What can I say … more from that ecstatic photographer Peter Hujar. One of my top ten photographers of all time.
I can’t get enough of his uncomplicated, fleeting photographs of people who have the bravery to be themselves. Photographs that haunt my memory.
A big thank you to Nick Henderson for allowing me to use the photographs that he took of the exhibition in the posting.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All installation images courtesy of and with thankx to Nick Henderson.
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing Hujar’s Nude Self-Portrait Series #5 (1967, above) Photo: Nick Henderson
While photography has long been associated with documentation and memory, Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) sought to produce images that construct a new reality through subtle exchanges between himself and his subjects. He created direct yet enigmatic portraits of people and animals, pictures of performers, and sexually charged male nudes. These were influenced by various dimensions of his experience, including a childhood spent on his grandparents’ farm, a lifelong interest in dance and theatre, and his identity as a gay man.
In the early 1970s Hujar lived in a loft in downtown Manhattan, amid numerous performers, choreographers, and playwrights who were exploring new approaches to representation. Operating in modes ranging from experimental dance to drag, they challenged the distinction between art and everyday life. Hujar created portraits of many members of these creative communities, and his work embodies the same sense of experimentation that his subjects pursued in their live and performance.
Hujar sought not to document a person or moment but instead to create a reality that exists only within the photograph. This exhibition connects these new realities with the worlds their subjects were making through performance. In keeping with the spirit of collaboration and exchange that typified the downtown New York scene, this exhibition also includes artwork by some of those in his circle.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing Hujar’s Nude Self-Portrait Series #5 (1967, above) Photo: Nick Henderson
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing at left, Gary in Contortion (2) (1979, below), and at second right Gary Indiana Veiled (1981, below) Photo: Nick Henderson
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Performance and Portraiture at the Art Institute of Chicago showing at fifth from left, Hujar’s John Flowers Backstage at the Palm Casino Revue (1974, below); and at right, Hujar’s Larry Ree Backstage (1974, below) with ‘Experimental and Camp Performance’ exhibition text to the extreme right Photo: Nick Henderson
Wall text from the exhibition Photo: Nick Henderson
Wall text from the exhibition Photo: Nick Henderson
While photography has long been associated with documentation and memory, Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) sought to produce images that construct a new reality through subtle exchanges between himself and his subjects.
He created direct yet enigmatic portraits of people and animals, pictures of performers, and sexually charged male nudes in close dialogue with the performance and movement study scene emerging in New York’s East Village in the 1970s. His subject matter was influenced by various dimensions of his experience, including a childhood spent on his grandparents’ farm, a lifelong interest in dance and theatre, and his identity as a gay man.
In the early 1970s, Hujar was living in a loft in lower Manhattan as, nearby, Robert Wilson founded the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, a performance group dedicated to exploring new approaches to theatre and choreography. Byrd Hoffman is just one of the groups Hujar would go on to photograph extensively, along with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, an absurdist project founded by Charles Ludlam, and The Cockettes, a psychedelic theatre troupe based in San Francisco. Hujar photographed performances by these companies but often paid more attention to capturing the actors and dancers backstage, in moments of transition – as they put on their costumes and make-up, preparing to embody the characters they would play.
This exhibition connects both the experimentation Hujar and his subjects pursued and the new realities they each created – whether through photographs or performance. The presentation includes over 60 works by Hujar, and in keeping with the spirit of collaboration and exchange that typified the downtown New York scene, also includes artwork by some of the artists and performers in his circle, including works by Greer Lankton, Sheryl Sutton, and David Wojnarowicz.
Hujar’s representation of artist Greer Lankton’s legs evokes tropes of feminine glamor and imagery such as fashion photographs and pin-ups, while also recalling the fragmentation of the body Lankton effected in her sculptures.
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Husband and wife] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Salt of the Earth
Little is known of the life of photographer Richard Jenkins but that matters little for the images the artist left behind captured on glass-plate negatives give clear insight into the nature of the man. His images are sensitive, full of feeling for the people he is photographing, direct and enigmatic at the same time.
An association can be made between Jenkins’ work and that of German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) as can be seen in the examples I have assembled in this posting. Both artists came from farming stock. Both artists took up photography to escape their proletarian roots. Both artists used an old-fashioned large-format camera with glass negatives. Shooting from a single (face-to-face) perspective both artists work possesses a frontality which places the subject front and centre in the pictorial plane with the background thrown out of focus by the use of low depth of field. Both artists planned compositions pictured their subjects within familiar surroundings and “considered the relationship between location and sitter to be the most essential ingredient for communicating both the status and essence of his or her personality.”1
But while Sander’s portraits tell of an uncertain cultural landscape during the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis during the interwar years through a set of typologies – ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’ and ‘The Last People’ – based on the tenants of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement “which advocated a return to realism and social commentary in art with a respectful and unadorned neutrality, and always within their familiar surroundings”2 rejecting all forms of expressionism and romanticism, Jenkins’ portraits picture the stable cultural landscape of Britain’s farming working class, a class of people that had existed since feudal times in the Britain: in sure and certain hope that hard work will be their salvation.
I grew up belonging to this working class. We were very poor. My mother had to boil a large kettle on the stove and then bathe us boys in a cowper on the floor of the kitchen for we had no hot running water when I was a child, and we only existed on what my father could shoot on the farm… pheasant, pigeon, rabbit, hare, partridge. But what we lacked for in creature comforts we made up in spirit. The energy of the land and its people. The connection to nature, the trees and birds, the crops and earth. In some ways it was a magical childhood amongst the forest, cowslips, fields, granaries – in others, not good at all. This spirit is what you can feel in Jenkins’ photographs. The essentialness of being of the people he photographed. As curator Hilary Engel insightfully observes, “He took photographs of them working, and the beautiful, useful things they made. Although Richard was not interested in farm work himself, he admired the skills that it entailed… You can sense their strength, their resilience – the spirit that has enabled them to survive the hard work and challenges of life in this remote farming community. Richard simply presents them, honestly, as they are: and you sense that they trust him.”
Jenkins’ photographs are not mere facades. They reveal in intimate detail, through every hard earned line on a human face, the triumphs and travails of that person’s existence. Observe if you will Jenkins’ photograph Untitled [Family group] (Nd, below) and note the intimacy of the scene with the two children balanced on the knee of their parents, the daughter held by the mother and the son clasped firmly by one of the stocky, dirty, hardened hands of the father who stares straight at the camera with a slight smile and a twinkle in his eye. Notice his patterned waistcoat peeking out from beneath his thick woollen jacket, thick workman’s trousers surmounting his WWI era puttees and likely army boots with studs. Did he serve during the First World War and survive? Observe also Jenkins’ photograph Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding] (Nd, below) where the family group are all in their Sunday best. What fascinates here is the sitters attitude towards the camera: the aloofness and stiff upper lip of the old gentleman (for that is what he would have been called) at top left, the quizzical look of the man at top right, the contemptuous defiance of the girl at lower left, the inscrutability on the man’s face at bottom right and, dominating them all, the openness and straight forward stare towards the camera of the woman at centre, she clutching a bouquet of flowers, wearing a prominent cross and surmounted by an enormous hat bedecked with blooms. High collars, bowlers hats, stiff upper lips, flowers and finery. It would have been a grand day…
“Sander once said ‘The portrait is your mirror. It’s you’. He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person’s story…”3 Jenkins’ photographs also tell each person’s story but my feeling is that he does it with a more humanist approach than those qualities Sander brought to photographic portraiture. There is a warm and empathy in photographs such as Untitled [Group of men with Romford & Evershed Ltd Pershorf 1885 steam engine] (Nd, below), Untitled [Man and dog](Nd, below) and Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog] (Nd, below replete with sheep and dog) which Sander’s more Germanic portraits (with their rejection of all forms of expressionism and romanticism) shy away from. If as Sander believed, the portrait is your mirror, it’s you… it’s also a reflection of the soul of the photographer evinced through the portraits of his subjects.
Richard Jenkins must have been one hell of a human being to capture such revealing, intimate, celestial portraits of the people he loved.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anonymous. “August Sander,” on The Art Story website Nd [Online] Cited 18/09/2023
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Family group] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins was born in 1890 on a farm ten miles from Hay and he became a brilliant pioneering photographer. He longed to escape the drudgery of farming – to go away and study. Instead he had to console himself by learning to wield a cumbersome camera, taking and developing spontaneous and moving portraits of his friends and neighbours going about their everyday lives. He had a gift for capturing his subjects’ personalities, paying tribute to their fortitude and skills. Miraculously, nearly a thousand of his glass-plate images survived decades of neglect and since the publication of Golden Valley Faces in 2020, his work has begun to be recognised as a remarkable record of life in rural Herefordshire at the start of the twentieth century.
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Bauernpaar – Zucht und Harmonie [Peasant couple – breeding and harmony] 1912 Gelatin silver print
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Working-class Mother 1927 Gelatin silver print
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins was born in 1890 in south west Herefordshire, close to the Black Mountains of Wales. He grew up to be a bright, curious young man: he longed to go to college to study engineering, to be part of the technological revolution that was going on in the outside world. But because he was the only son of a farmer it was not allowed: he had to stay on the farm. Even in this remote valley, new machinery was beginning to take over tasks that had always been done by hand, or with horses – like the mobile steam engine which travelled from farm to farm. Travel was being transformed, with the opening of railways. And country people were beginning to discover a new freedom with bicycles – or even motorbikes.
Communication was revolutionised during Richard’s childhood, with the invention of wireless and telephones. Electricity was reaching across the country. Any one of these burgeoning industries offered enticing prospects for a would-be engineer in the first decade of the twentieth century. But for Richard, it was not to be. As he grew up, Richard found a way to escape the prison of farming. He acquired a camera, and somehow mastered the art of composing telling images, as well as the science of developing and printing. It was his way of celebrating the world that he saw around him. He photographed every stage in the lives of his Golden Valley neighbours: their weddings, their babies, their graves.
He portrayed their children growing up, at school concerts and at chapel anniversaries. He took photographs of them working, and the beautiful, useful things they made. Although Richard was not interested in farm work himself, he admired the skills that it entailed. Richard’s subjects were not used to being photographed. Some of them look uncomfortable, apprehensive. But Richard was evidently charming, and had a knack for getting people to relax. They have various props to put them at their ease – dogs, cats, even sheep or horses. Or a favourite bicycle or motorbike. Richard saw that these additions helped to express his subjects’ personalities. Many of them stare resolutely into the camera. You can sense their strength, their resilience – the spirit that has enabled them to survive the hard work and challenges of life in this remote farming community. Richard simply presents them, honestly, as they are: and you sense that they trust him.
Richard’s portraits differ markedly from the conventional style of the time. A professional photographer might place his subjects in a studio against an elegant setting, and get them to take up a certain pose, gazing into the distance. Or they would be portrayed with objects representative of their status – splendid horses, or impressive houses. Instead, Richard’s subjects appear in their natural, often very modest, habitat. Richard adored his beautiful sister, Eva, and photographed her repeatedly. Her form lights up many of the pictures. She poses, elegantly composed, amongst the bracken at Quarrelly Farm.
Richard Jenkins died in 1964, having lived at Quarrelly Farm all his life. For decades his glass plate negatives were stored in shoeboxes and cupboards in the farmhouse – never catalogued or published. But in 2010 the Jenkins family generously decided to place the collection in the care of the Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, where it has since been digitised. Since the publication of Golden Valley Faces in 2020, Richard Jenkins has begun to be recognised as a remarkable photographer. Many of his subjects remain unknown: but their faces speak with all the freshness and vigour they had a hundred years ago. His images of the life around him form a unique portrait of rural Herefordshire at the start of the twentieth century.
Text by Hilary Engel on the Golden Valley Faces website Nd [Online] Cited 02/08/2023
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Child and bull] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Family group probably at a wedding] (detail) Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Woman lying among the ferns] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Woman lying among the ferns] (detail) Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Loading the hay] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Group of men with Romford & Evershed Ltd Pershorf 1885 steam engine] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Three men and a press] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Man with buttonhole posy] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Couple] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) Mother and Daughter 1912 Gelatin silver print
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Nurse, group of children and candles] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Man and dog] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Two heavy horses, two men and a plough] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) Untitled [Two men with pipes, bicycles and dog] Nd Digital scan from a glass plate negative
The first published selection of Richard Jenkins’ work, telling the story of his life and his photography
Author: Hilary Engel 112 pages, 240 x 200 mm 140 black and white photographs ISBN 978-1-5272-6998-9 Available in bookshops, or order online Retail price £12 Postage and packing within the UK: £5
Profits from sales of the book will go to the Laurie Engel Fund for Teenage Cancer Trust
Hay Castle Oxford Road Hay-on-Wye HR3 5DG Phone: 01497 820079
Unknown photographer Oud Batavia / Ancient Batavia April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Tuesday October 4th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Tuesday October 4th, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
ephemeran. things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.
It is incredible that these ephemera(l) menus with their attendant rotogravures (a form of gravure printing of superb contrast and quality) have lasted 85 years, probably stored away in someone’s bookcase, only to be purchased by me in an op shop (charity shop) in Melbourne, Australia just recently.
This is probably the first time these images have seen the light of day and been published for decades… most likely since they were given to the passengers aboard the K.P.M. ships T.S.S. Nieuw Holland, T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland and T.S.S. Op Ten Noort in 1938-1939.
Information and details on the ships construction are detailed in the posting but I could ascertain nothing about who took the photographs for the menus. In all likelihood the photographs were either a) taken by a (most likely) Dutch photographer employed by the shipping line or b) taken by a Western photographer living in Asia under brief from the shipping line or c) taken by a local photographer under similar direction. Whoever took the photographs (and I believe these images to be the eye of one person) displayed a magnificent understanding of portrait and landscape photography in the Western tradition… whilst also exoticising the Indigenous people and places (with their “heathen tombs”) for consumption – pardon the pun, as the images are on menus – by a Western clientele. Nevertheless the photographs are incredibly beautiful and direct. There is no flim flam here. And in that sense these images remain constant, constant in their historical link to cultures which they depict and valuable as such.
Just imagine being a first class passenger literally only a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War traversing the Java Sea in absolute luxury, wearing black tie, and dining on “stuffed eggs with caviar,” “veal cutlets a la Richelieu,” “larded Calfsliver,” and “Coupe Peche Melba” while being attended to by uniformed waiters! And then on the front cover of your menu (note different photographs on menus from the same day) photographs of barefoot Indigenous people from the various stops that the liner will make on its journey.
However, the status of humans will matter very little in the maelstrom that will engulf the region after the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, for people from Burma through Thailand, Singapore, Malaya, Indonesia, Dutch East Indies, Philippines, and New Guinea and more, and those defending those countries, will all suffer under the yoke of Japanese aggression and brutality. The very waters that these glamorous liners sailed would become the scene of sea battles, death and destruction.
If anybody has any information on the photographer(s) if you could please contact me at bunyanth@netspace.net.au I would be most grateful. Thank you.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer Krugdansers op Nias / War Dancers at Nias April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Nias (Indonesian: Pulau Nias, Nias language: Tanö Niha) (sometimes called Little Sumatra in English) is an island located off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. Nias is also the name of the archipelago (Kepulauan Nias) of which the island is the centre, but also includes the Batu Islands to the south-east and the small Hinako Islands to the west.
Location of Nias, Indonesia Public domain
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Chineezenwuk in Oud-Batavia / Ancient Batavia – Chinatown April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Old Batavia, the Jewel of Asia
In its heydays in the 16th century, Batavia was known as “The Queen of the East” and “the Jewel of Asia”. Its Sunda Kelapa harbour was abuzz with merchant vessels from Europe, China, India and from throughout the Indonesian archipelago, loading in and sailing away with precious nutmegs, pepper, tea, coffee, ceramics, cloths and other exotic products of the time. The warehouses were stacked with spices, tin and copper. The successful trade in Batavia filled the coffers of the Netherland’s Treasury.
Center of the VOC Dutch East India Company’s administration was the Stadthuis with its wide front plaza, around which were the Court of Justice, banks and other important buildings. Later the city expanded to the west bank of the Ciliwung river, where the Dutch built a fortress, a city wall and canals, outside which was Chinatown and the homes of the indigenous people.
This entire area, covering 1.3 square kilometers is today called the Old Batavia, present day part of North and West Jakarta.
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Rustschuren in de Toradjalanden / Rice Barns in the Toradja Country April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
The Torajans are an ethnic group indigenous to a mountainous region of South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Their population is approximately 1,100,000, of whom 450,000 live in the regency of Tana Toraja (“Land of Toraja”). Most of the population is Christian, and others are Muslim or have local animist beliefs known as aluk (“the way”). The Indonesian government has recognised this animistic belief as Aluk To Dolo (“Way of the Ancestors”).
The word Toraja comes from the Buginese language term to riaja, meaning “people of the uplands”. The Dutch colonial government named the people Toraja in 1909. Torajans are renowned for their elaborate funeral rites, burial sites carved into rocky cliffs, massive peaked-roof traditional houses known as tongkonan, and colourful wood carvings. Toraja funeral rites are important social events, usually attended by hundreds of people and lasting for several days.
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Type van Timor Koepang / Timor Koepang Type April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Kupang (Indonesian: Kota Kupang, Indonesian pronunciation: [ˈkupaŋ]), formerly known as Koepang, is the capital of the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara. At the 2020 Census, it had a population of 442,758; the official estimate as at mid 2022 was 468,913. It is the largest city and port on the island of Timor, and is a part of the Timor Leste – Indonesia – Australia Growth Triangle free trade zone. Geographically, Kupang is the southernmost city in Indonesia.
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Friday September 23rd, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Rotogravure
A printing system using a rotary press with intaglio (a design incised or engraved into a material) cylinders, typically running at high speed and used for long print runs of magazines and stamps.
The rotogravure printing process (commonly shortened to gravure) is a method of intaglio printing. Gravure printing works by applying ink to a substrate with the use of a metal plate that is typically mounted onto a cylinder. This plate is often made of copper or chrome.
Diagram of rotogravure process CC BY-SA 3.0
Unknown photographer Heidengraf Te Samosir (Toba Meer – Sumatra) / Heathen Tomb at Samosir (Lake Toba – Sumatra) April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Sunday September 25th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Samosir, or Samosir Island, is a large volcanic island in Lake Toba, located in the north of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Administratively, Samosir Island is governed as six of the nine districts within Samosir Regency. The lake and island were formed after the eruption of a super volcano some 75,000 years ago.
Lake Toba (Indonesian: Danau Toba, Toba Batak; romanized: Tao Toba) is a large natural lake in North Sumatra, Indonesia, occupying the caldera of a super volcano. The lake is located in the middle of the northern part of the island of Sumatra, with a surface elevation of about 900 metres (2,953 ft), the lake stretches from 2.88°N 98.52°E to 2.35°N 99.1°E. The lake is about 100 kilometres (62 miles) long, 30 kilometres (19 mi) wide, and up to 505 metres (1,657 ft) deep. It is the largest lake in Indonesia and the largest volcanic lake in the world. Toba Caldera is one of twenty geoparks in Indonesia, and was recognised in July 2020 as one of the UNESCO Global Geoparks.
Bisajunisa Lake Toba, Samosir Island and the surrounding hills taken from Tele Samosir 17 February 2019
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Sunday September 25th, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Passer Te Fort de Kock (Sumatra) / Market at Fort De Kock (Sumatra) April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Thursday September 29th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Fort de Kock was a 19th-century Dutch sconce fortification established over a hill in Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Around the fortification, a new settlement grew, which eventually grew into the city of Bukittinggi, the second largest city in West Sumatra. Although the remnants of the mound and some cannons can still be seen, the original buildings on top of the sconce have been demolished.
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Thursday September 29th, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Vrouwen van Nias / Women of Nias Nd T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Friday September 30th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Single sheet recto
The Great Barrier Reef. T.S.S. “Nieuw Holland” September 30th, 1938 K.P.M. line Single sheet verso
Unknown photographer Early photograph of the newly built T.S.S. Nieuw Holland c. 1927-1928 Courtesy of Dr Reuben Goossens
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland, K.P.M. Line
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland was built for KPM (Koninklijke Paketvaart Mij) by the Nederlandsche Scheepsbouw Co (Netherlands Shipbuilding Co) in Amsterdam. She was launched on December 1, 1927. After her completion on April 20 1928, she headed for Asia and commenced regular services from Malaya, via Singapore, Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Nieuw Holland and her newer sister, T.S.S. Nieuw Zealand, maintained a regular service between Australia and Asia until the outbreak of the war. These two KPM sisters were regarded as two of the most graceful pre-war liners to operate between Australia and Asia, with their magnificently decorated lounges clad with fine timbers featuring elaborate carvings. Their external appearance gave them a casual tropical feel being pained all white and buff to yellow funnels.
In 1940, Nieuw Holland headed for Melbourne where she was modified to become a troop transport ship for up to 1,000 troops. Upon completion she joined the Royal Navy, but she continued to be operated by her Dutch crew. She and T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland joined regular convoys between Europe and the Middle East, although Nieuw Holland did operate in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean for a short time. Late in 1941, she received yet another modification but his time in the UK increasing her capacity up to 2,000 troops. Both T.S.S. Nieuw Holland and her sister T.S.S. Nieuw Zealand were part of the November 1942 invasion of North Africa.
Specifications
Built: 1928 by Nederlandsche Scheepsbouw Co, Amsterdam – Yard 187 Engines: 2 Stork steam turbines – 7.500 SHP Propeller: One Speed: 15.5 knots Length: 160.60m – 527ft Width: 19.00m – 62.30ft Tonnage: 10.903 GRT – 1958 11.215 GRT Passengers: 123 First class – 50 Third class passengers 1958 – 155 all first class passengers Crew: 200 Troops: 1940 – 1,000. 1941 – 2,000
Unknown photographer Bataksche Vrouw / Batak Woman April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Saturday October 1st, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Batak is a collective term used to identify a number of closely related Austronesian ethnic groups predominantly found in North Sumatra, Indonesia, who speak Batak languages. The term is used to include the Karo, Pakpak, Simalungun, Toba, Angkola, and Mandailing ethnic groups. Which are related groups with distinct languages and traditional customs (adat).
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Saturday October 1st, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Danser van Tanimbar / Dancer from Tanimbar April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Sunday October 2nd, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
The Tanimbar Islands, also called Timur Laut, are a group of about 65 islands in the Maluku province of Indonesia. The largest and most central of the islands is Yamdena; others include Selaru to the southwest of Yamdena, Larat and Fordata to the northeast, Maru and Molu to the north, and Seira, Wuliaru, Selu, Wotap and Makasar to the west. The Indonesian phrase timur laut means “east of the sea” or “northeast”.
Tanimbar Islands in the south of Maluku Islands
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Sunday October 2nd, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Prauwen in Oud Batavia / Praos in Ancient Batavia April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Tuesday October 4th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland dinner menu. Tuesday October 4th, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Prauwen in Oud Batavia / Fishing Craft in Ancient Batavia April 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Holland menu. Wednesday October 5th, 1938 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Holland luncheon menu. Wednesday October 5th, 1938 Commander P.M. Verstelle K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland
Unknown photographer Tempel Te Koeboetambahan (Bali) / Temple at Koeboetambahan (Bali) December 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland. Monday 2nd May, 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Kubutambahan is a district in the regency of Buleleng Timur in northern Bali, Indonesia. It contains a number of notable temples such as Pura Meduwe Karang which have been painted in recent years.
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland luncheon menu. Monday 2nd May, 1939 Commander C.L. Van Dierendonck K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer KPM postcard of the T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland 1928-1939 Courtesy of Dr Reuben Goossens
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland, KPM Line
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland was launched on January 6 1928 and was completed on April 12 1928. She departed Rotterdam and headed for Asia where she commenced regular services from Malaya, via Singapore, Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Like her sister the T.S.S. Nieuw Holland, she maintained a regular service between Australia and Asia until the outbreak of the war. Her external appearance had that tropical look which was unusual for that time being pained all white and with her twin buff to yellow funnels. In 1935 due to engine problems, she was fitted with a new set of more efficient turbines at Mij Fijenoord in Rotterdam.
In 1940, with the war having commenced the SS Nieuw Zeeland was stripped of her passenger fittings and refitted into a troop ship in Singapore to accommodate up to 1000 troops and just a small number of passengers. She, like her sister the Nieuw Holland was handed over to the British Royal Navy, but the Dutch crew continued to serve onboard with an additional 43 members. She joined convoys sailing to the Middle East and Europe. Then in 1942 SS Nieuw Zealand was involved in “Operation Torch” being the invasion of North Africa, however, after she had disembarked her troops successfully and was heading homeward and sailing in the Mediterranean, she was suddenly tragically torpedoed by a German U-Boat, number U407, on November 11, 1942, in position 3557′ N-03° E.. With the damage being severe she sunk reasonably fast, but most on board were able to get off the ship, although there were 15 lives lost due to the torpedo explosions and subsequent fires.
Specifications
Built: 1927 by Rotterdamsche DD Mij. Rotterdam – Yard 142c Engines: 2 x Geared Steam Turbines by Mij Fijennoord – 8,000 SHP Propeller: One Speed: 15.5 knots Length: 160.60m – 527ft Width: 19.00m – 62.30ft Tonnage: 10.906 GRT Passengers: 123 First class – 50 Third class passengers Crew: 200 As a Troop ship in 1940 Troops: 1,000 Passengers: 14 Crew: 243
Unknown photographer Raksassa Te Sanoer (Bali) / Temple Guard at Sanoer (Bali) December 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland. Friday 26th May, 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
Sanur is a seaside town in the southeast of the island of Bali, in Indonesia. Its long stretch of beach offers shallow waters. Colourful jukung fishing boats rest on the sand, backed by a paved cycling path. The Pura Blanjong temple is built from coral and has inscriptions dating from the 10th century. Sanoer is a popular tourist destination thanks to its monuments and memorials.
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland luncheon menu. Friday 26th May, 1939 Commander C.L. Van Dierendonck K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Lègong-Meisje (Bali) / Lègong Girl (Bali) December 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland. Sunday 26th May, 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland luncheon menu. Friday 26th May, 1939 Commander C.L. Van Dierendonck K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Tempel Te Koeboetambahan (Bali) / Temple at Koeboetambahan (Bali) December 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland. Sunday 28th May, 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland luncheon menu. Sunday 28th May, 1939 Commander C.L. Van Dierendonck K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer Nias-Kruger / Nias’ Warrior December 1938 T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland. Wednesday 31st May, 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
T.S.S. Nieuw Zeeland luncheon menu. Wednesday 31st May, 1939 Commander C.L. Van Dierendonck K.P.M. line Bifold pamphlet interior
T.S.S. Op Ten Noort
Unknown photographer Oude Balinees / Old Type of Bali December 1938 ss. “op ten NOORT”. Thursday 8th June 1939 K.P.M. line Rotogravure De Unie Bifold pamphlet recto
ss. “op ten NOORT” DINNER a la Carte menu. Thursday 8th June 1939 K.P.M.. line Bifold pamphlet interior
Unknown photographer T.S.S. Op Ten Noort at Circular Quay, Sydney Nd Australian National Maritime Museum Object no. ANMS0047[155]
T.S.S. Op Ten Noort was a 6,076 ton Dutch merchant ship built in 1927 for the Dutch Royal Packet Steam Navigation Company (KPM). It was based in Batavia, Java. The vessel arrived in Sydney on 4 January 1936 and berthed at West Circular Quay, departing just over two weeks later on 20 January.
In 1941, during World War II, Op Ten Noort was taken over by the Royal Netherlands Navy and was refitted as a hospital ship. The vessel was bombed by Japanese aircraft in 1942 and soon after being repaired it came under Japanese control and was renamed Tenno Maru, operating for the Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha Company. In 1944, it was yet again renamed Hikawa Maru and was still used as a hospital ship.
The vessel was scuttled in August 1945 at Wakasa Bay. In 1953, the Dutch Government lodged a claim against the Japanese Government for 700 million yen as compensation. The Japanese Government paid about 100 million yen in compensation to the Dutch Government in 1978.
Text from the Australian National Maritime Museum Flickr website
KPM registered the ship at Batavia, Dutch East Indies, where the company was headquartered. Her code letters were TFCQ. She began her maiden voyage on November 9, 1927. She joined Plancius on the route from Singapore to Tanjung Priok via Bangkok, Saigon, Manila, the Maluku Islands, and Bali. In later years, KPM transferred Plancius and Op Ten Noort to serve the east coast of Java, from Batavia to Deli Serdang Regency via Muntok, Singapore and Belawan.
Her first class cabins each had one or two berths. Her first class public areas included lounges, bars, a smoking room, and a tropical verandah. In 1933 part of her first class accommodation was converted into two two-person de luxe suites with lounge, bedroom, two bathrooms, and private deck (veranda). She had 18 second class cabins, which had either two or four berths. Deck passengers were accommodated on her tween deck, which had a lounge and a cafeteria. In 1934 the call sign PKEA superseded her code letters.
Unknown photographer T.S.S. “Op ten Noort” of the KPM as a passenger ship Nd Public Domain
Unknown photographer T.S.S. Op Ten Noort, photo taken late twenties early thirties(?), probably in port of Belawan (Medan), Dutch East Indies c. late 1920s-1930s Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Shiba Temple, Japan c. 1870 Albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
After the latest burst of exhibition postings there seems to be a paucity of exhibitions that I would like to post on until the end of the year… and as I have been pushing it pretty hard lately and not feeling so well (needing a hip replacement), now is the time to take things a little easier.
While the photographs taken by Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried of Japanese culture and landscape portray a Western, romanticised, exoticised, staged and persistently Eurocentric view of Japan (linked to Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” which denotes the exaggeration of difference, the presumption of Western superiority, and the application of clichéd analytical models for perceiving the “Oriental”, namely those societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East world) … there is no doubting the sheer beauty of some of the photographs and the dignity of the sitters.
As such the photographs remain valuable documents of a time far removed from present day Japan but linking Japanese culture to long past ancestors and ways of life.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) The Ford at Sakawa Nagawa, Japan c. 1870 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Ferry boat, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Miyanoshita Onsen, Japan c. 1870 Albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Garden, Japan c. 1870 Albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Single-storied Pagoda, Hachiman Shrine, Kamakura 1867-1868 Albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Getty Center Public domain
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Samurai of the Satsuma Clan, during the Boshin War period (1868-1869) 1860s Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Public domain
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Noble in dress, Japan c. 1870 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Koboto Santaro, a Japanese military commander, wearing traditional armour c. 1868 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Wellcome Library Public domain
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Samurai, Yokohama 1864-1865 Albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Gilman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Robert Rosenkranz Gift 2005
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Buddhist Priests 1870s Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Barbers 1868 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Getty Center Public domain
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Mukojima, Tokyo 1870s Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Mukojima, Tokyo 1870s Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato (Italian-British, 1832-1909) Uyeno Park, Tokyo 1870s Hand-coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Felice Beato
Felice Beato (1832-1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian-British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato’s travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting.
Early life and identity
A death certificate discovered in 2009 shows that Beato was born in Venice in 1832 and died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate also indicates that he was a British subject and a bachelor. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so Beato was a British subject.
Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed “Felice Antonio Beato” and “Felice A. Beato”, it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow photographed at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. In 1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel that “Felice Antonio Beato” represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.
Japan
By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokohama, Japan, joining Charles Wirgman, with whom he had travelled from Bombay to Hong Kong. The two formed and maintained a partnership called “Beato & Wirgman, Artists and Photographers” during the years 1864-1867, one of the earliest and most important commercial studios in Japan. Wirgman again produced illustrations derived from Beato’s photographs, while Beato photographed some of Wirgman’s sketches and other works. (Beato’s photographs were also used for engravings within Aimé Humbert’s Le Japon illustré and other works.) Beato’s Japanese photographs include portraits, genre works, landscapes, cityscapes, and a series of photographs documenting the scenery and sites along the Tōkaidō Road, the latter series recalling the ukiyo-e [17th-19th century woodblock prints and paintings] of Hiroshige and Hokusai. During this period, foreign access to (and within) the country was greatly restricted by the Tokugawa shogunate. Accompanying ambassadorial delegations and taking any other opportunities created by his personal popularity and close relationship with the British military, Beato reached areas of Japan where few westerners had ventured, and in addition to conventionally pleasing subjects sought sensational and macabre subject matter such as heads on display after decapitation. His images are remarkable not only for their quality, but also for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan.
The greater part of Beato’s work in Japan contrasted strongly with his earlier work in India and China, which “had underlined and even celebrated conflict and the triumph of British imperial might”. Aside from the Portrait of Prince Kung, any appearances of Chinese people in Beato’s earlier work had been peripheral (minor, blurred, or both) or as corpses. With the exception of his work in September 1864 as an official photographer on the British military expedition to Shimonoseki, Beato was eager to portray Japanese people, and did so uncondescendingly, even showing them as defiant in the face of the elevated status of westerners.
Beato was very active while in Japan. In 1865 he produced a number of dated views of Nagasaki and its surroundings. From 1866 he was often caricatured in Japan Punch, which was founded and edited by Wirgman. In an October 1866 fire that destroyed much of Yokohama, Beato lost his studio and many, perhaps all, of his negatives.
While Beato was the first photographer in Japan to sell albums of his works, he quickly recognised their full commercial potential. By around 1870 their sale had become the mainstay of his business. Although the customer would select the content of earlier albums, Beato moved towards albums of his own selection. It was probably Beato who introduced to photography in Japan the double concept of views and costumes / manners, an approach common in photography of the Mediterranean. By 1868 Beato had readied two volumes of photographs, “Native Types”, containing 100 portraits and genre works, and “Views of Japan”, containing 98 landscapes and cityscapes.
Many of the photographs in Beato’s albums were hand-coloured, a technique that in his studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese watercolourists and woodblock printmakers to European photography.
Since about the time of the ending of his partnership with Wirgman in 1869, Beato attempted to retire from the work of a photographer, instead attempting other ventures and delegating photographic work to others within his own studio in Yokohama, “F. Beato & Co., Photographers”, which he ran with an assistant named H. Woollett and four Japanese photographers and four Japanese artists. Kusakabe Kimbei was probably one of Beato’s artist-assistants before becoming a photographer in his own right. These other ventures failed, but Beato’s photographic skills and personal popularity ensured that he could successfully return to work as a photographer.
In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea. Although it is possible that an unidentified Frenchman photographed Korea during the 1866 invasion of Ganghwa Island, Beato’s photographs are the earliest of Korea whose provenance is clear.
Beato’s business ventures in Japan were numerous. He owned land and several studios, was a property consultant, had a financial interest in the Grand Hotel of Yokohama, and was a dealer in imported carpets and women’s bags, among other things. He also appeared in court on several occasions, variously as plaintiff, defendant, and witness. On 6 August 1873 Beato was appointed Consul General for Greece in Japan.
In 1877 Beato sold most of his stock to the firm Stillfried & Andersen, who then moved into his studio. In turn, Stillfried & Andersen sold the stock to Adolfo Farsari in 1885. Following the sale to Stillfried & Andersen, Beato apparently retired for some years from photography, concentrating on his parallel career as a financial speculator and trader. On 29 November 1884 he left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said, Egypt. It was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his money on the Yokohama silver exchange.
Death and legacy
Although Beato was previously believed to have died in Rangoon or Mandalay in 1905 or 1906, his death certificate, discovered in 2009, indicates that he died on 29 January 1909 in Florence, Italy.
Whether acknowledged as his own work, sold as Stillfried & Andersen’s, or encountered as anonymous engravings, Beato’s work had a major impact:
For over fifty years into the early twentieth century, Beato’s photographs of Asia constituted the standard imagery of travel diaries, illustrated newspapers, and other published accounts, and thus helped shape “Western” notions of several Asian societies.
Photographic techniques
Photographs of the 19th century often now show the limitations of the technology used, yet Beato managed to successfully work within and even transcend those limitations. He predominantly produced albumen silver prints from wet collodion glass-plate negatives.
Beato pioneered and refined the techniques of hand-colouring photographs and making panoramas. He may have started hand-colouring photographs at the suggestion of Wirgman, or he may have seen the hand-coloured photographs made by partners Charles Parker and William Parke Andrew. Whatever the inspiration, Beato’s coloured landscapes are delicate and naturalistic and his coloured portraits, more strongly coloured than the landscapes, are appraised as excellent.
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Akindo, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Middle-class Woman, Japan c-1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Obasan, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Japanese man in armour 1881 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Art and Design Library Public domain
A portrait of a Japanese soldier from the waist up. He is standing facing his left whilst wearing ornate armour consisting of a chest plate and chainmail undershirt. His hair is swept back and is dressed in a topknot.
This item is part of a collection of prints from the studio of Baron Franz von Stillfried-Ratenicz, an Austrian photographer practising in Japan in the late 1870’s. Von Stillfried ran a studio in Yokohama at the same time as his brother Raimund, who was also known as ‘Baron Stillfried’. This caused a great deal of confusion with the local residents and visitors to Japan in the Meiji Period, and with art historians today.
This album, which dates from 1879-1883, comprises 67 separate mounted prints presented in a lacquerware box. Albums of this kind were popular among foreign tourists, who frequently selected the individual prints they wished to include from the studio’s collection. Many of these albumen prints were hand tinted. This was a laborious process for which von Stillfried employed, at the height of his success, a substantial number of Japanese workers.
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Woman, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried, also known as Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Rathenitz (6 August 1839, in Komotau – 12 August 1911, in Vienna), was an Austrian photographer.
He was son of Baron (Freiherr) August Wilhelm Stillfried von Rathenitz (d. 1806) and Countess Maria Anna Johanna Theresia Walburge Clam-Martinitz (1802-1874).
After leaving his military career, Stillfried moved to Yokohama, Japan and opened a photographic studio called Stillfried & Co. which operated until 1875. In 1875, Stillfried formed a partnership with Hermann Andersen and the studio was renamed, Stillfried & Andersen (also known as the Japan Photographic Association). This studio operated until 1885. In 1877, Stillfried & Andersen bought the studio and stock of Felice Beato. In the late 1870s, Stillfried visited and photographed in Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Greece. In addition to his own photographic endeavours, Stillfried trained many Japanese photographers. In 1886, Stillfried sold the majority of his stock to his protégé, the Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei, he then left Japan.
He left Japan forever in 1881. After travelling to Vladivostock, Hong Kong and Bangkok, he eventually settled in Vienna in 1883. He also received an Imperial and Royal Warrant of Appointment as photographer (k.u.k. Hof-Photograph).
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Hodo Falls at Nikko, Tochigi between 1871 and 1885 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Rijksmuseum Public domain
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Group of men, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Minzoku, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Umbrella maker, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Pipe maker, Japan c. 1870 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Japanese woman on her head between 1871 and 1885 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Rijksmuseum Public domain
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Portrait of two Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum c. 1875 Hand coloured albumen silver print from wet collodion glass-plate negative Rijksmuseum Public domain
Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934) and Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Japanese Tattoo between 1870 and 1899 Height: 26cm (10.2 in) Width: 20cm (7.8 in) Getty Center Public domain
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Fille de Sootchow (Suzhou Girl) 1870s Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Museum Purchase 2005
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Portrait of an Old Chinese Woman 1870s Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Museum Purchase 2005
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Courios Shop c. 1875 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Old beggar 1870s Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection Museum Purchase 2005
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Double portrait c. 1880 Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Untitled (Accountant with newspaper and his servant with folding fan) 1870s Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Portrait of Irezumi Tattooed man – Post Runner 1880-1890 Albumen silver print from glass negative with applied colour
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Young Lady c. 1875 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Hand-coloured albumen silver photograph 23.8 × 19.1cm La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) and Uchida Kuichi (Japanese, 1844-1875) Untitled [The Fishmonger] 1870s Hand-coloured albumen silver photograph
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Sleeping beauties 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Hairdressing 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Hand-coloured albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Tomiyoka 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Komagatake Volcano 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Ainu Village 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Odji Teahouse 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Views of Nagasaki, Japan 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) Views of Tokyo, Japan 1876 From Views and Costumes of Japan, c. 1876 Albumen silver print from glass negative Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria
Abbott appraises the camera with cool assurance in this portrait, made just after her return from Paris to New York. Her gamine-short hair and bare face affect a chic nonchalance that intrigued Evans. Describing her to a friend after their first meeting, he wrote: “You would like Berenice Abbott, with her hair brushed forward and her woozy eyes.” Her work likewise impressed the young photographer, then finding his footing in the field. Evans’s picture betrays admiration for his new acquaintance, whose burgeoning career offered a model for his own.
American visionary
What a wonderful photographer Berenice Abbott developed into and what a debt of gratitude we owe her for saving the archive of French photographer Eugène Atget whose photographs initially influenced her urban(e) style.
“Abbott felt the changing city [New York] needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.””
It is interesting to analyse Abbott’s New York photographs in relation to Atget. In photographs such as the grouping on Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan(1929, below) there is an almost symbiotic relationship between Atget’s photographs of street Petits Métiers (trades and professions) and those of Abbott. “The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity,” she said of seeing Atget’s photographs in Man Ray’s studio in 1926. Similarly, we can recognise in Abbott’s grouping in Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) and Pingpank Barbershop, 413 Bleecker Street, Manhattan (1938, below) an affinity with Atget’s photographs of architectural details of door handles and the front of shops.
A step away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs such as Brooklyn Bridge, With Pier 21, Pennsylvania R.R. (1937, below), West Street (1936, below) and Henry Street from Market, Looking West, Manhattan (1935, below) where the foreground of each photograph mimics Atget’s photographs of Old Paris whilst the soaring background of skyscrapers and bridges is all modernist New York, the near / far of the picture plane becoming old / new. Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.”
Still further away from Atget’s aesthetic are Abbott’s photographs grouped in Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan (1929, below) where the artist uses with the chiaroscuro (the treatment of light and shade) within the canyons of skyscraper New York – and modernist almost constructivist photographs such as Canyon, Broadway and Exchange Place (1936, below) and Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up (1936, below) where the artist plays with pictorial perspective by pointing her camera skywards.
Finally, there are Abbott’s photographs that bear no relation to those of Atget, where Abbott as an artist has stepped out of the older artist’s shadow and developed her own artistic signature. Those wonderfully abstract and enigmatic photographs at lower left and right in Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan push the boundaries of 1930s photographic language. In other glorious photographs such as The El at Columbus and Broadway (1929, below) and The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan (1936, below) Abbott captured the random disorder of urban activity with a focused intensity of vision that produces magical images… and by that I mean, images that transport you into other spaces, other states of being. Her dadaist poet Tristan Tzara put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.
Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that culminated in her federally funded project, Changing New York (1935-1939). Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents a selection of unbound pages from this unique album, shedding new light on the creative process of one of the great photographic artists of the twentieth century. For context, the exhibition also features views of Paris by Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927), whose extensive photographic archive Abbott purchased and publicised; views of New York City by her contemporaries Walker Evans, Paul Grotz, and Margaret Bourke-White; and photographs from Changing New York. The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website
MAP
This map charts some of the locations across Manhattan that Berenice Abbott photographed in her New York Album (1929). As the album bears almost no notations, identifying the exact sites depicted in the photographs had to be done through visual recognition of streets, buildings, and other urban landmarks.
Some of the iconic places Abbott photographed, such as the main branch of the New York Public Library and Trinity Church on Wall Street, haven’t changed much since 1929. Others, such as the city’s four elevated train lines and Harlem’s famed Lafayette Theater, have vanished completely. Several sites have gone through multiple transformations within the past century. The National Winter Garden Theater on Houston Street and Second Avenue opened in 1912 as a cinema and vaudeville theatre. By the time Abbott photographed it in 1929, it had been converted to a burlesque house; today, it’s a Whole Foods. The map is an invitation to explore Abbott’s photographs beyond the confines of the Museum’s galleries, and, like the artist herself, to cherish New York as a vibrant metropolis that is, and always has been, defined by change.
For their invaluable help with the historical research, The Met is grateful to the Jones Family Research Collective: former Manhattan Borough Historian Celedonia “Cal” Jones; his daughter, Diane Jones Randall; and his son, Kenneth Jones. Explore Abbott’s 1929 images of New York here with images of each album page.
Born in Ohio, Berenice Abbott moved to Paris and in 1923 became Man Ray’s darkroom assistant. In 1927 she made this photograph of Atget, the renowned documentarian of the streets of Paris and an unwitting hero of the surrealists; when she returned to his apartment to deliver a print of her portrait, Abbott learned of the elderly artist’s death. The unfortunate circumstance put in motion a process that led to Abbott’s purchase of Atget’s archive of five thousand photographs and one thousand negatives, the first (1930) monograph on Atget (edited by Abbott), and the collection’s eventual acquisition by MoMA in 1968.
In the spring of 1927, Abbott invited Atget to sit for a portrait in her Paris studio. She made only three exposures that day: a standing pose, a frontal view, and this profile view. Unfortunately, Atget never saw the photographs. When Abbott arrived at his apartment a few months later to deliver the proofs, she found that the elderly photographer had died suddenly. This portrait was used as the frontispiece in the first book devoted to his work, Atget, Photographe de Paris (1930), displayed in the case nearby.
Berenice Abbott opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris in 1926 after having worked for three years as an assistant to Man Ray, whom she had met in New York. Although her Paris portraits are indebted stylistically to Man Ray’s, she brought to them a sympathetic eye that was very much her own. Her portraits of women are notable for their empathic understanding of her subjects, but she reached a depth of expression in her photographs of James Joyce (1882-1941). Abbott photographed Joyce on two occasions, the first in 1926 at his home, the second in 1928 at her studio, as was her more customary practice. In spite of Abbott’s annotation on the back of the print, this portrait belongs to the earlier session, when Joyce was photographed both with and without the patch over his eye, worn because of his sadly degenerating sight. For this particular exposure Joyce removed the patch and held it, with his glasses, in his right hand; his forehead still bears the diagonal impression of the ribbon. This intimate portrait, with its softly diffused lighting, suggests the complex, introverted character of Joyce’s imagination. It is with good reason that Abbott’s are considered the definitive portraits of the author of “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake.”
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Djuna Barnes 1925 Gelatin silver print 22.6 x 17.1cm (8 7/8 x 6 3/4 in.) Purchase, Joyce and Robert Menschel Gift, 1987
Abbott lived with the American writer Djuna Barnes when she moved from Ohio to Greenwich Village in 1918, and the two women remained friends, and occasional romantic rivals, throughout their lives. In this portrait, made in Man Ray’s Paris studio, Barnes is elegantly attired and addresses the camera with a smouldering gaze above a slight smile. A decade later, Barnes would publish Nightwood (1936), a classic of lesbian fiction inspired by her tormented affair with the American artist Thelma Wood (1901-1970), who also had a brief relationship with Abbott.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Buddy Gilmore, Paris 1926-1927 Gelatin silver print 23.1 x 17.2cm (9 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.) Purchase Gift of the Polaroid Corporation and matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1981
Gilmore was an American jazz drummer known for his acrobatic dexterity and energetic solos. After seeing him perform at Zelli’s, a nightclub in Paris, Abbott invited him to her studio to pose for this action portrait with his drum set. “I was simply crazy about his playing,” she recalled.
In 1929, after eight years in Paris, Abbott returned to America, bringing with her an immense collection of photographs by Eugène Atget and the ideas of European modernist photographers. Her first pictures of New York show the modernist influence in the sharply angled viewpoints and tendency toward abstraction. By the mid-1930s, however, Atget emerged as the stronger influence, as Abbott’s style became more straightforward and documentary.
In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series documenting New York funded by the Federal Art Project, and during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture. Ninety-seven of these, including “Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8,” were published in “Changing New York” (1939). The caption for this picture informs us that “No. 8 was once the home of the art collection which formed a part of the original Metropolitan Museum of Art.” It was built in 1856 for John Taylor Johnston, president of the Central Railroad of New Jersey. A leading collector of American art, Johnston was a founder of The Met and was elected its first president in 1870.
The New York Album
Abbott sailed for New York in January 1929, hoping to find an American publisher for a proposed book of Atget’s photographs and to promote her own portrait work. She brought with her a new handheld Curt Bentzin camera, thinking she might make some views of the city to sell to publishers in Europe. Inspired by the towering skyscrapers that had reshaped the American metropolis in the 1920s, Abbott pointed her camera up, down, and at skewed angles, creating dynamic compositions with sharp contrasts of light and shadow. She wandered all over Manhattan, photographing storefronts in Harlem, construction sites in midtown, and street vendors and tenement buildings in Chinatown and on the Lower East Side. She paid special attention to the city’s transportation infrastructure: bridges, elevated train lines, railroad terminals, ships docked on the waterfront.
Without access to a darkroom, Abbott had her negatives processed and printed at local drug stores and commercial labs. She pasted the little prints onto the pages of a standard photo album, creating a kind of sketchbook of subjects and themes. When The Met acquired it between 1978 and 1984, the album had already been disbound. Abbott reconstructed the sequence of the first eleven pages displayed here for a publication in 2013; the order of the remaining pages is unknown.
Changing New York
Abbott’s New York album laid the groundwork for her ambitious documentary project Changing New York (1935-1939). Comprising more than 300 negatives and a wealth of research, the project was funded by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, a government program dedicated to supporting unemployed artists during the Great Depression. Aided by a team of researchers, field assistants, and darkroom technicians, Abbott chronicled “the changing aspect of the world’s great metropolis. … Its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.” She returned to many of the locations she visited in 1929, but the new photographs, made with a large-format view camera like the one Atget used, are more straightforward and less influenced by the jazzy, sharp-angled style of European modernism. The project culminated in a book, published in 1939, featuring ninety-seven photographs with captions by Abbott’s companion, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland. The photographs were widely exhibited and complete sets of the final images were distributed to high schools, libraries, and other public institutions throughout the New York area.
If you were an American artist or writer in the 1920s, Paris was where you wanted to be. Springfield, Ohio-born photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived there in 1921 by way of New York, and by early 1929 she had managed to establish herself in the French capital’s flourishing interwar avant-garde scene – first working as an assistant to Man Ray and later taking her own celebrated portraits of luminaries such as James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. She even changed the spelling of her name from “Bernice” to the more Gallic “Berenice.”
Yet somehow this magnet for culturally minded expatriates lost its hold on Abbott the moment she set foot in Lower Manhattan – on a messy January day, no less – at the beginning of what was supposed to be a short trip back to the United States. She had lived in New York once, just eight years before, but in her absence the city had been scaled up: new skyscrapers were rising, the population was exploding, and every block, it seemed, was abuzz with commerce and construction. (The market crash of October 1929 was still many months away). Suddenly, Paris was passe. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush,” she later recalled, “I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life.”
“Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a small but inspiring show at the Metropolitan Museum, channels the exhilaration Abbott felt upon arriving in the city. The exhibition’s focus is a disbound scrapbook with seven to nine photographs per page, all taken over the course of that year, as Abbott paced the streets (and piers, bridges and train platforms) with a hand-held camera and a compulsion to capture New York’s unruly, cutthroat modernity.
With its 32 pages of small contact prints processed at drugstores and commercial labs (or as Abbott called them, “tiny photographic notes”), the album can be seen as a rough draft of her well-known Works Progress Administration project of the 1930s, “Changing New York.” (Several examples from this later series are in the Met show, including a disconcertingly ethereal view of Seventh Avenue taken from the top of a 46-story building in the garment district.) But Abbott’s “New York Album” is a fascinating artwork in its own right, an adrenalized and ambitious alignment of artist and subject.
Abbott felt the changing city needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.” She had come to New York as part of an impassioned effort to promote Atget’s oeuvre, one that included purchasing the photographer’s archive after his death and making her own prints from his glass-plate negatives; in the “New York Album” she goes further, becoming, in effect, his heir.
The Met’s exhibition incorporates several Atget photographs from the museum’s collection, including one that Abbott was known to admire; it shows an early automobile garage in the Fifth Arrondissement, with a Renault parked in a cobblestoned courtyard. A similar appreciation for the collision of the newfangled with the outmoded can be seen throughout Abbott’s “New York Album,” in shots of skyscrapers looming over rows of tenements and, in one more subtle and almost surreal case, an overhead view of an equine statue photographed from the Ninth Avenue El.
Although the album is not strictly organized by location, it has a distinct cartography. Abbott gravitated to certain neighborhoods that, for her, showed the face of the new city emerging. Many of them were in lower Manhattan; multiple pages are devoted to the Lower East Side, where she was drawn to storefronts and their simultaneously poetic and transactional signage, and the Financial District, where she often pointed her camera skyward to exaggerate the intimidating height of new corporate towers.
Unlike peers such as Walker Evans, she did not take much of an interest in the human subject – or, at least, in individuals. To her, the city was a human construction and humanity was implicit in every part of it. “You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city,” she explained in a documentary film about her life. “You don’t have to have a person in it.”
As Abbott’s biographer has noted, she was influenced by the French literary movement of Unanimism, which emphasized collective consciousness and expression. You can sense this especially in her shots of the city’s elevated train system, which revel in the formal modernism of all that interlaced steel and cast iron without losing sight of its function of moving millions of people.
As an extension of the exhibition, the Met has created a helpful digital map that identifies some of the subjects in Abbott’s album and updates them with present-day photographs (a collaboration between the Met curator of photography who organized the exhibition, Mia Fineman, and the Jones Family Research Collective, led by the Manhattan borough historian emeritus, Celedonia Jones, until his death last April). It reveals, for example, that the site of a burlesque theater on Houston Street photographed by Abbott is now a Whole Foods.
Visitors to the exhibition can spend a lot of time testing their own knowledge of the city’s geography, but the pleasures of the show have more to do with the drive and dynamism behind the pictures. “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929” takes us back to an invigorating moment in the history of the metropolis, captured on the fly by an emergent modern artist.
During her upbringing in Ohio, Abbott had planned to be a journalist – she attended Ohio State University’s School of Journalism before turning to art – and it’s clear from her photography that she never lost that instinct for wanting to be where the story was. In those early months of 1929 she recognized that New York was the big story; looking at her “New York Album” gives us hope that it could be again.
Unanimism (French: Unanimisme) is a movement in French literature begun by Jules Romains in the early 1900s, with his first book, La vie unanime, published in 1904. It can be dated to a sudden conception Romains had in October 1903 of a ‘communal spirit’ or joint ‘psychic life’ in groups of people. It is based on ideas of collective consciousness and collective emotion, and on crowd behaviour, where members of a group do or think something simultaneously. Unanimism is about an artistic merger with these group phenomena, which transcend the consciousness of the individual. Harry Bergholz writes that “grossly generalising, one might describe its aim as the art of the psychology of human groups”. Because of this collective emphasis, common themes of unanimist writing include politics and friendship.
In 1921 Ohio-native Abbott left New York to study in Paris. Returning to the city in 1929, she found it transformed and ripe with photographic potential. Following the model of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose street views of Paris she admired, Abbott ventured around New York photographing seemingly incidental, but often profound, scenes that captured the city’s changing character. This page of small-scale photographs is one example of many of similar album pages in the Metropolitan’s collection. Assembled by Abbott, the album from which they derive comprised a kind of photographer’s sketchbook for subjects and themes.
In 1935 Abbott embarked on a series of photographs documenting New York City. Funded by the Federal Art Project, during the next four years she made hundreds of images of the city’s monuments and architecture, including this one of Sumner Healey’s shop. Attracted to the “extraordinary montage of antiques” – anchored by a ten-foot-tall figurehead of Mars from an eighteenth-century battleship – Abbott also captured the owner’s cat, seemingly trapped on either side by the decorative dogs flanking the store’s entrance. Healey died soon after Abbott made this photograph, and the shop closed two years later.
With its subtle interplay of reflection and interior, this slightly oblique view of a barbershop window reveals the influence of Atget’s photographs of Parisian storefronts. When Abbott made this image, August Pingpank was eighty-seven and was said to be the oldest barber in New York City. He lamented to Federal Art Project researchers that he would soon have to retire due to the invention of the safety razor: “It’s different now with men shaving themselves every morning at home.”
Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 presents selections from a unique unbound album of photographs of New York City created by American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), shedding light on the creative process of one of the great artists of the 20th century. Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on 32 pages, the album is a kind of photographic sketchbook that offers a rare glimpse of an artist’s mind at work. In addition to some 25 framed album pages, the exhibition features photographs from The Met collection of Paris streets by Eugène Atget, whose archive Abbott purchased and promoted; views of New York by her contemporaries Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White; and selections from Abbott’s grand documentary project, Changing New York (1935-1939).
“Berenice Abbott’s groundbreaking work in photography continues to inspire and captivate audiences today, nearly a century after she first began documenting the world around her,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met. “Abbott’s insightful and powerful images provide a window into the New York of the past, while also reminding us of the city’s enduring vitality and resilience.”
Born in Ohio, Abbott moved to New York City in 1918 and to Paris in 1921. She learned photography as a darkroom assistant in Man Ray’s studio and soon established herself as a prominent portraitist of the Parisian avant-garde. Through Man Ray, Abbott met the ageing French photographer Eugène Atget, whose documentation of Paris and its environs struck her as a model of modern photographic art. Following Atget’s sudden death in 1927, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions and publications.
In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was intended to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she found the city transformed and ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. Inspired by Atget, Abbott traversed the city with a handheld camera, photographing its skyscrapers, storefronts, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale. As the immediate precursor to her 1930s WPA project, Changing New York, Abbott’s New York album marks a key moment of transition in her career: from Europe to America and from studio portraiture to urban documentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by an online feature that identifies, for the first time, the locations of many of the photographs in the album.
Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 is organised by Mia Fineman, Curator in the Department of Photographs, with assistance from Virginia McBride, Research Assistant in the Department of Photographs, both at The Met.
Following her eight years of expatriate life in Paris, Abbott saw New York with European eyes. In this view, made shortly after her return, she captured the random disorder of urban activity as handily as her friend the dadaist poet Tristan Tzara, who put it this way: “We leave with those leaving arrive with those arriving / leave with those arriving arrive when the others leave.”
Manhattan’s elevated (El) train lines fascinated Abbott when she first photographed the city in 1929. Seven years later, she used her large-format camera to capture this shadowed vista beneath the El in Chinatown. “I was right in the middle of the street on a little island,” she recalled. “This was one of the occasions when it was downright dangerous to document New York, with traffic whizzing by on both sides, but it was very important to get in exactly the right position to make the photograph work.”
The Brooklyn Bridge was New York’s first and most famous, but Abbott favoured the all-steel Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909. She made this photograph on the southern pedestrian walkway; the vibrations of the suspension bridge required a fast shutter speed to avoid blur. “I seem to veer toward waterfronts,” she later said. “As Melville wrote in Moby Dick, the heart of a port city is around its waterfront, and by nature I seem to head right there. Perhaps I should have been a sailor – boats and bridges have always fascinated me.”
Abbott made this overhead view of skyscrapers in the garment district from atop the forty-six-story Nelson Tower on Seventh Avenue. The roof of the original Pennsylvania Station, demolished in 1962, can be seen in the lower right corner.
During the Depression, Horn & Hardart’s chain of “waiterless restaurants” served as many as eight hundred thousand freshly prepared meals a day to customers in New York and Philadelphia. With its clean lines, polished chrome details, and mechanical efficiency, the Automat struck Abbott as “an extremely American artefact.” New York’s first Automat opened in Times Square in 1912, but Abbott chose to document the branch at Columbus Circle, popular as a nighttime gathering spot for musicians and cabaret patrons.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Street Musicians 1898-1999, printed 1956 Title page from the portfolio 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget (1856-1927), 1956 Published by Berenice Abbott, New York Gelatin silver print from glass negatives David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1956
In 1956 Abbott produced a portfolio of twenty new prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives and offered it by subscription to museums, libraries, and private collectors. This photograph of an organ grinder and exuberant female singer belongs to a series of photographs devoted to the rapidly vanishing street trades, or petits métiers, of Paris.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) [Atget’s Work Room with Contact Printing Frames] c. 1910 Albumen silver print from glass negative 20.9 x 17.3cm (8 1/4 x 6 13/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990
This straightforward study by Atget of his own work room offers a rare glimpse of the inner sanctum of an auteur éditeur, as he described his profession. On the table are the wooden frames the photographer used to contact print his glass negatives; at right are several bins of negatives stacked vertically; below the table are his chemical trays; on the shelves above are stacks of paper albums – a shelf label reads escaliers et grilles (staircases and grills). Atget used these homemade albums to organise his vast picture collection from which he sold views of old Paris to clients.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) 15, rue Maître-Albert 1912 Gelatin silver print from glass negative 23.2 x 17.6 cm (9 1/8 x 6 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Rogers Fund, 1991 Creative Commons CC0 1.0
Eloquent testimony to Atget’s keen regard for the expressions of common folk, this photograph was part of a self-assigned survey of storefronts and commercial signs. Atget ennobled the little grocery with its modest façade and rudimentary display (covered for lunch hour against the midday heat) and framed it simply, thus withdrawing it from the predictable realm of the picturesque.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Courtyard, 7 Rue de Valence, 5th arr. 1922 Gelatin silver print from glass negative Image: 17.2 x 22.7cm (6 3/4 x 8 15/16 in.) Mount: 36.7 x 28.7cm (14 7/16 x 11 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
Atget found his vocation in photography in 1897, at the age of forty, after having been a merchant seaman, an itinerant actor, and a painter. He became obsessed with making what he termed “documents” of Paris and its environs, and with compiling a visual compendium of the architecture, landscape, and artefacts that distinguish French culture and its history. By the end of his life, Atget had amassed an archive of over 8,000 negatives that he had organised into such categories as Parisian Interiors, Petits Métiers (trades and professions), and Vehicles in Paris.
The subject of this photograph is an early automobile garage occupying a timeworn courtyard near the intersection of rue Mouffetard and rue Monge in the fifth arrondissement. Although Atget’s interest was primarily in the texture of old Paris – not the city’s new promenades and modern monuments – he did make a few studies of automobiles, signs of modern times, beginning in 1922. Beside a pair of motorcycles rests an early-model Renault touring car, probably dating from 1908. It, too, may be a relic: its four-cylinder engine lies beside it.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Fête du Trône 1925, printed c. 1929 Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative 23.4 x 17cm (9 3/16 x 6 11/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999
Abbott made new contact prints from Atget’s glass-plate negatives, experimenting with various photographic papers and processes to try to approximate the clarity and detail of Atget’s own prints. Sometime early in 1930, Walker Evans visited Abbott’s studio in New York’s Hotel des Artistes, where she stored her vast Atget archive. Deeply affected by the French photographer’s work, Evans left that day with four of Abbott’s Atget prints: this one, Boutique, Marché aux Halles (displayed to the right), and two others. Although Atget’s work was never exhibited during his lifetime, his soulful documentation of Paris had a profound impact on both Abbott and Evans, and contributed to the emergence of a documentary style in twentieth-century American art photography.
Learning from Atget
When Abbott met Eugène Atget in 1926, he had been photographing Paris for thirty years. Working with a large wooden-view camera, Atget made what he modestly called “documents” of the city, compiling a vast visual archive of Parisian streets, courtyards, gardens, shop windows, architectural details, apartment interiors, and tradespeople. Atget’s studio was on the same street in Montparnasse as that of Man Ray, who purchased several dozen of his photographs, publishing four of them in the journal La Révolution surréaliste. Abbott was instantly captivated by Atget’s photographs when she encountered them in Man Ray’s studio. “Their impact was immediate and tremendous,” she recalled. “There was a sudden flash of recognition – the shock of realism unadorned. The subjects were not sensational, but nevertheless shocking in their very familiarity.” In 1927 Abbott persuaded Atget to sit for a portrait in her own studio on the rue du Bac. Months later, following his sudden death at age seventy, she purchased his archive of some 8,000 prints and 1,500 glass negatives and set about promoting his work through exhibitions, publications, and sales of the prints, a selection of which are on display here. When she moved to New York in 1929, Abbott brought the archive with her, and eventually sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968.
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Printer: Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Boutique, Marché aux Halles, Paris 1925, printed c. 1929 Matte gelatin silver print from glass negative 23.1 x 17cm (9 1/8 x 6 11/16 in. ) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1999 Creative Commons CC0 1.0
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Rue Laplace and Rue Valette, Paris 1926 Gelatin silver print from glass negative Image: 22 x 17.6cm (8 11/16 x 6 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, by exchange, 1970 Creative Commons CC0 1.0
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Avenue des Gobelins 1927 Gelatin silver print from glass negative 36.8 x 28.6cm (14 1/2 x 11 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art Purchase, Rogers Fund, and Joyce and Robert Menschel and Harriette and Noel Levine Gifts, 1994
In this headless mannequin, clothed in a simple white uniform, Atget recognised a modern version of the commedia dell’arte clown Gilles, depicted by the eighteenth-century painter Jean Antoine Watteau, for example. It was for the type of transforming vision seen in this picture, which is among the very last in Atget’s lifelong exploration of Paris, that the artist’s work was so enthusiastically embraced by the Surrealists.
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![Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Nurse, group of children and candles]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ck18-180.jpg "Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Nurse, group of children and candles]' Nd")
![Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Man and dog]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ck18-142.jpg "Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Man and dog]' Nd")
![Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ck18-138.jpg "Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Three women, sheep and dog]' Nd")
![Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Two heavy horses, two men and a plough]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ck18-076.jpg "Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Two heavy horses, two men and a plough]' Nd")
![Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Two men with pipes, bicycles and dog]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/ck18-070.jpg "Richard Jenkins (British, 1890-1964) 'Untitled [Two men with pipes, bicycles and dog]' Nd")
![Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) and Uchida Kuichi (Japanese, 1844-1875) 'Untitled [The Fishmonger]' 1870s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/stillfried-and-kuichi-the-fishmonger.jpg "Baron Raimund von Stillfried (Austrian, 1839-1911) and Uchida Kuichi (Japanese, 1844-1875) 'Untitled [The Fishmonger]' 1870s")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) [Berenice Abbott] 1929-1930 from the exhibition 'Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - Sept 2023](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/11.-walker-evans-berenice-abbott.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) [Berenice Abbott] 1929-1930")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/07.-berenice-abbott-album-page-1-financial-district-broadway-and-wall-street-vicinity-manhattan-1929.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929 (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-album-page-financial-district-b.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929 (detail)")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page: Madison Square Park, Third Avenue and Ninth Avenue Elevated Train Lines, Manhattan] 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-album-page-madison-square-park-third-avenue-and-ninth-avenue-elevated-train-lines-manhattan.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page: Madison Square Park, Third Avenue and Ninth Avenue Elevated Train Lines, Manhattan] 1929")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/06.-berenice-abbott-album-page-city-hall-park-and-brooklyn-bridge-vicinity-manhattan-1929.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan] 1929")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan] 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/08.-berenice-abbott-album-page-5-pier-17-south-street-seaport-manhattan-1929.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 5: Pier 17, South Street Seaport, Manhattan] 1929")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan] 1929](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/09.-berenice-abbott-album-page-9-fulton-street-fish-market-and-lower-east-side-manhattan-1929.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Album Page 9: Fulton Street Fish Market and Lower East Side, Manhattan] 1929")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Sumner Healy Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue near 57th Street, Manhattan] 1930s, printed 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-sumner-healy-antique-shop.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Sumner Healy Antique Shop, 942 3rd Avenue near 57th Street, Manhattan] 1930s, printed 1936")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan] 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-the-el-2nd-and-3rd-avenue-lines-bowery-and-division-street-manhattan.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [The El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines, Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan] 1936")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Manhattan Bridge] 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-manhattan-bridge.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Manhattan Bridge] 1936")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Seventh Avenue Looking South from Thirty-fifth Street, New York] 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/abbott-seventh-avenue-looking-south-from-thirty-fifth-street.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [Seventh Avenue Looking South from Thirty-fifth Street, New York] 1935")
![Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames] c. 1910](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/atgets-work-room-web1.jpg "Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) [Atget's Work Room with Contact Printing Frames] c. 1910")
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