Exhibition dates: 4th September – 25th October, 2014
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled, family home outside Milwaukee, 1957 (#1) 1957 Multiple exposure gelatin silver print 7 3/4 x 9 5/8″ Stamp Signature on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Vale Ray K. Metzker. An artist who made difference
The one and only Ray K. Metzker has made his last photograph, passing away recently at the age of 83.
RESPECT. That is the word that springs to mind when I think of this artist. I utterly respect this man’s work for its integrity, vision, experimentation and intensity. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography. In images that challenge our perception of what photography is, what photography can do, and what realities it can depict, Metzker produced sublimely beautiful and evocative images that were distinctly his own. They are formidable photographs. You cannot mistake his work for that of any other artist.
His handling of line and light is that of a master. His understanding of angle, camera placement, composition, composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarisation and other formal elements AS A MEANS TO AN END are all superlative. He does not use these elements because they are gimmicky or fashionable but because they are an inherent part of his vocabulary as an artist. They help him produce avant-garde images that talk about the things he wants to talk about. Nothing is superfluous. Everything is focused, intense and passionate. A passionate engagement with reality.
Metzker’s drawing with light surely comes from an enlightened mind. Magical. Wonderful. And so another spirit passes on…
Many thankx to the Laurence Miller Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery.
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled, Chicago, February 1959 (#1) 1959 Multiple exposure gelatin silver print, 7 3/4 x 9 5/8″ Stamp Signature on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled multiple print, 69 KC-MX 1969 Gelatin silver print, 6 3/4 x 8 5/8″ Signed on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Chicago, Multiple exposure 1958 Gelatin silver print, 7 3/8 x 7 1/2″ Signed and inscribed “Unique” on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
It is with great sadness that Laurence Miller Gallery announces the death of Ray K. Metzker. Ray passed away early this morning at the age of 83, after a long illness.
Ray K. Metzker had quietly been making extraordinary photographs for the better part of six decades. Today, he is recognised as one of the great masters of American photography, a virtuoso who has pursued his chosen medium passionately for fifty years. Metzker was born in 1931 in Milwaukee and attended the Institute of Design, Chicago – a renowned school that had a few years earlier been dubbed the New Bauhaus – from 1956 to 1959. He was thus an heir to the avant-garde photography that had developed in Europe in the 1920’s. Early in his career, his work was marked by unusual intensity. Composites, multiple-exposure, superimposition of negatives, juxtapositions of two images, solarisation and other formal means were part and parcel of his vocabulary. He was committed to discovering the potential of black and white photography during the shooting and the printing, and has shown consummate skill in each stage of the photographic process. Ray Metzker’s unique and continually evolving mastery of light, shadow and line transform the ordinary in the realm of pure visual delight.
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Strip Tease #11 c. 1968 Gelatin silver print, 2 1/2 x 20 1/2″ Stamp signature on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Atlantic City, 1966 (66 FD-2) 1966 Gelatin silver print, 6 x 6″ Signed on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Esteemed as a photographer, Ray Metzker’s creative practice was nevertheless unbounded by the conventional borders of the medium. Metzker sought out methods that allowed him access to the full potential of photography as an art form. He continually explored the medium’s untapped possibilities; at various times embracing the roll of film as a single picture, using the prints as building blocks for composite works, and even setting aside the camera to explore the expressive potential of the developing process itself.
Nowhere is his spirit of creative curiosity more evident than in the unique, non-editioned works that he crafted at every stage in his career. These one of a kind pieces are the focus of our new exhibition, many of them shown here for the first time.
A broad range of techniques and sensibilities are on display in this group of pictures. Even in some of the earliest pictures, dating from 1957, objects have been dissolved past the point of recognition leaving form and light as the subject. The world that comes back into focus later in the exhibition is often the natural one, as in his photograms from the 1990s where ghosts of leaves are traced onto the paper itself. Towards the end of the show’s chronology there are light-drawn “landscapes” where wind whipped clouds and darkened horizons rise up not out of a camera’s aperture but from light and the darkroom’s chemicals alone. There is an elemental quality to these later works: they seem to be striving to depict an essence more than an image.
Some of the most revealing works included are the pieces that employ only cut and folded paper. Metzker was always a very material photographer, as his darkroom manipulations attest, and in these works it is as if concerns of photographic exposure have fallen away and he is directly arranging light and shade in this most tactile of ways.
It is notable that the spirit of playful invention is unflagging across the six decades of work collected for this exhibition. There is an impassioned curiosity on display that seems continually refreshed by the act of making. It tells us a great deal about his conception of photography that, in a medium known for reproduction, Metzker never stopped making unique, non-reproducible works. An edition of one if you will, like the man himself.
On the occasion of Ray’s 83rd birthday, Laurence Miller Gallery invites you to experience more than three dozen of his one of a kind works, showing us that seeing is a unique act of creation.
Jacob Cartwright
Text from the Laurence Miller Gallery website
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled light drawing 1996 Gelatin silver print, 4 x 5″ Signed on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled light drawing 1996 Gelatin silver print, 10 3/4 x 13 1/4″ Signed on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled light drawing 2007 Gelatin silver print, 11 x 13 1/2″, mounted Signed and dated on mount recto Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Untitled light drawing 1996 Gelatin silver print, 15 x 19 1/2″ Signed on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Ray K. Metzker (American, 1931-2014) Strip Tease #68 c. 1966 Gelatin silver contact print, 30 3/4 x 1 1/8″ Stamp signature on verso Copyright the Estate of Ray K. Metzker, Courtesy Laurence Miller Gallery
Laurence Miller Gallery
There is no longer a physical exhibition space for this gallery. Laurence Miller Gallery currently operates as a private fine art photography dealer.
Opening hours: We are open by appointment only, with locations in New Hope, Pa. and New York City.
Never the objective camera, always a mixture of spirit and emotion
Minor White and Eugène Atget. Eugène Atget and Minor White. These two photographers were my heroes when I first started studying photography in the early 1990s. They remain so today. Nothing anyone can say can take away from the sheer simple pleasure of really looking at photographs by these two icons of the art form.
I have waited six years to do a posting on the work of Minor White, and this exhibition is the first major retrospective of White’s work since 1989. This posting contains thirty seven images, one of the biggest collections of his photographs available on the web.
What drew me to his work all those years ago? I think it was his clarity of vision that so enthralled me, that showed me what is possible – with previsualisation, clear seeing, feeling and thinking – when exposing a photograph. And that exposing is really an exposing of the Self.
Developing the concept of Steiglitz’s ‘equivalents’ (where a photograph can stand for an/other state of being), White “sought to access, and have connection to, fundamental truths… Studying Zen Buddhism, Gurdjieff and astrology, White believed in the photographs’ connection to the subject he was photographing and the subject’s connection back via the camera to the photographer forming a holistic circle. When, in meditation, this connection was open he would then expose the negative in the camera hopeful of a “revelation” of spirit in the subsequent photograph.” (MB) The capturing of these liminal moments in the flux of time and space is such a rare occurrence that one must be patient for the sublime to reveal itself, if only for a fraction of a second.
Although I cannot view this exhibition, I have seen the checklist of all the works in the exhibition. The selection is solid enough covering all the major periods in White’s long career. The book is also solid enough BUT BOTH EXHIBITION AND BOOK ARE NOT WHAT WE REALLY WANT TO SEE!
At first, Minor White photographed for the individual image – and then when he had a body of work together he would form a sequence. He seemed to be able to switch off the sequence idea until he felt “a storm was brewing” and his finished prints could be placed in another context. It was only with the later sequences that he photographed with a sequence in mind (of course there is also the glorious fold-out in The Eye That Shapes that is the Totemic sequence that is more a short session that became a sequence). In his maturity Minor White composed in sequences of images, like music, with the rise and fall of tonality and range, the juxtaposition of one image next to another, the juxtaposition of twenty or more images together to form compound meanings within a body of work. This is what we really need to see and are waiting to see: an exhibition and book titled: THE SEQUENCES OF MINOR WHITE. I hope in my lifetime! **
How can you really judge his work without understanding the very form that he wanted the work to be seen in? We can access individual images and seek to understand and feel them, but in MW their meaning remains contingent upon their relationship to the images that surround them, the ice/fire frisson of that space between images that guides the tensions and relations to each other. Using my knowledge as an artist and musician, I have sequenced the first seven images in this posting just to give you an idea of what a sequence of associations may look like using the photographs of Minor White. I hope he would be happy with my selection. I hope I have made them sing.
Other than a superb range of tones (for example, in Pavilion, New York 1957 between the flowers in shadow and sun – like an elegy to Edward Weston and the nautilus shell / pepper in thetin) the size, contrast, lighter/darker – warmer/cooler elements of MW’s photographs are all superb. These are the first things we look at whenwe technically critique prints from these simple criteria, and there aren’t many that pass. But these are all well made images by MW. He was never Diogenes with a camera, never the objective camera, he was always involved… and his images were printed with a mixture of spirit and emotion. Now, try and FEEL your response to the first seven images that I have put together. Don’t be too analytical, just try, with clear, peaceful mind and still body, to enter into the space of those images, to let them take you away to a place that we rarely allow ourselves to visit, a place that is is out of our normal realm of existence. It is possible, everything is possible. If photography becomes something else -then it does -then it does.
Finally, I want to address the review of the book by Blake Andrews on the photo-eye blog website (Blake Andrews. “Book Review: Manifestations of the Spirit,” on the photo-eye blog website October 6, 2014 [Online] Cited 26/06/2021). The opening statement opines: “Is photography in crisis again? Well then, it must be time for another Minor White retrospective.” What a thrown away line. As can be seen from the extract of an interview with MW (published 1977, below), White didn’t care what direction photography took because he could do nothing about it. He just accepted it for what it is and moved with it. He was not distressed at the direction of contemporary photography because it was all grist to the mill. To say that when photography is in crisis (it’s always in crisis!) you wheel out the work of Minor White to bring it back into line is just ridiculous… photography is -what it is, -what it is.
Blake continues, “Minor White was a jack-of-all-styles in the photo world, trying his hand at just about everything at one time or another. The plates in the book give a flavour of his shifting – some might say dilettantish – photo styles.” Obviously he agrees with this assessment otherwise he would not have put it in. I do not. Almost every artist in the world goes on a journey of discovery to find their voice, their metier, and that early experimentation is part of the overall journey, the personal and universal narrative that an artist pictures. Look at the early paintings of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko in their representational ease, or the early photographs of Aaron Siskind and how they progress from social documentary to abstract expressionism. The same with MW. In this sense every artist is a dilettante. Every photograph is part of his journey as an artist and has value in an of itself.
And I don’t believe that his mature voice was “internalised, messy, and deliberately obtuse,” – it is only so to those that do not understand what he sought to achieve through his images, those who don’t really understand his work.
Blake comments, “Twenty-five years later White’s star is rising again. One could speculate the reasons for the timing, that photography is in crisis, or at least adrift, and in need of a guru. But the truth is photography has been on the therapist’s couch since day one, going through this or that level of doubt or identity crisis. Is it an art? Science? Documentation? Can it be trusted? When Minor White came along none of these questions had been resolved, and they never will. But every quarter century or so it sure feels good to hang your philosopher’s hat on something solid. Or at least someone self-assured.”
Every quarter of a century, hang your philosophers hat on something solid? Or at least someone self-assured? The last thing that you would say about MW was that the was self-assured (his battles with depression, homosexuality, God, and the aftermath of his experiences during the Second World War); and the last thing that you would say about the philosophy and photographs of MW is that they are something solid and immovable.
For me, the man and his images are always moving, always in a constant state of flux, as avant-garde (in the sense of their accessing of the eternal) and as challenging and essential as they ever were. Through his work and writings Minor White – facilitator, enabler – allowed the viewer to become an active participant in an aesthetic experience that alters reality, creating an über reality (if you like), one whose aesthetics promotes an interrogation of both ourselves and the world in which we live.
“There are plays written on the simplest themes which in themselves are not interesting. But they are permeated by the eternal and he who feels this quality in them perceives that they are written for all eternity.” ~ Constantin Stanislavsky, (1863-1938) / My Life in Art.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
**The Minor White Archive at Princeton University Museum of Art has a project called The Minor White Archive proof cards: “The ultimate goal of this project is a stand-alone website dedicated to the Minor White Archive, and the completely scanned proof cards represent significant progress to this end. The website will be an authoritative source for the titles and dates of White’s photographs. All of the scanned proof cards will be available on the website so that users can search the primary source information as well as major published titles. Additionally, the website will include White’s major published sequences, with additional sequences uploaded gradually until the complete set is online. Eventually, the hope is to have subject-term browsing available, adding another access point to the Archive.”
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Self-discovery through a camera? I am scared to look for fear of discovering how shallow my Self is! I will persist however … because the camera has its eye on the exterior world. Camera will lead my constant introspection back into the world. So camerawork will save my life.”
“When you try to photograph something for what it is, you have to go out of yourself, out of your way, to understand the object, its facts and essence. When you photograph things for what ‘Else’ they are, the object goes out of its way to understand you.”
Minor White
When Paul Martineau, an associate curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, was collecting photographs for a new retrospective of Minor White’s photography, he discovered an album called The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors. Only two copies of the volume were produced, each containing thirty-two images of Tom Murphy, Minor’s student and model. “It’s a visual love letter: he only created two, one given to Tom and one for him,” Martineau told me.
Martineau’s show, Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, is the first major retrospective of White’s work since 1989. White was born in Minneapolis, in 1908, took photographs for the Works Progress Administration during the nineteen-thirties, and served in the Army during the Second World War. He kept company with Ansel Adams, Alfred Steiglitz, and Edward Steichen, and, in 1952, he helped found the influential photography magazine Aperture. Martineau said that, while the Getty retrospective “comes at a time when life is rife with visual imagery, most of it designed to capture our attention momentarily and communicate a simple message,” White aimed to more durably express “our relationships with one another, with the natural world, with the infinite.” White believed that all of his photographs were self-portraits; as Martineau put it, “he pushed himself to live what he called a life in photography.”
Controversial, misunderstood, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (American 1908-1976) pursued a life in photography with great energy and ultimately extended the expressive possibilities of the medium. A tireless worker, White’s long career as a photographer, teacher, editor, curator, and critic was highly influential and remains central to understanding the history of photographic modernism. Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit, on view July 8 – October 19, 2014 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center is the first major retrospective of his work since 1989.
The exhibition includes never-before-seen photographs from the artist’s archive at Princeton University, recent Getty Museum acquisitions, a significant group of loans from the collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, alongside loans from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Portland Art Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Also featured is White’s masterly photographic sequence Sound of One Hand (1965).
“Minor White had a profound impact on his many students, colleagues, and the photographers who considered him a true innovator, making this retrospective of his work long overdue” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The exhibition brings together a number of loans from private and public collections, and offers a rare opportunity to see some of his greatest work alongside unseen photographs from his extensive archive.”
One of White’s goals was to photograph objects not only for what they are but also for what they may suggest, and his pictures teem with symbolic and metaphorical allusions. White was a closeted homosexual, and his sexual desire for men was a source of turmoil and frustration. He confided his feelings in the journal he kept throughout his life and sought comfort in a variety of Western and Eastern religious practices. This search for spiritual transcendence continually influenced his artistic philosophy.
Early Career, 1937-1945
In 1937, White relocated from Minneapolis, where he was born and educated, to Portland, Oregon. Determined to become a photographer, he read all the photography books he could get his hands on and joined the Oregon Camera Club to gain access to their darkroom. Within five years, he was offered his first solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum (1942). White’s early work exhibits his nascent spiritual awakening while exploring the natural magnificence of Oregon. His Cabbage Hill, Oregon (Grande Ronde Valley) (1941) uses a split-rail fence and a coil of barbed wire to demonstrate the hard physical labor required to live off the land as well as the redemption of humankind through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.
During World War II, White served in Army Intelligence in the South Pacific. Upon discharge, rather than return to Oregon, he spent the winter in New York City. There, he studied art history with Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University, museum work with Beaumont Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art, and creative thought in photography with photographer, gallerist, and critic Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946).
Midcareer, 1946-1964
In 1946, famed photographer Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) invited White to teach photography at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco. The following year, White established himself as head of the program and developed new methods for training students. His own work during this period began to shift toward the metaphorical with the creation of images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect known as “equivalence,” meaning an image may serve as an idea or emotional state beyond the subject pictured. In 1952, White co-founded the seminal photography journal Aperture and was its editor until 1975.
In 1953, White accepted a job as an assistant curator at the George Eastman House (GEH) in Rochester, New York, where he organised exhibitions and edited GEH’s magazine Image. Coinciding with his move east was an intensification of his study of Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism, and the I Ching. In 1955, he began teaching a class in photojournalism at the Rochester Institute of Technology and shortly after began to accept one or two live-in students to work on a variety of projects that were alternately practical and spiritually enriching. During the late 1950s and continuing until the mid-1960s, White traveled the United States during the summers, making his own photographs and organising photographic workshops in various cities across the country.
By the late 1950s, at the height of his career, White pushed himself to do the impossible – to make the invisible world of the spirit visible through photography. White’s masterpiece – and the summation of his persistent search for a way to communicate ecstasy – is the sequence Sound of One Hand, so named after the Zen koan which asks “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
“White’s sequences are meant to be viewed from left to right, preferably in a state of relaxation and heightened awareness,” says Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “White called on the viewer to be an active participant in experiencing the varied moods and associations that come from moving from one photograph to the next.”
Late Career, 1965-1976
In 1965, White was appointed professor of creative photography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he developed an ambitious program in photographic education. As he aged, he became increasingly concerned with his legacy, and began working on his first monograph, Mirrors Messages Manifestations, which was published by Aperture in 1969. The following year, White was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and he was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971.
Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing until the early 1970s, White organised a series of groundbreaking thematic exhibitions at MIT – the first of which served as a springboard for forming the university’s photographs collection. In 1976, White died of heart failure and bequeathed his home to the Aperture Foundation and his photographic archive of more than fifteen thousand objects to Princeton University. The exhibition also includes work by two of White’s students, each celebrated photographers in their own right, Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) and Carl Chiarenza (American, born 1935).
“An important aspect of Minor White’s legacy was his influence on the next generation of photographers,” says Martineau. “Over the course of a career that lasted nearly four decades, he managed to maintain personal and professional connections with hundreds of young photographers – an impressive feat for a man dedicated to the continued exploration of photography’s possibilities.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
A. It makes absolutely no difference what I want it to do. It’s going to do what it’s going to do. All I can do is stand back and observe it.
Q. What don’t you want it to do?
A. That doesn’t make any difference either, It’ll do that whether I want it to or not!
Q. Surely, you’ve got to have some feelings?
A. In one sense I don’t care what photography does at all. I can just watch it do it. I can control my photography, I can do what I want with it – a little. If I can get into contact with something much wiser than myself , and it says get out of photography, maybe I would. I hesitate to say this because I know its going to be misunderstood. I’ll put I this way – I’m trying to be in contact with my Creator when I photograph. I know perfectly well its not possible to do this all the time, but there can be moments.
Q. Do you see anything in contemporary photography that distresses you?
A. What ever they do is fine.
Q. Is there any work that you are particularly interested in?
A. What ever my students are doing.
Q. There seems to be a passing on of certain sets of ideas and understandings. Do you feel yourself to be an inheritor of a set of ideas or ideals?
A. Naturally. After all I have two parents, so I inherited some thing. I’ve had many spiritual fathers for example. The photographers who I have been influenced by for example. There have been many other external influences. Students have had an influence. In a sense that’s an inheritance. After a while we work with material that comes to us and it becomes ours, we digest it. It becomes energy and food for us, its ours. And then I can pass it on to somebody else with a sense of responsibility and validity. I am quoting it in my words, it has become mine and that person will take it from me – just as I have taken it from people who have influenced me. Take what you can use, digest it, make it yours, and then transmit it to your children or your students.
Q. It’s a cycle?
A. No, it’s a continuous line. Not a cycle at all.
Interview by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper of Minor White, published in 3 parts in the January, February and March editions of Camera 1977.
Controversial, eccentric, and sometimes overlooked, Minor White (1908-1976) is one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, whose ideas and philosophies about the medium of photography have exerted a powerful influence on a generation of practitioners and still resonate today. Born and raised in Minneapolis, his photographic career began in 1938 in Portland, Oregon with assignments as a “creative photographer” for the Oregon Art Project, an outgrowth of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
After serving in World War II as a military intelligence officer, White studied art history at Columbia University in New York. It was during this period that White’s focus started to shift toward the metaphorical. He began to create images charged with symbolism and a critical aspect called “equivalency,” which referred to the invisible spiritual energy present in a photograph made visible to the viewer and was inspired by the work of Alfred Stieglitz. White’s belief in the spiritual and metaphysical qualities in photography, and in the camera as a tool for self-discovery, was crucial to his oeuvre.
Minor White: Manifestations of the Spirit (Getty Publications, 2014) gathers together for the first time a diverse selection of more than 160 images made by Minor White over five decades, including some never published before. Accompanying the photographs is an in-depth critical essay by Paul Martineau entitled “‘My Heart Laid Bare’: Photography, Transformation, and Transcendence,” which includes particularly insightful quotations from his journals, which he kept for more than forty years.
The result is an engaging narrative that weaves through the main threads of White’s work and life – his growth and tireless experimentation as an artist; his intense mentorship of his students; his relationships with Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ansel Adams, who had a profound influence on his work; and his labor of love as cofounder and editor of Aperture magazine from 1952 until 1976. The book also addresses White’s life-long spiritual search and ongoing struggle with his own sexuality and self-doubt, in response to which he sought comfort in a variety of religious practices that influenced his continually metamorphosing artistic philosophy.
Published here in its entirety for the first time is White’s stunning series The Temptation of Anthony Is Mirrors, consisting of 32 photographs of White’s student and model Tom Murphy made in 1947 and 1948 in San Francisco. White’s photographs of Murphy’s hands and feet are interspersed within a larger group of portraits and nude figure studies. White kept the series secret for years as at the time he made the photographs it was illegal to publish or show images with male frontal nudity. Anyone making such images would be assumed to be homosexual and outed at a time when this invariably meant losing gainful employment.
Other works shown in this rich collection are White’s early images of the city of Portland that depict his experimentations with different styles and nascent spiritual awakening; his photographs of the urban streets of San Francisco where he lived for a time; his elegant images of rocks, sandy beaches and tidal pools in Point Lobos State Park in Northern California that are an homage to Edward Weston; and the series The Sound of One Hand made in the vicinity of Rochester, New York where he also taught classes at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and curated shows at the George Eastman House (GEH). Paul Martineau describes this iconic series as “White’s chef d’oeuvre, the work that is the summation of his persistent search or a way to communicate ecstasy.” Among the eleven images in the Getty collection are Windowsill Daydreaming, Rochester, Night Icicle, 72 N. Union Street, Rochester, and Pavilion, New York.
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Dodd Building, Portland, Oregon c. 1939 Gelatin silver print 34.3 x 26.7cm (13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.) Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services Administration
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Lily Pads and Pike, Portland, Oregon c. 1939 Gelatin silver print 34 x 26.8cm (13 3/8 x 10 9/16 in.) Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services
Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Design (Cable and Chain), Portland, Oregon c. 1940 Gelatin silver print 33.8 x 25.8cm (13 5/16 x 10 3/16 in.) Fine Arts Program, Public Buildings Service, U.S. General Services Administration
My god, how can a dryer hood or a pine cone become so sensual?
It should have been Paul-Martial’s World of Extra-Ordinary Things!
Marcus
Many thankx to the Kunstmuseum Basel for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
On July 5, 2014, the Kunstmuseum Basel opens a new exhibition presenting a selection of one hundred photographs from the archives of the Paris-based advertising agency Éditions Paul-Martial. The black-and-white pictures formed the basis for posters, newspaper advertisements, and brochures and show ordinary things: buildings, cars, typewriters, radiators, mannequins. What was unusual and novel, however, were the composition, lighting, and exposure of the pictures. In today’s perspective, the collection reflects the multifaceted evolution of photography from the 1920s onward. At the same time, it is an invaluable source for historians, documenting early forms of the carefully designed presentation of commodities and strategies designed to lure the consumer. The photographs are part of a collection newly acquired from the Herzog Collection and have never been on public display.
Cans make it possible to preserve food for the long term; zippers allow bags and pockets to be securely closed; rubber soles protect the walker from slipping; car jacks make it easier to change a tire: the advertising photographs produced by Éditions Paul-Martial tell stories about everyday life and how products like radiators, boilers, and cooking stoves help make it more pleasant. This renders the collection an extraordinarily valuable resource for historians: it illustrates the early history of the staging of consumer goods and the strategies employed to seduce the viewer. Beyond consumer products, the agency’s photographers also captured the new worlds of work in factories and offices and the rise of modern travel and communication technologies. For the time being, most of the photographs’ creators remained anonymous; in the business perspective, individual authorship was obviously a secondary concern, especially since the majority of the pictures were a sort of intermediate product to be used by graphic artists in the design of brochures and posters.
New Objectivity and Neues Sehen
The historic photographs also reflect the multifaceted evolution of photography as an art in its own right from the 1920s onward. Pictures of buildings, machines, and selected products hew to the sober aesthetic of the New Objectivity, which took hold after the Great War. Photographs of transformer stations and bridges point to the Neues Sehen (New Vision) of the Bauhaus photographers and the works of the Russian avant-garde, which emphasised diagonal lines to heighten the dynamic quality of the picture – this influence is also evident in techniques such as photomontage and double exposures. In isolated objects and enigmatic motifs such as a pinecone, the surreal, mysterious, and sometimes also absurd infiltrate the world of ordinary things.
The photographers’ love of experimentation is palpable throughout: they often created small series in which they tried different lighting effects and unusual angles of view. The selection of a hundred photographs is drawn from a larger collection the museum acquired from the collection of Peter and Ruth Herzog, Basel, in 2012 through a combined purchase-and-donation agreement. The exhibition was designed in close collaboration between the curator, Anita Haldemann, and the photography collector and expert Peter Herzog.
The Fonds Paul-Martial – considerable parts of its inventory have also gone to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole, the department of prints and photography at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the collection of Marc Pagneux, France – is still widely unknown, and the work of exploring this exceptionally rich archive, which promises important insights into the history of photography and especially of contemporary art, has only just begun.
Brave man, hanging over the side of a rickety biplane at 15,000 feet taking aerial photographs during World War One but just look at the images he brought back, especially the hellish Untitled (Vaux) (1918-1919, below). I’m still not that convinced by his portraiture. The technical proficiency is magnificent (lighting, set, costume) but they are just too styled for me – the cat in the top left corner of Noel Coward (1932, below), the bowler hat of Charles Chaplin (1931, below) and the double shadow of Fred Astaire in Funny Face (1927, below) coupled with bands of light/dark and tons of “atmosphere” (certainly not sharp and clear!) which echo the mannerisms of Pictorialism. I see little modernist aesthetics and advertising tactics in these photographs. They are beautiful but they leave me unengaged. I much prefer the advertising photography in the next posting, much more angular and modern. You will have to wait and see what it is!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
At the start of World War I in 1914, Edward Steichen was a pioneering champion of art photography – catapulting to fame as a leading member of the Photo Secessionists and as cofounder of the trailblazing magazine Camera Work. Yet by the early 1920s, Steichen had rejected the soft focus, dreamy landscapes and portraits of his early years in favour of realist photographs made for informational purposes or popular consumption. This turning point was first marked by his role in World War I as chief of the Photographic Section of the American Expeditionary Forces from 1917 to 1919; and was fully realised in his subsequent work as lead photographer at Condé Nast publications from 1923 to 1937.
While on military duty, Steichen helped adapt aerial photography for intelligence purposes, implementing surveillance programs that had a lasting impact on modern warfare. He later reflected: “The wartime problem of making sharp, clear pictures from a vibrating, speeding airplane ten to twenty thousand feet in the air had brought me a new kind of technical interest in photography… Now I wanted to know all that could be expected from photography.” Steichen began to value photography’s capacity to transmit and encode information, and he soon proved his savvy as a collaborator and producer rather than a solitary auteur – new skills that enabled his subsequent groundbreaking career in magazines. Upon his return to New York in 1923, Steichen joined Condé Nast publications, creating iconic fashion photographs and celebrity portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Over a period of nearly 15 years he created images that redefined the field through their clever use of modernist aesthetics and advertising tactics, becoming an influential impresario who promoted photography as a mass-media tool.
Focusing on rarely seen Steichen photographs drawn from the Art Institute’s collection, this exhibition includes a unique album of over 80 World War I aerial photographs assembled and annotated by Steichen himself as well as a group of iconic glamour portraits and fashion photographs done for Condé Nast, featuring notable figures such as Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and Gloria Swanson.
Throughout his extensive career, famed photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973) championed photography’s multiple roles – from his earliest efforts to promote American photography as an equal among the modern fine arts, to his groundbreaking work for the magazine industry. A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sharp, Clear Pictures: Edward Steichen’s World War I and Condé Nast Years, on view from June 28 – September 28, 2014, in Galleries 1-4, examines a crucial period in Steichen’s career, when he rejected the painterly Pictorialist aesthetic of his early years in favour of a straight, information-based approach. This turning point was first signalled by Steichen’s role in World War I, as chief of the Photographic Section of the American Expeditionary Forces from 1917 to 1919, and was fully realised in his work as lead photographer at Condé Nast Publications from 1923 to 1937.
Focusing on rarely seen Steichen photographs drawn from the Art Institute’s collection, this exhibition includes a unique album of over 80 World War I aerial photographs assembled and annotated by Steichen himself as well as a group of iconic glamour portraits and fashion photographs done for Condé Nast, featuring such early Hollywood royalty as Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson, as well as key historical figures like Winston Churchill.
Prior to WWI, Edward Steichen was a pioneering champion of art photography – he had a leading reputation in the Photo Secession movement in New York, and, along with his mentor Alfred Stieglitz, had cofounded its trail-blazing fine-art journal Camera Work. Together, they opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later 291, which first presented Picasso, Bråncusi, and a range of progressive photographers to the American public. In 1906, seeking a change, Steichen moved to Voulangis, France, with his family, where he immersed himself in European modern art. They remained there until the outbreak of the war in 1914, when, under the threat of advancing German troops, they fled home to the United States.
In July 1917, Steichen entered active duty with the goal of becoming “a photographic reporter, as Mathew Brady had been in the Civil War,” but he quickly abandoned this romantic notion to help implement the newest weapon of war – aerial photography. While on military duty, Steichen helped adapt aerial photography for intelligence purposes, implementing surveillance programs that had a lasting impact on modern warfare. He later reflected: “The wartime problem of making sharp, clear pictures from a vibrating, speeding airplane ten to twenty thousand feet in the air had brought me a new kind of technical interest in photography… Now I wanted to know all that could be expected from photography.” Steichen began to value photography’s capacity to transmit and encode information, and he soon proved his savvy as a collaborator and producer rather than a solitary auteur – new skills that enabled his subsequent groundbreaking career in magazines.
Following his military discharge in 1919, Steichen returned to Voulangis, where for a period of three years he created work that embraced clear focus, close cropping, and other techniques of modernist photography. Upon his return to New York in 1923, Steichen joined Condé Nast Publications, creating iconic fashion photographs and celebrity portraits for Vogue and Vanity Fair. In undertaking this challenging endeavour, the organisational and technical skills Steichen gained during his time in the military and in Voulangis proved invaluable.
Steichen championed the cultural and economic potential of celebrity, fashion, and advertising photography, creating images that became the foundation for contemporary magazine photography. Over a period of nearly 15 years he created images that redefined the field through their clever use of modernist aesthetics and advertising tactics, becoming an influential impresario who promoted photography as a mass-media tool.
Press release from The Art Institute of Chicago website
I started the archive 6 years ago with 11 people a day reading it. Today the archive averages between 3-4,000 people a day and has over 3,000 Likes on Facebook.
Reproduced below are a couple of postings from the archive on its very first day 13/11/2008 – just text please note, no images – and a mandala image of the Sahasrãra or Crown Chakra (for creativity) to celebrate the milestone.
Namaste
Marcus
The artist does not turn money into time
“The artist does not turn time into money, the artist turns time into energy, time into intensity, time into vision. The exchange that art offers is an exchange in kind; energy for energy, intensity for intensity, vision for vision… Can we afford to live imaginatively, contemplatively?”
Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects. London: Vintage, 1996, p. 139.
After Light
“And on the other end of the spectrum, there is the AFTER LIGHT, a light of the past, which are echoes from past experiences so intense that they sometimes appear in front of us in the form of unexpected shadows. They hide on clear days under the roofs of houses. It is believed to be the same light seen by people we knew many years ago that survives like a message in a bottle, but always in a precarious way and often vanishes into thin air.”
Helguera, Pablo. “How to Understand the Light on a Landscape,” in Patt, Lise (ed.,). Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, p. 119.
Sahasrãra or Crown Chakra / Thousand Petal Lotus
“That for which they seek is that which searches.”
Saint Francis of Assissi
Symbol
The Crown Chakra is known as the Thousand Petal Lotus. The number 1000, adds up and reduces to the number 1 in numerology. The number one represents strong leadership and will power, a courageous person who is goal oriented and driven. A number one person is a pioneer who is independent and individualistic and approaches issues from a unique perspective. A number one is original and sometimes unconventional. They possess tremendous potential for success in life.
Throughout history it has been depicted in paintings of Jesus the Christ, Buddha, Saints, Angels and other highly evolved beings as a golden white halo around their heads.
Colour
The Crown Chakra is associated with the colour violet. Some references link it to the colour white as well. Violet is the highest colour in the light spectrum. It represents the spiritual or higher self, wisdom, vitality, intuitive awareness, passion and dignity. White is purity and the colour of the Divine light. Red, which is the lowest colour on our physical perceptual light spectrum, and just above infrared light, rules the Root Chakra. Conversely, violet, the highest colour on our physical perceptual light spectrum, and just below ultra-violet light, rules the Crown Chakra.
Sense
Our multidimensional and extrasensory senses are ruled by the seventh chakra. Once this chakra is opened, our sense of empathy and unity expands. When we raise our consciousness, we experience another person, place or object as if we are inside of them or as if we are “being” them. It is important, then, that we remember that with this power comes responsibility. We should activate these senses only to provide help or healing – NEVER for mere curiosity or with any malicious intent.
Compassion is the main sense that develops as our Crown Chakra opens. We have two kinds of compassion: Crown Compassion, which is more about perception and communication, and Heart Compassion, which is more about emotions and empathy.
Element
The element of this Chakra is the Cosmic Energy, which is often experienced as an inner light emanating from the deepest part of our being. This Cosmic Energy, which rules the higher kingdoms and stems from the Source, feels like an ultimate intelligence and a sense of all-knowing. When our Crown Chakra opens we can also experience the complete isolation and blackness of the Great Void. This Void, which resonates just below the fifth dimension, represents the raw potential for all that can, or will be. The total darkness is representative of the centre of a seed before it opens into the light of manifestation. when we can perceive from our Crown Chakra, we can identify both extremes of all polarities.
The opening of the Crown Chakra expands our perception into the fifth dimension where there are NO polarities. Therefore, there are many paradoxes associated with this Chakra as it represents the “end of all paradox.” As we travel through the higher dimensions, it is important that we release all judgments associated with the polarities of light and dark. We must instead consult our own inner knowing and higher consciousness to navigate us through our inner worlds. Eventually, we will all be aware of our fifth dimensional selves; they know no judgment and hold no fear. For what is judgment, if not a form of fear?
Consciousness
Since our Crown Chakra represents our multidimensional consciousness, as we open this Chakra our reality will no longer be limited to the third and fourth dimension. When our Brow Chakra, the sixth Chakra, opens we begin to travel into the higher sub planes of the fourth dimension. With the opening of our seventh Chakra, and the subsequent activation of our Third Eye, our consciousness can now enter the fifth dimension. It is then that the many realities around and within us gradually become consciously apparent to us.
The process of our awakening begins with expanding the consciousness of our physical selves and working to clear our etheric bodies. Then the astral, the mental, the causal and the spiritual I AM consciousness can align themselves in preparation to ascend into the fifth dimension. Until we reach the fifth dimension we can “work” towards enlightenment, but from the fifth dimension on, we must simply “BE”. “Doing” is not important then; consciousness alone is important. And finally, in the sixth and seventh dimensions even consciousness is not important as there is only the “Isness”, the “Nowness” and the “Hereness.”
Exhibition dates: 8th February – 2nd November, 2014
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor
Curators: Organised by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) David Wojnarowicz 1981 Gelatin silver print 14 x 14″ (35.6 x 35.6cm) The Fellows of Photography Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish four of the photographs in the posting. The rest of the images were sourced from the Internet in order to give the reader a more comprehensive understanding of what this exhibition is actually about – especially if you are thousands of miles away and have no hope of ever seeing it!
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition is divided into 6 themes each with its own gallery space:
1/ Surveying the Studio 2/ The Studio as Stage 3/ The Studio as Set 4/ A Neutral Space 5/ Virtual Spaces 6/ The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground
A Neutral Space
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Eleanor 1948 Gelatin silver print 4 1/2 x 3 1/4″ (11.4 x 8.3cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Charles Harry Jones (English, 1866-1959) Brussels Sprouts c. 1900 Gelatin silver printing-out-paper print 6 1/8 × 8 1/16″ (15.5 × 20.5cm) Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel Museum of Modern Art Collection
Charles Harry Jones (1866 – 15 November 1959) was an English gardener and photographer, noted for his still lifes of fruit and vegetables.
The photographs were probably made between 1895 and 1910, and likely while he was employed at Ote Hall. Jones’ work was never exhibited in his lifetime, and was largely unknown even to his family, until the photographic prints were discovered by accident in 1981. Sean Sexton found a suitcase containing hundreds of prints of vegetables, fruits and flowers at Bermondsey antiques market. Other than a very few exceptions, Jones’ photographs exist only in unique examples. None of the glass-plate negatives have been located.
Jones isolated his vegetables, fruits and flowers against neutral dark or light backgrounds, in the manner of formal studio portraits. He used long exposures and small apertures to give depth of field.
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Cala Leaves 1932 Gelatin silver print 9 9/16 x 7 9/16″ (24.3 x 19.2cm) Gift of Paul F. Walter Museum of Modern Art Collection
Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004) Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, Reno, Nevada, from the series In the American West August 30, 1983 Gelatin silver print, printed 1985 47 1/2 x 37 1/2″ (120.6 x 95.2cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) Pascal (Paris) 1980 Gelatin silver print 14 5/8 x 14 11/16″ (37.1 x 37.3cm) Gift of David Wojnarowicz Museum of Modern Art Collection
Valérie Belin (French, b. 1964) Untitled from the series Mannequins 2003 Gelatin silver print 61 x 49″ (154.9 x 124.5cm) Purchase Museum of Modern Art Collection
Laurie Simmons (American, b. 1949) Allan McCollum (American, b. 1944) Untitled from the series Actual Photos 1985 Silver dye bleach print 9 5/16 x 6 5/16″ (23.7 x 16.1cm) Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
Josephine Meckseper (German, b. 1964) Blow-Up (Michelli, Knee-Highs) 2006 Chromogenic colour print 78 5/8 x 62 5/8″ (199.7 x 159.1cm) Fund for the Twenty-First Century Museum of Modern Art Collection
Christian Marclay (American and Swiss, b. 1955) Allover (Genesis, Travis Tritt, and Others) 2008 Cyanotype Composition and sheet: 51 1/2 x 97 3/4″ (130.8 x 248.3cm) Publisher and printer: Graphic studio, University of South Florida, Tampa Acquired through the generosity of Steven A. and Alexandra M. Cohen Museum of Modern Art Collection
Luigi Veronesi (28 May 1908 – 25 February 1998) was an Italian photographer, painter, scenographer and film director born in Milan.
Thomas Ruff (German, b. 1958) phg.06 2012 Chromogenic colour print 100 3/8 x 72 13/16″ (255 x 185cm) Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London Museum of Modern Art Collection
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Rayograph 1923 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 x 7″ (23.9 x 17.8cm) Purchase Museum of Modern Art Collection
György Kepes (American born Hungary, 1906-2001) Abstraction – Surface Tension #2 c. 1940 Gelatin silver print 14 x 11 1/8″ (35.6 x 28.3cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Pure Energy and Neurotic Man 1941 Gelatin silver print, printed 1971 19 1/8 x 15 1/2″ (48.6 x 39.3cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Cadenza 1940 Gelatin silver print, printed 1971 17 7/8 x 15″ (45.4 x 38.2cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Focusing Water Waves, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1958-1961 Gelatin silver print 6 9/16 x 7 15/16″ (16.7 x 20.1cm) Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz Museum of Modern Art Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Wave Pattern with Glass Plate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1958-1961 Gelatin silver print 6 9/16 x 7 9/16″ (16.7 x 19.2cm) Gift of Ronald A. Kurtz Museum of Modern Art Collection
Heinz Hajek-Halke (German, 1898-1983) Embrace (Umarmung) 1947-1951 Gelatin silver print 15 5/8 x 11 3/8″ (39.7 x 29.0cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Lead Falling in a Shot Tower 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 9/16 x 9 1/2″ (19.3 x 24.2cm) Gift of Gus and Arlette Kayafas Museum of Modern Art Collection
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Bouncing Ball Bearing 1962 Gelatin silver print 9 9/16 x 7 11/16″ (24.3 x 19.5cm) Gift of Gus and Arlette Kayafas Museum of Modern Art Collection
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) This is Coffee 1933 Gelatin silver print 9 7/8 x 12 7/8″ (25.1 x 32.7cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Sand Curtain (Sandvorhang) 1983 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Sand Stairs (Sandtreppe) 1975 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Rubber Motor (Gummimotor) 1983 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Sand Cone (Sandkegel) 1984 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Sand Pillar (Sandturm) 1987 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Sand (Sand) 1988 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Umbrella (Schirm) 1989 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Barrel (Fass) 1985 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Carriage (Wagen) 1982 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (Swiss, b. 1938) Tube (Schlauch) 1982 Super 8 film transferred to video (colour, silent) Approximately 2 min. Committee on Media Funds Museum of Modern Art Collection
Roman Signer (b. 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland) is principally a visual artist who works in sculpture, installations photography, and video. Signer’s work has grown out of, and has affinities with both land art and performance art, but they are not typically representative of either category.It is often being described as following the tradition of the Swiss engineer-artist, such as Jean Tinguely and Peter Fischli & David Weiss.
Signer’s “action sculptures” involve setting up, carrying out, and recording “experiments” or events that bear aesthetic results. Day-to-day objects such as umbrellas, tables, boots, containers, hats and bicycles are part of Signer’s working vocabulary. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Signer advocates ‘controlled destruction, not destruction for its own sake’.Action Kurhaus Weissbad (1992) saw chairs catapulted out of a hotel’s windows; Table (1994) launched a table into the sea on four buckets; Kayak (2000) featured the artist being towed down a road in a canoe. In documenta 8 (1987), he catapulted thousands of sheets of paper into the air to create an ephemeral wall in the room for a brief, but all the more intense moment. As the Swiss representative at the Venice Biennale in 1999, he made 117 steel balls fall from the ceiling on to lumps of clay lying on the ground.Many of his happenings are not for public viewing, and are only documented in photos and film.Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event.
Kiki Smith (American born Germany, b. 1954) My Secret Business 1993 Lithograph 23 9/16 x 18 1/8″ (59.8 x 46cm) Gift of Howard B. Johnson Museum of Modern Art Collection
Adrian Piper (American, b. 1948) Food for the Spirit #2 1971, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print 14 9/16 x 15″ (37 x 38.1cm) The Family of Man Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
Adrian Piper (American, b. 1948) Food for the Spirit #8 1971, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print 14 9/16 x 14 15/16″ (37 x 38cm) The Family of Man Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
Adrian Piper (American, b. 1948) Food for the Spirit #14 1971, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print 14 9/16 x 15″ (37 x 38.1cm) The Family of Man Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Indian Club Demonstration 1939 Gelatin silver print 13 x 10″ (33.0 x 26.0cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Bobby Jones with an Iron 1938 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 x 11 1/2″ (24.4 x 29.2cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
John Divola (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Vandalism 1974 Gelatin silver print 7 1/16 x 7 1/16″ (18.0 x 18.0cm) Purchase Museum of Modern Art Collection
John Divola (American, b. 1949) Untitled from the series Vandalism 1974 Gelatin silver print 7 x 7″ (17.9 x 17.9cm) Purchase Museum of Modern Art Collection
Robert Frank (American born Switzerland, 1924-2019) Boston (detail) March 20, 1985 Colour instant prints (Polaroids) with hand-applied paint and collage Each 27 3/4 x 22 1/4″ (70.3 x 56.4cm) Acquired through the generosity of Polaroid Corporation Museum of Modern Art Collection
Anna Blume (German, 1937-2020) Bernhard Blume (German, 1937-2011) Kitchen Frenzy (Küchenkoller) (detail) 1986 Gelatin silver prints Each 66 15/16 x 42 1/2″ (170 x 108cm) Acquired through the generosity of the Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art Collection
Anna Blume (née Helming; 21 April 1936 – 18 June 2020) and Bernhard Johannes Blume (8 September 1937 – 1 September 2011) were German art photographers. They created sequences of large black-and-white photos of staged scenes in which they appeared themselves, with objects taking on a “life” of their own. Their works have been shown internationally in exhibitions and museums, including New York’s MoMA. They are regarded as “among the pioneers of staged photography”. …
Anna and Bernhard Blume together created installations, sequences of large photo scenes and, mostly in the 1990s, Polaroids. Both created drawings. They staged and photographed scenes in which they appeared themselves, with objects taking on a “life” of their own. According to the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, their process was to create their picture sequences together and complete all related tasks without outside help. That included designing the sets and costumes, developing the negatives, and producing enlargements; at each stage the artwork was refined, polished and painted. Anna said: “Wir malen mit der Kamera, und diese malerische Arbeit findet auch noch im Labor statt.” (We paint with our camera, and this painterly work continues in the lab, too.) The images were produced without the aid of digital manipulation or post-production montages. Taking pictures of a “flying, crashing, and swirling world”, the artists used safety features such as ropes, nets and mattresses.
Exhibition dates: 8th February – 2nd November, 2014
The Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, third floor
Curators: Organised by Quentin Bajac, The Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator, with Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography
Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941) Composite Photo of Two Messes on the Studio Floor 1967 Gelatin silver print 40 1/2″ x 10′ 3″ (102.9 x 312.4cm) Gift of Philip Johnson Museum of Modern Art Collection
A bumper two part posting on this fascinating, multi-dimensional subject: photographic practices in the studio, which may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. The exhibition occupies all MoMA’s six photography galleries, each gallery with its own sub theme, namely, Surveying the Studio, The Studio as Stage, The Studio as Set, A Neutral Space, Virtual Spaces and The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground. See Part 2 of the posting.
The review of this exhibition “When a Form Is Given Its Room to Play” by Roberta Smith on the New York Times website (6th February 2014) damns with faint praise. The show is a “fabulous yet irritating survey” which “dazzles but often seems slow and repetitive.” Smith then goes on to list the usual suspects: “And so we get professional portraitists, commercial photographers, lovers of still life, darkroom experimenters, artists documenting performances and a few generations of postmodernists, dead and alive, known and not so, exploring the ways and means of the medium. This adds up to plenty to see: around 180 images from the 1850s to the present by some 90 photographers and artists. The usual suspects here range from Julia Margaret Cameron to Thomas Ruff, with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lucas Samaras, John Divola and Barbara Kasten in between.” There are a few less familiar and postmodern artists thrown in for good measure, but all is “dominated by black-and-white images in an age when colour reigns.”
The reviewer then rightly notes the paucity of “postmodern photography of the 1980s, much of it made by women, that did a lot to reorient contemporary photo artists to the studio. It is a little startling for an exhibition that includes so many younger artists dealing with the artifice of the photograph (Ms. Belin, for example) to represent the Pictures Generation artists with only Cindy Sherman, James Casebere and (in collaboration with Allan McCollum) Laurie Simmons” before finishing on a positive note (I think!), noting that the curators “had aimed for a satisfying viewing experience, which, these days, is something to be grateful for.”
SOMETHING TO BE GRATEFUL FOR… OH, TO BE SO LUCKY IN AUSTRALIA!
Just to have the opportunity to view an exhibition of this quality, depth and breadth of concept would be an amazing thing. Even a third of the number of photographs (say 60 works) that address this subject at any one of the major institutions around Australia would be fantastic but, of that, there is not a hope in hell.
Think Marcus, think… when was the last major exhibition, I mean LARGE exhibition, at a public institution in Australia that actually addressed specific ISSUES and CONCEPTS in photography (such as this), not just putting on monocular exhibitions about an artists work or exhibitions about a regions photographs?
Ah, well… you know, I can’t really remember.
Perhaps the American Dreams exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery, but that was a GENERAL exhibition about 20th century photography with no strong investigative conceptual theme and it was imported from George Eastman House.
Here in Australia, all we can do is look from afar, purchase the catalogue and wonder wistfully what the exhibition actually looks like and what we are missing out on. MoMA sent me just 10 images media images. I have spent hours scouring the Internet for other images to fill the void of knowledge and vision (and then cleaning those sometimes degraded images), so that those of us not privileged enough to be able to visit New York may gain a more comprehensive understanding of what this exhibition, and this multi-faceted dimension of photography, is all about.
It’s a pity that our venerable Australian institutions and the photography curators in them seem to have had a paucity of ideas when it comes to expounding interesting critiques of the medium over the last twenty years or so. What a missed opportunity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish six of the photographs in the posting. The rest of the images were sourced from the Internet. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February – November, 2014
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February – November, 2014
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February – November, 2014 showing at right, Seydou Keïta’s Untitled 1959
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February – November, 2014 showing at left and centre the work of Richard Avedon including Carl Hoefert, unemployed blackjack dealer, Reno, Nevada, from the series In the American West August 30, 1983; and at right, the work of Peter Hujar including at second and third right, David Wojnarowicz both 1981, and at right, Pascal (Paris) 1980
Installation view of the exhibition A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February – November, 2014
Surveying the Studio
Uta Barth (American, b. 1958) Sundial (07.13) 2007
Chromogenic colour prints
each 30 x 28 1/4″ (76.2 x 71.8cm)
The Photography Council Fund
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Geta Brâtescu (Romanian, 1926-2018) The Studio. Invocation of the Drawing (L’Atelier. Invocarea desenului)
1979
Gelatin silver prints with tempera on paper
33 1/16 x 27 9/16″ (84 x 70cm)
Modern Women’s Fund
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Geta Brătescu was a Romanian visual artist with works in drawing, collage, photography, performance, illustration and film. In 2008, Brătescu received an honorary doctorate from the Bucharest National University of Arts for “her outstanding contributions to the development of contemporary Romanian art”. Brătescu was artistic director of literature and art magazine Secolul 21. A major retrospective of her work was held at the National Museum of Art of Romania in December 1999. In 2015 Brătescu’s first UK solo exhibition was held at the Tate Liverpool. In 2017, she was selected to represent Romania at the 57th Venice Biennale.
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Laboratory of the Future 1935
Gelatin silver print
9 1/16 x 7″ (23.1 x 17.8cm)
Gift of James Johnson Sweeney
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Cactus and Photographer’s Lamp, New York 1931
Gelatin silver print
9 1/2 x 6 5/8″ (23.5 x 16.6cm)
Gift of Samuel M. Kootz
Museum of Modern Art Collection
Bringing together photographs, films, videos, and works in other mediums, A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio examines the ways in which photographers and artists using photography have worked and experimented within the four walls of the studio space, from photography’s inception to today. Featuring both new acquisitions and works from the Museum’s collection that have not been on view in recent years, A World of Its Own includes approximately 180 works, by approximately 90 artists, such as Berenice Abbott, Uta Barth, Zeke Berman, Karl Blossfeldt, Constantin Brancusi, Geta Brătescu, Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, Jan Groover, Barbara Kasten, Man Ray, Bruce Nauman, Paul Outerbridge, Irving Penn, Adrian Piper, Edward Steichen, William Wegman, and Edward Weston.
The exhibition considers the various roles played by the photographer’s studio as an autonomous space; depending on the time period, context, and the individual motivations (commercial, artistic, scientific) and sensibilities of the photographer, the studio may be a stage, a laboratory, or a playground. Organised thematically, the display unfolds in multiple chapters. Throughout the 20th century, artists have explored their studio spaces using photography, from the use of composed theatrical tableaux (in photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron or Cindy Sherman) to neutral, blank backdrops (Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe); from the construction of architectural sets within the studio space (Francis Bruguière, Thomas Demand) to chemical procedures conducted within the darkroom (Walead Beshty, Christian Marclay); and from precise recordings of time and motion (Eadweard Muybridge, Dr. Harold E. Edgerton) to amateurish or playful experimentation (Roman Signer, Peter Fischli / David Weiss). A World of Its Own offers another history of photography, a photography created within the walls of the studio, and yet as groundbreaking and inventive as its seemingly more extroverted counterpart, street photography.”
Text from the MoMA website
The exhibition is divided into 6 themes each with its own gallery space:
1/ Surveying the Studio 2/ The Studio as Stage 3/ The Studio as Set 4/ A Neutral Space 5/ Virtual Spaces 6/ The Studio, from Laboratory to Playground
The Studio as Stage
Unidentified photographer (French?) Untitled c. 1855 Albumen silver print from a wet-collodion glass negative 9 3/16 × 6 1/8″ (23.4 × 15.5cm) Gift of Paul F. Walter Museum of Modern Art Collection
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Untitled 1941 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.2 x 24.4cm) Anonymous gift Museum of Modern Art Collection
Lucas Samaras (American born Greece, 1936-2024) Auto Polaroid 1969-1971 Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink Each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4cm) Overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61cm) Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill Museum of Modern Art Collection
Working in the digital realm long before it was associated with fine art, Samaras pioneered radical new modes of image making throughout his storied career, pushing and redefining the boundaries of portraiture and self-portraiture over the course of seven decades. Centering on the body and the psyche, Samaras’s autobiographical work across photography, painting, installation, assemblage, drawing, textile, and sculpture often meditates on the malleable, shapeshifting nature of selfhood. “I like remaking myself in photography,” the artist once said. …
In the late 1960s, Samaras began working with a Polaroid 360 camera, creating his iconic Auto Polaroids by altering hundreds of images, mostly self-portraits, with applications of ink by his own hand. In 1973, using a Polaroid SX-70, he took this collagist approach further by manipulating the wet emulsion of the film with a stylus or his fingertip before the chemicals set. The resulting distortions in his Photo-Transformations series took on abstract, otherworldly effects, which he would continue exploring amid the rise of other image making technologies in the following decades.
Lucas Samaras (American, 1936-2024) Auto Polaroid (details) 1969-1971 Eighteen black-and-white instant prints (Polapan), with hand-applied ink Each 3 3/4 x 2 15/16″ (9.5 x 7.4cm) Overall 14 5/8 x 24″ (37.2 x 61cm) Gift of Robert and Gayle Greenhill Museum of Modern Art Collection
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Madonna with Children 1864 Albumen silver print 10 1/2 x 8 5/8″ (26.7 x 21.9cm) Gift of Shirley C. Burden Museum of Modern Art Collection
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Untitled (Mary Ryan?) c. 1867 Albumen silver print 13 3/16 x 11″ (33.5 x 27.9cm) Gift of Shirley C. Burden Museum of Modern Art Collection
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825-1903) Pierrot Surprised 1854-1855 Albumen silver print 11 1/4 x 8 3/16″ (28.6 x 20.8cm) Suzanne Winsberg Collection. Gift of Suzanne Winsberg Museum of Modern Art Collection
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984) Untitled 1929 Gelatin silver print 6 9/16 x 6 1/2″ (16.7 x 16.5cm) Gift of Robert Shapazian Museum of Modern Art Collection
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Anna May Wong 1930 Gelatin silver print 16 9/16 x 13 7/16″ (42.1 x 34.1cm) Gift of the artist Museum of Modern Art Collection
“Taking people away from their natural circumstances and putting them into the studio in front of a camera did not simply isolate them, it transformed them. Sometimes the change was subtle; sometimes it was great enough to be almost shocking. But always there was transformation.”
~ Irving Penn 1974
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) Untitled #131 1983 Chromogenic colour print 35 x 16 1/2″ (89 x 41.9cm) Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Fund Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Studio as Set
Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936) Construct I-F 1979 Colour instant print (Polaroid Polacolor) 9 1/2 x 7 1/2″ (24.0 x 19.0cm) Acquired through the generosity of Wendy Larsen Museum of Modern Art Collection
Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936) Construct NYC 17 1984 Silver dye bleach print 29 3/8 x 37 1/16″ (74.7 x 94.1cm) Gift of Foster Goldstrom Museum of Modern Art Collection
James Casebere (American, b. 1953) Subdivision with Spotlight 1982 Gelatin silver print 14 13/16 x 18 15/16″ (37.6 x 48.1cm) Purchase Museum of Modern Art Collection
Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) Light Abstraction c. 1925 Gelatin silver print 9 15/16 x 7 15/16″ (25.2 x 20.2cm) Gift of Arnold Newman Museum of Modern Art Collection
Francis Joseph Bruguière (15 October 1879 – 8 May 1945) was an American photographer.
Francis Bruguière was born in San Francisco, California, to Emile Antoine Bruguière (1849-1900) and Josephine Frederikke (Sather) Bruguière (1845-1915). He was the youngest of four sons born into a wealthy banking family and was privately educated. His brothers were painter and physician Peder Sather Bruguière (1874-1967), Emile Antoine Bruguiere Jr. (1877-1935), and Louis Sather Bruguière (1882-1954), who married wealthy heiress Margaret Post Van Alen. He was also a grandson of banker Peder Sather. His mother died in the 1915 sinking of the British ocean liner SS Arabic by a German submarine.
In 1905, having studied painting in Europe, Bruguière became acquainted with photographer and modern art promoter Alfred Stieglitz (who accepted him as a Fellow of the Photo-secession), and set up a studio in San Francisco, recording in a Pictorialist style images of the city after the earthquake and fire; some of them were reproduced in a book called San Francisco in 1918. He co-curated the photographic exhibition at the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, and nine of his photographs were included in The Evanescent City (1916) by George Sterling.
In 1918, following the decline of the family fortune, he moved to New York City where he made his living by photographing for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Soon he was appointed the official photographer of the New York Theatre Guild. In this role he photographed the British stage actress Rosalinde Fuller, who was debuting in What’s in a Name? (1920), and she partnered him for the rest of his life.
Throughout his life, Bruguière experimented with multiple-exposure, solarization (years ahead of Man Ray), original processes, abstracts, photograms, and the response of commercially available film to light of various wavelengths. Until his one-man show at the Art Centre of New York in 1927, he showed this work only to friends. In the mid-1920s, he planned to make a film called The Way, depicting stages in a man’s life, to be played by Sebastian Droste with Rosalinde doing all the female parts. To obtain funding, Bruguière took photographs of projected scenes, but Droste died before filming started; so we are left with only the still pictures.
In 1927 they moved to London, where Bruguière co-created the first British abstract film, Light Rhythms, with Oswell Blakeston. Long thought to have been lost, it has now been recovered. During World War II, he returned to painting.
Jaromír Funke (1 August 1896 – 22 March 1945) was a leading Czech photographer during the 1920s and 1930s.
Funke was recognised for his “photographic games” using mirrors, lights, and insignificant objects, such as plates, bottles, or glasses, to create unique works. In his still life imagery he created abstracts of forms and shadows reminiscent of photograms. His work was regarded as logical, original and expressive in nature. A typical feature of Funke’s work would be the “dynamic diagonal.”
Paul Outerbridge (American, 1896-1958) Images de Deauville 1936 Tri-colour carbro print 15 3/4 x 12 1/4″ (40 x 31.1cm) Gift of Mrs. Ralph Seward Allen Museum of Modern Art Collection
Elad Lassry (Israeli, b. 1977) Nailpolish 2009 Chromogenic colour print 14 1/2 x 11 1/2″ (36.8 x 29.2cm) Fund for the Twenty-First Century Museum of Modern Art Collection
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
Curators: Felicity Grobien, curatorial assistant, Modern Art Department, Städel Museum; Dr Felix Krämer, head of the Modern Art Department at the Städel Museum
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) London: The British Museum 1857 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 32.2 x 43cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
There are some absolutely stunning images in this posting. It has been a great pleasure to put the posting together, allowing me the chance to sequence Roger Fenton’s elegiac London: The British Museum (1857, below) next to Werner Mantz’s minimalist masterpiece Cologne: Bridge (c. 1927, below), followed by Carlo Naya’s serene Venice: View of the Marciana Library (c. 1875, below) and Albert Renger-Patzsch’s sublime but disturbing (because of the association of the place) Buchenwald in November (c. 1954, below). What four images to put together – where else would I get the chance to do that? And then to follow it up with the visual association of the Royal Prussian Institute of Survey Photography’s Cologne: Cathedral (1889, below) with Otto Steinert’s Luminogram (1952, below). This is the stuff that you dream of!
The more I study photography, the more I am impressed by the depth of relatively unknown Eastern European photographers from countries such as Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Turkey. In this posting I have included what details I could find on the artists Václav Jíru, Václav Chochola and the well known Czech photographer František Drtikol. The reproduction of his image Crucified (before 1914, below) is the best that you will find of this image on the web.
I would love to do more specific postings on these East European photographers if any museum has collections that they would like to advertise more widely.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Lichtbilder = light images.
Many thankx to the Städel Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing Nadar’s George Sand (1864, below)
Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) c. 1864
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing
(left)
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Country girls 1925
(right)
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Portrait of Anton Räderscheidt 1927
Otto Steinert (1915-1978) Ein-Fuß-Gänger (installation view) 1950
The Subjective Gaze
After the Second World War a young generation took an innovative approach to the medium of photography. Distancing themselves from the propaganda and heroic photography of the National Socialist era, they looked at the avant grade photography of the 1900s. Among those innovators were the six photographers who founded the fotoform group in 1949: Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstosser. Emphasising formal issues they focused on the artist potential of photography and a free and experimental way of working. Abstract and minimal images as well as de-familiarised and dreamlike compositions were the results.
Otto Steinert, who taught art photography initially in Saarbrücken and later in Essen, was soon perceived as the key figure of the movement. In the years to come his exhibitions and publications stood for ‘subjective photography’. He underlined the photographer’s role as artist. By arguing that the camera is inevitably handled by a subjective and calculating author, Steinert weakened the notion of photographic objectivity.
Wall text from the exhibition
Otto Steinert (German, 1915-1978) Ein-Fuß-Gänger 1950 Gelatin silver print 28.5 × 39cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt
Rudolf Koppitz(Austrian, 1884-1936) Head of a Man with Helmet (installation view) c. 1929 Carbon print, printed c. 1929 49.8 × 48.4cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt a. M., donated by Annette and Rudolf Kicken 2013
Installation view of the exhibition Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt showing at right, Otto Steinert’s La Comtesse de Fleury (1952, below)
In 1845, the Frankfurt Städel was the first art museum in the world to exhibit photographic works. The invention of the new medium had been announced in Paris just six years earlier, making 2014 the 175th anniversary of that momentous event. In keeping with the tradition it thus established, the Städel is now devoting a comprehensive special exhibition to European photo art – Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960 – presenting the photographic holdings of the museum’s Modern Art Department, which have recently undergone significant expansion. From 9 July to 5 October 2014, in addition to such pioneers as Nadar, Gustave Le Gray, Roger Fenton and Julia Margaret Cameron, the show will feature photography heroes of the twentieth century such as August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Man Ray, Dora Maar or Otto Steinert, while moreover highlighting virtually forgotten members of the profession. While giving an overview of the Städel’s early photographic holdings and the acquisitions of the past years, the exhibition will also shed light on the history of the medium from its beginnings to 1960.
“Even if we think of the presentation of artistic photography in an art museum as something still relatively new, the Städel already began staging photo exhibitions in the mid 1840s. We take special pleasure in drawing attention to this pioneering feat and – with the Lichtbilder exhibition – now, for the first time, providing insight into our collection of early photography, which has been decisively expanded over the past years through new purchases and generous gifts,” comments Städel director Max Hollein. Felix Krämer, one of the show’s curators, explains: “With Lichtbilder we would like to stimulate a more intensive exploration of the multifaceted history of a medium which, even today, is often still underestimated.”
The first mention of a photo exhibition at the Städel Museum dates from all the way back to 1845, when the Frankfurt Intelligenz Blatt – the official city bulletin – ran an ad. This is the earliest known announcement of a photography show in an art museum worldwide. The 1845 exhibition featured portraits by the photographer Sigismund Gerothwohl of Frankfurt, the proprietor of one of the city’s first photo studios who has meanwhile all but fallen into oblivion. Like many other institutions at the time, the Städel Museum had a study collection which also included photographs: then Städel director Johann David Passavant began collecting photos for the museum in the 1850s. In addition to reproductions of artworks, the photographic holdings comprised genre scenes, landscapes and cityscapes by such well-known pioneers in the medium as Maxime Du Camp, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Carl Friedrich Mylius or Giorgio Sommer. An 1852 exhibition showcasing views of Venice launched a tradition of presentations of photographic works from the Städel’s own collection.
Whereas the photos exhibited in the Städel in the nineteenth century were contemporary works, the show Lichtbilder will focus on the development of artistic photography. The point of departure will be the museum’s own photographic holdings, which were significantly expanded through major acquisitions from the collections of Uta and Wilfried Wiegand in 2011 and Annette and Rudolf Kicken in 2013, and which continue to grow today through new purchases. The exhibition’s nine chronologically ordered sections will span the history of the medium from the beginnings of paper photography in the 1840s to the photographic experiments of the fotoform Group in the 1950s.
In the entrance area to the show, the visitor will be greeted by a selection of Raphael reproductions presented by the Städel in exhibitions in 1859 and 1860. They feature full views and details of the cartoons executed by Raphael to serve as reference images for the Sistine Chapel tapestries. The art admirer was no longer compelled to travel to London to marvel at the Raphael cartoons at Hampton Court, but could now examine these masterworks in large-scale photographs right at the Städel. The following exhibition room is devoted to the pioneers of photography of the 1840s to ’60s. No sooner had the invention of the new medium been announced in 1839 than enthusiasts set about conquering the world with the photographic image. The aspiration of the bourgeoisie for self-representation in accordance with aristocratic conventions soon rendered photographic portraiture a lucrative business; to keep up with the growing demand, the number of photo studios in the European metropolises steadily increased. Works of architecture and historical monuments, art treasures and celebrities were all recorded on film and made available to the public. Quite a few photographers – for example Édouard Baldus, the Bisson brothers, Frances Frith, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt and Charles Marville – set out on travels to take pictures of the cultural-historical sites of Europe and the Near East, and thus to capture these testimonies to the past on film.
Among the most successful exponents of this genre was Georg Sommer, a native of Frankfurt who emigrated to Italy in 1856 and made a name for himself there as Giorgio Sommer. The second section of the show will revolve around the image of Italy as a kind of paradise on Earth characterised by the Mediterranean landscape and the legacy of antiquity. That image, however, would not be complete without views of the simple life of the Italian population. These genre scenes – often posed – were popular as souvenirs because they fulfilled the travellers’ expectations of encountering a preindustrial, and thus unspoiled, way of life south of the Alps. Faced with the challenges presented by the climate, the long exposure times and the complex photographic development process, photographers were constantly in search of technical improvements – as illustrated in the third section of the presentation. Léon Vidal and Carlo Naya, for example, experimented with colour photography, Eadweard Muybridge with capturing sequences of movement, and the Royal Prussian Photogrammetric Institute with large-scale “mammoth photographs.”
While the pictorial language of professional photography hardly advanced, increasing emphasis was placed over the years on its technical aspects. The section of the show on artistic photography demonstrates how, at the end of the nineteenth century, enthusiastic amateur photographs worked to develop the medium with regard to aesthetics as well. Whereas until that time, professional photographers had given priority to genre scenes and other motifs popular in painting, the so-called Pictorialists set out to strengthen photography’s value as an artistic medium in its own right. Atmospheric landscapes, fairy-tale scenes and stylised still lifes were captured as subjective impressions. While Julia Margaret Cameron very effectively staged dialogues between sharp and soft focus, Heinrich Kühn employed the gum bichromate and bromoil techniques to create painterly effects.
After World War I, a new generation of photographers emerged who questioned the standards established by the Pictorialists. Their works are highlighted in the following room. Rather than intervening in the photographic development process, the adherents to this new current – who pursued interests analogous to those of the New Objectivity painters – devoted themselves to austere pictorial design and sought to establish a “new way of seeing.” The gaze was no longer to wander yearningly into the distance, but be confronted directly and immediately with the realities of society. The prosaic and rigorous images of August Sander and Hugo Erfurth satisfy the demands of this artistic creed. The exhibition moreover directs its attention to early photojournalism and the development of the mass media. Apart from documentary photographs by the autodidact Erich Salomon, Heinrich Hoffmann’s portraits of Adolf Hitler – purchased for the Städel collection in 2013 – will also be on view. Although it was Hitler himself who had commissioned them, he later prohibited the portraits’ reproduction. For in actuality, Hoffmann’s images expose the hollowness of the dictator’s demeanour. The show devotes a separate room to the work of Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose formally rigorous scenes are distinguished by uncompromising objectiveness in the depiction of nature and technology.
The photographers inspired by Surrealism pursued interests of a wholly different nature, as did the representatives of the Czech photo avant-garde – the focusses of the following two exhibition rooms. In the section on Surrealist photography, the works oscillate between fiction and reality, and photographic experiments unveil the world’s bizarre sides. Employing strange effects or unexpected motif combinations, artists such Brassaï, André Kertész, Dora Maar, Paul Outerbridge and Man Ray sought the unusual in the familiar. The Czech photographers of the interwar period, for their part, explored the possibilities of abstract and constructivist photography. Their works, many of which exhibit a symbolist tendency, are concerned with the aestheticisation of the world.
The final section of the show is dedicated to Otto Steinert and the fotoform Group. It sheds light on how Steinert and the members of the artists’ group took their cues from the experiments of the photographic vanguard of the 1920s, while at the same time dissociating themselves from the propagandistic and heroising use of photography during the National Socialist era. The six photographers who joined to found the fotoform Group in 1949 – Peter Keetman, Siegfried Lauterwasser, Wolfgang Reisewitz, Toni Schneiders, Otto Steinert and Ludwig Windstosser – coined the term “subjective photography” and emphasised the photographer’s individual perspective.
The show augments the joint presentation of photography, painting and sculpture practised at the Städel Museum since its reopening in 2011 and also to be continued during and after Lichtbilder. The aim of this exhibition mode is to convey the decisive role played by photography in art-historical pictorial tradition since the medium’s very beginnings. The presentation is being accompanied by a catalogue which – like the exhibition architecture – foregrounds the specific “palette” of photography as a medium conducted in black and white. The subtle tones of grey are mirrored not only in the works’ reproductions, but also in the colour design of the individual catalogue sections. When the visitor enters the exhibition space, he is surrounded by an architecture that is grey to the core, while at the same time making clear that no one shade of grey is like another. In the words of curator Felicity Grobien: “The exhibition reveals how multi-coloured the prints are, for in them – contrary to what we expect from black-and-white photography – we discover a vast range of subtle colour nuances that emphasise the prints; distinctiveness.
Press release from the Städel Museum
Édouard Baldus (French, 1813-1889) Orange: The Wall of the Théâtre antique 1858 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 43.4 x 33.4cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Werner Mantz began his career as a portrait and advertising photographer, later becoming known for his architectural photographs of the modernist housing projects in Cologne during the 1920s. This portfolio of photographs was selected by the artist towards the end of his life as representative of his finest work. These rare prints reveal Mantz’s mastery in still-life and architecture photography, and are considered some of the most influential works created in the period.
Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816-1882) Venice: View of the Marciana Library, the Campanile and the Ducal Palace c. 1875 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 41.3 x 54.1cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Carlo Naya (1816, Tronzano Vercellese – 1882, Venice) was an Italian photographer known for his pictures of Venice including its works of art and views of the city for a collaborative volume in 1866. He also documented the restoration of Giotto’s frescoes at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Naya was born in Tronzano di Vercelli in 1816 and took law at the University of Pisa. An inheritance allowed him to travel to major cities in Europe, Asia, and northern Africa. He was advertising his services as portrait photographer in Istanbul in 1845,and opened his studio in Venice in 1857. He sold his work through photographer and optician Carlo Ponti. Following Naya’s death in 1882, his studio was run by his wife, then by her second husband. In 1918 it was closed and publisher Osvaldo Böhm bought most of Naya’s archive.
Royal Prussian Institute of Survey Photography (est. 1885) Cologne: Cathedral 1889 Gelatin silver prints mounted on cardboard 79.8 x 64.5cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Mrs Herbert Duckworth 1867 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 35 x 27.1cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Giorgio Sommer (European, 1834-1914) Naples: Delousing c. 1870 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 25.5 x 20.6cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Lewis Carroll (English, 1832-1898) Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin as Chinese “Tea-Merchant” (on Duty) 1873 Albumen print 19.8 x 15.2cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Additional images
Albert Renger-Patzsch (German, 1897-1966) Tropical Orchis, cattleya labiata c. 1930 Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1930 Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Photo: Städel Museum – ARTOTHEK
Václav Jíru (Czech, 1910-1980) Untitled (Sunbath) 1930s Gelatin silver print Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Acquired in 2013 as a gift from Annette and Rudolf Kicken
Jíru started to shoot as an amateur photographer, and since 1926 published photos and articles. He first exhibited in 1933 and collaborated with the Theatre Vlasta Burian, photographed in the Liberated Theatre, was devoted to advertising photography, and became well known in the international press (London News, London Life, Picture Post, Sie und Er, Zeit im Bild).
In 1940 he was arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities, and sentenced to life in prison by the end of the war. In the book Six Spring, where there are pictures taken shortly after liberation, he described his experience of prison and concentration camps. After the war he became a member of the Union of Czechoslovak Journalists and in 1948 a member of the Association of Czechoslovak Artists. He continued shooting, but also looking for new talented photographers. In 1957, he founded and led four languages photographic Revue Photography. By the end of his life he organised a photographic exhibition and served on the juries of photographic competitions.
The photographs of Václav Jírů, especially in the pre-war stage, was very wide: sports photography, theatrical portrait, landscape, nude, social issues, report. After the war he concentrated on the cycles of nature, landscapes and cities. A frequent theme of his photographs was Prague, which unlike many other photographers he photographed in its unsentimental everyday life (Prague mirrors, walls Poetry Prague, Prague ghosts).
Václav Chochola (Czech, 1923-2005) Kolotoc-Konieci (merry-go-round horse) c. 1958 Gelatin silver print Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Acquired in 2013 as a gift from Annette and Rudolf Kicken
Chochola (January 31, 1923 in Prague – August 27, 2005) was a Czech photographer, known for classic Czech art and portrait photography. He began photography while studying at grammar school in Prague-Karlin. After leaving the photographer taught and studied at the School of Graphic Arts. He was a freelance photographer, photographed at the National Theatre and has collaborated with many other scenes. Chochol created a series of images using non-traditional techniques, creating photograms, photomontage and roláže.
In his extensive work Chochol was devoted to candid photographs, portraits of celebrities (famous for his portrait of Salvador Dali), acts or sports photography. His documentary images from the Prague uprising in May 1945 are invaluable. In 1970 Chochol spent a month in custody for photographing the grave of Jan Palach. He died after a brief serious illness in Motol Hospital in Prague.
Text translated from Czech Wikipedia website
Jde užasle světem, o kterém jako kluk na předměstí snil a od něhož byl vždy oddělen červenou šňůrou, a do něhož má najednou přístup. Skutečnost, že v tomto světě nikdy nebyl úplně doma, dokázal proměnit v nepřehlédnutelnou přednost: zbystřilo mu to oko a zahlédl detaily, které my oslněni jinými cíli ani nevidíme.
He walks in amazement through the world he dreamed of as a boy in the suburbs, and from which he was always separated by a red cord, and to which he suddenly has access. He was able to turn the fact that he was never quite at home in this world into an unmissable advantage: it sharpened his eye and he saw details that we, dazzled by other goals, don’t even see.
František Drtikol (3 March 1883, Příbram – 13 January 1961, Prague) was a Czech photographer of international renown. He is especially known for his characteristically epic photographs, often nudes and portraits.
From 1907 to 1910 he had his own studio, until 1935 he operated an important portrait photostudio in Prague on the fourth floor of one of Prague’s remarkable buildings, a Baroque corner house at 9 Vodičkova, now demolished. Jaroslav Rössler, an important avant-garde photographer, was one of his pupils. Drtikol made many portraits of very important people and nudes which show development from pictorialism and symbolism to modern composite pictures of the nude body with geometric decorations and thrown shadows, where it is possible to find a number of parallels with the avant-garde works of the period. These are reminiscent of Cubism, and at the same time his nudes suggest the kind of movement that was characteristic of the futurism aesthetic.
He began using paper cut-outs in a period he called “photopurism”. These photographs resembled silhouettes of the human form. Later he gave up photography and concentrated on painting. After the studio was sold Drtikol focused mainly on painting, Buddhist religious and philosophical systems. In the final stage of his photographic work Drtikol created compositions of little carved figures, with elongated shapes, symbolically expressing various themes from Buddhism. In the 1920s and 1930s, he received significant awards at international photo salons.
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) 9:00 Going home: Marabastad-Waterval bus: For most of the people in this bus the cycle will start again tomorrow at between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. 1983-1984 From the series The Transported of KwaNdebele. A South African Odyssey Silver gelatin print 55.5 x 37cm Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
This looks like a very interesting exhibition, one which “examines documentary photographs dating from around 1979 in terms of their aesthetic, ethical, performative, and political engagement with reality” by examining one series of work for each of the thirteen artists. The exhibition investigates the photographs in terms of the documentary approaches they embody not through individual images, but through a series of images.
As the press release rightly notes, “Documentary standpoints are revealed not only by the photographs themselves, but also by the way in which they are used. The exhibition thus addresses five sets of issues in relation to each series of photographs: who the photographers were or are; when and where the photographs were taken; who commissioned them; where, how, and with which target audience in mind they were first published; and the extent to which they open up possibilities for photography today.”
The selection of the series offers a broad range of styles, continents and subject matter – as well as illustrating the changing nature of documentary photography between the years 1974-1985, between Candida Hofer’s series Turks in Germany and Thomas Ruff’s Portraits.
I think I have to buy the catalogue.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
David Goldblatt (South African, 1930-2018) AM/PM Travelers from KwaNdebele buying their weekly season tickets at the PUTCO depot in Pretoria 1983-1984 From the series The Transported of KwaNdebele. A South African Odyssey Silver gelatin print 55.5 x 37cm Courtesy of David Goldblatt and the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Miyako Ishiuchi (Japanese, b. 1947) Apartment #45 1977-1978 Silver gelatin print 35.5 x 28cm Courtesy of Miyako Ishiuchi and The Third Gallery Aya, Edobori, Nishi-ku, Osaka
Miyako Ishiuchi (Japanese, b. 1947) Apartment #47 1977-1978 Silver gelatin print 35.5 x 28cm Courtesy of Miyako Ishiuchi and The Third Gallery Aya, Edobori, Nishi-ku, Osaka
In his short book Camera Lucida, written in 1979 and first published in 1980, Roland Barthes distinguished two responses to photography – its taming by means of aesthetic categories, including authorship, oeuvre, and genre, and its acceptance as an unflinching record of reality relying on untamed effects. Some twenty years later the exhibitions documenta 10 and 11, set up in 1997 and 2002 respectively, proved that viewing photography both as an art form and as a reproduction of reality need not be a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, Okwui Enwezor has shown that in its documentary capacity photography can redefine the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Today, thirty-four years after the publication of Barthes’s volume, our exhibition examines documentary photographs dating from around 1979 in terms of their aesthetic, ethical, performative, and political engagement with reality.
The far-reaching social upheavals and crises associated with the period around 1979 highlighted the documentary approach as a major artistic concern. In his Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914‒1991 historian Eric Hobsbawm described the decades after 1975 as a period of crisis. The U.S.A. and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars in Latin America and many African countries in an attempt to cement their spheres of influence; the Islamic revolution took place in Iran; destabilisation of the Soviet Union began around 1980; and China developed into one of world’s most dynamic economic regions. In addition, banking policy worldwide led to a debt crisis in the so-called Third World and the power of transnational economies, promoted by revolutions in transport, manufacturing, and communication technology, grew in proportion to the decreasing influence of territorial states.
Artists and photographers monitored and documented these global changes over longer periods of time, generally in the places where they lived. This activity often resulted in a multitude of photographs. The exhibition therefore focuses not on individual images, but on series. It features one series for each of the thirteen artists and photographers represented in the museum’s collection, including Robert Adams, Joachim Brohm, Ute Klophaus, and Candida Höfer. Loans of works by David Goldblatt, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Raghubir Singh complement the collection.
Barthes based his discussion on the immediate emotional effect of single photographic images, on their arousal of feelings of wonder, sorrow, and empathy. His analysis revolved around viewer responses to what he perceived as the essence of photography. By contrast, the exhibition investigates photographs in terms of the documentary approaches they embody. Do they represent an ethnographic view, for example, aimed solely at recording change, or are they linked to a policy of investigative disclosure? Documentary standpoints are revealed not only by the photographs themselves, but also by the way in which they are used. The exhibition thus addresses five sets of issues in relation to each series of photographs: who the photographers were or are; when and where the photographs were taken; who commissioned them; where, how, and with which target audience in mind they were first published; and the extent to which they open up possibilities for photography today.
The catalogue, which contains an introductory essay and a text on each of the thirteen series of photographs, outlines the basic attitudes to photography and documentary work apparent in the works. Addressing the current role of documentary photography from a historical perspective, the volume constitutes a major contribution to the ongoing discourse on documentary work. Its extensive bibliographies also make it an important a resource for further research. Moreover, since the majority of the photographs come from the Museum Ludwig’s holdings, the catalogue acts as a reevaluation of its collection.
Installation view of the exhibition The Museum of Photography. A Revision at Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
The ghost of the photography museum. The ghost of the machine.
Marcus
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition The Museum of Photography. A Revision at Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest
Born in Granville, Ohio in 1808, Marcus Aurelius Root moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early 1830s to study painting with Thomas Sully. Sully’s lack of enthusiasm for his pupil’s artistic skills led Root to open a penmanship school before he turned to the new medium of daguerreotyping as a way to earn his living. Root seems to have whole heartedly committed to this new endeavour since in 1844 he reportedly had daguerreotype studios in Mobile, AL; New Orleans, LA; St. Louis, MO; and Philadelphia. By 1845 he had resettled back in Philadelphia with a studio at 140 Chestnut Street. Root headed up one of the city’s most esteemed studios attracting well-known patrons including failed presidential candidates Henry Clay and Winfield Scott as well as local Philadelphians. In 1849 in partnership with his brother Samuel, he opened a New York City gallery located on Broadway and remained part of that business for several years.
In 1856 Marcus Root’s life took an unexpected turn when he was severely injured in a train accident. Root began writing a book, The Camera and the Pencil, during the long years spent recuperating from his accident. Published in 1864, The Camera and the Pencil provided a history of photography along with technical information about the medium, but primarily focused on promoting the aesthetics of the practice. Root wanted photographers to be considered equal to painters and argued for the importance of a pleasing studio environment for the sitters and an artistic eye for the operators. Good photography, Root argued, was not merely the successful mechanical operation of a piece of equipment. Root also wrote extensively for photographic journals including Philadelphia Photographer, Humphrey’s Journal of Photography and the Allied Arts and Sciences, and Photographic and Fine Arts Journal.
Anonymous. “Marcus Aurelius Root,” on the Luminous-Lint: History, Evolution and Analysis website [Online] Cited 20/06/2021.
In 1873 Vogel discovered dye sensitisation, a pivotal contribution to the progress of photography. The photographic emulsions in use at that time were sensitive to blue, violet and ultraviolet light, but only slightly sensitive to green and practically insensitive to the rest of the spectrum. While trying out some factory-made collodion bromide dry plates from England, Vogel was amazed to find that they were more sensitive to green than to blue. He sought the cause and his experiments indicated that this sensitivity was due to a yellow substance in the emulsion, apparently included as an anti-halation agent. Rinsing it out with alcohol removed the unusual sensitivity to green. He then tried adding small amounts of various aniline dyes to freshly prepared emulsions and found several dyes which added sensitivity to various parts of the spectrum, closely corresponding to wavelengths of light the dyes absorbed. Vogel was able to add sensitivity to green, yellow, orange and even red.
This made photography much more useful to science, allowed a more satisfactory rendering of coloured subjects into black-and-white, and brought actual colour photography into the realm of the practical.
In the early 1890s, Vogel’s son Ernst assisted German-American photographer William Kurtz in applying dye sensitisation and three-colour photography to halftone printing, so that full-colour prints could be economically mass-produced with a printing press.
“It is my deepest wish that photography, instead of falling within the domain of industry, of commerce, will be included among the arts. That is its sole, true place, and it is in that direction that I shall always endeavour to guide it. It is up to the men devoted to its advancement to set this idea firmly in their minds.”
~ Gustave Le Gray, 1852 edition of his treatise
A ghost has been haunting podiums, periodicals, and arts pages for decades: the ghost of the photography museum. “We need one,” say advocates; “really?” counter opponents. Chemist Erich Stenger (1878-1957), a passionate collector of photographs, viewed them not as art, but as technological evidence. Yet the way he envisaged presenting them was in a museum. At an early date he called for the establishment of a (technology-based) museum of photography, accumulating items for it and drawing up a display plan. Among the first collectors of photography, he amassed holdings of nineteenth-century landscapes, portraits, photographs taken by airmen in World War I, portraits framed as decorative items, prizewinning pictures of animals from the first half of the twentieth century, caricatures about photography, and much else besides. As a scientist, Stenger collected data and represented it in the form of tables and diagrams. That is also how he ordered everything relating to photography that he could lay his hands on. He distinguished some one hundred categories, from architecture photography to trick photography. His museum was to resemble an encyclopedia of photography, and in that sense he was very much a man of the nineteenth century. He showed his collection at most major photography exhibitions held during his lifetime, including Pressa in Cologne in 1928.
Stenger’s collection is now integrated into the Agfa collection, which in turn forms an important part of the photography holdings at the Museum Ludwig. The items amassed by Stenger now therefore constitute a museum within a museum – within an art museum, in fact. How is an art museum to deal with a collection of this kind? Individual items and sections from it have been exhibited since the early years of the twentieth century. At the Museum Ludwig it has been represented in Facts (2006), Silber und Salz (Silver and Salt; 1988), An den süssen Ufern Asiens (On the Sweet Shores of Asia; 1989), and many other shows. Stenger’s ideas about his collection are now being spotlighted and presented under one roof. This seems appropriate at a time when museums and archives are the subject of heated debates and intensive self-examination. As institutions, they shape and regulate cultural memory; and photography in museums, in particular, influences our view of the past and the present. This function of the Stenger collection acquired semi-official status in 2005, when it was named a national cultural treasure. That is reason enough to subject it to a reappraisal, re-examining its contents, the criteria governing its accumulation, and the ways in which an art museum might want to approach it today.
The exhibition comprises approximately 250 photographs and objects.
The Helgoländer Franz Schensky one of the pioneers of black and white photography and has a firm place in the German photo-story. In 2003, 1,400 of his glass negatives, believed to be lost, were found in a cellar on Helgoland and processed and digitised by the Museum Helgoland and the museum’s friends’ association in a special laboratory. The focus of these photographs from the period between 1900 and 1950 are the areas of old Heligoland, aquarium, sea and waves, sailing, destruction and reconstruction, people and time in Schleswig.
Grainer created numerous portraits of the children of the last crown prince of Bavaria, Rupprecht, especially the firstborn Luitpold and the son Albrecht, who was the only one to reach adulthood. In 1919, he was one of the founding members of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Lichtbildner (GDL), the predecessor of the German Academy of Photographs, whose chairmanship he later took over and still held in the power takeover of the National Socialists.
In addition to portrait photographs, more and more nude studies emerged in the 1920s. Works by Grainer are held at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Fotomuseum in the Munich Stadtmuseum.
![Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)' c. 1864 from the exhibition 'Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960' at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, July - October, 2014](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nadar-george-sand.jpg "Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)' c. 1864 from the exhibition 'Lichtbilder. Photography at the Städel Museum from the Beginnings to 1960' at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, July - October, 2014")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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