Art Blart

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

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographs’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan 1 Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, portrait, reality, space, street photography, surrealism and time
Tags: American scene, Atget, Berenice Abbott, Berenice Abbott Blossom Restaurant, Berenice Abbott Broadway to the Battery, Berenice Abbott Changing New York, Berenice Abbott Flat Iron Building, Berenice Abbott Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, Berenice Abbott Happy's Refreshment Stand, Berenice Abbott Miner, Berenice Abbott Miner Greenview, Berenice Abbott New York Stock Exchange, Berenice Abbott Route 1, Berenice Abbott Sunoco Station, Berenice Abbott Treasury Building, Berenice Abbott Triborough Bridge, Blossom Restaurant 103 Bowery, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Broadway to the Battery, Changing New York, Daytona Beach, demolition, Elizabeth McCausland, Eugene Atget, Farm Security Administration, Flat Iron Building Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Florida, FSA, Gaëlle Morel, gelatin silver print, Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, Happy's Refreshment Stand, Jeu de Paume, Man Ray, Manhattan, modernism, modernity, Museum of Modern Art, New Deal, New Jersey, New Vision, New Vision aesthetic, New York City, New York Stock Exchange, New York World's Fair, Rayogram, reconstruction, Sunoco Station Trenton New Jersey, the city, Treasury Building New York City, Trenton, Triborough Bridge, Triborough Bridge East 125th Street Approach, urban environments, vanishing instant, West Virginia

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 29th April 2012

It is not her portraits or the road trip photographs, nor her scientific work for which Berenice Abbott will be remembered. Firstly, she will always be remembered as the person who photographed Eugene Atget in 1927 just before he died and who bought the remainder of his negatives (after the French government had bought over 2,000 in 1920 and another 2,000 had been sold after his death). She then tirelessly promoted Atget’s work helping him gain international recognition until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Secondly, she is remembered for her magnificent photographs of New York City and its urban environs, photographs that show the influence of Atget in their attention to detail and understanding of the placement of the camera, and imaging of old and new parts of the city (much as Atget had photographed old Paris before it was destroyed). However, these photographs are uniquely her own, with their modernist New Vision aesthetic, bold perspectives and use of deep chiaroscuro to enhance form within the photograph. Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-39) eventually consisted of 305 photographs that document the buildings of Manhattan, some of which are now destroyed. As the text on Wikipedia insightfully notes:

“Abbott’s project was primarily a sociological study imbedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as “fantastic” contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).”

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In the text below Gaëlle Morel observes, “Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.”

While Abbott’s photographs are definitely modernist in nature I believe that today they can also be seen as deeply nostalgic, emerging as they do in the period after the Great Depression when the economy was on the move again, a peaceful time before the oncoming armageddon of the Second World War, closely followed by the fear of nuclear annihilation and the threat of communist indoctrination. They are timeless portraits of a de/reconstructed city. The images seem to float in the air, breathe in the shadows. This is the disappearance of the moment into the enigma of past, present, future – where the photograph becomes eternal, where the best work of both Atget and Abbott resides.

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

Berenice Abbott
New York Stock Exchange, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
24 x 19 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Treasury Building, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
51 x 40.5 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Architecture

“The tempo of the city is not that of eternity, nor that of time, but that of the ephemeral. That is why recording it is so important, in both documentary and artistic terms.”

“All the photographs of New York took a long time to make, because the camera had to be carefully positioned. There is nothing fortuitous about these photographs.”

The exhibition features a substantial collection from Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-39). Commissioned by the Roosevelt administration as part of its response to the nationwide economic crisis, Abbott saw this piece of work as both a way of documenting the City and as a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs taken by Abbott are on show here, along with various documents providing insight into the background of this major photographic undertaking, including posters and views of the exhibition organized by the Museum of the City of New York in 1937, sketches and historical notes made by the team of journalists working with Abbott on the project, and proofs and dummies of the layout made by the photographer before she started work.

Abbott homes in on the contrasts between old and new elements in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publisher, E.P. Dutton, offered to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text by the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and staunch supporter. Going against the women’s original ideas for an art book, Dutton produced a more standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only informative entries about the buildings in the pictures.

In the exhibition, this set of architectural photographs is rounded out by a selection of pictures of vernacular architecture taken by Abbott during a journey in the southern states of the US in the 1930s and when she was travelling along Route 1 in the 1950s. Here, portraits of farmers and wooden houses alternate with pictures of streets and local events.

Berenice Abbott
Triborough Bridge, East 125th Street Approach, New York City, June 29, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 19 cm
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Broadway to the Battery, New York City, May 4, 1938
1938
Gelatin silver print
17.5 x 24 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Museum Purchase with funds from the Mrs. Elon Hooker Acquisition Fund
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Flat Iron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, New York City
1938
Gelatin silver print
101.5 x 76 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott Petit Journal

With over 120 photographs, plus a selection of books and documents never shown before, this is the first exhibition in France to cover the many different facets of the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), who is also famous for her international advocacy of Eugène Atget. She came to Paris in 1921 where she learnt her craft from Man Ray before opening her own studio and embarking on a successful career as a portraitist. Returning to New York City in 1929, she conceived what remains her best‑known project, Changing New York (1935-39). This was financed by the Works Progress Administration as part of its response to the economic crisis sweeping the country. The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition presents a previously unseen selection of these images) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.” Furthermore, in the 1950s, she also worked on a set of images for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) designed to illustrate the principles of mechanics and light for educational purposes.

A committed member of the avant‑garde from the early 1920s, and a staunch opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, Abbott spent the whole of her career exploring the limits and nature of documentary photography and photographic realism. This exhibition shows the rich array of her interests and conveys both the unity and diversity of her work.

Portraits

Berenice Abbott moved to New York City in the early 1920s and went about becoming a sculptor. Mixing in the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, she met writers and artists such as Djuna Barnes, Sadakichi Hartmann and Marcel Duchamp. She also posed for Man Ray. Economic hardship at home and the allure of what then seemed the cultural Eldorado of Europe impelled several of these artists to try their luck in Paris, and Abbott herself joined this group of American expatriates in 1921.

In 1923 she became the assistant of Man Ray, who had opened a portrait studio shortly after his arrival in France in 1921. While a fair portion of the studio’s clients were American tourists, Abbott found herself at the heart of the avant-garde scene – especially that of the Surrealists. Between 1923 and 1926 she thus learnt about darkroom techniques and portrait photography while at the same time picking up a broader intellectual and artistic education. She produced her portraits in Man Ray’s studio before opening her own in 1926. Success soon followed. Her clientele was a mixture of French cultural figures and American expatriates, of bourgeois, bohemians and literary types. Her portraits were on occasion manifestly influenced by Surrealism, and more generally show an interest in masquerade, play and disguise, but sometimes even in their use of overprinting and distortion.

The female models express a kind of sexual ambiguity, notably by their masculine haircut or clothes, deliberately exuding a sense of uncertainty with regard to their identity. In composing her portraits, Abbott developed a distinctive aesthetic, far removed from the usual commercial conventions. The absence of a set, with the background usually no more than a plain wall, helped to focus on the sitter and their posture, the position of their body and their facial expression. The use of a tripod and long-focus lenses placed at eye-height allowed her to avoid distorsions and thus heighten the physical presence of the models. In early 1929 Abbott left Paris for New York City. Back in America she continued with the same activities, opening a new portrait studio and taking part in exhibitions of modernist photography, while also promoting the work of Eugène Atget, having bought part of his estate in 1928.

New York City

In the early 1930s, Abbott set about her project for a great documentary portrait of the City of New York, but had no luck when she approached institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society for funding. She assembled her first efforts in an album (eight pages of which are exhibited here) in order to convey the scale of her ambitious undertaking, and in 1934 exhibited her photographs of the City at the Museum of the City of New York in the hope of attracting sponsors. In 1935, support was at last forthcoming from the Federal Art Project, a programme set up to aid artists by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal; she now had the support of a team of researchers who produced an information pack with text and drawings to accompany each image. Entitled Changing New York, she conceived this commission as both a vast documentary record of the City and a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs constituting this project have been selected for the exhibition. These are accompanied by documents – a poster, exhibition views, sketches and historical notes, proofs, pages from the preparatory album and original editions – that help to convey the concerns and ambitions behind this major photographic undertaking.

Abbott focused on the contrasts and links between old and new in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “vanishing instant” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

The upshot of all this work was the publication of a book, Changing New York, in 1939. But there was considerable tension between the publisher, whose concerns were commercial, and the photographer, with her artistic ambitions. In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publishing house E.P. Dutton proposed to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text from the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and unfailing supporter. Straying far from the project originally envisaged by the two women, Dutton changed the presentation of the photographs and produced what was a standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only information about the buildings in the pictures.

The “American scene”

This set of architectural images is completed by a selection of vernacular photographs. In the summer of 1935, Berenice Abbott went on a road trip down to the Southern US in order to create a portrait of a rural world in crisis. Choosing the kind of documentary style that would be the hallmark of the photographic survey launched by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) that same year, she focused on the modest wooden houses and the farmers. Driving around these states with Elizabeth McCausland, Abbott took some two hundred photographs which the two women saw as part of an ambitious photographic portrait of America in book form, although in the end this was never published. A similar fate befell Abbott’s piece on the small towns and villages along Route 1, which she travelled in 1954. Covering approximately 6,500 kilometres as she followed this road along the East Coast of the US, she took some 2,400 photographs, taking in stalls, shops, portraits of farmers, diners and bars and dance halls. Her photography alternated between the documentary aesthetic and Street Photography. With Route 1, Abbott continued to pursue her ambition of representing the whole of the “American scene.”

Science

Abbott started photographing scientific phenomena in 1939. In 1944 she was recruited by the journal Science Illustrated, where she published some of her own pictures, as head of its photography department. Abbott took a committed, pedagogical approach, seeing her images as a vital bridge between modern science and the general public. In 1957, as a result of the anxiety about national science stirred by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik into outer space, at the height of the Cold War, the National Science Foundation set up a Physical Science Study Committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its role was to develop new textbooks for the teaching of science in schools and to use innovative photographs to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics. Abbott was hired by MIT to produce photographs for the popularisation and teaching of the sciences. Using abstract forms to visually express complex mechanical concepts and invisible mechanical laws, she used black grounds to reveal principles such as gravity and light waves. The exhibition features a score of Abbott’s scientific and experimental images, as well as some of the books for which they were used. Harking back to the experiments of the avant-gardes, and in particular the rayogram technique, she was able to produce visually attractive and surprising images that were also rich in discovery, thus combining documentary information with a sense of wonder.”

Text by Gaëlle Morel, curator of the exhibition, on the Jeu de Paume website

Berenice Abbott
Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, New York City, October 24, 1935
1935
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Sunoco Station, Trenton, New Jersey
1954
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, 6 Centre Market Place and 240 Centre Street, New York City, February 4, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5 cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Happy’s Refreshment Stand, Daytona Beach, Florida
1954
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 28 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott
Miner, Greenview, West Virginia
1935
Gelatin silver print
25 x 19 cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
T: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
Tuesday: 12:00 – 21:00
Wednesday – Friday: 12:00 – 19:00
Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 – 19:00
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

Moderna Museet Malmö website

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: The Camera as a Mirror’ at the Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, Cindy Sherman, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography and time
Tags: African artists, African photographers, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Gianni Agnelli, Andy Warhol John Chamberlain and Lorraine, Andy Warhol Ladies and Gentlemen, Andy Warhol Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross), Bamako, Bangui, camera, Central African Republic, Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #56, Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Stills, Elina Brotherus, Elina Brotherus Honeymoon, Francesco Vezzoli, Francesco Vezzoli Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover, Gianni Agnelli, identity, John Chamberlain and Lorraine, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross), Ladies and Gentlemen: The Camera as a Mirror, Mali, Malmo, manipulations, masquerades, mirror, Moderna Museet, Patti Smith, performativity, photographic studio, photography studio, polaroid, Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover, portrait photography, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Mapplethorpe Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe Self Portrait, Salvador Dalí, Samuel Fosso, Samuel Fosso Années 70, Samuel Fosso from the series Années 70, sexuality, Seydou Keïta, Seydou Keïta Untitled #420, studio, studio photography, Sweden, the art of portrait photography, The Camera as Mirror, the stage, Untitled Film Still #56, Untitled Film Stills, Wilhelmina Ross

Exhibition dates: 18th February 2012 – 22nd April 2012

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

Cindy Sherman
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Samuel Fosso
Sans titre. De la série Années 70
1970-1980
© Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Robert Mapplethorpe
Patti Smith
1979
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe
Self Portrait
1980
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Seydou Keïta
Untitled #419
1950-1952
© Seydou Keïta Foundation, Bamaho, Mali

Seydou Keïta
Untitled #420
1950-1952
© Seydou Keïta Foundation, Bamaho, Mali

“This spring we will be showing more than forty photographs from the period 1950-90 taken by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Moffatt, and Elina Brotherus. The exhibition focuses on the art of portrait photography and how the artist in his or her studio creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.

Moderna Museet’s collection of photography is among the foremost in Europe, it includes some of the most prominent figures in the history of photography. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe are all big names in photography, artists whose work often revolves around concepts of identity, sexuality, and performativity. The photography studio is a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested. It therefore problematizes the idea that a portrait is meant to convey some truth about the subject’s inner life. How do we distinguish a staged scene from reality? Is it even possible to make such a distinction? How free are we to form our own identity? If it’s a matter of choosing a role, what roles are available to us?

Andy Warhol’s Polaroid pictures, whose title, Ladies and Gentlemen, has also provided the name for the exhibition, are examples of his interest in – or rather his obsession with – celebrities. From industrial magnates to movie stars, from rock musicians to the “superstar” friends who hung out around the Factory, his fabled studio. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are instead classically composed – stylized and aesthetically formed. In the controlled environment and lighting of the photo studio, he strives not for realism but for beauty. Here role-play becomes a part of the picture’s constructed character.

In Cindy Sherman’s suite of images called Untitled Film Stills (1977-80), she plays with film clichés. The scenes and characters in her photographs seem familiar, but in fact it’s always Sherman herself we see in the leading role. Using the camera as a mirror, she takes on and explores various roles. It’s a game of trying on identities that is familiar to teenagers in particular the world over, a game we play in an attempt to find ourselves, or rather to construct an individual identity. One of the many ways in which Sherman’s pictures have been interpreted is as a feminist critique of the limited number of roles available to women.

This exhibition also presents several works by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Samuel Fosso, studio photographers who work primarily with portrait photography. Keïta’s studio was next-door to a movie theater in Bamako, the capitol city of Mali. Sidibé takes pictures not just in his studio but also at weddings and other parties. His photographs from Bamako in the 1960s reflect the great hope that came with liberation from French colonial power. Fosso opened his studio in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, when he was still a teenager. He is best known for a series of self-portraits in which he dons a variety of outfits to assume different roles.”

Press release from the Moderna Museet website

Elina Brotherus
Honeymoon (detail)
1997
© Elina Brotherus

Francesco Vezzoli
Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover (Before & After Salvador Dalí)
2009
© Francesco Vezzoli/BUS 2012

Andy Warhol
Gianni Agnelli
1972
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

Andy Warhol
John Chamberlain and Lorraine
1978
© Andy Warhol/BUS2012

Andy Warhol
Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross)
1974
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Thursday - Sunday 11-18
Wednesday 11-21
Mondays closed

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation website

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson / Paul Strand, Mexico 1932 – 1934′ at HCB Foundation, Paris

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 11th January – 22nd April 2012

“The American’s immobility contrasts with [the] Frenchman’s fluidity.”

Press releases should be very careful when making such sweeping generalisations. Personally I find the photographs of Cartier-Bresson the more static (both physical and psychological) of the two photographers. The compartmentalisation of space in Bresson’s photographs – the use of diagonals and verticals – is more fixed than in the sensuous Strand, the emotions more didactic and formalised even as they seek the spontaneity of photojournalism. The placement of the two figures in Strand’s Men of Santa Ana (1933, below) is superlative, with the central dividing column and combination of tones and textures, father and son(?), stares and postures. Cartier-Bresson’s Prostitute (1934, below) is simpler in pose and purpose but we must remember this was a twenty-six year old photographer still finding his voice in the world, whereas Strand was a much older person and a more experienced photographer.

Many thankx to the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Mexico
1934
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Natcho Aguirre, Santa Clara, Mexico
1934
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Paul Strand
Nets, Michoacan
1933
© Paul Strand

Bringing together such different works by two great masters in the history of photography is not self-evident. There are many points of convergence, but their styles are profoundly different. The American’s immobility contrasts with Frenchman’s fluidity. They both travelled to Mexico during the same period and they crossed paths in New York in 1935 when they joined the political filmmakers’ group Nykino (which later became Frontier Films) in order to explore filmmaking at a critical point in their respective careers.

In autumn 1932, Paul Strand (1890-1976) set out for Mexico by car at the invitation of the Mexican Ministry of Education. He exhibited his photographs there and had the pleasure of witnessing the popular success of his images. It was in the course of working in the streets of Mexico, a practice which he had abandoned for many years, that Strand took up a different documentary style. At that point, he received a proposal to make a series of films. In 1934, he shot Redes (released in English as The Wave), a ‘docu-fiction’ about the oppression of the fishermen in the village of Alvarado. The film was screened in Mexico in 1936, and subsequently in the United States and France. In 1950, fleeing the climate of McCarthyism in the United States, he came to France and ultimately settled in the village of Orgeval, where he remained until the end of his life.

In 1934, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), who was eighteen years younger than Strand, signed up for a French ethnographic mission which was supposed to take him to Argentina. In the end, the mission was suspended and the twenty-six-year-old photographer spent a year in Mexico, literally fascinated by the country. He worked for several newspapers there, moved in intellectual and artistic circles together with his sister and worried about his future. In March 1935, he exhibited his work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes with Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The local press reacted favourably and the young Frenchman contacted New York art dealer Julien Levy – who had already exhibited him in 1933 – to suggest a show of his recent work. He left Mexico with the firm intention of becoming a filmmaker and thus headed straight for the Nykino group. Strand’s prints come from various international collections; those of Cartier-Bresson belong to the Fondation HCB archives.”

Press release from the HCB Foundation website

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Prostitute, Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico
1934
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Paul Strand
Men of Santa Ana, Lake Patzcuaro Michoacan
1933
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand
Woman of Alvarado, Veracruz
1933
© Paul Strand

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Mexico
1934
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation
90, Avenue du Maine, 48, rue de l’Ouest

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 1pm – 6.30pm
Saturday 11am – 6.45pm
Late night Wednesdays until 8.30pm
Closed on Mondays and between the exhibitions

Kunstmuseum Basel website

Apr

Exhibition: ‘Karlheinz Weinberger: Intimate Stranger’ at Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum for Gegenwartskunst

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 21st January – 15th April 2012

Another relatively unknown artist, people whose work I like promoting on this blog. I certainly had never heard of this photographer. A self-taught part-time photographer who worked as a warehouseman most of his life, Weinberger published photographs in the homosexual magazine “Der Kreis,” the same early gay magazine that George Platt Lynes submitted photographs to in the last stages of his life.

While their might seem to be a dichotomy between the desirous photographs of male youth and the city toughs and “rowdies” gay men have always been drawn to rough trade: from Oscar Wilde who was more sexually drawn towards the swarthy young rough trade to contemporary iconography of gay skinheads and punks, still a prevalent culture in London for example. Tattoos, shaved heads, braces, Docs – in Weinberger’s case rockabillies. Notice how in the photograph of the male reclining with candlestick, the form of the candlestick mimics the spidery tattoo on the hand in the photograph above. Notice also how the crouching nude lad looks almost identical to the lad in the photograph below, with his hands thrust into his pockets emphasising the crutch area. And the earlier crutch photograph with the mating of Elvis and Vince over a skull and cross bones which has delicious, subversive homosocial overtones. Toughs or not, there is always the desire for the dangerous and different.

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

Karlheinz Weinberger
Hardau, Zürich
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.7 x 58 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Knabenschiessen, Albisgütli, Zürich
1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50.5 x 60.5 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Fisherman with Hut, Sicily
ca. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
18.5 x 24 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Drei zusammen (three together)
ca. 1965
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
50 x 53.5 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Untitled, Zürich
ca. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
23.8 x 30.4 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

The exhibition presents the rarely shown work of the photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921–2006). Together with magazines and a selection of vintage apparel, the pictures document a youth culture in Zurich that emerged after World War II whose members sought to subvert contemporary notions of “Swiss correctness.”

Weinberger spent the largest part of his life working as a warehouseman for Siemens-Albis in Zurich. In his free time, he was a self-taught photographer, portraying his lovers and people he met in the street. From the late 1940s on, he frequently published his pictures in “Der Kreis,” a homosexual magazine produced in Zurich from 1943 until 1967 that garnered international attention, pseudonymously signing his work as “Jim.” In 1958, he launched a major project for which he would photograph a group of teenagers, the city’s so-called “Halbstarke,” over an extended period of time. Weinberger’s unfailingly respectful approach allowed him to capture the non-conformism of these “rowdies” with regard to social convention and their play with stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, most readily evident in the way they dressed.

Wearing embroidered denim jackets and oversized belt buckles adorned with the likenesses of idols such as Elvis or James Dean, Weinberger’s adolescent subjects present themselves to his camera in public settings like members of a gang. Photographs such as those taken at the Knabenschiessen, a target shooting competition held at Zurich’s Albisgüetli, show them sprawling on the ground between fairground stalls and compact vans, illustrating the “Halbstarke”‘s refusal to fit in with the traditions surrounding this Zurich folk festival. In addition to the photographs in public settings, Weinberger also took pictures in the improvised studio in his living room. Scantily clad, some of his subjects, mostly young men, strike confident poses showing off their denim shorts and hats, while others cower, their eyes glancing at the camera with a vulnerable expression. Weinberger’s role is that of an Intimate Stranger: he records the attitudes of a generation and its marginal social position in unvarnished pictures and develops the photographs capturing the objects of his fascination in his own photo laboratory.

In an oeuvre that spanned many years, Weinberger portrayed what lay behind the curtains of 1960s bourgeois Switzerland, finding ways to document deviancy without ever putting his protagonists on display.”

Press release from the Kunstmuseum Basel website

Karlheinz Weinberger
Untitled
ca. 1969
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30.4 x 23.8 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Untitled
ca. 1961
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
24 x 18 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Untitled
ca. 1960
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
39 x 29 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Zürich am Limmatquai
1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
30 x 24 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Karlheinz Weinberger
Milchbuck, Zürich
ca. 1962
Schwarz-Weiss Fotografie
60.5 x 49 cm
Courtesy The Estate of Karlheinz Weinberger in care of Patrik Schedler, Zürich

Kunstmuseum Basel
St. Alban-Graben 16
CH-4010 Basel
T: 0041 (0)61 206 62 62

Opening hours:
Tue – Sun 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Closed on Monday

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography and time
Tags: African American artist, African-Americans, American newspapers, architecture, arts, Belmar Gardens, black newsweekly, black urban community, Carnegie Museum of Art, cars, Charles "Teenie" Harris, Charles "Teenie" Harris holding camera and standing in front of Flash Circulation office, civil rights, Construction site with bulldozer, Flash Circulation office, Golden Gloves, Group portrait of eight male boxers possibly Golden Gloves contenders, Group portrait of women wearing church choir robes, Hill District, Homestead Grays, Jackie Robinson, Man lying with arms crossed and ferns on his lap, nature, Negro League baseball team, Negro League baseball teams, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh African American community, Pittsburgh Courier, Pittsburgh Crawfords, Roberto Clemente, Rock Springs Park, storytelling, Teenie Harris, Teenie Harris Archive, Teenie Harris Construction site with bulldozer, Teenie Harris Deserted Alley, Teenie Harris Group portrait of eight male boxers, Teenie Harris Group portrait of two women and two men, Teenie Harris Group portrait of women wearing church choir robes, Teenie Harris Large two story home with attic, Teenie Harris Man lying with arms crossed and ferns on his lap, Teenie Harris Photographer, Teenie Harris Photographer: An American Story, Teenie Harris Photographer: Image Memory History, Teenie Harris Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs, Teenie Harris Woman wearing one-piece skirted bathing suit, Teenie Harris Wooden roller coaster, Teenie Harris Young men playing sandlot baseball, The Rise and Fall of the Crawford Grill, Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs, Urban Landscapes, We the People project, Woman wearing one-piece skirted bathing suit, World War II, Young men playing sandlot baseball

Mar

Exhibition: ‘Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 29th October 2011 – 7th April 2012

What an astonishing photographer this man was. These photographs are a revelation. African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”

While Harris is most famous for depicting an innovative and thriving black urban community – daily life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District – it is the less figurative, more abstract urban landscape work that I am interested in here. Hence I have put four outstanding photographs that I picked out from the Archive at the top of the posting.

Earlier photographs of the city from the 1940s, such as Large two story home with attic, porch, double entryway, and yard, with young child on steps alone, next to smaller two story home with porches on both stories (c. 1940-45, below) have a touch of Walker Evans about them. Note how in this photograph the eve of the large two story home roof touches the top of the negative (allowing an exit for the eye at the top of the image), beautifully balanced on the left-hand side by the intrusion of the roof of another out of frame building and its shadow cast on the ground. The spatial separation between this roof and the porch of the smaller two story home is critical, as is the punctum of the child standing on the stoop. There are beautiful spaces in this photograph, as the eye plays across its surface, taking in form and detail, light and shade, eventually escaping down the right hand side of the building to the sky beyond.

It is only when we get to the 1950s that Harris really seems to hit his straps in these photographs of the urban landscape. Personally, I can’t remember any other photographs like them. By this time he has developed his own signature, his own voice. And what a voice it is!

In the three remaining photographs at the top of the posting there is a conciseness to his vision of the world, a spatial spareness, even sparseness that is very eloquent. In Construction site with bulldozer (c. 1954, below), possibly a photograph of the site of Belmar Gardens, Pittsburgh’s first black-owned housing cooperative, the landscape is shot from below up a slight incline, bookended with raised bank at left and car at right framing the image plane and holding it together. But it is the space around the central figures as they look off into the distance that is so magical – the blackened, textural ground playing off the cloudless sky with single tree at left. That space in the foreground, between the bottom of the image and the figures is tensioned so well with the distance between the figures and the top edge of the negative: Harris has an intimate understanding of what he wants to achieve in this image – spatially and narratively. The hope of the future.

The same can be said for Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs (c. 1958, below). Again, there is a spareness to his rendition of space and a complexity to his imaging of tone. It is almost like there is a dividing line between night and day, between the city in snow and the city in darkness, the ying yang of existence. Observe the light car is in darkness and the dark car in light; the dark trees, the light telegraph post; the space between the cars which no car could ever fit through; and the smallness of the child walking down the street. Incredible. Again, there is a openness to Harris’ rendition of space in Young men playing sandlot baseball with steel mill in background (c. 1955, below). Let your eyes soak in the open sky; the verticals of dark chimneys, left and light chimneys, right; the building at left perched atop the embankment; the composition of the figures across the middle of the image, reminiscent of a piece of music; the open space of the baseball sandlot at the bottom of the photograph with faint white line delineation and figure at right holding up the edge of the image. This is a master at work.

In this mature style, Harris has no need to fill space with an urban mass or congeries. These are spaces that matter, spaces of matter but these spaces are not empty, negative spaces, but active, fluid spaces, the space of possibilities. He understands what he wants to say so well, he is so confident of his previsualisation of the urban spaces of the city they become uniquely his own – open, engaging, optimistic. This is his voice, his gift, his legacy to the world – for me, not so much the portraits of Afro-American culture, but the spaces of the city as a metaphor for change within that culture. His reading of the landscape is his unique field of vision: in the stillness of these photographs time no longer passes, for the author and for the viewer. His images transcend place and, as such, like Atget before him, he deserves to be recognised as an artist who captured a changing world. Further research on this aspect of his art would seem appropriate.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Download the Book: Teenie Harris Photographer: Image, Memory, History (15.44Mb pdf) by Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco, and Joe Trotter with an introduction by Deborah Willis. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

I am most grateful to Tey Stiteler for allowing me to pick the photographs I wanted for this posting. This help was crucial as I wanted to talk about the less figurative work in the Teenie Harris Archive. Many thankx to the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Teenie Harris Archive for allowing me to publish the photographs and book pdf in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Teenie Harris
Construction site with bulldozer, two men, including one in front holding child, large tank with hose, and car on right, possibly in construction site of Belmar Gardens
c. 1954
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs, and small child on sidewalk of tree lined street with automobiles
c. 1958
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Young men playing sandlot baseball with steel mill in background
c. 1955
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Large two story home with attic, porch, double entryway, and yard, with young child on steps alone, next to smaller two story home with porches on both stories
c. 1940-1945
© Carnegie Museum of Art

“Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story, the first major retrospective exhibition of the work and legacy of African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, will be on view at Carnegie Museum of Art from October 29, 2011, to April 7, 2012.

The groundbreaking exhibition will celebrate the artist/photographer whose work is considered one of the most complete portraits anywhere of 20th-century African American experience. Large-scale, themed photographic projections of nearly 1,000 of Teenie Harris’s greatest images accompanied by an original jazz soundtrack will generate an immersive experience in the exhibition’s opening gallery. Subsequent galleries will present a chronological display of these photographs at a conventional scale, and give visitor access to the more than 73,000 catalogued and digitized images in the museum’s Teenie Harris Archive. The exhibition will offer an examination of Harris’s working process and artistry, and audio commentary on the man and his work by the people who knew him. In addition, the photographs and many of these materials will be accessible on Carnegie Museum of Art’s website.

“Since 2001, our museum has been the repository of the Teenie Harris Archive. This exhibition marks the culmination of a long effort to preserve and document an extensive collection of historically and artistically important images,” says Lynn Zelevansky, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art. “We are honored to present this retrospective of a photographer whose body of work gives so much to us.”

During his 40-year career as freelance and staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers, Teenie Harris (1908 – 1998) produced more than 80,000 images of Pittsburgh’s African American community. The photographs, taken from the 1930s to the 1970s, capture a period of momentous change for black Americans. His subjects ranged from the everyday lives of ordinary people to visits by powerful and glamorous national figures to Pittsburgh, the nation’s industrial center. From birthday celebrations to civil rights boycotts, the distinctive vision of Harris’s photographs folds into the larger narrative of American history, art, and culture.

.
Charles “Teenie” Harris

Teenie Harris grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a neighborhood once called “the crossroads of the world.” A serious photographer from the age of 18, he started his professional photographic career in 1937 when he opened a studio and began to take on freelance assignments. In 1941, Harris was appointed staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s preeminent black newsweekly. His images were disseminated nationally through the Courier, and played a key role in how African Americans visualized themselves.

Like the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC, James Van Der Zee in New York, and P. H. Polk in Alabama, Harris depicted an innovative and thriving black urban community, in spite of the segregationist policies and attitudes of mid-century America. His images captured daily life in the Hill – weddings, funerals, family portraits, parades, church events, street scenes, graduations – as well as of the great men and women who visited the neighborhood, including Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lena Horne, and Muhammad Ali. Some of the country’s finest jazz musicians – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Sarah Vaughan, and Duke Ellington – were photographed by Harris alongside bartenders, waitresses, and dancing crowds.

The longevity of Harris’s career offers an outlook on historic shifts that took place in the lives of African Americans everywhere. In the era of segregated baseball, for example, Harris photographed two legendary Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords (which Harris cofounded in the mid-1920s) and Homestead Grays. Later, when baseball’s color barrier was broken, he photographed African American major league baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente along with their teammates. The pride and optimism evident in Harris’s photos of the Double V campaign from the World War II era (victory abroad, victory for racial equality at home), turned to growing moods of frustration and anger evident in images of militant protests in the late 1950s and 1960s. These photographs provide important insights to issues that are still pertinent today.

“Teenie Harris had great empathy with his subjects and a talent for storytelling,” says Lippincott. “His images transcend place. Powerful and personal, they connect today’s viewers with a proud past and a vibrant artistic and cultural heritage. We hope that through this retrospective and traveling exhibition, Harris will be established in the canons of art, history, and photography.”

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About the Exhibition

Nearly 1,000 of Harris’s most striking and iconic photographs will be digitally projected as life-sized images in the opening gallery. The images, organized into seven sections – “Crossroads,” “Gatherings,” “Urban Landscapes,” “Style,” “At Home,” “The Rise and Fall of the Crawford Grill,” and “Words and Signs” – will be synchronized with an original jazz score produced by MCG Jazz, one of the nation’s top organizations dedicated to the preservation, presentation, and promotion of jazz music. A second gallery will feature a chronological installation of small prints of the projected images that will include a referencing system for in-depth exploration of each photograph through a bank of computers and books also located in the gallery. In addition, the computers will provide access to the interactive website that has been created for the show.

At the entrance to the third gallery, a mini exhibition of 12 fine-art-quality 16 x 20″ prints selected by 12 experts will be accompanied by their personal analyses of the meaning, significance, and beauty of the chosen images. This gallery will also feature a large-scale map showing the places Harris lived, worked, and photographed and a multimedia presentation called “Artist at Work” that demonstrates Harris’s technical skill and artistic vision, and shows how newspapers and publishers cropped and edited his work in order to tell a particular story. “Artist at Work” marries audio recordings of the stories and memories of Teenie Harris, as told by his family, friends, colleagues, and models, with a montage of projected images relating to their tales.

In addition to an exhibition-specific website, the museum is collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh Press on an illustrated book offering new and unpublished scholarship about Harris, his work, and his times that will impact the fields of American and African American art, culture, and history.

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About the Teenie Harris Archive

In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art acquired the Teenie Harris archive from the Harris family and began a multiyear project to preserve, catalogue, digitize, and make the images available on the museum’s website for public view. Few of Harris’s negatives were titled and dated; since the acquisition of the archive, the museum has invited the public to help in the identification of the people, places, and activities in the photographs through a series of museum-based displays of his work, outreach presentations, meetings with oral historians, and online response forms that accompany the continually growing display of images on the museum’s website.

The Teenie Harris Archive Project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which designated the archive a “We the People” project in the spring of 2007. “We the People” is an initiative to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Initial support for the Teenie Harris Archive Project was provided by the Heinz Endowments.”

Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art website

Teenie Harris Archive website

Teenie Harris
Man lying with arms crossed and ferns on his lap, in cabin of truck
c. 1940-1945
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Wooden roller coaster, possibly at Rock Springs Park, Chester, West Virginia
c. 1941
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Deserted Alley
1946-1970
© Carnegie Museum of Art

“Charles “Teenie” Harris had a photographic mission: going beyond the obvious or sensational to capture the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens. Now, a new exhibit and online catalog is showing the depth of Harris’ work, an archive showing a major artistic achievement that influenced people around the country.

“His shots of everyday people are amazing. People seem to kind of jump off the page,” said Stanley Nelson, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and MacArthur genius grant winner who has made a number of acclaimed films on African-American artists, business people, and workers. “They don’t have the sense of somebody kind of looking in and spying on the community. For me his pictures are very unique,” Nelson said.

Harris was a gifted basketball player as a young man, and helped start a Negro League baseball team, too. His brother was Pittsburgh’s biggest bookie, and that gave him access to people throughout the city. But he found his mission at the Pittsburgh Courier, which was distributed all over the country via a network of Pullman train porters. Through the paper Harris had endless opportunities to chronicle daily life and to meet the rich, famous, and powerful. Harris photographed Richard Nixon, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and many musical greats, such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. “That was the black national paper of record at the time,” said Laurence Glasco, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.

Many people stopped by the Courier offices because of its clout with African-Americans, Glasco said. Yet Harris neither pandered to nor looked down on celebrities, he added. “He really didn’t have a cult of celebrity. He wouldn’t cross a street to shake a celebrity’s hand. He was interested in them, but he really saw them as just people. And that really comes out in his photographs,” Glasco said. A young Muhammad Ali, for example, is shown picking up his mother and holding her in his arms. “He had an equal opportunity lens,” recalled Teenie’s son, Charles Harris. “He just liked people.”

The partnership with the Courier was a perfect match, since its reporters and editors were also pushing for equal rights. And true to Pittsburgh traditions, Teenie Harris was a hard worker, on call virtually 24-hours a day. “No matter what time it was, they could call. A lot of times he didn’t sleep,” his son said.

Louise Lippincott, the Carnegie Museum of Art Curator, worked closely with Harris in the last years of his life. “He had a very strong personal desire to complete a positive view of African-Americans and counter the negative stereotypes in the white press. On the other hand, there’s nothing sugarcoated,” said Lippincott. Glasco adds that Harris took pictures of very poor people without exaggerating their situation. “You can look at them and say, ‘These are real people; they happen to be very poor.’ They’re more than those clothes they’re wearing. They were first and foremost a person.” One picture shows a little girl with a big smile sitting on the floor of a newsstand, reading a comic book with a small dog on her lap. A key piece of history that Harris and the Courier covered heavily was African-Americans who served in World War II and returned home demanding that they be accorded rights equal to white soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

“The drive for civil rights really began in World War II,” Lippincott said, far earlier than many imagine. Yet the photographs are more than just a rich trove of mid-century American history. They emerge as art because Harris became a master of composition and for decades took each picture with a large-format camera that had to be hand-loaded with a single piece of film for each shot. “I remember being just shocked and amazed at what an incredible photographer he was. He just had this incredible eye,” said Nelson, who noted that Harris earned the nickname “One Shot” for his ability to deliver an assignment with one photograph.

Many of the pictures show a successful – and happy – black middle class. One young woman is depicted posing on the hood of a 1950s car, with steel mills in the background, while another simply kneels while playing with two small dogs. And even before the civil rights movement, there are many pictures showing black and white children and adults together. Glasco notes that even some controversial pictures seem to defy current expectations of what the past was like. In one, a man in a car has a cross-dressing male companion on each side.

“They’re happy, they’re proud, they’re smiling. It’s a joyful thing,” Glasco said of the men openly dressing as women. At an annual parade in Pittsburgh’s Hill district, one car was often filled with cross-dressers who waved at crowds, he added. Glasco once saw a Harris picture of cross-dressers next to contemporary pictures with the same subject, and was struck by the anger and hostility of the people in the new pictures, and the openness of the people in the older ones.

The Carnegie Museum of Art purchased Harris’ entire collection in 2001, through the Heinz Family Fund. The exhibit at the museum includes almost 1000 photographs, slide shows, and a jazz soundtrack commissioned especially for the show, which is up until next April. It’s also scheduled to travel to Chicago, Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta in the future. People who can’t get to one of those museums can view almost 60,000 Harris images that have been scanned and put online along with audio interviews of people who knew him.”

By Kevin Begos, Associated Press, November 27, 2011 on Boston.com [Online] Cited 21/03/2012

Teenie Harris
Woman wearing one-piece skirted bathing suit reclining on swimming pool diving board
c. 1940-1945
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Group portrait of two women and two men, woman on right wearing dark dress with wide brimmed hat, in interior with wainscoting and pictures on wall
c. 1940-1945
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Group portrait of eight male boxers, possibly Golden Gloves contenders, lined up in boxing ring
c. 1955
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris
Group portrait of women wearing church choir robes, posed outside in yard, with other houses, garage, and woman in background, seen from above
c. 1938-1945
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Anon
Charles “Teenie” Harris holding camera and standing in front of Flash Circulation office, 2132 Centre Avenue, Hill District
c. 1937
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Carnegie Museum of Art
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Opening hours:
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National Gallery of Canada website

Mar

Exhibition: ‘Made in America 1900-1950. Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada’, Ottawa, Ontario

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, documentary photography, Edward Steichen, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, space, street photography and time
Tags: alfred steiglitz, Alfred Steiglitz The Steerage, Alvin Coburn, Alvin Coburn Vortograph, Arthur Leipzig, Arthur Leipzig  Opening Night at the Opera, arts, Barbara Morgan, Barbara Morgan  Martha Graham, Camera work, Charles Sheeler, Charles Sheeler Side of a White Barn, Chicago, Citizen in Downtown Havana, Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Edward Steichen, Edward Steichen  Nocturne - Orangery Staircase, Frida Kahlo, gelatin silver print, Gertrude Kasebier Serbonne, Gertrude Käsebier, Havana, Imogen Cunningham, Imogen Cunningham Frida Kahlo, Made in America, Made in America 1900-1950, Made in America 1900-1950. Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada, Martha Graham Letter to the World, Model T, National Gallery of Canada, Nocturne - Orangery Staircase, Ontario, Opening Night at the Opera, Ottawa, Ralph Steiner, Ralph Steiner  Model T, Serbonne, Side of a White Barn, The Steerage, Versailles, Vortograph, Walker Evans, Walker Evans Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Walker Evans  Citizen in Downtown Havana

Exhibition dates: 9th December 2011 – 1st April 2012

Stunning photographs in this posting: Steichen’s  Nocturne – Orangery Staircase, Versailles (1908) is just sublime; Sheeler’s Side of a White Barn (1917) is early Modernist perfection, rivalling Paul Strand’s The White Fence, Port Kent (1916); Barbara Morgan’s photograph of dancer Martha Graham (1940) portraying, radiantly, her divine dissatisfaction; and the most beautiful portrait by Imogen Cunningham of Frida Kahlo (1931). Every time I see this portrait I nearly burst into tears – the light falling from the right and from the left onto the boards behind her, the texture of her cloak, the languorous nature of her hands, her absolute poise and beauty – looking straight into the camera, looking straight into your soul. What a beautiful women, such strength and vulnerability. A stunning photograph of an amazing women. The photograph just takes your breath away…

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

Edward Steichen 
Nocturne – Orangery Staircase, Versailles
1908
Purchased 1976
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Arthur Leipzig 
Opening Night at the Opera, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
27 x 34.1 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
© Arthur Leipzig/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Charles Sheeler
Side of a White Barn
1917
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.

.
“Lines and texture define this view of the side of a white barn. In the photographic rendering, the white barn is a soft gray, punctuated by knots in the wood and shadows cast by the uneven boards. In the lower right corner of the image, a small window, a fence, and a chicken standing atop a pile of hay add visual weight yet surrender to the repetitive, vertical domination of the structure. Like every other line, the horizontal line dividing the areas of wood and plaster is drawn without a straight edge.” Text from the Getty Museum website

Alfred Steiglitz
The Steerage
1907

Walker Evans
Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago
c.1946 – 1947
Gelatin silver print
27.7 x 32.3 cm; image: 26.1 x 25 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Benjamin Greenberg, Ottawa, 1981
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Barbara Morgan 
Martha Graham, Letter to the World, “Kick”
1940, printed c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
38.6 x 48.2 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

.
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU. Keep the channel open… No artist is pleased… There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

“In the first five decades of the 20th century photography came into its own – both as an art form and as a tool to document social and political change. American photographers were exploring both the poetic and transformative expressiveness of the medium, as well as recording the growth and change of the country in its various phases of industrial development. On view until April 1, 2012, Made in America 1900-1950: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada looks at both approaches, and the divisions between the two, as they are necessarily porous and somewhat arbitrary.

“The Gallery’s collection is so rich in 20th century American photographs that it needs an exhibition in two parts and a catalogue in two volumes. This first presentation focuses on the period between 1900 and 1950,” noted NGC director Marc Mayer. “This comprehensive collection has been amassed in large part through the generosity of brilliant collectors.”

“Each of [the decades] is characterized by tremendous growth, change, and creative thought about the medium and its reception in the United States,” noted curator Ann Thomas in the catalogue, American Photographs 1900-1950.

It was a period of great technical and technological change: such as the introduction of the personal 35mm camera in the early 1920s, following the German model developed by Leica, and Ansel Adams’ and Fred Archer’s creation of the zone system to determine optimal film exposure and development.

Composed of over 130 photographs, two issues of Camera Work, one issue of Manuscripts, and several period cameras, the exhibition Made in America celebrates the exceptional contribution that American photographers made to the history of art in the 20th century. Made been 1900-1950, these photographs represent an extraordinarily fertile period in the evolution of photography. They include stunning works by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Lisette Model, Weegee, and members of New York’s Photo League.

Made in America is the fourth in a series of exhibitions and catalogues presenting the Gallery’s outstanding collection of international photographs. It follows Modernist Photographs (2007), 19th Century French Photographs (2010), and 19th Century British Photographs (2011).

Made in America 1900-1950: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada explores a dynamic period in the history of photography when the medium was emerging as both an art form and a tool for documenting social change. Presenting 134 works from the National Gallery’s extraordinary collection of American photographs, this exhibition chronicles the evolution of the medium, beginning with Pictorialism and moving through modernism, straight photography and documentary work. On the walls are some truly magnificent, iconic works by the most influential photographers, among them Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, Edward Steichen’s Nocturne – Orangerie Staircase, Versailles, Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico and Barbara Morgan’s Martha Graham, Letter to the World (Kick).

At the turn of the 20th century, American photographers were fully engaged in the Pictorialist aesthetic, creating pastoral landscapes, foggy street scenes and idealized portraits of women and children. With their soft focus and gentle lighting, the images convey a romantic moodiness. Pictorialist photographers often manipulated their negatives and prints to achieve painterly effects. Gertrude Käsebier’s Serbonne, for instance, is reminiscent of an Impressionist painting.

Around the mid-teens, artists such as Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Walker Evans came to reject the notion of photography imitating painting, and instead sought to take advantage of the medium’s inherent, unique characteristics, especially its ability to achieve sharp definition, even lighting and smooth surfaces. The result was ground-breaking modernist work such as Stieglitz’s Equivalent series, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Vortograph and Charles Sheeler’s Side of White Barn.

Out on the west coast in the early 1930s, Group f.64 was committed to the ideal of pure, un-manipulated, or “straight” photography. Edward Weston’s nudes and juniper trees, and Imogen Cunningham’s portrait of Frida Kahlo demonstrate the hallmarks of f.64: crisp detail, sharp focus, and often a sensual minimalism.

The first decades of the 20th century also provided rich subject matter for documentary photographers, as social and economic changes dramatically transformed daily life. Lewis Hine’s photographs of immigrants and child labourers tell fascinating stories, as do images of the Depression by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The Photo League sent its members out into New York’s streets to capture ordinary people on film. Helen Levitt, Jerome Liebling and Sol Libsohn chronicled small dramas unfolding on sidewalks.

Visitors familiar with Ansel Adams’ grand, sublime landscapes might be surprised by his more contemplative series of foaming Pacific waves, titled Surf Sequence. Sharing the gallery space is Minor White’s poetic series Song Without Words, made along the same coast. Both demonstrate an almost cinematic approach to photograph-making and plunge the viewer into seaside reverie.”

Press release from the National Gallery of Canada website

Alvin Coburn
Vortograph
1917
Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852 – 1934)
Serbonne
1902, printed 1903
from Camera Work, January 1903
Gum bichromate, halftone
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Imogen Cunningham
Frida Kahlo
1931
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Ralph Steiner 
Model T
1929, printed later
Gelatin silver print
25 x 20 cm; image: 24.2 x 19.7 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Walker Evans 
Citizen in Downtown Havana
1933
Gelatin silver print
25.1 x 20.1 cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Phyllis Lambert, Montreal, 1982
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

National Gallery of Canada
380 Sussex Drive
P.O. Box 427, Station A
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada  K1N 9N4

Opening hours:
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Thursday 10 am – 8 pm

1 October – 30 April
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Mar

Exhibition: ‘Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964 – 1977′ at the Art Institute of Chicago

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, architecture, black and white photography, book, exhibition, gallery website, light, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: 100 Boots, Alighiero Boetti, Alighiero Boetti AW:AB =L:MD, Alighiero Boetti Twins (Gemelli), american artist, andy warhol, Andy Warhol Empire, Annette Messager, architecture, Art Institute of Chicago, arts, Bruce Nauman, Bruce Nauman Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, California, Chicago, Conceptual Art, conceptual art movement, contemporary art, Dennis Oppenheim, Dennis Oppenheim Stage 1 and 2, ed ruscha, Eleanor Antin, Eleanor Antin 100 Boots, Giulio Paolini Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto, Italian artist, Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari, John Baldessari The California Map Project Part I, John Baldessari Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, Light Years, Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph 1964 - 1977, Marcel Duchamp, Marian Goodman Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery Artists and Photographs, Mel Bochner Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup, photo canvases, photo grids, photobooks, photolithographs, Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y., The California Map Project Part I, Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, Twins (Gemelli), VALIE EXPORT, Victor Burgin Photopath

Exhibition dates: 13th December 2011 – 11th March 2012

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

John Baldessari (American, born 1931)
The California Map Project Part I: California
1969, exhibition copy 2011
Twelve inkjet prints of images and a typewritten sheet
Each image, 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.); sheet, 21.6 x 27.9 cm (8 1/2 x 11 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
© John Baldessar

Eleanor Antin (American, born 1935)
100 Boots
1971-73
Fifty-one photolithographic postcards
Each 11.1 x 17.8 cm (4 3/8 x 7 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment, 2000.106.1-51
© Eleanore Antin. Courtesy Ronald Fedlman Fine Arts, New York, NY

John Baldessari (American, born 1931)
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
1973
Portfolio of fourteen photolithographs
Each 24.7 x 32.7 cm (9 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
© John Baldessari

The 1960s and 1970s are recognized as the defining era of the Conceptual Art movement, a period in which centuries held assumptions about the nature of art itself were questioned and dissolved. Until now, the pivotal role that photography played in this movement has never been fully examined. The Art Institute of Chicago has organized the first major survey of influential artists of this period who used photography in ways that went far beyond its traditional definitions as a medium – and succeeded thereby in breaking down the boundaries of all mediums in contemporary art. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 - on view December 13, 2011 through March 11, 2012 - is the first exhibition to explore how artists of this era used photography as a hybrid image field that navigated among painting and sculpture, film, and book arts as well as between fine art and the mass media. More than 140 works by 57 artists will fill the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall in this major exhibition that will be seen only in Chicago.

Bringing to the fore work from the Italian group Arte Povera as well as artists from Eastern Europe who are rarely shown in the United States, Light Years also includes many pieces that have not been on public display in decades by such major artists as Mel Bochner, Tony Conrad, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Emilio Prini. To open the exhibition, the Art Institute has arranged a special outdoor screening of Andy Warhol’s Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. In a first for the United States, Warhol’s Empire will be projected from the Modern Wing’s third floor to be seen on the exterior of the Aon Center on Friday, December 9.

The acceptance of photography as fine art was an evolutionary process. Early 20th-century avantgarde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism articulated a new set of standards for art in which photography played a major role. By the 1930s, modernist photography found a small but influential niche in museum exhibitions and the art market, and vernacular forms such as photojournalism and amateur snapshots became a source of artistic inspiration. Engagement with mass media, exemplified in Pop Art, became prominent in the 1950s. Yet only with the advent of Conceptual Art did artists with training in painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts begin to make and exhibit their own photographs or photographic works as fine art.

Some Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Valie Export took up photography seriously only for a few key months or years; others, like Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Jan Dibbets, and Annette Messager have worked in photography their entire careers. Photography showed the way forward from Minimal Art, Pop Art, and other movements in painting and sculpture. But it came with its own set of questions that these artists addressed with tremendous innovation. Questions of perspective, sequence, scale, and captioning which have a rich history in photography, were answered in entirely new ways and made into central concerns for art in general.

Photography in these artists’ hands was the antithesis of a separate and definable “medium.” It became instead “unfixed”: photobooks, photolithographs, photo canvases, photo grids, slide and film pieces, and even single prints all counted as valid creative forms. The variety of work showcased in Light Years is crucial to conveying the greatest contribution of the Conceptual era: to turn contemporary art into a field without a medium.

Light Years showcases a great number of works that have not been seen together – or at all – since the years around 1970. Victor Burgin’s Photopath, a lifesize print of a 60-foot stretch of flooring placed directly on top of the floor that it records, has not been shown in more than 20 years and never in the United States. Likewise being shown for the first time in the U.S. are pieces by Italian artists Gilberto Zorio, Emilio Prini, Giulio Paolini, and others associated with the classic postwar movement Arte Povera. Paolini’s early photocanvas Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto (1967), an icon of European conceptualism, has only rarely been shown at all after entering a private collection in the early 1970s. Mel Bochner’s Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup (1969) has not been seen since its presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in the now legendary 1970 exhibition Artists and Photographs, from which no visual documentation survives. Equally rare and important early works by Laurie Anderson, Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente, Tony Conrad, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, and many others make the show a revelation for those interested in key figures of new art in the 1960s and ’70s. A special emphasis is placed on artists from Hungary, a center for photoconceptual activity that has long been overlooked in Western Europe and the United States.”

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940–1994)
AW:AB =L:MD (Andy Warhol: Alighiero Boetti = Leonardo: Marcel Duchamp)
1967
Silk screen print with graphite on paper
58.8 x 58.8 cm (23 5/16 x 23 5/16 in.)
Colombo Collection, Milan. © Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011)
Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y. Material… Solar Energy. Skin Exposure Time. 5 Hours June 1970
1970
Two chromogenic photographic prints, plastic labeling tape, mounted together on green board with graphite annotations
Overall: 81 x 66 cm (31 7/8 x 26 in.)
Top photo: 20.1 x 25.8 cm; bottom photo: 20.2 x 25.5 cm; Image/text area: 41.8 x 25.8 cm
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
© Dennis Oppenheim Estate

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
T: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
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Thursday, 10.30 – 8.00 (Free Admission 5.00 – 8.00, member-only access to Matisse)
Friday, 10.30 – 8.00
Saturday – Sunday, 10.00 – 5.00
The museum is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s days.

National Gallery of Art website

Feb

Exhibition: ‘Harry Callahan at 100′ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, New York, photographic series, photography, portrait, space, street photography and time
Tags: Ansley Park, Atlanta, Cape Cod, cape cod photographs, Chicago, Detroit, Eleanor and Barbara, Eleanor Chicago 1947, Eleanor Chicago 1948, Eleanor New York, Garry Winogrand, gelatin silver print, Harry Callahan, Harry Callahan at 100, Harry Callahan Cape Cod 1972, Harry Callahan Chicago 1961, Harry Callahan Detroit 1943, Harry Callahan Eleanor 1945, Harry Callahan Eleanor and Barbara 1953, Harry Callahan Eleanor Chicago 1947, Harry Callahan Eleanor Chicago 1948, Harry Callahan  Ansley Park Atlanta 1992, national gallery of art, Providence, washington

Exhibition dates: 2nd October 2011 – 4th March 2012

For me, the early photographs of his wife Eleanor and Eleanor with their child Barbara and the most poignant, intimate and beautiful of Callahan’s work while the later modernist Cape Cod photographs presage the spirit and aesthetics of the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape of 1975. Mario Cutajar observes

“These pictures of strangely vacant, light haunted intersections of sky, land, and ocean are confrontations with the limits of both the ego and photography itself as the ego’s instrument. They are oriented toward death rather than life, intimating in a cold, unsentimental way passage to another world or, perhaps, the engulfing oblivion at the horizon.”

1960s work is redolent of the stronger photographs of Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand.

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

Harry Callahan
Detroit
1943
gelatin silver print
overall (sheet, trimmed to image): 8.3 x 11 cm (3 1/4 x 4 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Eleanor and Barbara, Chicago
1953
gelatin silver print
overall (image): 19.5 x 24.45 cm (7 11/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Promised Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Cape Cod
1972
gelatin silver print
overall (image): 23.7 x 23.9 cm (9 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Joyce and Robert Menschel
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Ansley Park, Atlanta
1992
gelatin silver print
overall (image): 15.72 x 15.72 cm (6 3/16 x 6 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

“The year 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Harry Callahan (1912-1999), whose highly experimental, visually daring, and elegant photographs made him one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century.

On view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art from October 2, 2011, through March 4, 2012, Harry Callahan at 100 explores all facets of his work in some 100 photographs, from its genesis in the early 1940s Detroit to its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s, and finally to its maturation in Providence and Atlanta from the 1960s through the 1990s. In 1996, the Gallery organized the exhibition Harry Callahan, which traveled to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, and included numerous works on loan from the artist.

“Using the rich holdings of the Gallery’s own collection of Callahan’s work, as well as a large collection of photographs on long-term loan from the artist’s widow, the exhibition will reveal the remarkable consistency of his vision and will demonstrate how his strong, inventive formal language repeatedly enriched his art,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.

The Exhibition

Organized thematically and chronologically, Harry Callahan at 100 examines Callahan’s work in relation to the places where he lived and to his family, unveiling his unparalleled devotion to both his subjects and the medium of photography.

In his earliest photographs made in and around Detroit, Callahan explored the limits of the camera, constructing photographs of multiple exposures in both black-and-white and color. In works such as Twig in Snow (c. 1942) and Store Front and Reflections (c. 1943), he sought to capture simultaneously the simplicity and complexity of nature and the theater of urban life.

Callahan continued his aesthetic and technical experiments through photographs of his wife, Eleanor. His nudes play with dramatic contrasts of light and dark: his layered multiple exposures reveal Eleanor’s body against landscapes and frosted glass windows (Eleanor, Chicago, 1948). His photographs of his wife and their daughter, Barbara, in the lake, the city, and the woods (Eleanor and Barbara, Lake Michigan, c. 1953) exploit the spontaneity and intimacy of snapshots – yet, paradoxically, were made with a large, cumbersome 8- x 10-inch view camera.

Callahan’s twin interests in the city and the land expanded during his years in Chicago and Providence, where he created both spare and evocative photographs of the natural landscape and complex compositions of urban architecture and pedestrians. He began to document anonymous women on the streets of Chicago, first in close shots of squinting eyes, open mouths, and downcast faces seen in Chicago (1950), then in full-figure shots from a low angle that feature the women against backgrounds of skyscrapers and flagpoles, as in Chicago (1961).

In the 1970s Callahan returned to color photography, continuing to push the boundaries of the medium, seen in the well-known Providence (1977). Taken in Atlanta and during travels abroad, his late photographs emphasized vibrant colors, long shadows, and the complex humanity of urban life, seen in Morocco (1981) and Atlanta (1985).

Harry Callahan (1912-1999)

Born in Detroit in 1912, Callahan began to photograph in 1938. Although he received no formal training in the medium, his exceptional talent was immediately recognized. In 1946 László Moholy-Nagy hired him to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago. There and at the Rhode Island School of Design (he moved to Providence in 1961) he taught generations of younger photographers, inspiring them both with the creativity of his vision and his steadfast commitment to the medium. In a career that spanned nearly six decades, he repeatedly explored a few select themes – his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara, nature, and the urban environment. Yet each time he returned to a familiar subject, he reinvented it, endowing each photograph with both a personal and symbolic significance.”

Press release from the National Gallery of Art website

Harry Callahan
Eleanor, New York
1945
gelatin silver print
overall (image): 21.2 x 16.83 cm (8 3/8 x 6 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Eleanor, Chicago
1948
gelatin silver print
overall (image): 11.59 x 8.5 cm (4 9/16 x 3 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Joyce and Robert Menschel Fund
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Eleanor, Chicago
c. 1947
gelatin silver print
overall (sheet, trimmed to image): 11.91 x 8.6 cm (4 11/16 x 3 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Promised Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Harry Callahan
Chicago
1961
gelatin silver print overall (image): 40.6 x 27.1 cm (16 x 10 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
© Estate of Harry Callahan, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

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