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Aug

Exhibition: ‘The Classical Nude and the Making of Queer History’ at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, London, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: a man of little account, Alonze James Hanagan, Alonze James Hanagan Howard Hunter, Antiquity, Austin Young, Austin Young Dani Daniels Los Angeles, Bruce LaBruce, Bruce LaBruce Tripartite Goddess, classical iconography and same-sex desire, classical nude, Dani Daniels Los Angeles, Del LaGrace Volcano, Del LaGrace Volcano The Three Graces, Edwin Townsend, Edwin Townsend Tony Sansone, female nude photography, femininity, Francisco Moncion, Friedrich O. Wolter, Friedrich O. Wolter Drei Grazien, Friedrich O. Wolter Three Graces, gay art, gay artists, gay history, gender abolitionist, gender identity, gender variant visual artist, George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion, German artist, german photographer, Greco-Roman culture, Histoire de l'art de l'antiquité, homosexuality and photography, Howard Hunter, instability of gender identity, intersex, James Bidgood, James Bidgood Pan, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Johann Joachim Winckelmann Histoire de l'art de l'antiquité, lesbian masculinity, Lon of New York, Lon of New York Howard Hunter, los angeles, male nude, male nude photography, masculine beauty, masculinity, Nicholas Magallanes, Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balachines's Orpheus II, Nina Arsenault, nude photography, ONE Archives, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Orpheus II, performance of gender, performance of masculinity and femininity, queer art, queer artists, queer culture, Queer History, queer iconography, queer photography, same-sex desire, same-sex representation, technologies of gender, The Classical Nude, The Classical Nude and the Making of Queer History, the modern/contemporary period, the nineteenth century, the Renaissance, The Three Graces, The Warren Cup, Tony Sansone, Tripartite Goddess, un uomo di poco conto, USC Libraries, visual iconography of Greco-Roman culture, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Wilhelm Von Gloeden Untitled 1895

Exhibition dates: 29th June – 7th September 2014

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (German, 1717-1768)
Histoire de l’art de l’antiquité
1781
Leipzig: J. G. I. Brietkopf

Winckelmann was murdered in Trieste on June 8, 1768. The frontispiece to this French translation of the History presents an allegory of his death designed by his friend, the painter Adam Friedrich Oeser (1717-1799)

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (9 December 1717 – 8 June 1768) was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. “The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology”, Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications. His would be the decisive influence on the rise of the Neoclassical movement during the late 18th century. His writings influenced not only a new science of archaeology and art history but Western painting, sculpture, literature and even philosophy. Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art (1764) was one of the first books written in German to become a classic of European literature. His subsequent influence on Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Hölderlin, Heine, Nietzsche, George, and Spengler has been provocatively called “the Tyranny of Greece over Germany.”

Today, Humboldt University of Berlin’s Winckelmann Institute is dedicated to the study of classical archaeology. Winckelmann was homosexual, and open homoeroticism formed his writings on aesthetics. This was recognised by his contemporaries, such as Goethe.

Text from the Wikipedia website

These were the only press images I could get for this exhibition. I would have liked to have seen many more!

Marcus

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

George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955)
Nicholas Magallanes and Francisco Moncion in Balachines’s Orpheus II
1948
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 inches
Private Collection

Nicholas Magallanes (November 27, 1922 – May 2, 1977) was a principal dancer and charter member of the New York City Ballet. Along with Francisco Moncion, Maria Tallchief, and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Magallanes was among the core group of dancers with which George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein formed Ballet Society, the immediate predecessor of the New York City Ballet.

Magallanes embodied the Balanchinian archetype with the melancholy heroes of Serenade, La Valse, and La Sonnambula. He performed Orpheus, opposite Francisco Moncion as the Dark Angel and Tallchief as Eurydice. A set of photographs of the trio by George Platt Lynes suggests the drama of their interrelationships.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edwin Townsend (American 1879-?)
Tony Sansone
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
9.5 x 7.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Edwin F. Townsend

Born in Iowa in 1879, Edwin F. Townsend came to New York early in the 1900s. After the armistice, he took up professional photography, working with Lockeed Pictorial Co. In early autumn of 1921, he opened a studio on the upper west side of Manhattan. He established his credentials in the world of theatrical photography with a suite of portraits of opera singer / movie actress Geraldine Ferrar. He would continue as an active theatrical and celebrity photographer for the next two decades, excelling in dance photography.

In the mid-1920s, noting the success of fellow New Yorkers Edwin Bower Hesser and Alfred Cheney Johnston in supplementing studio income from portraiture with nudes (sold to “art magazines” and privately by mail order), Townsend began shooting male physique photographs. Among the Broadway photographers only Nickolas Muray then made the male nude an important component of his work. Bernarr Macfadden, the publisher and promoter of physical culture, and Ted Shawn, the modern dancer, in the 1920s elaborated a new aesthetics of the male body. Two poles of imagery came to the fore: a neoclassicism in which models posed in the attitudes of Greek statues, and a native Americanism in which models moved in dances enacting natural masculinity. Though Townsend (and Muray) had dealings with both Macfadden and Shawn, his own aesthetics tended toward the classical. Indeed, the produced the most famous set of physique photographs of the interwar period when he posed the model / actor Tony Sansone, whom he discovered in a David Belasco theatrical production, in a series of poses of Greek simplicity and dignity.

Townsend published two small books of photographic studies, dutifully airbrushed, of Sansone: Modern Classics (1932) and Rhythm (1935). For true connoisseurs, Townsend sold original prints, signed in red ink, of Sansone fully revealed. These images are among the most cherished and artistic icons of physique photography, establishing a standard of masculine beauty.

In 1933 Townsend moved his studio to midtown Manhattan. There he shot society portraiture, fashion layouts for department stores, and occasional theatrical and movie publicity work. The studio operated until the late 1950s.

David S. Shields/ALS. “Edwin F. Townsend,” on the Broadway Photographs website [Online] Cited 05/06/2021

James Bidgood (American, 1933-2022)
Pan
1965
Digital C-print
22 x 22 inches
Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York

James Bidgood

His artistic output has embraced a number of media and disciplines, including music, set and window design, and drag performance. In time, his interests led him to photography and film and it is for this work that he is most widely known. Highly recognisable, his photographs are distinguished by an aesthetic of high fantasy and camp. His work which was inspired by an early interest in Florenz Ziegfeld, Folies Bergère, and George Quaintance has, in turn, served as important inspiration for a slew of artists including Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle. …

Bidgood’s work is characterised by a heavy reliance on invention. His photographs feature elaborate sets built ground up from the materials of the theatre, fashion, design, and fine art. In a profile of the artist published in Aperture, Philip Gefter writes,

Necessity was the mother of invention for Bidgood, who created elaborate photographic tableaux in his small midtown Manhattan studio apartment. His first erotic series was an underwater epic called Water Colors, made in the early 1960s, in which he used a dancer from Club 82 named Jay Garvin as his subject. The underwater atmosphere is completely fabricated; the bottom of the ocean was created with silver lame spread across the floor of Bidgood’s apartment; he made the arch of a cave out of waxed paper, and fashioned red lame into the shape of lobster. He coated Garvin with mineral oil and pasted glitter and sequins to his skin so the silver fabric under photographic lights would reflect on his body like water. For weeks at a time, Bidgood would eat and sleep within the sets he constructed in his apartment. (Philip Gefter. “Off to the Camp,” in Aperture 191, Summer 2008)

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Many contemporary themes are found even in the earliest of Bidgood’s work. Camp, identity, erotica, desire, marginality, and performance all figure heavily in his portraits of nude men. Bidgood’s complex references to the theatre and performance seem to presage Queer articulations of Performance. His techniques, working processes, and masterful use of illusionistic colour indicate both a mature understanding of his influences and goals and an important contrast to the art movements of the time the work was first created.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Organised by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and curated by scholar Jonathan David Katz, The Classical Nude and the Making of Queer History investigates how the visual iconography of Greco-Roman culture has acted as a recurring touchstone in the development of same-sex representation. Within the canon of western art history, images of the classical past have acted as a sensitive barometer for the shifting constructions of what we today call LGBT or queer culture. The classical past is queer culture’s central origin myth, and tracing how this tradition has been utilised by queer artists over time offers far more information about the cultural context that appropriates the classical than it does about that past itself.

Examining the classical nude across centuries of artistic production, this exhibition considers four major periods: Antiquity, the Renaissance, the nineteenth century, and the modern/contemporary period. Drawn almost exclusively from the collections of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York, the objects are diverse in medium and format. While all periods are represented, the majority of the works illustrate how artists in recent history have utilised classical iconography and themes to explore same-sex desire. It is in the recent past, as artists reimagined a classical legacy that had not accounted for diverse gender and racial perspectives, that we find queer culture’s relationship to the classical tradition at both its most complex and dynamic.

This presentation at the ONE Gallery is a condensed preview of a show to open at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in October 2014. Containing over ninety-five objects, the exhibition in New York will include works by Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, Jacopo Pontormo, Andrea Mantegna, F. Holland Day, Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun, Herbert List, Jess, Paul Cadmus, and Pierre et Gilles, in addition to the works presented here, and will be accompanied by a scholarly exhibition catalogue.

Text from the ONE Archives website

Alonze James Hanagan (aka Lon of New York) (American, 1911-1999)
Howard Hunter
c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
13.25 x 7 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Artist unknown
Replica of The Warren Cup
Original c. mid-1st century AD
Silver
Unnumbered issue from edition of twelve
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Image of the original courtesy of The British Museum

Bruce LaBruce (Canadaian, b. 1964) with Nina Arsenault (Canadian, b. 1974)
Tripartite Goddess I, II, III
2011
Archival photograph
Signed on verso 1/10
18 x 28 in.

Austin Young (American, b. 1966)
Dani Daniels, Los Angeles
2011
Archival inkjet print
Edition 1/10

Austin Young

Austin Young (born April 12, 1966) is an American photographer, film maker and new media artist currently based in Los Angeles, known for both celebrity portraits and an encyclopaedic documentation of sub and trans culture in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Young is also co-founder of Fallen Fruit, an art collective that uses fruit as a common denominator for public engagement and collaboration. Young’s photographs have been featured in major publications such as Interview, OK, and Flaunt and have been shown in solo exhibitions and projects at LACMA (Los Angeles), Machine Project (Los Angeles), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, California); as well as groups shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles) and Stephen Cohen Gallery (Los Angeles).

Text from the Wikipedia website

Wilhelm Von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931)
Untitled
1895
Albumen silver print
9 x 6.75 inches
Collection of Sinski/McLaughlin

Wilhelm Von Gloeden

Wilhelm Iwan Friederich August Freiherr von Gloeden (September 16, 1856 – February 16, 1931) was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras, suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity. From a modern standpoint, his work is commendable due to his controlled use of lighting as well as the often elegant poses of his models. His innovations include the use of photographic filters and special body makeup (a mixture of milk, olive oil, and glycerin) to disguise skin blemishes. …

Works

While today Gloeden is mainly known for his nudes, in his lifetime he was also famous for his landscape photography that helped popularize tourism to Italy. In addition, he documented damage from the 1908 Messina earthquake, which may explain why the locals mostly approved of his work.

The majority of Gloeden’s pictures were made before the First World War, in the years from 1890 to 1910. During the war, he had to leave Italy. After returning in 1918, he photographed very little but continued to make new prints from his voluminous archives. In total, he took over 3000 images (and possibly up to 7000), which after his death were left to one of his models, Pancrazio Buciunì (also spelled Bucini; his dates sometimes given as c. 1864 – c. 1951 but probably should be 1879-1963), known as Il Moro (or U Moru) for his North African looks. Il Moro had been Gloeden’s lover since the age of 14 when he had first joined his household. In 1933, some 1,000 glass negatives from Gloeden’s collection (inherited by Buciuni) and 2,000 prints were confiscated by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist police under the allegation that they constituted pornography, and were destroyed; another 1,000 negatives were destroyed in 1936, but Buciuni was tried and cleared at a court in Messina (1939-1941) of disseminating pornographic images. Most of the surviving pictures (negatives and prints) are now in the Fratelli Alinari photographic archive in Florence (which in 1999 bought 878 glass negatives and 956 vintage prints formerly belonging to Buciuni to add to its existing collection of 106 prints) and further prints (which fetch hundreds of pounds at auction) are in private collections or held by public institutions such as the Civico Archivo Fotographico in Milan.

Attitudes towards his work during his lifetime and later

Gloeden generally made several different kinds of photographs. The ones that garnered the most widespread attention in Europe and overseas were usually relatively chaste studies of peasants, shepherds, fisherman, etc., featured in clothing like togas or Sicilian traditional costume, and which generally downplayed their homoerotic implications. He also photographed landscapes and some studies were of, or included, women. His models were usually posed either at his house, among the local ancient ruins, or on Monte Ziretto (c. 600 metres), located two kilometres to the north of Taormina and famous in antiquity for its quarries of red marble. He wrote in 1898: “The Greek forms appealed to me, as did the bronze-hued descendants of the ancient Hellenes, and I attempted to resurrect the old, classic life in pictures…The models usually remained merry and cheerful, lightly clad and at ease in the open air, striding forward to the accompaniment of flutes and animated chatter. More than a few greatly enjoyed the work and anxiously awaited the moment when I would show them the finished picture.”

More explicit photos in which boys aged between about 10 and 20, and occasionally older men, were nude (sometimes with prominent genitalia) and which, because of eye contact or physical contact were more sexually suggestive, were traded “under the counter” and among close friends of the photographer, but “as far as is known, Gloeden’s archive contained neither pornographic nor erotically lascivious motifs”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Friedrich O. Wolter
Drei Grazien (Three Graces)
Date unknown
Photograph
5.5 x 3.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Del LaGrace Volcano (American, b. 1957)
The Three Graces, Jasper, Suzie and Gill, London
1992
Digital C-print
30 x 23.5 inches
Collection of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York

Del LaGrace Volcano

Del LaGrace Volcano (born July 26th, 1957) is an American artist, performer, and activist from California. A formally trained photographer, Volcano’s work includes installation, performance and film and interrogates the performance of gender on several levels, especially the performance of masculinity and femininity. …

Volcano’s work complicates understandings of both femininity and masculinity by depicting lesbian masculinity. In “The Feminine Principle” Volcano takes queer femininities as a focus; including in this project is a portrait of Kate Bornstein. In “Lesbian Boyz and Other Inverts,” Volcano’s celebration of butch dykes, transsexual boys and other gender-queers. In the project, masculinity is shown as a tool of subversion.

Volcano’s recent photographs demonstrate how intersex bodies can offer an entirely new perspective on the body. The “normal” body in relation to Volcano’s photographs becomes queer, describing the bodies in their latest works as “sites of mutation, loss, and longing.” In these newer works, Volcano takes on the loss of their friend, Kathy Acker and the transformation of their lover Simo Maronati’s abled body into a disabled one. Here, Volcano illustrates the queerness of any body marked by illness or trauma. Their self-portrait “INTER*me” photograph series (formally the “Herm Body” series) is a raw rendition of the artist’s body using black and white Polaroid film, in conversation with their previous work it speaks to the construction of different age-selves and the technologies of gender in photography.

Volcano’s artist statement of September 2005 reads:

As a gender variant visual artist I access ‘technologies of gender’ in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist and an intentional mutation My journey must be distinguished from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their ‘ambiguous’ bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at “normalisation”. I believe in crossing the line, not just once, but as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.

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Volcano also explores themes of both sexual and gender fluidity throughout their work. Volcano often depicts the instability of gender identity, by pushing past the binary gender system, and frequently uses their queerness in their work to contest the idea of sexual identity as something that is permanently embodied. As shown in Volcano’s photography book, “Love Bites”, Volcano presents various images of women at sexual play, dressed “in costumes ranging from brides to gay leather men”. Volcano, in this way, seems to aim at defying conventional gender norms and feminist principles within their text. In “Teddy Boy David”, Volcano further pushes this agenda and toys with the idea of age dynamics and, mainly, youthfulness in terms of sexuality and sexual play.

Text from the Wikipedia website

ONE Archives Gallery & Museum
626 North Robertson Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Opening hours:
Currently closed for renovations

ONE Archives website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘Vanessa Winship’ at Fundación Mapfre, Madrid

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, digital photography, documentary photography, English artist, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space and time
Tags: Almería. Where Gold Was Found, Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction, British photographer, British photography, Eastern Anatolia, Fundacion MAPFRE, Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind, Humber, Imagined States and Desires, Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey, madrid, she dances on Jackson, she dances on Jackson. United States, social documentary photography, Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia, Vanessa Winship, Vanessa Winship Almería, Vanessa Winship Almería Where Gold Was Found, Vanessa Winship Black Sea, Vanessa Winship Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction, Vanessa Winship Georgia, Vanessa Winship Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind, Vanessa Winship Humber, Vanessa Winship Imagined States and Desires, Vanessa Winship she dances on Jackson, Vanessa Winship Sweet Nothings, Vanessa Winship Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia

Exhibition dates: 27th May – 31st August 2014

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey
1999-2002
© Vanessa Winship

“Young heart, old soul.” And then the vulnerability in those eyes… that burn right through you.

Such sensitivity, such presence. Glorious. All of them!

Marcus

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

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey
1999-2002
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series she dances on Jackson. United States
2011-2012
© Vanessa Winship

Fundación Mapfre opens its new photography gallery at Paseo de Recoletos 27 with the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the work of British photographer Vanessa Winship. Curated by Carlos Martín García, the show offers visitors a complete overview of Winship’s work, featuring a broad selection of photographs from all of her series, starting with her initial project in the Balkans and ending with her work in Almería this year, produced by Fundación Mapfre and due to receive its first public showing at this exhibition.

Vanessa Winship (Barton-upon-Humber, United Kingdom, 1960) studied at the Polytechnic of Central London during the 1980s at the time when postmodern theory was beginning to permeate the practice of photography and cultural studies. These ideas are reflected in the artist’s deliberate remove of all potential documentary content from her photography in order to concentrate instead on notions more related to identity, vulnerability and the body. Accordingly, since the 1990s Vanessa Winship has worked in regions which, in the collective imaginary, are associated with the instability and darkness of a recent past and with the volatile nature of borders and identities. Her images, in black and white, challenge the perception of photography’s immovable truth. Meanwhile, the formal choice of black and while reflects a deliberate shift from the photograph as narrative and constitutes, in the words of the artist herself, a “marvellous instrument of abstraction that enables us to move between time and memory.”

Vanessa Winship is one of the most renowned photographers on the contemporary international scene. In 2011 she was the first woman to win the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) award. Her other distinctions include winning first prize in the Stories category of the World Press Photo awards in 1998 and 2008, the Descubrimientos award at PhotoEspaña in 2010, and the Godfrey Argent Prize in 2008, bestowed by the National Portrait Gallery in London.

A tour of the exhibition

“I lived and worked in the region of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus for more than a decade. My work focuses on the junction between chronicle and fiction, exploring ideas around concepts of borders, land, memory, desire, identity and history. I am interested in the telling of history, and in notions around periphery and edge. For me photography is a process of literacy, a journey of understanding.”

Vanessa Winship

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The Vanessa Winship exhibition adopts the form of a chronological journey through each of the series that make up her oeuvre, featuring a selection of 188 photographs.

Between 1999 and 2003 Vanessa Winship traveled through the regions of Albania, Serbia, Kosovo and Athens, coinciding with the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia and resulting in her series Imagined States and Desires. A Balkan Journey. This project was a fundamental step in defining her photographic vision and in her decision to break with contemporary reportage and the traditional concept of the photojournalist. The images that make up this series mostly center on the tragedy of the exodus of Kosovar Albanian refugees from Serbia to neighbouring countries. They are a collection of snapshots that reflect the volatile nature of borders, ethnic groups and creeds while asserting that identity is not bestowed by territory but is ingrained in individuals, wherever they go. The fragmentary nature of the series, its condensation into micro-stories, lays the foundations for her future practice.

In 2002 Vanessa Winship moved to the Black Sea region and over the next eight years traveled through Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria. Her work in this area gave rise to one of her most renowned series, Black Sea: Between Chronicle and Fiction. In this series, she presents her vision of the area and the residents of the regions around the shores of the Black Sea, which she presents as a natural border – challenging all notions of geopolitical or historically established limits – of the vital space of each nation, and even of the distinction between public and private space. Winship’s work therefore focuses on the aspects that endure beyond the action of politics: collective rituals, modes of transportation, recreational spaces, and the movement of human beings up and down the coastlines.

In Black Sea, portraits of Turkish wrestlers and Ukrainian wedding guests allow Winship to elaborate on her reflections and explore the concepts of sexual differentiation governing societies: on one hand, Turkish wrestling, a direct descendant of Greco-Roman wrestling and an icon of masculinity in the country; on the other, participation in a wedding ceremony as a means of self-presentation in society for young Ukrainian women.

In both of these series, the images are accompanied by brief notes written by the artist, either expressing a single thought or a short description, which create a deliberately incomplete narrative. For Winship, these notes are meant to remind us of the power of text to evoke an image.

Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia (2007), produced during her travels through Eastern Europe, is a key project in Vanessa Winship’s evolution as a photographer. It is an almost serial collection of portraits of schoolgirls from the rural area of Eastern Anatolia, a region bordering with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran where the plurality of ethnic groups is silenced by the proliferation of uniforms, of both schoolchildren and military personnel. On a certain level, the school uniforms recall the tools used by states to classify the population, to “mark” their territory and neutralise the plurality of areas, as in Eastern Anatolia where the ethnic and geographic borders are not as clearly defined as they are on maps. This fact – the presence of uniforms – represents a framework for action, a boundary for the project, and allows Winship to further develop her interest in faces, gestures, and the sense of belonging to a group or community.

Georgia, another region on the shores of the Black Sea, is the setting for the series produced by between 2008 and 2010, in which she mostly focuses on portraits. Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind is a detailed study of the faces the photographer came across. These are portraits of youths and children, mostly individuals who, when grouped together, appear almost without variation as same-sex pairs. The collection suggests an energetic, survivor country. These images are combined with a series of colored photographs (the only ones in Winship’s entire output) that accompany tombstones in a cemetery. The two collections establish an interesting dialogue between different generations of Georgians and, simultaneously, between the artist herself and the original anonymous photographer. Meanwhile, the landscapes and stones that complete the series evoke a premature death. By combining landscape and portrait as places where the traces of identity, history and present are imprinted, this series is a key project in Winship’s work as it prompts a debate about her practice and the issues posed by the two genres.

In 2011 Vanessa Winship received the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson (HCB) photography award. The project for she won the prize led to the series she Dances on Jackson. United States (2011-2012), produced in the United States, a country which she represents as of great uncertainty, where the weight of the recent past is manifested through public works and constructions which are either underused or have fallen into disuse, and where the faces of anonymous individuals and groups reveal their disillusionment with the promises of the American dream. This series also constitutes Winship’s definitive approach to landscape photography, a genre which has gained increasing prominence in her output. Short texts written by the author replace the gradual disappearance of the portrait, operating as narratives of the missing photographs. In she Dances on Jackson. United States the geographic leap to the other side of the Atlantic defines the characters that people Winship’s earlier photography.

Before embarking on her trip to the United States, Winship worked in her home town on the estuary of the Humber river (2010), for which this series is titled. In this project, we again witness the growing preeminence of landscape in her work. This process culminates masterfully in her most recent series, produced in Almería, which represents the reaffirmation of her work as a landscapist and the total absence of the human figure. In January 2014, for the purposes of this exhibition, the artist moved to Almería, a place marked by rootlessness and its border nature and geological diversity, to carry out her latest project. Winship has focused on photographing the geological formations along the coastline of Cabo de Gata and the devastation of the area following the proliferation of intensive agriculture based on greenhouse production. The land of gold, Spaghetti westerns and marble now appears as a land of plastic and, like all other places Winship has photographed, seems to be located in a place suspended in space and time. All of the images in this section of the show reflect the rapid transformation of the region following the introduction of greenhouses, a radical systemic change and altered coexistence brought about by the arrival of communities of immigrants and their access to consumer society customs. Almería, as Winship’s photographs clearly show, continues to be a fragmented landscape in which urban and rural collide and where the “non-place” that is the greenhouse acts as a metaphor for the area’s instability and vulnerability.

Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue featuring all the images on display and specially commissioned essays about the work of Vanessa Winship by Neil Ascherson, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Carlos Martín García. The catalog will also include two excerpts from Campos de Níjar (Níjar Country) and Coto Vedado (Forbidden Territory) by Juan Goytisolo, as well as a biography-timeline, an updated bibliography, and a selection of the texts the photographer uses to complement her series, in the manner of a “travel diary”. To date there are only two monographs on Winship, one devoted to the Black Sea series and one to Sweet Nothings, which means that this catalog will be the first and most incisive historiographical approximation to her entire oeuvre.”

Press release from Fundación Mapfre

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Almería. Where Gold Was Found
2014
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Black Sea. Between Chronicle and Fiction
2002-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind
2008-2010
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Sweet Nothings: Schoolgirls of Eastern Anatolia
2007
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Humber
2010-2011
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series she dances on Jackson. United States
2011-2012
© Vanessa Winship

Vanessa Winship (British, b. 1960)
Untitled from the series Georgia. Seeds Carried by the Wind
2008-2010
© Vanessa Winship

FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE – Instituto de Cultura
Paseo de Recoletos, 23
28004 Madrid, Spain
Phone: +34 915 81 61 00

Opening hours:
Sunday 11.00am – 7.00pm
Monday 2.00 – 8.00pm
Tuesday 10.00am – 8.00pm
Wednesday 10.00am – 8.00pm
Thursday 10.00am – 8.00pm
Friday 10.00am – 8.00pm
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Aug

Exhibition: ‘The Sievers Project’ at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian artist, Australian photography, Australian writing, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, Melbourne, memory, photographic series, photography, quotation, reality, space and time
Tags: architectural photographs, architectural photography, Australian black and white photography, Australian contemporary photography, Australian fine art photography, Australian photography, black and white photography, Cameron Clarke, Cameron Clarke Küsters Washer Bruck Textiles, Cameron Clarke Loui Nedeski Ford Motor Company, Cameron Clarke Theis Dye Jets Bruck Textiles, CCP, CCP The Sievers Project, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria, fine art photography, Ford Motor Company, Gears for the Mining Industry, Ginninderra Bridg, Helen Ennis, In the Forum Romanum, industrial photography, industrial sewing machines, Jane Brown, Jane Brown Mining machinery Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Jane Brown Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Jane Brown Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Küsters Washer Bruck Textiles, Kyla McFarlane, Loui Nedeski, Loui Nedeski Ford Motor Company, Melbourne, Meredith Turnbull, Mining machinery Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Mother Vietnam, Naomi Cass, Naomi Cass The Sievers Project, National Gallery of Victoria, photography of factories, photography of machines, Phuong Ngo, Phuong Ngo Mother Vietnam, portrait photography, Staircase The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), The Sievers Project, Theis Dye Jets Bruck Textiles, Therese Keogh, Therese Keogh In the Forum Romanum, Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), urban photography, Vickers Ruwolt, Westgate Bridge, Wolfgang Sievers, Wolfgang Sievers Gears for the Mining Industry, Wolfgang Sievers Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, Zoë Croggon, Zoë Croggon Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria, Zoë Croggon John Holland Constructions, Zoë Croggon Westgate Bridge

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Artists: Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo, Meredith Turnbull, Wolfgang Sievers

Curators: Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield
2014
3 panels of 9, 6 and 6 selenium toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver prints

Curated by CCP Director Naomi Cass and Kyla McFarlane, this intelligent exhibition features the work of six early career artists who respond in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007). It was a joy to see again the large vintage silver gelatin, almost clinically composed photographs by Sievers. The light, tonality and stillness of the images make them seem mythic, modern and monumental.

Each artist offers a unique “take” on Sievers influence on Australian photography and design, including his interest in refugees and human rights issues and the representation of the dignity of labour (although the machine is more often represented in Sievers work with a distinct lack of human presence and the act of work itself).

My personal favourites were Phuong Ngo’s intimate silver gelatin photographs in four groups of sweat shop workers in Vietnam, people on boats coming to Australia, photographs of textile workers in Australia and photographs of his mother. Phuong Ngo’s shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers told through photographs is very moving, but only after you are told what the four bodies of images are about. Positioned in the small Gallery Four it was also difficult to associate this installation with the rest of the exhibition. Initially I thought it was a separate exhibition until the linkages were told, the light dawned, and the connections were made.

While Cameron Clarke’s photographs of Ford factory workers and machinery are meticulously lit and digitally observed, producing a strong body of work, it is Jane Brown’s gridded analogue triptych which steals the show (see photographs above and below). These are superbly rich and textured photographs, beautifully seen and resolved within the shifting mise-en-scène. Brown’s images kinetically flow from one image to another even as they are self contained within a modernist grid. In some instances the artist has used the same photograph within the triptych but cropped in a different manner, which pushes and pulls the viewer into a different perspective on the subject matter. This is highly intelligent art making that observes the self contained nature and monumentality of Sievers work and reworks it, lucidly commenting on the dis/integration of these spaces and industries in the present day.

This series of work is the best sequence of photographs I have seen this year and any institution worthy of their salt should snap up these works for their collection.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Director Naomi Cass and the CCP for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan 2014

Installation photographs of Jane Brown Triptych. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield 2014 (details) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Staircase. The Paper Mill (former Amcor and APM site), Fairfield, 2014
2014
Fibre-based, gelatin silver print

Jane Brown (Australian, b. 1967)
Mining machinery, Line of Lode Miners Memorial Complex, Broken Hill 2014-06-10
2014
Brown toned, fibre-based, gelatin silver print
Courtesy the artist

Installation photograph of Jane Brown’s work at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Gears for the Mining Industry, Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Victoria, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver photograph
49.6 x 39.3cm
National Library of Australia, Wolfgang Sievers Photographic Archive

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Sulphuric Acid Plant Electrolytic Zinc, Risoon, Tasmania, 1959
1959
Gelatin silver photograph

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (foreground) and Zoë Croggon (rear wall) at the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
John Holland Constructions, Ginninderra Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
70 cm x 86cm
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [7] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Comalco Aluminium Used in the Construction of the National Gallery of Victoria [18] (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Westgate Bridge (after Wolfgang Sievers)
2014
Photocollage
Courtesy the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

“Six early career artists, working in photography through to installation, have responded in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913-2007), icon of 20th century Australian photography. Sievers’ commercial practice exemplifies mid-century positivism and modernity, and the myth-making role of photography. As a German Jewish immigrant, he had a strong interest in refugees and human rights issues as well as an expressed commitment to representing the dignity of labour. The Sievers Project presents key historical works as a context for engaging the past through the present.

Photographers Jane Brown and Cameron Clarke have followed in his footsteps to industrial clients Sievers photographed and valorised, finding sites that are visually dynamic within industries now in decline. Through her intrepid, research-based practice, Therese Keogh has developed a materially-rich work from the starting point of a single, anomalous photograph Sievers took at the Roman Forum in 1953. Meredith Turnbull draws on his connections with Melbourne’s design community in the 1950s and 60s, including Gerard Herbst and Frederick Romberg. In Sievers’ photographs of industrial sewing machines and their machinists, Phuong Ngo finds shared stories of young Vietnamese refugees and the journeys taken by their mothers. Zoë Croggon positions fragments of Sievers’ iconic architectural photographs against found photographs of the human body in movement.”

Text from the CCP website

Foreword to the catalogue

The Sievers Project follows a number of exhibitions over the last five years where CCP has opened up a vista on contemporary practice by exhibiting early work by living artists such as Bill Henson, Kohei Yoshiyuki and Robert Rooney, as well as historical photography, alongside contemporary work. As a commissioning exhibition we have titled this a ‘project’ to point towards the year-long research period integral to the exhibition, capturing the curatorial gesture of inviting early career artists to engage with the past.

The Sievers Project represents a significant curatorial endeavour for CCP, the tale of which is recounted in the Introduction. It would simply not have taken place were it not for the willingness and generosity of Julian Burnside AO QC to participate, through allowing the artists research access to his Wolfgang Sievers collection and lending work from it for the exhibition, as well as contributing an essay for this catalogue.

I acknowledge the artists for setting out on this project and for returning with thoughtful and excellent work. It has been a pleasure to both engage with and exhibit the work of Jane Brown, Cameron Clarke, Zoë Croggon, Therese Keogh, Phuong Ngo and Meredith Turnbull.

The Sievers Project has been dignified by contributions by a number of experts and I wish to acknowledge Professor Helen Ennis, Australian National University School of Art who has also contributed a catalogue essay; Madeleine Say, Picture Librarian, Eve Sainsbury, Exhibitions Curator and Clare Williamson, Senior Exhibitions Curator, State Library of Victoria; Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography, National Gallery of Victoria and Professor Harriet Edquist and Kaye Ashton, Senior Coordinator, RMIT Design Archives, who all took time to speak about Sievers and share his work with the artists.

Opportunities to commission artists are relatively rare and funding through the inaugural Early Career Artist Commissions Grant from the Australia Council has enabled the project. CCP is pleased to acknowledge this recognition and support. We are delighted that Lovell Chen Architects & Heritage Consultants have provided further critical support to realise the project, for which we are grateful. We see a germane link between Lovell Chen and the premise of The Sievers Project.

The Besen Family Foundation are champions for enabling CCP to produce catalogues for selected exhibitions. I acknowledge the Foundation for their long-standing and generous engagement with CCP. We thank the National Library of Australia for providing permission to reproduce Sievers’ work in this catalogue.

The Sievers Project has provided a welcome opportunity for CCP to engage with colleagues in the fi eld of architecture and we are delighted to acknowledge a partnership with the Robin Boyd Foundation to present public programs. We are grateful to Tony Lee from the Foundation for his interest in the project.

Without doubt CCP’s ability to both present contemporary art well and look after artists is greatly enhanced through the longstanding and generous support of Tint Design and Sofi tel Melbourne on Collins. CCP is pleased to present a parallel exhibition of The Sievers Project at the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair and we thank the Melbourne Art Foundation for enabling CCP to bring the exhibition to broad new audiences. For the Art Fair exhibition we are also indebted to Christine Downer, previous CCP Board member and current supporter, for the loan of a major Sievers work.

The Sievers Project has been ably assisted by Philippa Brumby, curatorial intern. Co-curator Dr Kyla McFarlane and I thank Philippa for her wide-ranging skills over a substantial period of time. Lastly, I acknowledge Kyla for her excellent curatorial work and for the pleasure of collaborating with such a playful, dedicated and steely intellect.

Naomi Cass, Director, CCP

And what about his Legacy?

A response to this necessarily combines elements of certitude and speculation. Sievers himself was totally committed to ensuring his legacy as a photographer. He spent years meticulously cataloguing and documenting his work and was assiduous in placing as much of it as he could in major photography collections around the country – art galleries and libraries. The bulk of his archive, a staggering 65,000 negatives and prints, was acquired by the National Library where it has been digitised and is available online to users in perpetuity. But there is another aspect to his preoccupation with legacy that has troubled me over the years – his desire to control the readings of his work, to ensure that he ‘owned’ the contextualisation and interpretation of it. As I see it, some of the framing narratives he constructed were retrospective and are misleading because they are not borne out by the evidence, that is, by the photographs themselves. This is especially apparent in his insistence that the relationship between ‘man and machine’ was central to his industrial photography. In my assessment of his enormous archive, images that extol this interaction are actually relatively few in number. They are outweighed by thousands and thousands of other industrial scenes in which the worker is locked into the dreary, repetitive tasks associated with mass production, or is not present at all having been displaced by machines that are far more efficient than humans will ever be. In other words, the bulk of Sievers’ own photographs contradict his central tenet of the dignity of labour in the modern machine era. The most important aspect of his legacy is undoubtedly his photographs and the astonishingly vast, high quality body of architectural and industrial work he produced between 1938 and the early 1970s. My view is that his black and white photography is the best although he did not agree with me, arguing that his colour photography, with its expressive and dramatic qualities, was equally fine. For me, it is his black and white images that are visionary, their precision, clarity and drama embodying the belief in progress that underpinned modernity. I would also suggest Sievers’ legacy isn’t confined to his photography. As a man he cared deeply about the world and wanted it to be better. He was closely involved in the restoration of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s buildings in Berlin in the 1990s and in the re-evaluation of his own father’s reputation (Professor Johannes Sievers was an expert on Schinkel and had used his young son’s photographs in his books on the architect in the 1930s). Wolfgang donated his photographs to fund-raising campaigns for human rights and remained a passionate antiwar activist until his death.

What would he have thought about this project?

I suspect that he would have been thrilled to know that his contribution to Australian life and photography is the touchstone for the six photographers involved in the project and that his work continues to be appreciated.

Professor Helen Ennis is Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at ANU School of Art, Canberra.

Installation photographs of the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Therese Keogh (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Installation photograph of the work of Meredith Turnbull (detail) in the exhibition The Sievers Project at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP)

Therese Keogh
In the Forum Romanum (after Sievers)
2013
Graphite on paper
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Loui Nedeski, Ford Motor Company, Geelong
2014
Archival inkjet print
50 x 63 cm
Courtesy the artist

Cameron Clarke
Küsters Washer, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Cameron Clarke
Theis Dye Jets, Bruck Textiles, Wangaratta (detail)
2014
Archival inkjet print

Phuong Ngo (Australian, b. 1983)
Untitled
2014
from the Mother Vietnam series
Inkjet print
Courtesy the artist

Centre for Contemporary Photography
404 George St, Fitzroy
Victoria 3065, Australia
Phone: + 61 3 9417 1549

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Centre for Contemporary Photography website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, designer, exhibition, existence, gallery website, illustration, landscape, light, painting, photography, psychological, reality, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Abstract Speed + Sound, aerial imagery, aeropittura, arte meccanica, avant-garde painting, avantgarde, Étienne Jules Marey, Étienne-Jules Marey chronophotography, Ballo meccano futurista, Before the Parachute Opens, Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti) Syntheses of Communications, Benedetta Syntheses of Communications, Benedetta Synthesis of Aerial Communications, Bruno Munari and Torido Mazzotti, Bruno Munari and Torido Mazzotti Antipasti Service, Carlo Carrà, Carlo Carrà Interventionist Demonstration, Carlo Carrà Manifestazione Interventista, chronophotography, Cimino Home Dining Room Set, Descending over Saint Peter, Diavoletti neri e bianchi, Diavoletti neri e bianchi. Danza di diavoli, dinamismo plastico, Elasticity, Enrico Prampolini and Maria Ricotti, Filippo Masoero, Filippo Masoero Descending over Saint Peter, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Futurism, Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, Fortunato Depero, Fortunato Depero Black and White Little Devils, Fortunato Depero Diavoletti neri e bianchi. Danza di diavoli, Fortunato Depero Heart Eaters, Fortunato Depero Mangiatori di cuori, Francesco Cangiullo, Francesco Cangiullo Grande folla in Piazza del Popolo, Francesco Cangiullo Large Crowd in the Piazza del Popolo, Futurism, Futurism in the 1920s, Futurist art, Futurist environment, Futurist photography, Futurist serate, Gerardo Dottori, Gerardo Dottori Cimino Home Dining Room Set, Gerardo Dottori Sala da pranzo di casa Cimino, Giacomo Balla, Giacomo Balla Abstract Speed + Sound, Giacomo Balla La mano del violinista, Giacomo Balla The Hand of the Violinist, Giacomo Balla Velocità astratta + rumore, Grande folla in Piazza del Popolo, Heart Eaters, heroic Futurism, Interventionist Demonstration, Italian art, Italian artists, Italian avant-garde, Italian avantgarde, Italian Futurism, Italian Futurism 1909-1944, Italian Futurism 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Italian Futurist photography, Italian photographer, Italian photography, Ivo Pannaggi, Ivo Pannaggi Speeding Train, L'arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista, La mano del violinista, Large Crowd in the Piazza del Popolo, Le Figaro, Luigi Russolo, Luigi Russolo L'arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista, Luigi Russolo The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto, machine aesthetics, Mangiatori di cuori, Manifestazione Interventista, Manifesto dei pittori futuristi, Manifesto del Futurismo, Manifesto of Futurism, Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art, Manifesto of Futurist painters, Mechanical Futurist Ballet, opera d’arte totale, Perspectives of Flight, Pittura e scultura futuriste, Prima che si apra il paracadute, Program for the Theater of Futurist Pantomime, Sala da pranzo di casa Cimino, Scendendo su San Pietro, Sintesi delle comunicazioni aeree, Speeding Train, Syntheses of Communications, Synthesis of Aerial Communications, Théâtre de la Pantomine Futuriste, The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, The Futurists, The Hand of the Violinist, The Rhythms of the Bow, total work of art, Treno in corsa, Treno in corsa Ivo Pannaggi, Tullio Crali, Tullio Crali Before the Parachute Opens, Tullio Crali Prima che si apra il paracadute, Umberto Boccioni, Umberto Boccioni Elasticity, Umberto Boccioni Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, Umberto Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Velocità astratta + rumore

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 1st September 2014

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Many thankx to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the art.

Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958)
The Hand of the Violinist (The Rhythms of the Bow) (La mano del violinista [I ritmi dell’archetto])
1912
Oil on canvas
56 x 78.3cm
Estorick Collection, London
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Giacomo Balla

Around 1902, [Balla] taught Divisionist techniques to Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. Influenced by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla adopted the Futurism style, creating a pictorial depiction of light, movement and speed. He was a signatory of the Futurist Manifesto in 1910. Typical for his new style of painting is Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) and his 1914 work Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + rumore) (below). In 1914, he began to design Futurist furniture, as well as so-called Futurist “antineutral” clothing. Balla also began working as a sculptor, creating, in 1915, the well-known work titled Boccioni’s Fist, based on ‘lines of force’ (Linee di forza del pugno di Boccioni).

During World War I, Balla’s studio became a meeting place for young artists.

Balla’s most famous works, such as his 1912 Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash where efforts to express movement – and thus the passage of time – through the medium of painting. One of Balla’s main inspirations was the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey. Balla’s 1912 The Hand of the Violinist (above) depicts the frenetic motion of a musician playing, and draws on inspiration from Cubism and the photographic experiments of Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

In his abstract 1912-1914 series Iridescent Interpenetration, Balla attempts to separate the experience of light from the perception of objects as such. Abstract Speed + Sound (1913-14, below) is a study of speed symbolised by the automobile. Originally, it may have been part of a triptych.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958)
Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + rumore)
1913-1914
Oil on unvarnished millboard in artist’s painted frame
54.5 x 76.5cm
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553.31
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Francesco Cangiullo (italian, 1884-1977)
Large Crowd in the Piazza del Popolo (Grande folla in Piazza del Popolo)
1914
Watercolor, gouache, and pencil on paper
58 x 74cm
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Francesco Cangiullo

Neapolitan writer and painter who made an important contribution to Futurism’s experiments in poetry and drama.

The Napolitano artist was born on January 27th, 1884 and was largely self-taught. He joined the Futurist movement in 1910 and took part in the important Futurist exhibition in Rome in 1914, creating art collaboratively with both Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giacomo Balla. Cangiullo created his best-known artwork in 1915; in Café-Concert: Unexpected Alphabet he playfully portrays a lively evening at the theatre in his hometown of Naples in which the singers, dancers, acrobats, and comedians are composed of letters, numbers, and mathematical sings. In 1924 he distanced himself form the Futurists, but still continued a friendship with Marinetti. Fondly reminiscing on his experiences with the art movement, Cangiullo published Futurist Evenings recounting his memories with the group.

Filippo Masoero (Italian, 1894-1969)
Descending over Saint Peter (Scendendo su San Pietro)
c. 1927-1937 (possibly 1930-1933)
Gelatin silver print
24 x 31.5cm
Touring Club Italiano Archive

Ivo Pannaggi (Italian, 1901-1981)
Speeding Train (Treno in corsa)
1922
Oil on canvas
100 x 120cm
Fondazione Carima – Museo Palazzo Ricci, Macerata, Italy
Photo: Courtesy Fondazione Cassa di risparmio della Provincia di Macerata

Ivo Pannaggi

Futurism

Pannaggi joined the Futurist movement in 1918, but left soon after because of disagreements with Fillippo Marinetti. In 1922, he and Vinicio Paladini [it] published their “Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art.” The manifesto emphasised the importance of machine aesthetics (arte meccanica), which became one of the dominant strands of Futurism in the 1920s. He and Paladini also staged the Mechanical Futurist Ballet (Ballo meccano futurista) at Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Casa d’Arte.

Around the same time he painted Speeding Train (Treno in corsa), perhaps his most famous work (above). He also created many photomontage works. In Postal Collages (1925), Pannaggi created a series of unfinished photomontages that would be completed through the inevitable addition of stamps and seals by postal workers – an early instance of mail art.

Germany and the Bauhaus

In 1927, Pannaggi traveled to Berlin, where he would live until 1929. He became friends with Kurt Schwitters and Walter Benjamin and published photomontage works in German newspapers. Between 1932 and 1933, Pannaggi attended the Bauhaus, the only Futurist other than Nicolaj Diugheroff to do so.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Bruno Munari (Italian, 1907-1998) and Torido Mazzotti (Italian, 1895-1988)
Antipasti Service (Piatti Servizio Antipasti)
1929-1930
Glazed earthenware (manufactured by Casa Giuseppe Mazzotti, Albisola Marina)
Six plates: 21.6 x 21.6cm diameter each; one vase: 11.7 x 7.6cm
The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
© Bruno Munari, courtesy Corraini Edizioni
Photo: Lynton Gardiner

From February 21 through September 1, 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, the first comprehensive overview in the United States of one of Europe’s most important 20th-century avant-garde movements. Featuring over 360 works by more than 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers, and writers, this multidisciplinary exhibition examines the full historical breadth of Futurism, from its 1909 inception with the publication of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first Futurist manifesto through its demise at the end of World War II. The exhibition includes many rarely seen works, some of which have never traveled outside of Italy. It encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but also the advertising, architecture, ceramics, design, fashion, film, free-form poetry, photography, performance, publications, music, and theatre of this dynamic and often contentious movement that championed modernity and insurgency.

About Futurism

Futurism was launched in 1909 against a background of growing economic and social upheaval. In Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” published in Le Figaro, he outlined the movement’s key aims, among them: to abolish the past, to champion modernisation, and to extol aggression. Although it began as a literary movement, Futurism soon embraced the visual arts as well as advertising, fashion, music and theatre, and it spread throughout Italy and beyond. The Futurists rejected stasis and tradition and drew inspiration from the emerging industry, machinery, and speed of the modern metropolis. The first generation of artists created works characterised by dynamic movement and fractured forms, aspiring to break with existing notions of space and time to place the viewer at the centre of the artwork. Extending into many mediums, Futurism was intended to be not just an artistic idiom but an entirely new way of life. Central to the movement was the concept of the opera d’arte totale or “total work of art,” in which the viewer is surrounded by a completely Futurist environment.

More than two thousand individuals were associated with the movement over its duration. In addition to Marinetti, central figures include: artists Giacomo Balla, Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, and Enrico Prampolini; poets and writers Francesco Cangiullo and Rosa Rosà; architect Antonio Sant’Elia; composer Luigi Russolo; photographers Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni); dancer Giannina Censi; and ceramicist Tullio d’Albisola. These figures and other lesser-known ones are represented in the exhibition.

Futurism is commonly understood to have had two phases: “heroic” Futurism, which lasted until around 1916, and a later incarnation that arose after World War I and remained active until the early 1940s. Investigations of “heroic” Futurism have predominated and comparatively few exhibitions have explored the subsequent life of the movement; until now, a comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism had yet to be presented in the U.S. Italian art of the 1920s and ’30s is little known outside of its home country, due in part to a taint from Futurism’s sometime association with Fascism. This association complicates the narrative of this avant-garde and makes it all the more necessary to delve into and clarify its full history.

Exhibition overview

Italian Futurism unfolds chronologically, juxtaposing works in different mediums as it traces the myriad artistic languages the Futurists employed as their practice evolved over a 35-year period. The exhibition begins with an exploration of the manifesto as an art form, and proceeds to the Futurists’ catalytic encounter with Cubism in 1911, their exploration of near-abstract compositions, and their early efforts in photography. Ascending the rotunda levels of the museum, visitors follow the movement’s progression as it expanded to include architecture, clothing, design, dinnerware, experimental poetry, and toys.

Along the way, it gained new practitioners and underwent several stylistic evolutions – shifting from the fractured spaces of the 1910s to the machine aesthetics (or arte meccanica) of the ’20s, and then to the softer, lyrical forms of the ’30s. Aviation’s popularity and nationalist significance in 1930s Italy led to the swirling, often abstracted, aerial imagery of Futurism’s final incarnation, aeropittura. This novel painting approach united the Futurist interest in nationalism, speed, technology, and war with new and dizzying visual perspectives. The fascination with the aerial spread to other mediums, including ceramics, dance, and experimental aerial photography.

The exhibition is enlivened by three films commissioned from documentary filmmaker Jen Sachs, which use archival film footage, documentary photographs, printed matter, writings, recorded declamations, and musical compositions to represent the Futurists’ more ephemeral work and to bring to life their words-in-freedom poems. One film addresses the Futurists’ evening performances and events, called serate, which merged “high” and “low” culture in radical ways and broke down barriers between spectator and performer. Mise-en-scène installations evoke the Futurists’ opera d’arte totale interior ensembles, from those executed for the private sphere to those realized under Fascism.

Italian Futurism concludes with the five monumental canvases that compose the Syntheses of Communications (1933-1934) by Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti), which are being shown for the first time outside of their original location. One of few public commissions awarded to a Futurist in the 1930s, the series of paintings was created for the Palazzo delle Poste (Post Office) in Palermo, Sicily. The paintings celebrate multiple modes of communication, many enabled by technological innovations, and correspond with the themes of modernity and the “total work of art” concept that underpinned the Futurist ethos.

Text from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum website

Tullio Crali (Italian, 1910-2000)
Before the Parachute Opens (Prima che si apra il paracadute)
1939
Oil on panel
141 x 151cm
Casa Cavazzini, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome
Photo: Claudio Marcon, Udine, Civici Musei e Gallerie di Storia e Arte

Tullio Crali

Aeropittura

In 1928 Crali flew for the first time. His enthusiasm for flying and his experience as a pilot influenced his art. In 1929, through Sofronio Pocarini, he made contact with Marinetti, the founder of Futurism, and joined the movement. In the same year aeropittura was launched in the manifesto, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillia, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Guglielmo Sansoni (Tato). The manifesto stated that “The changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective” and that “Painting from this new reality requires a profound contempt for detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure everything.”

Despite his relative youth, Crali played a significant part in aeropittura. His earliest aeropitture represent military planes, Aerial Squadron and Aerial Duel (both 1929). In the 1930s, his paintings became realistic, intending to communicate the experience of flight to the viewer. His best-known work, Nose Dive on the City (1939), shows an aerial dive from the pilot’s point of view, the buildings below drawn in dizzying perspective.

Crali exhibited in Trieste and Padua. In 1932 Marinetti invited him to exhibit in Paris in the first aeropittura exhibition there. He participated in the Rome Quadrennial in 1935, 1939 and 1943 and the Venice Biennale of 1940. At that time Crali was researching signs and scenery, leading in 1933 to his participation in the film exhibition Futuristi Scenotecnica in Rome. In 1936 he exhibited with Dottori and Prampolini in the International Exhibition of Sports Art at the Berlin Olympics.

Crali’s declamatory abilities and his friendship with Marinetti led him to organise Futurist evenings at Gorizia, Udine and Trieste, where he read the manifesto Plastic Illusionism of War and Protecting the Earth which he had co-authored with Marinetti. He also published a Manifesto of Musical Words – Alphabet in Freedom.

After the Second World War

Crali lived in Turin after the war, where he continued to promote Futurist events. Despite the ending of the Futurist movement with the death of Marinetti in 1944 and its Fascist reputation, Crali remained attached to its ideals and aesthetic.

Between 1950 and 1958 he lived in Paris, making occasional visits to Britain. He moved to Milan in 1958 where he remained (apart from a five-year period teaching at the Italian Academy of Fine Arts, Cairo) for the rest of his life. In Milan he began to collect and catalogue documents relating to his life and work. He donated his archive and several of his works to the Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Fortunato Depero (Italian, 1892-1960)
Little Black and White Devils, Dance of Devils (Diavoletti neri e bianchi, Danza di diavoli)
1922-1923
Pieced wool on cotton backing
184 x 181cm
MART, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: © MART, Archivio fotografico

Gerardo Dottori (Italian, 1884-1977)
Cimino Home Dining Room Set (Sala da pranzo di casa Cimino)
early 1930s
Table, chairs, buffet, lamp, and sideboard; wood, glass, crystal, copper with chrome plating, leather, dimensions variable
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Photo: Daniele Paparelli, courtesy Archivi Gerardo Dottori, Perugia, Italy

Gerardo Dottori

Gerardo Dottori (11 November 1884 – 13 June 1977) was an Italian Futurist painter. He signed the Futurist Manifesto of Aeropainting in 1929. He was associated with the city of Perugia most of his life, living in Milan for six months as a student and in Rome from 1926-39. Dottori’s’ principal output was the representation of landscapes and visions of Umbria, mostly viewed from a great height. Among the most famous of these are Umbrian Spring and Fire in the City, both from the early 1920s; this last one is now housed in the Museo civico di Palazzo della Penna in Perugia, with many of Dottori’s other works. His work was part of the art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics and the 1936 Summer Olympics.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916)
Elasticity (Elasticità)
1912
Oil on canvas
100 x 100cm
Museo del Novecento, Milan
© Museo del Novecento, Comune di Milano (all legal rights reserved)
Photo: Luca Carrà

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni (19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death. His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City organised a major retrospective of 100 pieces. …

Boccioni moved to Milan in 1907. There, early in 1908, he met the Divisionist painter Gaetano Previati. In early 1910 he met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who had already published his Manifesto del Futurismo (“Manifesto of Futurism”) in the previous year. On 11 February 1910 Boccioni, with Balla, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Severini, signed the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (“Manifesto of Futurist painters”), and on 8 March he read the manifesto at the Politeama Chiarella theatre in Turin.

Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement. “Only when Boccioni, Balla, Severini and a few other Futurists traveled to Paris toward the end of 1911 and saw what Braque and Picasso had been doing did the movement begin to take real shape.” He also decided to be a sculptor after he visited various studios in Paris, in 1912, including those of Georges Braque, Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brâncuși, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, August Agero and, probably, Medardo Rosso. In 1912 he exhibited some paintings together with other Italian futurists at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and the following year returned to show his sculptures at the Galerie La Boétie: all related to the elaboration of what Boccioni had seen in Paris, where he had visited the studios of Cubist sculptors, including those of Constantin Brâncuși, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and Alexander Archipenko to further his knowledge of avant-garde sculpture.

In 1914 he published Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) explaining the aesthetics of the group:

“While the impressionists paint a picture to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the picture to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesise every moment (time, place, form, colour-tone) and thus paint the picture.”

Development of Futurism

Boccioni worked for nearly a year on La città sale or The City Rises, 1910, a huge (2m by 3m) painting, which is considered his turning point into Futurism. “I attempted a great synthesis of labor, light and movement” he wrote to a friend. Upon its exhibition in Milan in May 1911, the painting attracted numerous reviews, mostly admiring. By 1912 it had become a headline painting for the exhibition traveling Europe, the introduction to Futurism. It was sold to the great pianist, Ferruccio Busoni for 4,000 lire that year, and today is frequently on prominent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, at the entrance to the paintings department.

La risata (1911, The Laugh) is considered Boccioni’s first truly Futurist work. He had fully parted with Divisionism, and now focused on the sensations derived from his observation of modern life. Its public reception was quite negative, compared unfavourably with Three Women, and it was defaced by a visitor, running his fingers through the still fresh paint. Subsequent criticism became more positive, with some considering the painting a response to Cubism. It was purchased by Albert Borchardt, a German collector who acquired 20 Futurist works exhibited in Berlin, including The Street Enters the House (1911) which depicts a woman on a balcony overlooking a busy street. Today the former also is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, and the latter by the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.

Boccioni spent much of 1911 working on a trilogy of paintings titled “Stati d’animo” (“States of Mind”), which he said expressed departure and arrival at a railroad station – The Farewells, Those Who Go, and Those Who Stay. All three paintings were originally purchased by Marinetti, until Nelson Rockefeller acquired them from his widow and later donated them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Beginning in 1912, with Elasticità or Elasticity (above), depicting the pure energy of a horse, captured with intense chromaticism, he completed a series of Dynamist paintings: Dinamismo di un corpo umano (Human Body), ciclista (Cyclist), Foot-baller, and by 1914 Dinamismo plastico: cavallo + caseggiato (Plastic Dynamism: Horse + Houses). While continuing this focus, he revived his previous interest in portraiture. Beginning with L’antigrazioso (The antigraceful) in 1912 and continuing with I selciatori (The Street Pavers) and Il bevitore (The Drinker) both in 1914.

In 1914 Boccioni published his book, Pittura, scultura futuriste (Futurist Painting and Sculpture), which caused a rift between himself and some of his Futurist comrades. As a result, perhaps, he abandoned his exploration of Dynamism, and instead sought further decomposition of a subject by means of colour. With Horizontal Volumes in 1915 and the Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni in 1916, he completed a full return to figurative painting. Perhaps fittingly, this last painting was a portrait of the maestro who purchased his first Futurist work, The City Rises.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Enrico Prampolini and Maria Ricotti, with cover by Enrico Prampolini
Program for the Theater of Futurist Pantomime (Théâtre de la Pantomine Futuriste)
Illustrated leaflet (Paris: M. et J. De Brunn, 1927)
27.5 x 22.7cm
Fonds Alberto Sartoris, Archives de la Construction Moderne-Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
By permission of heirs of the artist
Photo: Jean-Daniel Chavan

Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966)
Interventionist Demonstration (Manifestazione Interventista)
1914
Tempera, pen, mica powder, paper glued on cardboard
38.5 x 30cm
Gianni Mattioli Collection, on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà (Italian, February 11, 1881 – April 13, 1966) was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.

In 1899-1900, Carrà was in Paris decorating pavilions at the Exposition Universelle, where he became acquainted with contemporary French art. He then spent a few months in London in contact with exiled Italian anarchists, and returned to Milan in 1901. In 1906, he enrolled at Brera Academy (Accademia di Brera) in the city, and studied under Cesare Tallone. In 1910 he signed, along with Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, and began a phase of painting that became his most popular and influential.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Luigi Russolo (Italian, 1885-1947)
“The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto” (“L’arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista”)
Leaflet (Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1913)
29.2 x 23cm
Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa
By permission of heirs of the artist
Photo: Courtesy Wolfsoniana – Fondazione regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa

Luigi Russolo

Luigi Carlo Filippo Russolo (30 April 1885 – 6 February 1947) was an Italian Futurist painter, composer, builder of experimental musical instruments, and the author of the manifesto The Art of Noises (1913). He is often regarded as one of the first noise music experimental composers with his performances of noise music concerts in 1913–14 and then again after World War I, notably in Paris in 1921. He designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori.

Luigi Russolo was perhaps the first noise artist. His 1913 manifesto, L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises), stated that the industrial revolution had given modern men a greater capacity to appreciate more complex sounds. Russolo found traditional melodic music confining, and he envisioned noise music as its future replacement.

Russolo designed and constructed a number of noise-generating devices called Intonarumori, and assembled a noise orchestra to perform with them. A performance of his Gran Concerto Futuristico (1917) was met with strong disapproval and violence from the audience, as Russolo himself had predicted.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Mino Somenzi, ed., with words-in-freedom image Airplanes (Aeroplani) by Pino Masnata
Futurismo 2, no. 32 (Apr. 16, 1933)
Journal (Rome, 1933)
64 x 44cm
Fonds Alberto Sartoris, Archives de la Construction Moderne–Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne EPFL), Switzerland
Photo: Jean-Daniel Chavan

Fortunato Depero (Italian, 1892-1960)
Heart Eaters (Mangiatori di cuori)
1923
Painted wood
36.5 x 23 x 10cm
Private collection
© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome
Photo: Vittorio Calore

Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916)
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio)
1913 (cast 1949)
Bronze
121.3 x 88.9 x 40cm
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image Source: Art Resource, New York

Benedetta (Cappa Marinetti) (Italian,
Synthesis of Aerial Communications (Sintesi delle comunicazioni aeree)
1933-34
Tempera and encaustic on canvas
324.5 x 199cm
Il Palazzo delle Poste di Palermo, Sicily, Poste Italiane
© Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, used by permission of Vittoria Marinetti and Luce Marinetti’s heirs
Photo: AGR/Riccardi/Paoloni

Benedetta Cappa

Benedetta Cappa (14 August 1897 – 15 May 1977) was an Italian futurist artist who has had retrospectives at the Walker Art Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work fits within the second phase of Italian Futurism.

Though she was an artist active in Futurist circles, Cappa felt labels were restrictive and initially rejected the designation. In a 1918 correspondence with F.T. Marinetti she writes, “I am too free and rebellious – I do not want to be restricted. I want only to be me.” Despite entering her marriage with such determined independence, the considerable contributions made by Cappa are often overshadowed by the figure of Marinetti and the vociferous manner with which he directed the movement. Cappa’s body of work spanned a range of media that included pen, paper, paint, metal and textiles. She wrote poetry and prose, signed, and spoke as an individual, but only recently has she garnered independent recognition.

In 1919, Cappa published Spicologia di 1 Uomo, a collection of poetry which incorporates “unusual word placement, typographic experimentation, and visual and auditory correspondences.” Subsequently published in 1924, Le Forze Umane: Romanzo Astratto con Sintesi Grafiche (Human Forces: Abstract Novel with Graphic Synthesis), has a similar structure presented in an extrapolated form. Two images from this novel provide an interesting conceptual contrast. The first, Forze Feminile: Spirale di Dolcezza + Serpe di Fascino (Feminine Forces: Spiral of Sweetness + Serpent of Charm) consists simply of three curved lines, one of which provides a central axis for the other two. The linear composition of the second drawing, Forze Maschili: Armi e Piume (Masculine Forces: Weapons and Feathers), has numerous straight lines and arcs arranged in an impenetrable tangle.

Cappa’s publication of Le Forze Umane was one of three books she has written. The release of her book made many futurists question her allegiance with Futurism, for her book seemed to align more with Neo-Plasticism at the time by many male Futurists who have written reviews on Cappa’s book. Cappa collected all of the reviews in her Librone which can be found at the Getty Research Institute. It was a decision made from many reviewers that Cappa’s first book represents the unwillingness from the reviewers to accept a women’s work as part of Futurism.

The action and aesthetic of the machine age is a trope within Futurism that appears frequently in Cappa’s artwork. One early abstract painting, Velocità di Motoscafo, (Velocity of a Motorboat), (1923-24), contains many of the elements that would come to mark Cappa’s painting style. Well defined, curvilinear shapes, painted in gradient tones are compositionally arranged to imply objects in motion: “… the interplay of ‘force lines,’ become the subject.” The artist’s exploration of the machine continued with Luci + Rumori di un Treno Notturno, (Lights + Sounds of a Night Train), (c. 1924) and with Aeropittura (1925). A trip to Latin America in 1926 was followed by a series of abstract paintings done in gouache on paper.

As Cappa developed her artistic practice, her influence within the Futurist Movement expanded. Between the end of World War I and the early 1930s, there was an ideological transformation which led to the period commonly known as Second Wave Futurism. The notably misogynistic tone of the foundation texts was largely muted as the number of female Futurists increased. Several other themes, such as Technology, Speed, and Mechanisation carried over into this new incarnation of Futurism. For this reason, Cappa’s oil painting Il Grande X (1931) is considered the culmination of one era and the prelude to another. In the two decades since F.T. Marinetti’s manifesto, the brash avant-garde movement had largely become the establishment.

It was the Futurists’ affiliation with the state establishment that would lead to one of Cappa’s most recognisable paintings, her mural series for the Conference Room at the Palazzo delle Poste in Palermo, Sicily. The building is an amalgam of works by several Futurist artists. Designed by the Rationalist architect, Angiolo Mazzoni, the Poste Italiane houses tile wall mosaics by Luigi Colombo Filìa and Enrico Prampolini in addition to the murals by Benendetta. The shared themes of synthesis and communication are critical to the aesthetic program of the Futurist structure. Completed between 1933 and 1934, each painting depicts a form of information transfer, including terrestrial, maritime, aerial, radio, telegraphic and telephonic communication. The pale blue and green colour palette, along with the use of tempera and encaustic media, were designed to invoke resonances with Pompeian frescos. The collection represents the idealised speed and efficiency of message delivery in the modern world.

Text from the Wikipedia website

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Aug

Review: ‘The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian artist, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, Monash Gallery of Art, photographic series, photography, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 1970s Australian photography, American conceptualist Ed Ruscha, Australian Centre for Photography, Australian contemporary photography, Australian landscape, Australian photographers, Australian photography, Australian road photography, Australian road-trip, Australian street photography, Australian suburban photography, Cibachrome, contemporary urban space, Ed Ruscha Sunset Strip, end of the road, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Holden cars, Holden Park 1 & 2, Instamatic cameras, Learning from Las Vegas, Photographers on the move 1970-1975, Ponch Hawkes, postwar Australian photography, postwar Melbourne, road photography, road to nowhere, road-trip, Ruscha Every building on the Sunset Strip, Ruth Maddison, Self portrait/self image, stephen shore, suburban photography, Sue Ford, Surfers Paradise Boulevard, Swiss conceptualist Daniel Spoerri, Ten viewpoints, The road, The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975, Three women photographers, travel and landscape in Australia, travel in Australia, Virginia Coventry, William Eggleston, William Eggleston and Stephen Shore

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Artists: Micky Allan, Virginia Coventry, Gerrit Fokkema, John Gollings, Tim Handfield, Ian North, Robert Rooney, Wes Stacey

Virginia Coventry (Australian, b. 1942)
Service road
1976-1978
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5cm (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

This is another stimulating exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art, a gallery that consistently puts on some of the best photography exhibitions in Melbourne each year. Kudos to them.

Each of the eight artists in this exhibition present mainly conceptually based work. Each body of work is individually strong but in the context of the exhibition they come together seamlessly to form a kind of giant jigsaw puzzle of images, a series of impressions of Australia and the road: work that responds to the experience of automotive travel in Australia, announcing “the road-trip as the quintessential Australian journey, highlighting the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the ways that Australians embraced the road during the 1970s and ‘80s.”

It is a pleasure to finally see Ian North’s colour series Canberra suite (1980-1981, below). Having seen but a few images online, to see the whole body of work in the flesh was illuminating. While lacking the formal rigour and structure of some of the other work in the exhibition, I enjoyed the natural simplicity of the photographs, their planned naïveté, which perfectly captures the suburbs of Canberra at that time. I also delighted in the intimacy of the small silver gelatin prints of Micky Allan’s Mock-up for ‘My trip’ 1976 (1976, below) with their pithy aphorisms such as “Need help?” when the car is bogged.

Another great series is Wes Stacey’s spunky The road (1974-1975, below) – small automated chemist shop prints with their 1970s colours and rounded corners all housed in cheap plastic sleeves pinned to board. This series is beautifully resolved which today allows for a sensually self-indulgent nostalgia to form for the time in which they were taken. The cars, the colours, the travel, people and places so evocatively captured on an Instamatic camera form a captivating narrative of “the sense of movement and adventure that underpins a road trip in a relatively cheap and expedient way.” Another strong series of photographs are by Tim Handfield who I have always thought is an excellent photographer with a good eye. As can be seen by the four images in this posting, Handfield is a master at handling form, structure and colour in the image field. In these photographs he almost seems to compress the space inside the photograph so that they have a vaguely threatening presence.

Finally, there is the wonderful Surfers Paradise Boulevard (1973, below) by John Gollings. The artist’s riff on the American artist Ed Ruscha’s book Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966) – which presented composite black and white panoramas of each side of Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip – Gollings vision is in glorious Ektacolour film which highlights the sensuality of what can, at that time, be seen as a sleepy surf coast town. The shock comes on seeing the main strip of the town and envisioning in your mind what a monster it has become today… how human beings almost always despoil the very thing that is beautiful and valuable in a spiritual sense (such as my favourite place in Australia, Byron Bay). This fragmented, Hockney-esque view of the vernacular forms of cultural expression perfectly captures the insouciance of a town that doesn’t yet know what’s going to hit ’em – through an ideal representation of contemporary urban space and the automotive experience of it.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and Monash Gallery of Art

Installation view of Ian North’s series Canberra suite 1980-1981 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Installation views of Wesley Stacey’s series The road 1974-1975 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

This exhibition brings together a range of photographic projects that responded to the experience of automotive travel in Australia during the 1970s and ’80s. The work in this exhibition shows that there was a strong relationship between photography and the road in Australian culture at this time. Photography helped to make sense of the particular experience of movement made possible by faster cars and better roads; at the same time, it helped to demonstrate the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the rise of the road in Australia.

The road is one of the great subjects in Australian visual culture. In many of our greatest films, books and works of art, the road is a place where personal identity is negotiated, where the national story unfolds, and where culture, technology and nature come together at times in extraordinary ways. MGA’s latest exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 brings together a range of photographic projects that explore the road as experienced by many Australians in the 1970s and ’80s.

Presenting the work of eight prominent Australian artists, The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 announces the road-trip as the quintessential Australian journey, highlighting the challenges to life and culture that accompanied suburban expansion and the ways that Australians embraced the road during the 1970s and ‘80s. Using a range of strategies – from Instamatic cameras and chemist-shop printing, to expansive composite panoramas and photographic grids that replicate the experience of the modern city – these photographers helped to make sense of the particular experience of movement and landscape made possible by faster cars and better roads, in a way only photography could.

The exhibition features some of the most significant photographic projects produced by Australian photographers during this period. Wes Stacey’s mythic series of over 300 photographs The road presents an epic travelogue of road trips made by the artist in his Kombi Van during 1973 and 1974. The exhibition also features John Gollings’s monumental, ten-metre long streetscapes of Surfers Paradise Boulevard from 1973, as well as Robert Rooney’s iconic Holden park, featuring the artist’s Holden car parked in 20 different locations across Melbourne. The road also features work by two of Australia’s most important feminist photographers, Micky Allan and Virginia Coventry, who both challenged many of the gendered assumptions about the road, automotive travel and Australian life during the ’70s and ’80s.

As MGA Curator Stephen Zagala notes, “The road has often provided Australian photographers with a means to an end, whether a landscape or a picturesque community in some distant part of the country. But as this important exhibition shows, during the 1970s, the road took on a whole new meaning for Australian photographers. It provided a space for innovation and experimentation, and also a photographic reconsideration of Australian life.”

Gallery Director Shaune Lakin states, “The history of MGA – with its genesis in the late 1970s – is intricately linked to The road, one of our most important exhibitions of the year. Relatively cheap and accessible petrol, increased private car ownership, and a vastly improved network of roads encouraged the suburban expansion of Melbourne, and MGA is one of the many legacies of this expansion. We are proud to present this exhibition, which provides an as-yet untold account of Australian photography and has such a close historical association with our gallery.”

Press release from the MGA website

Installation views of Micky Allan’s Mock-up for ‘My trip’ 1976 (1976) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Micky Allan (Australia, b. 1944)

Micky Allan’s My trip is a conceptual art project based on a road trip that she made through country Victoria in 1976. Allan’s conceptual premise was to photograph everyone who spoke to her and then invite these people to use her camera to photograph whatever they chose. Allan also recorded the conversations that transpired in these encounters, and subsequently compiled all these elements as a photographic essay that was printed and distributed as a broadsheet. Like many road trip narratives, Allan’s My trip conceptualises travel as a trajectory of chance encounters that illuminate social differences.

Micky Allan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1967 and a Diploma of Painting at the National Gallery School in 1968. Allan began taking photographs in 1974 after joining the loosely formed feminist collective at Melbourne’s experimental arts and theatre space the Pram Factory. In this context Allan was part of a vibrant community of feminist artists that included Sue Ford, Ruth Maddison, Ponch Hawkes and Virginia Coventry, who taught her how to take and print photographs. Allan is well-known for reclaiming the antiquated practice of hand-colouring monotone photographs, as a way of investing the photo-mechanical process with subjective qualities. She has often used the theme of travel to embed her practice in a personal journey of discovery.

Installation views of Virginia Coventry’s series Service road 1976-1978 (detail) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Virginia Coventry (Australian, b. 1942)
Service road
1976-1978
1 of 34 gelatin silver prints and two text panels
26.5 x 32.5cm (each)
Collection: Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Courtesy of the artist and Liverpool Street Gallery (Sydney)

Virginia Coventry b. Melb 1942

Virginia Coventry’s Service road continued the artist’s interest in reflecting social and emotional experiences that differed from dominant, particularly masculine positions and experiences. The series presents two rows of reverse-angle photographs of houses and empty blocks that line a service road near the recently-completed Princes Freeway at Moe, Victoria. The weatherboard houses and the scene no doubt reflect the experience of many Australians living in postwar suburban developments who commuted between home and work, in this case the thousands of men who worked at the nearby Yallourn and Morewell power stations. Coventry photographed these homes and empty blocks as if viewed from a car passing by. Coventry has also included a number of views of the road, seen from inside the homes. The dark interiors take on a particular psychological and emotional countenance, one that contrasts starkly with the brightly lit outside. In this way, the series illuminates the experience of many women for whom the service road was a place of loneliness and dislocation.

Virginia Coventry studied painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology during the early 1960s, before undertaking postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. While painting and drawing have remained a constant part of Coventry’s practice, she started taking photographs during the mid-1960s and developed a significant reputation during the 1970s for her photographs and installations. Her photographic work often comprised sequences of images combined with text and other fragments, and examined the relationship of landscape, place and power – particularly in relation to the experience of women. Her photographs were included in a number of key exhibitions of the period, including Three women photographers at George Paton Gallery, the Sydney Biennales of 1976 and 1979, Ten viewpoints (Australian Centre for Photography, 1976), and Self portrait/self image (Victorian College of the Arts, 1980).

Gerrit Fokkema (b. 1954, Papua New Guinea; Australia since 1958)

During the 1970s Gerrit Fokkema used the spacious streetscapes of Canberra to compose surreal photographs of contemporary urban life. In Exit Canberra and Ligertwood Street, the infrastructure of new suburbs has become overgrown with grass while waiting to be populated. The road itself doesn’t appear in these photographs, but its presence is alluded to with street signs and a lamp post. In this way, Fokkema suggests that these places exist at the ‘end of the road’ or on a ‘road to nowhere’. The optimistic skies that feature in these photographs seem to mock the aspirations of Canberra’s town planners.

Gerrit Fokkema studied photography at Canberra Technical College (1974-1977) while working as a press photographer. In 1980 he moved to Sydney to work for the Sydney Morning Herald, and in 1986 he left the paper to pursue a freelance commercial career. Throughout his professional life Fokkema has maintained a personal photographic practice and exhibited his work on numerous occasions. He held his first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1975, where he exhibited regularly throughout the late 1970s. His photographs are executed in a social-documentary mode, with a particular interest in urban landscapes and situated portraits of ‘everyday’ Australians.

Installation and detail views of John Gollings’ work Surfers Paradise Boulevard 1973 (details) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

John Gollings (Australian, b. Melb 1944)

John Gollings is best known for his architectural photography, and has over the last four decades photographed most of Australia’s and Asia’s most significant architectural projects. In 1973, Gollings travelled to Surfers Paradise to photograph its buildings, streetscape and signage. He had recently read influential architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour’s book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), which asked architects to pay closer attention to vernacular forms of cultural expression in favour of heroic or monumental architecture of the past. Gollings was also familiar with the work of the Californian artist Ed Ruscha, notably his book Every building on the Sunset Strip (1966), which presented composite panoramas of each side of Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. For many urbanists at the time – including the authors of Learning from Las Vegas – Ruscha’s book realised an ideal representation of contemporary urban space and the automotive experience of it.

Gollings undertook a depiction of Surfers Paradise Boulevard that drew on Ruscha’s composite panorama of Sunset Strip. Sitting on the bonnet of a V8 Valiant station wagon, Gollings drove up and down Surfers Paradise Boulevard on a quiet Sunday morning, progressively photographing each side of the strip with his Nikon camera using Ektacolour film. The resulting composite panorama has become a remarkable historical record of an urban setting that has undergone radical transformation in the time since 1973.

Installation view of Tim Handfield’s work Babinda 1981 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Installation view of Tim Handfield’s work Gordonvale 1981 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Tim Handfield (Australian, b. 1952)
Promenade
1985
Silver dye bleach print
51 x 67cm
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and M. 33 (Melbourne)

Tim Handfield (Australian, b. 1952)
Bayview Heights, Cairns
1980
Silver dye bleach print
51 x 67cm
Collection of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and M. 33 (Melbourne)

Tim Handfield (Australian, b. Melb 1952)

These photographs come from an extended series of pictures taken by Tim Handfield on the road. The series features images of the roadside landscape of places Handfield travelled through and visited along Australia’s eastern seaboard during the 1980s. The photographs relate to a broad body of often diaristic postwar literature, cinema and visual arts that considered the particular experience of the world made possible by the road (at least in the West). In this way, the pictures reflect the dominance of American culture at this time, when earlier assumptions about the road as a place of quest and opportunity were giving way to accounts of the road as a place of boredom, sameness and danger. The series is also about the particular experience of travel and landscape in Australia, at a time when the impending bicentennial of European settlement led many to reconsider the assumptions upon which Australian life was based.

Tim Handfield has been working at the forefront in Australia of new colour photographic processes since the mid-1970s. Spending extended periods of time in the United States during the early to mid-1970s, Handfield became interested in the work of American photographers such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who found deadpan beauty in the banality of American suburban life. After returning to Australia, Handfield sought out non-dramatic urban sites, which he photographed in highly formal ways. These images were ideally served by the Cibachrome printing process, a dye destruction positive-to-positive photographic process noted for the purity of its colour, clarity of image and archival stability.

Ian North (born New Zealand 1945; arrived Australia 1971)
Canberra suite
1980-1981
1 of 24 chromogenic prints, printed 1984
37 x 46cm (each)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through the NGV Foundation with the assistance of David Symen & Co. Limited, 2001
Courtesy of the artist

Ian North (b. 1945, New Zealand; Australia from 1971)

Ian North developed his Canberra suite while living in Canberra during 1980-1984. The suite reflects North’s experience of the particular suburban interface that is so intrinsic to Walter Burley-Griffin’s vision of Canberra. Having grown up in New Zealand, making artwork about the sublime urban spaces of Wellington, North brought a particularly soulful sensibility to Australia’s suburban capital. Canberra suite also reflects North’s professional experience of the city. He moved to Canberra in 1980 as the first Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia. A key feature of NGA’s collection development at the time was the acquisition of work by contemporary American photographers, including prints by William Eggleston and Stephen Shore and books by Ed Ruscha. After work hours, North made a pastime of wandering the streets of Canberra and taking photographs in a similar vein. Like his American contemporaries, North embraced the roadside as an uncanny threshold between public and private space, systematically documenting the everyday in order to imbue it with a sense of mystery.

Ian North initially studied art history and spent most of his professional life working as a curator and an academic. Alongside his career as a curator, North developed a substantial artistic practice which flourished when he moved away from museum-based work. Working with photography and painting, North’s art practice focuses on the representation of the landscape.

Installation views of Robert Rooney’s series Holden Park 1 & 2, May 1970 at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Robert Rooney (Australian, b. Melb 1937-2017)

Robert Rooney’s Holden Park 1 & 2, May 1970 is one of the key works of postwar Australian photography. The work comprises a grid of photographs depicting Rooney’s Holden car parked at 19 different sites around the artist’s East Hawthorn home, locations which Rooney chose at random from a street directory. Holden Park draws on a range of influences that include the photographic books of American conceptualist Ed Ruscha, the absurd topographies of the Swiss conceptualist Daniel Spoerri, and the American composer John Cage’s interest in chance as a creative principle. However, and while the work is very ‘literate’ in relation to these influences, Holden Park is very much a product of postwar Melbourne. Rooney has always maintained a strong interest in the suburban experience and the way that Melbourne has developed around this experience. While it would be disingenuous to say that Holden Park is a product of social history, it was certainly informed by and reflects the sensation of driving around Melbourne’s suburbs on a Sunday afternoon.

Robert Rooney is one of Australia’s best-known artists. Rooney studied art and design at Swinburne Technical College and quickly developed a significant reputation for his abstract painting and art criticism. Rooney gave up painting during the early 1970s and for over a decade focussed largely on photographic work. Using an Instamatic and later a 35 mm camera, Rooney photographed in great detail his suburban life, organising his pictures according to gridded frameworks that seemed to distil the rigour of European and American conceptualism and performance art, the humour of Pop Art, and the particular countenance of Australian suburban life during the 1970s. Examples include AM/PM of 1974, for which Rooney photographed his bed each morning and night for 107 days, and Garments 1972-1973, for which he photographed the clothes he would wear each day for 107 days.

Installation views of Wesley Stacey’s series The road 1974-1975 (detail) at the exhibition The road: Photographers on the move 1970-1975 at the Monash Gallery of Art

Wesley Stacey (Australian, b. 1941)
The road (details)
1974-1975
304 chromogenic prints
9.0 x 12.7cm (each)
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Courtesy of the artist

Wesley Stacey (Australian, b. 1941)

Wesley Stacey’s The road is an epic travelogue that documents a series of specific road trips made by the artist in his Kombi Van during 1973 and 1974. This project grew out of Stacey’s interest in Instamatic cameras and automated colour printing, which became readily available during the early 1970s. Remote Australian landscapes are a persistent theme in Stacey’s photography, but these new technologies allowed him to document the sense of movement and adventure that underpins a road trip in a relatively cheap and expedient way. The road was initially exhibited as a series of sequential panels at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1975, and then re-configured as a series of photobooks containing 305 prints. A second version containing 280 photographs was printed for the National Gallery of Australia in 1984.

Wesley Stacey studied drawing and design at East Sydney Technical College (1960-1962) before working as a graphic designer and photographer for the ABC in Sydney and the BBC in London through the 1960s. In the late 1960s he worked as a magazine photographer in Sydney and from 1969-1975 worked as a freelance commercial photographer. In 1973 Stacey helped establish the Australian Centre for Photography and was a member of its inaugural board of management. In 1976 Stacey moved to the Bermagui area of the NSW South Coast, where he purchased land and established a rudimentary bush camp where he continues to live.

Text © Monash Gallery of Art 2014

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘Now You See It: Photography and Concealment’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, photographic series, photography, printmaking, psychological, reality, space, time and video
Tags: aerial photographs, Arthur Webber, Bill Wasilevich, Bill Wasilevich Jimmy "One Eye" Collins, Bill Wasilevich Jimmy "One Eye" Collins After Arraignment, Birth of Ectoplasm During Séance with the Medium Eva C, camera obscura, Charles Sodokoff, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces, Countess Verasis de Castiglione, Covered Car - Long Beach California, Desert Bloom, Dutch Landscapes, Fazal Sheikh, Fazal Sheikh Desert Bloom, gaze of the camera, Grace Ndiritu, Grace Ndiritu The Nightingale, Helen Levitt, Helen Levitt Kids in a Box, Helen Levitt Kids on the Street Playing Hide and Seek, Holocaust, Jack Pierson, Jack Pierson The Lonely Life, Juliette Alexandre-Bisson, Juliette Alexandre-Bisson Birth of Ectoplasm, Juliette Alexandre-Bisson Birth of Ectoplasm During Séance with the Medium Eva C, Kids on the Street Playing Hide and Seek, Lee Friedlander Shadow, Lee Friedlander Shadow New York City, Mishka Henner, Mishka Henner Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Negev desert, New York City, Now You See It, Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, Occasion for Diriment, Occupied Territories, Pepsi Cola Interior II, Photography and Concealment, pictorial ambiguity, Pierre-Louis Pierson, Pierre-Louis Pierson Scherzo di Follia, publicity and privacy, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Ralph Eugene Meatyard Occasion for Diriment, reality and artifice, Robert Frank, Robert Frank Covered Car - Long Beach California, Scherzo di Follia, Shadow New York City, Staphorst Ammunition Depot, The Lonely Life, The Nightingale, Thomas Demand, Thomas Demand Vault, Vault, Vera Lutter, Vera Lutter Pepsi Cola Interior II, Virginia Oldoini, Weegee, Weegee Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces

Exhibition dates: 31st March – 1st September 2014

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

Weegee (American born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899-1968 New York)
Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces
January 27, 1942, printed c. 1983
Gelatin silver print
31.8 x 41.4cm (12 1/2 x 16 5/16 in.)
Gift of Aaron and Jessica Rose, 1983
Rights and Reproduction: © Weegee / International Center of Photography

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972)
Occasion for Diriment
1962
Gelatin silver print
18.0 x 18.7cm (7 1/16 x 7 3/8 in.)
Rogers Fund, 1967
© The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Ralph Eugene Meatyard was a photographer and optician who spent the last two decades of his life in Lexington, Kentucky, producing an eccentric body of work at some remove from the photographic mainstream. He often posed his family and friends in enigmatic tableaux with props such as dolls and rubber masks, imbuing his images with a haunting Surrealist sensibility. The curious title of this photograph stems from Meatyard’s passion for odd names, puns, and peculiar words and phrases. Diriment is a made-up word, a Lewis Carroll-like compound of “dire” and “merriment” that suggests a mood of high-spirited fun and hilarity fraught with anxious undertones.

Lee Friedlander (American born Aberdeen, Washington, 1934)
Shadow, New York City
1966, printed 1973
Gelatin silver print
16.0 x 24.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990

Robert Frank (American born Zurich, 1924-2019)
Covered Car – Long Beach, California
1955
Gelatin silver print
21.4 x 32.7cm (8 7/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005

Photography is a medium prized for its capacity to expose, lay bare, make visible. For many artists, the camera is, above all, a tool for revealing what would otherwise remain unnoticed. As Diane Arbus once said: “I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.” At the root of this artistic impulse is a keen fascination with that which is hidden, obscure, or hitherto unseen. This exhibition presents a selection of contemporary photographs and video from the permanent collection that variously explores the medium’s dynamic interplay between concealment and revelation.

Some of the artists featured here use the camera to reveal subjects or places ordinarily hidden, as in Vera Lutter’s majestic view of the interior of a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant or Miguel Rio Branco’s lush image of a tapestry’s seamy underside. Others address instances of geopolitical obfuscation: Fazal Sheikh’s aerial photographs of the Negev desert in southern Israel record the traces of Bedouin villages that have been transformed into forests or farmland, while Mishka Henner collects images of stylishly censored high-security sites on Google Earth. In Vault (2011), Thomas Demand takes his inspiration from current events, meticulously re-creating a storeroom in which thirty missing works of art were discovered during a recent police raid.

The tension between publicity and privacy – the simultaneous desire to be looked at and to evade the merciless gaze of the camera – animates the work of artists as diverse as Arbus, Lutz Bacher, Jack Pierson, and Taryn Simon. In her video, The Nightingale (2003), Grace Ndiritu explores the tradition of the veil and its complex poetics of exposure and effacement. Complementing the contemporary works on view is a selection of earlier photographs in which the primary subject is hidden or obscured – a brief anthology of playfulness, shame, and seduction.

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Desert Bloom (various numbers)
2011
Excerpt from the Erasure Trilogy
Inkjet print
Image: 40 × 60cm (15 3/4 × 23 5/8 in.) Sheet: 52.1 × 72.1cm (20 1/2 × 28 3/8 in.)
Frame: 73.7 × 53.3cm (29 × 21 in.)
Purchase, Jane P. Watkins Gift, 2013

In 2011 the French photographer Frederic Brenner invited eleven prominent photographers to spend six months in residence in Israel and the Occupied Territories, or West Bank, to explore the area’s complexity and to create bodies of work that might broaden and reframe the conversation about the region. Among those invited was Sheikh, an artist best known for his sensitive black-and-white portraits of people living in displaced and marginalised communities around the world. Sheikh’s project takes the form of a trilogy titled Erasure, of which Desert Bloom is the central part. The images were made during several months of flying above the Negev desert and are intended to articulate the rapid transformation of the region. On the one hand, they invoke the Israeli endeavour to “make the desert bloom,” and on the other, they reveal traces of the Negev’s history: the construction of towns for the Bedouin, the natural erosion of the land, the demolition of local dwellings, the remains of military installations, the afforestation campaigns of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), and the transformation of nomadic desert regions into farmland.

Thomas Demand (German, b. 1964)
Vault
2012
Chromogenic print
220 x 276.9cm (86 5/8 x 109 in.)
Purchase, Louis V. Bell Fund; Alfred Stieglitz Society, The Fledgling Fund, through Diana Barrett and Robert Vila, Joseph M. and Barbara Cohen Foundation Inc. and Hideyuki Osawa Gifts, 2013
© Thomas Demand / Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York

Demand’s photographs of the paper constructions he builds in his studio are typically based on photographs related to politically charged real-world events. He begins with an existing image, usually culled from the news media, which he translates into a three-dimensional life-sized model made of coloured paper and cardboard. The models are then carefully lit and photographed, after which they are destroyed. Three times removed from the scenes they depict, Demand’s works are masterpieces of pictorial ambiguity that occupy a mesmerising middle ground between reality and artifice.

Vault is based on a police photograph of a storeroom at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, where thirty paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were discovered during a police raid in 2011. The missing artworks belong to the heirs of a French Jewish family displaced during the Holocaust. In Demand’s picture, as in the photograph on which it is based, the framed paintings – which include works by Degas, Manet, and Morisot – are turned to face the walls and remain tantalisingly hidden from view.

Vera Lutter (German, b. 1960)
Pepsi Cola Interior II: July 6-13, 2000
2000
Gelatin silver print
Overall installation: 90 3/4 in. × 14 ft. 3/4 in. (230.5 × 428.6cm)
Sheet (A): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6cm)
Sheet (B): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6cm)
Sheet (C): 90 in. × 55 3/4 in. (228.6 × 141.6cm)
Frame (each): 90 3/4 × 56 1/4 in. (230.5 × 142.9cm)
Purchase, Joseph M. and Barbara Cohen Foundation Inc. Gift, 2001
© Vera Lutter

While the basis for Lutter’s technique – the camera obscura – is older than photography itself, her images and subject matter are wholly modern. This enormous negative print was made inside a room-sized pinhole camera that Lutter built in a derelict Pepsi-Cola bottling plant on the East River in Hunters Point, Queens. After pinning three huge sheets of photographic paper opposite the camera’s pinhole aperture, she worked inside the camera to monitor and manipulate the light during the weeklong exposure. The bottling plant itself closed in 1999 and was later demolished.

Mishka Henner (British, b. 1976)
Staphorst Ammunition Depot, Overijssel
2011, printed 2014
From the series Dutch Landscapes
Inkjet print
31 1/2 × 35 7/16 in. (80 × 90cm)
Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2014
© Mishka Henner

In his “Dutch Landscapes” series, Henner selects and reproduces images of the Netherlands found on Google Earth. The multicoloured shapes punctuating these landscapes were created not by the artist but at the behest of the Dutch government. When Google Earth was introduced in 2005, satellite imagery of the entire planet became freely accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This sudden visibility created concerns among many governments, who required Google – or its image suppliers – to obscure the details of sites deemed vital to national security. While most nations employed standard techniques, such as blurring, pixilation, or digital cloning, the Dutch chose to conceal hundreds of sites – including royal palaces, army barracks, and fuel depots – with bold, multicoloured polygons. “There is of course an absurdity to these censored images,” Henner has written, “since their overt, bold and graphic nature only draws attention to the very sites that are meant to be hidden. Yet this contradiction seems perfectly apt for the absurd fear of terror that has come to dominate the cultural landscape of the last decade.”

Now You See It: Photography and Concealment, an installation of 25 works at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, focuses on the dynamic interplay between concealment and revelation in contemporary photography and video art. The featured works, all from the Museum’s Department of Photographs, range from a late 19th-century photograph by Pierre-Louis Pierson to a recently acquired work by Thomas Demand.

The installation presents works by artists who use the camera to reveal subjects or places ordinarily hidden from view, as well as works that explore broader themes of secrecy and obscured or partial vision. A highlight of Now You See It is Thomas Demand’s photograph Vault (2012). The image is based on a police photograph of a storeroom at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris, where 30 paintings and sculptures that had been missing for decades were discovered during a police raid in 2011. In Demand’s picture, as in the photograph on which it is based, the framed art works are turned to face the walls, remaining tantalisingly hidden from view. Other highlights include Vera Lutter’s haunting view of the seldom seen interior of the Pepsi Cola bottling plant in Queens, New York, Pepsi Cola Interior II: July 6-13 (2000), and Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011), a series of aerial photographs of the Negev desert. In Grace Nditru’s acclaimed video The Nightingale (2003), the artist explores the tradition of the veil and its complex associations of exposure and effacement. Accompanied by a recording of the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, Ndiritu evokes a rapid-fire series of cultural references as she performs a hypnotic, Scheherazade-like series of gestures and movements with a piece of fabric, swiftly transforming it from turban to blindfold, and do-rag to noose to niqab. The tension between publicity and privacy, inherent in the field of photography, is explored in works by artists as diverse as Diane Arbus, Lutz Bacher, Jack Pierson, and Taryn Simon. The 20th-century photographs on view present the theme of concealment in a literal way and include Weegee’s Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (January 27, 1942) and Helen Levitt’s Kids in a Box, on the Street, New York City (c. 1942).

Now You See It: Photography and Concealment is organised by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
[Kids in a Box, on the Street, New York City]
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
Image approx.: 9 × 6 in. (22.9 × 15.2cm)
Promised Gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
[Kids on the Street Playing Hide and Seek, New York City]
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
9 3/4 × 6 3/4 in. (24.8 × 17.1cm)
Promised Gift of Mrs. Robert O. Levitt
© Estate of Helen Levitt

Attributed to Juliette Alexandre-Bisson (French, 1861-1956)
[Birth of Ectoplasm During Séance with the Medium Eva C.]
1919-1920
Gelatin silver print
11.8 x 8.9cm (4 5/8 x 3 1/2 in.)
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2001

Bill Wasilevich (American, active 1940s)
Jimmy “One Eye” Collins After Arraignment
1946
Gelatin silver print
18.6 x 14.4cm (7 5/16 x 5 11/16 in.)
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2008
© Steve Schapiro/Corbis

Grace Ndiritu (British, born 1976)
The Nightingale
2003
Video
Gift of the artist, 2009
© 2003 Grace Ndiritu, Courtesy Grace Ndiritu and LUX, London

Before a camera fixed on her face and neck and accompanied by a recording of the Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, Ndiritu performs a hypnotic, Scheherazade-like series of gestures and movements with a piece of fabric, swiftly transforming it from turban to blindfold, from do-rag to noose to niqab. Both jubilant and unsettling, the video evokes a rapid-fire series of cultural references, counterposing the enforced modesty of the Islamic world with Western fantasies of exoticism. Ndiritu, who studied textiles at the Winchester School of Art, acquired this simple red-and-white scarf while traveling in India and carried it with her as a talisman through years of global exploration.

Jack Pierson (American, b. 1960)
The Lonely Life
1992
Chromogenic print
Frame: 76.2 × 101.6cm (30 × 40 in.)
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2000
© Jack Pierson

In 1994, Pierson was invited by the Whitney Museum of American Art to show his photographs alongside a group of works by Edward Hopper (1882-1967) that the artist selected from their vast holdings. Like Hopper, Pierson creates works that are inherently cinematic in their scope and effects; both are primarily concerned with mood, atmosphere, and exhibit a particularly urban kind of melancholy. His greatest asset, however, is an almost overwhelmingly lush palette, which he uses to depict objects of desire or scenes that are unabashedly sensual and emotional. An excellent example of the artist’s high-key chromaticism, The Lonely Life describes the unique brand of loneliness shared by the performer and the fan, both of whom (like Pierson) are doomed to experience existence solely through the intoxications of art.

Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913)
Scherzo di Follia
1861-1867, printed c. 1930
Gelatin silver print from glass negative
39.8 x 29.8cm (15 11/16 x 11 3/4 in.)
Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005

Virginia Oldoini, Countess Verasis de Castiglione (1837-1899), created a sensation when she appeared on the social scene in Paris in 1855, having been sent by the Italian statesman Cavour to secretly win Napoleon III over to the cause of Italian unity by “any means she chose.” Within months, the statuesque beauty was the mistress of Napoleon III and a much-talked-about ornament of the lavish balls so prevalent during the period. After the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, she led an increasingly secluded existence, which gave rise to fantastic speculation about her affairs. As the years went by, her mental stability declined and she ventured out only at night, shrouded in veils.

The countess’s raging narcissism found in photography the perfect ally; Pierre-Louis Pierson produced over seven hundred different images of her. In a reversal of roles, the sitter would direct every aspect of the picture, from the angle of the shot to the lighting, using the photographer as a mere tool in her pursuit of self-promotion and self-expression.

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Aug

Review / Interview: Simon Maidment, co-curator of the exhibition ‘David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me’ at NGV Australia, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian artist, black and white photography, colour photography, designer, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, illustration, intimacy, Marcus Bunyan, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, New York, painting, photography, portrait, printmaking, psychological, quotation, reality, review, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: AIDS, Australia HIV/AIDS, Australian artist, Australian contemporary art, Australian designer, Australian gay artist, Australian graphic design, Australian photography, Australian posters, David McDiarmid, David McDiarmid at his first one-man show Secret Love, David McDiarmid Body language, David McDiarmid Day of the dead skeleton, David McDiarmid Discard after use, David McDiarmid Disco kwilt, David McDiarmid Hand and heart, David McDiarmid I want a future that lives up to my past, David McDiarmid Judy 1976, David McDiarmid Juicy fruit, David McDiarmid Ken's Karate Klub, David McDiarmid Kiss of light, David McDiarmid Kiss of light series, David McDiarmid Mardi Gras, David McDiarmid Mighty real, David McDiarmid Paua kimono, David McDiarmid Pictograms, David McDiarmid Q, David McDiarmid Rainbow aphorisms, David McDiarmid Real confessions, David McDiarmid Secret Love, David McDiarmid So I walked into the theatre, David McDiarmid Strangers in the night, David McDiarmid Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras poster, David McDiarmid Thinking of you, David McDiarmid Totem works, David McDiarmid Tube of joy, David McDiarmid Untitled 1990-95, David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me, Day of the dead skeleton, Discard after use, Disco kwilt, fashion, gay, HIV/AIDS, homosexual artist, I want a future that lives up to my past, Ken's Karate Klub, Kiss of light, Marcus Bunyan, Mardi Gras posters, Peter Tully Totem works, Rainbow aphorisms, Rainbow aphorisms series, Ron Smith Totem works, Secret Love, Simon Maidment, Sleaze Ball posters, So I walked into the theatre, Strangers in the night, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras poster, Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras posters, Sydney party posters, When This You See Remember Me, William Yang, William Yang Artist David McDiarmid

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 31st August 2014

Unidentified photographer
David McDiarmid at his first one-man show ‘Secret Love’, Hogarth Gallery, Sydney, 1976
1976
Silver gelatin photograph
Dennis Altman Collection, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA)

Here’s winking at you, sweetie…

My apologies for the slightly out of focus nature of some of the installation photographs, but I had to take them quickly as I walked through the gallery with co-curator Simon Maidment. If you relied on the nine press images supplied by the NGV (bottom of the posting), you would have no idea of the complexity of this artists work nor would you possess an understanding of the scale, intimacy, brashness, beauty and confrontational visibility of the art. You would also have no idea what a stunning installation the NGV has produced to display the work.

Simply put, this is the best exhibition I have seen in Melbourne this year.

.
David McDiarmid (1952-1995) – activist (the first gay person ever to be arrested in Australia) and multi-dimensional artist – proves the personal IS political AND influential. His work moves from early personal narratives through decorative to visually commanding and confrontational art. As homosexual identity transits from camp to gay to queer, McDiarmid deconstructs and redefines this identity using context as a FOIL for his art making. As Robert Nelson in his excellent review of the exhibition in The Age newspaper observes, “McDiarmid’s expression of the erotic is an act of protest as well as festivity. When McDiarmid began in full fervour, gay sex was not only reviled but illegal; and as he ended his career, homosexuality seemed to pass from the police to the undertaker. He began his expose of gay eroticism in the spirit of a demonstration and ended it as an act of compassion.”1

Well said. Homosexuality was illegal were McDairmid started making art and was deathly when he himself succumbed to the Grim Reaper. But during the journey that he took the key thing to remember is that McDiarmid never “passed” as something he was not. He was always up front, out there, doing his thing since he was first arrested in 1971. He was always pushing the boundaries, offering a wider perspective on social histories and political contexts. He questioned the marginalisation of minorities (Secret Love, 1976), the boundaries of self and society and examined taboo and transgression in a conservative society. He lived at the cutting edge of culture. Later, he waged a life and death struggle for HIV/AIDS funding, awareness and compassion with a fierce determination combined with sparkling wit, humour and sardonic aphorisms. Sexual politics and safe sex campaigns went hand in hand.

Of course, sexuality and sexual identity were at the core of his creativity. He explored the urban gay male world and the struggle for gay rights, sexual and emotional sensibilities and the cultural politics of HIV/AIDS. Early work was influenced by time spent in New York (where he knew Keith Haring) and San Francisco, where he experienced the development of the clone scene and the music of the clubs. His mode of construction has a lot in common with folk and women’s art (in particular patchwork and quilting) coupled with the use of contemporary materials (such as holographic foil).

McDiarmid’s later work becomes more symbolic and universal but still contains that cutting edge of the personal (DEMENTED QUEEN REMEMBERS HER NAME – forgets to die; POSITIVE QUEEN FEELS NEGATIVE – goes shopping). In the most amazing room of art I have seen this year, McDiarmid uses reflective cut and tiled holographic foils to create moving tribute and biting comment on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this darkened room the viewer is surrounded by tiles that “scintillate in spectral transience, changing their colours holographically according to your movement. The image is blunt and horny but also melancholy and scary; and similarly the medium impenetrable, deflecting the gaze and forcing you to change perspective.” (Robert Nelson)

But it’s more than that. You are surrounded by metallic flesh and embedded amongst the iridescence is both love and hate, life and death, winking eyes and holographic rainbow coloured skulls. Body language (1990, below) contains the names of McDairmid’s dead lovers woven into its fabric, a Swastika with the word AIDS for a head and the desire for the anus as a man pulls his arse cheeks apart. But here’s the rub – the tiny, puckered hole contains a holographic image of a winking eye, inviting you in, sharing the death/life joke with you. It’s a classic. In this room it feels as though you are surrounded by the fires of hell as the opalescence of the work changes from footstep to footstep, from positive to negative, from love to hate – and the pure beauty of the work is overwhelming. These are absolutely stunning works of art by any mark of the imagination, up there with the very best art ever made in Australia. His famous Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 (below) are strong but they are are not a patch on the silver foil works. Less successful are the textile and costume designs, the weakest part of the exhibition.

One question springs to mind. Would his art have been as strong without the impetus of “death art” behind it? What would it have looked like?

I wonder which direction his art would have taken after his initial investigation of gay male identity had he not contracted HIV/AIDS and started making art about the disease. This strong focus gives the work the impetus and grunt it needed to move from the purely decorative and graphic, ney camp in some cases, to work with serious gravitas. In these later works McDiarmid lays it all on the line and just goes for it. I am so glad he did. They are powerful, concise, confrontational, beautiful, shimmering renditions of a soul living life to the full while he still had time.

It’s a pity the NGV has not advertised and promoted this exhibition more extensively. With a stunning catalogue, insightful research, amazing installation and world class art this is one exhibition you shouldn’t miss in Melbourne this winter.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

ART BLART: THE ONLY PLACE TO SEE INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS OF THIS EXHIBITION ON THE WEB.

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Many thankx to Simon for allowing me to take the installation photographs during our discussion and to the NGV for allowing me to publish them, along with the nine press images at the bottom of the posting. All installation photographs © Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation photograph of early works including, in the case, Vest (c. 1972), hand-embroidered by McDiarmid with the words ‘sydney gay liberation’ as a gift for John Lee with photographs of McDiarmid and artist Peter Tully used as a wallpaper on the wall behind at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation photograph of early works including Secret Love art show, poster (1976, far left), Secret Love (1976, top centre left), Ken’s Karate Klub (1976, centre below left) and Tube of joy (1976, above right) – all from the Secret Love series, 1976 except KKK – at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love
1976
From the Secret Love series, 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, coloured pencil, collage of cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78 x 66cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Secret Love (detail)
1978
Collage of cut colour photo-offset lithographs on plastic, metal and plastic
135 x 142.8cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Various artworks from 1978 including Strangers in the night (top second left), Mardi Gras (top fourth left), Juicy fruit (top second right) and Real confessions (bottom second left)
All National Gallery of Victoria

Bush Couture, Sydney (fashion house) (front)
Linda Jackson (designer)
David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987) (painter)
Paua kimono
1984
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Interview with co-curator Simon Maidment

MB: First of all Simon, can I ask how long have you been at the National Gallery of Victoria and what brought you to the institution?

SM: I’ve been at the NGV since June 2013 and I joined because of a new vision for the gallery which is making contemporary art a priority, both in collecting practices in the exhibitions that the NGV holds. Recently, there has been a real push for change, precipitated by the appointment of Max Delany who is a friend and colleague I respect a lot and who has been really supportive of my career.

MB: So what was your background in terms of training?

SM: I studied as an artist and immediately before coming to the NGV I was undertaking my PhD at The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts Centre for Ideas with Elizabeth Presa as one of my supervisors.

MB: And what new knowledge was your PhD based around?

SM: It investigated curatorial practices that could be thought of as context responsive, looking at artists who seek to enact some sort of social and/or political change.

MB: So this exhibition would be perfect to fit into that…

SM: Yes, indeed… so largely my background has been working with living artists. I have done a few shows in which I have worked with existing bodies of work, but I have done a lot of shows where I have been facilitating artists works. I started as an artist working in media arts – sound, video, projection and digital technologies – and often worked as a studio assistant for more senior artists, people like Sue Ford, Susan Fereday, Ian de Gruchy and my role with them became more and more about facilitation. Then the directorship of Westspace came up and I got that, and my focus turned more from collaboration and working as a studio assistant to facilitation. I became a curator because basically that is what I was doing.

MB: So can you tell me Simon, what was the lead in time for this exhibition? I know it was postponed and delayed at various times, what were the reasons for that?

SM: It was kind of before my time so I am not really sure, but there have been different curators at different times from the NGV involved with the project. So Ted Gott was involved with the exhibition, even before he began work at the NGV. Ted was involved with David’s estate with Sally Gray, my co-curator, right from the start, so he’s been an advisor to Sally right from the start of this long journey. I think the initial discussion about the show was with Ted, and then when Jason Smith was in my position he was involved in this project. When I was talking with Sally the very first discussions about holding the exhibition at the NGV was maybe 15 years ago…

MB: So to finally get it here and up on the walls…

SM: So when I started 11 months ago there was really very little in place. So Max Delany and Sally started a conversation about working towards this show probably about 14 months ago. When Tony Ellwood started he was like, “We’re doing this show.” He’s a big fan of David McDiarmid. He was very familiar with his work so I think that helped speed things along and he really facilitated getting this exhibition done. It was scheduled for 2011.

MB: To get it together from start to finish in 14 months is pretty amazing really…

SM: It was a lot of work but bearing in mind how familiar Sally is with the material we kind of had a real head start.

MB: But then you have to pull it all together from lenders and institutions that hold works and that would have been very intensive. Then to design it all and to make it look like it does. It looks fantastic! Everyone at the opening was just smiling and having a good time, looking at the work, remembering.

SM: I knew the work en masse would blow people away.

MB: Reading the catalogue, you can see that David comes from a period where there was a ground swell of social movements, which was almost like one movement. Everybody went to everyone else’s rallies and they all protested together. David McDiarmid was the very first gay person to get arrested in Australia and at the moment I am digitally restoring the image of him being marched away by two policemen at the ABC protest in Sydney. It is so degraded it will take a long time to restore but it is a really important image. Out of that there comes a real social conscience, fighting for your rights and freedom. So leading on from that, when you think about having this exhibition here now (after Ted Gott’s seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994), you observe that marginalised voices rarely enter institutional centres of art, rarely enter the mainstream art. It’s usually ARI’s or small public galleries. Not that the artist is gay (because they are just artists) but that the CONTENT addresses gay issues – which is why it’s so fantastic to see this exhibition here at the NGV.

So were there any barriers here to doing David’s show?

SM: No, not really. I think one of the really important things to note is that they show would not have really happened without the large gift from the estate. Becoming the key holder and custodian of David McDiarmid’s work added extra emphasis and responsibility about doing the right thing. At that point the organisation is implicated in that legacy and somehow we have to disseminate the work out into the community.

MB: It is quite a confronting show, how do you think the general public will respond to it?

SM: I have done a couple of tours of people through the exhibition, members and other, and one of the things that has been surprising to me, in a way, which has only become apparent when I have been describing the show in which David makes work in response to particular social and political conditions and contexts… is how different things are. AIDS is now not a terminal illness. To speak to a younger generation than even myself, they have no idea about dying from lack of a viable treatment, of AIDS being a death sentence.

MB: Last night I had a cry for all the people I had loved and lost. But it’s not just the public coming in to see this exhibition, it’s young gay men who don’t ever see anybody ill, don’t understand about the side effects of taking the medication, about what living with HIV is like. They don’t understand the struggle that went on for them to live as they do now. Do you think they will engage with that?

SM: We have structured the show in a way that teases those things out. One of the aspects of McDiarmid as a figure that I find very interesting is that, in 20 short years of practice, he spanned incredible key moments and periods of change in broader society and also within gay society. The legal, medical, institutional change… and really looking at that 20 years is looking at a period of immense social change. The narrative of the exhibition is then to reflect on that broader cultural shift through the biography of one person.

MB: It’s interesting when I looked at the show, when you start making work as an artist it’s always about personal narratives – lovers, friends, places – which then widens out into more universal concerns. You can see in David’s early work him scribbling, writing and really intimately notating his world, investigating his self and his relations to the world around him. And then to take that insight and then to mould it into these reflective images into the Rainbow Aphorisms at the end is an incredible journey. Stephen Alkins was saying to be last night that even the last works were still grounded in this humorous, ironic look at life. He as a really important multimedia artist when you actually study the work.

SM: Just to pick up on one aspect that you are mentioning, and going back into my own background, one of things that Max Delany and I have been talking about that has in some ways illuminated this project is that, in the 1970s and 80s that saying ‘The personal is political’, is very important. David’s work is talking very much about the political as his own biography. Perhaps there is a shift in his later work to a more symbolic realm, and I would argue that nowadays artists working in a political and social context and to affect social change is not so much now as a personal identity – a woman, a black man, a gay man – it’s not necessarily about individual identities anymore, in some ways those battles seem to have been won within Western society. Actually for artists now in this context it’s more about neo-liberalism or capitalism. So it tends to be more on an institutional level and people tackling that in a much more symbolic realm. For instance I am thinking of such people as Jeremy Deller, an English artist who engages with British history and in particular his Battle of Orgreave, a reenactment of the actual Battle of Orgreave which occurred during the UK miners’ strike in 1984.

MB: People like Tom Nicholson in Australia, then, who did the Monument for the flooding of Royal Park (2008-2010), a proposition for the scattering of nardoo sporocarp throughout Royal Park, a vast Park in Melbourne’s inner north which was Burke and Wills departure point, now commemorated by a small cairn.

SM: Exactly. Artists like Tom are working in very propositional ways about memory, social imagination, monuments and memorialisation. All those kind of things are very much within a symbolic realm now. McDiarmid’s work fills the personal and then moves into the symbolic.

MB: But then Stephen Alkins said it was always personal to David, still based in the personal. He was very loyal to his friends, he was a very quiet person, very loving person with great energy. But he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and I think that this comes out of that culture of standing up for yourself and being strong because of the stuff we had to go through to where we are today. Seeing this exhibition actually shows you that difference and what we had to fight for.

SM: There’s a real drive there in that last room. He made so much work, across so much media, at the end of his life – that impending death drive was the source of so much creativity.

MB: McDiarmid was heavily influenced by international artists such as Keith Haring but he never really showed overseas. What do you think about that diaspora, that going overseas and then returning home to then begin exhibiting?

SM: Well the earlier work is, as you say, heavily influenced by the New York scene, the clone scene that was prevalent in the 80s – San Francisco, New York – so he’s definitely channelling those places… Interestingly, unlike many other artists, his art practice is nearly all Australian.

MB: Finally, what do you think is is his legacy in terms of his standing as an artist?

SM: In the last ten years of his life he was heavily involved as a community artist. He was incredibly busy and incredibly involved with things like the organisation of the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras and the design of the posters and floats. He was director of Mardi Gras from 1988-90 and he worked up float designs for various groups. You really get a sense of, as you said, of the solitary work of an artist and a real commitment to that work. In terms of his legacy as an artist, I don’t think that we will know until the exhibition is over. His work, such as the Rainbow Aphorisms, has been distributed widely but not really in an art context, and certainly not in a museum show such as this. People have not had the opportunity to visualise his work as a whole body of work until now.

MB: That brings me to the international context. The Keith Haring Foundation relentlessly promotes his work through books, exhibitions and conferences throughout the world. Do you think that you will start promoting his work overseas to other galleries and getting it into international exhibitions?

SM: I think the book will open a lot of doors. Because his work reproduces so well, because his writing is so interesting there is a broad range of voices for the scholars to investigate. But I think because the work reproduces so beautifully that will be hugely important. One of the aspects that the book will hopefully communicate to a younger audience is that of an infected muscular, sexually active, virile man not an emaciated artist… but to understand that and where that came from, and how radical that was at the time. I think that is one of the legacies that people will take away from David’s work. He is one of the artists that has been really instrumental in redefining that imaginary representation of a dying gay man.

MB: I remember seeing those + and – posters in gay sex venues, and thinking to myself, wow those are so amazing, who did those!

SM: Yes, those posters are about not closing down, about always been open to possibilities.

MB: Thank you so much Simon for taking the time to talk to me, it’s been great.

SM: Always a pleasure.

Dr Marcus Bunyan with Simon Maidment for Art Blart, June 2014

Simon Maidment is Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGV.

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation views of various Sydney party posters with a black and white background wallpaper of David and the HIV Living group’s Day of the dead skeleton for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 1992 (commissioned by the AIDS Council of NSW) at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Sleaze Ball, Horden Pavilion, 12 October 1985
1985
Screenprint printed in black and gold ink
91.2 x 65cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Gift of the artist, 1991

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
So I walked into the theatre
1984-1985
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
So I walked into the theatre (detail)
1984-1985
Synthetic polymer paint, iron-on transfer, and cotton thread on cotton
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

So I walked into the

theatre and lit a cigarette

I looked around. Then I

saw Tony. He lives in

Brooklyn and has a nice

beard and greasy hair.

He didn’t acknowledge

me, but I expected that.

I’d already made it with

him several times before

and each time, he pretended

was the first. He had

even told me his name

once, and that he lived

with a lover. We always

have great sex, but he doesn’t

want me to do anything

but stand there. He has

an incredible mouth…

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Disco kwilt
c. 1980
Artbank collection

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Installation view of works from the series Kiss of Light, 1990-92 including at left Mighty real 1991 with Kiss of Light 1990 right at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Mighty real (detail)
1991
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
144.5 x 123.6cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney

Detail of one of David McDiarmid’s holographic film art works showing the winking eyes

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Body language
1990
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
152.4 x 121.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

There is a holographic winking eye in the arsehole of this work

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Thinking of you (detail)
1990
Collage of cut self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
140 x 120cm
Collection of Steven Alkins, Mullumbimby, New South Wales

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at left on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-95 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Standard bold condensed
1994
Screenprint on mylar on colour laser print
255.7 x 242.3cm (overall)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Works from the Rainbow Aphorisms series
1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110cm (image and sheet each)
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney

Peter Tully (Australian, 1947-1992)

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Lived in United States 1979-1987

Ron Smith (Australian, b. 1950s)
Totem works
1992-1995
Anodised aluminium, found objects (installation)
Dimensions variable
Collection of Ron Smith, Woonona, New South Wales

Installation photograph of the last room showing, at right on the wall, work from the Rainbow Aphorisms series 1994 with in front Totem works 1992-95, then at left on the wall Pictograms 1995 at the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me at NGV Australia, Melbourne

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Pictograms
1995
Vinyl and reflective plastic on aluminium

“I never saw art as being a safe thing. I know that exists but that’s not something that involves me.”

David McDiarmid, 1993

The vibrant, provocative and pioneering work of leading Australian artist, designer and gay activist David McDiarmid will be presented in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Defying classification, McDiarmid’s work encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics.

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Mewill bring together more than 200 works, including the artist’s early gay liberation work; New York graffiti and disco quilts; fashion collaborations with Linda Jackson; his pioneering Rainbow aphorisms andGothic aphorisms digital work; material he produced as Sydney Mardi Gras Artistic Director; posters created for the AIDS Council of NSW; and, his significant and highly influential international campaigns developed in the context of AIDS, sexual politics and safe sex in the 1990s.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “The NGV is pleased to be staging this retrospective of an artist whose work had enormous impact on both the gay liberation movement and the international dialogue around AIDS, and whose clear messages of liberation, equality and emancipation continue to resonate today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me explores the social history, as well as political and art historical context, that informed McDiarmid’s work, which inspires through its courage, poetry, exuberance and cultural impact.”

Defying classification, the work of David McDiarmid encompasses the complex and interconnected histories of art, craft, fashion, music, sex, gay liberation and identity politics; happily residing in the spaces between high and low art, popular culture and community engagement. At once kaleidoscopic, celebratory and darkly humorous in tone, the artist’s idiosyncratic, highly personal and at times, confessional work highlights the redefinition and deconstruction of identities – “from camp to gay to queer” – drawing on the experiences of a life intensely lived in Melbourne, Sydney and New York. Charting the shifts in politics and individual and community expression that unfold across the decades of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, this exhibition also reveals McDiarmid’s artistic and grassroots political response to the impact of HIV/AIDS during the 1980s and beyond, for which he is best known internationally.

Recognising the cultural climate in which the artist worked, including the burgeoning of the gay rights movement, and a decade later, the advent of the AIDS crisis, the playful and provocative nature of McDiarmid’s work was critically related to changes that were occurring throughout this time to sexual identity and politics in Australia.

Dr Sally Gray, Guest Curator, said, “McDiarmid’s work speaks so eloquently of its time yet its importance and relevance endures today. David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me is the first exhibition in which the full scope of McDiarmid’s creative oeuvre is on display and is the culmination of painstaking research, with the support of many of his collaborators, friends and fans.”

David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me will coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne in July 2014.

This exhibition includes coarse language and sexual content. Press release from the NGV website

William Yang (Australian, b. 1943)
Artist David McDiarmid photographed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales adjacent to his giant Q artwork on the gallery’s facade for Perspecta May, 1995
1995
© Reproduced with permission of William Yang

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Judy
1976
From the Secret love series 1976
Metallic paint, red fibre-tipped pen, cut photo-offset lithograph and red and black ink on graph paper
78.0 x 66.0cm
Collection of Paul Menotti and Bryce Kerr, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Strangers in the night
1978
Collage of cut coloured paper and photocopy on mulberry paper
62.6 x 50.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Proposed acquisition
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Hand and heart
1984
Synthetic polymer paint on cotton
250.0 x 230.0cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of the Estate of the late David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, poster
1989-1990
Colour photo-offset lithograph
69.0 x 49.0cm
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Gift of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Limited, 1995
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Untitled
1990-1995
Self-adhesive holographic film and self-adhesive colour plastic on plastic
122.7 x 122.7cm
Collection of Bernard Fitzgerald, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Discard after use
1990
From the Kiss of light series 1990-1992
Collage of self-adhesive holographic film on enamel paint on plywood
61.2 x 61.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift from the Estate of David McDiarmid, 1998
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
I want a future that lives up to my past
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

David McDiarmid (Australian 1952-1995, worked in United States 1979-1987)
Q
From the Rainbow aphorisms series 1994, printed 2014
Computer generated colour inkjet prints
149.1 x 110.0cm
Collection of the McDiarmid Estate, Sydney
© Reproduced with the permission of the David McDiarmid estate

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘People In A River Landscape: August Sander And The Photography Of The Present From The Lothar Schirmer Collection’ at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, black and white photography, Cindy Sherman, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Alte Pinakothek Self-portrait Munich, Alter Posthof in Bacharach, Antlitz der Zeit, August Sander, August Sander Alter Posthof in Bacharach, August Sander Bauernpaar, August Sander Bauernpaar - Zucht und Harmonie, August Sander Children in the city, August Sander Der erdgebundene Mensch, August Sander Deutz Bridge, August Sander Die Familie in der Generation, August Sander Handlanger, August Sander Hans Poelzig, August Sander Heinrich Hoerle, August Sander Painter [Heinrich Hoerle], August Sander Peasant Couple, August Sander People of the 20th century, August Sander Stadtwald, August Sander The Architect, August Sander The Architect [Hans Poelzig], August Sander The Rhine near Boppard, August Sander Urban Forest, August Sander View from the Mülheim Bridge, Bauernpaar - Zucht und Harmonie, Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman Untitled #127, Das Lichtbild, Der erdgebundene Mensch, Die Familie in der Generation, German artist, German modernist photography, german photographer, German photography, Handlanger, Hans Poelzig, Heinrich Hoerle, Heinrich Zille, Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Jeff Wall The Thinker, Kurt Wolff Verlag, Lothar Schirmer collection, Michael Fried, Modernist Photography, New Objectivity, People in a River Landscape, People of the 20th century, Rhineland, Rhineland landscapes, Sander Antlitz der Zeit, Sander Das Lichtbild, Sander Rhineland landscapes, Stammmappe, The Earthbound Human, The Rhine near Boppard, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Ruff Portrait (T. Ruff), Thomas Ruff selfportrait, Thomas Struth, Thomas Struth Alte Pinakothek Self-portrait Munich, Why Photography Matters, Wolfgang Kemp

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 24th August 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Stadtwald [Urban Forest]
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
23 x 29cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

What a fascinating exhibition this looks to be… I wish I could see it!
Quite a few Sander photographs I have never seen before in the posting.
Sander is another photographer that would be near the top of my list.

Marcus

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

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Children in the city
1930
Gelatin silver print
21.3 x 26cm (sheet)
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Alter Posthof in Bacharach
1926
Gelatin silver print
15.3 x 21.4cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Die Familie in der Generation
1912
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 28.6cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Deutz Bridge, Rhine in winter
1937
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
The Rhine near Boppard, Osterspey
1938
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 29.3 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Andreas Gursky (German, b. 1955)
The Rhine II
1999
Chromogenic print
1564 x 3083 mm

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
View from the Mülheim Bridge, Sunrise
1938
Gelatin silver print
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander’s epochal cycle People of the 20th Century is considered one of the most important works in the history of art and photography of the last century.

Sander’s photographic typology of German society did not only fascinate artists, writers and philosophers of that period but, at the same time, formed an important point of reference for the artistic concept contemporary photographers had of themselves. This is also reflected in the Munich publisher Lothar Schirmer’s photographic collection, the starting point of which was a group of some 80 works by Sander comprising not only portraits, but also landscapes and urban pictures, acquired in the early 1970s.

This batch of works, acquired from the artist’s estate back in the 1970s, comprises not only more than 40 originals of Sander’s famous portraits, including masterpieces such as the Stammmappe focussing on farmers in Westerwald, the portrait of the artist Heinrich Hoerle in the austere style of New Objectivity and Handlanger, with its impressive visual directness, but also a rare group of lesser known Rhineland landscapes and vedute of Cologne from the 1930s. Precisely the last two groups of works mentioned are enduring proof that Sander’s vision of an equally authentic and veritable document of the times was not only to be limited to people within their social and societal structure but should also include their immediate surroundings, the landscape and the urban environment – an aspect that, for a long time, was given little attention in analyses of the photographer’s work since his death in April, fifty years ago.

In view of the undisputed importance of Sander’s portraits, it is surprising that a more extensive selection of the photographer’s work is only now to be seen in the exhibition People in a River Landscape – and that in Munich too, although there were in fact a number of links between the artist and the city. Sander’s pioneering photography book, Antlitz der Zeit, was published in 1929 by the Munich-based Kurt Wolff Verlag; one year later, his works were to be seen in the exhibition Das Lichtbild – one of the rare presentations of Sander’s works anywhere before 1933; and in the 1960s and ’70s his extensive estate was stored not far from Munich.

Sander’s photographs from this collection will be exhibited for the first time in their entirety and be displayed in dialogue with works by contemporary artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall. The selection will be extended by a rare group of extraordinary photographs taken in Berlin by Heinrich Zille in the late 19th / early 20th century and enlarged by Thomas Struth almost 100 years later.

The exhibition presents a both representative and focussed cross section of Sander’s photographic oeuvre. At the same time it shows the medium of photography in a wider perspective by placing individual groups of works by Sander in dialogue with those of contemporary artists. Starting with a typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose encyclopaedically structured work can be regarded as an immediate successor to Sander’s photographic credo, the selection – supplemented by works from the holdings of the Sammlung Moderne Kunst – includes Andreas Gursky’s Rhine picture, urban views by Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall and portraits by Thomas Ruff and Cindy Sherman, among others. The interplay between the past and the present, between small-format, black-and-white prints and colour images the size of large canvases, between austere documentary works and staged and digitally processed pictures, not only illustrates the immediate relevance of Sander’s concept, far beyond any temporal or formal distinctions, but also how photography has become established as an artistic form of expression in its own right within the context of contemporary art. This topic will be explored in greater depth in the accompanying series of lectures Why Photography Matters, at which the artists Hilla Becher and Thomas Struth, as well as the art historians Wolfgang Kemp and Michael Fried will be speaking. As a modest homage to another historical precursor, the exhibition finishes with a rare group of photographs of Berlin by Heinrich Zille taken at the turn of the century, which Thomas Struth enlarged and reinterpreted in 1985 using the original negatives.

Press release from the Pinakothek der Moderne website

Jeff Wall (Canadian, b. 1946)
The Thinker
1986
Large-format slides in lightbox
216 x 229 cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
Courtesy of the artist
© Jeff Wall

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Handlanger [Odd-job man]
1928
Gelatin silver print
43.0 x 28.5cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
The Architect [Hans Poelzig]
1929
Gelatin silver print
40 x 29.8cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958)
Portrait (T. Ruff) [Selfportrait]
1987
C-Print/Diasec
210 x 165cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Der erdgebundene Mensch [The Earthbound Human]
1910
Gelatin silver print
29.2 x 23.1cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Bauernpaar – Zucht und Harmonie [Peasant Couple – Breeding and Harmony]
1912
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 23.1cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
Alte Pinakothek, Self-portrait, Munich
2000
© Thomas Struth / Courtesy Schirmer/Mosel München

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Painter [Heinrich Hoerle]
1928
Gelatin silver print
59.3 x 47.7cm
Lothar Schirmer Collection, Munich
© The Photographic Collection, SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Strasse 40
Munich

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Daily except Monday 10am – 6pm
Thursday 10am – 8pm

Pinakothek der Moderne website

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Aug

Exhibition: ‘Roman Vishniac Rediscovered’ at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 1930s social documentary photography, AJDC, american artist, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American photography, Amsterdam, Anne Frank and her family, avant-garde photography, Beachgoers in the afternoon, Berlin, Berlin before the Second World War, Berlin in Ruins, Berlin street photography, Berlin Street Photography 1920s-30s, Berlin Zoo, Boy standing on a mountain of rubble, Boy with kindling in a basement dwelling, Boys admiring a motorcycle Brandenburg, Boys exercising in the gymnasium of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, Bratislava, Central Organization of German Jews, color photomicroscopy, Customers waiting in line at a butcher's counter during wartime rationing, David Eckstein, Deutsche Presse, documents of a lost epoch, Drawer of freshly farmed eggs, Dutch Zionist agrarian training camp, Eastern Europe, Eastern Europe before the Second World War, Eastern European Jewish life, Eastern Jewry, Ernst Kaufmann, European modernism, Farm Security Administration, genocide, German artist, german photographer, German photography, German-Jewish Relief and Community Organizations, germany, halutz, Hénonville Displaced Persons' Camp, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), Holocaust, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust survivors and American relief worker, Holocaust survivors gathering outside a building where matzoh is being made in preparation for the Passover holiday, Inside the Jewish quarter Bratislava, Interior of the Anhalter Bahnhof railway terminus, Jüdischer Kulturbund, Jewish Cultural Association, Jewish displaced persons camps, Jewish Historical Museum, Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Jewish Life in the Carpathians, Jewish schoolchildren Mukacevo, Jewish social documentary photography, Juden unerwünscht, Karen Gumprecht, Leica, Mara Vishniac, Mara Vishniac Kohn, Marion Gumprecht, Martin Grünpeter, Mauthausen concentration camp, National Refugee Service (NRS), Nazi party, Nazi Rise to Power in Germany, Ostjuden, People behind bars Berlin Zoo, photographs of Eastern European Jewish life, photography before the Seoncd World War, photography of Jews before the Second World War, photomicroscopy, Pictures of Jewish Life in Prewar Poland, Preparing food in a Jewish soup kitchen, Recalcitrance, Refugees and Displaced Persons' Camps, Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden, Renate Gumprecht, Robert Frank, Robert Frank The Americans, Rolleiflex, Roman Vishniac, Roman Vishniac Beachgoers in the afternoon, Roman Vishniac Boy standing on a mountain of rubble, Roman Vishniac Boy with kindling in a basement dwelling, Roman Vishniac Boys admiring a motorcycle Brandenburg, Roman Vishniac Boys exercising in the gymnasium of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, Roman Vishniac Customers waiting in line at a butcher's counter during wartime rationing, Roman Vishniac daughter Mara posing in front of an election poster for Hindenburg and Hitler, Roman Vishniac David Eckstein, Roman Vishniac Drawer of freshly farmed eggs, Roman Vishniac Eastern Europe, Roman Vishniac Ernst Kaufmann, Roman Vishniac Holocaust survivors and American relief worker, Roman Vishniac Holocaust survivors gathering outside a building where matzoh is being made in preparation for the Passover holiday, Roman Vishniac Inside the Jewish quarter Bratislava, Roman Vishniac Interior of the Anhalter Bahnhof railway terminus, Roman Vishniac Jewish schoolchildren Mukacevo, Roman Vishniac People behind bars Berlin Zoo, Roman Vishniac Preparing food in a Jewish soup kitchen, Roman Vishniac Recalcitrance, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered, Roman Vishniac Sara sitting in bed in a basement dwelling, Roman Vishniac Sisters Marion Renate and Karen Gumprecht, Roman Vishniac Street scene with a swastika flag on a storefront, Roman Vishniac Students learning metalwork techniques, Roman Vishniac The streets are free of brown batallions!, Roman Vishniac Villagers in the Carpathian Mountains, Roman Vishniac Willy Lefkowitz and Martin Grünpeter constructing a foundry, Roman Vishniac Zionist youth building a school and foundry while learning construction techniques, Russian American photographer, Sara sitting in bed in a basement dwelling, Schlachtensee Displaced Persons' Camp, Seoncd World War, shtetlach, Sisters Marion Renate and Karen Gumprecht, social-documentary photographer, Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor, Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT), Street scene with a swastika flag on a storefront, Students learning metalwork techniques, T’munah, the americans, The Face of America at War, The streets are free of brown batallions!, urban landscape, Villagers in the Carpathian Mountains, Vishniac Berlin in Ruins, Vishniac Jewish Life in the Carpathians, Vishniac Pictures of Jewish Life in Prewar Poland, Vishniac's daughter Mara posing in front of an election poster for Hindenburg and Hitler, Weimar Berlin, Weimar Republic, Werkdorp images, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis Agrarian Training Camp, Westerbork Transit Camp, Willy Lefkowitz, Willy Lefkowitz and Martin Grünpeter constructing a foundry, YIVO, YIVO Exhibitions in New York, Zehlendorf, Zionist youth building a school and foundry while learning construction techniques

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 24th August 2014

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
Recalcitrance, Berlin (detail)
1926
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

It takes guts and moral fortitude to continue photographing the city that you live in even as the state that controls that city (and country) conspires against you. It takes talent to produce memorable images of urban poverty, to record for posterity communities that would soon vanish forever under the weight of a malignant form of madness, of genocide.

Vishniac was the only one not concerned with ego. He went out there and got the job done where no one else did. He produced thoroughly modern images of an ancient culture on the verge of destruction. He knew the danger and yet he still took the photos. Courage and fortitude, and in the end the luck to escape the Holocaust himself.

You can’t look at these images without a sense of regret and sadness – at the stupidity of humanity, of the egos of men, and the waste of millions of lives. One name says it all: Ernst Kaufmann. Standing on a pile of rocks, wearing wooden clogs, this man with the wavy hair looks down into the camera and he will ever be thus – young, handsome, alive in the moment that the photograph was taken.

Ernst Kaufmann was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1911. He was arrested in June 1941 and killed in August of that year in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Jewish Historical Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. Lots more images can be found on the excellent Roman Vishniac Archive website.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Interior of the Anhalter Bahnhof railway terminus near Potsdamer Platz, Berlin]
late 1920s – early 1930s
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered brings together four decades of work by an extraordinarily versatile and innovative photographer for the first time. Vishniac (1897-1990) created the most widely recognised and reproduced photographic record of Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars. These celebrated photographs were taken on assignment for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the world’s largest Jewish relief organisation, from 1935-1938, yet this exhibition follows the photographer’s long and accomplished career from the early 1920s through the 1950s. Roman Vishniac Rediscovered introduces a radically diverse body of work – much of it only recently discovered – and repositions Vishniac’s iconic photographs of Eastern European Jewry within a broader tradition of 1930s social documentary photography.

More than any other photographer, Roman Vishniac’s images have profoundly influenced contemporary notions of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Vishniac created the most widely recognised and reproduced photographic record of that world on the eve of its annihilation, yet only a small fraction of his work was published or printed during his lifetime. Known primarily for this poignant record, Vishniac was in fact a remarkably versatile and innovative photographer. His body of work spans more than five decades, ranging from early engagements with European modernism in the 1920s to highly inventive colour photomicroscopy in the 1950s and ’60s.

Born in 1897 to an affluent Russian-Jewish family, Vishniac was raised in Moscow, where he studied zoology and biology. He immigrated to Berlin in 1920 in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. As an amateur photographer he took to the streets, offering witty and wry visual commentary on his adopted city while experimenting with new approaches to framing and composition. As Vishniac documented the Nazi rise to power, foreboding signs of oppression soon became a focal point of his work. In 1935, he was commissioned by the European headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) – the world’s largest Jewish relief organisation – to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Vishniac’s four years of work on the project yielded the celebrated images that have largely defined his photographic legacy.

Arriving in New York on New Year’s Day 1941, Vishniac opened a portrait studio, working to make ends meet by documenting American Jewish communal and immigrant life, while establishing himself as a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy. In 1947, he returned to Europe and documented Jewish Displaced Persons’ Camps, the efforts of Holocaust survivors to rebuild their lives, emigration and relief efforts, and the ruins of Berlin.

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered is a comprehensive reappraisal of Vishniac’s total photographic output, from his early years in Berlin through the postwar period in America. The exhibition is drawn from the Roman Vishniac archive at ICP and serves as an introduction to this vast assemblage comprising more than 30,000 objects, including recently discovered vintage prints, rare moving film footage, contact sheets, personal correspondence, and exhibition prints made from his recently digitized negatives.

Berlin Street Photography, 1920s-30s

Vishniac immigrated to Berlin in 1920, shortly after the formation of the Weimar Republic. He and his wife Luta settled in the Wilmersdorf district, home to a large community of affluent Russian-Jewish expatriates. Berlin in the 1920s was the epitome of a modern city: cosmopolitan, loud, vibrant, diverse, and full of recent immigrants. Already an accomplished amateur photographer, Vishniac joined several of the city’s ubiquitous camera clubs. Armed with his Rolleiflex and Leica, he took to the streets, creating astute, often humorous observations of his adopted city.

Vishniac’s interest in photography had begun during his childhood in Russia; many Russian Jews owned photography shops and studios, and Vishniac’s family encouraged his pursuits. In Berlin, his perspective as an outsider contributed to his inventive and dynamic images of life in the city, and marked his transformation from amateur hobbyist to accomplished street photographer. His best, most intimate photographs were often taken in his own neighbourhood, where he built a fully equipped photo-processing lab in his apartment.

Vishniac took full advantage of the city’s manifold resources, improving his technique and experimenting with modernist and avant-garde approaches to framing and composition – hallmarks of Weimar Berlin. This prodigious body of early work became increasingly influenced by European modernism as he captured the buzzing day-to-day life of the city: streetcar drivers, municipal workers and day labourers, marching students and children at play, bucolic park scenes and the intellectual café life of the bustling metropolis that was, in Vishniac’s words, “the world’s center of music, books, and science.”

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
People behind bars, Berlin Zoo
Early 1930s (printed 2012)
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

The oldest and most renowned zoo in Germany, the Zoologische Garten was a popular gathering place for Berlin’s middle- and upper-class Jewish community before World War II. Many affluent Jewish families, including the Vishniacs, were shareholders. Beginning in 1933, the zoo began to force out Jewish board members. In 1938, a sign reading “Juden unerwünscht” (Jews Unwanted) was displayed at the entrance to the zoo and in early 1939 Jews were denied entry entirely. In Vishniac’s photograph of the zoo’s famous polar bears, it appears that the visitors, and not the animals, are in a cage.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Boys admiring a motorcycle, Brandenburg, outskirts of Berlin]
1929 – early 1930s (printed 2012)
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Nazi Rise to Power in Germany, 1933-1938

“I grew up in Berlin with a pervasive sense of danger and dread combined with a perceived obligation not to show fear. I was aware of personal danger and knew that whatever happened to me, my parents could offer no protection or help. That was everyday life.”

Mara Vishniac Kohn

Vishniac’s development as a professional photographer coincided with the Nazi rise to power and the establishment of the Third Reich. Widespread antisemitism and the implementation of increasingly restrictive measures against Jews became daily realities. Vishniac documented the ominous changes he encountered, photographing campaign posters, swastika banners, phrenology shops, and marching Nazi soldiers. Following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, the government relentlessly pursued those artists and intellectuals not in line with the Reich’s values. Berlin’s cosmopolitan vivacity was soon drained of its intellectual and cultural capital. Once-vibrant neighbourhoods became ruled by fear; anyone considered an opponent of the Nazi government could be sent to Dachau, a concentration camp established in 1933 outside Munich.

Many photographers suffered from the Nazi policies; the Schriftgesetz (Editorial Act) of November 1933 forced anyone working in publishing – photographers included – to provide proof of Aryan heritage. In 1934, the Deutsche Presse (German Press) published a list of authorised Aryan photographers whose work aligned with the Nazi party. Jews were forbidden to take photographs on the street. In spite of these restrictions, Vishniac tenaciously documented Berlin’s rapid acclimation to Nazi policy. To avoid suspicion, he often used his young daughter Mara as a prop, snapping seemingly innocuous pictures of her in front of advertising columns and shop windows festooned with Nazi propaganda.

These symbols of oppression formed the quotidian backdrop of Vishniac’s Germany, a fact to which the ubiquity of Nazi flags, banners, and posters in his later Berlin photographs testify. Capturing the spread of Nazi ideology on Berlin’s streets, Vishniac’s images embodied his own marginalisation – and endangerment – as both a photographer and a Jew.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
Recalcitrance, Berlin
1926
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Vishniac’s daughter Mara posing in front of an election poster for Hindenburg and Hitler that reads “The Marshal and the Corporal: Fight with Us for Peace and Equal Rights,” Wilmersdorf, Berlin]
1933
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Street scene with a swastika flag on a storefront (at left), Berlin]
c. 1935-1936 (printed 2012)
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Vishniac often positioned himself in doorways or building foyers in his Berlin street photography, documenting daily life as a removed observer. This image reveals multiple layers of time in one shot: the car positioned alongside the horse-drawn wagon, bicyclists speeding by as pedestrians young and old navigate the cobblestones and pavement, against the backdrop of a rapidly modernising metropolis. Only upon closer examination do our eyes move to a swastika flag blowing in the wind above the horses, a common site on most Berlin streets by 1935.

German-Jewish Relief and Community Organizations, Berlin, mid- to late 1930s

Prior to Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, Jewish social service organisations in Germany primarily served Eastern European Jews, the majority of whom were less cosmopolitan, assimilated, and affluent than their German-born coreligionists. The Nazi regime recognised no such distinction, however, and their rise to power drastically affected almost every Jew living in Germany. As Germany’s Jewish population was gradually excluded from both social and economic life, many came to depend upon a Jewish social structure that was originally intended to look outward but quickly expanded to serve the growing needs of the community.

In 1933, German-Jewish groups unified into the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden (Central Organization of German Jews), an umbrella organisation intended to ameliorate the effects of Nazi racial policy. Between 1933 and 1938, subsidiary and affiliate organisations created Jewish education and healthcare systems and instituted a welfare system for Jews facing impoverishment. Zionist and other youth organisations flourished under the exclusionary policies of the Nazis, helping would-be émigrés learn the agricultural and vocational skills needed to build new lives in Palestine and elsewhere. The Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Association) was established in response to restrictions placed on Jewish artists. Vishniac and his family were among its 70,000 members and regularly attended lectures and performances. Vishniac was also a member of T’munah, a Jewish photographic group founded in 1934 in response to the exclusionary policies of “Aryan” camera clubs.

As restrictions on photographers increased, Vishniac was commissioned to document the work of several Jewish community and social service organisations in Berlin. This fascinating body of work is largely unknown, but it helped establish his reputation in Jewish philanthropic circles, leading to major commissions from a wide range of Jewish relief and community organisations from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Drawer of freshly farmed eggs, Gut Winkel, a training farm for German-Jewish youth hoping to emigrate to Palestine, Spreenhagen in der Mark, Brandenburg, Germany]
c. 1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Preparing food in a Jewish soup kitchen, Berlin]
mid- to late 1930s
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, c. 1935-1938

In 1935, Roman Vishniac was hired by the European headquarters of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) to document impoverished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Photographic images offered limitless, affordable reproducibility, and could be used in slide lectures, brochures, appeals, and annual reports throughout America and Western Europe. Vishniac’s images played a crucial role in communicating the AJDC’s message, and they would ultimately become the last extensive photographic record by a single photographer of Jewish communities that had existed for centuries.

The majority of Vishniac’s published photographs of Eastern Europe depict privation. Many others illustrate the philanthropic activities of the AJDC such as children’s camps, free loan societies, soup kitchens, schools, and health organisations. And while Vishniac is often associated with images of rural villages and small towns, or shtetlach, most of his photographs record urban poverty in major cities like Warsaw, Krakow, and Lodz. His work for the AJDC echoes the contemporaneous projects of American photographers like Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Walker Evans. In the same years that the Farm Security Administration sent photographers to the American South and West to document those affected by drought, depression, and migration, Vishniac was sent east by the AJDC. Today, his work stands alongside the best social-documentary photographers of his era. His unpublished work imparts a much more complex and nuanced perspective on Eastern European Jewish life, and reveals a much more versatile – and modern – artist.

That Vishniac was commissioned to document the most impoverished Jews is significant, as is the fact that he often chose the most traditional and observant Jews as subjects, to amplify the contrast between Ostjuden, or Eastern Jews, and the more assimilated Western Jews who would be viewing the images. It was only after the Holocaust, when the communities he had so poignantly depicted were annihilated, that his body of work came to symbolise the vanished world of Eastern Jewry.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
Villagers in the Carpathian Mountains
c. 1935-38
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Jewish schoolchildren, Mukacevo]
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Inside the Jewish quarter, Bratislava]
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Eastern Europe]
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Eastern Europe] (detail)
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Boy with kindling in a basement dwelling, Krochmalna Street, Warsaw]
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[David Eckstein, seven years old, and classmates in cheder (Jewish elementary school), Brod]
c. 1935-1938
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Sara, sitting in bed in a basement dwelling, with stenciled flowers above her head, Warsaw]
c. 1935-1937
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Werkdorp Nieuwesluis Agrarian Training Camp, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands, 1939

As the plight of German Jews became increasingly dire throughout the 1930s and many Jewish families attempted to send their children to safety in neutral countries, many young German Jews, including Vishniac’s children Wolf and Mara, joined a large number of Zionist organisations. With the British government maintaining strict immigration quotas, hundreds of young German Jews planning to go to Palestine and waiting to obtain visas were sent to the Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, a Zionist agrarian youth training complex, or hachschara, in the Netherlands. Established in 1934 by the Foundation for Jewish Labor on land donated by the Dutch government, the Werkdorp taught young, urban Jews farming, animal husbandry, construction, and other unfamiliar skills they would need as pioneers in Palestine.

In 1939, Vishniac was sent by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) to document the Werkdorp’s activities. Vishniac photographed the capable young men and women as idealised, heroic Zionist pioneers, lifting heavy stones, constructing scaffolding, and tugging on rope. The images bear a striking resemblance to heavily circulated halutz (Zionist pioneer) photography made in Palestine in the 1930s, and demonstrate Vishniac’s versatility: here is an ambitious, accomplished series in a style that is radically different from his earlier work, and perfectly suited to his athletic, industrious subjects. Shot from a low vantage point, the Werkdorp images juxtapose clear skies and strong silhouettes to form vigorous, balanced compositions. Young, healthy bodies play off the clean, rhythmic geometry of the construction sites in a manner that is also reminiscent of the Russian Constructivist photographer Rodchenko, whose work would certainly have been familiar to Vishniac.

In March 1941, Nazi SS officers ordered the evacuation of the camp, and most of its inhabitants were sent to transit camps, including Westerbork. Out of 315 Werkdorp residents in May 1940, 175 were killed in concentration camps in the east.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Zionist youth building a school and foundry while learning construction techniques, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands]
1939
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Ernst Kaufmann, centre, and unidentified Zionist youth, wearing clogs while learning construction techniques in a quarry, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands]
1939
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Vishniac’s Werkdorp images did not include any caption information on the few existing prints of the work, and were thus difficult to identify. A small, 2 1/4-inch-square contact print of three young men wearing wooden clogs provided a vital clue that facilitated the attribution of this larger body of Werkdorp material, with the assistance of curators at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. This is the only known example of a professional photographer documenting this Dutch Zionist agrarian training camp.

Ernst Kaufmann was born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1911. He was arrested in June 1941 and killed in August of that year in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Willy Lefkowitz and Martin Grünpeter constructing a foundry, Werkdorp Nieuwesluis, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands]
1939 (printed 2012)
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Willy Lefkowitz, left, was forcibly removed from the Werkdorp when it was closed by the Nazis in 1941. Lefkowitz, along with the majority of the Werkdorp’s remaining inhabitants, was sent to the Westerbork Transit Camp in northeastern Netherlands, a site where Dutch Jews and Roma were assembled during World War II prior to their deportation to Nazi extermination camps in the east. Of the 107,000 people who passed through Westerbork – among them Anne Frank and her family – only 5,200 survived, including Lefkowitz, who immigrated to the United States. He is believed to have died in Brooklyn in 2001. Martin Grünpeter, right, a German Jew born in 1914, survived World War II and immigrated to Palestine.

Travel, Refuge, and Internment in France: Paris, Nice, and Marseille, c. 1939

From April to September 1939, Vishniac worked as a freelance photographer based in France while his family struggled to secure exit visas to the U.S. (his children had been sent to safety in Sweden). In the interwar years, France had welcomed Jews from across Europe. By 1939, as Jews fleeing Nazi rule brought the Jewish population in France to over 300,000, an increasingly conservative and nationalist government sought to limit immigration. Detention camps for Jews were established in southern France.

During this time, Vishniac was commissioned by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) and the Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT) to photograph and film an ORT vocational training school for Jewish refugees near Marseille. Vishniac’s parents had relocated to Nice in 1937, and while visiting them, he took playful, spontaneous photographs of Riviera beach life, a stark contrast to the intense and machine-focused ORT images that were to be his final photographic assignment for the AJDC until his return to Europe in 1947.

In late 1939, after entrusting a large selection of his negatives to his friend Walter Bierer in Paris, Vishniac was arrested and imprisoned at the Camp du Ruchard internment camp. Held for three months, he wrote desperate letters to family, friends, and the staff of the AJDC, describing the dismal conditions and pleading for assistance. Following his release, secured through the efforts of his wife, Vishniac waited in France while his family worked to obtain exit visas, with assistance from the AJDC. Vishniac reunited with Luta, Wolf, and Mara in Lisbon, and the family sailed for America on the S.S. Siboney in December 1940, arriving in America on New Year’s Day 1941.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Beachgoers in the afternoon, Nice, France]
c. 1939
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Students learning metalwork techniques, Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor (ORT), Marseille]
1939
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

YIVO Exhibitions in New York, January 1944 and January 1945

In 1944 and 1945, as World War II raged in Europe, Vishniac staged two large exhibitions at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, presenting his commissioned work from Eastern Europe to an American audience.

Founded in 1925 as the Yiddish Scientific Institute in Wilno, Poland, YIVO was created to preserve, research, and promote Eastern European Jewish culture and history during a period of rapid modernisation and immigration. After the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the organisation was reestablished in New York in 1940 as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, at 55 West 123rd Street, while a group of brave and dedicated archivists in Wilno worked to rescue precious material in defiance of Nazi orders.

Vishniac’s first exhibition at YIVO, Pictures of Jewish Life in Prewar Poland, opened in January 1944 and focused on urban Jewish life, with a large selection of images from Lublin, Warsaw, and Wilno. The second exhibition, Jewish Life in the Carpathians, opened in January 1945, and featured photographs of Jewish farming communities in the Carpathian Mountains, and yeshivas and religious life in Galicia.

The largely Yiddish-speaking audience in New York viewed images of their communities of origin just as those communities were being destroyed, a fate the viewers were virtually powerless to stop. As word of the destruction of Eastern European Jews spread across the Atlantic, Vishniac’s photographs – originally intended to call attention to the privation of living Eastern European Jews – began to be seen as “documents of a lost epoch,” as phrased in the exhibition text at YIVO. These exhibitions signalled the first major shift in the contextualisation of Vishniac’s work: from documentary assignments to bolster relief efforts in the late 1930s to images capturing a world on the brink of annihilation.

The YIVO exhibition boards, labeled in both English and Yiddish utilising an innovative, Bauhaus-inspired typography that originated in interwar Wilno, are now in the collection of ICP and are being displayed as a group for the first time since the original exhibitions.

Today, YIVO continues to advance the study of Eastern European Jewish cultural heritage, and houses an archive of more than 24 million artefacts.

“The Face of America at War”: New York, 1941-44

The recent discovery of Vishniac’s unsuccessful 1944 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship sheds new light on a group of more than 200 negatives from the early 1940s that had previously appeared to be unrelated. Printed and exhibited here for the first time, these images show the impact of war rationing on shoppers at the Washington Market, the war relief efforts of New York’s Chinese-American community, women’s entrance into the industrial workforce and the military, the carousing of off-duty soldiers in Central Park, and the impact of war on the lives of New Yorkers. Vishniac’s Guggenheim proposal described a “photographic series portraying the face of America at war,” and this diverse yet cohesive group of images was likely submitted as a sample portfolio with his application, the beginnings of a project never completed for want of funding. His extraordinary, extensive series on Chinatown, reminiscent of his photographs of urban Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, depicts a neighbourhood that is both separated from and integrated into the fabric of the larger city, reflective of Vishniac’s own efforts to navigate yet another new, adopted home as an outsider. The images capture the “objectivity” of “un-posed” journalistic photography, in the words of one recommender, and have a great deal in common with fellow Jewish émigré Robert Frank’s Guggenheim-funded project, The Americans, made a decade later.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Sisters Marion, Renate, and Karen Gumprecht, refugees assisted by the National Refugee Service (NRS) and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), shortly after their arrival in the United States, Central Park, New York]
1941
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Customers waiting in line at a butcher’s counter during wartime rationing, Washington Market, New York]
1941-1944
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Boys exercising in the gymnasium of the Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn]
1949
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Berlin in Ruins, 1947

In 1947, Vishniac returned to Europe as an American citizen, hired by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) and United Jewish Appeal (UJA) to document relief efforts in Jewish Displaced Persons’ Camps. While on assignment, Vishniac visited Berlin, where he created a bleak and poignant record of the destroyed city that had been his home for twenty years. Focusing on West Berlin, he took intimate photographs of his former Wilmersdorf neighbourhood, now reduced to ruins. The same locations that had thrummed with life in his street photography from the Weimar era are suffused with a haunting silence in his 1947 photographs. One photograph reveals the crumbling and mangled platform that had once been Vishniac’s living room. Other images capture the tentative steps of a city emerging from devastation: children walking hand-in-hand and playing amidst the ruins, flowers growing through the rubble, and hairdressers once more advertising their services. Together, these pictures, which have not been previously printed or exhibited, constitute a unique and highly personal contribution to the documentation of postwar life in Berlin.

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Boy standing on a mountain of rubble, Berlin]
1947
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
The streets are free of brown batallions!, Berlin
1947
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Refugees and Displaced Persons’ Camps, Germany and France, 1947

In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied nations had initially expected the repatriation of displaced refugees to take six months. Most Jewish refugees, however, no longer had communities or family to which they could return, presenting a unique challenge. Following the 1945 Harrison Report, the Allies considered Jewish survivors a distinct group, to be housed in exclusively Jewish camps and aided in eventual emigration. By mid-1947, 250,000 Jews lived in Displaced Persons’ Camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. Officially administered by the United Nations, the primary aid, support, and administration for the DP Camps came from Jewish charitable organisations, most notably the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC). In France, Jewish organisations ran DP Camps privately, housing nearly 40,000 refugees. Despite difficult conditions and profound trauma, Jewish life soon flourished in the camps, as families reunited and formed anew.

Commissioned by the AJDC and the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), Vishniac traveled to various DP Camps in 1947, documenting a broad range of relief programs, including food distribution centres, visa application lines, occupational training, and health services. Other images record children’s camps, religious and cultural events, and refugee reunions. Wired back to America, Vishniac’s images helped publicise the plight of homeless and stateless Jewish refugees, raising funds and increasing the pressure on Britain and the U.S. to open their doors to survivors.

Spurred by these cultural and educational programs and the emerging Zionist youth movement, survivors soon rallied against British restrictions on immigration to Palestine. Following the Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, and the American Displaced Persons Act of 1948, most Jews left DP Camps for Israel or the United States. By 1952, almost all DP Camps had closed.

Maya Benton, Curator at the International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Holocaust survivors and American relief worker, probably Schlachtensee Displaced Persons’ Camp, Zehlendorf, Berlin]
1947
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990)
[Holocaust survivors gathering outside a building where matzoh is being made in preparation for the Passover holiday, Hénonville Displaced Persons’ Camp, Picardy, France]
1947
© Mara Vishniac Kohn, courtesy International Center of Photography

Jewish Historical Museum
Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1
1011 PL Amsterdam

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Daily 10am – 5pm

Jewish Historical Museum website

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Aug

Review: ‘Sue Ford’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: Australian artist, Australian cabinet cards and cartes de visite, black and white photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, National Gallery of Victoria, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Australian artist, Australian feminism, Australian feminist photography, Australian landscape, Australian landscape photography, Australian photographer, Australian photography, Australian woman photographer, Australian women, Australian women photographer, Bob Hawke, Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Discussions between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, feminism, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Lyn and Carol, Photogram of two hands and garden path, photography and ageing, Somewhere in France 1917, Sue Ford, Sue Ford Annette, Sue Ford Discussions between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Sue Ford Dissolution, Sue Ford Fabian, Sue Ford Jim, Sue Ford Lyn and Carol, Sue Ford Photogram of two hands and garden path, Sue Ford Ross, Sue Ford Self-portrait, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1961, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1974, Sue Ford Self-portrait 1986, Sue Ford Shadow portraits, Sue Ford Somewhere in France 1917, Sue Ford Time, Sue Ford Time series, Sue Ford Time series II, Sue Ford Vietnam: the six o'clock news, Vietnam: the six o'clock news

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 24th August 2014

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Discussions between Bob Hawke and Galarrwuy Yunupingu
1988, printed 2014
Gelatin silver photograph
51 x 61cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

This is hugely disappointing exhibition of the work of Sue Ford at NGV Australia, Melbourne. The artist deserved better.

There is no doubting the importance of Ford’s early black and white photographs. Images of this type had not been seen in Australia before, and looking back now it is hard to appreciate the impact that the Time series (1962-74), Self-portrait with camera (1960-2006) and images of women had on the photographic scene at the time. These muscular, robust photographs, while not possessing great technical skill, are rightly acknowledged as seminal images in the history of photography in Australia. I cannot praise them highly enough.

However, this exhibition and the important series in it have been ruined by a disastrous hang. The first room is spoiled by an ugly, cheap looking round central installation which is covered by pinned images from the much later series Somewhere in France, 1917 (1995, below) inside of which is projected the video Faces 1976-96 (below). This huge installation simply destroys the sensitivity, size and presence of the small silver gelatin works, overpowering them with repetitive images of a much larger scale.

The second room features a haphazard disposition of Ford’s important portraits of women from her book A Sixtieth of a Second: Portraits of Women 1961-1981, the arrangement of which seems to have no rhyme or reason. It’s all downhill from there. It doesn’t help that Ford’s work looses focus after the initial succinct statements as she begins to work with experimental photographic techniques – photograms, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives – and, starting in the mid-1980s, branches out into research of Indigenous histories which only results in serviceable photographs at best. What is more disturbing is how later work such as the powerful series Shadow portraits (1994, below) are displayed. I remember seeing this series many years ago at the NGV in St Kilda Road and being bowled over by their size and formal presence; here in a darkened room they are displayed piecemeal and all impact and import is lost. The whole room should have been dedicated to this series, surrounding you with scans of nineteenth-century cartes-de-visite, the empty silhouettes filled with magical photograms of indigenous Australian fauna. That would have been something.

Finally, the exhibition shows 1990s works such as Bima, Brenda and the Madonna (1992-93), Video land (Kakadu river tour) (1994) and Yellowcake (1991) which continue Ford’s interest in social and political issues relating to the Australian landscape. Featuring still images of video shot from a tv screen these fractured, distorted and oversaturated images are printed as colour photocopies and then displayed as fragmented images in a rigid grid system pinned to the wall. These are ugly works. They contain too many elements, the colour, distortion, and bounding box of the tv screen playing badly against the too rigid grid system of the colour photocopies. Ford’s work seems to tail off into something unnatural, a dissolution of identity that really has nothing constructive to say. Perhaps these works do parallel the physical, ecological and spiritual gulf that Ford felt existed between many non-indigenous urban Australians but I don’t really feel that connection in the work and her investigation doesn’t lead to good art. If you want to see the most excellent use of colour, collage, montage, weaving and layering you only have to go up a level at NGV Australia to look at the David McDairmid exhibition to see how it should be done… it’s like night and day, one artist experimenting for abstraction’s sake, and the other really knowing their medium, what they are doing and what narrative / message they want to communicate.

What we cannot take away from Sue Ford is the utmost importance of those feminist images of strong, independent women and the precious, jewel-like, time travelling portrait works. For Ford the process of taking, looking at and using photographs was implicitly connected to a sense of time, time in flux in which the faces of a doubled past (1962-74, 1976-96) are reanimated in the present allowing for a consideration of the effects of ageing and change. Ultimately, these are conceptual works that have great power and integrity.

Unfortunately, the itsy bitsy design of this exhibition doesn’t allow any of the work to shine. It is not up to scratch and not worthy of the artist. Did the NGV run out of time, money and inspiration or where there other factors going on behind the scenes, such as access to the work? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but when you put this exhibition side by side with the 2011 Time Machine: Sue Ford at the Monash Gallery of Art, there is no comparison as to which better conveys the importance of Ford’s work in the history of Australian photography.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
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.

For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. The machine has an enormous power easily abused. Man seems to misuse his machines continuously, with disastrous results for this century. In Time series I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.

.
Sue Ford 1974

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974
1964-1974, printed 1974
From the Time series 1962-1974
Gelatin silver photograph
(a-b) 11.1 x 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 (PH171.a-b-1974)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Annette, 1962; Annette, 1974
1962-1974, printed 1974
From the Time series 1962-1974
Gelatin silver photograph
11.1 x 20.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) Pty Ltd Fund, 1974 (PH170.a-b-1974)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path)
c. 1970
Gelatin silver photogram
27.6 x 34.7cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Vietnam: the six o’clock news
c. 1970
Collage of cut gelatin silver photograph on offset-photo lithograph
19.1 x 24.3cm (image and sheet)
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Lyn and Carol
1961, printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
34.1 x 34.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased 1988 (372.1988)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

“The ground-breaking work of Australian photographer and filmmaker Sue Ford will be explored in a major retrospective opening at the National Gallery of Victoria on 17 April. One of the most important practitioners to emerge in the wave of 1970s feminist photographers, Ford is recognised for her inventive and unique approaches to the medium and passionate engagement with feminism and gender issues, contemporary politics and the histories of Australia and its Indigenous people.

The exhibition will bring together more than 150 photographs, digital prints, collages and films spanning the five decades of Ford’s career, as well as important archival materials and, poignantly, several unseen works that the artist was working on at the time of her death in 2009.

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “Sue Ford has a long and significant history with the National Gallery of Victoria; she was the first Australian photographer to hold a solo exhibition at the Gallery with her renowned Time Series in 1974, and we have been honoured to present her work many times since. It is appropriate, then, that the NGV presents this retrospective exhibition surveying and celebrating her artistic work and life.”

Ford’s Time Series 1962-1974 is regarded as a key moment in Australian photography. In this work, black-and-white double portraits of Ford’s friends and associates were taken around ten years apart and displayed side by side. Some sitters were photographed for a third and even fourth time, producing a remarkable dialogue on the passage of time, identity and personal histories. The entirety of the Time Series will be on display in the exhibition, along with Ford’s long-term project Self-portrait with camera, an extraordinary series of 47 self-portraits taken between 1960 and 2006.

The exhibition will feature Ford’s social documentary and portraiture work; both political and personal, these images reveal intimate depictions of life in inner-city Melbourne along with powerful records of critical political and social milestones including the 1988 Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory. Her prolific output also allows for the exhibition to survey the development of her experimentation with photographic, film, printing and multimedia techniques since the 1960s, such as the photogram, multiple exposures and mirroring of negatives.”

Press release from the NGV website

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Somewhere in France, 1917
1999
Digital plan prints on paper
(1-54) 219.6 x 901.8cm (overall) (installation)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1999 (1999.96.1-54)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Shadow portraits
1994
Colour photocopies (a-bbbb)
166.5 x 594.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1995 (1995.614.a-bbbb)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Jim, 1964; Jim, 1969; Jim 1974; Jim 1979
1964-1979, printed 2014
From the Time series II 1962-1982
Gelatin silver photographs
(a-d) 11.1 x 8.2cm (each)
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Fabian, 1966; Fabian, 1974; Fabian, 1980
1966-1980, printed 1982
From the Time series II 1962-1982
Gelatin silver photographs
(a) 11.0 x 7.6 cm, (b) 11.8 x 8.4 cm, (c) 11.3 x 8.2cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Purchased with funds provided by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales Contempo Group 2013 (265.1996)
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1961
1961, printed 2011
Type C photograph
26.0 x 19.9cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1974
1974, printed 2011
Selenium-toned gelatin silver photograph
19.9 x 18.0cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Self-portrait 1986
1986
Gelatin silver photograph
8.4 x 6.5cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Dissolution
2007
From the Last Light series 2007
Colour lightjet print
112.0 x 142.0cm
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne
© Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Bima, Brenda and the Madonna
1992-1993
Colour laser prints
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

Sue Ford (Australia 1943-2009)
Video land (Kakadu river tour) (detail)
1992-1993
Colour laser prints
Sue Ford Archive, Melbourne

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His art work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes Art Blart, an art and cultural memory archive, which posts mainly photography exhibitions from around the world. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne, a Master of Arts (Fine Art Photography) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne.

Contact

bunyanth@netspace.net.au

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LISTING OF ALL AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE ARCHIVE AT THIS LINK

LISTING OF ALL INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS AND EXHIBITIONS THAT HAVE APPEARED ON THE ARCHIVE AT THIS LINK

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Orphans and small groups’ 1994-96 Part 2

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Orphans and small groups' 1994-96 Part 2

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Archive for August, 2014

Exhibition dates: 29th June – 7th September 2014

Edwin F. Townsend

James Bidgood

Austin Young

Wilhelm Von Gloeden

Works

Attitudes towards his work during his lifetime and later

Del LaGrace Volcano

Exhibition dates: 27th May – 31st August 2014

A tour of the exhibition

Catalogue

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Foreword to the catalogue

And what about his Legacy?

What would he have thought about this project?

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 1st September 2014

Giacomo Balla

Francesco Cangiullo

Ivo Pannaggi

Futurism

Germany and the Bauhaus

About Futurism

Exhibition overview

Tullio Crali

Aeropittura

After the Second World War

Gerardo Dottori

Umberto Boccioni

Development of Futurism

Carlo Carrà

Luigi Russolo

Benedetta Cappa

Exhibition dates: 13th June – 31st August 2014

Micky Allan (Australia, b. 1944)

Virginia Coventry b. Melb 1942

Gerrit Fokkema (b. 1954, Papua New Guinea; Australia since 1958)

John Gollings (Australian, b. Melb 1944)

Tim Handfield (Australian, b. Melb 1952)

Ian North (b. 1945, New Zealand; Australia from 1971)

Robert Rooney (Australian, b. Melb 1937-2017)

Wesley Stacey (Australian, b. 1941)

Exhibition dates: 31st March – 1st September 2014

Exhibition dates: 9th May – 31st August 2014

Here’s winking at you, sweetie…

Interview with co-curator Simon Maidment

Exhibition dates: 2nd April – 24th August 2014

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 24th August 2014

Berlin Street Photography, 1920s-30s

Nazi Rise to Power in Germany, 1933-1938

German-Jewish Relief and Community Organizations, Berlin, mid- to late 1930s

Jewish Life in Eastern Europe, c. 1935-1938

Werkdorp Nieuwesluis Agrarian Training Camp, Wieringermeer, The Netherlands, 1939

Travel, Refuge, and Internment in France: Paris, Nice, and Marseille, c. 1939

YIVO Exhibitions in New York, January 1944 and January 1945

“The Face of America at War”: New York, 1941-44

Berlin in Ruins, 1947

Refugees and Displaced Persons’ Camps, Germany and France, 1947

Exhibition dates: 17th April – 24th August 2014

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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