I profoundly admire the work of Polish social documentary photographer Zofia Rydet.
There are no ‘look at me I’m the photographer’ flourishes to her photographs, no egotistical excess, just a version of reality pictured through direct flash photography – rural Polish life, interiors and ancestors, families and marriages, portraits of younger self, older self and the transience of time.
Here lives religion, wallpaper, stencils pasted directly onto thick, rough hewn walls, patterned, fabrics, youth and old age. A boy in his flat with a racing helmet and a poster of Brazilian Formula 1 driver Carlos Reutemann on the wall, bottles of gin and brandy above the door; a young girl, wall plastered with posters of Sting and the band The Police; a woman sitting on a chair, bare feet, rickety bed to left, portraits of wedding day and husband and life behind her. Ancient and modern.
Like August Sander’s unfinished magnum opus People of the 20th Century in which the photographer attempted “to produce a definitive atlas of the German people over the course of his lifetime” (Getty), Zofia Rydet’s archive, record, document, is “an unfinished atlas of memory” of a Polish way of life that is fast disappearing. Her stories of Polish humanity with their huts and habitations speaks to the essential nature, the rootedness, of a people and culture.
The souls are not photogenic, but through Rydet’s direct, engaging process they become photo-gene(ic), archetypes and representatives of ancestors past, present and future which together form the genetic make-up of Polish society. Rydet tells their stories with empathy and compassion, the artist “captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits.”
These photographs hold the viewers attention because they mean something in this transient world of facile images. As Youssra Manlaykhaf cogently observes,
“Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.”1
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knock on the door, I say ‘hello’, and I shake hands.”
“Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.”
“For me, photography is not just a visual image, but above all, a language I’d like to speak to ordinary people, not great artists. Photography’s greatest value lies in its informative role, its content – not in its transient artistic endeavours. The more my “Record” grows, the more I believe it will have lasting value. I’m convinced I’m on the right track – I still have so many plans, just not enough life ahead of me…”
“I know some people think I’m hypocritical, self-serving, telling these people they’re beautiful. But I truly see something interesting, beautiful in every person, and I’m captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits. Each person is a story in itself, some very interesting, some instructive, sometimes moving…”
Zofia Ryde
Interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation | The Photographers’ Gallery
Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet in an interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation and Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions, The Photographers’ Gallery.
Sociological Record by Zofia Rydet is a sweepingly comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.
Head curator and art historian Karolina Ziębińska explorie the work and legacy of Zofia Rydet (1911-1997), one of Poland’s most significant post-war photographers.
Best known for her lifelong project The Sociological Record (1978-1990), Rydet sought to systematically document the interiors and inhabitants of Polish homes, creating a vast visual archive of everyday life during a time of profound social and political transformation.
In this talk, Ziębińska introduce Rydet’s distinctive approach to photography, situating her practice within the shifting cultural, historical and ideological contexts of 20th-century Poland. It also spotlights other areas of Rydet’s practice and is an opportunity to consider how Rydet’s work resonates within broader conversations about identity, memory and the role of the photograph as social document.
Installation view of the exhibition Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
From 1978, when she was 67, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out to photograph the inside of every Polish household. She would approach a home unannounced, knock, and warmly introduce herself and ask the people living there if they would like to take part in her project.
Rydet was always on the road, with a camera in her hand. For nearly three decades, she photographed people in their homes, still lives, building exteriors and landscapes. She also returned to the same houses several years after she first visited to document the transformation of rural Poland. The result – Sociological Record – is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.
Rydet used photography to express everyday stories and capture the essence of what it meant to be human. Despite the project’s epic scope, the individual portraits often feel intimate and revealing. Her careful and considered practice spans decades and she worked on the project until her death in 1997.
Rydet is best known for The Sociological Record – an extraordinary lifelong project documenting thousands of domestic interiors and portraits across Poland from the late 1970s onwards. Her work captured the nuances of everyday life during a time of rapid social and political change, revealing how identity, class and belonging were expressed within the home. For me, Rydet’s photographs are a commentary on a particular period in time, a transition from communism to capitalism, a shift from rural to the urban and a way of seeing that span the personal and the collective. …
I discussed Sociological Record with my mum who also visited the exhibition. We were both deeply moved by the large vinyl image of a straw house surrounded by smaller photographs of other homes. It is heartwarming to see such intimate, everyday experiences documented and acknowledged in the Gallery – moments that resonate deeply with many Polish people living in the UK. …
The recurring presence of John Paul II in Rydet’s work also struck a familiar chord; his image continues to appear in Polish households both in the UK and in Poland, carrying with it layers of cultural memory, belonging, but also conflict. Some of Rydet’s portraits – with their lace curtains, tablecloths, patterned rugs and carefully arranged family photographs – reminded me of our own home in Poland. They share an aesthetic and emotional language that feels instantly recognisable: the way ancestors’ portraits watch quietly from the walls, the mix of pride and modesty in how people present their space. To see this visual culture acknowledged and valued within a major British art institution feels both affirming and long awaited – a recognition of a Polish history that has long existed yet has rarely been seen.
Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet
By the time Zofia Rydet began her greatest work, she was already in her sixties, an age when most photographers might be reflecting on what they’ve accomplished, not setting out to capture an entire nation. Yet that’s exactly what she did. From the late 1970s until a few years before the end of her life, Rydet roamed through towns and villages across Poland, camera in hand, knocking on doors and asking to come inside.
Her project, Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny), became one of the most extraordinary photographic archives of the twentieth century: over 20,000 black-and-white portraits, most taken inside a person’s home. The format rarely changed. Her subjects stand in their living rooms, surrounded by furniture, family photos, crucifixes, embroidery, clocks and wallpaper that tells as much of a story as their faces do. Every image is composed with the same direct flash, the same square frame, and the same feeling that time has briefly stood still.
At first glance, Rydet’s portraits might seem uniform, almost bureaucratic in their repetition. But look longer, and the sameness dissolves. You begin to notice the delicate individuality in each frame: the proud tilt of a chin, a mismatched chair, a child’s toy tucked behind an armchair. Each photograph becomes a world of its own.
Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, a city that no longer exists as it once did. Over her lifetime, Poland’s borders shifted, wars came and went, and entire ways of life vanished. Perhaps that’s why she photographed with such urgency. She once said she wanted to “save people from disappearing,” and in Sociological Record, that impulse becomes visible. Her archive reads like a collective portrait of Poland on the brink of transformation, the last breaths of a rural and domestic culture before modernity swept through. “I can already see the difference now, three or four years later – the huts are disappearing, being rebuilt… I miss the houses near Warsaw, but I’m afraid to go there…”
Before she began this monumental project, Rydet had already spent two decades photographing daily life: children playing in the streets, fishermen, women at markets. Her early images are tender and human, often filled with humour. But in the late 1970s, she found her true calling. Carrying her medium-format camera and a small flash, she entered the homes of strangers, sometimes by invitation, sometimes by bold insistence, and created what she saw as a kind of “photographic sociology.”
What’s remarkable is that Rydet’s approach, while systematic, never feels cold. Her use of flash flattens space so that every detail, faces, furniture, wallpaper and light becomes equally significant. It’s as if she believed that the soul of a person might just as easily reside in the pattern of a curtain as in their expression.
Her images speak not only of individuals but of collective identity: Polish Catholic iconography, working-class aspiration, domestic pride. And beneath it all, the quiet ache of time passing. In one photo, a couple stands shoulder to shoulder beneath their wedding portrait, two images separated by decades, yet bound by the same gaze. In another, a young boy stares directly at the camera, his future still unwritten.
Rydet continued photographing well into the 1980s, often assisted by younger artists who recognised the importance of what she was building. She never considered the project finished; how could she? The very premise, recording the human condition through its domestic spaces, was infinite by nature. When she died in 1997, she left behind a sprawling, incomplete monument to ordinary lives.
Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.
Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Opening this October at The Photographers’ Gallery, as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, Sociological Record is a landmark photographic project undertaken by Polish photographer Zofia Rydet. The series is a comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.
Starting in 1978, aged 67 years old, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out on a mammoth task to photograph the inside of ‘every’ Polish household. Motivated by a desire to capture the ordinary, unsung populations, particularly of the countryside – but also covering towns and cities – Rydet would become increasingly obsessed with her mission to record the cultures and people that she sought out.
Rydet cut an unlikely figure on her field trips to different regions, a diminutive woman travelling by bus or with the help of friends who could drive her. Approaching households unannounced, she would knock and warmly introduce herself, asking those living there if they would like to take part in her project. Using a newly acquired wide angle lens and flash, Rydet was able to capture often darkened interiors of homes and their inhabitants in great detail. Asking her sitters not to smile and look straight ahead into the camera lens, her subjects are posed in their homes, rich in personal histories.
As the series progressed, Rydet would identify different categories within the Sociological Record such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Professions’, ‘The Ill’, ‘Road Signs’, ‘Windows’, ‘Houses’ and ‘Televisions’. She would also come to identify more philosophical themes such as ‘Presence’ – noting the omniscience of the Polish Pope John Paul II’s image (inaugurated the same year Rydet started the Record in 1978) within Polish households. Others included ‘The Myth of Photography’ focusing on the central position and significance of family photographs within the home, such as traditional, hand-painted studio photographs of married couples in homes with little or no other decoration.
Through the cumulative interactions with her sitters, sometimes returning to households more than once over time, Rydet identified a change in her own personal and artistic journey and the role photography played within it. Creating over 20,000 images, many of which by the end of the project were never printed – Sociological Record is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.
Rydet said of her hopes for the work: “Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.” Rydet continued working on the Record until 1990, seven years before she died aged 86 years old.
This is the first substantial exhibition of Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record in the UK. It focuses on the small proportion of rare prints she made from the series in her home darkroom, including the significant ‘People in Interiors’ works, and other sub-series such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’ and ‘Presence’. It will also feature ephemera from Rydet’s archives and original publications. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki’s 1989 documentary film about Rydet, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’, as well as Polish photographer Anna Beata Bohdziewicz’s documentary portraits of Rydet at work will also be on show.
Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. It is produced by The Photographers’’’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage), Poland, and the Zofia Rydet Foundation.
A new English catalogue will accompany the exhibition featuring texts by Zofia Rydet and 100 images from the Sociological Record series. Edited by co-curators of the exhibition, Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej, image edit with the collaboration of Wojciech Nowicki. Produced by Lola Paprocki and designed by Brian Kanagaki / Kanagaki Studio. Co-published by The Photographers’ Gallery and Palm* Studios, with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
About Zofia Rydet
Zofia Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, Galicia – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. The daughter of a Polish lawyer and judge who served the rural populations of the area, her first photographs were in the regions of south-eastern Polish borderlands.
Following the brutal and tumultuous occupation of Nazi Germany in World War II and the region’s absorption into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, her family fled into the newly defined borders of Poland at the end of the war to Rabka and then Bytom in Upper Silesia. There she would focus on her passion for photography, as one of the few women members of the Gliwice Photography Society, which she joined in 1954. She met other avant-garde photographers, became a photography teacher and began sending her photographs to international and national competitions.
Her artistic career developed through many distinct but overlapping phases which included the seminal series and photobook Little Man (Mały Człowiek), which drew on her many photographs of children taken during her national and international travels, highlighting humanist approaches to documentary photography and emphasising the complexities and challenges of childhood. Her long-standing surrealist collage series The World of Feelings and Imagination (Świat uczuć i wyobraźni) also marked an important expressive phase in her creative practice. Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny) would become her final and largest artistic project.
About Adam Mickiewicz Institute
The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (AMI) brings Polish culture to people around the world. Being a state institution, it creates lasting interest in Polish culture and art through strengthening the presence of Polish artists on the global stage. It initiates innovative projects, supports international cooperation and cultural exchanges. It promotes the work of both established and promising artists, showing the diversity and richness of our culture. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is also responsible for the Culture.pl website, a comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture. For more information please visit: www.iam.pl.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
Portrait of Zofia Rydet Nd
Zofia Rydet and photographer friends Nd
Zofia Rydet with camera and subjects Nd
The Photographers’ Gallery 16-18 Ramillies Street London W1F 7LW
The base images for this series of work come from a book on the history of St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin published in 1931. These images have then been reflected, distorted, overlapped and filters have been used to produce the desired feeling. Each image has a different number of variations depending on this feeling. The 75 images in the series are sequenced as in the book.
The influences on the work were the architecture in Fritz Lang’s 1937 film Metropolis; the surrealist photography of Dora Maar notably her image Le Simulateur (The Pretender) 1936; the modernist photographs of factory machines by artists such as Jakob Tuggener and Albert Renger-Patzsch; and the prisons of Piranesi’s etchings published in Carceri d’invenzione, often translated as Imaginary Prisons, c. 1745 to 1750.
Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image. Please view the work on a large computer screen if possible. Please see the whole series on my website. Many thankx to Elizabeth Gertsakis for her invaluable help.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) No. 2 Brewery 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Boiler House B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Old Engine A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Electric Power Station A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Compressor Machines A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Refrigerating Plant A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Robert St. Malt Store – Exterior A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Robert St. Malt Store – Interior A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Malt Wagons B, D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cooke’s Lane Malt House A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Barley in Process of Being Malted 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Malt Train Outside No. 2 Brewery B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hops in Store A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Hop Wagons A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Regulating Mash Temperatures B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Copper Stage A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Striking Off” a Copper 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A Corner of No. 11 Vat House A 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Vat House – Another View A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Making Shop – Blazing A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Magazine A-C 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cooperage Yard A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Cask Cleansing Shed A-D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Racking Room, Showing Casks being Filled 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Railway Wagons 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Low Platform Vehicle A-B 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Some of the Delivery Fleet About to Start 2026 from the series Metropolis
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Loading Wharf on River Liffey C-D 2026 from the series Metropolis
Curators: Laurie Hurwitz and Shoair Mavlian in collaboration with Boris and Vita Mikhailov
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Luriki (1971-1985, below) and Sots Art (c. 1975-1986, below); and at right, a photograph from the series National Hero (1991, below)
“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not.”
From the film Perfect Days, 2023 directed by Wim Wenders
I love this man’s work. I feel very connected to his worlds. His constructed discontinuities. His ruptures, compressions, ambiguities. His social codifications of rich, poor, haves and have nots, and, as someone said, his portrayal of “the overlooked, the uncomfortable, and the unabashedly human.”
“Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large.”1
“By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.”2
Experimental, conceptual, staged, performative, his photographs appeal to my subversive nature, prodding as they do at the status quo. His “rebellious visual language” takes us on a journey – his journey, Ukraine’s journey – “a journey through time, loss, and transformation.”
“Mikhailov’s photographs are emotionally powerful, politically astute and uncannily effective conversations with the world… about subjects that should matter to all of us: war, destitution, poverty, oppression, and the power of an authoritarian state to control the thoughts and actions of human beings under its control. They are about the freedom of individual people to live their lives as they choose; and they are about the freedom of a group of people which form a country to not be subjugated under the rule of another country to which they are historically linked.
His photographs are about choice and difference, they are about life.
They perform a task, that is, they bring into consciousness … the ground on which we stand together, against oppression, for freedom. Of course, no country is without its problems, its historical traumas, prejudices and corruption but the alternative is being ruled over without a choice, which is totally unacceptable.
Against the “failed promises of both communism and capitalism” and the “economic history that is written on the flesh” of the poor, Boris Mikhaïlov’s Ukrainian diary documents day after day the dis-ease and fragility, but also resilience, of his subjects and the world in which they live. He uses his art as a visual tool for cultural resistance. And the thing about his images is: you remember them. They are unlike so much bland, conceptual contemporary photography because these are powerful, emotional images. In their being, in their presence, they resonate within you.”
In this earlier posting you will find a longer text that I wrote, descriptions of the each of the artist’s series and more images. I hope you can view the posting.
2/ Kateryna Filyuk. “Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/2026
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I chose to focus on ordinary, everyday scenes and the search for formal solutions to translate this mundaneness into photography.”
Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino. Köln: König, 2011, p. 230
“Central themes – heroism, failure, power, the body, identity, absurdity, ideology – recur throughout, not as definitive conclusions but as open-ended provocations that invite sustained contemplation. In this way, the exhibition operates as both a temporal sequence and a constellation of moments – fragmented yet interconnected – that collectively evoke the complexity, contradictions, and richness of Mikhailov’s visionary practice.”
Laurie Hurwitz curator
“The explicit, dramatic and total power of the absolute monarch had given place to what Michel Foucault has called a diffuse and pervasive ‘microphysics of power’, operating unremarked in the smallest duties and gestures of everyday life. The seat of this capillary power was a new ‘technology’: that constellation of institutions – including the hospital, the asylum, the school, the prison, the police force – whose disciplinary methods and techniques of regulated examination produced, trained and positioned a hierarchy of docile social subjects in the form required by the capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic life.”
John Tagg. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993
From the beginning, we conceived two video works as conceptual bookends. At the entrance, Yesterday’s Sandwich – a seminal project from the late 1960s – presents a hallucinatory sequence of double exposures set to music by Pink Floyd. These psychedelic, surreal images, rejecting Soviet visual orthodoxy, open up a new, rebellious visual language. At the exit, Temptation of Death (2019) offers a quieter, meditative counterpoint. Combining images from a crematorium in Ukraine with intimate portraits and cityscapes, it evokes the myth of Charon, ferryman of the dead, and a journey through time, loss, and transformation. Together, these two works, created nearly fifty years apart, frame the exhibition with a meditation on mortality, reinvention, and the fragile persistence of life.
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Salt Lake (1986, below); at at right in the background, photographs from his series I am not I (1992, below)
A major retrospective of work by influential Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine).
Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov, one of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.
Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering practice, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of his most important series, up to his more recent projects. Viewed today, against the backdrop of current events and ongoing war in Ukraine, Mikhailov’s work is all the more poignant and enlightening.
“The word ‘red’ in Russian contains the root of the word for beauty. It also means the Revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associates red with Communism. Maybe that’s enough. But few people know that red suffused all our lives, at all levels.”
Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv). One of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.
Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering work, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of life in the Ukraine and the tumultuous changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
From early underground works and images of everyday life in Kharkiv, to his self-depreciating self-portraits which mock traditional Soviet masculine stereotypes, Mikhailov creates an ambiguous, fragmented view of a world in constant flux. His photographs contradict the onesideness of Soviet ideology, especially during the time when photography was heavily controlled and censored in the Soviet Union.
Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including Yesterday’s Sandwich, I am not I, Salt Lake, Red, Sots Art, Luriki, Case History and Theatre of War.
Self-taught and ‘somewhat careless’ (in his words), Yesterday’s Sandwich (1960s-1970s), one of his most important series, began as an accident when a handful of slides stuck together. He was fascinated by the result and continued to randomly layer slides, creating new combinations which ‘reflected the dualism and contradictions of Soviet Society’.
Mikhailov created ‘bad photography’ as a way to undermine official Soviet aesthetics, as introduced in the series Black Archive (1968-1979). Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were an artistic device that Mikhailov described as ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’.
The series Red (1965-1978) bridges documentary photography and conceptual art – over 70 images taken in the late 1960s and 1970s highlighting the colour red in everyday objects and scenes. His documenting of red reveals the extent to which communist ideology saturated daily life.
Together his uncompromising, subversive work is a powerful photographic narrative on Ukraine’s contemporary history.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
About Boris Mikhailov
Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. With access to a camera, he took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene. His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series Case History, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine.
Curator and researcher, Kateryna Filyuk, explores the intimate diaristic qualities of Boris Mikhailov’s subversive body of work.
Even before seeing Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, I found myself thinking about its title. The idea of a diary fits naturally with Mikhailov’s work: instead of creating a grand, official narrative inherent to Soviet photography, he developed an intimate and fragmented way of seeing. The term Ukrainian, however, is less straightforward. Some of his more recent bodies of work that directly address Ukrainian events: Parliament (2015-17); and Temptation of Death (2014-19), which adopts the Kyiv Crematorium as its binding motif, are not included in the exhibition.
Mikhailov began challenging Soviet photographic norms as early as the mid-1960s, working with a circle of like-minded friends. At the time, photographing “for no reason” could be equated with spying; showing Soviet life as anything less than ideal was seen as an attack on communist values; and photographing the naked body could result in prison. Mikhailov did all of this and more. He turned his camera toward mundane subjects, mixed genres freely and questioned photography’s claim to present an ultimate truth. By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.
Art historian Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk reflects on whether Ukrainian is an appropriate label for the Kharkiv School of Photography, of which Mikhailov is a founding figure. She writes that ”the school’s activities stretch between two heterogeneous historical realities: on the one hand, Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’ and the perestroika fatal to the USSR, and on the other, the economically brutal birth of the Ukrainian state.” [2] This dramatic time span, during which Ukrainians experienced long-awaited yet destabilising transformation, offers a more fitting temporality for understanding Mikhailov’s work in Ukrainian Diary. Geographically, most of his projects take place in what was first Soviet Ukraine and later became independent Ukraine. Temporally, however, they exist within a landscape marked by ruptures, discontinuities, and perpetual new beginnings.
In the preface to one of his most audacious works, Case History (1997-98), Mikhailov reflects on the lack of a photographic record documenting complex historical shifts in Ukraine: ”I was aware that I was not allowed to let it happen once again that some periods of life would be erased.” [3] After returning to Kharkiv from a year in Berlin, he was struck by the stark divide between the newly rich and the newly poor, a process already in full swing. Yet his aim in photographing the homeless did not follow the classic documentary model, such as the USA Farm Security Administration’s work, which sought to highlight a social problem and prompt state intervention. Instead, by showing the everyday lives of those most affected by the collapse, Mikhailov “directly assaults the onlookers’ sensitivity” [4] and “transgresses the acceptable limits of representation,” [5] His goal was not to provoke pity or shock though.
Rather, Mikhailov asserts something more fundamental: the individual’s right to exist and express themselves beyond convention. Through his unwavering attention to ordinary lives, he bears witness to massive transformations unfolding beyond any single person’s control. Ukrainian Diary, then, is not simply a national label or a chronological record. It is a testament to how one artist has persistently documented a world defined by instability, reinvention, and the fragile, but enduring presence, of everyday life.
Kateryna Filyuk
Kateryna Filyuk is a curator and researcher, who holds PhD from the University of Palermo. In 2017-2021 she served as a chief curator at Izolyatsia., a Platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv. Before joining Izolyatsia, she was co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). The co-founder of the publishing house 89books in Palermo, she has participated in curatorial programmes at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2017), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2015-16), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2014) and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2023 Filyuk was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and in 2024 a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg) and the Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome). Currently she develops a two-year scholarly initiative – the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.
Footnotes
1/ Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino (Köln: König, 2011), 230. 2/ Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, The Kharkiv School of Photography: Game Against Apparatus. Kharkiv: Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography, 2020, 17. 3/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 7. 4/ “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 58. 5/ Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” MOKSOP, accessed November 25, 2025
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing photographs from his series Case History (1997-1998, below)
In the [Case History] book preface, Mikhailov explains that already in 1997 he vividly apprehended the rupture of Ukrainian society into new, burgeoning social strata, when the new rich and the new poor began to acquire features of class identities with their own psychology and behavioural modalities. The new rich were already hard to approach, protecting themselves with bodyguards and other social fences. The new poor, however, specifically the bomzhes (homeless people with no social support) could still allow an outsider in their midst – this was “a chance”, according to Mikhailov, that could only last for a short period of time. Most of the book’s protagonists had only recently lost their homes. Their rapidly deteriorating social position was still uncertain, malleable, and flickering with hope. Yet, the transformation was inevitable, which propelled the artist to act: “For me it was very important that I took their photos when they were still like “normal” people. I made a book about the people who got into trouble but didn’t manage to harden so far.” [2] …
Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large. …
The majority of Mikhailov’s photographs provide no emotional crutches to lean on, no mechanism of ennobling or aestheticising infected abused flesh of the homeless. It is presented “as is”: frontal, looming large with all its detailed naturalistic vividness. If there is a visual code that Mikhailov activates in these images, it comes from a clinical rather than an art discourse, from surveilling patents for medical records. It is a discourse that John Tagg described as a nineteenth century record-keeping practice associated with certain disciplinary institutions such as an asylum or a prison that with the help of photography created a new social body of dependent subjects upon whom power could be exercised due to their newly-minted subaltern position.
Art, following Barthes’ dictum, domesticates and tames photography [21]. It generates the level of “studium”, accepted cultural knowledge that veils the trauma, renders it familiar, therefore trivial, therefore easily dismissed. Mikhailov makes his viewers constantly oscillate between images that give themselves for contemplation and images that confront with their clinical nature that can be scrutinised and observed but certainly not contemplated. Not one or the other type of image, but the switch between the two unsettles the viewing process. Mikhailov orchestrates poses and gestures of his subjects to create this visual roller-coster of plunging in and out of the aesthetic.
2/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1985) 21/ Matthias Christen, “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness. Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52-66
Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Curator: Taous Dahmani, art historian and writer. The exhibition was developed in collaboration with Autofoto (Rafael Hortala Vallve and Corinne Quin) and features archival material from Raynal Pellicer
Untitled [Women Photobooth Portraits] c. 1940s-1950s
This “small archival display celebrating 100 years of the much-loved photobooth” (which occurred in 2025) – no installation photographs available – seems not a patch on one of the best photography exhibitions on Art Blart in 2025: Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August 2025 which introduced us to “Alan Adler (2932-2024), who while little known, was the oldest and longest serving photobooth technician in the world… For over 50 years, Adler maintained a fleet of photobooths across Melbourne / Narrm, most notably the site at Flinders Street Station.”
There are still some delightful, happy, joyful snapshots in this posting however.
Pay the money, cross the threshold of the booth, draw the curtain, adjust the seat, comport yourself into whatever “pose” you choose, then perform for each flash of the Time Machine.
Captured in a space of privacy and experimentation these portraits of the self (your essential being at that moment in time), eventually, minutes later, reveal you to yourself.
Some conforming, some rebelling, some crossing the taboo of self-revealing.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Practical at first – cheap, quick and accessible identity photos – the booth quickly became something else: a private stage. Behind the curtain, anyone could perform beyond the gaze of a photographer. Sitters experimented alone or packed in with friends, kissing, laughing, trying on disguises or staring back with deadpan seriousness. The Photomaton promised autonomy: pull the curtain, face the lens, decide how to appear. Some likened the ritual to a slot machine: drop a coin, wait for the surprise. Josepho’s invention, in hindsight, feels like the ancestor of the selfie: it put image-making directly into the hands of its subjects, a century before smartphones did the same. …
In our digital world, we’re used to photographs that are instant, endless and easily stored or deleted. By contrast, the analogue photobooth resists perfection. Control is never total: the flashes are blinding, the stool wobbles, the timing is merciless. Each strip bears the marks of chance – a blink, a smirk, a blur, a half-formed gesture. That unpredictability is its charm, giving the images a peculiar energy that no app filter can replicate.
Their resurgence taps into the wider appetite or the tactile and the ‘vintage’: objects that feel authentic precisely because they escape the seamlessness of the digital. The photobooth doesn’t have a photographer mediating or directing the sitter. It’s a space of agency and play, where friends cram together or someone experiments alone, producing an image that can be private or shared, that can be spontaneous or completely staged.
In contemporary culture, where self-presentation is curated and optimised online, the photobooth is a refreshing counterpoint. The strips are imperfect, uneditable and physical – small paper relics that capture a moment in time with all its messiness intact. That’s why they resonate now: they remind us that identity is not just polished images, but also the accidents, surprises and fleeting gestures that make us human.”
Installation view of the AUTOFOTO photobooth at the exhibition Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Anonymous photographer Portrait of Anatol Josepho in his Photomaton United States of America, 1927 Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
French Photomaton Advertising “6 photos in 8 minutes. Identity” 1927 Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
8 Poses Strip USA, 1927 Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
8 Poses Strip (details) USA, 1927 Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
“Always thinking of you” United States of America, 1930s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
A special, small archival display celebrating 100 years of the much-loved photobooth.
2025 marks 100 years since the invention of the photobooth in New York. A game-changer for the world of photography, photobooths became an everyday sight in cities around the world.
In the 1950s and 1960s, photobooths were a common feature at fairs, shopping centres and train stations. With no technical knowledge needed and no operator, anyone could step behind the curtain, alone or crammed in with friends, put their money in the slot and strike a pose. The booths were loved by everyone, from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and used by artist Andy Warhol for his famous series of self-portraits.
These popular coin-operated booths began to disappear with the rise of digital photography in the 1990s. Now, restored by dedicated experts, analogue booths are reappearing in cities across the world and enjoying a resurgence of interest and delight with modern-day fans.
This autumn we’re celebrating the centenary by telling the story of the much-loved photobooth. Through a small archival display, Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth will explore the history, imperfections and quirks of the booth. There’s also a 1960s analogue booth at the Gallery for everyone to create their own selfie souvenir and a live feed to see the unique mechanics of the booth in action.
Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth features work from the collection of Raynal Pellicer and is part of a year-long programme of centenary celebrations, in partnership with AUTOFOTO.
Photomaton Pochette France, c. 1930s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
Couple c. 1930s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
Couples c. 1930s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
Couples (details) c. 1930s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
This autumn The Photographers’ Gallery celebrates 100 years of the much-loved photobooth.
Through a special archival display, Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth looks back on the history of the photobooth and explores its intimate charms, imperfections and quirks.
2025 marks the year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of the invention of the analogue photobooth by Anatol Josepho. His first Photomaton appeared on Broadway in New York in 1925. The photobooth was a game-changer for the world of photography and quickly became an everyday sight in cities around the world.
A combined studio and photography lab in one place, booths offered the first affordable access to photography. With no technical knowledge needed and no operator, anyone could step behind the curtain, put their money in the slot and strike a pose.
After the success of the first booth, when over 7,500 New Yorkers used the booth in its first 5 days, global success quickly followed. The first photobooth launched in the UK in Selfridges, London, in 1928 and was an immediate hit.
In the 1950s and 1960s, photobooths were a common feature at fairs, shopping centres and train stations. These intimate inexpensive spaces gave everyone the freedom to control their own images. Behind the curtain, whether alone or crammed in with friends, the photobooth was a playground, beyond the gaze of a photographer. The booths were loved by everyone, from John Lennon and Yoko Ono, to John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and used by artist Andy Warhol for his famous series of self-portraits.
The coin-operated booths, once ever-present on high streets and stations, disappeared with the rise of digital photography in the 1990s. Now, restored by dedicated experts, analogue booths are reappearing in cities across the world and enjoying a resurgence of interest and delight with modern-day fans. Alongside the display of archive prints, vintage strips and materials, there’ll also be a booth at the Gallery for everyone to create their own selfie souvenir and a live feed to see the unique mechanics of the booth in action.
Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth features work from the collection of Raynal Pellicer and is part of a year-long programme of centenary celebrations, in partnership with AUTOFOTO.
AUTOFOTO are analogue photobooth experts who have been rescuing and restoring original auto-photography machines for over a decade. Their restored machines can be found in locations across London and Barcelona. Through careful restoration and servicing, AUTOFOTO’s mission is to ensure the survival of these beautiful machines and photobooth photography for future generations.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits] c. 1940s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits] (details) c. 1940s-1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
Strip United States of America, 1950s Courtesy Raynal Pellicer
This is one of those unheralded exhibitions on a photographer that you may never have heard of that Art Blart likes to promote.
Gabrielle Hébert as she became, married the painter Ernest Hébert in 1880. She was 28, he was 63. From 1888 until his death in 1908 at the age of 91, she documented her husband painting, their surroundings and their affluent, upper class social milieux. And then she stopped, she gave up photography, she lost the amour fou, that incredible passion that had driven her for so many years to take photographs.
While “her photographs provide an intimate look into the artistic life of the time, portraying artists, models, and domestic scenes” they also do something more – they represent the viewpoint of a female artist which challenges the masculine conventions of the day. “Overturning gender stereotypes, she watched him obsessively and was never tired of capturing him on film… Thanks to her images, which she shared and exchanged with her friends and family, she became recognised as an auteur and gained social status in a milieu where artistic creation was the preserve of men.” (Text from the Musée d’Orsay website)
Further, from my point of view, Gabrielle Hébert was not an amateur photographer taking snapshots for her “visual diary” but an artist fully conversant with current trends in photography. While there are the standard documentary photographs of sculptures and Ernest Hébert and friends painting … there is so much more!
Photographs such as the allegorical Peppino Scossa endormi dans les bras de sa mère, 11 août 1888 (Peppino Scossa asleep in his mother’s arms, August 11, 1888) (1888, above) and La duchesse de Mondragone et l’une de ses bellessoeurs posent pour une Annonciation, juin 1890(The Duchess of Mondragone and one of her sisters-in-law pose for an Annunciation, June 1890) (1890, below) are redolent of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879).
Other photographs such as Lys des parterres, juin 1890 (Flowerbed lilies, June 1890) (1890, below) evidence her consummate skill at capturing the perfume of a place whilst images such as Procession sur le port de Brindisi (Pouilles) (Procession in the port of Brindisi (Apulia)) (1893, below) show her ability to picture the informality of large groups of people and the atmosphere of the scene.
Then there are the joyous highs of a modern woman looking at the world with perceptive eyes. In the photograph Amalia Scossa et Ernest Hébert à sa peinture La Vierge au chardonneret sur la terrasse du campanile (around 1891, below), Gabrielle Hébert was not afraid to dissect the pictorial plane with strong verticals, horizontal and diagonal lines, providing the viewer with the feeling of an almost voyeuristic in-sight into the creative scene, each section of the photograph holding out attention – two chairs, one upturned on the other, supporting the umbrella shielding the painter from the sun; the Virgin and her child filling the distant space; the painting on the easel leading our eye down and then back up into the cloaked, wizened figure of the artist holding his easel; folding stool for him to rest and other accoutrements earthing the foreground; and the massive pillars slightly askew enclosing our furtive view. Magnificent!
My favourite photograph in the posting is Garçon au coin de la place Zocodover, Tolède, 31 octobre 1898 (Boy on the corner of Zocodover Square, Toledo, October 31, 1898) (1898, below), taken when Hébert had abandoned her large format camera for a more portable Kodak. A wonderful use of depth of field, movement, vanishing point, light, architecture and the ghostly presence of a boy, forever peering at us through eons of time, lend the image an enigmatic, allegorical mystery … as to the passage of time, the journey of life.
How I wish we could have seen more of these later photographs where Hébert proposed “daring viewpoints – notably from a speeding train – a camera in motion, glances towards the camera, the operator’s shadow cast on the ground, motion blur of people and things (smoke, clouds, and waves), truncated figures, and close-ups.” (Marie Robert)
And then there is the crux of the matter. As the text on the Musée d’Orsay website insightfully observes, “… above all, photography revealed her to herself: through capturing a particularly remarkable geography and era, she effectively invented her own mythology.”
Through love and life, through devotion to husband, through devotion to photography, and through devotion to herself, she revealed her to herself and to the world. What crazy, mad love!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. With photographs like Femmes à la fenêtre, Taormine (Sicile), mai 1893 (Women at the window, Taormina (Sicily), May 1893) (1893, below) it is likely Gabrielle Hébert would have met Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) who lived and worked there between 1878-1931.
Many thankx to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Active between 1888 and 1908, Gabrielle documented daily life at Villa Medici in Rome, where her husband served as director of the French Academy. Her photographs provide an intimate look into the artistic life of the time, portraying artists, models, and domestic scenes. The exhibition features original prints, albums, diaries, glass plate negatives, and her cameras, alongside works by Ernest Hébert and personal items that tell their love story. With over 3.500 prints, Gabrielle Hébert is considered a pioneer of female photography, having sensitively and precisely documented an artistic environment predominantly male.
When Gabriele von Uckermann and a friend discovered Ernest Hébert’s painting, La Mal’aria [below], at the Munich International Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1869, the two young women sent a telegram to the artist expressing their admiration. A few months later, the painter agreed to receive Gabriele in his Parisian studio, and their marriage in 1880 sealed their whirlwind romance. He was 63, she was 28. Five years later, Ernest Hébert’s reappointment as director of the French Academy in Rome allowed the young woman to have her own studio. Gabrielle Hébert, who had Gallicized her first name, dates her photographic debut to July 8, 1888. From that day forward, she never stopped photographing her husband. She also dedicated herself to visually documenting their stay at the Villa Medici, as well as their travels in Italy, Sicily, and Spain. …
The exhibition’s subtitle, “Mad Love at the Villa Medici,” while certainly catchy, is somewhat misleading, as the section strictly devoted to photographs related to her stay at the French Academy in Rome represents only a third of the exhibition. However, each period of this prolific output is contextualised using a variety of documents: diary entries, correspondence, camera footage, albums, contact sheets, and more.
Christine Coste. “Gabrielle Hébert, un itinéraire photographique singulier,” on the Le Journal des Arts website, 17th December, 2025 [Online] Cited 02/01/2026. Translated from the French by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Ernest Hébert (French, 1817-1908) The Mal’aria 1848-1849 Oil on canvas 1930 x 1350cm Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN / Patrice Schmidt Bought 1851
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The photograph above shows a nude woman posing for the artist Alexis Axilette for his painting Summertime (c. 1891, below)
Alexis Axilette (French, 1860-1931) Summertime c. 1891
Only a black and white reproduction is available of this work
At the Salon exhibition of 1891, a picture which attracted a marked amount of attention was a vividly painted midsummer landscape, with the figures of three wood-nymphs, basking in the flood of golden sunshine. It was entitled “Summertime.” The painter was A. Axilette, a Parisian artist whose studio was already well known to collectors. The success of “Summertime” in Europe was enormous. It was successively exhibited at various continental exhibitions, and everywhere repeated the hit it had made in France. It was, in fact, one of those works of which it is said that they “make” their authors, and in the sense that it completely established the painter’s reputation, “Summertime” realised this figure of speech.
Mary S. Van Deusen. “Alexis Axilette,” on the Master Paintings of the World website 2007 [Online] Cited 02/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Alexis Axilette (French, 1860-1931)
Alexis Axilette was born in 1860 in Durtal, a small town in Maine-et-Loire. From a modest background – his father was a merchant – his future seemed predetermined, far removed from the world of art. His parents, who dreamed of a career as a notary’s clerk for him, were nonetheless surprised to discover his talent for drawing. After encouraging him to prove his abilities, they supported his choice to become an artist, a vocation he embraced with passion and determination. This ambition led him to become one of the most remarkable painters of his time.
A Promising Start
At the age of 16, Alexis Axilette began working as an apprentice in a photography studio, retouching photographs by hand, a modern activity for the time. At the same time, he attended evening classes at the Angers Municipal School of Fine Arts, where he distinguished himself with his talent and won several prizes. Supported by his teachers, he obtained a scholarship to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1878 and 1880, he learned Neoclassical principles there under the influence of the renowned painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, teachings that would profoundly shape his artistic approach.
The Rise to Recognition
At 24, Alexis Axilette reached a major turning point in his career by winning the prestigious Premier Grand Prix de Rome with his painting Themistocles Taking Refuge with Admetus (1885), a masterfully executed historical scene. This success, achieved at such a young age only by Fragonard, propelled his career, marked by gold medals, honorary distinctions, and the Legion of Honor. From that moment on, he became a central figure in the artistic and literary life of the Third Republic, frequenting high society and financial circles. An accomplished artist, he traveled throughout Europe and forged an international reputation, becoming a sought-after portraitist with prestigious commissions, notably from the Imperial Court of Russia.
In 1898, he received a major state commission: the creation of a monumental triptych for the ceiling of the Social Museum, entitled Humanity, Fatherland, and Muse. This work, both moral and balanced, perfectly embodies the republican ideals of the time.
Historical and Artistic Context
Under the Third Republic, the arts were seen as a privileged means of promoting national cohesion. Axilette’s academic style, rooted in moral and patriotic values, perfectly aligned with this objective. However, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of new artistic movements such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Expressionism. Axilette’s attachment to classicism and a rigorous aesthetic set him apart from the avant-garde movements that favored experimentation and creative freedom. Thus, although he perfectly embodied his era, his art gradually came to be perceived as outdated and obsolete.
A Transition to Pastels
In the 1910s, as artistic tastes evolved, Alexis Axilette turned to the use of pastels. This more subtle and delicate medium allowed him to explore a new sensibility while remaining true to his academic style. His works from this period, primarily portraits and landscapes, testify to his desire to renew his approach while remaining rooted in classical tradition. These pastels reveal an undiminished technical mastery and a willingness to adapt to new artistic trends, although his style seems to have been less appreciated at this time.
Posthumous Oblivion
Like many academic artists, Alexis Axilette suffered from the evolution of tastes in the 20th century. Classical art, once revered, lost ground to the avant-garde, relegating its works to museum storage. Furthermore, his image as a society artist, associated with the establishment of the Third Republic, did not help his legacy. While artists like Gauguin symbolized rebellion and innovation, Axilette remains perceived as a representative of a bygone academicism.
A body of work to be rediscovered
Alexis Axilette died on July 3, 1931, in Durtal, his birthplace. Today, his legacy lives on through his works held in private and public collections: academic drawings, nude sketches, portrait studies, landscapes, and historical paintings. These paintings bear witness to his exceptional talent and his dedication to his art. Although he was a major figure of his time, he remains relatively unknown today. He embodies the fate of many artists: celebrated in their lifetime, but gradually forgotten by history.
Anonymous. “Alexis Axilette,” on the French Wikipedia website, translated by Google Translate
Designed in partnership with the Musée Départemental Ernest Hébert in La Tronche (Isère), where it will be hosted in spring 2026, the exhibition will also be presented at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici in autumn 2026, where the exhibition’s curator Marie Robert spent a year in the context of a Villa Medici/ Musée d’Orsay cross-residency.
The exhibition Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? (1839-1945) presented at the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2015 was a milestone for recognition of women artists in France. One of the many photographers featured was Gabrielle Hébert (1853, Dresden, Germany – 1934, La Tronche, France). Born Gabrielle von Uckermann, she was an amateur painter before marrying Ernest Hébert in 1880, an academic artist twice appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome. She went on to develop an intensive, extremely prolific photography practice, begun at Villa Medici in 1888 and ending twenty years later in La Tronche (near Grenoble) following the death of the man she had idolised, her elder by almost forty years, and whose place in history she largely ensured by supporting the creation of two monographic museums.
In the late 19th century, between France and Italy, like many artists and writers (including Henri Rivière, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Émile Zola) who equipped themselves with a camera to record their and their families’ daily lives, Gabrielle Hébert pursued a private, sentimental photography practice, helped along by the technical and aesthetic revolution brought about by the invention of snapshot photography. At Villa Medici, as the wife of its director, she organised receptions and received elite visitors. She was not long in escaping her assigned duties, however, and acquired a camera. She took a few lessons with a Roman professional and, along with a resident of her own age, set up a darkroom to develop and print her negatives and retouch the results. It was the beginning of an extremely voluminous output of photos, which she consigned to her diaries. Hardly a day passed without her taking a snapshot, interspersing them with remarks that tell us how she set about taking pictures: “Je photo…. Je photographie…”.
Although Gabrielle Hébert shared her taste for society portraits and tableaux vivants with Luigi and Giuseppe Primoli, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte’s nephews and pioneers of snapshot photography in Italy, she explored all photographic genres on her own at Villa Medici, including nudes, reproductions of artworks, landscapes, still lifes and “photographic recreations” … Providing us with the viewpoint of a permanent resident who is dazzled by the palace, the site and its inhabitants (artists in residence, employees, models, dogs and cats) as seen from the inside and in all seasons, her output reveals a completely unknown aspect of life in that artistic phalanstery. Her “diary in images” is the first photo-report on daily life in the institution, a centre for residencies, training and creation by winners of the Grand Prix de Rome (many of whose works are now conserved by the Musée d’Orsay) as well as a laboratory for the new political relationship between France and Italy, which had just been “unified” (1861) and of which Rome became the capital in 1871. It also constitutes a unique testimony on one of the first couples of creators at Villa Medici. Although Gabrielle assisted Ernest with his activities as an artist, posing for him, preparing his canvases, retouching his paintings and even copying them, it was Ernest himself who was the photographer’s real focus. Overturning gender stereotypes, she watched him obsessively and was never tired of capturing him on film. Posing sessions with sitters, progress made in his paintings, moments of conviviality with visitors and interactions with residents, along with walks in the Roman countryside, bathing in the sea and alone in his office: all these aspects of artist, director and husband Ernest Hébert’s life were scrutinised and documented. When she returned permanently to France with him, Gabrielle stopped cultivating her passion for photography, a passion born in Italy and in exile, but nevertheless continued to photograph Hébert until the very end of his life, determined to immortalise him through images. Before that, though, in 1898, she escaped the closed quarters formed by the Renaissance Palace and its eccentric occupants and performed her photographic swansong during a trip to Spain, which she photographed with a resolutely modern eye influenced by the early days of cinema.
This chrono-thematic exhibition, from Gabrielle Hébert’s photographic beginnings (1888) to her last images (1908), will seek to present what she made of photography and what photography made of her. Thanks to her images, which she shared and exchanged with her friends and family, she became recognised as an auteur and gained social status in a milieu where artistic creation was the preserve of men. But above all, photography revealed her to herself: through capturing a particularly remarkable geography and era, she effectively invented her own mythology. By doing so, she was Villa Medici’s first photographic chronicler and made a place for herself in the medium’s history.
Most of the works on exhibition are original prints (in 9 x 12 cm format), along with photograph albums created by Gabrielle Hébert, her diaries, boxes of glass plates and cameras she used. Enlargements created from negatives she never printed will add further life to the presentation. The itinerary will be rounded out by drawings and paintings by Ernest Hébert, as well as sentimental relics (palette, medallion and letters), testimony to a story of love for a man and a country.
“Ciociaria” refers to a historic, rustic region southeast of Rome in Italy, and “ciociara” (singular) or “ciociare” (plural/feminine) describes people, especially women, from that area, known for their traditional leather sandals (ciocie), embodying a simple, rural Italian identity, famously portrayed in the film La Ciociara (Two Women). The term evokes a strong connection to the land, traditional life, and the unique culture of this central Italian territory.
Adaptation of the texts from the exhibition in large print
Introduction
An amateur painter and wife of the artist Ernest Hébert, director of the French Academy in Rome, Gabrielle Hébert began photography intensively and passionately at the Villa Medici in 1888. She abruptly stopped twenty years later in La Tronche (near Grenoble), upon the death of the man she idolised and who was forty years her senior. She will ensure her legacy through the creation of two monographic museums.
Like Henri Rivière, Maurice Denis, or Émile Zola, who at the end of the 19th century seized upon a camera to record family life, Gabrielle developed a private and sentimental practice, fostered by the technical and aesthetic revolution of the snapshot. As the entries “I take photos” or “I photograph” in her diary show, not a day went by without her taking pictures. Securing her place as an author through these images in a milieu where artistic creation was reserved for men, she discovered herself.
Through the chronicle of her chosen land and happy days, she creates a work of memory and inscribes herself in History.
A Woman Under the Influence
On July 21, 1888, Gabrielle “went out to buy things necessary for photography.” This marked the beginning of an obsessive production of two thousand photographs, mostly taken at the Villa Medici where, as First Lady of a prestigious cultural institution, she organised receptions and received visiting high society. Gabrielle quickly escaped the constraints of her duties: she acquired a camera, took lessons from Cesare Vasari, a Roman professional, and, together with fellow resident Alexis Axilette, set up a darkroom to develop her negatives, print, and retouch her photographs.
She already had an eye for it thanks to her artistic background and her practice of painting and drawing. But it was with the Franco-Italian counts Giuseppe and Luigi Primoli that Gabrielle explored the potential of the instantaneous, becoming the subject of a creative and existential experience: photography.
An art of joy
Gabrielle chronicles the Villa Medici, at once an architectural masterpiece overlooking the Eternal City, a residence for the winners of the Grand Prix de Rome, and a laboratory for a new relationship between France and Italy, newly unified. She focuses her gaze on its inhabitants: artists and models, foreign visitors on holiday, Italian employees at work, flowers, and animals. She enjoys working alongside the “button-pushers” in her circle, as amateurs equipped with handheld cameras are known.
She also observes professionals capturing perspectives of the palace with their imposing camera. “Magnificent weather. I’m photographing the residents”: Gabrielle often associates the day’s weather with an urgent need to act. Present in the world, joyful in her being, she then presses the shutter. Taking the picture is an epiphany. “I photograph, therefore I exist,” she seems to be saying.
Mein Alles (My Everything)
Gabrielle focuses her attention on her husband, around whom she circles and whose activities she seems to observe when he is painting or showing guests around the premises. The tender and sensitive portrait she paints of him is that of a director, an artist entirely devoted to his work at his workplaces, or sketching en plein air on excursions. She also captures him in his nakedness, as an elderly man bathing in the sea. She is concerned about his state of health; she notes how he slept or the time he got up.
The couple’s asymmetry, commonplace at that time and in that social circle, is also expressed in their writings: while he uses the informal “tu” with her, she uses the formal “vous” and addresses him with the superlative phrase “Mein Alles”: My Everything.
Travels in Italy
During their eleven-year stay in Italy, Ernest and Gabrielle travelled all over the country.
The artist enjoys returning to favorite places painted during her youth. They take with them a boarder or student, Amelia Scossa, Ernest’s beloved model, or a few friends; the dogs are always present. In 1893, they travel to Sicily, to the Duke of Aumale’s estate, and then explore the ancient sites of Selinunte and Agrigento, and the Greek theaters of Syracuse and Taormina. By escaping the confines of the Villa Medici and its eccentric inhabitants, Gabrielle literally leaves her social milieu.
With an attention full of empathy for popular and regional culture, she manages to get groups of strangers, women and men, to pose in front of her lens, no doubt placed on a tripod, whom she brings together in an amusing jumble around a fountain or on the steps of a building, arousing in return a certain curiosity.
In Spain, a cinematic perspective
In 1896, the couple left Italy with great regret and sorrow, returning to Paris and La Tronche where they continued to lead an intense social life. Two years later, Gabrielle completed her photographic swan song during a final journey, this time to Spain, which took them both from Burgos to Granada via Madrid, El Escorial, Toledo, Granada, and Seville.
Abandoning her large-format camera for a Kodak, she amplified in nearly three hundred photographs what she had already experimented with: daring viewpoints – notably from a speeding train – a camera in motion, glances towards the camera, the operator’s shadow cast on the ground, motion blur of people and things (smoke, clouds, and waves), truncated figures, and close-ups.
The nascent cinematograph had passed by. She no longer poses her subjects; she captures them on the fly. She seizes fleeting gestures, radiant moments, the stroll of passersby, the burst of laughter. This journey is an enchanted interlude that allows the couple to get back on their feet, one last time.
The tomb of an artist
Upon returning from Spain, Gabrielle ceased to cultivate her passion, born under the Italian sky. Her output diminished significantly, ceasing altogether in 1908, with Ernest’s death.
During his final months, she recorded his last visits and outings in the sun, his walks, and setting up his easel outdoors. She portrayed him as a draftsman and painter to the very end, then staged his posthumous portrait, for eternity. Containing the seeds of anticipation of the end, the photographs of moments lived, places visited, and people met, were in reality intended to be viewed by others besides their sole author.
With her thousands of images, Gabrielle composed a tomb, in the poetic sense of the word, erected in memory of her husband and their love. In the museum she created in Isère, in La Tronche, in honour of Ernest, it would take until the beginning of the 21st century for her photographic work to be discovered by a happy accident.
Marie Robert, Chief Curator, Photography and Cinema at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, translated from the French by Google Translate
Prince Semyon Semyonovich Abamelek-Lazarev (also Abamelik-Lazaryan; Russian: Семён Семёнович Абамелек-Лазарев; 24 November 1857 in Moscow – 2 October 1916 in Kislovodsk) was a Russian millionaire of Armenian ethnicity noted for his contributions to archaeology and geology.
Count Giuseppe Napoleone Primoli (in French, Joseph Napoléon Primoli; 2 May 1851 in Rome – 13 June 1927 in Rome) was an Italian nobleman, collector and photographer. …
Giuseppe Primoli lived in Paris from 1853 to 1870. He befriended writers and artists both in Italy and France, and was host to Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Alexandre Dumas fils, Sarah Bernhardt and others in Palazzo Primoli in Rome. In 1901 he became the sole owner of the palazzo, which he enlarged and modernised between 1904 and 1911.
Primoli was a bibliophile and collector, who assembled a large collection of books and prints. He amassed a collection of books by Stendhal as well as many from the writer’s library.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Primoli, an avid photographer, produced over 10,000 photographs.
With photographs like the one above, taken at Taormina, it is likely Gabrielle Hébert would have met Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) who lived and worked there between 1878-1931.
Curators: Simon Baker & Laurie Hurwitz, MEP and Polly Fleury & Hope Kingsley, Wilson Centre for Photography
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s ‘M’ on the Black Horsehair Sofa, 1921 (below); and at right, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio), 1922 (below)
Shadow man
You can always learn from the great artists now matter how many times you have seen their work, especially when the photographs are simply, effectively hung ‘on the line’ in a beautiful space.
Here are photographs by Edward Weston I have never seen before: Pictorialist photographs of suffused and intimate beauty. An exhibition of Weston’s Pictorialist work would be magnificent to behold.
And then Weston’s Peppers (1929, below).
I don’t know why I have never seen this photograph before, why his Pepper (1930, below) is more famous, for this is a monstrous image of dark, writhing, semi-abstract figurative forms, just as valid an artistic statement (in a completely different way) than the more famous image.
Can you imagine holding a vintage print of this photograph in your hands!
Gloria virtutem tanquam umbra sequitur
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Only rhythm, form and perfect detail to consider – first conceptions coming straight through unadulterated.”
“What I seek now is simplicity – the form reduced to its essence.”
Edward Weston. Daybooks II: California (1930-1945). Aperture, 1961
“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.”
“To see the Thing Itself is essential: the Quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism.”
Edward Weston. The Daybooks of Edward Weston, from Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition. Aperture, 1965
Installation view of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026 showing at left, Edward Weston’s Shell 1927 (below); and right, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) 1936 (below)
Installation views of the exhibition Edward Weston: Becoming Modern at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, 15th October, 2015 – 25th January, 2026
The exhibition
The MEP presents Edward Weston: Becoming Modern, the most significant exhibition dedicated to Edward Weston in Paris in nearly thirty years. A pioneering figure of photographic modernism, Weston helped forge a new visual language – marked by clarity, formal rigour, and a profound engagement with the essential qualities of the photographic medium.
Originating from an idea by Michael Wilson – founder of the Wilson Centre for Photography in London and one of the world’s foremost collectors – Becoming Modern brings together a rare selection of vintage prints from his collection, many of which have never been exhibited in France. These works offer an exceptional insight into Weston’s evolving practice and the emergence of a distinctly photographic modernism.
Spanning more than three decades, from 1908 to 1945, the exhibition traces Weston’s artistic trajectory. His early pictorialist photographs, created in California during the 1910s and early 1920s, draw upon 19th-century artistic traditions, employing soft focus, carefully staged settings, and symbolic imagery. Over time, his vision transformed: his images became sharper, compositions more austere, with an increasing emphasis on form, surface, and structure. By the 1920s, many of his photographs approached geometric abstraction – though Weston was never confined to a single style. This transformation unfolded gradually, as motifs intertwined and techniques evolved in a subtle, ongoing dialogue, revealing an artist continuously refining and deepening his vision.
Highlights include works from Weston’s time in Mexico, where, in close collaboration with Tina Modotti – an artist, political activist, and his lover – he created portraits and nudes imbued with a newfound freedom and radicalism These are complemented by evocative landscapes of the dramatic California coastline near Point Lobos and Carmel. At the heart of the exhibition are his most iconic series: sensuous close-up studies of natural forms – peppers, shells, fruits, and vegetables – captured with an almost obsessive intensity; dune and rock landscapes from Point Lobos and Death Valley; and luminous nudes of his muse, Charis Wilson. Throughout, Weston reveals the universal beauty of everyday subjects, transforming them into pure, sculptural forms. Recurring themes – portraiture, the nude, still life, and nature – are placed in dialogue, uncovering deeper connections across his oeuvre. His work displays remarkable strength and variety, with many natural forms taking on subtle anthropomorphic qualities.
Becoming Modern invites audiences to rediscover a bold innovator whose visionary approach helped shape the course of photographic history. The exhibition also includes a selection of rare works by leading Pictorialist photographers, offering a broader context for Weston’s early influences and the artistic milieu from which his modernism emerged.
Edward Weston biography
Widely regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century photography, Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) reshaped the medium through a vision rooted in clarity, form, and a profound sensitivity to the physical world. Over a career spanning more than forty years, he forged a style that was both radically modern and deeply grounded in the landscapes and materials of the American West.
Born in Highland Park, Illinois, Weston spent his early years in the Chicago area, where his fascination with photography first took hold. By 1903, as a teenager, he was already exhibiting his early works. At sixteen, he received his first camera – a gift from his father that marked the beginning of a lifelong creative journey. He studied at the Illinois College of Photography from 1908 to 1911 before relocating to California, where, at age 25, he opened a portrait studio in Tropico, operating from 1911 to 1922. In his early career, Weston worked within the Pictorialist tradition – a popular style of the early 20th century characterised by soft focus and romantic, painterly effects. His portraits from this period brought him recognition from the art community. Yet by the early 1920s, he began to move away from this approach, embracing a sharper, more precise, and abstract visual language that emphasised form and detail.
A turning point in Weston’s artistic journey occurred in 1922 on a trip to New York, where he met influential modernist photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. They recognised the originality of his work and encouraged him to fully embrace this new direction, which soon included close studies of fruits, vegetables, shells, and stones, rendered with astonishing clarity and sculptural intensity. Through close observation and meticulous composition, he revealed the inherent beauty of form, transforming the ordinary into the iconic.
In the mid-1920s, Weston travelled to Mexico with the photographer and political activist Tina Modotti, with whom he shared a studio and a deep creative partnership. Immersed in the vibrant cultural life of Mexico City, he engaged with a dynamic community of artists and thinkers whose ideas further catalysed his break from tradition.
Returning to California in 1928, Weston found new inspiration in the rugged coastal terrain of Point Lobos. The region’s intricate rock formations, windswept trees, and tide pools became a central focus of his work, offering endless opportunities for visual exploration and formal innovation. In 1932, Weston co-founded Group f/64 – a collective of West Coast photographers dedicated to “straight” photography, emphasising sharp focus, rich tonality, and the use of large-format cameras. The group championed an unmanipulated approach to the medium. Weston’s contributions during this period, especially his landscapes, remain among the most enduring images in American photography.
Becoming Modern traces Edward Weston’s evolution from the soft pictorialism of his early years to the clarity and precision that came to define modern photography. Spanning nearly three decades, the exhibition presents more than 100 rare vintage prints from the Wilson Centre for Photography. It invites viewers to rediscover one of photography’s most visionary pioneers through an extraordinary body of work.
The exhibition opens with two emblematic photographs that frame its central theme, reflecting a curatorial concept developed by Michael Wilson to highlight Weston’s extraordinary range and experimentation. On one side hangs M on the Black Horsehair Sofa (1921, above), a quintessential example of the Pictorialist style: a languid pose, softly diffused light, and a painterly atmosphere enriched by symbolic elements – a floral bouquet, a circular mirror. Opposite it, Tina Modotti (Nude in Studio) (1922, above) marks a striking departure. The figure sits upright, smoking, in a bare studio – captured with crisp focus and a stark, modern sensibility. Though created just a year apart, these works embody the transformative arc at the heart of Weston’s career: a restless search for new ways of seeing. From these beginnings, Weston’s exploratory approach soon dissolved strict categories, embracing a practice defined by an ongoing dialogue between subjects and forms.
From here, the exhibition situates Weston’s early work within the broader context of the Pictorialist movement. His prints are shown alongside key images by photographers who shaped or anticipated his early style – Edward Steichen, George Seeley, Anne Brigman, Dorothea Lange, Margrethe Mather, and Alfred Stieglitz. A tireless advocate for photography as a fine art, Stieglitz helped define the medium’s possibilities through his publications Camera Work and 291, and through his influential New York gallery of the same name. Weston’s own early prints – including a striking self-portrait – are exhibited alongside these historic works. These are placed in conversation with later photographs that capture Weston and his creative circle in 1920s California, evoking a distinct artistic atmosphere. Rooted in the landscape and rhythms of the West Coast, Weston’s early vision subtly diverged from that of his East Coast contemporaries.
The exhibition then turns to the pivotal decade of the 1920s, a period of remarkable transformation and experimentation in Weston’s practice. Rather than unfolding in a linear progression, this section reveals how Weston moved fluidly between subjects and styles – returning repeatedly to certain motifs while continually refining his formal vocabulary.
This section opens with works from Weston’s extended stays in Mexico from 1923 to 1926 with photographer and political activist Tina Modotti – his muse, lover, and collaborator – where he encountered a vibrant avant-garde community. Immersed in the artistic and political ferment of 1920s Mexico, Weston developed a bold new visual language focused on form, contrast, and a sense of immediate presence. A striking portrait of Modotti, presented in both gelatin silver and palladium prints, showcases Weston’s ongoing technical experimentation alongside his deepening sensitivity to tonal nuance. Modotti encouraged Weston toward an even more radical vision, challenging him to see the world anew through his camera.
His Mexican experience deepened Weston’s experimental impulse, introducing sharper contrasts and new formal rigor that reverberated through his portraits and nudes. His obsession with natural forms intensified. He photographed them repeatedly, seeking the perfect composition and meticulously refining his prints to reveal the interplay of light, shadow, and volume.
These subjects interact and reflect one another through Weston’s lens. The sinuous curves of a shell echo the lines of a nude; the gleaming porcelain of Excusado (Toilet) (1926) takes on the quiet sensuality of the human body. Shell (1927, above), one of Weston’s most iconic images, exemplifies his singular ability to elevate everyday objects into studies of luminous purity, rendering form, texture, and light with a precision so distilled that they verge on abstraction – not simply photographs of things, but meditations on form itself. During this period, his treatment of the nude also evolved dramatically: the body becomes fragmented and abstracted, its anatomy transformed into sculptural rhythm. This exploration reaches its pinnacle in Charis, Santa Monica (Nude in Doorway) (1936, above), one of Weston’s most celebrated images.
At the heart of the exhibition are many of Weston’s most exceptional works from the late 1920s and 1930s, in which he famously transformed the ordinary into something sensuous and unexpected. In his iconic studies of vegetables – particularly peppers – their curves and folds evoke the flesh and contours of the human torso, recalling both modernist sculpture and the body. Using the camera to express, in his words, “the very substance and the quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston also photographed in close-up what he saw around him: an egg-slicer, the plank from a barley sifter, a gnarled tree.
His portraits from this period grew sharper in focus and more daring in composition, echoing the dynamic perspectives emerging in European Modernist photography. By the late 1920s, after returning to California, his work had begun to appear in major exhibitions linked to the New Objectivity movement, which championed photographic clarity and rejected painterly effects. This evolution is also evident in his treatment of the nude: the body is fragmented and abstracted, its forms studied as sculptural elements.
Weston’s practice moved fluidly between subjects, embracing both the human body and the natural world, constantly refining his vision through intense study and formal innovation. Close-up studies of nature – sand patterns, rocks, and wood – verge on abstraction, including Rock Erosion and Sandstone Erosion (Point Lobos) – photographs made along the dramatic California coastline that Weston returned to repeatedly. Jagged rock formations, knotted seaweed, wind-twisted cypress trees, and bleached driftwood became recurring motifs, offering endless opportunities for formal exploration. These works also include a group of powerful portraits, from images of his future wife, Charis Wilson, and her brother Leon, to Weston’s son Brett and daughter-in-law Elinore Stone.
In my humble opinion Diane Arbus is the best portrait photographer of the 20th century.
As can be seen in the quotation from a 1939 high-school essay on Plato when Arbus was just 19 years old (below), latent inside her was an appreciation of difference, uniqueness, and the importance of life – all awaiting an out, an emanation of her spirit later manifested in her photographs through the picturing of her subjects.
Arbus found her mature voice as an artist, her métier if you like, when in 1962 she switched from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 inch twin-lens reflex (TLR) Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), a square format which became her iconic signature.
In the photograph Nancy Bellamy’s bedroom, N.Y.C. 1961 (1961, below) we therefore have evidence of the early results of the use of this new camera. In this photograph I believe you can feel how Arbus is still getting used to his new way of seeing the world, for you have to approach your visualisation of the world in a completely different way when constructing the image plane in a square format. Here she is still unsure as to where to place the camera. The light is fantastic coming in through the window and flooding the room but the out of focus left wall is weak and simply does not work with the image.
Fast forward to 1963-1965 and we see Arbus in complete control of her physical and emotional environment. In photographs from this period, whether medium distance portraits showing subjects in situ or tightly cropped portraits with minimal backgrounds, we see her undoubted mastery of natural light, flash, construction and tensioning of the image plane but, above all, in control of the feeling that emanates from the photographs that flows to the viewer.
Whether direct / acceptance / this is who I am (Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey, 1963, 1963 below) to contained / introspective (Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966 below) – but never the dreaded “dead pan” – and on to the inscrutable / open / closed looks on each of the three faces in the photograph Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 (1963, below), Arbus is the master at conjuring, no what is the word I’m looking for … Arbus is the master at materialising the energy of a person or place before our very eyes.
As the press release so eloquently states, “Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.”
An unspoken exchange between photographer and subject. A moment of revelation, or revelatio, where the curtain is pulled back to reveal our innermost secrets. Visualised by Arbus without judgement.
As the years progress towards 1968-1970 Arbus becomes bolder still. In photographs such as A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below), Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below) and Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.YC., 1970 (1970, below) we see and feel such an intimate bond between the photographer and the subject – all crap cut out, all extraneous noise gone, just the baring of the soul of the sitter looking directly into the camera. As Minor White used to say, a communication / communion between the photographer and the subject, back through the lens of the camera and onto the film, forming a Zenian circle of energy, hoping for a revelation of spirit in the negative and subsequent print – whether that be from a rock, a landscape or a portrait.
And in two photographs from the same sitting, we can begin to understand how Arbus achieved her aim. In the photograph Transvestite at the birthday party, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) we have the subject in situ, in context, laughing, happy, enjoying her birthday party surrounded by her things. Then things change. In Transvestite with her birthday cake, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) Arbus closes in on this wonderful human being on her bed with her birthday cake. Isolating her from the background through the use of flash, there she is, fag in hand, staring directly into the camera in all her strength and vulnerability. Arbus evinces what it is to be this human being, she has empathy for the subject in these intimate settings.
I believe that Arbus’ empathy for her subjects was greatly enhanced by the waist level engagement with her sitters when using her medium format camera. Instead of bringing the camera up to the eye, Arbus looks down into the viewfinder to locate and ground the energy of her subjects, and the camera is nestled at solar plexus / belly button, with all the connection to mother, blood, energy and water (Amniotic Fluid) from which we all come. When singing and in yoga practice, breathing comes from the stomach and the energy flows in an out of the navel, the Manipura (solar plexus) in yoga, linked to personal power, emotional balance, and metabolism, acting as a hub for energy distribution.1 Having used an old Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera myself I can totally appreciate the unique perspective and energy such a camera position brings to picturing the world.
“These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.”2
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ The (navel) is seen as a powerful energy centre in many traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, TCM) and science, representing our origin, core strength, digestion (Agni/digestive fire), self-esteem, and life force (prana).
2/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Diane Arbus at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2011 – February 2012
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the 5 images and installation photographs in the posting. All other photographs are used under fair use conditions for the purposes of eduction and research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
Diane Arbus
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth: individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life…. I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at left, Arbus’ Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968; at centre, Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963; at second right, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in a negligee, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; and at right, Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at second left, Arbus’ Two friends at home, N.Y.C., 1965; at second right, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966; and at right, Transvestite at her birthday party, N.Y.C., 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing Arbus’ photograph A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing in the centre distance, Arbus’ Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970; at second right, Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966; and at right, Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964
Lucas Samaras (Greek: Λουκάς Σαμαράς; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. …
His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.
~ Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy
Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 6 November to 17 January 2025, and travels to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition, jointly published by both galleries.
Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.
Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.
The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968.
While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.
Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).
Exhibition Catalogue
This new title ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ illuminates Diane Arbus’s singular ability to enter private worlds.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
One of Arbus’s lesser known pictures, this photograph is of the bedroom of Nancy Bellamy, the wife of Richard Bellamy, a leading gallerist in 1960s New York who influentially championed Pop Art and Minimalism. Before she began her personal projects, Arbus worked in fashion photography with her husband, Allan, and she first met Nancy when she modelled for the Arbuses on a fashion shoot. As well as modelling, Bellamy also worked as a dancer, painter and costume designer, and had a keen interest in spiritualism. Like ‘Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963’, Arbus uses an empty room to create a portrait of the person – the dressmaker’s dummy, the canvas on the wall, the photographs by the mirror and the simple, yet elegant furnishings together create an impression of Arbus’s friend’s personality.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
The bishop in Diane Arbus’s photograph “Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal.” (1964, above) was Bishop Ethel Predonzan, a unique figure who believed she was in Santa Barbara to await the Second Coming of Christ and wore elaborate robes, described by Arbus as a “small lady in damask robes with hair of phosphorescent pink”.
Predonzan was a key subject in Arbus’s exploration of individuals on the fringes, showcasing the artist’s ability to find deep personal connection and reveal inner strangeness.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Mrs T. Charlton Henry was a Philadelphia socialite, a philanthropist, and a fashion icon – often top of the ‘best-dressed’ lists. She was the kind of wealthy upper-class woman that Arbus’s father would have hoped to see in his Fifth Avenue department store buying the latest furs.
“Mrs. Henry, born Julia Rush Biddle of Philadelphia’s Main Line, weighs approximately 88 pounds. She will be 82 years old this month. She has been on the best-dressed list so often that she is now a member of fashion’s Hall of Fame. She still lives in Philadelphia, but commutes to New York for luncheon, shopping, theater. She sits, with the posture of another era, on a bound-to-be-seen banquette at La Caravelle restaurant and delves into a curry (“I’ll have jellied soup for dinner tonight”). Her silver and gold “57 varieties” hair is meticulously coifed; the fingernails that blow delicate little kisses of greeting to friends are tinted a deep pink. Her brown and white gingham Mainbocher is perked up with her favorite day jewels. There are marble-size pearls around the neck and one wrist, and massive yellow sapphires at the other wrist, the ears, and flashing away on a ring and a brooch.”
Around the world, 2025 hasn’t been a great year for photography exhibitions. As a friend of mine said on Facebook it has been a dreary year and I would tend to agree with him.
Curatorially, everything was pretty cut and dried, relying on the usual one artist show or group exhibition on a theme with nobody prepared to take a risk on anything creative, inventive even.
I found little to inspire me in terms of idiosyncratic but illuminating pairings of photographers or unusual insights into the conditions and conceptualisation of photographic production and presentation – other than a few of the exhibitions noted below: costume, gesture and expression – yes! the development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous American artists – yes! and the life in self-portraits of a photobooth operator in Melbourne, part magician, part artist – YES!
Out of the 60 postings on Art Blart in 2025 I’ve picked what I think are the 11 best exhibitions, plus a couple of honourable mentions.
I hope you enjoy the selection and a Happy New Year to you all!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Past present,” on the exhibition Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, August 2024 – January 2025
Victor Plumier (Belgian, 1820-1878) Lady in Costume About 1850 Daguerreotype, half plate 5 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
“The emotions and the sentiments, the gestures and the expressions. The actor and the stage, the photographer and the sitter. The staged photograph and the tableaux vivant. The Self and the Other.” ~ MB
2/ A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, October 2024 – January 2025
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 1863 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds Lucinda Weill Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keogh Family
“Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events – remembrances of events – brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives. Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for (still) living people.” ~ MB
3/ Marcus Bunyan. “Out in the midday sun,” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025
“I am always fascinated with the early work of an artist. In essence, the photographs tell you what are the primary concerns for the artist and these themes usually remain with them for the rest of their career. These early black and white photographs provide a window into that ongoing investigation, that golden path. They are more subtle in their modulation of British life than in the later colour work – it’s as though the artist had to change gears with the use of colour developing a more ironic way of seeing British life through a different spatial relationship to his subjects – but in these photographs there is still that deprecating humour that is often missing in the work of his contemporaries…” ~ MB
“There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” ~ Saul Leiter
5/ True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna, January – April, 2025
Léon Vidal (French, 1833-1906) Oriental Onyx Sardonyx Cup (16th century) 1876 Photomechanical proof (photochromy using the Léon Vidal process) mounted on cardboard H. 20.8 ; L. 26.2 cm. Don Fondation Kodak-Pathé, 1983
“What a wonderful exhibition. It’s so exciting to see the history and development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous, American artists William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, much as I like both artists.” ~ MB
6/ The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March – May 2025
Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948) Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda 1977 Gelatin silver print 15.9 x 23.7cm Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024
“Prahran College itself played a critical role in the legitimisation of photography as an art form within Australia. It spearheaded the integration of art photography into tertiary education curricula, fostering an environment where young artists … could experiment formally and conceptually.”
James McArdle. “Epoch,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 25th April, 2025 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025
“The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.” ~ MB
8/ Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“Through the strip self-portraits Adler took while servicing and then testing the photobooths that he operated in Melbourne, Australia we become immersed in an archive of his world, the exhibition becoming a joyous ode to a man who devoted his life to photography (not in the traditional sense): in turns humorous and historical, a travelogue, his travelogue, through time and space.’ ~ MB
“Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval…
Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.” ~ MB
10/ Marcus Bunyan. “Myths of the American West,” on the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West’ 1979-1984 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
“Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”” ~ MB
“The Bechers’ typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.” ~ MB
“Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.” ~ MB
Curators: Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
“Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment. They are the result of curiosity, inspiration, and these words do not pretend to convey any information.”
Man Ray1
The rayographs
Although not the inventor of the photogram, a photograph made without the use of a camera by placing objects directly onto sensitised photographic paper and then exposing the paper to light, Man Ray’s rayographs have become the most recognisable and famous form that photograms have taken. This is because of their inventiveness, their subliminal connection to the psyche, and the use of “objects from the real world to make ambiguous dreamscapes.”7
It is interesting that Man Ray called his images rayographs, for a graph implies a topographical mapping, a laying out of statistics, whereas Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms imply in the title of their technique the transmission of some form of message, like a telegram. The paradox is that, as the quotation above states, Man Ray always insisted that his rayographs imparted no information at all; perhaps they are only dreams made (un)stable. Contrary to this the other two artists believed that, “photographic images – cameraless and other – should not deal with conventional sentiments or personal feelings but should be concerned with light and form,”8 quite the reverse of the title of their technique.
After his arrival in Paris Man Ray started experimenting in his darkroom and discovered the technique for his rayographs by accident. With the help of his friend the Surrealist poet Tristan Tzara, he published a portfolio of twelve Rayographs in 1922 called Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields). “This title is a reference to ‘Les champs magnétiques’, a collection of writings by André Breton and Philippe Soupault composed from purportedly random thought fragments recorded by the two authors.”9 The rayographs are visual representations of random thought fragments, “photographic equivalents for the Surrealist sensibility that glorified randomness and disjunction.”10
Man Ray, “denied the camera its simplest joy: the ability to capture everything, all the distant details, all the ephemeral lights and shadows of the world”11 but, paradoxically, the rayographs are the most ephemeral of creatures, only being able to be created once, the result not being known until after the photographic paper has been developed. In fact, for Man Ray to create his portfolio Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields), he had to rephotograph the rayographs in order to make multiple copies.12
Man Ray “insisted in nearly every interview that the rayograph was not a photogram in the traditional sense. He did something that a photogram didn’t; he introduced depth into the images,”13 which denied the images their photographic objectivity by depicting an internal landscape rather than an external one.14 What the rayographs do not deny, however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality (because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance).
Through an alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper, representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects themselves, in the surface of the paper. Perhaps these objects offer, in Heidegger’s terms, ‘a releasement towards things’,15 “a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time, between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there.”16
Finally, within their depth of field the rayographs can be seen as both dangerous and delicious, for somehow they are both beautiful and unsettling at one and the same time. As Surrealism revels in randomness and chance these images enact the titles of other Man Ray photographs: Danger-Dancer, Anxiety, Dust Raising, Distorted House. The rayographs revel in chance and risk; Man Ray brings his fantasies to the surface, an interior landscape represented externally that can be (re)produced only once – those dangerous delicious fields.
1/ Man Ray quoted in Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image. London: Gordon Fraser, 1980, p. 213
7/ Mark Greenberg (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 38
8/ Naomi Rosenblum. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997, 394
9/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
10/ Jed Perl (ed.,). Man Ray: Aperture Masters of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1997 pp. 11-12
11/ Perl, op. cit., pp. 5-6
12/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
13/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 112
14/ Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28
15/ “We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery … Releasement towards things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way…”
Martin Heidegger. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56 quoted in Mauro Baracco. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of Some Melbourne Architecture,” in Leon van Schaik (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72. No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, 74, Footnote 6.
Many thankx to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Stepping into the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art feels like entering the bellows of an old camera. Through a rectangular frame cut into the entry, the darkened walls unfold, accordion-like, to reveal a visual feast of the artist’s work, as Man Ray’s earliest film, “Retour à la raison (Return to Reason)” (1923), flickers across the screen opposite. Although the exhibition brings together approximately 160 works from an impressive array of lenders, it reveals itself gradually, taking the viewer through several turns before one can grasp its sheer enormity. When Objects Dream proves, thrillingly, that anyone left feeling jaded from the many, many recent exhibitions surrounding Surrealism’s centennial in 2024 can still see the movement’s key photographer with a fresh set of eyes.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.”
. Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934
“One sheet of paper got into the developing tray – a sheet unexposed that had been mixed with those already exposed under the negatives. … Regretting the waste of paper, I mechanically placed a small glass funnel, the graduate, and the thermometer in the tray on the wetted paper. I turned on the light; before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass more or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a black background. … I remembered when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof paper, exposing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. This was the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tone graduation. I made a few more prints … taking whatever came to hand; my hotel-room key, a handkerchief, some pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine … excitedly, enjoying myself immensely. In the morning I examined the results. … They looked startlingly new and mysterious.”
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experiments that pushed the limits of photography, painting, sculpture, and film. In the winter of 1921, he pioneered the rayograph, a new twist on a technique used to make photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed, Man Ray turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. Introduced in the period between Dada and Surrealism, the rayographs’ transformative, magical qualities led the poet Tristan Tzara to describe them as capturing the moments “when objects dream.”
The exhibition will be the first to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to Man Ray’s larger body of work of the 1910s and 1920s. Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs – including some of the artist’s most iconic works – to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice.
“Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” ~ Man Ray
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026
In the 1923 silent short of the same title, Man Ray filmed barely discernible scenes of Paris at night along with his own enigmatic photograms and conglomerations of spiraling or gyrating objects. The resulting sequence of near-total abstractions seems devoid of sense or purpose. The “return to reason” in the film comes finally in the form of a woman’s torso – modelled by cabaret personality Kiki de Montparnasse – turning to and fro beside a rain-covered windowpane. Man Ray reproduced the seductive finale, as well as other moments from the film, as photographs, singly and in strips. A still from Man Ray’s film, this particular photograph appeared on its own in the first issue of the key avant-garde journal La Révolution surréaliste, in 1924.
Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason), Man Ray, 1923
Emak-Bakia (1926) – directed by Man Ray
Emak-Bakia (Basque for Leave me alone) is a 1926 film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features.
Emak-Bakia shows elements of fluid mechanical motion in parts, rotating artifacts showing his ideas of everyday objects being extended and rendered useless. Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is shown driving a car in a scene through a town. Towards the middle of the film Jacques Rigaut appears dressed in female clothing and make-up. Later in the film a caption appears: “La raison de cette extravagance” (the reason for this extravagance). The film then cuts to a car arriving and a passenger leaving with briefcase entering a building, opening the case revealing men’s shirt collars which he proceeds to tear in half. The collars are then used as a focus for the film, rotating through double exposures.
The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso, and some of Man Ray’s mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.
Originally a silent film, recent copies have been dubbed using music taken from Man Ray’s personal record collection of the time. The musical reconstruction was by Jacques Guillot.
When the film was first exhibited, a man in the audience stood up to complain it was giving him a headache and hurting his eyes. Another man told him to shut up, and they both started to fight. The theatre turned into a frenzy, the fighting ended up out in the street, and the police were called in to stop the riot.
Emak bakia can also mean “give peace” (“emak” is the imperative form of the verb “eman”, which means “give”) in Basque.
The film was based on Robert Desnon’s surrealist poem L’Étoile de mer.
The Met Presents First Major Exhibition on Man Ray’s Radical Reinvention of Art through the rayograph
Featuring 160 rayographs, paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs, Man Ray: When Objects Dream highlights the principal place of the rayograph – a type of cameraless photograph – within the context of many of the artist’s most important works
This exhibition includes thirty-five works by Man Ray which are part of the major promised gift of nearly 200 works of Dada and Surrealist art from Trustee John Pritkzer
Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first major exhibition to examine the radical experimentation of American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) through one of his most significant bodies of work, the rayograph. Man Ray coined the term rayograph to name his version of the 19th-century technique of making photographs without a camera. He created them by placing objects on or near a sheet of light-sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. These photograms – as they are also called – appear as reversed silhouettes, or negative versions, of their subjects. They often feature recognisable items that become wonderfully mysterious in the artist’s hands. Their transformative nature led the Dada poet Tristan Tzara to describe rayographs as capturing the moments “when objects dream.” While Man Ray acknowledged the photographic origins of his new works, he did not think of them as strictly bound by medium. Taking Man Ray’s lead, this presentation is the first – more than a century since he introduced the rayograph – to situate this signature accomplishment in relation to his larger artistic output. The exhibition is on view September 14, 2025, through February 1, 2026.
“As one of the most fascinating and multi-faceted artists in the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, Man Ray challenged traditional narratives of modernism through his daring experimentation with diverse artistic mediums,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Anchored by Man Ray’s innovative and mesmerising rayographs along with new research and discoveries, this exhibition invites visitors to explore his ground-breaking manipulation of objects, light, and media, which profoundly reframed his artistic practice and impacted countless other artists. We’re so thrilled to include thirty-five works by Man Ray in this exhibition as part of John’s incredible promised gift.”
Drawing from the collections of The Met and more than 50 U.S. and international lenders, the presentation includes more than 60 rayographs, many of which were featured in important publications and exhibitions at the time of their making, and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, collages, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice. The exhibition marks a collaboration with the recently closed Lens Media Lab, Yale University, under the direction of Paul Messier, and with photography conservators and curators at various lending institutions, to study more than fifty rayographs.
In the winter of 1921, while working late in his Paris darkroom, Man Ray inadvertently produced a photogram by placing some of his glass equipment on top of an unexposed sheet of photographic paper he found among the prints in his developing tray. As he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, “Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted … In the morning I examined the results, pinning a couple of the rayographs – as I decided to call them – on the wall. They looked startlingly new and mysterious.” This supposed accident, now the stuff of legend, has obscured the fact that rayographs might be seen as the culmination of Man Ray’s work up to 1921 as well as the frame through which he would redefine his work thereafter. They harnessed his interests in working between dimensions, media, and artistic traditions, fittingly at the moment between Dada and Surrealism, which writer Louis Aragon once called the mouvement flou (flou means “hazy, blurry, or out of focus” in French).
Unfolding in a series of spaces that intersect with a central, dramatic presentation of rayographs, the exhibition illuminates their connections with Man Ray’s work in other media, including assemblage, painting, photography, and film. In approaching the rayograph in this expansive way, the exhibition also offers a reappraisal of the most productive and creatively significant period of his long career, beginning in New York around 1915 with his ambitious paintings and concluding in Paris in 1929 with his fine-tuning of the solarization process with Lee Miller. A critical factor across the exhibition is the central role of objects for Man Ray’s career, both in the creation of many of the rayographs and in his work more generally.
At its core, Man Ray: When Objects Dream focuses new attention on some of the artist’s most recognised, but little-studied, works, most particularly the rayograph. The exhibition opens with Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields) (1922), a portfolio of 12 rayographs which marks the first time Man Ray presented his photograms to the public. Critics hailed them for putting photography on the same plane as original pictorial works. The presentation concludes with the working copy of Champs délicieux, which the artist canceled and dedicated to his friend, Dada artist Tristan Tzara, in 1959.
Between these two works, twelve thematic sections of the exhibition explore such concepts as the silhouette, the dream, the body, the object, and the game, which are inspired by Man Ray’s experimentation with the rayograph. Other groupings will focus on specific media and techniques, and the artist’s studio, as well as watershed moments in the artist’s production, such as the years of 1923 and 1929, when Man Ray unexpectedly returned to painting. Three of his newly restored films, Retour à la raison (Return to Reason) (1923), Emak Bakia (1926), and L’étoile de mer (The Starfish) (1928), will be screened within the exhibition.
Highlights include such iconic objects like Man Ray’s iron studded with tacks, known as Cadeau (Gift) (1921), and his metronome, Object to be Destroyed (1923), that keeps time with the swinging eye of his companion, the photographer Lee Miller. Celebrated photographs, including his landmark Le violon d’Ingres (1924), in which the torso of the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) is depicted as a musical instrument, are also featured. The exhibition brings together some of his boldest but most refined experimental works – compositions like Aerograph (1919), a painting made with an airbrush and pigment sprayed through and around items from his studio. For Man Ray, objects could function as metaphors for the body, as demonstrated in works such as Catherine Barometer (1920) and L’homme (Man). Rarely seen paintings in the exhibition, including Paysage suédois (Swedish Landscape) (1926) record the artist’s great experimentation, working paint without a brush and in an almost sculptural way, building up and scraping down the surface that reflects his experiments in the darkroom.
Man Ray: When Objects Dream is curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro, Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art and Senior Research Coordinator in Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met, and Stephen C. Pinson, Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Met, with the assistance of Micayla Bransfield, Research Associate, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Installation view of the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 2025 – February 2026 showing at centre, Man Ray’s photograph Le violon d’Ingres 1924 (below)
American artist Man Ray (1890-1976) was a visionary known for his radical experimentation that pushed the limits of art. His most iconic works – an iron studded with sharp tacks, a woman’s back reimagined as a violin – combine this boundary-breaking attitude with a singular belief in the transformative potential of everyday things.
In the 1920s, the most significant of Man Ray’s investigations – and the thing that connected much of his work – was what he called the rayograph, a new twist on an old technique for making photographs without a camera. By placing objects on or near a sheet of sensitised paper, which he then exposed to light and developed, he turned recognisable subjects into wonderfully mysterious compositions. This radical art form, inextricably linked to the era’s Dada and Surrealist movements, grew out of his early work in New York and redefined his groundbreaking career in Paris.
Introduction
This exhibition’s subtitle, When Objects Dream, comes from a phrase by Tristan Tzara, a poet, artist, and early champion of Man Ray. Witness to some of the earliest rayographs, Tzara understood perhaps better than anyone else their physical and metaphorical link to objects reimagined through art. In a similar spirit, the current presentation reconsiders the role of the rayograph within Man Ray’s practice, especially its ability to extend his ideas across diverse media. The loosely chronological installation unfolds across a series of interconnected galleries organized around ideas that motivated the artist; to that end, visitors are invited to explore it in any number of ways.
All works in the exhibition are by Man Ray (American, 1890-1976).
Champs délicieux
In April 1922, readers of a French literary journal discovered a curious announcement for an album titled Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields). Its twelve “original photographs” by Man Ray feature objects from his studio – tongs, a comb, string, a hotel room key – composed in groupings. The images are ordered without clear logic or narrative. Instead, as advertised, they mark a “state of mind,” the artist’s free play, alone at night and without work obligations, in his studio darkroom.
Man Ray introduced Champs délicieux in the period between two revolutionary movements that arose in the wake of World War I: Dada and Surrealism. Both challenged conventional art and society by upending traditional subjects, techniques, and expectations. Inspired in part by a collection of unconsciously driven, automatic writings by poets André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Man Ray sought to render everyday objects unfamiliar. As early subscriptions attest, the album found an enthusiastic audience who appreciated the language of the rayograph and its ability to open up a new visual world.
A New Art
Before Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, he was focused on painting. He set out to stake his claim in the exhilarating avant-garde scene, his interest fueled by cutting-edge exhibitions at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291, and thrilling examples of Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, and Futurism at the modern art presentation known as The Armory Show in 1913. Unexpectedly, photography offered Man Ray a path forward. Noting the way a camera lens could compress and flatten space, he determined to endow art with a similar “concentration of life” while simultaneously freeing it from the burden of illusionism. “The creative force and the expressiveness of painting,” he wrote at the time, “reside materially in the colour and texture of pigment, in the possibilities of form invention and organisation, and in the flat plane on which these elements are brought to play.” He made paintings using palette knives and other tools instead of brushes and employed patterns, cutouts, and collage to create a self-proclaimed “new art of two dimensions.”
Objects At Hand
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR GOODS LEFT OVER THIRTY DAYS. So reads a sign in a photo, displayed nearby, of Man Ray’s West Eighth Street studio in New York. It was one of several items the artist discovered in the trash heap at his apartment building and brought up to his top-floor space. He considered retooling the sign to read LEFT OVER GOODS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THIRTY DAYS but decided it was perfect as is. This act – of elevating junk to art – is a familiar one in histories of the avant-garde, especially for the Dada movement. Art did not have to be painted or modelled or made with traditional materials and tools; it could be found in the everyday world and appreciated for the idea that it introduced, not for its beauty.
As Man Ray developed his “new art,” he came to see the latent potential of all the objects within his studio. This spurred further investigations that likewise tested the limits of two and three dimensions and blurred the boundaries between media. At the same time, he continued to explore how the camera could be used not only to document his work but to open new perspectives onto ordinary objects and their creative possibilities.
Clichés-verre
While the rayograph is often described as Man Ray’s first experiment with cameraless photography, that moment occurred years earlier. Around 1917 he explored several photographically based techniques, including the cliché-verre, or “glass-plate” print. A nineteenth-century reproductive process that incorporates both photography and printmaking, a cliché-verre is traditionally made by covering a plate of glass with a darkened medium and drawing into it to produce clear lines. When set onto sensitised paper and exposed to a light source, the plate transmits the scratched away areas as dark lines. Man Ray chose to incise directly into the emulsion of an exposed photographic plate, which he then subjected to light again with paper below it to make a contact print.
Photography
Man Ray first picked up a camera in 1915, to document his art. Through this experience, he discovered that the works acquired new qualities when reproduced in black and white. He made photographic portraits, too, which in Paris would become a dependable source of income. Revelling in the camera’s transformative optical abilities, Man Ray soon used it as a tool to facilitate his self-appointed role as a “marvellous explorer of those aspects that our retinas will never record.” He sought to reveal the creative potential of objects in his studio and in 1918 began a series of photographs using specifically arranged everyday items.
Aerographs
Still grappling with how to paint without a brush, Man Ray found inspiration at his day job working for an advertising agency, where he was introduced to an airbrush. He later brought the equipment back to his attic studio and began to experiment. Using an air compressor, the artist directed pigment through stencils and around masked areas and objects, which he rested on the composition board and repositioned as he worked. “It was thrilling,” he would later recount, “to paint a picture, hardly touching the surface – a purely cerebral act.” These works, which he termed “aerographs” were made, in effect, before they hit the paper. Objects were carved, shaped, and modeled in the air. Voids register as substance, and what we see on the paper is residue fused to the surface. “I tried above all,” Man Ray explained, “to create three-dimensional paintings on two-dimensional surfaces.”
Flou
Man Ray introduced his rayographs during a transitional period between the Dada and Surrealism movements that the French writer Louis Aragon called the mouvement flou – flou translating to “blurry” or “out of focus.” The term also suits these works, which viewers initially deemed curious and captivating but difficult to pin down. Rayographs, as cameraless photographs, exist in an indistinct place between photography and painting, the mechanical and the handmade, documentation and dream.
During the 1920s Man Ray also explored blurriness in his camera images. Even as technical improvements facilitated increased focus and detail, and the preference for sharp photographs grew, he generally pursued a flattering, soft-focus technique in his growing business of portrait commissions. At other times, he sought more radical effects, which the director Claude Heymann described as “strange, troubling blurs” produced “through distortions, prolonged poses or special focusing techniques.” The anomalies in the resulting photographs are visible signs of the effort and time Man Ray spent to realise the images – even if he later called them unplanned or accidental.
A New Field of Gravity
In his preface introducing the album Champs délicieux (Delicious Fields), Tristan Tzara remarked that rayographs “present to space an image that exceeds it, and the air, with its clenched fists and superior intelligence, seizes it and holds it next to its heart.” Indeed, objects in Man Ray’s images beckon us in but keep us thrillingly at the edge – or put another way, they test our senses of proximity and location. His experiments in New York expanded the bounds of the photograph, object, painting, and installation, and he developed a novel relationship between object and viewer. These works demonstrate in their construction what the French writer Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes would identify in the artist’s rayographs as a “new field of gravity.”
The rayograph
The term rayograph designates Man Ray’s version of a technique for making photographs without a camera: by setting objects on or near sensitised paper and exposing it to light. In his autobiography, the artist described happening upon the process by chance, late one night, while developing prints in his makeshift darkroom. For subjects, he looked no further than the things in his studio. When exposed to a directed flash of light, they appear as reversed silhouettes – but in Man Ray’s hands they also gained new life. The nature of the image depended on the items’ translucency, reflectivity, density, placement, and distance from the sheet, as well as the source and location of the illumination and the number of exposures. Surfaces could cast unexpected reflections or eclipse elements in darkness. Forms might multiply or transform. Sometimes Man Ray’s objects and the space between them acquired an insistent, compressed volume that registered on the paper. The resulting works present what writer Pierre Migennes described as a “metamorphosis of the most vulgar utensils.” Everyday things became wonderfully unfamiliar as Man Ray wielded light in the darkroom like a brush in paint.
As he prepared to launch his rayographs in Champs délicieux, Man Ray also considered how to disseminate them for reproduction in magazines. On November 1, 1922, he wrote to Harold Loeb, editor of Broom: “Each print is an original, no plate or duplicate exists, as the process is manipulated directly on the paper, like a drawing. If you could assure me that the … originals would be safely handled and returned, I shall gladly send them on [to Berlin]. If, however, you cannot guarantee their safe return, I can re-photograph them … which, while not having the intensity and contrast of the originals, would nevertheless reproduce well.” Loeb offered to transport them personally and published these four in Broom the following March.
Man Ray transformed and energised ordinary objects in his rayographs by tapping their powers of translucency or reflectance. Bodies and their proxies, however, remain stubbornly recognisable. Hands reach out, hold things, and interact with objects; heads turn to kiss and drink, even if the action might be staged. The artist’s rayographs tie the body to a kind of specificity that his objects do not experience; this might explain why there are fewer of these works with bodies than without. As Tristan Tzara explained in his appreciation of the rayographs in 1934, Man Ray approached objects in a manner that allowed them to be free “to dream.”
Dangerous Games
Reactions to Man Ray’s cameraless photographs consistently identified them with the realm of play. The first to comment on the rayograph was French poet Jean Cocteau, who wrote in an open letter, “You, my dear Man Ray, will nourish our minds with those dangerous games it craves.” He was soon joined by Tristan Tzara, who likened the rayograph to a “game of chess with the sun.”
Man Ray had a strong sense of the game as a strategy for producing art. For him, play was a state of readiness to engage. This comes through in the provocative humour of his objects and collages and in the invitation to chance embedded in the rayograph process – the “discovery” of which, he recounted, entailed real amusement. Marcel Duchamp once playfully defined his friend as synonymous with the joy of the game: “MAN RAY, n.m. synon. de joie, jouer, jouir” (joy, to play, to enjoy).
Chemical Paintings
In April 1922, the same month that the Champs délicieux album was announced, Man Ray proudly reported to friends and patrons that he had freed himself “from the sticky medium of paint.” His rayographs claimed a rebellious position aimed at the traditional hierarchy of fine art – and particularly its apex, painting. Critics asserted they had equal status, and New York’s Little Review even called them “chemical paintings.”
Just a year later, however, while his rayograph production remained steady, Man Ray quietly returned to painting. The works here show how his practice had changed. Abstract and relatively small, they were made on commercially available boards, wood, sandpaper, or metal supports. With their overlapping pictorial elements and dramatic contrasts of luminosity and shadow, angled and geometric forms, the compositions emulate aspects of rayographs. Each is a thorough exploration of depth on a flat surface and a bid to make paint reflect its own material reality.
Objects and Bodies
Man Ray’s experience of making rayographs informed his consideration of the human body, which he handled, at times, like an object, devoid of personhood and open for manipulation. Writing about the artist’s portraits and rayographs, André Breton noted that Man Ray considered the bodies of women in his work no different from the objects at hand in his darkroom:
The very elegant, very beautiful women who expose their tresses night and day to the fierce lights in Man Ray’s studios are certainly not aware that they are taking part in any kind of demonstration. How astonished they would be if I told them that they are participating for exactly the same reasons as a quartz gun, a bunch of keys, hoar-frost or fern!
For Man Ray, a body could function as a kind of concentrated equivalence, like the essence represented by an object. This attitude is visible in some of the most iconic works of his career, in which his presentation of female models such as the artist and performer Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin) also involved darkroom manipulation. While his approach to men’s bodies was notably less sexualised, they too were posed and set up like the objects in his rayographs.
Darkroom Manoeuvres
Like other pictures of Kiki de Montparnasse in this gallery, Le violon d’Ingres involved multiple darkroom campaigns. For the version published in Littérature, Man Ray worked on a print to sharpen the contours and smooth the forms; he added f-shaped sound holes directly onto it with dark ink.
The version here, larger than the first, is the result of further experimentation. Man Ray covered the entire print with a mask from which he hand cut two f-shaped forms. He then made a second exposure, which turned the exposed spaces black. Instead of ink shapes that disrupt the surface, these marks read as deep, dark space compressed within the flat surface of the photograph. Man Ray described this version as “a combination of a photo and a rayograph.” As such, the f-holes are eerily – seamlessly – part of the woman’s body. She appears as a kind of dreamlike human-instrument hybrid, a whole object to be visually taken in and possessed.
Dreams
Even before the Surrealist manifesto of 1924 claimed the fertile ground of the unconscious, many poets and artists in Man Ray’s circle focused on dreams. The same group, two years earlier, had followed André Breton’s experiments with hypnosis and trance states. They practiced séances and so‑called sleeping fits, writing down or drawing what came to them in order to reveal hidden desires. The poet Louis Aragon wrote of these slumberous escapades: “Dreams, dreams, dreams, the domain of dreams expands with every step.”
Apart from photographing the sleep sessions, Man Ray remained an independent supporter of the group, explaining, “It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realise them.” Even so, Aragon included him in his multipage inventory of dreamers, with a nod to the rayographs: “Man Ray … dreams in his own way with knife rests and salt cellars: he gives meaning to light, which now knows how to speak.” The artist found great support among the Surrealist circle in Paris, whose members acquired his work and included him in exhibitions and publications.
Dream Objects
Man Ray’s dreamlike rayographs have counterparts in the new kinds of hybrid objects he began to make at the same time. These mysterious works seize upon unexpected transformations: a fragile soap bubble rendered solid; the taut strings on a musical instrument’s neck turned loose and sensuous; or a budding plant metamorphosed into a pudgy hand.
The strange bundle wrapped with string has long been associated with the power of objects to stir the unconscious. In 1920 Man Ray assembled, photographed, and deconstructed the original object. The Untitled photograph appeared in the first issue of La revolution surréaliste, in 1924, with the text “Surrealism opens the door of the dream to all those for whom night is miserly.” Over the next decade, the image came to embody another phrase popular among the Paris Surrealist group, by the poet Isidore Ducasse: “as beautiful … as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
“Objects to touch, to eat, to crunch, to apply to the eye, to the skin, to press, to lick, to break, to grind, objects to lie, to flee from, to honor, things cold or hot, feminine or masculine, objects of day or night which absorb through your pores the greater part of our life. … These are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” (Tristan Tzara, “When Objects Dream,” 1934)
Returns
In 1929 Man Ray found himself “longing to touch paint again.” By the fall, he had taken a second Paris studio, near the Luxembourg Gardens, where he painted in the mornings before returning home to oversee photographic portraits and magazine work. In his new compositions, he let paint drip across a canvas from a poured line and squeezed pigment directly from the tube onto a support in a loose, calligraphic manner. Trading on narratives of chance and automatism, he later called these paintings “unpremeditated.”
Another return accompanied the arrival in Paris of Lee Miller, who became Man Ray’s apprentice in photography and then his personal and professional partner. As a result, he again embraced the camera as his primary tool of photographic experimentation, after years of making rayographs without one. Together, Miller and Man Ray discovered a creative synergy that led to their joint development of the solarization process. The same year signalled the near culmination of Man Ray’s exploration of the rayograph: by some accounts, he made one hundred in 1922, but just one in 1929.
Solarization
Together with Lee Miller, Man Ray developed a darkroom technique that complemented his return to painting. Like the rayograph, solarization was not entirely new, and both he and Miller claimed that it similarly resulted from an accident. The process involves exposing a negative a second time during development, which causes a reversal of the expected tonalities. Honed by Miller and Man Ray and applied to their portraits and nudes beginning in fall 1929, the process often endowed subjects with subtly glowing black contours that Miller called “halos.” This feature became so well-known – largely through reproductions of the solarized portrait of Miller shown nearby – that a 1932 article called it both “the beacon and despair of experimenters.” Like the drips and skeins in Man Ray’s 1929 paintings, these lines create a friction between the subject and surface of the image – a noted departure from the artist’s earlier approach to the flat plane.
Revisiting Champs délicieux
Man Ray completed his Champs délicieux project nearly forty years after its debut. A handwritten inscription to Tristan Tzara in the final copy (number 41, displayed here) refers to the sparks set off by their initial exploration of the rayograph; he added an almost identical inscription in his 1922 working copy. This suggests a Dada game between the two artists: the announcement laid out the rules and the inscriptions signified its end.
As promised in the 1922 first announcement of the album, the last copy features the canceled proofs (a practice meant to show that no further prints can be made from the originals). A canceled print edition is not unusual. In this case, however, a purposeful ambiguity was in play from the beginning of the project – when it was presented as an album of “original photographs” copied from unique rayographs – to the end. Only the negatives used to produce the album were canceled, meaning that the primary rayographs might still exist. Ever the prankster, Man Ray ensured that the game continues.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Catherine Barometer 1920 Glass, metal, felt, washboard, tube, wire, wood, steel wool, gouache on paper, and paper stamp 48 1/8 × 12 × 2 1/8 in. (122.2 × 30.5 × 5.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker Photo courtesy of The Bluff Collection, photo by Ian Reeves
!['Untitled [Women Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s from the exhibition 'Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth' at The Photographers' Gallery, London, October 2025 - February 2026](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/women-photobooth-portraits.jpg "'Untitled [Women Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s from the exhibition 'Strike a Pose! 100 Years of the Photobooth' at The Photographers' Gallery, London, October 2025 - February 2026")
!['Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/untitled-color-photobooth-portraits.jpg "'Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s")
!['Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/untitled-color-photobooth-portraits-a.jpg "'Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s (detail)")
!['Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/untitled-color-photobooth-portraits-b.jpg "'Untitled [Color Photobooth Portraits]' c. 1940s-1950s (detail)")
![Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/dennis-mcguire-diane-arbus.jpg "Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd")
![Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2-typologien_heinrich-riebesehl_siae_sm.jpg "Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969")
![Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
'Torse (Retour à la raison)' (Torso [Return to Reason]) 1923, printed c. 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/man-ray-retour-c3a0-la-raison-web.jpg "Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Torse (Retour à la raison)' (Torso [Return to Reason]) 1923, printed c. 1935")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.