’s Terra Nova expedition of 1910-13 and Shackleton’s expedition on Endurance in 1914-16, and unique artefacts, such as the flag given to Scott by Queen Alexandra (widow of King Edward VII) and taken to the Pole.

The exhibition documents the dramatic landscapes and harsh conditions the men experienced, through the work of expedition photographers Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley. These sets of photographs are among the finest examples of the artists’ work in existence – and the men who took them play a vital part in the explorers’ stories. Highlights from Scott’s voyage include Ponting’s The ramparts of Mount Erebus, which presents the vast scale of the icescape, and the ethereal The freezing of the sea. Among the most arresting images from Hurley’s work on Shackleton’s expedition are those of the ship Endurance listing in the frozen depths and then crushed between floes.

The photographs also give insights into the men themselves. For instance, at the start of the journey Scott appears confident and relaxed, with his goggles off for the camera. In contrast, a photograph taken at the Pole shows him and his team devastated and unsmiling, knowing they had been beaten. The exhibition also records the lighter moments of expedition life, essential for teams cut off from the outside world for years at a time. On Shackleton’s expedition, a derby for the dogs was organised – with bets laid in cigarettes and chocolate. A menu for Midwinter’s Day, on 22 June 1911, shown in the accompanying exhibition publication, includes roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, ‘caviare Antarctic’ and crystallised fruits.

Antarctic adventurer David HemplemanAdams has been closely involved in the exhibition and has written an introduction to the catalogue. First given the taste for adventure by The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, he was inspired, like generations of school children, by the tales of discovery. As a South Pole veteran, the first Briton to reach the Pole solo and unsupported, he is still in awe of Scott and Shackleton’s achievements – and will return with his daughter this year to mark the centenary. David Hempleman Adams said: “We have a big psychological advantage today: We know it is possible to reach the South Pole. Nowadays you can go on Google Earth and see what’s there. Back then, it was just a big white piece of paper. Scott and Shackleton had no TVs, radios or satellite phones – they were cut off from the outside world – and in terms of equipment, the tents, skis and sledges, today, we carry about one tenth of what they carried, over the same mileage. What they achieved, with what they had, is really magnificent. This is the 100th anniversary and the legend has stood the test of time. Even in this modern world, there’s still just as much interest.”

As the photographs show, animals played an important part in the expeditions. There are portraits of the ponies and of individual sledge dogs. In his diaries, Scott describes the relationship he struck up with the badtempered husky Vida: “He became a bad wreck with his poor coat… and… I used to massage him; at first the operation was mistrusted and only continued to the accompaniment of much growling, but later he evidently grew to like the warming effect and sidled up to me whenever I came out of the hut… He is a strange beast – I imagine so unused to kindness that it took him time to appreciate it.”

Ponting also photographed wildlife, including seals, gulls and penguins. Scott writes of the moment Ponting tried to photograph killer whales and how the creatures crashed through the ice to catch him. Scott, watching but unable to help, observes, “It was possible to see their tawny head markings, their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth – by far the largest and most terrifying in the world.”

The inspirational qualities of the explorers were recognised by King George V. In his book, The Great White South, Ponting records what the Monarch said to him when he went to Buckingham Palace to show his Antarctic film: “His Majesty King George expressed to me the hope that it might be possible for every British boy to see the pictures – as the story of the Scott Expedition could not be known too widely among the youth of the nation, for it would help to promote the spirit of adventure that had made the Empire.”

Royal interest in polar exploration began with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who followed the fortunes of the early adventurers, such as Sir John Franklin and William Bradford, and it continues to this day. The Duke of Edinburgh, who has written a foreword to the exhibition catalogue, has been the patron of many of David HemplemanAdams’s expeditions and has himself crossed the Antarctic Circle. HRH The Princess Royal is Patron of the UK Antarctic Heritage Trust.”

Press release from The Royal Collection website

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This photograph of Scott, with Mount Erebus in the background, was taken at the start of the expedition. He is wearing fur gloves with an attached cord, leather boots, gaiters and thick socks

The Royal Collection
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace
London SW1A 1AA

Opening hours:
Open daily, 10.00 – 17.30

Helen Gory Galerie website

Apr

Review: ‘Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1 – 41′ by Nicola Loder at Helen Gory Galerie, Prahran, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 14th March – 7th April 2012

“Fredric Jameson wrote that in the postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentred and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is an anxiety of identity… In simulation, identity can be fluid and multiple, a signifier no longer points to a thing that is signified, and understanding is less likely to proceed through analysis than by navigation through virtual space.”

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Sherry Turkle. Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995, p.49.

I have always loved the work of Nicola Loder ever since I saw her solo exhibition Child 1-175: A Nostalgia for the Present at Stop 22 Gallery in St Kilda in 1996. This exhibition is no exception. Loder is the consummate professional, her work is as imaginative and intriguing as ever and there has been a consistent thematic development of ideas within her work over a long period of time. These ideas relate to the nature of seeing and being seen, the mapping of identity and the process of its (dis)appearance.

This latest iteration of her ongoing series Tourist (described in detail, below, in the erudite essay by Stuart Koop) again involves de/reconstructions of identity through slippages, elisions, deletions, disappearances and transformations. In Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1 – 41 the shroud-like effigies that result from Loder’s project, a reference reinforced by the muslin cloth lying over the bench in the gallery space (see the installation photographs below), are a repeated re-presentation of a lost or missing identity: the disappearance of the person in their own minds; photography’s “capture” of the original person; Loder’s deletion of this identity (I was there) to be substituted by Photoshop’s geometric algorithms; the West Bengali women’s reinterpretation of this disappearance; and the reappearance of a new energy in the colourful, embroidered reinterpretations. I have very much a feeling of a spiritual energy in this last embodiment – think of the link between death and the spirit (as in the Shroud of Turin),

The images have multiple narratives and are already textualized but Loder disrupts this marking, the continual reiteration of norms by weaving a lack of fixity into her objects. In her reconceptualisations of space and matter Loder redefines the significations of the body in the fold of inscription, through a process of materialisation. But this materialisation, like the image seared into the fabric of the Shroud of Turin, still somehow eludes us. This is what makes this work so tantalising…

This interweaving of texts culminates in the body inscribed on another plane existing in, as Loder herself describes it, a “de-constructed non-space somewhere between image, imagination, identity, language and being,” which, as Stuart Koop observes, “is… not a removal or deletion but a reconfiguration beyond verisimilitude, beyond our appearance to others and ourselves.” This is the navigation through a virtual space that Sherry Turkle posits in the quotation at the top of the posting, where the self is decentred and identity is fluid and multiple.

Loder’s exquisitely sensuous description of disappearance allows us to see the phenomenal word afresh. I look forward with a sense of anticipation to the next voyage of discovery the artist will take me on.

Dr Marcus Bunyan for the Art Blart blog

Many thankx to Nicola Loder, Stuart Koop and Helen Gorie Galerie for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1 – 41 by Nicola Loder, installation photograph at Helen Gorie Galerie

West Bengali woman embroidering the Disappearances

“Photographer Nicola Loder explores the way in which people see.

The purpose of photography is largely to make things visible. Inspired in part by her experiences teaching blind children photography, Loder reverses photography’s function using it instead to capture objects and experiences that aren’t visible. She embraces Photoshop but counters its typical role of improving clarity and focus, rather using it to collapse images into layers of pattern and colour.

‘Tourist #5: disappearing project 1 – 40′ is a multi-faceted project that teases out notions of seeing and being seen and the role of creator as truth teller. Loder sent out a flyer inviting people who had disappeared to send her a full-length image of themselves with a written description of what happened when they disappeared. The stories and images she received range from out of body near death experiences to the mundane act of sleeping, each shedding light on what people identify as disappearing. Loder then manipulated the submitted images into highly colorful digital patterns, resonant of her earlier photographic work. She took the reworked images to India where they were embroidered onto muslin by local women in West Bengal. The result is beautiful hand-embroidered works that reflect the women’s personal interpretations of the images and incorporate their rich history, cultural patterns and iconography.

“The obliterated, atomized, reconfigured portraits ‘rematerialise’ as tapestries executed by women from a small rural village, at the margins of Indian society, who – but for NGOs dedicated to overcome disadvantage, in this case Street Survivors empowering rural women through skills development – are largely invisible to their communities, to politicians, as well as their castes.

Of course, Loder has paid these women, a means of recognizing and honoring their work, a means of bringing them into view, at the margins of economy, welfare and community. Indeed, she has taken their portraits and documented them at work, and it’s a startling contrast. Our middle-class stories, anxieties and interests ending up in the careful hands of these women in colourful saris, sitting and working together, our (largely) passing concerns darned into the muslin cloth in their laps, our own saturated photographic hues indistinguishable from the bright chaos of folded cloth and pleated skirts, with their nimble fingers tracing our desires and cares in bright lurid threads.” (Stuart Koops, 2012)

For Loder India is a central tenet of the project given its multiple associations with disappearing, from the focus on meditation to the burning of bodies at the Ghats in Varanasi, the final act of disappearing. On a personal level Loder lived in Calcutta as a child and views her experience of leaving India as another act of disappearing: both her Indian Ayah (Moti) and India physically disappeared from her life. Involving the women from her Ayah’s village is Loder’s reflection on and tribute to those experiences of disappearing.”

Press release from Helen Gorie Galerie website

Nicola Loder
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 11)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm

Nicola Loder
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 16)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm

Catalogue Essay by Stuart Koops

“Nicola Loder has facilitated childrens’ photography projects before, on several occasions working with marginalized groups, including kids from low socio-economic and non-English speaking schools and kids from the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind. Indeed she chose these groups with purpose, to consider the role of photography in highlighting certain communities most often occluded on the basis of an incapacity – making the invisible visible, making those who cannot see visible to us, giving those without the means of expression a language we can understand – in many ways, reversing the polarity of familiar concepts, disrupting our conventional understanding.

In teaching blind kids especially, Nicola told me she felt like she was disappearing. Not surprising, I guess, when you try to describe the camera, the lens, optics, focus, framing, composition. When your identity or your role as a photographer dissipates along with the explanatory power of these foundation terms and concepts. And practical demonstrations must at first seem frustratingly pointless.

That profound experience seems to have led Loder to use photography in reverse, as the means to decompose images; to utilize Photoshop’s algorithms, not to augment or highlight certain attributes in her portraits she ultimately took of these kids, but return images to an undifferentiated field of static, the digital correlate to the original photochemical chaos, the entropy of raw silver halides, which the ‘irrefutable sun’ miraculously sorts into resemblance. In short, to unphotograph the kids somehow, commensurate with their disability and her own disappearance in the workshops.

But it’s not just Loder who has had the experience of disappearing. It’s a profound sensation shared by many and for different reasons, and Loder has collected different accounts of the experience which illustrate the further registers in which one may ‘disappear’; from spiritual attainment in transcending physical reality to out of body transcendental near-death experiences, from relief at escaping a difficult situation, to feelings of terror as a child abandoned, or worse, abducted, from the social isolation and alienation of teenagers and adults, to a freedom or liberation from social constraint and physical containment, wanting to leave behind an unhappy circumstance or just wanting to be magically, wonderfully invisible.

Practically speaking, there’s considerable interest in – and information on – how to disappear, especially in America. In 2008 artist Seth Price published How to Disappear from America, excerpted text from found sectarian tracts, paranoid rants and helpful DIY tips to assist anyone wishing to get off the grid without a trace (burn your credit cards, dump your car, hide your tracks, grow your own, etc) including great suggestions about where to go (motorcycle hangouts, punk rocks groups, new age dance studios, soup kitchens, churches, and homeless shelters).

But Loder’s more interested in the personal, individual experience of disappearing. She asked for photo-portraits to accompany people’s descriptions of disappearing, from which she has seemingly excised each subject, using Photoshop as she did before with the blind kids, leaving a whorl of digital effect in the vacant space within their outline, set in high relief against a lounge-room, or a yard, or other family members. Yet on closer inspection this is perhaps a matter of transformation, since ‘disappearing’ may be very different from ‘deletion’.

In Photoshop we are each just so much chroma, luma and shape. A touch of the magic wand and we are separated from the rest of our lives, ‘lassooed’, a godly power to designate liberated from special-effects cinema by the Knoll brothers in 1988 and given to every geek with a Mac II. Since when it’s just too easy to be deleted; two clicks and we’re in the trash.

But in Loder’s work our data is recast, colour intensified, details blurred, outlines softened, curves modified, screens overlaid and so it seems Photoshop’s myriad algorithms – set against their intended technical imperative to optimise appearances – might provide a metaphor for our disappearing, which is indeed not a removal or deletion but a reconfiguration beyond verisimilitude, beyond our appearance to others and ourselves. And while we might lose visual coherence as an image, we are inscribed upon another plane altogether, one at odds with photographic realism, and which Loder describes as a “de-constructed non-space somewhere between image, imagination, identity, language and being.” Like the shimmering dissipation of Kirk on the teleporter’s deck in Star Trek, these subjects are transported to another realm, different orders of reality merging into a new volatile blend. Perhaps it’s a higher plane too where all souls mingle and coalesce as either zeros or ones, a digital afterlife in which everything is equivalent and a new digital equanimity prevails.”

Stuart Koops 2012

Nicola Loder
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 8)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm

Nicola Loder
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 17)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm

Nicola Loder
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 18)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm

West Bengali women embroidering the Disappearances

Helen Gory Galerie
25, St. Edmonds Road,
Prahran, Vic 3181

Opening hours:
Wed – Fri 11 – 5pm
Sat 10 – 4pm

Nicola Loder website