A short text this week because I’m suffering from sinusitis and headache.
Annelies Štrba’s “intimate family scenes… breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction” are the antithesis – or anti-thesis – of last weeks posting were the curators conceptualised 1930s American documentary photography as a sort of reality-dream.
Here there is no need to conceptualise such a response to the photographs for Štrba’s unconventional, poetic photographs really are a mixture of dream and reality. At the limits of visibility Štrba’s glances, glimpses, clefts, over / under exposures, double exposures, colour disfigurations and ingressions – the process by which a potentiality enters into actuality – offer to the viewer a “no place” of becoming, where “recognition” is the trigger of exposure.
Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple. (Minor White)
It is difficult in a posting to leave an “impression” of an artists body of work in so few photographs, especially an artist who works in series of images. Therefore, I heartily recommend viewing the familial architectural Shades of Time series (1970-1997) on Annelies Štrba’s website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is an observer and magician: She captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. When her children were small, the camera was part of everyday family life; at night, the mother would develop her prints in the darkroom. Again and again, she adopted new techniques and forms of presentation, for instance when she began working with video in the 1990s and when she eventually started to paint over photographs printed on canvas. While her earlier analogue works play with snapshot aesthetics, her video stills and edited digital photographs achieve the intensity of expressionist paintings.
The Fotostiftung Schweiz collection contains a big group of Štrba’s early black-and-white photo canvases and colour photographs – intimate family scenes, but also bleak facades of large-panel-system buildings and high-rises.
This retrospective exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, presents these works for the first time. They are positioned around two newly conceived projections of the work cycles with which Annelies Štrba translated her view of the family into images: Shades of Time brings together photographs taken between 1974 and 1997, showing the children Sonja, Samuel and Linda as they grow up. Noonday is dedicated to her children’s children. When these series are seen together, the interweaving of eras becomes tangible. The visual worlds, characterised by subjectivity and intuition, merge to form one comprehensive cosmos.
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned contemporary artists using photography. In her works, she captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. This exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz presents, for the first time, large-format photo canvases from the collection and a projection specially conceived for Fotostiftung Schweiz.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
From the attic to Kunsthalle Zurich
Despite her photographic apprenticeship, which she commenced at the age of 16, Annelies Štrba is a self-taught artist, as she never attended an art school. In 1969, she married Bernhard Schobinger, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil, where the pair lived. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes.
It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in photographs that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Annelies Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition. Against all expectations and advice (from the men involved), Annelies Štrba decided to enlarge her intimate sketchy pictures on photo canvases, in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and the visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Shades of Time: changes in the visual language
As the children grew older and the artist became more successful, her radius of movement increased: In the 1990s, Annelies Štrba received a studio scholarship from Landis+Gyr. She travelled to England, Scotland, Ireland and Japan, and exhibited in Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. In 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released her extensive monograph Shades of Time (which has long since been out of print). In this book’s series of images, a change can be seen in her visual language and attitude to life over the years: landscapes passing by the car window, house facades, gardens, but above all Sonja and Linda as young women continuing the game with the camera, on equal footing, and obviously enjoying it. The birth of the first grandchild, Samuel-Maria, brings a Madonna-like depiction of maternal love and care into Štrba’s visual cosmos – a motif that had been absent until then, not least because the mother had remained hidden behind the camera.
First video works and video stills
Also in 1997, Štrba produced her first video, because a filmed portrait of the artist was required for the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by this technique, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images. By adjusting or saturating the colours and using visual distortion, she created special aesthetics that looked painterly and technical at the same time. The motifs also liberated themselves more and more radically from the domesticity of the previous years. Landscapes, cityscapes and flowers served as visual composition elements, as did the silhouettes of her adult daughters.
However, still photography and children did come back to dominate Annelies Štrba’s imagery once again. From countless photographs of her grandchildren, especially Linda’s daughter Shereen, a new cycle of works emerged, culminating in the 2015 publication Noonday: Colourful scenes, many of which were taken at the artist’s home in Amden, show a children’s paradise comprising brightly coloured fabrics, cushions, blankets and a trove of princess dresses.
“My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”
The photo canvases that were purchased in 2015 and 2021 with support from the Förderverein Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others, and supplemented by generous donations from the artist, are presented for the first time in this exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, The motifs also appear in a digital interpretation of the Shades of Time slide show, newly conceived in 2020. In addition, Štrba has composed a projection from the Noonday picture series specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur, with a soundtrack produced by her son, Samuel Schobinger. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. The inclusion of selected video stills, mounted behind glass in a large format, also visualises the themes of the artist’s life and her tireless pursuit of image forms for her cosmos.
With the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”, Fotostiftung Schweiz continues its commitment to honouring female photographers. Like previous presentations of female artists, such as Pia Zanetti and Manon, this show offers a focused retrospective on an oeuvre that shaped the history of photography in Switzerland. The exhibition was curated by Teresa Gruber, curator at Fotostiftung Schweiz.
Press release from the Fotostiftung Schweiz
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Linda (1991, below); Hiroshima (1994, below); and Linda and Sonja with Samuel-Maria (1995, below)
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is a keen observer, but also a magician: She intuitively captures fleeting moments, then transforms them into images that come across as symbolic. Today, she is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned artists working with photography. Her first solo exhibition though, in 1990 at Kunsthalle Zurich, was provocative. An unknown at the time, she appeared in public with her intimate family scenes, defying all expectations and breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction. Shortly afterwards, Annelies Štrba’s works were exhibited in Berlin, London and New York. She has continued to amaze ever since. Always open to new stylistic devices, techniques and modes of presentation, she translates her view of the world into unconventional poetry.
In this exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz, her early work comes to the fore: Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and (in a reconceived digital interpretation from 2020) the slide show Shades of Time present images from the 1970s through to 1997. They show Štrba’s children Sonja, Samuel and Linda growing up. There are also indications of an initial shift in the visual language here, towards more movement and a playful handling of motifs, in which the daughters participate as young women. These almost traditional works are framed by the video stills created later. By means of manipulation carried out on the monitor, colours are remixed and stills dissolve into shimmering structures.
Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren then brought her back to photography. With a mobile phone camera and digital photography, she accompanied her heroines and heroes through everyday life, opening up a new colourful cosmos, which she encapsulated under the title Noonday in 2015. From that group of works, Štrba has also composed a projection, specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. Finally, princesses sleeping in fairy-tale landscapes (usually granddaughter Shereen is the performer) whisk the observer away to the land of dreams: The artist had begun to work on the picture surfaces with brush and paint. Štrba made reference to art history and her own images, reproducing, defamiliarising and creating objects, into which the marks of time are, in turn, inscribed.
In 2015 and 2021, Fotostiftung Schweiz was able to purchase a group of Annelies Štrba’s canvases, with support from the society Friends of Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others. These works were supplemented by generous donations from the artist. Representing various phases of her early work, they are now being exhibited together for the first time – and confronted with later works.
Biography
Annelies Štrba was born in 1947 in Zug. After training as a photographer and completing her first professional assignments, she married Bernhard Schobinger in 1969, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes. It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in pictures that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition.
Triptych
The first room of the exhibition introduces Annelies Štrba’s various spheres by means of a brightly coloured triptych – a group of three, albeit constituting one female figure. By extracting two stills from a video work and mirroring one of them, the artist has created a ‘community’ and arranged it as a psychedelic altarpiece: Shown frontally and immersed in golden brown, the internally calm queen is bowed to by her brightly dressed servants on the left and right – one in blue, the other in magenta, with glowing contours. Due to the coarse resolution of the video images, the surface and figure disintegrate into pixel-like patches of colour, bringing to mind the structure of paintings. The pictures’ saturated defamiliarised colouring makes reference to expressionist works.
Canvases
For her first exhibition, at Kunsthalle Zurich in 1990, Annelies Štrba enlarged her photographs on canvases in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and these visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. At the same time, they came across like washed-out yellowed pictures from a bygone era. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Kitchen pictures
The kitchen was the heart of the Richterswil house in which Annelies Štrba and Bernhard Schobinger raised their three children Sonja, Samuel and Linda together. Here, they did not merely cook and eat, but also received visitors, discussed and pondered. In this room, which looks cramped and humble, cosiness and chaos merge. Years pass, and suddenly adult daughters are sitting at the same table. The video Max, Annelies Štrba’s first video piece, marks a turning point in her oeuvre and shows a bizarre kitchen spectacle. Although all movements are in slow motion, the activeness of Sonja and Linda setting and clearing the table contrasts with the rather passive attitude that they exhibit in many photographs. In flowing dresses, they make preparations, but these do not lead to anything and instead seem to represent an inherently strange ritualistic process. Annelies Štrba produced this video when a filmed portrait of the artist was required for a 1997 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by the technology, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images.
Shades of Time projection
Also in 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released an extensive monograph that encompassed Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. Its title, Shades of Time, was provided by a sign on a shop front, photographed from a moving car during a trip to England. Years and impressions pass by in an associative and only roughly chronological sequence. The shots of sleeping and playing children are replaced by house fronts and landscapes. The heaviness of the early domestic scenes dissolves into increasing movement and colourfulness. This shift in photographic language can also be interpreted autobiographically. In 2001, Annelies Štrba conceived a slide show in which the images were projected in groups of three, with a techno audio accompaniment by Peter Ford. The duplication and mirroring of some individual motifs give rise to arrangements that sometimes appear ornamental or even sacral. The digital version of this projection was made in 2020, in collaboration with video company in Zofingen.
Noonday projection
While growing up, Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren presented her with a new world of images: a chaotic clarity, a banal colourfulness, in which there is also room for laughter and group photos. Annelies Štrba cleverly combined the children’s joy in dressing up and acting with spontaneous photo shoots. Mostly though, she reacted impartially to life as it happened, proudly taking part in the daily routine and marvelling at it. Štrba herself remains invisible, but her backdrop, her colourfully designed nest, as if made for her little protagonists, frames the action. In 2015, the book Noonday, comprising over three hundred pages, was released by Lars Müller Publishers. In 2023, the artist has collaborated with video company to compose a Noonday projection, adding new motion to the captured moments, with the accompaniment of a soundtrack by her son Samuel Schobinger.
Buildings
Already in her first exhibitions, Annelies Štrba placed architectural photographs between the pictures of her children. The bleak facades of residential blocks and high-rise buildings that she photographed on her travels through Silesia contrast with the depictions of cosiness at home. Often, the photographer seems to just glance at these buildings in passing. People also live in most of them, including families. On the other hand, the ruins of Einstürzende Neubauten (collapsing new buildings) captured in the Polish city of Sosnowiec recall Soviet planning and memorialise the Berlin band of the same name, founded in 1980. Štrba’s interest in experimental and electronic music is also incorporated into her video works and projections.
Fairy-tale pictures
The motif of sleeping children connects the Shades of Time and Noonday groups of works with NYIMA and Momoka. For the latter, Annelies Štrba edited digital photographs, some of which were taken in the context of Noonday, but also took new photographs: staged scenes, mostly featuring her granddaughter Shereen. All of them show resting girls – in forests, in meadows or on sofas, seemingly immersed in deep sleep. In their princess dresses, they appear to be from another time. Defamiliarisation of colours and superimposition of multiple exposures transform the photographs into visualisations of these dainty figures’ dreams. Aesthetically and compositionally, they resemble the famous painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, which depicts the drowned Ophelia lying in a stream, surrounded by plants, flowers and her magnificent gown. The romantic beauty of Štrba’s pictures can also evoke associations with the relationship between sleep and death.
Sleeping children
The exhibition’s final room completes the circle and leads back to the beginnings of Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. While the kitchen has already been examined as an important motif, we now look into the bedroom or children’s room. The artist remembers how, after long evenings in the darkroom, she used to find her children asleep. She would often feel an urge to photograph them like this, cosy in their nests, or surrounded by evidence of play. However, the bed is also a platform on which the state of being awake can be presented: Time and time again, the artist produced portraits of her children sitting on beds.
Text from the exhibition leaflet
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at right, Linda with Shereen (2000, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Nyima 410, Nyima 409, Nyima 408 (2009, below); and on the right a photograph from the series Shades of Time (1970-1997)
In Tibetan Nima (also spelled as “Nyima”) is also a female or male given name which means ‘the sun’, also the one with radiance of the Sun. And in Hebrew as a female given name it means ‘grace, mercy’.
Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive 1929 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Transcending reality
While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.
While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.
But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.
Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1
All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2
To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”
Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15 2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
Many thankx to the Cantor Arts Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.
The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.
“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”
Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.
The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.
Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother, California 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.
Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”
The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.
To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …
The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.
Press release from the Cantor Arts Center
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.
Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.
Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California 1930, printed c. 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.
Wall label from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Sumner Healy Antique Shop 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.
Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.
Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.
Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.
Natural Wonders
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959) Wildflowers 1930s-1940s Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …
In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.
Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007) Mount La Perouse c. 1933 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.
1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).
2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.
3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961) Untitled Late 1930s Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …
Photography style
Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.
In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Bananas 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.
Wall label from the exhibition
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …
Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
Career
While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.
Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.
In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper No. 35 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California c. 1935, printed 1979 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Divine Figures
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Overview of the City 1935 Gelatin silver print Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Mother and Daughter 1934 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941 1941, printed 2002-2003 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso) 1935 Gelatin silver print Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude (Charis) Floating 1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986) Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 Dye transfer print Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969) Chief Owasippe 1939 Gelatin silver print The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.
Wall label from the exhibition
Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.
Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.
Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?
By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.
Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…
Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Everyday Splendors
Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941) The Shadow c. 1931 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…
The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975) Washing, San Francisco, California 1937 Gelatin silver print San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Photography
Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.
Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.
Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.
Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.
Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cement Worker’s Glove 1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Junk 1934 Gelatin silver print Gift of Florence Alston Swift San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection
Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006) Yosemite 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …
Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.
Text from the Online Archive of California website
Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.
Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.
Living Relics
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.
Wall label from the exhibition
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.
Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska 1941, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine 1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter 1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989) Eucalyptus Leaves 1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.
Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.
Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.
The World of Tomorrow
Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968) Cargo 1929 Bromoil Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Egg Slicer 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006) Kitchen Music 1930-1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991) The Thinker c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. 1937 Gelatin silver print Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991) Times Square in the Rain 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”
Wall label from the exhibition
It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.
Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.
Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.
Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.
1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22. 5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83. 6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.
Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) “Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Street Theater
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Corrugated Tin Façade 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Daniel Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night” 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.
Wall label from the exhibition
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Untitled from St. Joseph’s House c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Vincent Bressi Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988) Sunday – After Church 1933 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.
Wall label from the exhibition
Surreal Encounters
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monster on Broadway, New York City 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
John Vachon (American, 1914–1975) Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C. 1938 Gelatin silver print Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen Cantor Arts Center Collection
By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert 1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.
Wall label from the exhibition
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Repulsive Bed 1941 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.
Wall label from the exhibition
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.
Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana 1935, printed 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997) Uncommon Man 1936, printed 1983 From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978 Gelatin silver print Gift of the Mattis Family Cantor Arts Center Collection
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Jack Rabbit 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.
Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.
Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert 1937
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Man, Colorado Desert 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cantor Arts Center 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way Stanford, CA Phone: 650-723-4177
Curator: Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Participating artists: Ansel Adams, 1902-1984; Matthew Brandt, b. 1982; Lois Conner, b. 1951; Binh Danh, b. 1977; Mitch Epstein, b. 1952; Lucas Foglia, b. 1983; Sharon Harper, b. 1966; Frank Jay Haynes, 1853-1921; CJ Heyliger, b. 1984; John K. Hillers, 1843-1925; Mark Klett, b. 1952; Chris McCaw, b. 1971; Laura McPhee, b. 1958; Arno Rafael Minkkinen, b. 1945; Richard Misrach, b. 1949; Abelardo Morell, b. 1948; Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-1904; Catherine Opie, b. 1961; Trevor Paglen, b. 1974; Meghann Riepenhoff, b. 1979; Mark Ruwedel, b. 1954; Victoria Sambunaris, b. 1964; Bryan Schutmaat, b. 1983; David Benjamin Sherry, b. 1981; John Payson Soule, 1827-1904; Stephen Tourlentes, b. 1959; Adam Clark Vroman, 1856-1916; Carleton E. Watkins, 1829-1916; Will Wilson, b. 1969; Byron Wolfe, b. 1967.
Please note: This posting may contain the names or images of people who are now deceased. Some Indigenous communities may be distressed by seeing the name or image of a community member who has passed away.
Ansel Adams made this remarkably abstract image of ancient salt beds during the first year of his national parks project. Barely visible in the distance is a delicate string of telephone poles and wires, a slightly jarring intervention into an otherwise empty space. Adams’ inclusion of the poles might be explained in part by the fact that Wendover was the meeting point for the first telephone line between New York and San Francisco. This achievement was celebrated at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition – a fair that the young Adams attended nearly every day, after his father gave him a season pass with instructions to visit daily, in place of formal schooling.
Exhibition label text
Man and imagination
Most could not fail to know the superb landscape work of Ansel Adams, that master of the large format camera used to produce stunning black and white silver gelatin photographs of great formal beauty and technical prowess, the rich detail and tonal range of his landscape photographs used “in service of what he called the “spiritual-emotional” aspects of parks and wilderness, conveying their restorative power to as wide an audience as possible.” His photographs are so well known that they became icons and he a legend in his own lifetime. But all is not as effortless in his beautiful modernist photographs as they seem.
Early landscape photographs from his 1927 portfolio Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (below) show Adams’ indebtedness to pictorialist and modernist photography. Indeed these elemental and muscular photographs show a dramatic use of dark and light hues in the near / far construction of the picture frame, the warm toned prints adding to their chthonic, almost underground and dystopian nature. Dark and brooding, dystopian and abstract. Those dark tones have a warmth that is contradictory – a lack of light: yet warmth! So there is a fiction at their heart… and that is why their dark brooding never seems a threat for they were based on a dream-world that couldn’t exist. What a difference to the later straight-ahead aesthetic of the artist and Group f64 (“a group founded by Adams of seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterised by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western viewpoint.” ~ Wikipedia).
Other mutations and obfuscations are hidden from view “in order” that the artist achieve his desired transcendence of the American landscape. Adams cropped out attendant carparks and people viewing the scene even as other artists such as Seema Weatherwax incorporated them into their work (in the 1940s) as “indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work.” Adams even manipulated the negative where necessary, for example removing a road that inconveniently ran through the centre of a canyon that destroyed his imaginative (and Western) vision of the pristine Sierra Nevada. So much for his “absolute realism” and honest simplicity in service of a maximum emotional statement.
Adam’s photographs of Indigenous Americans are also pictures seen from a particularly Western viewpoint, that of the fetishistic valorisation of Indigenous culture. “In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic. Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris…”1
When Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927 to publish a book about Taos Pueblo “that aimed to communicate the threat tourism in the region posed to the artistic and religious traditions of Indigenous people [he] made images for the book only after receiving permission from the Taos Pueblo council, to whom he paid a fee and gifted a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed some Indian cultural observances that had become popular attractions among tourists. Adams’s own images of Native dancers have a complex legacy: although he was one of the non-Native onlookers, he carefully framed his views to leave out evidence of the gathered crowds.” (Exhibition wall text) As Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo) notes in a further exhibition label text, “At the time, Pueblo people and other Native Americans in the Southwest were trying to navigate the outsiders who were interested in their culture. Some of them did not quite understand the circumstances surrounding the curiosity, while others did understand the extractive nature, and they had to weigh that in terms of their other needs. I get questions from members of my community about why they did not chase the archaeologists and photographers out, and I often respond it is because of the uneven power relations between Indigenous and non-Native people at the time.” This influx of artists and photographers did lead to the racist exoticisation and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph. What is heartening to see in this exhibition is that the curators have placed Adams’ Indigenous American portraits and landscapes in both a historical and contemporary setting, proffering alternative points of view from within the communities being photographed.
An extractive, imaginative and emotional Western “nature” then, is at the heart of Adam’s work and his “marketing the view” – whether that be national parks, empty bays before the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, or Native Americans. While he was a tireless champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art and an unremitting activist for conservation and wilderness preservation, Adams’ photographs are a creation of a myth of his own of a pristine wilderness which had never co-existed with man. To our benefit, Adams had his ideals and he let them manifest themselves in his imagination.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Many thankx to the de Young museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Only pictures that look as if they had been made easily can convincingly suggest that beauty is commonplace.”
Robert Adams. Beauty in Photography. New York: Aperture, 1996, p. 28.
A self-described “California photographer,” Ansel Adams had his first museum exhibition at the de Young in 1932. In a San Francisco homecoming, more than 100 of his most iconic works are on view in Ansel Adams in Our Time alongside those of 23 contemporary artists who share his deep concern for the environment, Catherine Opie, Richard Misrach, Trevor Paglen, and Binh Danh among them. An unremitting activist for conservation and wilderness preservation in the spirit of his 19th-century predecessors, Adams is today beloved for his lush gelatin silver prints of the national parks. Organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Ansel Adams in Our Time is enhanced at the de Young by the addition of works from the Museums’ permanent collection and new interpretive framing that explores Adams’ close connection to the Bay Area and the state of California more broadly.
Installation views of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams in Our Time brings iconic artist home to San Francisco
Beloved for his lush gelatin silver photographs of the national parks, Ansel Adams is a giant of 20th-century photography whose images have become icons of the American wilderness. Opening April 8 at the de Young, Ansel Adams in Our Time brings more than 100 works from this self-described “California photographer” to the site of his very first museum exhibition in 1932, placing him in dialogue with 23 contemporary artists who are engaging anew with the landscapes and environmental issues that inspired Adams. The exhibition is organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and enhanced at the de Young by the addition of works from the permanent collection and new interpretive framing exploring Adams’ close connection to his hometown of San Francisco.
“Ansel Adams’ photography is renowned for its formal beauty and technical prowess, but his work is equally one of advocacy,” remarked Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “Adams was a tireless conservationist and wilderness preservationist who fully understood the power of images to sway public opinion. Ansel Adams in Our Time is exceptional in underscoring his brilliant legacy and the critical role that his works and others’ before him have played in safeguarding our national parks and other public lands.”
Instrumental to Adams’ development as a photographer was Yosemite, one of the oldest national parks in the country, which he visited regularly from the age of 14 with his Eastman Kodak Brownie camera in tow. Ansel Adams in Our Time examines the critical role that photography has played in the history of the national parks, with Adams following in the footsteps of predecessors such as Carleton Watkins, whose efforts first secured Yosemite as protected land. A longtime member of the Sierra Club, Adams would go on to perfect the rich detail and tonal range of his landscapes in service of what he called the “spiritual-emotional” aspects of parks and wilderness, conveying their restorative power to as wide an audience as possible. Presenting President Gerald Ford with a print of Yosemite: Clearing Winter Storm (c. 1937) in 1975, Adams urged, “Now, Mr. President, every time you look at this picture, I want you to remember your obligation to the national parks.”
At the de Young, the exhibition delves further into the artist’s Bay Area connections with new interpretive framing and works from the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection. Adams became a truly modernist photographer in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s, experimenting with the large-format camera that would yield the maximum depth of field and razor-sharp detail that are today considered his signature. He was a tireless champion of photography as a legitimate form of fine art. From his pristine Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (1927), a landmark work in 20th-century photography, to images of oil derricks, ghost towns, drought conditions, and the sand dunes of Death Valley, Ansel Adams in Our Time spans the scope of the artist’s nearly seven-decade career and efforts to establish both environmental stewardship as a pillar of civic life and the photographic medium as a widely accepted art form.
The works of 23 contemporary artists, including Catherine Opie, Abelardo Morell, Binh Danh, Trevor Paglen, Mitch Epstein, and Victoria Sambunaris, among others, provide a new lens for Adams, drawing on his legacy of art as environmental activism to confront issues such as drought and fire, mining and energy, economic booms and busts, protected places and urban sprawl. The exhibition’s five thematic sections – Capturing the View, Marketing the View, San Francisco: Becoming a Modernist, Adams in the American Southwest, and Picturing the National Parks – open up new conversations around Adams’s work, looking both forward and backward in time to present a richer picture of the relationship between photography, art, environmentalism, and conceptions of landscape.
“Ansel Adams had close ties to San Francisco, and the California landscape, and the de Young museum was among the first institutions to celebrate his work when he was a rising artist,” noted Lauren Palmor, Associate Curator of American Art, who organised Ansel Adams in Our Time at the Fine Arts Museums. “His reverence for our region’s natural beauty drew him to photograph the natural diversity that can be found throughout the Bay Area over the course of his lifetime. Adams was also a tireless advocate for the environment, and the Bay Area shares that spirit as a global center of innovation in conservation and wilderness preservation today.”
Exhibition organisation
Ansel Adams in Our Time was organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in partnership with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition was curated by Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Presenting Sponsor is the Clare C. and Jay D. McEvoy Endowment Fund. Lead Sponsors are The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund and the San Francisco Auxiliary of the Fine Arts Museums. Major Support is provided by the Byers Family and The Herbst Foundation, Inc. Significant Support is provided by The Ansel Adams Gallery. Generous Support is provided by David A. Wollenberg and Merrill Private Wealth Management.
About Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams (1902-1984) made indelible images of the American landscape and successfully advocated for the environment and the preservation of natural resources. Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, and he made his first trip to Yosemite when he was just 14 years old. Transfixed by the valley’s beauty, he took his first photographs of Yosemite’s waterfalls and rock formations. Adams went on to develop his photographic practice in parallel with his environmentalist outlook.
The de Young museum hosted several important early Adams exhibitions in the 1930s, celebrating the achievements of this local photographer whose star was rapidly rising nationally: Photographs by Ansel Easton Adams (1932); the landmark Group f.64 exhibition (1932-1933), which also featured the work of Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Ames Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston; and Yosemite in Four Seasons: Photographs by Ansel Adams (1935).
Adams shaped the field for other practicing photographers on both coasts, and his impact is immeasurable. In addition to teaching, he authored a celebrated series of books on photographic techniques that distilled his expertise for generations of budding photographers. Parallel to his achievements in photography, Adams dedicated himself to environmental advocacy for over seven decades. In 1980, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for his artistic and environmental efforts.
These photographs were issued together as a portfolio by San Francisco’s Grabhorn Press in 1927. Although photographic print portfolios would become common later in the century, Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras represents one of the first attempts to market photographs in this way. Looking back on this moment in his career, a time when he was struggling to make a living and gain recognition as an artist, Ansel Adams was embarrassed by the made-up term “Parmelian” in the title. His publisher thought it was necessary because photographs were not yet considered worthy of investment by fine art collectors. Later, Adams would use the same negative of Half Dome from this series to produce the larger version of Monolith – The Face of Half Dome [below] that appears at the start of this exhibition.
This majestic view of Half Dome is one of Ansel Adams’ most important and groundbreaking early photographs. Shot on a hike in the spring of 1927, it represents his first conscious “visualisation” – an image fully anticipated before he tripped the shutter, and one that for Adams captured the emotional impact of the scene. He made this enlarged print years later, but the dramatic sky and the sharp contrast between the brilliant white snow and dark ridges in the granite were recorded in 1927 when Adams took the photograph, using a deep red filter and a long exposure (made possible by the windless conditions that day).
Spending time in the wilderness was a spiritual experience that Ansel Adams marvelled at his entire life. Describing one such transcendent moment, he wrote: “It was one of those mornings when the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of clouds move in a lofty sky. … I was suddenly arrested … by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.”
Ansel Adams made this photograph near Fish Camp, south of Yosemite National Park, in an area where forest fires raged some years earlier. In his close-up view, he juxtaposes the tender shoots of new grass and the charred surface of a burned stump. This is an example of what Adams liked to call the “microscopic revelation of the lens,” which he saw as the ideal of his “straight,” sharp-focus approach to photography.
On a visit to Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp, in 1944, Ansel Adams drove to the field of boulders that extends to the base of Mount Williamson. “There was a glorious storm going on in the mountains,” he wrote. “I set up my camera on the rooftop platform of my car, [which] enabled me to get a good view over the boulders to the base of the range.” The resulting photograph captures a storm passing over the distant mountain range – an awe-inspiring image that confounds all sense of scale and perspective.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Birds on Wire, Evening 1943, printed 1984 Gelatin silver print This print from the Library of Congress
A few months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast (two-thirds of whom were American citizens) were quickly rounded up, separated from homes, possessions, and businesses, and quietly relocated to remote incarceration camps.
A total of 11,070 Japanese Americans were processed through Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California. Ansel Adams was invited to photograph Manzanar by Ralph Merritt, a Sierra Club friend who had recently been appointed director of the isolated detention center. Although he was not allowed to photograph the center’s barbed wire or guns, Adams did see himself as a kind of conscientious objector for his work documenting the site and the people forced to live there.
Adams was personally moved by the treatment of Japanese Americans in World War II when an older Japanese man who worked for his family for many years was transferred to a detention center. When Adams first went to Manzanar in 1943, he was “profoundly affected” by photographing the camp and meeting its incarcerated inhabitants. He later presented his Manzanar images in an exhibition and book entitled Born Free and Equal. Manzanar means “apple orchard” in Spanish, but agriculture in the area had suffered since the diversion of water to Los Angeles began in 1913. Nonetheless, the internees were responsible for raising much of their own food in the fields near the camp.
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Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Potato Field, North Farm, Manzanar 1943, printed 1984 Gelatin silver print This print from the Library of Congress
Ansel Adams shot this image of Mount McKinley in Denali National Park at 1:30 in the morning, just two hours after the setting of the midsummer sun. He described, “As the sun rose, the clouds lifted, and the mountain glowed an incredible shade of pink. Laid out in front of Mount McKinley, Wonder Lake was pearlescent against the dark embracing arms of the shoreline. I made what I visualised as an inevitable image. The scale of this great mountain is hard to believe – the camera and I were thirty miles from McKinley’s base.”
In 1919, at the age of seventeen, Ansel Adams joined the Sierra Club. The organisation’s original focus on environmental preservation, and its initial failure to acknowledge Indigenous people and their homelands, helped lay the groundwork for the twentieth-century environmentalism he would come to represent. Adams participated in the club’s annual High Trips, serving as photographer and assistant manager from 1930 through 1936. He produced albums of photographs from these treks, inviting members to order contact prints or, for a higher fee, enlargements in “plain or soft-focus.” His ingenuity ultimately lad to his 1927 portfolio, Parmesan Prints of the High Sierras, on view in this gallery – one of the earliest experiments in custom printing, sequencing, and distributing fine photographs.
Adams was not the first to market view of the American West. In the nineteenth century, images of western landscapes were mass-produced and widely distributed, catering to a burgeoning tourist market. Today, contemporary artists are using photography to highlight the dynamic nature of landscapes and to document humans’ impact on the environment. Sometimes these works take the form of extended series or grids, as though invoking earlier methods of mass-distributing western views.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) The Golden Gate from Telegraph Hill, San Francisco 1868 Albumen silver print from wet-collodion-on-glass negative Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Museum purchase Prints and Drawings Art Trust Fund
Installation views of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at centre Adams’ The Golden Gate Before the Bridge(1932, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
San Francisco: Becoming a Modernist
San Francisco is where Ansel Adams became a modernist photographer. He grew up in present-day Sea Cliff, where his family home overlooked the Presidio to the Marin Headlands beyond. These views made a lasting impact on his photographs – he later described constantly returning to the elements of nature that surrounded him in his childhood. Adams’ first exhibition, featuring photographs he took on Sierra Club hikes, was held at the club’s headquarters on Montgomery Street in 1928. Convinced that he could make a living as a photographer, he acquired a large-format camera and became an advocate of “straight” (unmanipulated) photography, leaving behind the soft-focus aesthetic of his earlier work. He experimented with abstraction and extreme close-ups, capturing texture and clarity of detail. He recorded cloud-filled skies and depicted landscapes as seemingly infinite spaces devoid of people. During the Great Depression, Adams began photographing a wider range of subjects, including the challenging reality of urban life in San Francisco and the region’s changing landscape. The latter included the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), which radically transformed the views of San Francisco Bay that had captivated Adams in his youth.
Golden Gate Bridge
Ansel Adams made this photograph [below] near his family home the year before construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. He later recalled, “One beautiful storm-clearing morning, I looked out the window of our San Francisco home and saw magnificent clouds rolling from the north over the Golden Gate. I grabbed the 8-by-10 equipment and drove to the end of 32nd Avenue, at the edge of Sea Cliff. I dashed along the old Cliff house railroad bed for a short distance, then down to the crest of a promontory. From there grand view of the Golden Gate commanded me to set up the heavy tripod, attach the camera and lens, and focus on the wonderful evolving landscape of clouds.”
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Golden Gate Bridge, 10.31.98, 5:18 pm 1998, printed 2016 Pigment prints Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
In 1997, Richard Misrach began what would become a three-year project photographing the Golden Gate Bridge from his porch in the Berkeley Hills. Placing his large-format 8-by-10-inch camera in the same position on each occasion, Misrach recorded hundreds of views of the distant span, at various times of day and in every season, set off against the constantly changing sky. The series was reissued in 2012 to mark the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bridge’s landmark opening.
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Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Golden Gate Bridge, 12.19.99, 7:31 am 1999, printed 2020 Pigment prints Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Picturing National Parks
Photography played a critical role in the establishment of the national parks. The dramatic views made by Carleton Watkins and other nineteenth-century photographers ultimately helped convince government officials to protect Yosemite and Yellowstone from private development. However, the formation of the national parks further dispossessed Indigenous people of their ancestral lands, overlooking their ongoing stewardship of the land and restricting their access to it.
Although Ansel Adams claimed he never intentionally made a creative photograph that related directly to an environmental issue, he was aware of an image’s power to sway opinions on conservation. Adams’ photographs of King’s River Canyon [below] helped the Sierra Club successfully campaign to establish the site as a national park. Over the following years, Adams photographed national parks from Alaska to Texas, Hawaii to Maine, creating images that conveyed the transformative power of the parks to a wide audience.
Many contemporary artists working in the national parks acknowledge, as Adams did, the efforts of the photographers who came before them. But the complicated legacies – and uncertain futures – of these protected lands have led some photographers to take more personal and political approaches to the work they are making in these places.
Ansel Adams made this photograph while on a Sierra Club outing in Kings River Canyon. Three years later, he represented the club at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC. Armed with photographs like this one, he argued successfully for the transfer of Kings River Canyon from the Forest Service to the National Park Service. When it became a national park in 1940, the director of the Park Service wrote to Adams, saying, “I realise that a silent but most effective voice in the campaign was your book Sierra Nevada – John Muir Trail. As long as that book is in existence, it will go on justifying the park.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park (about 1937, below); at centre, Rain, Yosemite Valley, California (c. 1940, below); and at right, Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park (1960, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams described photographs like Monolith and Clearing Winter Storm as his “Mona Lisas”: images so popular with the public that they were printed countless times over the course of his long career. He took this remarkable photograph from Yosemite’s Inspiration Point soon after a sudden rainstorm turned to snow and then, just as swiftly, began to clear. It records an expansive valley view that Adams had attempted on several previous occasions but never been successful in rendering in such shimmering detail. Trained as a pianist, Ansel Adams often compared the photographic negative to a musical score and described each print from a particular negative as an individual performance of that score.
Like Clearing Winter Storm [above], this photograph features what the nineteenth-century photographer Carleton E. Watkins described as “the best general view” of Yosemite Valley, with the massive granite outcropping of El Capitan on the left and the silvery stream of Bridalveil Fall visible on the right. Yet here Yosemite’s famous features are shrouded in mist, and the pine tree in the foreground, its needles glistening with rain, stands in place of the distant peaks.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Abelardo Morell’s Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011, below); and at centre Adams’ The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming(1942, below) Images courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photos: Gary Sexton
Ansel Adams began writing how-to books on photography in the mid-1930s, but he is best known for his series of technical books, including Camera and Lens, The Negative, The Print, and Natural Light Photography. In one of his later books, he uses an image of a Yellowstone geyser as an example of a particularly challenging subject that defies light-meter readings and tests a photographer’s ability to “visualise” in advance something so inherently fleeting and unpredictable. “It is difficult to conceive of a substance more impressively brilliant than the spurting plumes of white waters in sunlight against a deep blue sky,” he wrote.
Lyell Fork was one of Ansel Adams’ favourite locations from his earliest years as a photographer in Yosemite. It was a place he also loved introducing to others—he took Georgia O’Keeffe and photography collector David McAlpin there when they hiked into the backcountry in 1938. Reflected in the placid water are several distant peaks, the most prominent of which was named Mount Ansel Adams after the photographer’s death in 1984.
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The Other Side of the Mountain
Ansel Adams made his reputation mainly through images of beautiful, seemingly unspoiled nature. Less well known are the images he produced in California’s Death Valley and Owens Valley [below], southeast of Yosemite. Yet he was drawn to these more forbidding landscapes multiple times – occasionally lured by a book or magazine project but often of his own volition.
Here, on the dry side of the Sierra Nevada, Adams and his work took a dramatic detour. The photographer Edward Weston introduced Adams to Death Valley, where he photographed sand dunes, salt flats, and sandstone canyons. Owens Valley was once farmland, but its residents struggled after their water supply was diverted to the growing city of Los Angeles. In 1943, Adams first traveled to nearby Manzanar, where he photographed Japanese Americans forcibly relocated to internment camps shortly after the US entered World War II. The resulting series explores the tension between the area’s open spaces and the physical restrictions imposed upon internees.
Contemporary photographers continue to find compelling subjects in these remote places. Their images explore the raw beauty of the terrain and the sometimes unsettling ways it is used today – including as the site of maximum-security prisons and clandestine military projects carried out under wide skies.
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Salt Flats Near Wendover, Utah (1953, above); at second left, Self‑Portrait, Monument Valley, Utah (1958, below); at second left Trees Near Washburn Point, Illiloutte Ridge, Yosemite Valley (c. 1945, below); and at bottom right, Burned Trees, Owens Valley, California(1936, above) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
This unusual self-portrait depicts Ansel Adams, light meter in hand, standing next to his large-format camera and tripod. He made this image of his shadow falling across a fissured rock face while in Monument Valley to shoot a Colorama for display in New York’s Grand Central Station. Sponsored by Eastman Kodak, Coloramas were panoramic, backlit transparencies, almost eighteen feet high and sixty feet long, whose sweeping scale and luminous colour were the antithesis of this intimate image that Adams shot while waiting for the weather to cooperate.
This stunning double portrait records a pair of massive tree trunks following a fire. The Illilouette Ridge is an area of Yosemite National Park that lies between Glacier Point and the valley floor. In recent decades, the Illilouette Creek basin has been the focus of an environmental study to measure the potential benefit of managing fires with minimal suppression and fewer controlled burns on the overall health and diversity of forests.
Ansel Adams made this spectacular image of two of his favourite subjects – Half Dome and the moon – on an autumn afternoon in 1960. He witnessed a brilliant gibbous moon rising to the left fo the vertical rock face and, using a long lens and orange filter, carefully framed what would become one of his most popular late works. “As soon as I saw the moon coming up by Half Dome, I had visualised the image,” Adams wrote.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Ansel Adams often recorded urban subjects like this view looking toward San Bruno Mountain, just south of San Francisco. Here Adams documents one of the many tract housing developments built during this period, as it snakes across the steep hillsides surrounding the rapidly growing city.
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Mount Starr King and Glacier Point, Yosemite, No. 69 1865-1866 Mammoth albumen print from wet collodion negative Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Carleton E. Watkins took this photograph from the floor of Yosemite Valley while working for the California State Geological Survey in the mid-1860s. It is a more intimate and less sweeping view than the photograph Watkins self-described as the “best general view of Yosemite” (below), which presents the most recognisable features of the landscape.
Mount Starr King, the distant peak at centre, was named for Thomas Starr King, the Unitarian minister from Boston whose life and ministry were powerfully influenced by his experiences in the Yosemite wilderness. Ansel Adams later shared his “disregard for the naming of things and [his skepticism] of those non-professionals who go through the wilderness classifying and labelling everything in sight.”
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Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Yosemite from the Best General View No. 2 1866
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left, Adams’ The Golden Gate Before the Bridge (1932, above); and at second right, Eadweard J. Muybridge’s Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point, No. 33 (1872, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, 1830-1904) Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point, No. 33 1872 Albumen print Gift of Charles T. and Alma A. Isaacs Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Eadweard Muybridge first came to Yosemite in the 1860s. Capitalising on the growing popularity of wilderness landscape subjects, he stayed for six months, making large-format albumen prints and stereo views. Hoping to compete with Carleton E. Watkins’s earlier grand vistas, he returned in 1872 with a mammoth-plate camera. Often, Muybridge shot his atmospheric images from unusual perspectives, with sharp contrasts between foreground and background, light and shadow. This is evident in this photograph taken from Union Point, which provided a closer view of the valley and a greater sense of three-dimensional space than the better-known Glacier Point above.
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Frank Jay Haynes (American, 1853–1921) Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Falls About 1887 Albumen print Sophie M. Friedman Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Frank Jay Haynes was one of the second generation of photographers to be employed by the railroads and government surveys in the American West in the late nineteenth century. In 1884, he was named official photographer and concessionaire of Yellowstone to serve the growing numbers of tourists coming to visit the first national park. Yellowstone is situated on top of a massive subterranean volcano, which produces its active hot springs and towering geysers, such as Old Faithful. For his photograph of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River, Haynes used a mammoth-plate camera to produce a large glass negative, from which he made this highly detailed contact print.
These Nevada landscapes are from Grays the Mountain Sends, a series that depicts the landscapes, structures, and residents of former mining towns. Bryan Schutmaat seeks out these far-flung mountain communities, now mostly abandoned due to the loss of their mineral wealth.
Not unlike Ansel Adams’ fleeting view of Hernandez, New Mexico, first seen in his rearview mirror, Schutmaat’s vision is that of an extended road trip. And like Adams, he is drawn to the methodical way that his large-format camera forces him to work. He waits patiently for the changing light to activate a scene. For Schutmaat, each town’s deserted structures and lonely inhabitants stand as last “relics of hope” and proof of the tragic demise of the American dream. The fragile, hardscrabble beauty of these modern-day ghost towns is also a powerful reminder of the region’s uncertain future and its long history of economic booms and busts.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at foreground left and right, works by Mark C. Klett (below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
“[Ansel Adams’] depopulated scenes suggest that the landscape does best without our presence, and that wilderness is an entity defined by our absence. However, anyone who has visited the site of one of Adams’ photographs knows that the romance of his landscapes is often best experienced in the photographs themselves. The reality of place is quite different. … The natural beauty of the land is still there to be seen, but you will not see it alone.” ~ Mark Klett
Mark Klett has photographed and rephotographed the western American landscape for more than thirty years. With his longtime collaborator, Byron Wolfe, Klett carefully studies prints by Carleton E. Watkins and other nineteenth-century wilderness photographers, as well as twentieth-century modernists like Ansel Adams. By studying the shadows, they determine the time of year and time of day that an image was made. Once on-site, Klett photographs the view with Polaroid film, and Wolfe measures that image against the original photograph, repeating the process until they locate exactly where the earlier photographer stood. By visually collapsing time and space in this composite panorama of Yosemite Valley, Klett and Wolfe document changes to the landscape over more than a century.
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The Changing Landscape
In his own time, Ansel Adams was aware of the environmental concerns facing California and the nation. Although Adams continued to make symphonic and pristine wilderness landscapes, as his career progressed, he began to create images that showed a more nuanced vision – images that decidedly break with widely held ideas about his work. He photographed urban sprawl, freeways, graffiti, oil drilling, ghost towns, rural cemeteries, mining towns, and the sometimes-dispossessed inhabitants of those places, as well as less romantic views of nature, such as the aftermath of forest fires.
Appreciated for their imagery and formal qualities, Adams’ photo-graphs also carry a message of advocacy. Photographers working in the American West today confront a changed, and changing, landscape. Human activity – urbanisation, logging, mining, ranching, irrigated farming – and global warming continue to alter the terrain. Works by contemporary artists bear witness to these changes and their impacts, countering notions that our natural resources are limitless. Placed in conversation with Adams’ photographs, these images aid our understanding of his singular contribution to the ways we envision the landscape and the urgency with which we must protect it.
Several of the contemporary photographers in this exhibition call into question the archetypal images of empty wilderness spaces that have long held a central place in the popular imagination. Arno Rafael Minkkinen activates pristine, unpopulated landscapes by introducing his own naked body into them, without relying on digital manipulation. Here, the artist’s seemingly headless torso and the gentle curve of his outstretched arms perfectly echo the bowl-shaped Yosemite Valley as seen from Inspiration Point.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left in the light panel, Laura McPhee’s Early Spring (Peeling Bark in Rain) (2008, below); and at second right, Mitch Epstein’s Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California (2007, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Mitch Epstein (American, b. 1952) Altamont Pass Wind Farm, California 2007 Chromogenic print Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reproduced with permission
Mitch Epstein’s American Power series investigates energy in its many forms by exploring how we create and consume it, as well as its impact on our daily lives. Often employing a bird’s-eye view and printed on a very large scale, Epstein’s photographs – like these showing oil drilling, wind turbines, desert irrigation, and suburban sprawl – call into question the very definition of power and point to our shared accountability for the abuse of our natural resources. In a world in which we are constantly inundated with photographs, these densely detailed views are also meant to slow down our “reading” of the images and remind us that each may be interpreted in a variety of ways.
“[The] American Power [series] is an active response to the American dream gone haywire. My project focuses on the United States not only because I am American, but because the US has exported its model of unrestricted growth around the world in the form of mass consumerism, corporatism, and sprawl.
“We need to now export a revised model of growth, a revised American dream. I included pictures in American Power of renewable energy – wind, biotech, solar – to show that a healthier, more economical, and compassionate way of life is possible. American Power bears witness to the cost of growth; it asks viewers to consider the landscape they have created – and take responsibility for it.” ~ Mitch Epstein
Working with a large-format camera, Laura McPhee records the impact of human activity on the land, especially in Idaho, a state she loves and visits regularly. These photographs from her Guardians of Solitude series were made in the aftermath of a massive forest fire. Caused by human error, it devastated thousands of acres of woodland before it was finally extinguished. McPhee returned to the area three years later to find that it had burst into bloom. In the renewal of the charred landscape, she found a powerful metaphor for human resilience in the face of terrible personal loss.
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Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing the work of Abelardo Morell including at left centre, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of the Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View (2012, below); at centre, Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (2011, below); and at right his Tent-Camera Image on Ground: View of Mount Moran and the Snake River from Oxbow Bend, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (2011, below) Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Photo: Gary Sexton
Early in his career, Abelardo Morell began experimenting with the camera obscura (from the Latin for “dark room”), a setup that allowed him to photograph the view outside, projected through a small hole (or lens) and inverted on the opposite wall of an interior. More recently, Morell has adapted this technology, using a tent fitted with a periscope and angled mirror, with a digital camera pointed downward to capture the sweeping landscapes reflected on the ground. This process of combining the distant view with the grass, pebbles, pine needles, sand – even pavement – underfoot, allows Morell to turn the terrain into his “canvas” and transform familiar scenes into otherworldly, impressionistic images.
Like several of the contemporary artists in this gallery, Abelardo Morell is a foreign-born photographer for whom US national parks hold special meaning. While growing up in Cuba, he fell in love with the popular Hollywood Westerns playing at the local cinema. Once he immigrated to the United States, he was eager to discover the region for himself. Here he takes in the sweeping grandeur of snowcapped Mount Moran and the Snake River from a vantage point similar to the one employed by Ansel Adams seventy years earlier for his photograph of Grand Tetons National Park (on view nearby).
Abelardo Morell made this photograph along the Rio Grande River, which runs for more than one hundred miles through Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas, forming the border between the United States and Mexico. The tranquility of the scene belies the fact that this is contested space, sometimes violently so. Morell’s tent camera optically inverts the river’s northern and southern banks, and the mysteriously floating compass further compounds the sense of dislocation or disorientation.
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John K. Hillers (American born Germany, 1843-1925) Zuni Pueblo, Looking Southeast c. 1879 Albumen print The Lane Collection Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Images such as this one, created in the 1870s and 1880s as ethnographic data for the US government, often ended up in popular magazines, perpetuating problematic stereotypes of Indigenous people. Beginning in 1871, John K. “Jack” Hillers worked on John Wesley Powell’s survey expeditions for such data. He continued to work under Powell’s leadership at the US Bureau of Ethnology for nearly thirty years. Hired by Powell to photograph Indigenous people living in agrarian communities in New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, Hillers made his most extensive photographic record at Zuni Pueblo in the high plateau region of New Mexico. The photograph is taken at the middle place, or Halona I:diwanna in Zuni/A:shiwi.
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Adam Clark Vroman (American, 1856-1916) An Isleta Water Carrier (Nine of Spades) c. 1894 Chara, Cacique at Pueblo (Jack of Clubs) c. 1894 Playing cards with halftone prints Lazarus and Melzer (Los Angeles), publishers Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Lewis A. Shepard, 2006
An amateur archaeologist and committed preservationist, Adam Clark Vroman owned a bookstore in Pasadena, California, that also sold photography supplies. In the mid-1890s, he made the first of many photographic trips to Navajo, Pueblo, and Hopi communities in Arizona and New Mexico. Like Edward S. Curtis and other Anglo-American photographers, he approached Indigenous subjects with concern for what he saw as their threatened lifeways. Nevertheless, when he produced this set of playing cards in 1900, his sitters, each representing a different Southwestern tribe, were reduced to elaborately costumed “types” and often were not identified by name, relegating Indigenous people to a novelty. For instance, in one example shown here, a group of young Walpi women is simply captioned “Bashful,” illustrating the limits of Vroman’s ability to respectfully record the identities of his sitters.
“This photo of Cloud Dance (Po-Who-Geh-Owingeh) was taken at a time when there was an influx of tourists, archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, and photographers who were intrigued by Pueblo people. At the time, Pueblo people and other Native Americans in the Southwest were trying to navigate the outsiders who were interested in their culture. Some of them did not quite understand the circumstances surrounding the curiosity, while others did understand the extractive nature, and they had to weigh that in terms of their other needs. I get questions from members of my community about why they did not chase the archaeologists and photographers out, and I often respond it is because of the uneven power relations between Indigenous and non-Native people at the time.” ~ Joseph Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo)
In 1937 Ansel Adams spent several weeks traveling in the Southwestern states with painter Georgia O’Keeffe and friends. Adams and O’Keeffe shared an interest in the region’s expansive skies and distinctive mesas, as well as the mix of Indigenous and Spanish cultures. The group first spent two weeks at Ghost Ranch, O’Keeffe’s home in the Chama River Valley of New Mexico. Adams made this picture in a nearby town, perhaps drawn by the way the foreground cross echoes a smaller one on the church steeple. Their road trip took them through Pueblo and Navajo lands in New Mexico and Hopi lands in Arizona; Monument Valley, Canyon de Chelly, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona; and Mesa Verde in Colorado.
When a Sierra Club friend gave him a copy of the Wheeler geographical survey album (1871-1874), Ansel Adams had the opportunity to study Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s photographic technique, as well as his subject matter. In 1941, as Adams set out to work in Canyon de Chelly as part of his national parks project, he decided to try to rephotograph O’Sullivan’s view of an Ancestral Pueblo site. Adams used a green filter to replicate the dramatic striations in the canyon walls that are so pronounced in the early print, as otherwise they would not appear in a “straight” print from his modern negative. Of the power of works like this one, Adams said, “O’Sullivan had that extra dimension of feeling. You sense it, you see it.”
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Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Ancient Ruins in the Cañon de Chelle 1873 Albumen silver print
John K. Hillers (American b. Germany, 1843-1925) Hedipa, Diné (Navajo) Woman c. 1879 Albumen print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Gift of Jessie H. Wilkinson – Jessie H. Wilkinson Fund
Between 1879 and 1881, Hillers extensively documented the pueblo at Zuni, photographing not only its people and distinctive multi-storied adobe architecture, but also its relationship to the surrounding land. He made panoramic views of the pueblo and recorded cultural observances including ceremonial dance and individual artisans at work.
The Paiutes of Utah gave John K. Hillers a name that meant “Myself in the Water,” a reference to his ability to record their likenesses using the wet-plate collodion process to produce glass negatives. Here, Hillers has photographed a Diné (Navajo) man and woman in front of boldly patterned blankets, which he used to create a backdrop for his outdoor portrait “studio.”
The Ahwahnechee (Miwok) of Yosemite prepared food and sharpened tools using semi-spherical holes ground into bedrock as mortars and smooth stones as grinding tools (or pestles). Acorns of the black oak trees were a diet staple once abundant in the region. Settler colonialism, logging in the nineteenth century, and modern-day fire suppression have led to the growth of mainly conifers in their place.
Ansel Adams made this aerial view of the famously tangled freeways of Los Angeles while photographing for Fiat Lux (1967), a publication commissioned by the University of California to celebrate its centennial. Intended to serve as a visual document of the entire University of California system, the project saw Adams travel to the nine UC campuses, along with the system’s various research stations, observatories, natural reserves, and agricultural extensions. The most extensive of all his commercial projects, Fiat Lux took Adams three years to complete and resulted in several thousand negatives.
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Lois Conner (American, b. 1951) Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona 1988 Platinum print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Otis Norcross Fund
Inspired by the stories told to her by her Cree maternal grandmother, Lois Conner regularly traveled throughout the Navajo Nation and Four Corners region with an old-fashioned banquet camera to document Indigenous people and their land. The elongated format and subtle tonal range of the platinum prints that resulted from these trips seem ideally suited to capturing subjects like the expansive desert landscape of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the vertiginous rock face of Canyon de Chelly.
“The extended sweep of the panorama allows me to draw on multiple levels, much as cinema does, and to take something of the immediate present, and layer that with something from a few centuries before. The large-format camera can draw the particular in minute detail. Like adjectives in a sentence, they allow the viewer to look closer, engaging them in the little world contained by the frame.” ~ Lois Conner
This portrait of six-time world-champion hoop dancer Nakotah LaRance (1989-2020) is from an ongoing series that Will Wilson calls the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX). Using a large-format camera and the wet-plate collodion process – the first photographic process used to image Native Americans – Wilson produces a portrait; he then gives his sitter the original tintype, while he retains a digital copy. Wilson is aware of the long history of inaccurate and romanticised representations of Indigenous people in the United States. His goal is to negotiate a more collaborative relationship between photographer and sitter in order to return personal agency to his subjects, like this young Hopi man with his traditional dance hoop and contemporary headphones, game console, and Japanese manga.
Exhibition label text
Nakotah Lomasohu Raymond LaRance (August 23, 1989 – July 12, 2020) was a Native American hoop dancer and actor. He was a citizen of the Hopi Tribe of Arizona. …
At four years old, LaRance began dancing as a fancy dancer and competed in the youth division of the World Championship Hoop Dance Contest in Phoenix, Arizona. He performed on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2004. LaRance won three championships in the youth division and three in the teenage division of the World Championship Hoop Dance competition.
In 2009, LaRance joined the Cirque du Soleil troupe as a principal dancer. He worked as a traveling performer with the troupe for over three years. In 2015, he danced at the opening of the Pan American Games in Toronto with Cirque du Soleil. He won the title of World Champion at the Hoop Dance Contest three times, as part of the adult division in 2015, 2016 and 2018. LaRance taught hoop dancing to students at the Lightning Boy Foundation in New Mexico.
LaRance died at age 30 on July 12, 2020, after a fall from climbing a bridge in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.
Installation view of the exhibition Ansel Adams in Our Time at the de Young museum, San Francisco showing at left in the light panel, Will Wilson’s Nakotah LaRance (2012, above); and at centre Will Wilson’s How the West is One (2014, below)
Adams in the American Southwest
Ansel Adams first visited the American Southwest in 1927. While there he collaborated with author Mary Austin on an illustrated book about Taos Pueblo that aimed to communicate the threat tourism in the region posed to the artistic and religious traditions of Indigenous people. Adams made images for the book only after receiving permission from the Taos Pueblo council, to whom he paid a fee and gifted a copy of the finished publication. He also photographed some Indian cultural observances that had become popular attractions among tourists. Adams’s own images of Native dancers have a complex legacy: although he was one of the non-Native onlookers, he carefully framed his views to leave out evidence of the gathered crowds.
In Diné photographer Will Wilson’s ongoing series Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, the artist responds to and confronts historical depictions of Native Americans by white artists. He focuses in particular on those who traveled west in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to document the Indigenous people they viewed as a “vanishing race” due to US government-sanctioned genocide and settler colonialism.
Born in San Francisco, Diné photographer Will Wilson spent his childhood in the Navajo Nation. Today he lives and works in Santa Fe. Made from his original tintypes, Wilson’s double self-portrait shows him in profile, facing off against himself: on one side wearing an elaborate silver and turquoise necklace, and on the other dressed in a cowboy hat and work gloves. The title riffs on the 1962 John Ford movie How the West Was Won, an epic Western of the type that helped turn stereotypical cowboys and Indians into potent symbols for the American public. Wilson’s dual portrait illustrates the disparate ways that he – as a Native American artist – might be portrayed and perceived by others, whereas in his case, the reality lies somewhere between the two.
Exhibition label text
CJ Heyliger (American, b. 1984) Broken Glass 2015 Inkjet print William E. Nickerson Fund Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reproduced with permission
CJ Heyliger makes his desert landscapes in many different places, resulting in images that reveal the sites’ alien beauty and hallucinatory detail. His approach to mapping the terrain on film reduces it to the medium’s most basic elements – simply light and time. Here, he magically transforms a trail of broken glass into a constellation of stars in a night sky, and in North, East, South, West, his multiple exposures of a spiky yucca create a wildly spinning whirligig.
“My current work brings me to places that, for one reason or another, have become geographical outcasts,” says Heyliger. “These scraps of land are often hidden in plain view and are rife with artefacts and submerged histories of their own. Photography allows me to gather these shards of cultural debris and weave them into a new narrative constructed of diverse environments with varying relationships to reality.”
Based in Southern California, Catherine Opie is best known for her unflinching portraits – of herself and of members of the lesbian leather community to which she belongs. In 2015, she was commissioned to create a large-scale piece spanning the multi-story atrium of a new federal courthouse in Los Angeles, which inspired her to tackle a very different California subject: Yosemite National Park.
The opportunity to produce such a major work motivated Opie to take on the iconic views of the park’s natural wonders, examine her relationship with these Western landscapes, and try to “de-cliché” them. Her luminous colour images of Yosemite are often soft-focused yet still recognisable, thanks to the popularisation of such views by earlier photographers like Carleton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams. Depicting Yosemite through a feminist lens, Opie seeks to assert her equal rights to such wilderness subjects, previously considered the domain of photographers who are white men.
Hurricane Sandy was a turning point for Lucas Foglia, who witnessed its disastrous impact on his family’s Long Island farm in 2012. Convinced that human behaviour and the changing weather patterns that produce such destructive storms are connected, he decided to document the many ways in which human beings use science and technology to respond to climate change. Now living in California, Foglia photographed workers and machines performing the extremely demanding and futile task of shoring up the Pacific coastline in the face of El Niño wind and waves. His sharply angled viewpoint from the highway above consciously echoes the abstract composition of Ansel Adams’ Surf Sequence of 1940.
Exhibition label text
Binh Danh (Vietnamese-American, b. 1977) Lower Yosemite Fall, August 16, 2016 2016 Daguerreotype Mary S. and Edward J. Holmes Fund Copyright by Binh Danh Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Binh Danh and his family immigrated to California after the Vietnam War. For much of his early life, he felt little personal connection to this country’s national parks, several of which were located near his home. That sentiment changed once Danh reached adulthood, took up photography, and discovered a new found pride while documenting these wilderness areas using a mobile darkroom and the daguerreotype process developed in France by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839.
Made with a highly polished metal plate, the daguerreotype has a mirror-like surface that allows Danh to capture in stunning detail the same views that he admires in the photographs of Carleton E. Watkins and Ansel Adams. But it also makes it possible for him to create landscapes that reflect his own likeness back to him, literally situating him within those very American spaces.
Exhibition label text
de Young Golden Gate Park 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, CA 94118
Frames of reference: spaces that humans construct (mainly interiors that serve specific functions) – for example, spaces of pleasure, corporate arenas, sanctioned death chambers, subterranean spaces, human habitats for captured animals, fields of industrial agriculture.
Format: The square format perfectly supports the themes being investigated, balancing and tensioning the pictorial plane within each image.
Colour palette: The limited colour palette of each image heightens the atmosphere and focuses the senses of the viewer.
Lighting: As in a movie set or theatrical production, whether ambient light, spot light, interior light.
Staging: Nothing is out of place. These are utilitarian/utopian/dystopian spaces.
Everything is perfectly ordered within Devlin’s human(less) worlds… and yet the photographs are instilled with a hyperreality where everything is not as it seems, where spaces exist as a “reality” we do not normally perceive.
The luscious heart shaped red bath surrounded by a halo of lights and flowered red carpet; the unexpected, alien flippers in the round portal of an undersea lodge; “a surgical lamp that looks like an oversized star in the night sky which illuminates the pictorial space”; a bright yellow electric (in colour and intent) chair that looks like an oversized piece of Lego; the ether-reality of the purple haze glacier paradise at the Matterhorn. The spaces are full of human presence even as we acknowledge their physical absence. Their fossilised fingerprints are all over these fantastical creations – these disturbing, sometimes grim, fairy tales.
While acknowledging a debt to the history of photography through the New Color Photography movement, New Topographics, “the direct and objective methodology pursued by August Sander”, and “the strict comparative typology practiced by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher” … the photographs are most definitely Devlin’s own. They hold a particular signature, more theatrical than ever New Topographics, Sander or the Bechers.
“The way each space is staged can tell us something about its intended impact and use.” And the recognition and interpretation of that staging can ultimately tell us as much about the artist as about the space itself: perfectionist, environmentalist, passionate creative artist who perceives difference in the everyday, who is aware, aware of the different realities that life (re)presents.
It’s best to view Devlin’s work in the complete series to get the full immersive effect. More photographs from each series can be found on the Lucinda Devlin website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lucinda Devlin – Frames of Reference
American artist Lucinda Devlin rose to fame in the 1990s with a series of soberly observed photographs of execution rooms in US correctional facilities titled “The Omega Suites.” The images caused a sensation at the Venice Biennale in 2001. One of the motifs had already attracted attention in 1992 when it was featured in a controversial advertising campaign for an Italian fashion label. “The Omega Suites” is one of nine photographic series, along with a video, on view in Frames of Reference, the first large-scale survey to be devoted to Lucinda Devlin in Europe.
Devlin, once part of the New Color Photography movement, seeks out her motifs mainly in interiors that serve specific functions. Most of her subjects are in the USA, but she has also done projects in Germany and other countries. In the mid-2000s, the artist added landscape scenes to her repertoire.
One searches in vain for people in Devlin’s pictures, and yet her images tell of human sensitivities and values, evoking existential life questions. In the series “Pleasure Ground” (1977-1990), for example, Devlin provides glimpses of hotel rooms with fantasy themes, discotheques, and beauty salons – places that promise relaxation and enjoyment. By contrast, the interiors in the “Corporal Arenas” series (1982-1998) have an unsettling effect.
Operating rooms for human or animal patients, treatment spaces, and morgues are reproduced here in all objectivity. Viewers are compelled to reflect on their own feelings and experiences in such settings.
It was themes such as these that led the photographer to pursue the project she titled “The Omega Suites” (1991-1998). Devlin did not intend her photographs taken in maximum security prisons to be understood as a statement for or against the death penalty.
Contemplation of these very specific spaces is instead meant as an encouragement to engage personally with a difficult subject.
With the support of a DAAD grant, Devlin shot her series “Water Rites” (1999-2002) in German spas, adding a new twist to “Corporal Arenas.” “Water Rites” takes a look at what are in some cases time-honoured institutions devoted to promoting well-being as well as to healing and convalescence. In Devlin’s “Subterranea” series (ongoing since 1980), she focuses her lens on caves and tunnels that have been made accessible for various uses, reproducing in her pictures the luminous colours generated by artificial lighting schemes installed underground. The way each space is staged can tell us something about its intended impact and use. That Devlin’s interests extend beyond spaces occupied by humans is evident from her “Habitats” series (ongoing since 1985), which spotlights zoo enclosures and aquariums that are modelled on natural animal habitats.
With “Field Culture” (primarily since 2007), the artist has turned to the question of how humans shape the outdoor environment. Here she investigates industrial agriculture in the USA, where genetic engineering and the need to generate sufficient energy are major factors in food production.
Devlin has found an enduring source of inspiration in the vast expanses of Lake Huron, to which she dedicated a series between 2010 and 2019 called “Lake Pictures,” with images illustrating the beauty and grandeur of nature. She presents similarly imposing views of salt lakes and salt flats in Utah in the series “Salt” (ongoing since 2014).
The documentary and serial nature of Devlin’s projects suggests close parallels with the style of depiction represented in the collection of Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur. In the 1980s, while working as a university professor and curator, the artist already developed a fascination with the direct and objective methodology pursued by August Sander in his portraiture. And her photos also echo in some ways the strict comparative typology practiced by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Here as well, compelling correlations can be found among the Cologne collection’s central holdings.
The exhibition has been made possible by generous loans from the artist; Galerie m, Bochum; DZ Bank, Frankfurt/Main; and private lenders.
A publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Lucinda Devlin, and Claudia Schubert, as well as an interview conducted with the artist by Lisa Le Feuvre (Steidl Verlag, approx. 300 pages, DE/EN).
Press release from Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
This series marks the beginning of Lucinda Devlin’s artistic work. Recorded between 1977 and 1996, for example in imaginative theme hotels, in spa and cosmetic areas, in discotheques or striptease bars. Where people seek pleasure and distraction from the toils of everyday life, where desires and dreams provide the incentive to set up these spaces. In their functions and legitimised offers, they are still rarely factual and people are presented in a virtually unrecorded way. They are “stages” for which social agreements exist, but also “space capsules” that are temporary and can become private, taboo-free zones. Socially harmonious, ritualised manners are to be expected as well as one’s hedonistic and borderline actions.
Red emerges as a prominent colour in Pleasure Ground, it signals warmth, love and eroticism. All the more so when in the vicinity of these “islands of happiness” as in the case of the humble Creative Pines Motel little more than highways, gas stations and fast food places. They appear flooded red light retreats with frivolously rigged equipment, even more of the rough world relieved. Lucinda Devlin’s numerous emblematic images in this group of works succeed. That of the heart-shaped whirlpool at Pocono Palace is one of them. The camera stands in the luxurious tub and exposes with the self-timer in the ceiling mirror installed above. This technical trick enabled Devlin to capture the big red heart framed with mirrors and lights undistorted and centred in the picture. The narrow square frame emphasises the rounded shape as well as the oscillating between near and deep space.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
For Lucinda Devlin, the question of physical well-being is of great importance: how much control over your own body and personality is given and in which moments one is in other hands or spheres of influence is handed over. Aspects that make them different in the field of medical treatment and examination rooms for humans and animals. So explores the photographer in her series Corporal Arenas, created between 1986 and 1998, insights into sometimes highly specialised rooms that are mostly shielded from the outside world connect with exceptional situations up to death, while the rooms present themselves as workplaces for certain professional groups.
The picture Operating Room # 8, Forrest General Hospital Hattiesburg is a salient example that meets both the requirements of an operating room clarified as well as the skilful implementation of the subject. He is almost in the middle of the picture operating table provided with a cover protected by cloths. Essential for the constellation is a surgical lamp that looks like an oversized star in the night sky which illuminates the pictorial space above the table to the floor while the surroundings disappear in the dark. This light and line management creates a balanced image geometry. The furnishings thus gain a type spiritual power. Even an altar can be associated.
The other practice rooms considered by Devlin are also connected by a pragmatic decor with smooth, easy-to-clean surfaces and prevailing artificial light. Mostly, however, these are lighter and can be walked through visually. Lucinda Devlin’s pictures also connect in this way to soberly presented documentation views from health technology or from textbooks. But what sets her recordings apart is that they are far removed from any idealised model and in them material ageing and signs of wear as well as irregularities in the arrangement of objects have their place.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
With her views of execution rooms in American prisons, in which are electric chairs, operating tables for administering lethal injections are located or the massive lockable entrances of gas chambers are show, Lucinda Devlin raises awareness of an oppressive topic: the enforcement of the death penalty, which applies in the US and in other countries. However, the photographer is concerned with her project – which took place between 1991 and 1998 in over 20 correctional facilities in various US states – which is neither a sensation nor an accusation. Again, she relies on her thoughtful restrained imagery, which is characterised by realistic colouring and precise perspective and line management of the pictorial space. Not only finding execution rooms with windows and executioners’ technical rooms but also neighbouring cells in which the convicts spend their last hours. There are also rooms for witnesses to witness the execution through a window. To carry out the photographic work Lucinda Devlin completed extensive research. Only the locations of the institutions were laboriously located by her – at that time without the internet – each visit prepared by prior correspondence. A selection of extensive correspondence can be seen in the exhibition showcases.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
At the end of the 1990s, Lucinda Devlin developed her Water Rites series. The series is themed with and performs in conjunction with Corporal Arenas, facilities that deal with the physical and mental well-being of the people. Specific objects are the typical spa and bathing landscapes with its extensive range of medical treatments and wellness offers. Lucinda Devlin has visited traditional spa towns where the element of water is used and therapeutic measures for healing are practiced. The American art historian Michael Mackenzie states that that the construction periods of the baths visited by Lucinda Devlin can be divided into three phases: “The earliest is the architecture of the 19th century with its high tiled rooms, with the equipment made of cast iron and stainless steel. They are followed by the cool clinical rooms of the healthcare industry during the post-war period and finally as a recent development spaces that are modelled like ice caves or Arabian oases and the surprising fantasy rooms of American hotels from the Pleasure Ground series” (in: Lucinda Devlin: Water Rites, Göttingen 2003, p. 6)
An overview of the motifs from Water Rites confirms that the photographer is especially looking at manageable parts of the room as well as utensils and furnishings in which the room is dressed, which she encounters at eye level with her camera and gives an optical order by maintaining the central perspective; thus creating an emblem that, like a trademark, has a direct visual access allowed. Again in this series, Lucinda Devlin asks to what extent the body and thus the affected individual has the possibility and ability to control and regulate these influences, or whether this is done by the person or is desired at all.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
As with the Habitats series, Subterranea dates back to the 1980s. The subject of the series are different natural cave formations in America and Europe, Lucinda Devlin also has tunnels from the former mining industry included.
The cave is always in its uses, as well as in representational contexts, been connected with basic human needs and issues. Due to its circumstances, it can be considered the archetype of dwelling, it can be used as a shelter as well as serve a place of worship. Early evidence of human expression can be found in caves, one thinks, for example, of the paintings of Lascaux in France or of those in Spanish Altamira. For Lucinda Devlin, who designs functional spaces as an expression of cultural self-understanding and cultural acceptance, caves may appear to be downright predestined, and this is exactly what she visually reflects. A look at art history reveals a long iconographic tradition of cave representations. In the visualisation of Christian themes for example the birth of Jesus not only in a stable, but often in one cave shown. His grave is also sometimes located in a rock cave. Saints such as Aegidius are depicted in cave settings. In the psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation can symbolise the unconscious or a reference to caves be female sexuality.
Caves are shrouded in mystery, dark and cool, you can get inside them get lost and never find out. They are fear rooms or can offer protection and be a hiding place in threatening situations. This complexity and ambivalence is captivating in Lucinda Devlin’s recordings in which transparent, iridescent colours are definitely perceptible. The images contrast light and dark, allow a glimpse into corridors whose end cannot be made out and offer bizarre sculptural rock formations.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
In 2010, the first recording was made on the shore of Lake Huron, which is one of the five great lakes of the USA. Until 2019 Lucinda Devlin worked on this series, which differs conceptually and compositionally from its other series. First it is noticeable that they always have a view looking out over the shore viewpoint photographing the lake towards the east. The central picture element is the horizon which Devlin takes at the same height and in the centre of each picture. Accurate to the second, Lucinda Devlin has the time, day, month and year noted for each photograph. Through this precision, combined with the rigorous image structure, the series has the character of a painterly quality for all empirical series that brings together comparative meteorological observations. Seasons, light situations, sky formations and the texture of the water can be understood so clearly that in their interaction they become the real actors. They seem endless variations and leave impressions of a high degree of artistic abstraction which emerge to invite contemplation and reflection.
In addition, it is important to Lucinda Devlin to point out the existential importance in reference to the element of water, from which life arose and without it no life is possible on planet earth. Lake Huron offers the photographer an essential, at the same time exemplary, field of exploration which brings significant habitat to the region, its biodiversity threatened from environmental pollution and climate change.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
The Habitats series has been photographed in numerous zoos and aquariums since the 1980s originating mainly in America. In this decade lies the beginning of Lucinda Devlin’s interest in the animal world and in particular how humans interact with the creatures they handle. In order to trace this request, zoological gardens were a very suitable terrain. The photographer especially likes aquariums, her fascination with the element of water can also be felt here, mirrored repeatedly. But basically, aquariums are like the enclosures of zoos around constructed purpose-built spaces, around replicas of natural habitats, ideally the needs of the respective animal adjusted. Lucinda Devlin argues that this must inevitably be an illusion, as in a touching picture of a pygmy hippopotamus in the Berlin zoo from 1999. The animal stands on the bottom of its pool and nudges its snout against a glass border. As can be in front of a shop window with goods on offer the zoo visitor – currently the viewer of the photograph – from a safe distance look at every movement of the living being in front of him. About zoology and animal science, it is a central function of zoological gardens to meet this human need to see. This is also intended as a mastery of man over nature.
And yet, in Lucinda Devlin’s Habitats series, there are photographic compositions that seem to elude real space. So drift in a picture three jellyfish through seemingly infinite deep blue waters in one, in others a shark swims directly towards the viewer. Habitats is the only series showing those for whom the spaces have been created.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
Lucinda Devlin also sees the outside space as a designed space, shaped according to human needs and ideas. Her series Field Culture redeems this to a particular degree by showing the diverse phenomena of industrial agriculture in the USA. In the Corn Belt states and beyond, which are characterised by large-scale cultivation of grain, cotton or soya, for example, is in what the photographer finds her own expressive motifs. Monocultures prevail in these areas, geared towards maximum yield and profit. Such conditions can only be with appropriate plant breeding, often implemented using genetic engineering, chemical fertilisers and intensive energy management. Lucinda Devlin has the necessary structures, constructions and buildings in her series to provide numerous insights. In numerous photographs technology dominates nature, traditional forms of tillage are a thing of the past, direct contact with the earth is only a marginal phenomenon. A shot of the view into a magenta-coloured illuminated greenhouse, the futuristic-surreal. Another shot shows the entrance to one wind turbine reminiscent of a rocket.
Lucinda Devlin sees her Field Culture series in the tradition of the legendary New Topographics. It was under this name in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, an exhibition of photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel were shown. They all have a critical view of the environment they encounter: no untouched nature, no romantic moods, no reverential bowing to nature characterise her pictorial creations. Rather, it is a far-reaching urban sprawl with highways and related motels, parking lots and gas stations, industry and peripherals that determine the American landscape.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
Dialogue: Old English dialogas (plural), from Latin from Greek dialogos, from dia ‘through’ + logos ‘word’
“As we define it, dialogue is “a communicative process in which people with different perspectives seek understanding.” To be in dialogue means that participants are not only engaging each other in light of their different views, but they are also striving to achieve a degree of mutual understanding.”
Jason Combs. “What is Dialogue?” on the University of Dayton website Monday October 28, 2019 [Online] Cited 01/07/2023
Short and sweet because I’m not feeling well.
What an inspired pairing for an exhibition. “Each [artist] addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition.”
From street-based photographs of everyday life to conceptual excavations of Black Histories, they produce incisive thought provoking works “that intermingle past and present, referenc[ing] African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.”
I love them both for their commitment to and passion for life in all its different forms. Bringing people together. Expressing a degree of mutual understanding.
#BlackLivesMatter #AllLivesMatter
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been friends and colleagues for more than 40 years. Each addresses race, class, representation, and systems of power in their work, creating photographic series grounded in Black history and realities that speak to the human condition. This exhibition sheds light on their unique trajectories and modes of presentation, and their shared consciousness and principles. Organised by the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
In 1976 I had been making photographs for a couple of years. I had certainly been looking at a lot more photographs than I had actually made. From looking at photographs in books and magazines and going to exhibitions of pictures by Mike Disfarmer at MoMA, Richard Avedon at Marlborough, and haunting whatever other places there were to see photographs in New York in the early 1970s, I had begun to educate myself, with the intent of adding something to the conversation through my own pictures.
The artist Janet Henry, who was from the same Jamaica, Queens neighborhood that I lived in, had gotten a job in the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem, then located above a Kentucky Fried Chicken on 125th Street and Fifth Avenue in a large second floor loft space. When Frank Stewart, the museum’s staff photographer and photo teacher, left to do a commissioned project in Cuba, Janet called me and asked if I would take over the class. On the first day of class a few students straggled in. One of them, a seemingly shy woman with big expressive eyes, introduced herself, “Hi, my name is Carrie. Do you think I could be a photographer?” she asked, holding her Leica camera in her hand. That began what has now been 33 years of friendship and camaraderie with one of the most brilliant people I know.
From the very beginning, Carrie Mae Weems has had a sharp intelligence that was looking for a way into the world. From her early documentary photographs to the more expansive and materially varied recent works, she has consistently set out to visually define the world on her own terms and to redefine for all of us the nature of the world that we are in. After all these years I still anticipate her work with a fresh sense of wonderment, knowing that her restless search for the deeper meaning of things will yield a continuing rich trove of objects and images. On a Sunday morning in May I called from my home in Chicago to reconnect with my dear friend while she was traveling in Seville, Spain.
Since meeting at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1977, Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems have been intellectual colleagues and companions.
From the outset of their careers, both have operated from a deep social commitment to participate in, describe, and define culture. In seeking to express themselves fully, each has expanded possibilities within photography and video to address their chosen subjects.
Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue, on view April 4 through July 9, 2023, brings together for the first time a focused selection of work from a period of over 40 years by two of today’s most important and influential photo-based artists. Each grapples with issues of race, class, and representation in their work, making art grounded in the experiences and realities of Black Americans while also speaking to the broader human condition.
“The Museum’s Department of Photographs has made great strides in recent years in building an exhibitions program that highlights more expansive narratives of photographic history,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems are two artists who reframe American traumas that have been ignored or simplified in the national historical record. We are proud to showcase their work in dialogue with one another.”
Jim Ganz, senior curator of photographs, adds, “These artists are two of the most dynamic and insightful of our time. As presented in this extraordinary exhibition, their eloquent dialogue gives unique perspective on their shared concerns as image makers.”
Dawoud Bey (American, born 1953) creates photographs that focus on individuals, communities, and important but often overlooked American histories. His carefully composed images convey the dignity and rich inner lives of his subjects. Carrie Mae Weems (American, born 1953) first gained recognition in the 1980s for exploring identity, race, power, and history, themes that still fuel her art. Over her career, Weems has turned increasingly to staged photography and the use of text to heighten the emotional intensity of her work.
This exhibition is divided into five sections, starting with early pictures that both artists made in the photodocumentary tradition and followed by ambitious, groundbreaking explorations of the medium as it developed technologically and artistically. The exhibition then focuses on how both artists moved beyond candid pictures of everyday life and began making larger scale work that is more planned than spontaneous. Bey’s portraiture evolved from street-based glimpses of the world made with a handheld camera to portraits that are formal but intimate, in which his subjects appear at ease and engage directly with the lens. With her Kitchen Table Series, Weems transitioned from representing real people in their natural environments to creating staged photo essays. For each artist, the techniques developed in this period became the foundation for future projects.
In Resurrecting Black Histories, each artist addresses the 19th century and its legacies in distinctive ways. Bey’s carefully composed landscapes evoke the experience of fleeing along the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network that helped enslaved people escape the South. Weems, by incorporating texts that intermingle past and present, references African Americans whose lives and stories have been co-opted or lost.
In Memorial & Requiem, Bey and Weems reference traumatic 20th-century events. They worked with community partners to stage scenes meant to reinvigorate discussion of the American legacy of racial violence. Each photographer also created a related video, bringing their own sensibility – Bey’s searching, intimate gaze; Weems’ choreographed social commentary – to the moving image, using sequencing and sound to deepen engagement with American history.
The exhibition ends with Revelation in the Landscape, where both Bey and Weems contemplate the built environments in which we live and how those spaces affect our perceptions of the world and ourselves. Bey returns to the Harlem neighbourhoods he photographed in the late 1970s, tracking the changes wrought by gentrification. Weems photographs imposing sites in Rome, inserting herself into historical places imbued with power and legacy. Both series reveal the economic and institutional forces that shape daily life.
In conjunction with the exhibition Getty has created a community program inspired by the exhibition, L.A.: In Dialogue. This program brings Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue to a wider Los Angeles community, furthering the influence of the two artists and introducing their work to a new generation of artists and viewers. The artist-led program will host educational workshops for local teens and young adult photographers, and will teach participants techniques in black-and-white photography and the artistic practice of capturing portraiture and place. They will explore themes from the exhibition, collaborate with peers, and explore their local communities: Culver City (Black Image Center), South L.A. (LA Commons), Downtown L.A. (Inner-City Arts), and Venice Beach (Venice Arts). This program will result in a satellite exhibition that will open in June 2023.
Related programming includes Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems in Conversation on Tuesday, April 4 at 4pm. That evening at 7pm, the Museum presents master saxophonist David Murray in concert with his newly formed quartet as part of the exhibition programming.
The pose of the figures, other than the obvious reference to the Pieta, reminds me of that famous and most moving Eugene W. Smith photograph Tomoko and Mother in the Bath (1971)
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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