March 2013

Exhibition: ‘Treasures of the Alfred Stieglitz Center: Photographs from the Permanent Collection’ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Exhibition dates: 22nd December 2012 – 7th April 2013

Many thankx to the Philadelphia 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.

William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877)
Group of Persons Selling Fruit and Flowers
1845
Salted paper print from a paper negative
6 11/16 x 8 1/4 inches (17 x 21cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Robert A. Hauslohner Fund, 1967

Felice Beato (English, born Italy, 1825-1913)
Confucius, Canton, April 1860
April 1860
Albumen silver print
10 x 12 inches (25.4 x 30.5 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by Dr. Chaoying Fang, Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, and with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, 1978

Dorothy Norman (American, 1905-1997)
Harbor II, (Osterville), Cape Cod
1930s
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 2 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches (7.3 x 9.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1980

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Dunes, Oceano
1936
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Louise Lawler (American, b. 1947)
Living Room Corner Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Sr.,
1984
Dye destruction print
Sheet: 18 1/4 x 23 3/4 inches (46.4 x 60.3cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Henry S. McNeil, Jr., 1988

Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949)
Pink Lightning, Salton Sea
1985
Chromogenic print
18 5/16 x 23 1/16 inches (46.5 x 58.6 cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1986

Joachim Koester (Danish active United States, b. 1962)
Room of Nightmares #1
2005
Chromogenic print
18 7/8 x 23 7/8 inches (47.9 x 60.6cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Lynne and Harold Honickman

This exhibition presents a survey of photographs from the permanent collection and includes an important group of works by Dorothy Norman and her mentor Alfred Stieglitz, one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century American art. There are also early masterworks by Gustave Le Gray, whose images of light and motion inspired the Impressionists; Edward Weston; Julia Margaret Cameron; and Charles Aubry. These striking images are complemented by an array of modern and contemporary works that trace the medium’s history as a visual art form, including recent acquisitions by artists such as Florence Henri, Roy DeCarava, and Hiroh Kikai, many on view for the first time in Philadelphia.

The mainly black-and-white photographs reflect the strengths of the Museum’s photography collection, ranging from the 1840s to 2005. Nineteenth-century photographs include works by William Henry Fox Talbot, an early inventor of photography; a group of views from Felice Beato’s 1860 album China; and Rue des Prêtres Saint‑Étienne, de la rue Descartes by Charles Marville, who documented the narrow quarters of nineteenth-century Paris.

Post-World War II American and Japanese photography is seen through a number of works by Robert Frank including Jehovah’s Witness, Los Angeles (1955), Diane Arbus’s Untitled (6) (1970-71), and Masahisa Fukase’s Untitled (1976). The exhibition continues with contemporary photography by a broad range of international artists, including Joachim Koester’s Room of Nightmares #1 (2005) and Gerhard Richter’s Guildenstern (Rhombus II) (1998), a cunning investigation of the shared terrain between painting and photography.

The works by Norman and Stieglitz were made during the years of their creative exchange, from 1929 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. These include a number of portraits, such as Norman’s cropped close-up Alfred Stieglitz IX, New York (1933); cityscapes and landscapes, as seen in Stieglitz’s New York from the Shelton (1935), showing the interplay of light and shadow on the skyscrapers of a changing New York skyline; and Norman’s Harbor II, Osterville, Cape Cod (1930s), a study in line and composition. These images are complemented by photographs made by their contemporaries, including Man Ray’s surrealist Marquise Casati (1922) and Florence Henri’s Portrait (c. 1930).

Press release from the Philadelphia Museum of Art website

Dorothy Norman (American, 1905-1997)
Alfred Stieglitz IX, New York
1933
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 2 5/8 x 2 11/16 inches (6.7 x 6.8cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1968

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Marquise Casati
1922
Gelatin silver print
Image and sheet: 8 1/2 x 6 9/16 inches (21.6 x 16.7cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Carl Van Vechten, 1949
© Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019)
Jehovah’s Witness, Los Angeles
1955
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971
Untitled (6)
1970-71
Gelatin silver print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Charles Marville (French, 1816-1879)
Rue des Prêtres Saint-Étienne, de la rue Descartes
c. 1865
Albumen silver print
Image and sheet: 12 13/16 x 10 3/8 inches (32.5 x 26.4cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2009

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
New York from the Shelton
1935
Gelatin silver print
Image and sheet: 9 5/8 x 7 9/16 inches (24.4 x 19.2cm)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, From the Collection of Dorothy Norman, 1997
© The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Exhibition: ‘Primrose – Russian Colour Photography’ at Foam, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 25th January – 3rd April 2013

Curator: Olga Sviblova

Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
Red Army Men
1930
Photomontage for Abroad magazine

A bumper posting on a fascinating subject. The portrait of Tolstoy is incredible; more poignant are the photographs pre-World War I (the last days of the Tsarist dynasty), and pre-World War 2 (Portrait of Yury Rypalov, below). People stare into the camera with no idea of the maelstrom about to descend…

Marcus

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

Boris Mikhailov (Ukranian, b. 1938)
Untitled
1971-1985
From the series Luriki

Vasily Ulitin (Russian, 1888-1976)
Flame of Paris
1932
Bromoil
Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Dmitry Baltermants (Russian, 1912-1990)
Men’s talk
1950s
Colour print
Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Dmitry Baltermants Archive
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Dmitry Baltermants (Russian, 1912-1990)
Rain
1960s
Colour print
Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Dmitry Baltermants Archive
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Yakov Khalip (Russian, 1908-1980)
Sea cadets
End of 1940s
Artist’s colour print
On the reverse side text of congratulation to Alexander Rodchenko
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow/ Moscow House of Photography Museum

The exhibition Primrose – Russian Colour Photography takes place as part of Netherlands-Russia 2013. The title refers to the primrose flower, used metaphorically here to represent the many colours in which it appears during early spring. Primrose – Russian Colour Photography presents a retrospective of the various attempts in Russia to produce coloured photographic images. This process began in the early 1850s, almost simultaneously with the discovery of the new medium itself. The colouring technique, based on the traditional methods of craftsmen who added colour into a certain contour design, has determined a whole independent trend in the history of photography in Russia, from ‘postcard’ landscapes and portraits to Soviet propaganda and reportage photography.

The use of colour in Russia stems from the early 1850s and practically coincides with the invention of the medium itself. The term colour photography is slightly disingenuous, since at first it referred to a toning technique in which black and white photographs were painted by hand. Traditionally this technique was used by specialised tradesmen who added colour to the photographs according to certain methods and within the contours of the image. This technique became so popular that it started a trend in and of itself and to a large extent determined the appearance and aesthetics of colour photography in Russia. Initially used especially for portraits, Pictorialist landscapes and nudes, it later also found favour with avant-garde artists. Interestingly enough these aesthetics also formed the starting point for Soviet propaganda and for portraits, political leaders and reportage.

Primrose – Russian Colour Photography can be viewed as a journey through various techniques and genres, meanings and messages, mass practices and individual experiments. The exhibition contains works by renowned photographers and artists such as Sergey Produkin-Gorsky, Ivan Shagin, Dmitry Baltermants and Robert Diament. But is also shows unique photos of Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stephanova, and recent works from the famous Luriki series by Boris Mikhailov, in which he mocked the visual culture of the Soviet propaganda.

Press release from the Foam website [Online] Cited 24/03/2020 no longer available online

Pyotr Pavlov (Russian, 1860-1924)
Moscow. Lubianka
1910s
Offprint
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Tania, Natasha, Kolia and Liza Kozakov, Vera Nikolayevna Vedenisov and Elena Frantsevna Bazilev. Yalta
1910-1911
Copy; original – autochrome
Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Nikolskoye Simbirsk province
1910

Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Race. “Dynamo” Stadium
1935
Artist’s gelatine silver print, gouache
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© A. Rodchenko – V. Stepanova Archive
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Dmitry Baltermants (Russian, 1912-1990)
Meeting in the tundra
1972
From the Meetings with Chukotka series
Colour print Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Dmitry Baltermants Archive
© Moscow House of Photography Museum

Installation photographs of the exhibition Primrose – Russian Colour Photography at Foam, Amsterdam

Primrose

This exhibition with the metaphorical title Primrose demonstrates the appearance and development of colour in Russian photography from the 1860s to 1970s, and at the same time reveals the history of Russia in photography. With examples of works from classics of Russian photography such as P. Pavlov, K. Bergamasko, A. Eikhenvald, A. Rodchenko, V. Mikoshi, G. Petrusov, D. Baltermants and B. Mikhailov, as well as unknown photographers, we can see how life in Russia changed in the course of a century as it endured historical and socio-political catastrophes, also the diverse roles that photography played during this period.

Colour became widespread in Russian photography at approximately the same time as in Europe – in the 1860s. This was dependent on the manual tinting of photographic prints with watercolour and oil paints, either by the photographers themselves or by artists working with them. Above all this applies to solo or family portraits commissioned as a keepsake. The photographic studios of Nechayev, Ushakov & Eriks and Eikhenvald produced thousands of tinted portraits that became an important part of the domestic interior.

People were eager to see their own image in colour, and moreover in a picturesque form. The colouring of early photographic shots could also hide imperfections in the prints, including those introduced on albumenised paper. With time this paper turned yellow. To conceal this, the paper was tinted green, pink and other colours and coloured with watercolours, gouache, oils, or later aniline dyes. Sometimes the photograph was partially redrawn during the process of tinting, and foliate embellishments or different items of interior decoration appeared in the background.

By the end of the 19th century, by the 1880s and 1890s, colour photography was extended to architectural, landscape and industrial subject matter. For instance, the photographic studio of the Trinity and St. Sergius Monastery (photographic studios attached to Russian monasteries became a very common phenomenon) produced numerous coloured architectural images of Orthodox churches.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Russia was on the one hand undergoing active europeanisation, as reflected in the style of architectural structures, interiors, costume and way of life, but meanwhile there was also a search for national identity, and new interest in the national particularities of inhabitants in the Russian Empire. Entire series of tinted photographs appeared, depicting people in national costumes – Russian, Tatar, Caucasian, Ukrainian, and so on.

With the industrial boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries people began to decorate their walls not only with tinted landscapes, but also photographs of industrial structures (eg Dmitri Yezuchevsky’s photograph Building the Bridge). In the early 20th century, in the 1910s, coloured photographs of Russian military officers, an important social class before the outbreak of the First World War, were particularly popular.

The photographic documentation of life in the Russian Empire in the early 20th century acquired the status of a State objective, largely because Tsar Nicholas II and his family were enthusiastic amateur photographers. In May 1909 Emperor Nicholas II gave an audience to the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky. In 1902 Prokudin-Gorsky had first announced a technique for creating colour photographs, and in 1903 he published a brochure entitled ‘Isochromatic Photography with Manual Cameras’. Prokudin-Gorsky used black-and-white plates sensitised according to his own formulae, and a camera of his own construction. Three rapid shots were taken successively through light filters coloured blue, green and red (the photographer managed to reduce the exposure time to an absolute minimum). From this triple negative a triple positive was prepared. A projector with three lenses in front of three frames on the photographic plate was used to view the shots. Each frame was projected through a colour filter of the same colour as that through which it had been photographed. A full-colour image appeared on the screen as the three images combined. Prokudin-Gorsky succeeded in making polygraphic reproductions of his shots, printed in the form of photo cards, and also as inserts for illustrated magazines.

Delighted with this invention, Emperor Nicholas II asked the photographer to take colour photographs of every aspect of life in the various regions that then constituted the Russian Empire. For this the photographer was issued with a specially equipped railway car. The government provided him with a small manned steamship able to traverse the shallows for his work on waterways, and a motorboat for the River Chusova. A Ford automobile was dispatched to Yekaterinburg for his shots of the Urals and the Ural mountain range. Prokudin-Gorsky was presented with official imperial documents that gave him access to all parts of the Empire, and government officials were ordered to assist Prokudin-Gorsky on his travels.

Meanwhile autochrome pictures by the Lumière brothers, with whom Prokudin-Gorsky worked after emigrating from Soviet Russia, became very popular in early 20th-century Russia. Autochromes, colour transparencies on a glass backing, were first produced on an industrial scale in 1907. Granules of potato starch tinted red, yellow and blue were applied to a glass plate. The granules worked as colour filters. Addition of a second layer of granules provided orange, violet and green hues. After that a light-sensitive emulsion was applied. The plate was exposed and developed. Autochromes could be viewed against the light, or projected with the aid of special apparatus, which at that time was manufactured by the Lumière brothers’ own company (diascopes, chromodiascopes, mirrored stereoscopes, etc.). The Lumière brothers’ autochromes were used, for example, by Pyotr Vedenisov, a prosperous nobleman and graduate of the Moscow Conservatoire, who settled in Yalta, in the Crimea, in the late 1880s. As was the case with the Lumière brothers’ autochromes, Vedenisov’s favoured subject matter was the photographer’s own family life. However, what was at first sight very private and personal photography later provided an excellent description of the typical lifestyle enjoyed by educated Russian noblemen in the early 20th century.

The onset of the First World War in 1914 and October Revolution in 1917 annihilated the Russia whose memory is preserved in the tinted photographs and autochromes of the second half of the 19th to early 20th centuries.

Vladimir Lenin and the new Soviet government actively supported photography in the early post-revolutionary years, seeing it as an important propaganda weapon for a country where 70% of the population were unable to read or write. At first there was emphasis on photo reportage, but very soon it became clear real change in a country where hunger and devastation ruled after the Revolution and Civil War was as insubstantial as the utopian dreams of ardent revolutionaries. From the mid-1920s photomontage was widespread in the Soviet Union, enthusiastically encouraged by the Bolsheviks. Photomontage allowed for a combination of documentary veracity and the new Soviet myths. In the 1920s it was practised by such highly talented modernists as A. Rodchenko, G. Klutsis, El Lissitzky, V. Stepanova and others. Photomontage embraced colour and became an ideological ‘visual weapon’.

From the mid-1920s A. Rodchenko regenerated the forgotten technique of hand colouring his own photographs. His use of tinting profited from his experience with photomontage (Mosselprom House Advertising Wall, Dynamo Running Stadium, etc.), and he also applied it to develop experiments with positive-negative printing (scenes from the film Albidum) and for very personal and even intimate portraits of his muse Regina Lemberg – Girl with Watering Can. In 1937, at the height of Stalin’s repression, A. Rodchenko began photographing classical ballet and opera, using the arsenal of his aesthetic opponents, the Russian Pictorialists, who by that time were subject to even harsher repression in the Soviet Union than modernist photographers. For Alexander Rodchenko soft focus, classical subject matter and toning typical of pictorial photography were a mediated way of expressing his internal escapism and tragic disillusionment with the Soviet utopia.

In 1932 general rules for socialist realism were published in the USSR, as the only creative method for all forms of art, including photographic. Soviet art had to reflect Soviet myths about the happiest people in the happiest country, not real life and real people. On this Procrustean bed it was hard not only for modernism with its constructivist aesthetics, but even Pictorialism, to fit into the aesthetics of Socialist realism.

Pictorialism was one of the most important tendencies of early 20th-century Russian photography, and Russian Pictorialist photographers were awarded gold and silver medals at international exhibitions. Pictorial photography differed not only by the method of shooting and complex printing techniques intended to bring photography closer to painting, but also by the selection of traditional themes. Romantic landscapes and architectural ruins or nude studies were from the point of view of socialist realism dangerous remnants from the past. Some of the Pictorialist photographers ended up in Stalin’s prison camps, and were forbidden from practising their profession or settling in the capital or other large cities. Those who remained at liberty – for example, Vasily Ulitin, a participant in major international photo exhibitions and recipient of medals and diplomas in Paris, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Toronto, Tokyo and Rome – tried with difficulty to adapt to the new reality and attempted to depict revolutionary subjects (Flames of Paris, Red Army Soldier), thereby gaining indulgence and the right to work from the Bolsheviks.

Almost simultaneously, in 1936 the German company Agfa and American company Kodak introduced colour film. Broad distribution and introduction to the amateur photography market were delayed by the outbreak of the Second World War. In the USSR colour photography only appeared at the end of the war. Production of Soviet-made colour film in the USSR was facilitated by German trophy equipment in 1946. From that year onwards Ivan Shagin and several other photographers began to relay their colour news chronicle to the country.

Before 1946 colour photographs of Soviet Russia were made only in isolated cases, on German or American film. Until the mid-1970s, in the USSR negative film for printing colour photographs was a luxury only available to a few official photographers who worked for major Soviet publications. It was used by such classics of Soviet photography as V. Mikosha, G. Petrusov, D. Baltermants, V. Tarasevich, and others. All of them were in one way or another obliged to follow the canons of socialist realism and practise staged reportage. In those days even still life studies of fruit bore an ideological message, being photographed for cookery books in which the Soviet people could see produce that remained absent in a hungry postwar country, where the ration-card system of food distribution was still functioning (Ivan Shagin, Lemons and Fruit, 1949).

From the late 1950s, in the Khrushchev Thaw after the debunking of Stalin’s cult of personality, the canons of socialist realism softened and permitted a certain freedom in aesthetics, allowing photography to move closer to reality (Dmitri Baltermants’ series Arbat Square). In the postwar period, during the 1950s to 1960s life gradually improved and coloured souvenir photo portraits again appeared on the mass market. They were usually produced by unknown and ‘unofficial’ photographers, since private photo studios that had carried out such commissions since the mid-19th century were now forbidden, and the State exercised a total monopoly on photography by the 1930s. Boris Mikhailov copied and enlarged such kitsch colour photographs as souvenirs to supplement his income at his photo laboratory in Kharkov in the early 1970s. He began collecting them. They form the basis for a new aesthetics he developed in the Lyrics series from the early 1980s. By tinting these naïve photographs he revealed and deconstructed the nature of Soviet myths.

Colour transparency film appeared on the Soviet mass market in the 1960s and 1970s. As opposed to colour negative film that requires a complicated and expensive development process for subsequent printing, colour slide film could be developed even in domestic surroundings. Above all it was widely used by amateurs, who created transparencies that could be viewed at home with a slide projector. An unofficial art form emerging in the USSR at this time developed the aesthetics and means for a new artistic conceptualisation of reality, quite different from the socialist realism that still prevailed, although somewhat modified. Photography took a significant role in this unofficial art. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Boris Mikhailov began photographing his series Suzi Et Cetera on colour slide film.

More than half a century of Soviet power after the 1917 Revolution radically altered Russia. The surrounding reality has fallen into decline, and people brought up on Soviet slogans never thought to pay attention. But this was the only reality offered by our perception, and Boris Mikhailov tries to develop its colour, humanise it with his attention and give it the right of existence. Photography textbooks of that period were made up of one-third technical formulae and two-thirds description of what to photograph, and how. The photographer was certainly not required or even allowed to take nude studies. Corporeality and sexuality are inherent signs of an independent individual, of selfhood. The Soviet system specifically tried to level out any sense of selfhood, smothering it and challenging such ideas with the collective community and the impersonal ‘we’ of the Soviet nation. In photographing Suzi Et Cetera Boris Mikhailov disrupts the norms and reveals characters, his own and that of his subjects. It was impossible to show these shots in public, but slides could be projected at home, in the workshops of his artist friends or the small, often semi-underground clubs of the scientific and technical intelligentsia, who began to revive during Khrushchev’s Thaw after the Stalinist repression. Boris Mikhailov’s slide projections are now analogous to the apartment exhibitions of unofficial art. By means of colour he displayed the dismal standardisation and squalor of surrounding life, and his slide performances helped to unite people whose consciousness and life in those years began to escape from the dogmatic network of Soviet ideology, which permitted only one colour – red.

Curator Olga Sviblova
Director, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow

Boris Mikhailov (Ukranian, b. 1938)
Untitled
1971-1985
From the series Luriki

Vladislav Mikosha (Russian, 1909-2004)
Portrait of Yury Rypalov
1938-1939

V. Yankovsky
“In memory of my military service”. Saint Petersburg
Beginning of 1910s
Collodion, painting
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Moscow House of Photography Museum

Elena Mrozovskaya (Russian, before 1892-1941)
Portrait of girl in Little Russia costume. Saint Petersburg
1900s
Gelatine silver print, painting
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Moscow House of Photography Museum

A. Nechayev
Portrait of girl
1860s
Salted paper, covered by albumen, painting
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (Russian, 1863-1944)
Portrait of Lev Tolstoy
23rd of May 1908
Offprint
Collection Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Uknown woman, the Crimea, Yalta
1914

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Andrei Aleksandrovich Kozakov. Yalta
1911-1912
Copy; original – autochrome
Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Vera Kozakov in Folk Dress
1914
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

The scenes in Vedenisov’s autochromes take place in Yalta or in the Simbirsk Government, where the Kozakov family, the photographer’s relations, resided. Piotr Vedenisov chooses his models among the members of this single large family. Vedenisov’s photos are mostly staged portraits. Other subjects include everyday life and travelling, feasts, pets, interiors and landscapes. Vedenisov’s autochromes are shot over a relatively short period of time, roughly from 1909 to 1914.

About the photographer

Piotr Ivanovich Vedenisov (1866-1937) was a Russian nobleman living in Yalta, who graduated at the Moscow Conservatorium in 1888. Beside his ultimate passion for music, he was enthusiastic about the history of Crimea and photography. In the early 20th century, Vedenisov masters a technical innovation: he could make colour autochromes on glass. It was a technique of creating works in colour, based on three stages of consecutive shooting through colour filters. It was further developed by the Lumière brothers who succeeded in placing all the filters on a single plate.

Text from the Foam website Nd [Online] Cited 19/09/2022

Piotr Vedenisov (Russian, 1866-1937)
Kolya Kozakov and the Dog Gipsy. Yalta
1910-1911
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Vasily Ulitin (Russian, 1888-1976)
Red Army man
1932

Dmitry Baltermants (Russian, 1912-1990)
Show window
Beginning of 1960s
Colour print
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Dmitry Baltermants Archive
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Ivan Shagin (Russian, 1904-1982)
Fruits
1949
Colour print
Collection of Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

Robert Diament (Russian, 1907-1987)
He has turned her head
Beginning of 1960s
Colour print
Collection Moscow House of Photography Museum
© Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow / Moscow House of Photography Museum

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Review: ‘Shrouds’ by Mike Reid at the Colour Factory Gallery, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 8th March – 30th March 2013

Mike Reid (Australian)
Santa Monica, Los Angeles, USA
Nd

“Any discovery changing the nature, or the destination of an object or phenomenon constitutes a Surrealist achievement. Already the automats are multiplying and dreaming… realism prunes trees, Surrealism prunes life.”

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J-A. Boiffard, Paul Ellard and Roger Vitrac, in La Revolution Surréaliste, December 1924, p. 2, quoted in Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: the rigour of imagination, Thames & Hudson, London, 1977, p. 161.

This is a strong exhibition of documentary photography by Mike Reid at the Colour Factory Gallery. Interesting idea; well seen formal photographs; good use of colour (brown, blue, silver, red and green shrouds); nice sized prints appropriate to the subject matter; and an excellent self published book to accompany the exhibition. This is just what it is – a solid exhibition of documentary photography.

Unfortunately the artist cannot leave it there. In his almost unintelligible artist statement (below), he tries to lever the concept of resurrection onto the work, meandering from Horus and Osiris through The Shroud of Turin, to Jewish Tachrichim (burial shrouds) and onto the commerce of Billabong and the politics of the burqa linking, very tenuously, the covering of Islamic women with the idea of these cars being “old bombs.”

Here I take issue with Reid’s conceptualisation of the word “shroud” vis a vis his photographs of covered cars. One of the definitions of shroud is “A cloth used to wrap a body for burial” but the more pertinent use of the word in relation to this work is “To shut off from sight; something that conceals, protects, or screens” from the Middle English schrud, garment. These are not abandoned, lifeless vehicles awaiting resurrection but loved vehicles that have been protected from the elements by their owners, wrapped and cocooned jewels that are in a state of hibernation. If they were unwanted they would have been abandoned by their owners to the elements, not protected beneath a concealing garment in a state of metamorphosis. The shrouding of the car acts like a Surrealist canvas, hinting at the structure underneath (the Cadillac, the Volkswagen, the Morris Minor) but allowing the viewer to discover the changing nature of the object.

All that was needed to accompany the exhibition and the book was something like the quotation at the top of the posting. Leave the rest up to the strength of the work and the viewer. They have the intelligence and imagination to work out what is going on without all the proselytising that only reveals the artist’s ultimate disconnection from the source. In other words, less is more. Nothing more, nothing less.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Mike Reid (Australian)
Toorak, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
South Fremantle, Western Australia
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Richmond, Victoria
Nd

Shrouds, by Mike Reed is a collection of photographs of covered cars. His love of gleaning was inherited from his ‘rag and bone’ father who amassed a metal detritus found on the bicycle route home from the factory where he worked. This assortment was stockpiled in his father’s rusted sheds, which appeared like an ‘Aladdin’s cave’ to a youthful Mike.

“The car was draped with a plastic sheet in the back blocks of Surfers Paradise whilst seeking to photograph decay in the landscape… You start with one and then see another then… over time, the medley plays into a collection… patterns precipitate or idiosyncrasies evolve from within…This is the joy of “seeing”.”

“Within my category of covered cars I began to view these still loved but lifeless vehicles, as if a resurrection was about to take place… for the heavenly roads of restoration or hell.”

Mike equates the car covers to the burial garments adorning the dead in preparation for resurrection. Mike cites the ‘wrapping’ of objects found in the work of artists’ Christo, Jean Claude, Man Ray and Magritte as inspiration. This incredible accumulation of images spans over two decades and 6 countries. A small selection has been chosen for this exhibition and a larger range appears in his book to be launched at the opening of Shrouds.

Press release from the Colour Factory Gallery website

Mike Reid (Australian)
Richmond, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Macleod, Victoria
Nd

Shrouds

The resurrection of the dead is a fundamental and central doctrine of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Many religious critics have alleged that even Christ’s resurrection was borrowed from the accounts of Osiris, God of the underworld, and the best-known deity in all of ancient Egyptian history. As a life-death-rebirth deity, Horus, the Sun God, and Osiris became a reflection of the annual cycle of crop harvesting as well as reflecting people’s desires for a successful afterlife. The Masons, Illuminati, Priory De Sion, clandestine government groups, and others believed that on December 22, 2012, Osiris would be resurrected. Nothing happened on that world shattering day but Spam and candle sales most certainly went through the roof. Thus in preparation to meet thy maker, a shroud, burial sheet or winding-cloth, usually cotton or linen but with no pockets, is wrapped around a body after it has been ceremonially washed and readied for burial.

Certainly the most controversial and famous burial garment is the Shroud of Turin. It is now stored in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Northern Italy after the crusaders stole it and bought it first to France around 1204.

Many believe this 4.3 by 1.1m linen cloth of a rare herringbone weave covered the beaten and crucified body of Jesus of Nazareth when He was laid in a tomb prior to His resurrection. Is it really the cloth that wrapped His bloodstained body, or is it simply a medieval hoax? This has lead to intense scrutiny by forensic experts, scientists, chemists, immunologists, pathologists, believers, historians, and writers regarding the where, when, and how the bloodstain image on the shroud was created. C-14 Carbon dating carried out in 1988, dated the cloth between 1260 and 1390.

In Jewish religious traditions the Tachrichim (burial shrouds) are traditional simple white burial garments, containing no pockets, usually made from 100% pure linen.A shroud or sometimes a prayer shawl for a man, in which Jews are dressed by the Chevra Kadisha for burial after undergoing a taharah (purification ceremony). Burying the departed in a garment is considered a testimony of faith in the resurrection of the body (commentary of Shach). This is a fundamental principle of faith, one of the thirteen principles, which the Rambam enumerates as being essential to Jewish belief. More to the point today we have an insurrection, while not yet violent against the wearing of another kind of covering… the niqab or the burqa. European governments are escalating the introduction of laws on the basis that the face covering, along with ski masks and bikies helmets, encourages female subjugation, lack of communication, non-safety, isolation, female abuse, oppression of freedom and non-conformity to the western culture. In fact the Koran only dictates to modesty in dress. May I say it that Billabong could improve sales with the launch of a ‘Tri-Kini’ on the beaches next summer.

Meanwhile… “The 2012 ban in France is officially the second country in Europe, after Belgium, to introduce a full ban on a garment which immigration minister Eric Besson has called a “walking coffin.””1 Indeed Australian Liberal Cory Bernadi said, “The burqa is no longer simply the symbol of female repression and Islamic culture, it is now emerging as a disguise of bandits and n’er do wells.”2 More so now the government and police authorities in the Netherlands, a usually very tolerant nation, have become anxious regarding security worries that a terrorist could use one for concealment. Well my shrouded cars could be the same, as most do conceal “old bombs.”

The inspiration for my rag tag assortment evolved from the artistes Christo and Jeanne-Claude who have wrapped, covered whole buildings, bridges and landscapes. Other favourites of mine, Man Ray and Rene Magritte have objects and humans covered as well, specifically Magrittes’ Las Amants 1 & II (The Lovers)3 1928. A plastic explanation is that “love is blind” and that the mantles are symbolic to the idea that a devoted lover would identify his soul mate in any form, immortal love. Another interpretation of Magrittes’ shrouds is that the paintings symbolise his mothers’ death. Magritte, when only 14, discovered her lifeless body which was naked apart from her nightdress that had swathed up around her face.

I started recording these morphological images over 20 years ago. The first was draped with a plastic sheet in a paddock in the back blocks of Surfers Paradise while meandering aimlessly, seeking decay in the landscape.

With my wandering and collecting shots I realised I have inherited the trait from my father. In his latter years my father became a rag and bone man in order to supplement the low family income. A bicycle route from his employment at Laminex factory to home lay through the local hard rubbish dump. Copper wire, lead, iron, even an aerial practice bomb, military helmets, a stockless revolver and rifle, rusted tools… festooned from his bike and festooned from his gladstone bag. Two rusting sheds contained somewhat the ever-growing metal waste for selling or keeping… an Aladdins’ cave to a young boy, everyday re-discovering lifes’ discards care of the Dendy Street tip.

Within my category of covered cars I began to view these still loved but lifeless vehicles, as if a resurrection was about to take place… for the heavenly roads of restoration or hell… (a scrap yard)

Mike Reed, 2013

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1 The Telegraph, April 11 , 2011, “Peter Allen In Paris”
2 Cory Bernadi, SMH, May 6, 2011
3 “Las Amants” 1 is in the NGA collection, Canberra, NGA

Mike Reid (Australian)
Brunswick East, Victoria
Nd

Mike Reid (Australian)
Fairfield, Victoria
Nd

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse
1920, remade 1972
Sewing machine, wool and string
355 x 605 x 335 mm

Mike Reid (Australian)
Athens, Greece
Nd

Colour Factory Gallery
409-429 Gore Street
Fitzroy, Victoria 3056
Phone: +61 3 9419 8756

Opening hours:
Closed for refurbishment

Mike Reed Photography website

Colour Factory Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Catherine Opie’ at Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 29th March 2013

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #4
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, +2 APs

In a nutshell: good presentation, good idea – just needs really good pictures. In fact the presentation is too good for the pictures, so in the end it feels a bit ridiculous.

There IS something here (the relationship between young and old, wisdom and penitence, love and abuse, tondo and ethereal landscape), but it seems a bit of a muddle. For me, too many easy decisions have been made – obvious opposites, too much reliance on “black”, sometimes caricature rather than real observation… but then again there is occasionally something inside that caricature.

This feeling of muddling through is not helped by an abysmal press release. Along with zen and ironic (both of which seem to have any meaning a writer wants today), we now have sublime joining the pack. Maybe if anything is out of focus (such as these forgettable landscapes) it is sublime. As I go through each sentence I get shivers from either how generic or incorrect or meaningless or (especially) SELF-SERVING they are (… and now the new photographs make a trajectory… and now Opie draws on documentary photography AND the history of photography… and seduction, and formalism, and painting, and high aesthetic, and abstraction, and conceptualisation, a(n)d nauseum… )

I have seen “the Unphotographable” … and it is not as good as one hoped!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

PS. When you walk across a room, you can remark about your chiaroscuro.

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Many thank to Regen Projects for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles © Catherine Opie

Installation views
Regen Projects, Los Angeles
February 23 – March 29, 2013
Photography by Brian Forrest

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Jonathan
2012
Pigment print
50 x 38.4 inches (127 x 97.5cm) Oval
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Idexa
2012
Pigment print
50 x 38.4 inches (127 x 97.5cm) Oval
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new portraits and landscapes by Catherine Opie. These photographs mark both a progression and a departure for the artist. Opie’s work has always investigated the figure in relation to the landscape, disregarding the polarities typically found within these approaches. This new body of work draws upon Opie’s beginnings in documentary photography, the traditions of painting, and the history of photography.

Opie’s new portraits evoke the sublime and the inner psychological space of both the viewer and subject. Utilising techniques of chiaroscuro, colour, and formal composition found in classical 17th century portraiture, Opie arranges her subjects in allegorical poses that suggest an emotional state. Evoking formal classicism, these beautifully elegant and technically masterful compositions immerse and seduce the eye. Opie’s subjects have always been part of her personal community, and the range of individuals in these new works illustrates how this community has shifted and expanded.

Catherine Opie’s work is deeply rooted in the history of photography. The new landscapes draw upon this trajectory – both contemporary and historical. In addition to utilising motifs that informed the California Pictorialists, these works reference the painterly tradition. Images of iconic landscapes float in abstraction and are reduced to elementary blurred light drawings. The viewer no longer relies on traditional markers of recognition of place, but instead on the visceral reaction to the sensate images Opie captures. These painterly, poetic, and lyrical visions resonate with oblivion, the sublime, and the unknown.

Catherine Opie’s complex and diverse body of work is political, personal, and high aesthetic – the formal, conceptual, and documentary are always at play. Her work consistently engages in formal issues and maintains a formal rigour and technical mastery that underscores an aestheticised oeuvre. Visual pleasure can always be found in her arresting and seductive images.

Opie very knowingly engages art-historical conventions of representation like this in order to seduce her viewers: “I have to be interested in art history since so much of my work is related to painting and photography history. It gives me the ability to use a very familiar language that people understand when looking at my work and seduce the viewer into considering work that they might not normally want to look at. It is very classical and formal in so many ways… In a way, it is elegant in the seduction I was talking about earlier, that this device really can draw the viewer in through the perfection of the image. It is like wearing armour for a battle in a way, the battle for people to look into themselves for the prejudices that keep them from having an open mind.”

(Jennifer Blessing. “Catherine Opie: American Photographer” in Catherine Opie: American Photographer, published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, p. 14).

Press release from the Regen Projects website

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Diana
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Mary
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #5
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Oliver & Mrs. Nibbles
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 2/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Kate & Laura
2012
Pigment print
77 x 58 inches (195.6 x 147.3cm)
Edition 2/5, 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Guinevere
2012
Pigment print
33 x 25 inches (83.8 x 63.5cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #2
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Friends
2012
Pigment print
24 x 18 inches (61 x 45.7cm)
Edition 1/5, + 2 APs

Catherine Opie (American, b. 1961)
Untitled #1
2012
Pigment print
40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4cm)
Edition 1/5, +2 APs

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90038, United States
Phone: +1 310-276-5424

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm

Regen Project website

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Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe’ at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 23rd October 2012 – 24th March 2013

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman
1984
Platinum print
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

One of the reasons for setting up Art Blart nearly five years ago was the idea of an exhibition archive – the cataloguing of the archive so that featured exhibitions did not ephemerally drift off into virtual space. One of the problems of a blog is its roll-through postings one after the other and I didn’t want this to happen. Thankfully, I recognised the need for a taxonomic ordering of the information early on in the life of the archive, so that Art Blart has now become a form of cultural memory.

The impulse for this idea was the memory of seeing the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney in 1995 (and what an outstanding experience it was) and being able to find nothing about this exhibition online (at the time of writing in 2013). Thankfully, there is now a Mapplethorpe Retrospective web page with 7 installation photographs on the MCA website, so at least there is some representation online.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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This exhibition runs concurrently with that of the last posting, Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Many thankx to The J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Early Work

Born in Queens, New York, Mapplethorpe studied graphic arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His early work included collage, found objects, and jewellery. Before he took up the camera, Mapplethorpe often used pictures he cut out of magazines as collaged elements to explore sexuality and eroticism. By altering this fetishistic image and re-presenting it in a shadow box, Mapplethorpe removed the picture from its original context and elevated it to a homoerotic icon. The five-pointed star is a symbol of religious significance and the plastic mesh covering the figure evokes the metal screens commonly found in confessionals in Roman Catholic churches.

In 1972 Mapplethorpe met two influential curators: John McKendry, who gave him a Polaroid camera, and Samuel Wagstaff Jr., who became the artist’s lover and mentor. By the mid-1970s, Mapplethorpe had acquired a medium format camera and began documenting New York’s gay S&M community.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Leatherman #1
1970
Mixed media print
9 7/16 x 6 3/4 in
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Portraits

Mapplethorpe met writer-musician Patti Smith in 1967, and they lived together as intimate and artistic partners until 1974. This image of Smith was one of his earliest celebrity portraits.   The two collaborated to create this image as the cover for her 1975 debut rock album, Horses. Working in a borrowed apartment, Mapplethorpe suggested using a wall adjacent to a window where a triangle of light fell at a certain time in the afternoon. Smith dressed in men’s clothes and channeled the American entertainer Frank Sinatra with her jacket slung over her shoulder. Her uncombed hair and androgynous air broke radically from the image that the music industry expected women in rock to assume.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Patti Smith
Negative 1975; print 1995
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

A man’s jacket slung over one shoulder, the cuffs of her shirt cut off with scissors, the Bohemian poet and performer Patti Smith levels her gaze outward with authority and calm. The set of her jaw and lift of her chin suggest she wears confrontation lightly. Simultaneously, a waifish delicacy haunts her tiny body. She touches the ribbon around her neck with long fingers cupped near her heart – a shy gesture and nod to the garb of the 19th-century Romantic poets she admires. With quiet ferocity, the portrait hovers between masculine and feminine, strength and vulnerability.

Intimately bonded in life and work, Mapplethorpe and Smith made this image for the cover of her debut rock album, Horses. It is one of his earliest celebrity portraits, a genre in which he went on to distinguish himself. He often amplified the glamour of his subjects, but modernised conventional portrayals with provocative depictions of race, gender, and sexuality. For example, record executives, concerned that Smith with her lack of makeup and messy hair wasn’t conventionally pretty enough to sell records like other “girl singers,” wanted to airbrush this image. Knowing Mapplethorpe would back her up, Smith refused and the image and album shaped the start of both their iconoclastic careers.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Lisa Lyon
1982
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Flowers and Still Lifes

Mapplethorpe refined his style in the early 1980s, creating images of timeless elegance. After his erotic nudes, his delicate floral still lifes encouraged sexual interpretations. Although floral still lifes have traditionally held these connotations, Mapplethorpe transformed them from a subject that sophisticated collectors were reluctant to display in their homes into an important contemporary theme.   Arranged with his characteristic sense of balance and meticulously lit, this image of a calla lily appears to glow from within. Although preternaturally still, the composition exudes a sense of latent excitement, with the milky white flower almost vibrating against the rich, black background.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Calla Lily
Negative 1988; print 1990
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Jointly acquired by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

“My whole point is to transcend the subject… go beyond the subject somehow, so that the composition, the lighting, all around, reaches a certain point of perfection.”

~ Robert Mapplethorpe

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Mapplethorpe’s work, whether in his fashion or fine art photography, is distinguished by a tension between opposites. At the base of this image of a calla lily, he punctuates the wide planes of black and white with what seems a decadent surprise: the three-dimensional, curving lip of the flower’s edge. He explores the effects of light as a painter might experiment with a palette of colours. At the top, the flower glows milky white, reminiscent of light seen through delicate alabaster or porcelain. Mapplethorpe’s spare compositions often showcase familiar subjects in unusual ways. Floral still lifes, for example, have long encouraged sexual interpretations, and especially here, given the artist’s other work with erotic and sadomasochistic subjects. His imagination transformed and energised what some had considered a stale genre.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989) is one of the best-known and most controversial photographers of the second half of the 20th century. As a tastemaker and provocateur, his highly stylised explorations of gender, race, and sexuality became hallmarks of the period and exerted a powerful influence on his contemporaries. In recognition of the 2011 joint acquisition of Mapplethorpe’s art and archival materials with the Getty Research Institute and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Getty Museum presents In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe, on view October 23, 2012 – March 24, 2013 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center.

Containing 23 images that date from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the Getty’s exhibition features key last of edition prints, rarely shown early unique mixed-media objects, and PolaroidsTM, as well as a wide range of subject matter including self-portraits, nudes and still lifes.

Before he took up the camera, Mapplethorpe often used pictures he cut out of magazines as collaged elements to explore sexuality and eroticism. In Leatherman #1 (1970), Mapplethorpe alters a fetishistic image and re- presents it in a shadow box, removing the picture from its original context and elevating it to a homoerotic icon. His early work also reflected the influence of his idol, Andy Warhol, and it is perhaps Warhol’s cover art for the band The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut album featuring a banana that inspired Banana & Keys (1973), a photograph-in-a-box construction. This object marks a transition in Mapplethorpe’s work between his collages and sculpture and his work as a photographer. Much of the tension is contained in the object’s success as a clever trompe l’oeil.

“The mixed-media objects and PolaroidTM snapshots in the exhibition demonstrate the struggle of a budding artist to find his proper medium of expression and develop his aesthetic vision,” said Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “However, the carefully crafted gelatin silver and platinum prints make evident Mapplethorpe’s mature style as well as his eye for prints of the highest quality and beauty.”

As Mapplethorpe committed his focus to photography, he began to explore the subjects to which he would return throughout his career – portraits, self-portraits, and nudes. Photographs that feature these subjects are among his best-known, and continue to influence artists today. One of his earliest celebrity portraits, Patti Smith (1975), was carefully staged by Mapplethorpe and Smith, his lifelong friend. Dressed in men’s clothes and channeling the American entertainer Frank Sinatra, Smith broke radically from the image that women in rock were expected to assume, and embodies the androgyny often found in Mapplethorpe’s photographs.

Mapplethorpe also evoked classical themes in his work, particularly in his nude figure studies. Using the motif of the three graces as depicted by artists from ancient Greece to the 19th century, Ken and Lydia and Tyler (1985) features one female and two male models of different racial backgrounds. Mapplethorpe chose a range of skin tones from light to dark in order to invite new, non-binary interpretations of gender, race and sexual orientation.

Concurrent to the Getty’s exhibition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, from October 21, 2012 – March 24, 2013. The exhibition presents the 39 black and white photographs that make up the X, Y, and Z Portfolios created by Mapplethorpe and published in 1978, 1978, and 1981, respectively. Taken together, the portfolios summarise his ambitions as a fine-art photographer and contemporary artist.

About Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)

Mapplethorpe was a major cultural figure during a period of tumultuous change who contributed to shaping not only the art of photography but the larger social landscape. His international fame derives from his prolific body of almost 2,000 editioned, large format black-and-white and colour photographs, which have been featured in over 200 solo exhibitions around the world since 1977. Extensively exhibited and widely published, Mapplethorpe’s elegant prints representing portraits, nudes, flowers, and erotic and sadomasochistic subjects dominated photography in the late 20th century. Less known are the over 1,500 PolaroidTM works that Mapplethorpe produced in the early 1970s before he took up the Hasselblad 500 camera given to him in 1975 by Sam Wagstaff, the visionary curator who became Mapplethorpe’s benefactor and mentor.

Widely recognised for the role he played in elevating photography to the level of art, Robert Mapplethorpe always considered himself not only a photographer, but an artist. From 1963 to 1969, Mapplethorpe studied for a B.F.A. at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts and took courses in painting and sculpture – but never attended photography courses. In the late 1960s, he started clipping images from magazines to incorporate into collages. While living at the Chelsea Hotel with his friend and muse, Patti Smith, he borrowed a PolaroidTM camera in 1971 from fellow hotel resident Sandy Daley to create his own images for use in collages. Overshadowed by the power of his later large format photographs, Mapplethorpe’s early drawings, collages and assemblages, created between 1968 and 1972, remain largely unfamiliar, despite the importance they hold in understanding the artist’s formative years.

In the mid-1970s, using the Hasselblad 500, he began photographing participants in New York’s S&M subculture and created many of the strikingly powerful studies for which he is most renowned. He refined his style in the early 1980s and began concentrating on elegant figure studies and delicate floral still lifes, as well as glamorous celebrity portraits. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his work emerged at the centre of a culture war over the use of public money to support art that some deemed obscene or blasphemous. When some of Mapplethorpe’s more controversial works were exhibited at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, director Dennis Barrie was arrested and charged with pandering (a charge of which he was ultimately acquitted after a landmark public trial).

Mapplethorpe died in 1989 at age 42 from complications of AIDS.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Thomas
Negative 1987; print 1994
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Mapplethorpe’s strong, uncluttered compositions of statuesque male models fused a classical sensibility with homoerotic content at a time when the male nude was not a popular subject among camera artists. In this image, the model’s body is taut with compressed energy, his muscled limbs bent in a way that is reminiscent of those seen on ancient Greek figure vases.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Ken and Lydia and Tyler
Negative 1985, print 2004
Gelatin silver print
5 1/8 x 15 1/16 in.
Jointly acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with funds provided by The David Geffen Foundation, and The J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Nudes

Mapplethorpe often evoked classical themes in his work, particularly in his nude figure studies. In this image, he began with motif of the Three Graces as depicted by artists from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth century, but took the reference in fresh directions.   He selected one female and two male models of different racial backgrounds to achieve a range of skin tones from light to dark and to invite new, non-binary interpretations of gender, race, and sexual preference. Mapplethorpe trained his lens on the models’ conjoined bodies, purposely excluding their heads from the frame. Although he identified his models by name in the title, instead of a portrait, he created an elegant study of form and tone.

Self Portraits

From 1970 until his untimely death in 1989, Mapplethorpe continually returned to the self-portrait as a means of expression. Despite his elaborate pompadour and face so attractive as to be almost pretty, the artist’s stare in this self-portrait is forceful and direct. Mapplethorpe’s sophisticated use of lighting gives the outlines of his mouth, nostrils, and earlobes a refined, even sculptural quality. The same elements of glamour and striking simplicity for which he is known in his celebrity and fashion portraiture are visible here, including a tightly cropped composition and uncluttered background that further dramatise the face. Mapplethorpe drew on his early commercial work for magazines, including Vogue. This aspect of his career followed the examples of other noted photographers such as Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Herb Ritts.

Robert Mapplethorpe  (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
14 x 14 in.
Jointly acquired by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by The J. Paul Getty Trust and the David Geffen Foundation
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

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

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday, Sunday 10am – 5.30pm
Saturday 10am – 8pm
Monday Closed

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ’ at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Exhibition dates: 21st October 2012 – 24th March 2013

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Y Portfolio
1978
37.7 x 35.5 x 4.9cm closed
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

“The X Portfolio centers on men engaged in gay sex, including hard-core sadomasochism. The subject wasn’t entirely new. In Greek vase decorations, Indian miniatures and pagan temple sculptures, candid and highly refined sex pictures, heterosexual and homosexual, have been around since before Alexander the Great and the Mahabharata.”

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Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex. Robert Mapplethorpe made photographs of hard-core sadomasochistic gay sex.

A fist up an arse, a finger down the penis, a dildo up the bum. These photographs are seminal images in the work of the artist and yet we never get to see them online. Would it be too shocking for the sensibilities of the gallery or the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation that these cause célèbre images, five of which were used as evidence in the obscenity trial of Director Dennis Barrie and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center in 1990, were actually seen?

Instead we have two tame representations from the X Portfolio in the posting.

If you go to the slick Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation website, what do you find in the portfolio section: tasteful self portraits, male nudes, female nudes, flowers, portraits, statuary. Nothing to suggest that Mapplethorpe was one of the most transgressive artists of the twentieth century, an artist who documented an essential element of gay culture AS ART, who famously said that there was nothing shown in his photographs that he hadn’t done himself. Not an inkling, not a whisper, not a bull whip up the arse to be found. This is the sanitised vision of the artist – the desire, the pleasure, the release of living, re-shackled under the commercialisation of brand Mapplethorpe.

It’s like the Foundation is afraid of the artist’s shadow. On their website they state that the Foundation was set up by Mapplethorpe in part to protect his work and advance his creative vision. The X Portfolio and his early work are part of that vision, deserving to be seen by everyone – online!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a a larger version of the image.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Cedric, N.Y.C. (X Portfolio)
1978
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Irises, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1977
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Jim, Sausalito (X Portfolio)
1977
19.5 x 19.5 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents three portfolios created by American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989). The exhibition, Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ, features a total of thirty-nine black-and-white photographs, exploring three subject matters: homosexual sadomasochistic imagery (X, published in 1978); flower still lifes (Y, 1978); and nude portraits of African American men (Z, 1981). LACMA’s presentation will showcase the works in three rows – X above, Y in the middle, and Z along the bottom – an idea which was suggested by Mapplethorpe in 1989.

“Robert Mapplethorpe is among the most important photographic artists of the twentieth century,” comments Britt Salvesen, Department Head and Curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at LACMA. “The X, Y, and Z portfolios not only defined the artist’s career, but also played a role in an important moment of American cultural politics that is still pertinent to us today.”

This is the first presentation of Mapplethorpe’s work since last year’s widely publicised joint acquisition by LACMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and The Getty Research Institute of Mapplethorpe’s art and archives – including over 1,900 editioned prints and over 1,000 non-editioned prints, 200 unique mixed-media objects, over 160 Polaroids, 120,000 negatives, and extensive working materials, ephemera, and documents. The majority of the acquisition originated as a generous gift from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and the remainder of the funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Concurrent with the LACMA exhibition, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Robert Mapplethorpe, on view October 23, 2012 – March 24, 2013. This single-gallery exhibition reviews the artist’s work from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, and features editioned prints, rarely seen mixed-media objects, and Polaroids that depict a wide range of subject matter including self-portraits, nudes, and still lifes. A larger Mapplethorpe retrospective, jointly organised by LACMA and the Getty, is planned for 2016.

About the artist

Born in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe grew up in the suburban area of Floral Park, Queens. As a student at the Pratt Institute in New York, he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture and experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages. When Mapplethorpe acquired a Polaroid camera in 1970, he began incorporating his own photos into his constructions. His first solo gallery exhibition, Polaroids, took place at Light Gallery in New York City in 1973.

Two years later he transitioned from the Polaroid to a Hasselblad medium format camera and began shooting his circle of friends and acquaintances. His subjects – artists, musicians, socialites, pornographic film stars, and members of the S & M underground – came from a variety of backgrounds. Mapplethorpe’s interest in documenting the New York S&M scene was strongest in the late 1970s, when he produced photographs with shocking content but remarkable technique and formal mastery. In 1978, the Robert Miller Gallery in New York City became his exclusive dealer. Throughout the 1980s, Mapplethorpe produced images that challenged and adhered to classical aesthetic standards including stylised compositions of male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and studio portraits of artists and celebrities. He explored and refined different techniques and formats – including colour 20″ x 24″ Polaroids, photogravures, platinum prints on paper and linen, Cibachrome and dye transfer colour processes – but gelatin silver printing remained his primary medium.

In 1986, Robert Mapplethorpe was diagnosed with AIDS. Despite his illness, he accelerated his creative efforts, broadened the scope of his photographic inquiry, and accepted numerous commissions. The Whitney Museum of American Art mounted his first major American museum retrospective in 1988, one year before his death in 1989. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which he established in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to find medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV related infection.

Exhibition history

Mapplethorpe’s work has historically provoked strong reactions, most notably during the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, a period of conflict between conservative and liberal factions. The traveling retrospective, The Perfect Moment, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1988. Among the 150 photographs and objects in the show were the sadomasochistic imagery of Mapplethorpe’s X portfolio, as well as the Y and Z portfolios; the show appeared in two venues without any incident. When it was due to open at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., during the summer of 1989, politicians who opposed federal funding for the arts became alarmed. The Corcoran canceled the exhibition, resulting in a protest against the gallery’s withdrawal of the show. Controversy ensued further at a subsequent venue, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where charges of obscenity were brought against director David Barrie. In this high-profile trial, five images from the X portfolio were used as evidence. Barrie was acquitted, and Mapplethorpe has been linked to debates about censorship ever since.

Press release from The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) website

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Carnation, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1978
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Alistair Butler, N.Y.C. (Z Portfolio)
1980
Gelatin Silver Print
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Leigh Lee, N.Y.C. (Z Portfolio)
1980
Gelatin Silver Print
19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Rose, N.Y.C. (Y Portfolio)
1977
Gelatin silver print
Image 19.5 x 19.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Z Portfolio
1978
37.7 x 35.5 x 4.9 cm closed
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Partial Gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; partial purchase with funds provided by the David Geffen Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
5905 Wilshire Boulevard (at Fairfax Avenue)
Los Angeles, CA, 90036
Phone: 323 857-6000

Opening hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11am – 5pm
Friday: 11am – 8pm
Saturday, Sunday: 10am – 7pm
Closed Wednesday

LACMA website

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Photographs: Anonymous motor vehicle wizbang thingamabobs

A friend sent these to me and I thought you might enjoy them. He supplied nothing of the vehicle type, country, year, photographer, etc… so I have undertaken some judicious research and surmised the rest. Somehow today’s cars just don’t have the joie de vivre of these earlier contraptions. Enjoy the inventiveness of man and his love of the vehicular device!

Information on any of the photographs would be appreciated.

Marcus

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Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

English amphibious car – by the look of the number plate, 1910s-1920s

English half-track car c. 1910s-1920s?

English, probably at a Butlins holiday camp or some such, 1940s-1950s by the look of the cars

French, 1960s?

Amphibious Riley
1931

For a private Africa expedition (London to Capetown) Riley needed a trick to cross the rivers on his journey. The inflatable pontoons did the job but the holding rack was so close to the wheels that steering was impossible when the pontoons where in place. The brand name of the car is Riley to, if you are wondering where Riley got the money for his expedition.

Text from the Amphiclopedia website [Online] Cited 12/03/2013 no longer available online

Miniature lorry, English c. 1920s-1930s?

Ian Cameron
Ay-Ell
1964

16th January, 1964: “On the day after the official opening of the Tay Salmon Rod Fishing Season, Duncan McGregor catches an 8lb salmon from Ian Cameron’s amphibious car ‘Ay-Ell’.”

American delivery van 1910s-1920s?

Motorised half-track ferry, French?

English tricycle ambulance, c. 1940

Those mad Englishmen – boat car 1950s?

Motorouta
Swiss engineer Mr. Gerdes astride/inside his one-wheel motorcycle
1931

OMG, I’m in love, I want one now!

Across Europe on a Monowheel!

The 1920s, however, also saw the introduction of a few more ‘sensible’ motorised monowheels, which were really aimed as useable one-wheeled motorcycles. One of these was the mid-1920s Italian Motorouta that was actually produced in limited numbers. According to an advertisement of the time this machine had a 175 cc engine coupled to a 3-speed gearbox. It must have worked reasonably well, since a Swiss engineer by the name of Gerdes set of with a Motorouta machine for a rather grand trip from Switzerland to Spain in 1931. We know that he made it to Arles in the south of France, but whether he ever reached Spain is unclear.

Text from the Dark Roasted Blend: Monowheels website [Online] Cited 24/10/2020

English open-air tram – class-ridden scene with the old workers houses, gas container behind, c. 1930s-1940s?

American, 1910s-1920s?

Oh wow, love this!
English 1930s?

English tricar, two photographs of the same vehicle, 1920s-1930s? Love the circular door… another three-wheeler!

Bond Minicar 3-Wheeler
In production 1948-1965
English

Bond Minicar poster 1953

At the end of the war cars were at a premium so engineer Lawrie Bond came up with a budget three-wheeler Britain could afford. The Bond Minicar was poverty motoring in the extreme: no roof, no doors, brakes only at the rear and precious little suspension. The 1-cylinder two-stroke 122cc motorcycle engine started life with just 5bhp but gave 40mph and a claimed 104mpg. Minicars gradually became more refined and powerful until production ended in 1966. The final Mark G had a roof, doors and hydraulic brakes (Wikipedia).

There is a minicar club in England and they hold rallies for all types of minicar, including my first ever car, the Bond Bug (see below). The Bond Bug had a 700cc Reliant engine sitting between the two seats, was made of fibreglass, and had fabric windows offering now protection to side impact at all. The car was so low, and you entered and exited by raising the roof of the car that was supported by a pneumatic strut. I had so much fun in that car, blew the engine on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall one trip away. Stuck for 3 days before friends drove down from London with a Transit van, took the doors off the back of that, heaved the Bug up into the back, and drove back to London!

Bond Bug
1970-1974
English

The Bond Bug is a small British two-seat, three-wheeled sports car built from 1970 to 1974. It is a wedge-shaped microcar, with a lift-up canopy and side screens instead of conventional doors. The engine is the front-mounted 700 cc (later uprated to 750 cc) Reliant light-alloy four-cylinder unit which protruded into the passenger cabin. In contrast to the image of three-wheeled Reliants as being slow, the Bond Bug was capable of some 78 mph (126 km/h), comparable to the Mini (72 mph) and the least powerful version of the Lotus Seven (80 mph). The car was, however, not cheap. At £629, it cost more than a basic 850 cc Mini which was at the time £620. Although it had a fairly short production run (1970-1974), it has a dedicated following today

Text from the Wikipedia website

English, c. 1910s-1920s?

British, 1940s?

What a classic!
English, c. 1930s?

Wow! No idea… looks American

The James Samson Handyvan
1933-1939
In production 1929-1939
English

The James Handyvan first puttered onto the chaotic roads of Britain in 1929, and survived in production until 1939. Obviously motorcycle-based, the Handyvan offered an economical light goods vehicle for the small-business owner. Early Handyvans were powered by an engine of just 247cc and offered a payload capacity of 5cwt. In 1933 the engine was replaced with a larger V-Twin unit, as can be seen on this page, and the payload capacity was increased to 8cwt or 12cwt, depending on the model chosen. The later James vans were known as the “Samson Handyvan”.

Anonymous. “The James Handyvan, 1929-1939,” on the Old Classic Car website [Online] Cited 18/10/2020

I have no idea (Italian?), but boy are they groovy!

Oh my, how beautiful!
English (because of the number plate!), 1930s?

Georges Monneret
Amphibious Vespa
1952

A Vespa travelling across the English Channel to London? Yes – 1952

“The Vespa also has a racing career behind it. In Europe back in the Fifties, it took part, often successfully, in regular motor cycle races (speed and off-road), as well as unusual sporting ventures. In 1952 the Frenchman Georges Monneret built an “amphibious Vespa” for the Paris-London race and successfully crossed the Channel on it.”

Text from the Vespa Official website [Online] Cited 12/03/2013 no longer available online

R.A. Lister & Company / Lister Blackstone
Lister Autotruck
c. 1930s-1940s?
English, next to LNER railway train

The London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) was the second-largest of the “Big Four” railway companies created by the Railways Act 1921 in Britain. It existed from 1 January 1923 until nationalisation on 1 January 1948, when it was divided into the new British Railways’ Eastern Region, North Eastern Region and partially the Scottish Region

Text from the Wikipedia website

Dr John Archibald Purves (English, 1870-1952)
Dynosphere
1932
English

Two photographs of the same amazing contraption… fantastic!

“Another fascinating chapter in monowheel history was written by a chap called Dr John Archibald Purves from England, who seriously believed that one huge wheel encompassing five passengers was far more efficient than a car with four (smaller) wheels. In 1932, Purves designed the remarkable Dynosphere.

This monowheel differed from other designs in various ways. For one, it was wide enough to stand up by itself, without the need of continuous and rather tricky balancing. The outside of the wheel was part of the surface of a sphere, so that it did not touch the ground over its entire width and could be tilted sideways for steering. The outside consisted of a metal framework, so that the driver could look through the openings in the wheel frame.

Purves built a few different prototypes that were either petrol-driven or electrically powered. These machines were tested on the beach at Brean Sands and at Brooklands racing track. A short surviving film clip of the latter shows the difficulty in making a smooth ride – even at fairly constant speed – without the occupants gerbilling back and forth inside the wheel. It has even said to have knocked someone over during this test-run because of the inadequate steering system. The project was soon abandoned after that. The last known news from the project was a finished model of a five-seating Dynosphere with an enclosed glassed-in cabin, complete with bumpers and headlights.”

Text from the Dark Roasted Blend: Monowheels website [Online] Cited 24/10/2020

American, 1900s-1910s?

English cars with gas bags used for fuel during the early days of the Second World War, c. 1940

Gas bag vehicles

What can be seen on the roof is the fuel tank of the vehicle – a balloon filled with uncompressed gas. Gas bag vehicles were built during World War One and (especially) World War Two in France, the Netherlands, Germany and England as an improvised solution to the shortage of gasoline. Apart from automobiles, buses and trucks were also equipped with the technology. The vehicles consumed ‘town gas’ or ‘street gas’, a by-product of the process of turning coal into cokes (which are used to make iron). The fuel used for gas bag vehicles during the World Wars was generally not compressed and had a much lower energy density than LPG or CNG. To replace one litre of gasoline, two to three cubic metres of gas was needed.

Private automobiles were equipped with a wooden framework which was fastened to the roof and the reinforced bumpers of the vehicle. It was hard to overlook a gas bag vehicle passing along. Witnesses to the vehicle passing by could easily see how much fuel was left: the gas bag was fully inflated at the start of a trip, and it deflated with every mile that was driven. The gas storage bags were made of silk or other fabrics, soaked in rubber (Zodiac was one of the manufacturers). These bags were (and are) much cheaper and easier to build than metal tanks. They could also be repaired in a similar way to bicycle tyres. The bag was anchored to the roof using rings and straps. Some gas bag vehicles could operate alternatively on gas or gasoline. Switching between the two options could be controlled from inside the vehicle.

Kris De Decker. “Gas Bag Vehicles,” on the Low-tech magazine website [Online] Cited 18/10/2020

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Exhibition: ‘Thomas Demand’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 30th November 2012 – 17th March 2013

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Copyshop
1999
C-Print / Perspex
183.5 × 300cm
Collection of John Kaldor, Sydney
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Sitting here in my non-air-conditioned flat trying to survive Melbourne’s autumn heatwave is no fun; my mind has turned to mush. So instead of trying to write an in depth review of this exhibition I shall just make some salient comments, for fear my sweat would literally buckle Demand’s meticulously constructed paper models before he could photograph them.

Demand is firstly a sculpture, constructing studio-sized models of photographs that reference “source material in the archive that already has some fateful resonance,” (Robert Nelson, The Age, 12th December 2012) such as the control room of the Fukushima nuclear reactor, the Geneva hotel bath tub where the German politician Uwe Barschel found a brutal death – personally my mind went to David E. Scherman’s photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub (see below); scenes of nature such as Clearing (2003, below) or Grotto (2006, below) that are hyperreal simulacra of natural phenomena; and modular environments and objects, such as Copyshop (1999), Space Simulator (2003) and Bullion (2003, all below) that strip away the relational intimacy between man and environment by the removal of all labelling and tactility of surface. Demand then photographs his denuded “models” before destroying them, the photograph then becoming the soul evidence of their intrinsic existence (much like the documentary evidence of photographs of Land Art). Demand’s visualisation of the environment is triple coded (photograph, model, photograph), a hybrid tri-articulation that produces new identities that release energies of multiplicity, irony and destabilisation.

Robert Nelson observes in The Age that Demand’s world is paper thin and because the eye detects the forgery, “the famous icon of unthinkable fortune [Bullion] – which might have played a part in some famous heist or the security of a national economy – is also a lie, a tinsel falsehood of no substance… All of Demand’s pictures have an empty or hollow character, which defies the earnest weight of their associations.” Dan Rule insightfully notes that, “By removing the image’s reference or index, only to so painstakingly recast it, he [Demand] begs us to look and look again. These resolutely “unreal” images demand that we consider reality with much greater care.” (Dan Rule, The Age, 19th January 2013). Christopher Allen in The Weekend Australian (2nd March, 2013) states that Demand’s huge final prints, hidden under a layer of Perspex, “adds another level of truth and illusion that preoccupies Demand as it must any serious photographer today. In this case, the photographs can claim to be, for what this is worth, absolutely and literally true in their recording of their subject; it is only the subject itself that is entirely illusory and fabricated.”

Interesting comments all. Demand’s recasting of the relationship between image and referent (image and the object being photographed) is critical to his practice, but I am unsure that all photographers have to be preoccupied with the relationship between truth and illusion as Allen states. As my recent review of the exhibition Confounding: Contemporary Photography noted not all photographs have to confound the relationship between truth and illusion in order to be art. “Collectively, it is the ideas contained within the images in this exhibition that unsettle the relationship between the photograph and the world in the mind of the viewer, not their confounding.” As in the Jeff Wall Photographs exhibition, there is not much emotion in any of these images and perhaps this is an outcome of the long pre-photographic production process.

Demand’s recordings, re-orderings of a constructed reality are fabrications of the highest calibre, amazing to witness at first hand (is that really a model, how does he do that with paper and lighting?!), and yet one is left with a feeling that the work needed something more to go beyond this illusion, some layering that takes the viewer beyond the surface of the image, beyond the understanding of image / model / reality. I look at the photographs, I understand the skill, the imbrication of the process – I think that is the word I want, meaning the covering with a design in which one element covers a part of another – the looking again at a fabricated (our!) reality but the photographs still leave me a little cold of heart, of empty and hollow character. Perhaps that is the point, however it doesn’t make me want to look at the photographs over weeks, months and years and let them reveal themselves to me. Like the paper on which they are printed they are a little paper thin.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Kontrollraum / Control Room
2011
C-Print / Perspex
200 × 300cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Labor / Laboratory
2000
C-Print / Perspex
180 × 268cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Space Simulator
2003
C-Print / Perspex
300 × 429.4cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Regen / Rain (still)
2008
35 mm colour film, sound, 4 min, looped
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Lichtung / Clearing
2003
C-Print / Perspex
192 × 495cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Grotte / Grotto (detail)
2006
C-Print / Perspex
Photograph: Marcus Bunyan

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Bullion
2003
C-Print / Perspex
42 × 60cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

David E. Scherman (American, 1916-1997)
Lee Miller in Hitler’s bath, Hitler’s apartment, Munich, Germany 1945
1945
From Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke
© Lee Miller Archives

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Badezimmer / Bathroom
1997
C-Print / Perspex
160 × 122cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Tribute
2011
C-Print / Perspex
166 × 125cm
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery, Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Matthew Marks Gallery
© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / VISCOPY, Sydney

NGV International
180 St Kilda Road

Opening hours
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Video: ‘Marcus Bunyan – what makes a great photograph?’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne

Event date: Wednesday 5th December 2012

Marcus Bunyan
What makes a great photograph?
2012

The video is a little underwhelming but it was done for free for the CCP. It doesn’t show the 12 images that I used to illustrate the talk, you can see me pressing the buttons on the computer. Unfortunately, this ruins the structure of the speech.

Marcus

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Dr Marcus Bunyan, artist and curator of Art Blart, examines one of his favourite photographs – Alexander Gardner’s photograph of one of the plotters to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Lewis Paine, who was captured by the camera months before his execution in April 1865 – and asks what makes this a great photograph.

Many thankx to the Director of the CCP, Naomi Cass, for asking me to speak at the event.

Click on the picture to view the video or go to the Vimeo website.

Other presenters: Serena Bentley, Helen Frajman, Natalie King, Tin & Ed, Tom Mosby and John Warwicker.

CCP website

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Exhibition: ‘Juergen Teller: Woo!’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

23rd January – 17th March 2013

When the wall text introduction to an exhibition boldly states in the very first sentence, “Juergen Teller is one of the most important photographers of our time,” you know you’re in trouble. I think the word that springs to mind when I look at these photographs is vapid.

Blanched, empty photographs that have an inane void at their centre. I really don’t want to look at them any longer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The ICA is delighted to present a major solo exhibition of photography by Juergen Teller from 23 January to 17 March 2013. The exhibition marks the first survey presentation of Teller’s work in the UK in a decade and will include new and recent work.

Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, Teller is one of a few artists who has been able to operate successfully both in the art world and at the centre of the commercial sphere. This exhibition will provide a seamless journey through his landmark fashion and commercial photography from the 90s, presenting classic images of celebrities such as Lily Cole, Kate Moss and Vivienne Westwood, as well as more recent landscapes and family portraits.

Teller entered the London photography scene through the music industry taking photographs for record covers. Photographing amongst others Björk, Cocteau Twins, PJ Harvey and Courtney Love, it was Teller’s photograph of Sinéaad O’Connor for her single Nothing Compares 2 You that marked an important moment in his career. In 1991 he photographed Nirvana back stage when they toured Germany. Teller’s photographs first appeared in fashion magazines in the late 80s, and included portraits of Kate Moss when she was just fifteen years old. It was also in the early 1990s that Teller shot behind the scenes at Helmut Lang’s fashion shows capturing the models, clothes and atmosphere with a deceptively casual aesthetic. Teller’s images could be described as the antithesis of conventional fashion photography seen perhaps most markedly in his campaigns for Marc Jacobs.

Picture and Words introduces a series from a weekly column in the magazine of Die Zeit. For over a year the photographer presented a new image each week with an accompanying text. Like his images the texts are often controversial and provoked outcry amongst readers. The exhibition will feature many of the letters that the magazine received and some of which Teller included in his book. Irene im Wald and Keys to the House are Teller’s most recent bodies of work. These series reveal the photographer’s more personal world in his hometown in Germany and family home in Suffolk.

Teller’s provocative interventions in conventional celebrity portraiture are apparent in works such as a photograph of Victoria Beckham for a Marc Jacobs ad in which we only see her bare, high-heeled legs flopping over the side of a shopping bag. Vivienne Westwood reclines nude on a floral settee in a startling triptych whilst Björk and her son swim in the Blue Lagoon in an intimate portrait. Subverting the conventional relationship of the artist and model, Teller himself often figures as the naked muse in his photographs, seen for example in the Louis XV series with Charlotte Rampling. Whatever the setting, all his subjects collaborate in a way that allows for the most surprising poses and emotional intensity. Driven by a desire to tell a story in every picture he takes, Teller has shaped his own distinct and instantly recognisable style which combines humour, self-mockery and an emotional honesty.

“Whether Juergen Teller’s photography is art, or whether he is an artist or photographer, or both, or none of the above, or anything cconected with such thoughts, can only lead us astray. Teller’s work is about great images.” Gregor Muir, Executive Director ICA.

Press release from the ICA