I love artists who push the boundaries of seeing / being, body / Self, self / spirit.
Artists who see and feel the world in unique and tantalising – excites the senses or desires of (someone) – ways.
Hannah Villiger is one such artist.
Her fragmentary, space-related assemblages (Works or Blocks) investigate the representation of the female body, “its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin.” (Exhibition text)
But more than that, it is the conceived ‘idea in the mind’ strangeness of Villiger’s out of body gridded experiences… that promote in the viewer an acknowledgement of the physicality, touch, and emotion of actually living and feeling in the human body and beyond. Touch your skin, run your hands over the shape of your mouth, feel your ears, raise your foot, look at your reflection. Marvel at the bodies distortion, energy, spirit. For there is only one you. “I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it.”
You are unique. An individual, unique, sentient animal. A human – being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Susch for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With my Polaroid camera I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it. Thus I create images that I can correct immediately.”
Hannah Villiger
“The longest distance between the camera and any body part is between raised arm and my toes. I always trigger the camera myself, sometimes without looking through the viewfinder. I tilt the camera to an angle of 90, 180, 270 degrees. I turn myself – literally – upside down.”
Hannah Villiger. On My Book Envy
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) was an extraordinary voice in the late 20th-century contemporary art, but her work came to an abrupt end with her untimely death. She became known above all for her photographic works based on the body.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre in fifteen years. Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Villiger’s large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes. Her oeuvre spans from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
Running from 4 January to 2 July 2023, Muzeum Susch presents Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me, a comprehensive survey dedicated to the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) with contributions from contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud (b. 1990) and Manon Wertenbroek (b. 1991).
The exhibition Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Hannah Villiger’s (1951-1997) large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s work in fifteen years. The exhibition spans her oeuvre, from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. On display are vintage prints, existing though often still unknown individual works, as well as so-called blocks, large-format assemblages of up to fifteen square picture panels. Some of these will be shown for the first time in the exhibition in Susch.
The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
The undiminished relevance of Villiger’s work is underscored by the inclusion of works by the contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud and Manon Wertenbroek. These younger women artists present thematically related works – distributed throughout the entire exhibition – in dialogue with Villiger and at the same time represent strong contemporary positions. The artists have been selected based on their exploration of similar themes to those of Villiger. Bachzetsis in collaboration with Julia Born presents This Side Up, a video installation of the artist moving in all directions in a confined space, much like the way Villiger writhes, turns and shapes her own body under the eye of her Polaroid camera. Masduraud presents Petrifying basin (kisses with the nymphs), a sculptural installation and small wall objects that playfully and sensually rethink organic life and anchors mythological traditions in the present day. And finally, Wertenbroek presents a selection of objects addressing the boundaries between the skin and surrounding world and reflects on themes such as unveiling and veiling.
On the exhibition and Hannah Villiger, Muzeum Susch’s found Grazyna Kulczyk says, “Female artists are no longer afraid to document their bodies being destructed due to illness or ageing – often the artworks become projects showing chronicles of pain. Observing and recording their own bodies has become a form of manifesto for female artists, reclaiming the subjectivity of the body. Female artists have painted, photographed and sculpted themselves. In this way, the shame of nakedness or imperfection has often become a point of pride. Hannah Villiger, through photographs of her body, become the body’s conscious sculptor.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the latest research on Hannah Villiger’s practice and influence. Villiger is often likened to an artist’s artist, which has inspired the editors to invite artists who knew her to contribute texts, including Katja Schenker, Beat Streuli, and Claudia and Julia Müller. The book, part of a series of monographs by Muzeum Susch and Skira, will be published in March 2023.
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) grew up as the fourth of five children in Cham (CH). After completing her studies at the School of Applied Arts in Lucerne, Villiger spent a period travelling and living between Toronto, Rome, Montefalco and Switzerland until she finally settled in Basel in 1977. In Basel, she produced her first black-and-white photographs as well as wood and Plexiglas objects. In 1980 Villiger fell ill with open tuberculosis and spent a month isolated in the Basel Cantonal Hospital, followed by a stay in a sanatorium in Davos. Despite her poor health, Villiger continued to create and exhibit her work. From 1981 to 1982 she undertook a world road-trip with Susan Wyss, with whom she had been in a relationship since 1975. In the early 1980s, Villiger began to use Polaroid cameras primarily to explore her body, serving as a working material, and increasingly moved away from the classic black-and-white and colour photographs. In 1988 in Paris, she met Mouhamadou Mansour (“Joe”) Kébé, with whom she had a son with in 1991. Between 1992 and 1997, Villiger taught at the Basel School of Art and Design. She died of heart failure in 1997.
Curators: Christine Barthe: Head of the Photography Heritage Department at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac; Annabelle Lacour: Head of the Photography Collection at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.
Unknown photographer Portrait of a Persian Dignitary Tehran, 1848 Daguerreotype Photo: RMN – Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) Hervé Lewandowski
I wish we had tele-transportation so that I could go and see this incredible exhibition about the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
It took me many hours to construct this posting. Placing the information into a logical order was an important consideration, matching the installation photographs with the exhibition texts and individual images so that the story makes sense. Finding country of origin and dates for the photographers was another issue. Further bibliographic information has been added from sources around the internet to fill out life stories and sometimes this information was difficult to find.
Congratulations to the curators for assembling a photographic tour de force in which “the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts.” In other words what was the force majeure, the greater force, that directed the what, where, when, how, who and for whom of their production. Here, force is the operative word… for many of the foremost contexts are both anthropological and geographic (to record what people and places looked like) under the guise of European colonial conquest: to “capture” the spirit of the people and conquered lands under force of occupation.
More interesting are the photographs taken by photographers of their own people, for example different Indian “casts” taken by a Indian born photographer. How did they picture themselves using a European machine? In this context we must remember that the images were usually taken to fulfil a commercial brief, either taken for a rich patron or to be sold through the photographers studio to local and foreign clients.
Predominantly using a Western pictorial language, sometimes these local photographers step outside the mould of making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ or recording a monument within the landscape by embodying within their art the aesthetics of their own cultural history. For example, “Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà.” (Wikipedia) “In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities.” (Exhibition text)
Undoubtedly this was the exception rather than the rule – for the rule of the lawful image was usually Western in power and aesthetic. As the exhibition text notes, “The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything.” And one might add, own everything, both physically and visually (through the photographers and viewers gaze).
Thus the European photographer of the 19th century taxonomically ordered the world around him through a classification of the visual culture of the exotic. Anthropologically, “within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories that shape racial stereotypes.” This racial science was to have a lasting impact well into the 20th century through the now debunked theory of eugenics (which has no association with anthropology) – “the study of all agencies under human control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations” (Galton) – influencing cultures around the world with devastating impact especially through the genocide of untermensch, or what were seen as racial subhumans, by the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s-1940s.
What is undeniable is the inalienable presence of the sitter in these powerful portraits. This is William Lane in the here and now, with his strong face and sorrowful eyes. This is Botcudo “brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months.” This is his representation but also his spirit from the past, this impression all that is left of his life force today. But it is enough. We pay reverence to his life. This is a half-length portrait of a 77-year-old Japanese man… what did he do in his life, what journey led him to be present in front of the camera in February 1890, the learnt lines on his open face evidence of a hard life well lived. And these are Majeerteen Woman trapped in silver like ghosts in a machine, a movement of mutable energy through time and space that still has me engaging with their life even today. Bless them all.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Among the 101 photographers on show, 52 are Westerners and 49 are indigenous. This near-parity was made possible by the rise, over the last decade, of acquisitions of works by artists from the four continents.”
Quotation by curator Christine Barthe, head of the heritage unit at the Quai Branly’s photographic collection and co-curator of the exhibition with Anabelle Lacour, head of the photographic collection
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the two bottom images the section ‘Daguerreotypes for anthropology’ and in the bottom image the daguerreotypes of Henri Jacquart (French, 1809 – died after 1873) from September 1851 (below)
Many places in the world became accessible through photography as soon as it was invented in 1839. From the 1840s, darkrooms were taken on official expedition ships and crossed the borders of Europe. From Mexico to Gabon, the camera served the taste of the time for archaeological and geographical description and curiosity about the models encountered. In the second half of the 19th century, photography was used to examine all areas of the globe. This thirst for images was notably fuelled by the European colonial conquest.
Starting from the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac’s photograph collection, completed by exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition considers the routes and the dissemination of photography outside Europe in the 19th century. Through a selection of photographs produced between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas, it aims to understand better the development and the different appropriations of the medium locally by bringing to light less well-known photographs, patrons, phenomena and forms of photography in different parts of the world. An attempt to rebalance the history of photography, too often centred on Europe and the United States.
This exhibition is an adaptation of the exhibition Photographs. 1842-1896: An Early Album of the World designed by the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi from 25 April to 13 July 2019.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac website
There was a time without photography, and there were places without cameras. Even if it is hard to imagine nowadays, it was not so long ago. Since its invention in 1839, photography has extended its reach at varying paces into all the visible spaces and every corner of the globe: starting in familiar places, spreading to nearby regions and neighbouring countries, and finally making it way into more far-flung lands as well. From the most extraordinary scenes to the most trivial, from breathtaking scenery to the food on our plates, nothing is too intimate or too grandiose to escape our desire to take a picture of it.
But how did it all start? How did photography spread, contributing to our view of the world? Who are the players who make this “photo album of the world”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied countless scientific and military expeditions and trips. It was part of the usual conquest of the world, in the context of colonial expansion by the European powers, which intensified in the second half of the 19th century. As a tool to describe landscape and map territories, it contributed to the knowledge and control of Indigenous populations. Europe did not have a monopoly over this modern technology, however. Photography travelled and was transformed. In many regions, from Mexico and Colombia to Sierra Leone and Madagascar, Iran, Japan and India, it was adopted and sometimes adapted to social practices and local cultures, to create, control and conserve an image of the self and one’s environment.
The exhibition revisits some of this early histories of photography outside of Europe.
There was a time without photography and places without a camera. Even if it is difficult to imagine it today, this period is not so far away.
Since the announcement of its invention in 1839, photography has more or less quickly invaded all visible spaces, penetrated all places on the scale of the globe: familiar places, nearby regions, then neighbouring countries, also the most distant. From the most extraordinary to the most trivial, from the sublime landscape to the content of our plates, nothing was too intimate or too grandiose to escape the desire to create its image.
How did it all start? How did photography come about? propagated, participating in the global geographical imagination? Who are the actors who make up this “world album”?
Since the 1840s, photography has accompanied the countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions. It participates in the visual conquest planetary, in the context of the colonial expansion of the European powers which accelerated in the second half of the 19th century. Description tool landscapes, territorial mapping, it supported the knowledge and population control. But Europe did not have a monopoly on this modern technology. Photography travels, transforms, takes root. In many regions, Mexico, Colombia, West Africa in Madagascar, from Iran to Japan via India, it has been adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures to build, control and maintain an image of oneself and one’s environment.
This exhibition proposes to return to some of these stories from the beginnings of photography practiced outside Europe.
First appearances
The first technique that was widely used in the early days photography, between the 1840s and 1850s, takes its name “daguerreotype” of its inventor Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. It’s about of a copper plate coated with silver and made sensitive to light. Relatively expensive to manufacture and requiring learning, this technique was widely used to produce portraits. The long exposure time made it difficult to apply it to the landscape. These images are unique because formed directly on the silver plate, they cannot therefore give rise to several tests. The difficulty of their realisation as well as their cost explain their rarity today. European and American practice in its very beginnings, the daguerreotype quickly exported around the world. new technique modifying the relationship to its own image, the daguerreotype is also used as a tool of scientific description. Practiced by travellers and traveling photographers, it was also adopted very early in many photographic studios of major world cities, such as Mexico City, Bogotá and Lima. In Tehran, the daguerreotype is practiced at the court of the Shah of Persia from 1845.
Daguerreotypes for anthropology
If photography is quickly adopted by travellers and offers a new vision of the real world, it also serves a new discipline: anthropology. In France, the first scientific applications of photography to this burgeoning field are experienced in the years 1840-1850. Within the framework of a science then racial, and in a project typology inherited from natural history classification methods, photography is a tool that establishes visual categories, that shape racial stereotypes. Daguerreotypes made on demand from the anthropology laboratory of the National Museum of Natural History show the importance attached by scientists to skulls, casts and human skeletons, central in a discipline marked by the medicine and comparatism. Produced by professionals like Louis-Auguste Bisson, or by employees of the Museum like Henri Jacquart, these examples testify of an objectification of bodies that photography reinforces. These daguerreotypes are produced or collected by the institution in the same way as the portraits of living people.
Twenty years after the conquest of Algeria, the Arab horsemen have stopped fighting, and are but the shadows of those who for years thwarted the French army. They came to Paris for a show set up by the Museum, Children of the Desert, a fantasia on the Champ de Mars in June, 1851. They too are photographed, and casts of their bodies taken for science – but as popular artists, these horsemen leave their names under their portraits and are paid to pose.
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Installation views of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing in the bottom image the section ‘Recreated worlds: photo studios’ (below)
Recreated worlds: photo studios
In the second half of the 19th century, travel by land and sea developed considerably. European colonial expansion was one of the drivers behind the rise in global photographic coverage, not only did cameras and photographers travel, but so did their models. Members of the Indigenous elites made regular diplomatic trips or came to Europe to study. At the major colonial world’s fairs between 1870 and the early 20th century, groups were brought to European cities to be exhibited.
From the 1860s onwards, a great number of photo studios were set up in major cities. Those involved in this new commercial practice adapted to demand from a tourist clientele in search of exoticism, and sets and accessories were used to recreate artificial worlds. These widely distributed images with simplistic, sometimes demeaning captions, transmitted and perpetuated stereotypes. Photos with the frame centred on the face were often taken to respond to the need for description expressed in the field of physical anthropology. But studio decors also attracted a local clientele keen to create souvenirs with their loved ones.
Looking at these portraits, many questions remain today: Who are these individuals? What can we find out about their interactions with the photographer and their participation when being photographed?
Portraits of Aboriginal Australians
The aboriginal populations were privileged subjects of the first commercial photographers in Australia. Produced in the studio, these portraits obey 19th century racialist scientific interests; they are designed to document what was then considered to be an endangered population. German photographer John William Lindt, based in Grafton, New Wales of the South, produces a series of portraits of the aboriginal populations of Clarence Valley, marketed in the form of portfolios from the 1870s.
Combining exoticism and pictorial tradition, his pictures met with great success. Despite this problematic production context and the sometimes artificial nature stagings, this visual heritage is now a resource important for the descendants of the communities. In Australia, research have been undertaken since the 1990s to obtain information on the models, their identity and their territory of origin. The photography model known as “Mary Ann of Ulmarra” was identified in 2013 as Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan, through research conducted by one of his descendants.
Text from the exhibition
John William Lindt (Australian born Germany, 1845-1926) Mary Ann of Ulmarra (Mary Ann Williams, née Cowan) 1873 Albumen print
Lindt took at least sixty photographs in this series of studio portraits of Clarence River Aborigines, although extant albums usually contain fewer than a dozen each. When first published, these studio tableaux were regarded as accurate. Reference: An Eye for Photography: the camera in Australia / Alan Davies. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 2004, p. 60.
Antoine Julien Nicolas Fauchery (French, 1823-1861) and Richard Daintree (Australian born United Kingdom, 1832-1878) Untitled (Two Aborginal Australian men and three women posing in front of a studio backdrop) Victoria possibly Mt Franklin, 1858 9.20 x 21.20cm
John Beattie (1859-1930) came to Tasmania from Scotland at the age of nineteen, in 1878. Within a year, he was using the brand-new dry-plate photographic technique to take a series of views of Lake St Clair. He joined the Anson Brothers studio, and worked with the three siblings until he bought them out in 1891. In the 1890s he established a museum of curiosities he had collected. The first of the island’s wilderness photographers – with a keen interest in preservation of the environment – Beattie became the ‘official’ photographer for the Tasmanian Government. In addition to his well-known series of photographs of convicts, he made a number of portraits of Aboriginal people, of whom he said ‘for about thirty years this ancient people held their ground bravely against the invaders of their beautiful domain.’
Of Scottish origin, John Watt Beattie landed in Australia in 1878. The following year, he moved to Tasmania to a farm in New Norfolk, northwest of Hobart. Feeling more interest in going out in the bush than for the work of the farm, he then devotes himself to the photography of countryside. He was appointed official government photographer of Tasmania in 1896. Able to promote his work, he also enthusiastically supported the development of the tourism industry. In 1906, he traveled to Melanesia, Polynesia and the Norfolk Islands and derives hundreds of widely distributed photographs.
Text from the exhibition
Charles Woolley (Australian, 1834-1922) William Lanne 1866 Albumen silver photograph
William Lanne (1834-1869), also known as King Billy or William Laney, is said to have been Truganini’s third partner. Lanne was captured along with his family in 1842 and taken to the Aboriginal camp at Wybelenna on Flinders Island. He moved for a time to Oyster Cove in 1847, before spending the years until 1851 in a Hobart orphanage. Four years later he joined a whaling ship. Regarded as the last surviving male of the Oyster Cove clan, Lanne died in March 1869 from a combination of cholera and dysentery. Following his death an argument broke out between England’s Royal College of Surgeons and Tasmania’s Royal Society over who should have his remains for scientific purposes. A member of the College of Surgeons, William Crowther, managed to break into the morgue where Lanne’s body was kept, decapitating the corpse, removing the skin and inserting a skull from a white body into the remnants. The Royal Society, discovering Crowther’s work, moved to thwart any further violations by amputating the hands and feet and discarding them separately. In this state, Lanne’s body was buried.
Charles Alfred Woolley (17 December 1834-1922) was born in Hobart Town, Tasmania, Australia. He was an Australian photographer but also created drawings, portraits and visual art. He is best known for his photographic portraits of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people taken in August 1866 and exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne the same year. …
In August 1866, Woolley took photographic portraits in his studio of the five surviving Oyster Cove Aboriginal people which became his best known work. These were exhibited at the Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia colonial exhibition in Melbourne later that year. Two of the portraits were of Truganini, a female, and William Lanne, also known as King Billy.
These works are now exhibited in the National Library, and the State Libraries of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria. James Bonwick’s publication The Last of the Tasmanians (1870) included several of the photographs and shortly after engravings started to appear. Woolley exhibited the prints again in 1875 at the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition. A few of the original sets survive, mainly in English collections, as well as copies that J. W. Beattie made.
After Lanne’s death in 1869, his grave was desecrated and his body mutilated and a full sized bust was produced by an artist named Francisco Santé. The Evening Mail advertised that it could be seen for a “small fee”. Though Woolley was not known as a sculptor, the Hobart Town Examiner reported that “numerous” busts he had produced were at Walch and Sons and Birchall’s bookshops.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Conquering souls and spreading the word’ with, at left, three photographs by Augustine Dyer (Australian, 1858-1931) of Papua New Guinea (1884, see below)
Conquering souls and spreading the word
The movement of colonial conquest also proceeded through missionary work where competition between congregations and between nations played out, much like at the political level. The Pacific was a place of rivalry between the United Kingdom and France. Protestant societies established from 1875 onwards in south-eastern New Guinea found themselves in competition with the Catholic missionaries. National alliances were formed between explorers and missionaries, promoting each other’s work. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the development of illustrated travel press allowed these heroic stories to be shared with a wide audience. Conferences with photo projections organised by the Geographical and Anthropological Societies were part of this process, combining different sources of images and narratives and establishing a lasting visual culture of the exotic.
Dyer was the Australian Government Printing Office photographer who went to British New Guinea with John Paine (a studio photographer), for the purpose of recording the British annexation of the territory. He travelled more extensively with Paine in 1884 through PNG visiting Port Moresby, Motu-Motu, Kerepunu, etc.
Taking as its starting point the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe in the 19th century, from its invention. Through a selection of nearly 300 photographs taken between 1842 and 1911 in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, it seeks to better understand the phenomenon of the global dissemination of photography and the regional histories of non-European photography.
A visual collection of the world
Many places in the world became accessible through photography after the official announcement of its invention. The technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris in August 1839 and, in September, the darkrooms were loaded onto ships and crossed the borders of Europe. A tool associated with Western technological modernity, taken on countless voyages and scientific and military expeditions around the world, the medium of photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to investigate everywhere on the globe. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite. European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography.
Dissemination and local appropriation
The new medium spread throughout the world from the 19th century, with very varied adoption rates in different regions. Europeans were no longer the only ones experimenting with, commissioning and marketing photography. Its local roots can be linked to the relations of countries with the West and to the relationship of societies to images. The exhibition, which presents the work of European and local photographers on four continents, seeks to better understand the development and appropriation of the medium around the world on a local scale by bringing to light lesser-known photographers, sponsors, phenomena and photographic forms, in an attempt to rebalance a history of photography that too often focuses on Europe and the United States. In many regions, from Colombia to West Africa to Madagascar, and from Iran to Japan to India, photography was adopted and sometimes adapted to social uses and local cultures and in many places seems to satisfy the desire for self-representation and the construction of modern identities. If cameras and photographers travelled, their models also travelled. The indigenous elites made regular diplomatic visits or came to Europe for training. From the 1860s, many photography studios were set up in large cities to meet the demands of tourists looking for exoticism. But the studios’ decor also attracted a local clientele wanting to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
How far should photography be taken?
The 19th century in Europe was characterised by a need to accumulate objects, knowledge and also territory. Through photography, landscapes became lands to be mapped and conquered, and their inhabitants subjects to be studied. In the scientific field, the natural history model influenced the use of photography. It contributed to the myth of virgin territories and was a tool in the growing geographical discipline, making claims of exhaustivity: see everything, photograph everything. But this thirst for images, which began in 1840 in Europe and then spread rapidly throughout the world, met with contrasting situations. From the beginning, the question of limits arose: how far to go, under what conditions and for what purposes should a photograph be taken? This was sometimes a technical challenge, but above all an ethical question when it involved showing the horrors of wars or producing the image of scenes or objects that were supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers may have tricked, coerced or negotiated to get an image.
The selection of works, mostly taken from the quai Branly photography collection, highlights the diversity of photographic practices outside Europe at their origins and reveals early testimonies of indigenous photographers. By revealing the scientific, military and commercial uses, as well as the memorial and social functions of photography, and by presenting a wide range of objects and techniques, the exhibition invites us to re-examine today the meaning of the photographic gesture in these different non-European contexts.
Publication
Mondes photographiques, histoires des débuts
The book that accompanies the exhibition broadens its scope of study to offer the first decentralised history of early world photography. Taking as its base the photography collection of the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, a reference collection for the representation of the extra-European world in the early years of photography, it deepens this study to focus on the trajectories and geographies of the medium outside Europe from the 19th century. Co-publication musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac / Actes Sud 400 pages. €69
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
In 1844, two Brazilian Indians were brought to France by a certain Mr. Porte and are going to stay in Paris for a few months. This man baptised Manuel (and the young woman baptised Marie) in the press, will arouse interest certain among the anthropologists of the Natural History Museum. Werner, painter from the Museum, paints their portrait in watercolour, while Thiesson photographs them using the daguerreotype. They also lend themselves at a moulding session in the anthropology laboratory. The five daguerreotypes that remain today from the photography session show us two people with the top of the body undressed, and the bottom dressed of what appears to be European clothing.
Text from the exhibition
This man from the Canaries counts among the very first non-Europeans to have been photographed, probably in Paris. His portrait illustrates the first scientific publication offering daguerreotypes to visually appreciate the anatomic characteristics of human skulls. The Botocudo Indian from Brazil was photographed in Lisbonne, in 1844, but he visited Paris; his name was Manuel, and his wife was Maris. They lodged with some man called Porte, who brought them to the Museum. There, people wanted to make casts of their faces, their torsos, their arms and legs. Manuel and Marie walked across Marville’s Paris – across that city that was to disappear; they walked on the Boulevard du Temple and might have even visited the theaters. Actors, spectators? Dressed, costumed, naked? Under applause, mockery, examination, or measurement?
Catherine Darley. “Ghosts (1) – Shadows,” on the Poemas del río Wang blog 10/08/2012 [Online] Cited 07/05/2023
Luis Garcia Hevia is the first Colombian photographer and daguerreotypist. He exhibited his first “two essays of daguerreotypes” at the exhibition of industry in Bogota in November 1841. He was also a painter and miniaturist.
Recreated Worlds: The Studios
In the second half of the 19th century, land and sea travel grow considerably. European colonial expansion is one of the driving forces behind the acceleration of global photographic coverage. If cameras and photographers travel, their models also travel. The indigenous elites make regular diplomatic visits or come to train in Europe. During major universal and colonial exhibitions, population groups are moved and exhibited in European metropolises, between the 1870s and the beginning of the 20th century.
From the 1860s, many photographic studios set up in the big cities. The actors of this new commercial practice adapt to the demand of a tourist clientele in search of exoticism. Staging and props recreate artificial worlds. When the framing refocuses on the face, it is often to respond to the descriptive need of physical anthropology. But the decor of the studio attracts also a local clientele anxious to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
Faced with these portraits, many questions persist today: who were these individuals? What can we know of their interaction with the photographer and their participation at the time of the shot?
In photography, the portrait genre has from the outset brought together goals and very different situations. Like today, it may have been used at recreational or law enforcement purposes, as a personal memento or as a means of recording. The very ambiguity of the medium lies in this possible permeability of domains: a family album image can leave the private sphere, a photograph made for an anthropological description can sometimes also be a true portrait, shedding light on the personality of its subject.
The images of Jacques-Philippe Potteau, produced for scientific purposes between 1860 and 1869 at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, confer a undeniable dignity to their models, sometimes photographed as part of diplomatic functions (embassies of India, Siam, Japan). Jean Lagrêne, Philippe Colarossi are closely associated with the artistic world, as models. If Jacques-Philippe Potteau, a technician employed by the Museum, took care to note the names of the people he photographs, the reason for their presence in the photographic workshop, or in the Parisian capital is not always known to us. This is currently under research.
Jacques-Philippe Potteau was a member of the anthropology department of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Paris. Between 1860 and 1869 he made a series of ethnographic portraits for the museum under the collective title Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris. In 1862 Potteau succeeded Louis Rousseau as the departmental photographer. Potteau showed his work at the London Photography Exhibit in 1862 and 1863, and the 1863 Paris International Photography Exhibit.
As early as the 1840s, cameras were on board on expedition ships departing from Europe. sailors, explorers, archaeologists, missionaries, artists are among the first experimenters of this new technology in remote regions, which are gradually passing under the yoke of the colonial powers. From Mexico to Gabon, photography is in turn an instrument of description and visual appropriation landscapes and monuments, a knowledge and control tool populations, or even an object of diplomacy vis-à-vis the local elite.
If the camera records with the same acuity the architectural detail, the landscape grandiose and the faces crossed, the authors gathered here turn out to be excellent technicians with a personal eye. Their travelogues relate the difficulties overcome: technical challenges, climatic constraints or even reluctance of local populations to pose. But these spectacular images, carried out in more or less accessible places, are also the result of a collaboration with many less visible local intermediaries: guides, interpreters, informants or porters – necessary to transport photographic equipment – played a decisive role.
The Briton Philip Henry Egerton worked for most of his life as senior civil servant for the colonial regime in northern India. He realises these photographs during a semi-official mission in the Himalayas, trying identify alternative routes for the wool trade across the border
India and Chinese Tibet. The Kangra and Kullu valleys, as well as the sites of Spiti and the Bara Shigri glacier are thus photographed for the first time. The images are published, accompanied by the story of their author, in 1864, with the support of the government of Punja.
Text from the exhibition
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – From the River (Main View) Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Philip Henry Egerton (Welsh, 1824-1893) Shigri Glacier – Lower View Negative June – August 1863; print 1863-1864 From Journal of a Tour Through Spiti, To The Frontier of Chinese Thibet, With Photographic Illustrations Albumen silver print 21.6 × 26.5cm (8 1/2 × 10 7/16 in.) Credit Line: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Public domain
Improvised archaeologist and photographer with a taste for travel, Désiré Charnay is known to be the first to have brought back from several archaeological sites Mexicans a harvest of spectacular images. He uses the process of the negative on wet collodion glass, which requires him to carry heavy equipment. His fame was ensured by the publication, in 1861-1862, of the album photographic American cities and ruins.
Local stories and self-images
Europeans are not the only ones to experiment, order and market photography from the 19th century. The new medium is spreading to scale across the globe and has very variable rates of adoption depending on the region. Its local roots can be linked to the countries’ relations with the West or the relationship of societies to images. In Qajar Iran, in Siam (Thailand present day), in the princely courts of India and Java, royalty has been a patron enthusiast of photography and accelerated its growth by designating official photographers and importing equipment. The leaders take awareness of the potential of photography for the representation of power and the assertion of their authority. In India, Japan, China, West Africa and in Madagascar, indigenous photographers are getting professional training to practice, open their commercial studio in the major port cities, and very often work for a wider clientele, among the local and colonial elite. Photography is appropriate and adapted to social uses, it sometimes mixes to local visual traditions – such as painting or calligraphy – and seems in many places respond to the desire for self-representation and construction modern identities.
Royal appropriations of photography in Iran and Thailand
The monarchs Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), in Iran, and Mongkut in Siam (Rama IV, r. 1851-1868), seduced by the technology and the possibilities of dissemination of the royal image, were important patrons. Naser al-Din Shah, defender of the arts and open to Europe, initiated himself into the practice, becoming an amateur keen. It promotes the development of photography through the diversity of actions which he led: in 1858, he established the Royal Photography Workshop within the of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, promotes the teaching of technique at school polytechnic of Dar ol-Fonoun, imports equipment, translates manuals, and appoints official court photographers who are given the title of Akkasbashi. Siam’s science-savvy King Mongkut also ramps up production photography at court. The Thai Francis Chit, who receives the title of “photographer of His Majesty the King of Siam”, produced several portraits of the royal family and views of official court events.
In Japan, a considerable boom during the Meiji era (1868-1912)
In Japan, photography developed as soon as the country opened up to trade international in 1859, and experienced considerable growth during the Meiji era (1868-1912), period of great modernisation. Uchida Kuichi and Ueno Hikoma, trained in Nagasaki, are among the most famous Japanese photographers of their time. They have developed a unique style with a pronounced taste for theatricality and sometimes humour. The production of ambrotypes, known as garasu shashin – “photography on glass” – is experiencing a particular boom in the field portraiture from the 1860s. Unique objects, they are mounted in boxes in raw paulownia wood, with traditional geometric shapes simple, used to preserve calligraphy or personal property.
The ambrotypes were intended for the private sphere of Japanese families, wishing to pass on the portraits of their loved ones as an inheritance. The tekagami-style accordion albums, richly decorated with gilding and sophisticated paintings, originally planned to accommodate calligraphy, have been diverted from their traditional use to receive prints large format photographs of Ichida Sota and Suzuki Shin’ichi II.
Tamoto Kenzō (田本 研造, 1832-1912) was a Japanese photographer. He was born in Kumano, in the Mie Prefecture of Honshu. When he was twenty-three, he moved to Nagasaki to study western culture. In 1859, he relocated to Hakodate, where he lost a foot due to frostbite. The surgeon who amputated his foot had an interest in photography, specifically ambrotypes, and Tamoto became his apprentice. It was not until 1866 that he began working as a photographer. In 1867, he photographed the construction of the last castle to be built in Japan, Fukuyama Castle. Tamoto took photographs of military leaders Enomoto Takeaki and Hijikata Toshizō during the Battle of Hakodate between 1868-1869. Tamoto opened his own portrait studio in Hakodate in 1869. Starting in 1871, he documented the improvements to infrastructure in the Hokkaido region, eventually presenting 158 photographs of the process to the Settlement Office.
Introduced in India in 1840, photography was used by the authorities British and quickly adopted by the Indian elite. Studios set up in major port cities like Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. Active members of the Photographic Society of Bombay, Narayan Dajee and Hurrychund Chintamon are among the first native photographers to practice from the 1850s with the local elite, Brahmans, members of the government, and at the same time participate in colonial projects ethnographic documentation. The technology aroused enthusiasm very early on many maharajas. Famous Indian photographer Lala Deen Dayal received the title of official photographer of the ruler of Hyderabad in 1884. In some princely states like Indore, Udaipur and Mewar, photography of painted court is a great success and is part of the tradition of royal portraiture of pageantry. Enlarged prints are coated with a vivid layer of paint and opaque, which emphasises the abundance of jewels and the sumptuous character clothes.
One of India’s earliest commercial photographers who specialised in portraiture, Hurrychund Chintamon was based in Bombay (now Mumbai). He received his training at Elphinstone College in 1855 under WHS Crawford, a secretary of the Photographic Society of Bombay, where Chintamon also exhibited his work the following year. He subsequently set up his photography studio in the city, initially photographing members of local mercantile families and later expanding his clientele to aristocracy and important political, administrative and literary figures, including Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and Manickjee Antarya.
When Elphinstone introduced a course in photography in 1855, under instruction from the British East India Company, Chintamon was among the first batch of forty students to enroll. He graduated in 1856 with distinction, having twice earned the best photographs prize. The same year, he exhibited his photographs at the Bombay Photographic Society, along with others such as Narayan Daji, gaining the visibility he needed to operate as an independent professional. He also went on to produce a number of ethnographic images, some of which were displayed at the Exposition Universelle, or the Paris International Exposition, of 1867 for industrial, art and craft manufactures. His studio, Hurrychund & Co., which he set up at Rampart Row in 1858 flourished until 1881, when it ceased operations. …
Accompanying the proliferation of independent photography studios in the mid-nineteenth century, was the development of a hybrid aesthetic, seen also in Chintamon’s work. He evolved a visual style that combined the Victorian iconographies of class and refinement with the Indian symbols of ethnicity, caste and status. In staging his sitters, he used the popular European conventions of painted backdrops as well as props such as printed carpets and flower vases. The sitters were often posed or arranged to suggest an air of casualness or informality, in conspicuous contrast to their own self-conscious formality – likely a result of having to hold still during extended individual exposure times. This unintended tension between setting and sitter is another notable characteristic of Chintamon’s portraits.
Anonymous. “Hurrychund Chintamon,” on the Mapacademy website April 21, 2022 [Online] Cited 27/05/2023
Of British origin, P. A. Johnston and Theodore Julius Hoffmann founded the Johnston & Hoffmann studio, at its time the second largest European studio important in India. Established in Calcutta in 1882, they opened eight years later a annex to Darjeeling. Their studio is best known for its portraits of locals and royalty from Nepal, Sikkim and Tibet.
Raja Lala Deen Dayal (Hindi: लाला दीन दयाल; 1844-1905; also written as ‘Din Dyal’ and ‘Diyal’ in his early years), famously known as Raja Deen Dayal) was an Indian photographer. His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI, who awarded him the title Raja Bahadur Musavvir Jung Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885. He received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing the section ‘Composite photographs in Mexico’
Composite photographs in Mexico
In the history of painted photography practices, colourisation often aims to embellish the print considered monochromatic and dull. A set of photographs painted by landscape artist Conrad Wise Chapman show a association of these two techniques around picturesque and popular subjects. Other forms of formal hybridisation are attested in Mexico. Three shots set with a medallion were partially covered with feathers in the colours shimmering, to highlight clothes and certain elements of the decor. These composite objects are rare testimonies that combine the art of featherwork, widespread in Mexico during the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, with the new technique of photography. The figure of the peddler is attributed to the photographer Augustin Péraire [below] and the image of the three women is a reproduction of a print of the popular figure showing the “China poblana”.
Installation view of the exhibition Photographs. An Early Album of the World (1842-1911) at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris showing at second left, W.J. Sawyer’s Mr Sawyer, photo man (Nigeria, 1880-1890, below)
Photo of W. J. Sawyer and his sons taken in Calabar (possibly at his studio). W. J. Sawyer was a photographer based in Calabar, mostly active during the late 19th century and early 20th century, having photographed the Oba of Benin during the period of his craft.
W.J. Sawyer
The biography of W. J. Sawyer is still quite incomplete. He takes, on demand of the Spanish Commander Francisco Romero, several photographs in Bioko (current Equatorial Guinea), in 1883. The images are shown the same year at the International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam. The picture showing a man accompanied by two boys could be a self-portrait of the photographer, as the title on the back suggests.
Rapid growth in West Africa
Photography was quickly adopted in many regions in the world from the 1840s to the 1860s. West Africa combines several factors which have fostered its rapid growth. Many ports connect the cities with each other and with the European continent, facilitating transatlantic and regional trade. In Freetown (current Sierra Leone), Lagos (current Nigeria), Libreville (current Gabon) established communities made up of elders freed and returning slaves from North and South America and the Caribbean. A cosmopolitan culture reigns in these cities where trade can develop.
As early as 1853, the African-American Augustus Washington left the United States and set up a daguerreotype studio in Monrovia. In the 1860s, Francis W. Joaque or J.P. Decker practice photography on an itinerant basis on the coast. These photographers respond to a local demand for photography loved ones or events to remember. They also include a clientele European, Joaque realising for example many portraits of the explorer Italian Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza. The Lutterodt dynasty establishes several studios photographers who operate in Accra (current Ghana) and Freetown between the years 1870 and 1940.
J. A. Green is one of West Africa’s most prolific photographers. Born in Nigeria, he is the son of a palm oil merchant. He practices photography from 1891 and provides images to a clientele African and European. He also trains other photographers. In this image, Green photographs a stage at the leader’s funeral slaver Amonibienye Ofori Long John. The tanda burial custom involves, for the elites, the public presentation of the body of the deceased dressed in his clothes of pageantry. Son Henry Obulu supports his father’s jaw to affirm his position as legitimate heir.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green
Jonathan Adagogo Green (J. A. Green), born in the village of Ayama (Peterside), Bonny (Rivers State, Nigeria) in 1873. The son of Chief Sunju Okoronkwoye Dublin Green and Madame Idameinye Green, he was looked after by his uncle Uruasi Dublin Green after his father’s death in 1875. He attended school in Lagos and possibly Sierra Leone. It is unknown where he trained as a photographer but by 1891 he had set up his photographic practice in Bonny. His work covered a range of themes including portraiture of British colonial officers, European merchants, prominent chiefs and their families, scenes of daily and ritual life, commerce and building – a body of work that appealed to both local elites and expatriate clients. Green died in 1905 at the age of 32, after practicing in the Niger Delta for 14 years. His work is in held in a number of collections in the UK, USA and Nigeria.
Text from the exhibition
Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873-1905) was according to some sources the first professional photographer in what is now Nigeria to have ethnic origins in that area. He is significant in being a pioneering photographer in what is now Nigeria, noted for his documentation of the colonial power and local culture, particularly his Ibani Ijo community.
Green was born in Bonny, present day Rivers State. “He studied photography in Sierra Leone and then established a studio in Bonny.” The area where he lived became part of the British Oil Rivers protectorate in 1884, which was renamed to the Niger Coast Protectorate in 1893. It was part of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate for the last few years of Green’s life, starting in 1900.
Green was active as a photographer for only a short lifetime, dying at the age of 32. “But during this period he was both energetically productive and remarkably adroit in serving both indigenous and colonial clienteles.” “When he set up shop his work was appreciated and rewarded by two very different communities.” His “strategic use of initials on his business cards and stamps… disguised his African origins”, part of his working with the colonial era officials.
William Ellis (29 August 1794 – 9 June 1872) was a British missionary and author. He travelled through the Society Islands, Hawaiian Islands, and Madagascar, and wrote several books describing his experiences.
In Madagascar, photography as a tool of social distinction
Photography is introduced to Madagascar by the British missionary William Ellis [above]. First rejected by Queen Ranavalona I (r. 1828-1861), the technology was enthusiastically adopted during the reign of Radama II (r. 1861-1863) by the king himself, the court and the Malagasy elite, responding to the desire for individualisation and social distinction from high society. Several European photographers mentioned the ease and familiarity of the models with the device. From the 1890s, the first Malagasy studios won great success with a population wishing to design and maintain a self-image. The photos presented here are the work of this first generation Malagasy photographers, including Joseph Razaka based in Antananarivo and Joseph Razafy in Toamasina.
Ulke Brothers Studio (Julius Ulke and Henry Ulke) Apsáalooke (Crow) delegation 1872 Albumen silver print from glass negative 8 x 10 in. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
Back row (standing) from left to right: Long Horse; Thin Belly; Bernard Prero (interpreter); unknown name, wife of Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Major F.D. Pease (agent); unknown name, wife of Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); Frank Shane (interpreter); and Bear In The Water. Front row (seated in chairs) from left to right: Bear Wolf; White Calf; Awé Kúalawaachish (Sits In The Middle Of The Land); Uuwatchiilapish (Iron Bull); One Who Leads The Old Dog; and Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven]). Front row (seated on the floor) from left to right: Stays With The Horses, wife of Bear Wolf; and Pretty Medicine Pipe, wife of Peelatchixaaliash (Old Crow [Raven])
This series by Timothy H. O’Sullivan comes from the album Photographs from Geographical explorations and surveys west of the 100th meridian Wheeler 1871-2-3, consisting of fifty photographs of explorations in the Western United States (New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, etc.). The set shows mainly landscapes and natural sites, some portraits of Zunis, Apaches and Navajos, and views of architecture and monuments.
The limits of visibility
The thirst for images which manifested itself as early as 1840 in Europe and then rapidly in the whole world has encountered contrasting situations. From the beginning arose the question of limits: how far to go? Under what conditions do a photography ? For what purposes? Technical challenge sometimes but above all question ethics when it comes to bearing witness to the horrors of war, or when it comes to to produce the image of scenes or objects that are supposed to remain hidden. Some photographers could trick, coerce or negotiate. The images produced are remained secret or, conversely, circulated widely. The life of photographs after the shot is a fundamental element of this medium, they are led to undergo multiple changes of meaning depending on the way we perceives them, from which they are presented. In this section are photographs that evoke certain situations limits: images of conflicts shown or hidden, sacred places of which a part remains invisible, images obtained by trickery. These photographs are not shown as trophies but as traces of practices that we can re-examine today.
Uncover the Sacred
For many photographers, the attraction of the forbidden or the opportunity to attend a singular event played into the desire to create an image. We consider today with a certain reserve these images of masks or places Holy. While they may still constitute factual documents, our attention now turns to the conditions of their realisation. In what contexts could they have been made, and what do they show us, apart from the very fact that they were produced in an exceptional way?
James album
The history of photography in Pueblo territory, in the United States, offers a rare example of strong reaction to the invasion of photography. The first reactions of mistrust from the Indian communities, from the 1890s, are linked to the dissemination of images and the tourist promotion of rituals supposed remain secret. The Hopi Snake Dance ceremony had become a major attraction. Often disrupted by ever-increasing numbers of visitors, it will be definitively prohibited to photographers in 1913, following the mobilisations of Hopi communities. The exhibition does not present here the photographs of this ritual that George Wharton James manages to capture, in order respect the Hopi restrictions. The exposed double page combines two times of shooting, the first image showing the perplexed waiting of the Indians in front the church of Acoma, and the second their reaction of just surprise and mistrust after shooting.
Félix Adrien Bonfils was a French photographer and writer who was active in the Middle East. He was one of the first commercial photographers to produce images of the Middle East on a large scale and amongst the first to employ a new method of colour photography, developed in 1880. …
Maison Bonfils produced thousands of photographs of the Middle East. Bonfils worked with both his wife and his son. Their studio became “F. Bonfils et Cie” in 1878. They photographed landscapes, portraits, posed scenes with subjects dressed up in Middle Eastern regalia, and also stories from the Bible. Bonfils took photographs in Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul). While Bonfils produced the vast majority of his work, his wife, Lydie, and son Adrien were also involved in photography produced by the studio. As few are signed, it is difficult to identify who is responsible for individual photographs. Lydie is thought to have taken some of the studio portraits, especially those of Middle Eastern women, who were more inclined to pose for a female photographer. Adrien became more involved in the landscape photography at age 17, when Félix returned to Alès to have compiled collections of their photographs published and then to open a collotype printing factory. Félix died in Alès on the 9th of April 1855.
As Christine Barthe observes, “In the first ten years of photography, from 1841 to 1851, many travelers would try their hands at daguerreotypes outside Europe. Guillain’s photographs, taken in very difficult conditions, are not always perfect from a technical point of view, but they nevertheless represent the pioneering works in the history of photography.” They offer extraordinary insight into the people, the policies, and the places along the east coast of Africa during the mid nineteenth-century.
Ernest Philipp Benecke may have been part of a well-known German banking family of the same name from the Hamburg and Hanover area. Benecke made his only known photographs in Egypt and Nubia in 1852, which consisted of portraits and studies of the daily life of the cultures he visited. His works are among the earliest surviving photographs of non-Western civilizations.
Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1832-1902) was an Ottoman Egyptian army engineer and surveyor who served as treasurer of the Hajj pilgrim caravan. As a photographer and author, he documented the holy sites of Islam at Mecca and Medina, taking the first ever photographs in what is now Saudi Arabia. …
Born in Cairo, Sadiq was educated in Cairo’s military college and at the Paris École Polytechnique. He qualified as an colonel in the Egyptian army and returned to the military college to teach cartographic drawing.
In 1861, he was assigned to visit the region of Arabia from Medina to the port of Al Wajh and conduct a detailed survey. He took a small team and some surveying equipment as well as his own camera; photography was not part of the official mission. His records of the expedition are the earliest known detailed accounts of the region’s climate and settlements. His photographs of Medina were the first ever taken there. In 1880 he was assigned to accompany the Hajj pilgrim caravan from Egypt to Mecca as its treasurer. He was responsible for the safe passage of the mahmal, a ceremonial passenger-less litter, to Mecca. Again he brought a camera, becoming the first person to photograph Mecca, the Great Mosque, the Kaaba, and pilgrim camps at Mina and Arafat. …
Sadiq used a wet-plate collodion camera, which had been invented in the 1850s. This produced negatives on wet glass plates, requiring a portable darkroom. From these negatives he made albumen prints which he signed or, later, stamped.
The sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina are the holiest sites of Islam. As part of the Hajj which is one of the five pillars of Islam, pilgrims perform rituals at Mecca and other nearby sites. On his expeditions from 1861 to 1881, Sadiq photographed the interiors and exteriors of sites on the Hajj pilgrimage route as well as at Medina. Photographing the Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (Prophet’s Mosque) and its surroundings in Medina on 11 February 1861, he noted in his diary that no-one had taken such photographs before.
He used walls and mosque roofs as vantage points to capture panoramas of the cities. He also photographed people connected to the holy sites. As well as the Hajj pilgrims walking around the Kaaba, he photographed Shaykh ‘Umar al-Shaibi, the keeper of the key of the Kaaba, and Sharif Shawkat Pasha, guardian of the Prophet’s Mosque.
Jules Borelli (b. 1853, d. 1941) was a French traveller and explorer who travelled to Ethiopia from Egypt on 16 September 1885 to explore the Omo river. In this effort he was supported by his brother, a financier in Cairo and the owner of a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities. He was delayed from moving into western and southwestern Ethiopia by ase Ménilék II, who, out of political concerns, detained him at the capital of Éntotto for part of the period from July 1886 to November 1887. Finally, in November 1887. Borelli started out for the headwaters of the Omo river, and reached a point some 300 miles north of Lake Rudolf (Turkana) on 17 June 1888, three months after Count Samuel Teleki von Szek and Lieutenant Ludwig Ritter von Hohnel had arrived on the lake’s southern shore. Had Ménilék not detained him and had he not fallen ill with malaria, Borelli could have reached the lake well before Teleki and von Hohnel. During his travels, Borelli was given a good description of the lake by people in Ethiopia, who called it Lake Šambara.
Borelli arrived in Cairo on 15 November 1888, where he later met Teleki and von Hohnel who were returning to Europe from their trip. The latter assisted B. in drawing his maps of the country surrounding the Omo river. Borelli doubted von Hohnel’s unsubstantiated claim that two rivers flowed into Lake Rudolf, and, as was later proven, correctly deduced that only the Omo flowed into the lake. In 1889, Borelli invited von Hohnel to Paris to attend an international geographical congress, where both men lectured. Borelli described his Ethiopian travels in his beautifully illustrated and well documented book published in 1890.
Isidore van Kinsbergen (Bruges 1821-Batavia 1905) was a Dutch-Belgian engraver, who after an educational period in Bruges and Gent discovered the artistic wealth of the theatre. In Batavia (Jakarta) he proved to be a real all-rounder, combining decoration painting with singing, acting and management. In 1855, Van Kinsbergen also took up photography. He was invited to photograph ‘all peculiarities’ on the Dutch mission to Bangkok in 1862 and took part in two inspection tours covering Java, Madura and Bali (1862 and 1865). Between 1863 and 1867 and again in 1873 he was contracted by the Government of the Netherlands-Indies to photograph Java’s antiquities. Two series, together holding over 375 photos, constitute his art and archaeology legacy.
There is a less or even ‘unknown’ Van Kinsbergen as well, who commercially operated from a professional studio in Batavia. Thanks to research, more than 200 anonymous or wrongly attributed photos can now be assigned to him. How to recognize Van Kinsbergen in portraits, landscapes, views and ‘types’? After all, making a portrait or casting a ‘type’ is quite different from photographing monuments. Are characteristics found within his art and archaeology series evident in his so-called commercial work? Yes, but not in one stereotypical way. Besides a general artistic rendering of items and the careful use of light, his style is direct, full of contrast, academic and theatrical at the same time.
Isidore van Kingsbergen (1821-1905) is sometimes described as the “sleeping beauty” of nineteenth-century photography, because his remarkable body of work has never been presented in its entirety. Yet he was a flamboyant artist who appeals to the imagination. For the first time, this publication gives a broad overview of the exceptional qualities of this photo pioneer. Van Kinsbergen became famous for the almost four hundred photographs he took of Java’s antiquities at the behest of the Dutch colonial government and the Batavian Society. Detailed research has also brought to light a hitherto unknown part of his oeuvre, including the portraits he made at the courts of Yogyakarta, Surakarta, Bandung, Madura and Buleleng (Bali). In his studio, he used his experience as a theatre director to photograph people from various social backgrounds in an expressive manner. Due to his tireless efforts for new cultural projects, he has also been called as the “soul of colonial artistic life in Batavia.”
Unknown photographer Album of photographs of the Philippines Nd Photo: musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Dist. RMN – Grand Palais image musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
The text on the photo stating that this man is from Papua New Guinea is incorrect. He is from the Marquesas archipelago. Please see another photograph of Hitoro, King of the island Ua Pou by Eugene Maunoury on the Ua Pou Wikipedia entry.
Eugene Maunoury
Eugène Maunoury settled in Chile between 1858 and 1865, in Santiago and Valparaiso. Then, from 1861, he was at the head of a luxurious studio in Lima (Peru) which saw parade the elite of society. From 1862 he was a correspondent for the Nadar studio. However, these portraits of Marquesans taken in Peru are neither intended images exotic, or photographs intended for scientific use. They were made by Maunoury to protest against the kidnapping of these people intended for be employed in forced labor in the exploitation of guano, in Peru. Maunoury publishes in L’Illustration of August 29, 1863 an article denouncing the situation of the raid, using some of his portraits. We recognise the king of the island Ua Pou, in the Marquesas Archipelago.
Many places in the world have become accessible through photography since it was invented. In August 1839, the technical details of the daguerreotype were revealed in Paris, and from September onwards, cameras were taken on board the ships of countless scientific and military expeditions and voyages all around the world. Associated with technological modernity, photography was used in the second half of the 19th century to record the whole planet. From Mexico to Gabon, photography was in turn an instrument of description and the visual appropriation of landscapes and monuments, a tool for knowledge and the control of populations, and an object of diplomacy with the local elite.
European colonial expansion was one of the driving forces that greatly accelerated global photography. Taking as its starting point the collection of photographs at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, enriched by several exceptional loans from public and private collections, the exhibition focuses on the trajectories and geographies of photography outside Europe in the 19th century.
4 key questions for Christine Barthe and Annabelle Lacour, the curators of the exhibition
1- What is the origin of this exhibition project?
Christine Barthe: The origins of this exhibition can be found in a project set up for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where a first version of the exhibition was shown in 2019. Originally, it was based on the museum’s own collection, focusing on early photographs taken in regions far removed from Europe. The museum’s collection mainly reflects the European and American point of view, and we wanted, right from the beginning, and even more so for this adaptation for the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, to show a little more interest in local productions, which are not so well known and visible as those of Westerners. So this project quickly expanded in terms of research to try and decentralise the history of photography.
2- More precisely, what discoveries did you make during this new research?
C.B.: The project was built up over a period of several years, and so we benefited from the layering of experiences, in-depth research, new acquisitions, contacts… It’s a long-term project. Right from the beginning, we have been researching images from the museum’s collection. This work has allowed us to re-identify major artists in the history of photography, whose images were previously anonymous in the museum’s collections. Lesser-known photographers have been found in French collections such as the National Library and the Asian arts museum Guimet. We were thus able to include a lot of local photographers in the exhibition, especially from West Africa, in present-day Ghana, Sierra Leone, Iran, India, Japan…
3- How did photography spread outside Europe?
Annabelle Lacour: What is striking about the beginning is how fast things happened. As soon as the French government announced the invention of the process in 1839, there were articles in newspapers all over the world. In the weeks that followed, boats left for foreign countries carrying cameras to make daguerreotypes. Lots of people all over the world were curious to see how it worked. As early as 1842, the Shah of Iran asked Russia and the United Kingdom to send him some cameras. Photographers trained people at the Persian court. There were different examples in India, in Thailand, where we see this infatuation of sovereigns for photography. However, the speed it was taken up with also varied greatly depending on the region. In Japan, for example, photography developed a little later, in the late 1850s, when the country opened up to trade. In Europe, photography was related to the idea of a visual conquest that accompanied the colonial conquest. And of course, we should never forget the significant use of photography to design and build up one’s own image.
4- Today, the way we perceive these photographs has evolved. How does this translate into the way they are displayed?
A.L.: The idea of this exhibition, through these fascinating images, is to give visitors the opportunity to see how, right from the beginning, the production of these images is diverse and responds to different wishes, desires, and fits into various different contexts. Obviously, the intention with which they were made for was not fixed in time. Some images may have seen their meaning change completely in the course of history. So we have this whole issue of a new reading of the images, which is important. The questions they posed when they were taken, and pose again today, are very much contemporary. The end of the exhibition raises certain ethical questions: what does it mean to want to photograph everything? What do we do with the images of scenes or people that we were not allowed to see or photograph? I don’t think the choice lies in the alternative of showing or concealing everything. The interest in showing these images today is the possibility to reflect, to ask the question of meaning, to show certain contexts and historical narratives, to realise just how contemporary these issues are.
Text from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
Lai Afong (Chinese: 黎芳; c. 1838 or 1839 – 1890) was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, considered to be the most successful photographic studio in the late Qing Dynasty. He is widely acknowledged as the most significant Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century. …
Lai Afong was the most successful of his generation of Chinese photographers in appealing to both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele. Lai Afong advertised in English-language newspapers – offering a “Larger, and more complete collection of Views than any other Establishment in the Empire of China” – and the artist captioned much of his work in both Chinese and English. Afong Studio photographs were sold to both Chinese patrons – both those local to Hong Kong and those visiting from other parts of China – and foreign visitors to China.
The Afong Studio became a destination and training ground for foreign photographers in the region, and photographers such as Emil Rusfeldt and D.K. Griffith began their careers under the tutelage of Lai Afong. In 1875, Griffith claimed that his mentor had “entered the arena of European art, associating his name with photography in its best form, and justly stands first of his countrymen in Hong Kong.” John Thomson, a Scottish photographer working in China at the time, praised Lai Afong’s images as “extremely well-executed, [and] remarkable for their artistic choice of position,” in his book The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China.
Lai Afong seems to have been the only Chinese photographer of his generation to be embraced by his foreign contemporaries. However, his work is distinct among them, as many of Lai Afong’s photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà. Additionally, Lai Afong favoured the panorama more than any other photographer working in China in the 19th century, earning his work a place among the giants of 19th century landscape photography such as Carleton Watkins in America and Gustave Le Gray in France. No other nineteenth-century Chinese photographer offered as extensive and diverse a view of late Qing Dynasty China.
Upon his tomb is inscribed this epitaph: “Cole – Photographer”
‘Photographer’ could have had the prefix: ethical, conscientious, brave, magnificent. But there is no need… Ernest Cole was a photographer.
Cole fled South Africa in 1966 in order to publish his seminal book about living under apartheid, House of Bondage (1967), and then lived a nomadic existence around the world until his death, never returning to the country of his birth.
I feel so sad that this legend of photography died penniless and living rough on the streets of New York in 1990.
But then I rejoice in the photographs that he left us. For (unlike so many photographs) they are memorable. They make us remember that we must respect each other – through an ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality.
“Respect is not fear and awe, it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation … It is clear respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms.”1
Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … and love.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp. 28-29.
Many thankx to FOAM for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to my friend and fellow artist Drager Meurtant for visiting the exhbition for me and allowing me to publish his photographs of the exhibition in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knew what I must do. I would show the world what the white South African had done to the black.”
Ernest Cole
“Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940, to a working-class Black family in a Black township outside the city of Pretoria. Growing into that society he came to know, with a depth of understanding that only belonging could bring, both its richness and the hardship and humiliation imposed by apartheid. As a boy he photographed people in the township for a shilling a time. By the age of eighteen he had begun to work as a photojournalist, and within a few years he was deeply committed to his essay on what it meant to be Black under apartheid. At age twenty-six, to escape the Security Police and to publish his seminal book, House of Bondage, he went into bitter and destructive exile. Cancer killed him in 1990. Apartheid destroyed him.”
David Goldblatt
Foam x Aperture: Celebrating the Legacy of Ernest Cole
For the current exhibition House of Bondage by Ernest Cole, Foam has joined forces with Aperture to host a special online event celebrating the enduring legacy of Ernest Cole (1940-1990). During the evening, a distinguished panel of experts will share their insights and reflections on Cole’s powerful photographic work, which captured the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa, exposing the dehumanising effects of racial oppression in the daily life of black South Africans.
The Mines
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Cole’s Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, awaiting processing and assignment (1960-1966, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right an Untitled image from Cole’s House of Bondage (1960-1966, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam
Foam proudly presents the first overview of the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole. The exhibition includes parts of his archive, which had long been considered lost. The overview was assembled in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, which in 2017 secured control of Cole’s archive. Restless and tenacious, yet dedicated and empathetic. It is difficult to define the enigmatic South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). He is celebrated for his tireless documentation of Black lives in South Africa under apartheid: a regime of institutionalised racial segregation that was in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s.
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
Cole lived a nomadic life, exiled from his native South Africa for his photographic publication House of Bondage (1967). The chapters from this book form the narrative for this exhibition. The book openly denounced the apartheid regime and was promptly banned in South Africa. In risk of arrest, Cole had gone into exile in 1966. He would never return to South Africa again.
Living between Sweden and the United States, Cole continued to document Black lives in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. However, being Black and stateless proved debilitating there too, and a publication of his American work would never materialise. Towards the end of his life, Cole became increasingly disillusioned and reportedly started living on the streets of New York. He died at age 49 from pancreatic cancer. Much of Cole’s work had been considered lost, until the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017.
Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
About the exhibition
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
This exhibition shows the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017. Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
The photographs in this exhibition were taken between 1958-1966, unless stated otherwise. All contact sheets are modern prints from scans. Original titles and text from House of Bondage are in quotation marks or italics. The exhibition pens in tandem with the launch of two volumes published by Aperture: the first a republication of House of Bondage, the second presenting US work for the first time in history.
This exhibition was made in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust and Magnum Photos.
Press release from Foam
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the background at left the section of the exhibition entitled ‘Banishment’
Banishment
Cole secretly visited Frenchdale, a remote government detention camp. Its inhabitants were banished without trial, on account of their political views. Cole recorded the basis conditions under which they lived in exile, sometimes for decades. Cole’s presence in the camp was unauthorised, and he recalls having to hide from the police during his stay. When he left, he was relieved. “For them and infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead. For me the frightful nothingness of Frenchdale was about to end (…) ironically, as I re-entered the restricted black life of Johannesburg, I felt free.”
Cole’s anger about apartheid education is inescapable in his chapter ‘Education for Servitude’, for which he visited various Bantu schools. His images and handwritten notes from a visit to a school in Vlakfontein in 1965 testify to overly crowded and understaffed classrooms in which children are studying to be “educated for servitude”.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section ‘Education for Servitude’: in the bottom image at left, Cole’s Earnest boy (1960-1966, below); and at right, Teacher toward end of her day in school, South Africa (1960-1966, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage (see photographs below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage Photo: Drager Meurtant
“African township is bulldozed out of existence to make way for white expansion. Government trucks will move residents and their few possessions to matchbox houses in new locations, usually in remote areas, perhaps not even named on the map. Even to live there, families must qualify. People at right did not, and thus have not only had their homes razed, but have nowhere to go.”
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing Nightmare Rides (1960-1966, all below) from the House of Bondage Period Photo: Drager Meurtant
Encouraged by his boss Jürgen Schadeberg, and inspired by other photographers at Drum – such as Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani and Alf Kumalo – Cole became one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photojournalists. Working in Johannesburg but not being allowed to live there, he commuted to the office by train. The platforms and carriages were segregated and overcrowded leading to bizarre situations that inspired the series ‘Nightmare Rides’. The item was commissioned by the Rand Daily Mail and first published in the Netherlands in 1962 as Mensen als vee [People as Cattle] in Katholieke Illustratie.
“Twice each day, at the morning and evening rush hours, the segregated station platforms are a bizarre sight. At one end, a few white trailers stand about, surrounded by space. At the other, a dense mass of Africans is congregated, crowded and compressed.”
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at right, Untitled (Police and Passes) (1960-1966, below) from the House of Bondage Period Photos: Drager Meurtant
“The standard by which the police operate is cruelly simple. To them every black man is a criminal suspect. In a technical sense, the police are not far off the mark to be so suspicious. The laws of apartheid are a far-reaching tangle of restrictions, reaching so deeply into everyday life that it is a rare African who does not violate some law.”
Curated by Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London)
Please note: This exhibition includes photographs showing nudity and sexually suggestive scenes. There is no age restriction for visitors to the exhibition. We are leaving the decision to visit to the discretion of parents, guardians and carers.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Nothing hard to see here…
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition albeit with not a single erect penis on show and about half the exhibition showing flaccid examples. The photographs seem particularly asexual. Hardly any of them are what you would call “erotic”, except perhaps the photographs from the earliest album in this posting, Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond Album (1933, above and below). For me, the most sexual photographs are the “rough trade” such as the skins and carnies… an archetype which has existed for centuries.
My Phd research titled Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (1997-2001) examined in part the history of the male body in photography, including photos of ephebes (young men), the muscular mesomorphic body as featured in the physique magazines and gay male pornography. My history of the male body in photography can be found in the Historical Pressings chapter while the Bench Press chapter investigates the ‘Cult of Muscularity’, the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it.
Much as gay men had to speak ‘Polari’ (gay slang language) when going to pubs such as the Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane in London in the 1970s so that those around us could not understand what we were saying, so physique or ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950s and 1960s relied heavily on the iconography of classical Rome and Greece to legitimise and hide from unknowing eyes (in plain sight) their homo-erotic overtones. Use was made of columns, drapery, and sets that presented the male body as the contemporary equivalent of idealised male beauty of ancient times.
While Simon in his excellent post on the exhibition notes that there was a delicate balancing act in the photographs in their subtle aesthetics of constraint and tact and a “self-imposed restraint which made ‘physique photographs’ walk such an exciting fine line between factual depiction of male anatomy and objects of lust from the 1930s to the 80s,” behind the scenes the models were getting boners and having sex all over the place. Purely for private consumption in their day, none of these photographs are ever shown (as in this exhibition) or published today and hardly anyone knows about them. The limp, flaccid penis is all that we get to see for fear of offence and/or moral outrage… for what was covert activity at the time (with a wide underground circulation) is kept impotent today.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I think the interest is not so much in the images, per se, as in their variety, and also in the extraordinary density and complexity of the clandestine networks of gay photographers, subjects, printers, publishers and distributors which the wall labels describe and explain. That’s interesting social history.
And then, when you lay the complex mesh of legal and cultural and visual parameters over the images you get, as it were, another layer of complexity beyond the images themselves; you get to see them as varying visual strategies and approaches and sublimations of very powerful male urges of desire and sexuality.”
“The bodies in the ‘beefcake’ magazines of the 1950’s tend to be bigger than that of the ephebe, even when the models were quite young in some cases. As the name ‘beefcake’ implies, the muscular mesomorphic shape was the attraction of these bodies – perfectly proportioned Adonis’s with bulging pectorals, large biceps, hard as rock abdomens and small waists. The 1950’s saw the beginning of the fixation of gay men with the muscular mesomorph as the ultimate ideal image of a male body. The lithe bodies of young dancers and swimmers now gives way to muscle – a built body, large in its construction, solid and dependable, sculpted like a piece of rock. These bodies are usually smooth and it is difficult to find a hirsute body11 in any of the photographs from the physique magazines of this time. According to Alan Berube in his book, Coming Out Under Fire,
“The post-war growth and commercialization of gay male erotica in the form of mail-order 8 mm films, photographic stills, and physique magazines were developed in part by veterans and drew heavily on World War II uniforms and iconography for erotic imagery.”12
Looking through images from the 1940s in the collection at The Kinsey Institute, I did find that uniforms were used as a fetish in some of the explicitly erotic photographs as a form of sexual iconography. These photographs of male2male sex were for private consumption only. I found little evidence of the use of uniforms as sexual iconography in the published photographs of the physique magazines. Here image composition mainly featured classical themes, beach scenes, outdoor and studio settings. …
As the 1950s turned into the 1960s other stereotypes became available to the photographers – for example the imagery of the marine, the sailor, the biker, the boy on a tropical island, the wrestler, the boxer, the mechanic. The photographs become more raunchy in their depiction of male nudity.
In the 1950s, however, classical aspirations were never far from the photographers minds when composing the images as can be seen in the undated photograph Jim Stevens by Lon of New York in London taken from a book called ‘Art in Physique Photography’.14 This book, illustrated with drawings of classical warrior figures by David Angelo, is subtitled: ‘An Album of the world’s finest photographs of the male physique’.
Here we observe a link between art and the body. This connection was used to confirm the social acceptability of physique photographs of the male body while still leaving them open to other alternative readings. One alternative reading was made by gay men who could buy these socially acceptable physique magazines to gaze with desire upon the naked form of the male body. It is interesting to note that with the advent of the first openly gay pornography magazines after the ruling on obscenity by the Supreme Court in America in the late 1960s,15 classical figures were still used to justify the desiring gaze of the camera and viewer upon the bodies of men. Another reason used by early gay pornography magazines to justify photographs of men having sex together was that the images were only for educational purposes! …
As social morals relaxed in the age of ‘free love’, physique photographers such as Bob Mizer from Athletic Model Guild produced more openly homo-erotic images. In his work from the 1970s full erections are not prevalent but semi-erect penises do feature, as do revealing “moon” shots from the rear focusing on the arsehole as a site for male libidinal desires. A less closeted, more open expression of homosexual desire can be seen in the photographs of the male body in the 1970s.17 What can also be seen in the images of gay pornography magazines from the mid 1970s onwards is the continued development of the dominant stereotypical ‘ideal’ body image that is present in contemporary gay male society – that of the smooth, white, tanned, muscular mesomorphic body image.
Marcus Bunyan. “Historical Pressings,” from Presing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male. PhD thesis, RMIT University, 2001
A Hard Man is Good to Find! celebrates a clandestine visual culture of men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period, during a time when making and distributing such images was a criminal offence.
This exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared.
While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act.
Including work by John S. Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green, David Gwinnutt, Angus McBean, Patrick Procktor, Ajamu X and many more.
Whilst this is an exhibition of queer pictures, it is important to note that not all the photographers or models can be claimed as queer subjects. It also acknowledges that language evolves and while queer is employed today for its inclusivity, the reclaiming of the derogatory term can sit uneasily for the generation subjected to it; the term homosexual can be similarly problematic for a younger generation.
As a number of the works are historical documents, it has not been possible to identify all individuals represented in the exhibition. We welcome any amendments or additions.
Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website
A Hard Man is Good to Find! Interview with exhibition curator Alistair O’Neill
Alistair O’Neill, professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) talks about curating the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album, front cover 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Highgate men’s pond has a history of accommodating physical culturists and queer men as swimmers and sunbathers. At the age of 21, artist Keith Vaughan purchased a Leica camera and set up a darkroom in his bedroom. One of his first projects was a photobook he designed and made charting the climbing temperature of a summer’s day at the pond. This is the first time the album has been exhibited.
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Keith Vaughan (British, 1912-1977) Highgate Men’s Pond Album (detail) 1933 Courtesy Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
In a study of Dulak taken in Angus McBean’s Covent Garden studio, an idealised diptych of the naked dancer is created from controlled lighting and double exposure. It was taken after McBean was released from prison, having served two years’ hard labour for gross indecency. During the Blitz, McBean relocated his studio to Bath and it was raided by police in 1941.
Between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks
I.e. Pimlico, an area of boarding houses and rented rooms, an enclave of queer life. Angus McBean opened his photographic studio on Belgrave Road in 1935.
Montague Glover had served in the First World War where he was awarded a medal. He went on to practice as an architect with photography on the side. His military career gave him easy access to the barracks where he recruited like-minded Guards to return to his studio or rented rooms and pose in less than full uniform. Squaddies available for gay sex were known as ‘a bit of scarlet’.
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak (detail) 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“… by the time of the 1939 National Register he was 35 and living in a Hertfordshire cottage with three other men; his 19 year old photographer’s assistant, a 21 year old theatre clerk, and a 26 year old builder’s carpenter. Because of the London Blitz McBean moved to Bath where he set up a studio in his ground floor flat in Kingston House, Pierrepont Street, which soon became a meeting place for gay men, including servicemen who were stationed nearby.
On 13 November 1941 Bath police raided the flat and arrested McBean and a 16 year old youth. This began a chain of arrests using evidence from letters, diaries and statements to the police. It also resulted in one, and possibly two, suicides.
McBean and five other men were tried “on grave charges” at Winchester Assizes in March 1942 in front of Bristol born and former Clifton College pupil Lord Chief Justice Thomas Inskip, 1st Viscount Caldecote. All six men were found guilty and sent to prison with McBean receiving a 4 year sentence of hard labour for three charges of gross indecency. On hearing the sentence McBean collapsed in the dock. Others convicted were: 25 year old Lt. Tom Gill, in civilian life an actor, who received 15 months in prison; 18 year old Theodore Parker who was found in possession of 36 love letters from Gill and was sent to borstal for three years; 28 year old Arthur Sigmund Politzer, a well known artist and glass designer serving with the Field Security Police who received a 20 month prison sentence; 21 year old Eric Hughes, a civil servant sentenced to three years Borstal; and 22 year old Brian Ball, a soldier stationed in Surrey and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment.
Two other lives were ended by the case, though neither was charged. Alan Farr, a 30 year old Admiralty electrical fitter and draughtsman had been interviewed twice by police in the week after the raid about connections with McBean. On 16 December 1941 a Detective Inspector called at Farr’s office to escort him to the police station, probably to be charged. On the pretext of visiting the cloakroom before leaving, Farr shot himself and died instantly. Also mentioned during the trial was 18 year old Allan Patrick Nottingham, already on probation for indecency charges in Portsmouth, who may have been the catalyst for the initial discovery of Bean’s circle. A week after the trial, the Bath Chronicle of 21 March 1942 reported that Nottingham had been found in a crashed car on the Wiltshire Downs and had died shortly after in Swindon Hospital.
Jonathan Rowe. “Angus McBean,” on the Out Stories Bristol website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Angus McBean (Welsh, 1904-1990) David Dulak Ballet, January 1946 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Dulak was a dancer, found by physique photographer John S Barrington in 1938 on Charing Cross Road. Barrington introduced him to theatre photographer Angus McBean; this study featured on the cover of Richard Buckle’s progressive dance journal, Ballet.
The Photographers’ Gallery presents A Hard Man is Good to Find! – a bold new exhibition charting over 60 years of queer photography of the male physique, on display from 2 March to 11 June 2023.
Bringing together more than 100 works, the exhibition centres on queer photographs of men’s bodies, produced in London in the twentieth century. While the 1955 Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act marked the partial decriminalisation of gay sexual activity, prompting gay liberation and the fight for social equality; any depiction of male nudity which suggested homosexuality remained subject to the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which made making or distributing such images a criminal offence.
A clandestine visual culture emerged, regulated by laws which enforced homosexuality as invisible. In turn, it directly fed the defiant, overt visuality of gay men’s bodies that emerged in the post-war period. The tension between invisibility and visibility was negotiated through ideas about the male body drawn from art, physical culturists, and pornography – both home-grown and imported.
Taking a novel approach, the exhibition highlights key areas of London which were a focus for men seeking out men to photograph. It maps out a territory of risk and possibility across Highgate, between Chelsea and Wellington Barracks, in Soho, Brixton, Portobello and Euston. Within each site it is possible to locate artists of all persuasions, creating work about queer sensibilities and men’s bodies in radical ways. Catalogues, print ordering sheets, personal albums, magazines and publications are also included in the exhibition to explore how these photographs were circulated, exchanged and shared. Drawing together photographs produced for commercial, as well as creative and personal purposes, A Hard Man is Good to Find! dissolves hierarchies, creates non-linear historical narratives and brokers unlikely adjacencies.
Covering the 1930s to early 1990s, many works are exhibited here for the firsttime including Keith Vaughan’s Highgate Men’s Pond album, a modernist photo collage made in 1933; ‘The Portobello Boys’, an anonymous and striking portfolio of young men taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. A set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 1960s by Anthony C Burls (trading as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits of subcultural men photographed in Euston in the 1980s.
The hinge of this history is the posing pouch, a modest fabric covering for the male genitals developed by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible. Its origins lie in the US, in the Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, although there is evidence of it being worn for sunbathing in London in the early 1930s. An original 1950s posing pouch will on display in the exhibition. Employed to circumvent the ban on full nudity (which included the postal system), the pouch was also painted on mail order reproductions so that customers could rub them off once received in the post. The sighting and dematerialising of the posing pouch is key to thinking through how such images were consumed, and how queer erotics were discursively constructed from imaginative forms of resistance to power and oppression.
The exhibition includes works by: John S Barrington, Cecil Beaton, Guy Burch, Basil Clavering (trading as Royale), Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Bill Green (trading as Vince), David Gwinnutt, Paul Hawker, Angus McBean and Ajamu X.
Press release from the Photographers’ Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition A Hard Man is Good to Find! at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
Mrs Mizer Tangerine Posing Strap 1955 Miles Chapman Collection
In 1945 Bob Mizer started the Athletic Model Guild, a model agency for bodybuilders for the film industry. In 1951 he launched a quarterly magazine, Physique Pictorial. For his photoshoots Mizer developed the skimpiest possible garment which dwindled down to the posing pouch. The exhibition explains that the earliest versions were sewn for him by his mother who, nonetheless, strongly disapproved of his sexuality. …
Slightly spoiling the effect, there is a small mention of the photographic evidence that this kind of super-minimalist covering was, in fact, being worn by sunbathing men in London in the early 1930s. Still. American has to be shoehorned in somehow. [see photographs by Keith Vaughan at the top of the posting]
Bill Green (Vince) catalogue sheet 31949 June 1949
Bill Green set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, Marylebone in 1946, specialising in photographs of bodybuilders. Prints could be ordered from catalogue sheets advertised in the classifieds of Health and Strength magazine. His catalogue sheets always had a gutter in the middle so they could be folded for discreet posting without creasing any image.
“Vince” had originally been the pseudonym of Bill Green, a photographer for men’s magazines, who shot wrestlers and bodybuilders naked but for nifty briefs he had cut down from chainstore trunks. These were so unlike available mens’ underwear that models and readers wanted to buy them. Green obliged by mail order, later adding to his catalogue the black sweater get-up of intellectual Paris and unshrunk Levis; in 1954 he set up in the Soho premises – described by Richard Benson of the Face magazine as “a CS Lewis of a wardrobe for young men” – they passed through its door into somewhere far out.
Vince and his boys supplied flagrant colour, untweedy texture, tight fit and low cut to a theatrical and artistic clientele, and many followers of camp. But these were not the only customers for that “certain ambiguity”: pink hipsters walked out of the shop on heteros, too.
Veronica Horwell. “John Stephen,” on The Guardian website Mon 9 Feb 2004 [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Bill Green (Vince) Monotosh Roy c. 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Bill Green – ‘Vince Man’s Shop’
In the 1940s, Bill Green was a local photographer who specialised in artistic images of ‘muscle men’ and male wrestlers. His models wore fairly revealing (for the time) homo-erotic garments that were mainly designed by himself due to the lack of availability of commercial items. He decided to develop this business and by 1950 was selling them through mail-order catalogues appealing mainly to the gay community. Following European trips in the early Fifties he expanded his portfolio to include the ‘existentialist’ look that was popular in France and Italy and was the first to introduce British men to ‘Beatnik’-style fashions.
With the continued success of his mail-order business, and aware of its popularity with the gay community, he opened Vince Man’s Shop in 1954. The establishment was located in Newburgh Street, an intelligent business decision as this was right at the heart of London’s gay community and very close to Marshall Street Public Baths which was a well-known and popular meeting area for gay men. One of the earliest advertisements featured a muscular Sean Connery in a ‘matelot’ vest and skin-tight jeans.
His colourful and unconventional designs, which included velvet and silk materials and pre-faded denim, quickly widened its appeal by attracting younger members of the Bohemian and Thespian fraternities who frequented the West End of London. The window displays were provocative for the time, often featuring mannequins wearing outrageous fashions including briefs and pink hipster-style slacks, and his wide range of clientele included the likes of George Melly, Peter Sellers, Sean Connery, Pablo Picasso and even the King of Denmark!
The fashions in the establishment were not cheap, and were generally out of the normal price range of ordinary teenagers, but this brought a certain ‘respectability’ to the informality and flamboyance of new styles and were certainly one of the catalysts in the major changes that were to take place in the fashions appealing to young males in the Sixties. As the decade progressed, and ’boutiques’ started providing a progressively fast-moving outlet for cheap fashion clothing, Vince’s came under increasing financial pressure and the establishment was forced to move to a less expensive location in North London. Bill Green closed the shop for good in 1969, subsequently becoming the manager of a Soho restaurant.
Anonymous. “Carnaby Street,” on the Sixties City website Nd [Online] Cited 29/05/2023
Montosh Roy (1916-2014)
Monotosh Roy (1916-2014) was an Indian bodybuilder, who held the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division in 1951. Roy was the first Indian and Asian to be awarded the Mr. Universe title. …
In 1939, he competed in his first bodybuilding competition, but did not fare well. He resolved for success and engaged himself in further practice. In 1939, he won the East Indian Bodybuilding Championship. In 1947, he won the All India Bodybuilding Championship.
In 1951, Roy travelled to the United Kingdom and participated in the Mr. Universe competition. He won the Mr. Universe title in Group III Amateur Division category. The audience at the competition were mesmerised by his muscle display. They queued up for his autograph and even waited up to two and half hours for his autograph. Following his victory at the Mr. Universe competition, he was felicitated at the India House by the Indian High Commissioner.
After his return to India he acted as a trainer in many physical culture clubs. He used to train fitness and yoga to celebrities. He founded the Indian Bodybuilding Federation in 1958. He was also the founding member of Asian Bodybuilding Federation. He also taught at the Calcutta University and the Law College. He became a featured columnist in periodicals on health and fitness. He also wrote a few books on Yoga. He conducted bodybuilding programmes that were telecast in the Doordarshan. He set up several bodybuilding and yoga centres in Kolkata.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince advertisement Health and Strength, 29 May 1952
In 1951, Green was advertising posing briefs in the Daily Mirror. They were made by shortening and over-dyeing Marks & Spencer underwear. This advertisement was shot at the Serpentine Lido. In 1954, Green opened the first men’s fashion boutique, Vince Man’s Shop, on Fouberts Place, Soho; it was the start of the peacock revolution and Carnaby Street as a fashionable retail destination.
Bill Green (Vince) Vince Man’s Shop catalogue, model Sean Connery Spring/Summer 1957 Courtesy Alistair O’Neill Collection
Vince Man’s Shop was the first boutique to sell imported men’s fashion such as American workwear jeans and Italian suiting and shirting. It catered to homosexual men and benefited from its proximity to the Marshall Street gym, Soho’s coffee bars and Piccadilly Circus. The cover model here is aspiring actor Sean Connery, better known at the time as a bodybuilder and artist’s model
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) ‘Narcissus of 1967’ (Gervase Griffiths) c. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Marylebone
‘The City of Quebec’ pub in Marylebone is supposed to be London’s oldest gay pub. It opened in 1946 and was popular with gay RAF men. Bill Green learned photography and wrestling in the RAF and in 1946 set up Vince Studio at 46 Manchester Street, soon establishing a name for ‘physique photography’. He advised beginners to use a little oil to help highlight the contours of male musculature.
In 1954 Green opened a men’s fashion boutique in Foubert’s Place, Soho. In 1956 his assistant, John Stephen, opened another fashion store. According to the exhibition’s curator, Alistair O’Neill, Professor of Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins, these sparked ‘the peacock revolution’ in men’s fashion. They helped turn Carnaby Street into the centre of modern fashion.
Artist Patrick Prockter also had a studio on Manchester Street. He took photos as preparatory studies for paintings, especially of his boyfriend Gervase Griffiths. He cultivated an artistic circle which included painter David Hockney, fashion designer Ossie Clark, and physique model Peter Hinwood. The veteran photographer Cecil Beaton was attracted to this young group of openly queer men. The exhibition includes sets of colour photos of Griffiths on a beach, and two by Beaton which are among my favourites, not because they’re nude, camp or gay – simply because they’re beautiful.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Mail order Storyette print late 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Basil Clavering ran the Cameo Royal cinema on the Charing Cross Road, and the Cameo Poly (now Regent Street Cinema). He built a studio in the basement of his home on Denbigh Street, Pimlico, with his friend, John Charles Pankhurst, both of whom had served in the navy. In their studio Basil & John recruited military men to model in authentic uniforms, and Clavering innovated the ‘storyette’ where the catalogue sheet of photos available to order would set out a narrative drama like film stills from a motion picture.
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
“Clavering and Parkhurst’s work reflects in both imagery and subject matter the drawings of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991). Laaksonen met Clavering during a visit to London and Studio Hussar commissioned a series of 17 panel drawings from him entitled The Thieving Cowboy (1957). No other photographers of the time were extracting so much visual drama from the clothed male figure. Other physique photographers were viewing the legal restrictions of the time as a challenge, whereas Royale and Hussar embraced them as an opportunity to produce magnificent risqué images.
Clavering and Parkhurst both served in the Navy, and their experience and connection to their subject matter is evident in the way clothing and partial undress was depicted, reflecting an insider’s comprehension and understanding.
Many of the models were also active military personnel, who Clavering met in public houses close to Hyde Park and the Chelsea barracks. Consequently, the images are not simply of men dressing up in uniforms, but rather men fully aware of both the purpose and symbolism of the uniform.”
Basil Clavering (British, 1910-1973) (Royale, Hussar, Dolphin) Photograph from Storyette EX FJSS 1950s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Clavering was a successful businessman, and owned the Gala-Royale cinema chain. More as a hobby than anything else, he established a photographic studio in the basement of his Pimlico home, with his friend John Charles Parkhurst (1927-2000). Both men had served in the Navy, and they were drawn to the military men around the Hyde Park and Chelsea barracks, whom they paid to model for them.
The studio operated under two names, Royale and Hussar, and Clavering sold the photographs by mail order. The images are profoundly erotic, despite there being no frontal nudity. Models are occasionally depicted solo, but more often in groups, and scenarios involve uniform, military and naval discipline, wrestling, light bondage and spanking – somehow always in a mood of levity and playfulness. Clavering met Tom of Finland, and several images from a biker series echo the Finn’s work; in 1957 Studio Hussar even commissioned a series of drawings from him.
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
Paul Hawker Spencer Churchill 1951 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
The Serpentine
In the 1950s British bodybuilding magazines catered for two audiences, straight bodybuilders and a gay readership. As well as the obvious photos and articles, in their back pages these magazines offered discreet mail order services for ‘original physique studies’. This section features the work of mail order publisher William Domenique (trading as Lon of New York) and gay erotic artist Bill Ward.
Paul Hawker came from Bristol, moved to London, and took photos of young men preening and parading at the Serpentine Open Air swimming pool, another well-known gay haunt. He is represented by some of the photos he took of his friend, body builder Spencer Churchill. Apparently Churchill was one of the first to adopt the American fashion for denim workware jeans as regular casual clothing.
And once you knew, you could purchase. Lots of the images here skirt around the legality of the male nude by being available in bodybuilding magazines, or as a catalogue of physiques for fitness buffs to emulate at home. One amazing image shows Spencer Churchill tensed and glistening while wearing a posing pouch that you could scratch off to reveal the goods beneath. It’s a fascinating portrait of hidden mid-century male desire in London.
But there are ethical questions here too. John S Barrington pretended to be a Vogue photographer to persuade men to pose for him. That’s uncomfortable, exploitative and not really dealt with in the show. Also, lots of the subjects in the exhibition wouldn’t have considered themselves gay or queer either, so framing them anonymously in a queer context totally removes the sitters’ agency.
Then there’s the group of photos of young men lounging around in west London bedrooms and living rooms. They’re amazing images, totally unguarded and joyful, but they were purchased as a box of anonymous negatives from Portobello Antiques Market by Emmanuel Cooper. These men have had no say in their private nude moments being plastered across The Photographers’ Gallery decades after they were taken. This was a time when privacy not only mattered, but had a tangible impact on people’s lives, and this has taken the choice away from them.
So there are issues here and some tricky ethical moments, but there’s still a lot to like. At its best, this show is a celebration of the male form in London from a time when that was an incredibly dangerous thing to celebrate. The thing is, men are hot, always have been, and we should be very grateful that these days we can say that without getting put in prison.
Anonymous photogapher The Portobello Boys Early 1960s Courtesy Emmanuel Cooper Archive The Bishopsgate Institute Special Collections and Archives
Emmanuel Cooper purchased a set of negatives from Portobello Antiques Market in the early 1980s. Cooper was a ceramicist, writer, art critic and gay rights activist. He called this anonymous body of work The Portobello Boys, as he believed they were taken in the north Kensington area in the late 1950s to mid-60s. Taken in an era before gay liberation, they document young men posing, in turns uncertainly and assertively, in states of undress.
Notting Hill
Became known after the war for its combination of bachelor housing and growing immigrant community. In the early 1980s ceramics artist Emmanuel Cooper picked up a set of negatives at Portobello Market. It turned out to be a set of studies of nude or partially clothed young men with an obvious queer vibe taken in the late 1950s and early 1960s in North Kensington. Cooper titled it ‘The Portobello Boys’ and arranged for its publication. They are surprisingly homely, unguarded, intimate studies of everyday life.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Catalogue sheet c. 1968-1970 Guy Burch collection
Anthony C Burls was a photographer who engaged young men to model through street casting. He also ran a coffee shop at World’s End in Chelsea in the 1960s, took casual work at Battersea Funfair and regularly attended a gym in Brixton. He used these contexts to find working-class men to photograph.
White Brixton
Anthony C. Burls was an interesting character. In the 1960s he ran a coffee shop at the World’s End in Chelsea, got odd jobs working at funfairs, and attended a gym in Brixton. In all these settings he asked working class men if he could photograph them and the result is a series of full length, mostly fully clothed studies which I think I liked most out of the exhibition. He named the series ‘The Londoners: Official reports’, including not just the photos but the man’s job description and a pen profile. His first business address was Studio 200 on Railton Road, also home to the South London Gay Community Centre. …
I liked Anthony C. Burls’ set of photos of the rough, dirty, tough-looking young men you get working at funfairs and such, swaggering among the dodgems in tight jeans, unbuttoned shirts and rocker brylcreemed hair. [see photograph at bottom of posting]
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) John Hamill c. 1966 Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S. Barrington (1920-1991) was a British physique photographer and publisher. Barrington’s photos of nude or semi-nude men appeared widely in British and American physique magazines, sometimes under the pseudonym John Paignton. Barrington published many of his own physique magazines, including Male Model Monthly, the first in Britain. He also published a number of books related to photography and anthropometry. Barrington was a prolific artist and publisher, and by 1984 was said to have published more nude titles than any other individual in Europe or the United States.
Barrington had frequent sexual encounters with men throughout his life, particularly with the men who modeled for him, though he identified as heterosexual.
Barrington began photographing men in 1938 at the men’s bathing pond at Hampstead Heath. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art and L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In addition to photography, Barrington was also a visual artist and sculptor.
Barrington began working as a physique photographer in 1948. In 1954, he began publishing Male Model Monthly, the first physique magazine in Britain. From 1954 until 1979, he would go on to publish many more physique magazines in Britain and the US, among the best-known being MAN-ifique, FORMosus, Superb Youth, and Youth in the Sun.
Barrington was known to select models in the “boy next door” mold, with average body types. His photographs were mostly taken outdoors, with models appearing in relaxed, natural poses.
In the 1950s and 1960s Barrington published books on anatomy and anthropometry, ostensibly for the benefit of artists.
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
John S Barrington (British, 1920-1990) Catalogue sheet (details) c. 1970s Courtesy Rupert Smith Collection
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Martin Spenceley photographed young men in Euston in the 1980s, scouting for Teds, punks and skinheads, persuading them to pose by cheekily lying that he worked for Vogue America.
Martin Spenceley Untitled 1980s Courtesy of the Michael Carnes Collection
Rough trade!
The show is split into different geographical areas of London, each of which had a slightly different character, lending themselves to different types of man and images. We start in the bedsit land of Pimlico. In the 1950s this was home to many single young queer men as well as soldiers living in the two nearby army barracks. We see pictures of many of the young fit soldiers who liked being photographed to earn a little extra money.
We then move on to Hampstead Heath the famous cruising area and home to the men-only Highgate Men’s Swimming Pond. A good collection of sunbathing men from the 1930s is included here. Other areas of London shown include a selection of 1950s male physique photography shot in Marylebone and in Hyde Park and ‘The Portobello Boys,’ an interesting selection of men shot at home in Notting Hill and Portobello in the 1960s. This area of West London was very queer back then.
Then we head south of the river to Battersea and Brixton where pictures range from 1960s fairground and other workers through to queer artists and activists in the 70s and 80s.
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) The Young Londoners late 1960s – early 1970s
“The show is structured through areas of London that were known for attracting queer communities and related imagemaking practices,” he explains.
“This might be open air sites where men could see and be seen, such as Highgate Men’s Pond or the Serpentine Lido, but it also includes areas that offered furnished rooms for rent that were popular with single gay men, such as Pimlico or Notting Hill.”
Interesting adjacencies are revealed, such as the fact that artist Patrick Procktor had a studio in Marylebone in the same street as physique photographer Bill Green (who traded under the name Vince).
Many of the works in the show are being exhibited at the gallery for the first time, including a set of archetypes, ‘The Londoners’, documented in the late 60s by Anthony C Burls (who traded as Cain of London) and Martin Spenceley’s street portraits, photographed in Euston in the 80s.
It also highlights fascinating historical objects such as an original 1950s posing pouch, which has its origins in the US Athletic Model Guild established by Bob Mizer in 1945, but was widely used by gay physique photographers to show as much of the male body as possible.
In bringing the show to life, O’Neill hopes to demonstrate how this fascinating pocket of queer history has gone on to influence visual culture more broadly. “The movement certainly informed the body consciousness of queer visual culture,” he says, “but I would argue that it’s intertwined history with the emergence of men’s fashion in the 1950s and 60s has played a significant role in contemporary queer style positions, both naked and dressed.”
Anthony C Burls (Cain of London) Untitled (Carnie) 1960s
As far as I know this photograph is not in the exhibition but I like it!
A secret history
All this explains why, as the tools of photography became cheaper and more widely available, from the 1920s and 30s onwards a clandestine visual culture emerged. During the 1930s stunning images of athletic male physiques could be associated with the general social trend towards hiking and healthy outdoor activities. During the Second World War photographers were encouraged to take photos of our brave boys looking butch and manly. After the war publishers gained more confidence but were still liable for arrest and confiscation of stock. It was only really in the later 1960s that, along with so many other social movement, gay men felt increasing confidence in depicting their lifestyles and objects of desire openly.
Throughout the period there is a continual interplay and overlap between licit and illicit ways of visualising the male body: the naked athlete trope ultimately derived from statues of ancient Greek and Roman men. Images of tough soldiers could walk a narrow line between being heterosexual propaganda and gay adoration. Young men sunbathing could be following European models of health and fitness. Models and precedents from heterosexual art and culture were continually being subtly reworked, the borderline between legal art and illegal ‘obscenity’ shimmered and wavered within individual images, different definitions of desire fight in single photographs.
Anyway, the repression gay photos were liable to be subject to at any moment explains why a good deal of this visual culture was underground or hidden. Some gay publications were subscription only, others were available as a sideline in otherwise ‘respectable’ book and art shops. In the 60s and 70s more magazines and specialist shops came out of the closet.
Curator: The exhibition is curated by Kara Felt, assistant curator of art at the Denver Botanic Gardens and a former Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, with the organisational assistance of Diane Waggoner, Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art.
Gilles Peress (French, b. 1946) NORTHERN IRELAND. Belfast. Summer evening 1989 Gelatin silver print Corcoran Collection Museum Purchase with funds donated by the Marlin Miller, Jr. Family Foundation and by exchange: John Bryant and Patricia Bauman
I lived through these years in Britain.
Strikes, unemployment, high inflation and economic failure New Right, monetarist ideas and the free market economy The Troubles The Winter of Discontent The queens silver jubilee Glam Rock, punk and then New Romantics; disco and then HiNRG Aston Martin, Triumph TR7, two door Capri and MGB GT Falklands War Charles and Diana 1984-1985 miners’ strike Recession North-South divide Gay Liberation, women’s liberation Clause 28 HIV/AIDS Brixton Riots (September 1985) Racism and the National Front Victorian values and moral behaviour vs the permissive society
and Margaret Thatcher
That one name still sends shivers down my spine.
The photographs in this posting capture the grittiness of those years… and the surreality of the lived experience. From my perspective, I worked really hard and partied even harder at clubs such as Scandals, Adams, Bang and Heaven. I spent as much as I earnt and careered around London in my beloved Mini 1275 GT as fast as I could, listening to David Bowie, Barry White and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, Pink Floyd, and the inimitable Grace Jones.
In black and white, Graham Smith’s Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough (1982, below) perfectly encapsulates the depressive, dank mood of the country during these years. The meaning of “Giro corner” in the title references a place where people would go, in this case two pubs, to spend their Giro cheque: an unemployment or income support payment by giro cheque, posted fortnightly.
In colour, Martin Parr’s two photographs of New Brighton, Merseyside(1984, below) reference the absurdity of the British at play: leisure time in “new” Brighton on Mersyside in North West England (many miles from the affluent Brighton on the south coast of England) – eating surrounded by rubbish and relaxing on a hard concrete ramp with crying baby, while other artists capture the isolation of individuals, their working class lives and middle class pretensions.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain highlights the socially conscious photographers who captured this moment in time, among them Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Martin Parr. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints in the National Gallery of Art’s collection. It brings together works by photographers who explored the national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The exhibition also includes Handsworth Songs (1986, below), a 59-minute film on the uprisings that rocked London and Birmingham in 1985. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah. The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Advertising Agency, Docklands Enterprise Zone 1988 From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8 cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8 cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Conference and Exhibitions Organiser, Euston. Personal Assistant to the Director 1988, printed later From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Anna Fox (British, b. 1961) Cafe, the City. Salesperson 1988 From the series Work Stations Chromogenic print Image (visible): 44.5 x 54.8cm (17 1/2 x 21 9/16 in.) Framed: 68.5 x 83.8cm (26 15/16 x 33 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Britain experienced profound changes in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was racked by deindustrialization, urban uprisings, the controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Photography became a central form of creative expression during this period, supported and disseminated through new schools, galleries, artists’ collectives, magazines, and government funding.
This Is Britain brings together the work of a generation of photographers who were commenting on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others pictured communities, traditions, and landscapes affected by Britain’s shifting social and economic realities. Together, they photographed a nation redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Text from the National Gallery of Art website
Profound changes in British society in the 1970s and 1980s inspired a revolution in British photography. This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s highlights the work of socially conscious photographers who captured this period of unrest. The exhibition features some 45 newly acquired prints by Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Martin Parr, and others. It brings together photographers who examined national identity as Britain grappled with deindustrialisation, uprisings in inner cities, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the sometimes controversial policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On view on the Ground Floor of the National Gallery’s West Building from January 29 through June 11, 2023, the exhibition also features the film Handsworth Songs (1986). The 59-minute film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah, explores uprisings in London and Birmingham in 1985. Reece Auguiste, a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, is the guest curator for an accompanying film program.
Beginning in the 1970s, photography gained its contemporary prominence in Britain, with a rapidly expanding network of galleries, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to promoting the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting Britain’s growing multiculturalism, introduced fresh perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field. A generation of young photographers moved from largely black-and-white, documentary styles to more conceptual and often humorous projects in colour in the 1980s. As photographers forged new directions, they pictured a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
“This Is Britain tells history on an intimate scale, highlighting stories we may have otherwise missed. The addition of these photographs to the National Gallery’s collection allows us to reflect on two decades of artistic innovation and celebrate the talented, diverse group of creators who captured them. We hope that this exhibition inspires visitors, as they contemplate some of the highs and lows experienced by British citizens in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art.
Exhibition overview
This Is Britain: Photographs from the 1970s and 1980s focuses on the work of photographers who recorded ways of life that were under threat or disappearing in those tumultuous decades. John Davies’s expansive view of Agecroft Power Station, Salford (1983) emphasises the displacement of industrial structures. Paul Graham’s elegiac series A1: The Great North Road (1982) examines the shift away from the A1 – a major thoroughfare from London to Edinburgh – to the newer, more direct M1 motorway, resulting in businesses along the former highway to suffer. With their forlorn colours and barren spaces, his pictures challenged the expectation that photography on social themes should be in black and white. Reflecting Britain’s growing immigration and multiculturalism during this period of modernisation, Vanley Burke’s Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park (1970) pictures a Black youth proudly displaying the Union Jack from his bike.
Many artists in the 1980s continued exploring colour photography, using intense hues inspired by advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. The series The Last Resort (1983-1986) by Martin Parr, arguably Britain’s most influential living photographer, surveys seaside tourists in New Brighton with acerbic wit. Chris Steele-Perkins’s decade-long project The Pleasure Principle (1980-1989) captures Margaret Thatcher’s England through surreal images, such as Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball. Six photographs from Anna Fox’s Work Stations (1987-1988) signal the competition and stress of London office life in the late 1980s. Sunil Gupta strikes a more polemical tone in his series “Pretended” Family Relationships (1988) by responding to Thatcher’s policy prohibiting the promotion of gay and lesbian lifestyles.
The final room presents Handsworth Songs (1986, 59 minutes), a landmark nonfiction film that connects the civil unrest in London and the Handsworth section of Birmingham in 1985 with Britain’s colonial past, weaving contemporary reports and interviews with historical footage and photographs. The film, produced by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by the acclaimed filmmaker John Akomfrah, features a soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk with industrial noises and voiceovers.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art, Washington
Punk Rock, record unemployment, urban uprisings, Margaret Thatcher, the Troubles in Northern Ireland: profound changes shook British society and inspired a revolution in photography in the 1970s and 1980s. A generation of young photographers used their cameras to comment on the deep unrest of these pivotal decades. With a keen eye for social critique and a spirit of rebellion, they photographed a country redefining what it meant to be British and, ultimately, modern.
Photography during this period became a central form of creative expression, fuelled by a rapidly expanding network of galleries, museum departments, artists’ collectives, schools, and magazines dedicated to the medium. Immigrants and artists of colour, reflecting the nation’s growing multiculturalism, introduced new perspectives, as did the many women who entered the field.
Moving from largely black-and-white, documentary styles toward more conceptual projects in colour, photographers adopted new strategies to examine national identity. In the face of severe economic dislocation, widespread civil disorder, and Prime Minister Thatcher’s controversial policies, these artists declared: This is Britain.
Documenting the Deindustrial Revolution
The decline of British heavy industry in the 1970s led to labor disputes and high unemployment in the early 1980s. As the country prioritised modern technologies and greater efficiency, photographers recorded the communities, structures, and ways of life that were under threat or disappearing. Graham Smith and Vanley Burke portrayed people they had known for decades, while Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, and Gilles Peress undertook long-term projects to create intimate yet often bleak photographs of life on the margins of society. Paul Graham and John Davies explored England’s uneasy embrace of the future by showing the people and places being left behind. While these photographers held no real hope of inspiring change, they shared an earnest concern for who and what was being lost as the nation modernised.
Picturing Absurdity in the Thatcher Years
As the leader of the Conservative Party from 1975 and as prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher was a polarising figure in Britain. She oversaw the development of an American-style free market economy, the resurgence of British nationalism, and major cutbacks to public spending (famously declaring that “there is no such thing” as society). During the Thatcher years, photographers Martin Parr and Anna Fox used the brash colours of advertising to poke fun at the rise of leisure activities, consumerism, and corporate greed. Combining text and image, Karen Knorr and Sunil Gupta considered how traditional English institutions sidelined women, people of colour, and gay and lesbian communities. Their works openly satirise long-held traditions and question emerging values in British society.
Wall text from the exhibition
Tony Ray-Jones (English, 1941-1972) Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Scarborough 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 15.8 x 24.8cm (6 1/4 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 35.8 x 28cm (14 1/8 x 11 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) A mood of Highly Coloured Naturalism 1983 From the series Country Life Gelatin silver print mounted on board Image: 40.2 x 40.9cm (15 13/16 x 16 1/8 in.) Sheet: 60.7 x 51cm (23 7/8 x 20 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards Fallen 1981-1983, printed 2015 From the series Gentlemen Gelatin silver print Image: 40.6 × 40.5cm (16 × 15 15/16 in.) Sheet: 61.5 × 50.7cm (24 3/16 × 19 15/16 in.) Mat: 71 × 55.8cm (27 15/16 × 21 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Karen Knorr (American born Germany, b. 1954) We owe it to the Free world not to Allow Brutal Forces to succeed. When the Rule of law Breaks down, the World takes a further Step towards Chaos 1981-1983, printed 2015 From the series Gentlemen Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 40.7cm (15 15/16 x 16 in.) Sheet: 60.8 x 50.5cm (23 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Chris Killip (Isle of Man, 1946-2020) Margaret, Rosie, and Val, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland 1983 Gelatin silver print Image: 40.5 x 50.5cm (15 15/16 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 47.8 x 57.6cm (18 13/16 x 22 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Colin Jones (English, 1936-2021) The Black House, London 1973-1976 Gelatin silver print Image: 33.8 x 49.1cm (13 5/16 x 19 5/16 in.) Sheet: 41 x 50.8cm (16 1/8 x 20 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Young Men on See-Saw, Handsworth Park, Birmingham 1984, printed 2021 Gelatin silver print Image: 30.1 x 45.4cm (11 7/8 x 17 7/8 in.) Sheet: 40.4 x 50.5cm (15 7/8 x 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Vanley Burke (British born Jamaica, b. 1951) Boy with Flag, Winford in Handsworth Park 1970, printed 2022 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen (Finland, b. 1948) Young Couple in a Backyard on a Summer’s Day 1975, printed 2012 Gelatin silver print Image: 36.1 × 39.3cm (14 3/16 × 15 1/2 in.) Sheet: 40.4 × 50.5cm (15 7/8 × 19 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
John Davies (British, b. 1949) Agecroft Power Station, Salford 1983 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.6 × 56.1cm (14 13/16 × 22 1/16 in.) Sheet: 50.5 × 60.4cm (19 7/8 × 23 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund Courtesy L. Parker Stephenson Photographs
Graham Smith (British, b. 1947) Bennetts Corner (Giro Corner), the Erimus Club and Commercial Pub, South Bank, Middlesbrough 1982, printed 2008 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.4 x 47cm (14 3/4 x 18 1/2 in.) Sheet: 47.7 x 57.4cm (18 3/4 x 22 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) Café Assistants, Compass Café, Colsterworth, Lincolnshire November 1982 Chromogenic print Image: 19.4 x 24cm (7 5/8 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 27.4 x 35cm (10 13/16 x 13 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Between Chester and Birkenhead 1989 Vintage gelatin silver print Image: 17.2 x 26.1cm (6 3/4 x 10 1/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.2cm (11 x 13 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Tom Wood (Irish, b. 1951) Lime Street 1995, printed 1997 Analogue hand print Image: 19 x 25.6 cm (7 1/2 x 10 1/16 in.) Sheet: 19.8 x 27.2cm (7 13/16 x 10 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Sunil Gupta on Community and Activism
Sunil Gupta, photographer, curator, writer, and activist has maintained a visionary approach to photography, producing bodies of work with keen social and political commentary. Gupta’s diasporic experience of multiple cultures informs a practice dedicated to themes of race, migration, and queer identity. His photographic projects – born from a desire to see himself and others like him represented in art history – draw upon his own life as a point of departure.
The Arnold Newman Lecture Series on Photography provides a forum for leading photographers, primarily known for portraits, to discuss contemporary issues in the medium. Arnold Newman (1918-2006) is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries whose work changed portraiture. The Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation generously supported this series to make such conversations available to the public.
A landmark in nonfiction filmmaking, Handsworth Songs was the first film directed by the Ghanaian-born artist John Akomfrah. It was produced by the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), a group of experimental Black artists who examined the diasporic African and Asian experience in Britain. The film weaves archival footage with scenes, interviews, and pictures from contemporary events, including photographs by Vanley Burke, with a haunting soundtrack that mixes reggae and post-punk music with industrial noises and voiceovers. This layered structure connects Britain’s colonial past with unrest in London’s Tottenham and Brixton neighbourhoods and Birmingham’s Handsworth area in 1985. Today, Handsworth Songs reveals the solidarity shared by Britons of African and Asian descent in the face of inequality as it brings historical perspective to civil disturbances in the 1980s.
This film includes depictions of police violence and the use of racial slurs. Viewer discretion is advised.
Wall text from the exhibition
Chris Steele-Perkins (British, b. 1947) Hypnosis Demonstration, Cambridge University Ball 1980-1989 Silver dye bleach print Image: 25.4 × 38.1cm (10 × 15 in.) Sheet: 30.2 × 40.4cm (11 7/8 × 15 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Paul Reas (British, b. 1955) Constable County, Flatford Mill, Suffolk c. 1992 From the series Flogging a Dead Horse Inkjet print image: 41 x 50.5cm (16 1/8 x 19 7/8 in.) Sheet: 50.5 x 61cm (19 7/8 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
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