Australian artist, curator and writer.
Doctor of Philosophy (RMIT University), Melbourne.
Master of Art Curatorship (University of Melbourne), Melbourne.
Master of Arts (RMIT University), Melbourne.
BA (Hons) (RMIT University), Melbourne.
A.R.C.M. (Associate of the Royal College of Music), London.
Exhibition dates: 10th September – 28th October, 2016
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Jimmy’s Bar and Grill and Conmar Zipper Company, Newark, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
An American iconography
George Tice is a master photographer and an exceptional artist. Using a large format 8 x 10 camera this craftsman has created a “deeply-penetrating” photographic record of the American urban landscape, mainly based around the city of New Jersey where he has lived for most of his life.
Tice’s ongoing epic visual poem is at its strongest in his early period, from 1973-74. While his later 1990s work is qualified by simplified imagery and semiotic statements (for example Dorn’s Photoshop, Red Bank, NJ, 1999 and Lakewood Manor Motel, Lakewood, NJ, 1998, below) it is this early work that produces “attentive and quotidian descriptions of the everyday structures and places that define the American cultural landscape.” There seems to be a greater personal investment in these earlier images. Tice’s recognition of subject matter that mere mortals pass by is translated into beautiful, serene, tonal and dare I say, sensual images, that belie the complexity of their previsualisation. You only have to look at two images, Houses and Water Towers, Moorestown, NJ, 1973 and Hudson’s Fish Market, Atlantic City, NJ, 1973 (below) to understand that these photographs are visually complex, slightly surreal, affectionate images of places he personally knows so well. They possess a totally different feeling from the conceptual photography of the German school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. As Sanford Schwartz in The New York Times, on December 3, 1972 noted: “Tice’s pictures… show a remarkable blend of intimacy, affection and clear-sightedness.”
The almost tragic, objective renditions of a post-industrial landscape evidence a poetic intensity that has deep roots in the history of photography. Vivien Raynor, writing in The New York Times, said, “Finding precedents for Mr. Tice’s photography is easier than defining the personal qualities that make it so special. As others have remarked, his tranquil towns, usually deserted, could sometimes be those of Walker Evans updated; his industrial views are not unrelated to Charles Sheeler’s, and, for good measure, the stillness and silence of his compositions link him to Atget, the first great urban reporter.” Tice builds upon the lineage of other great artists but then, as any good artist should, he forges his own path, not reliant on the signature of others. As he himself observes, “… if you learn to see what photography is through one person’s eyes you become fixed in that one way of seeing.”
When I first started taking photographs in 1990, my heroes were Atget, Strand, Evans and Minor White. Looking at art, and looking at photographers, trained my eye. But as an artist, looking at the world is the most valuable education that you can have, for eventually you have to forge your own style, not copy someone else … and the signature that you create becomes your own. You know it’s a Mapplethorpe, just as you know it’s an Evans, or a Tice. Each piece of handwriting is unique. Nobody can teach that and it only comes with time and experience. As Paul Strand said, it takes 10 years to become an artist, 10 years to learn your craft, 10 years to drop ego away and find your own style. This is what the work of George Tice speaks to. He approaches the world with a clear mind, focused on a objective narrative that flips! exposing us (like his film), to a subjective, visceral charm all of his own making.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“As I progressed further with my project, it became obvious that it was really unimportant where I chose to photograph. The particular place simply provided an excuse to produce work… you can only see what you are ready to see – what mirrors your mind at that particular time.”
“Documenting the place is principally what I do. The bulk of my photographs are of New Jersey. It may have been a subject series, like ice or aquatic plants, that could have been anywhere, but it was done in New Jersey. Most of my pictures are about place. I would say the Urban Landscape work is what is most distinctive about me.”
George Tice
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Houses and Water Towers, Moorestown, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Hudson’s Fish Market, Atlantic City, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Dorn’s Photoshop, Red Bank, NJ, 1999 1999 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Lexington Avenue, Passaic, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Palace Funhouse, Asbury Park, 1995 1995 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Railroad Bridge, High Bridge, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Route #440 Overpass, Perth Amboy, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographs by one of the medium’s master photographers, George Tice. George Tice: Urban Landscapes will open with a book signing and reception with the artist on Saturday September, 10th from 6-8pm. The exhibition will continue through October 28th, 2016.
The exhibition will present a remarkable selection of forty exceptionally rare vintage 8 x 10 inch gelatin silver contact prints from the early period (1973-1974), of Tice’s ongoing epic visual poem of his native state of New Jersey. These unique vintage prints will be punctuated with larger photographs of some of artist’s most revered and significant images, as well as selections of more recent work from his extended New Jersey portrait.
Renowned for their attentive and quotidian descriptions of the everyday structures and places that define the American cultural landscape, Tice’s exquisitely printed photographs catalog a rich and layered journey that is both personal and universal. In the photographs that comprise Urban Landscapes, Tice defines a sense of America within a tradition rooted in the work of other American masters, namely Edward Hopper and Walker Evans. Tice’s photographs of New Jersey in the early to mid 1970’s describe a particular time and place; however, as the artist states, “It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.” Now, with decades past, Tice’s observations have become even more poignant depictions, everlasting a specific era and landscape, as the artist intended.
As well as being one of the 20th Century’s most prominent photographers, Tice is revered as a master printer, having printed limited-edition portfolios of some of his favourite photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Edward Weston and Frederick H. Evans, as well as other important photographers including Francis Bruguiere, Ralph Steiner and Lewis Hine.
Press release from the Joseph Bellows Gallery
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Tenement Rooftops, Hoboken, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Steve’s Diner, Route 130, North Brunswick, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Ideal Diner, Perth Amboy, NJ, 1980 1980 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) White Castle, Route #1, Rahway, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Strand Theater, Keyport, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Industrial Landscape, Kearny, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice in conversation with Paul Caponigro
JPC You had said, “After a time you don’t want to have any photographic influences. It’s okay to be influenced by writers, poets, people in other fields but not okay by other photographers.”
GT You don’t want to be like anyone else. Like all those people who were influenced by Ansel Adams. I don’t think any of them will do better than he did.
JPC Not until they find their own voice. It’s impossible to successfully imitate someone else’s voice.
GT Right. And the natural landscape of the west, that’s not going to be better in the future, as the population increases and much of the wilderness gets erased. Timothy O’Sullivan probably had a better chance at it than Ansel Adams did. But you don’t want anyone to be too great an influence, like an apprenticeship. If I was to begin photography, study it, I wouldn’t want one teacher. I think one teacher is too great an influence. I’d rather have an education based on workshops. You draw some knowledge through every one of them. But if you learn to see what photography is through one person’s eyes you become fixed in that one way of seeing.
George Tice Conversations on the John Paul Caponigro “Illuminating Creativity” web page 07/01/1997 [Online] Cited 09/10/2016
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Jahos Brothers Clothing Store, Trenton, NJ, 1973 1973 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Minnie’s Go-Go, Route 130, Merchantville, 1975 1975 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Lakewood Manor Motel, Lakewood, NJ, 1998 1998 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Esso Station and Tenement House, Hoboken, NJ, 1972 1972 Silver gelatin print
George Tice (American, b. 1938) Telephone Booth, 3 am, Railway, NJ, 1974 1974 Silver gelatin print
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
The year was 1970. The year of the first Earth Day, the year that the United States invaded Cambodia, the year when National Guardsmen shot four student demonstrators at an antiwar rally at Kent State University. A year in the continuing fight for social and political rights, be they black, female or gay. As part of the larger push for Civil Rights in the 1970s these photographs, though mainly unpublished at the time, document that struggle. Today these important and joyful photographs taken by Mother Boats C.P. act as testament to the first-ever Gay Pride Parade in the world [because of the time zone], which was held in Los Angeles on June 28, 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots the previous year. Although one of several gay pride parades that took place that day around the United States, this was the only “street closing” gay pride parade held in 1970″1 The Advocate reported, “Over 1,000 homosexuals and their friends staged, not just a protest march, but a full blown parade down world-famous Hollywood Boulevard.”2 The photographs evidence that very first flowering of mass gay visibility and freedom the world had ever seen.
From a personal perspective, the scanning and digital cleaning of the images and the research that has gone into this posting has been a labour of love, as it should be, for something that you care deeply about and that is important to culture and community. I came out in London in 1975 only six short years after the Stonewall Riots and, looking at the these photographs, I know how strong and resolute these fellow human beings would have had to have been, to be out of the closet and be photographed in public at such a point in the fight for gay liberation
Early gay activism
For those people engaged in research into gay identity and gay and lesbian history there is an awareness of groups like the Mattachine Society3 (founded in 1950, one of the earliest gay rights organisations in the United States, probably second only to Chicago’s Society for Human Rights4) and the Daughters of Bilitis5 (founded in 1955, the first lesbian civil and political rights organisation in the United States), which formed part of the homophile moment pre-Stonewall and gay liberation. Following these early groups, there is a really interesting period in the mid- late 1960s where there is an increasing level of activism right across America. Now however, there seems to exist a simplified narrative of this period that is skewed towards New York when in actuality there were a lot of things happening prior to and leading up to Stonewall all over the United States. Of course, events that flow on from Stonewall stand alone, but I believe that there is not a broad public awareness of the nuances of what was happening across the country: for example, in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D. C., San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In August 1966 there was the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in Los Angeles,6 which occurred in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. This incident was one of the first recorded transgender riots in United States history, preceding the more famous 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City; in April 1965 in Philadelphia an estimated 150 people participated in a sit-in when the manager of Dewey’s restaurant refused service to several people he thought looked gay and in July of that year in the same city demonstrators picketed at Independence Hall, returning each year through 1969 for what came to be known as the Annual Reminder7 beginning a new era in Philadelphia LGBT culture as a presence in the community8; while in April 1969 in San Francisco, quite a prominent event took place which was picked up by student newspapers across the country – “when gay activist and journalist Gale Whittington was fired by the States Steamship Company after coming out in print, a small group of activists operating under the name “Committee for Homosexual Freedom” (CHF) picketed the company’s San Francisco offices every workday between noon and 1.00pm for several weeks.”9 An incomplete list of LGBT actions in the United States prior to the Stonewall riots can be found on the Wikipedia website.1
Artist and photographs
Mother Boats C.P. (a.k.a. Brian Traynor) undertook journalism and photojournalism for a few semesters between 1962-66 using old flat plate cameras and top view 120 roll film cameras, developing his prints in the dark room. He went to Vietnam on active service in 1967: “There was duty free exchange and I got an Olympus SLR c. 1967. I had up to three cameras around my neck, one black and white, one colour, and I even had a 16mm spy camera.”11 When he got back from Vietnam in 1969 with his equipment shipped back in a cargo container he went to a Sexual Freedom League (SFL)12 meeting at the Bi Centre San Francisco, joined the league and started shooting everything he could until all his gear got ripped off in the back of a hippie van a year and a half later. As Boats states, “I shot whatever was happening.”13 He became a freelance writer for the Berkeley Barb, a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, during the years 1965 to 1980 – “one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s.”14 By this time Brian had got new cameras and founded the darkroom and took photographs for the paper. At night he completed a year course at Lanny College in Oakland (TAFE) in printing and print camera dark room techniques.
“Leo Laurence then co-founded a militant group the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) with Gale Whittington, Mother Boats, Morris Kight and others. Gale Whittington a young man who had been fired from States Steamship Company for being openly gay, after a photo of him by Mother Boats appeared in the Berkley Barb, next to the headline “HOMOS, DON’T HIDE IT!”, the revolutionary article by Leo Laurence. The same month Carl Wittman, a member of CHF, began writing Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, which would later be described as “the bible of Gay Liberation”. It was first published in the San Francisco Free Press and distributed nationwide, all the way to New York City, as was the Berkeley Barb with Leo’s stories on CHF’s gay guerilla militant initiatives and Mother Boats’ photographs. CHF was soon to become renamed as GLF (Gay Liberation Front).”15
Boats participated in the emerging gay liberation movement, becoming president of the Psychedelic Venus Church (Psyven) which was founded by Jefferson Poland in 1969. Organised sexual radicalism reached its zenith in the activities of the church, which fused group sex with marijuana consumption with Eastern mysticism and paganism. “”We believed,” Boats later recalled, “in breaking the chains of restriction, to liberate the body and turn it on and enjoy hedonistic comforts.” Under Boat’s guidance, Psyven became the epicentre of some of the most radical and performative sexual experimentation of the era.”16 Boats permanently left the United States in 1973, first for New Zealand and then Australia: “… he sailed off into the sunset with the mostly nude crew of the three-masted cargo schooner S.V. Sofia.“17
Turning to the photographs themselves, what is fascinating about them is the fluid energy that they embody. Up until this point, gay liberation protests had either been respectful pickets or small protests by a tight coterie of people. In the sense that this was an organised public event, gay people – on this day, with this march – became visible in large numbers. For gay people this was a new and unique experience. To be out in public, and to be “out” in public was for most a daring escapade, an escape from a denial of their existence. For a culture that had been hidden and oppressed for so long this venturing out in public (instead of “passing” in the shadows) was a first: there was no point of reference for what they were doing. The point of view of these photographs captures that feeling with élan. They capture the feeling of the possibility of sexual freedom and … they just feel so very alive with that energy.
This newfound freedom was a release from oppression, if only for a short period (Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”). As Boats moves in an out of the parade, varying his camera height and angles (in some images almost seeming to hover above the crowd), the ephemeral, fluid, fleeting moments that he captures are like a performative dance, something different from the usual static parade photographs of the time. Boats’ point of view is vital and alive and his photographs are redolent of the beginning of an openly gay sensibility. In the crowd we observe African Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, young straight couples, hippies, young children and families, gay sons with their mothers, old men and elderly husbands and wives. Most seem to be laughing and having a good time. For example, in Untitled (June 1970, below) two middle-aged women, one in a white cardigan and patterned dress, the other in a check dress, clutching a raffia type handbag with neatly permed hair are accompanied by a man in glasses with his arms folded resting his behind on a car. All three are smiling broadly for the photographer, as are the couple at left and the man behind them. It is a wonderful portrait of the spectators enjoying the spectacle of the parade and perhaps the visage of the photographer. The group portrait is grounded by the feet, particularly the two pairs of white shoes of the women planted on the tarmac, one women’s shoes bisected by a large crack in the white paint that has been laid down on the road, perhaps a metaphor for the fractured society that lives and breathes in plain sight once the festivities are over.
As much as a parade is a spectacle and performance, these photographs capture the authenticity of the display. With their link to the indexical nature of photography (this happened, on this day, in this place) the photographs acknowledge that the multicultural crowd (in some photographs up to three deep) enjoyed the spectacle. And in so doing they, the spectators, move from objective observers to becoming active participants in the parade. The clear denouement of these photographs can be summed up as this: once that sense of freedom for gay people came into being in public (and was accepted by the crowd lining the parade route) – in future, that ecstatic feeling could not be so easily put back into the closet. The genie was out of the bottle.
Legacy
To date, we must acknowledge that most of the research and visual contextualisation has been based around the New York march and the vast majority of material available is from that city. If mention is made of the march in Los Angeles, it is essentially as a footnote to the march in New York which happened on the same day. But at the time, in the July 22-August 4, 1970 issue of The Advocate (below), we can see that the New York and Los Angeles marches were given equal billing on the front page. To this point, there has been little research into this documentation of the beginnings of Gay Liberation in California. Unfortunately, most of the people involved in this activism are now in their 80s or have passed on. This is why these mainly unpublished photographs of the Los Angeles march in June 1970 are so important: they bear witness to the people, the places and the event as it was taking place. They are now our visual memories, in which we too can celebrate the first anniversary of the Stonewall Riots as it took place around the country.
11/ Email to the author from Mother Boats C.P. 28/02/2016.
12/ “In 1965, Jefferson Poland returned to San Franciso from New York where he and Leo Koch had founded the New York City League for Sexual Freedom in 1964, an organisation to promote and conduct sexual activity among its members and to agitate for political reform. In San Francisco Poland “lent his support to the creation of the Sexual Freedom League (SFL), a West Coast analogue of the New York group. … Poland began hosting weekly lectures and discussion on topics such as “Sex in the Mental Hospital,” “How to Be Queer and Like It,” and “Sex and Civil Right.” … Part of his goal was to “free bohemia from monogamy, possessiveness, jealousy, and sexual ‘faithfulness.'”” John Sides. Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Oxford: OUP, 2009, p. 70.
13/ Email to the author from Mother Boats C.P. 28/02/2016.
14/ Anonymous. “Berkeley Barb,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 08/10/2016.
15/ Anonymous. “Gay liberation,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 08/10/2016.
“If I could send back a message, it’s never give up. We had no way of knowing 45 years ago that we would affect the world by giving people the wherewithal to speak up in their own cultures. The majority of gay pride celebrations [around the world] are now gay pride parades. The bittersweet thing is, ‘Oh, if Morris [Kite] could have lived to see gay marriage before the Supreme Court.’ It’s funny to look back think that so much of this started from a gay pride parade in Los Angeles.”
“Reverend Bob Humphries, United States Mission founder, a gay welfare organisation; Morris Kight, Gay Liberation Front founder; and Reverend Troy Perry, Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches founder; gathered at Rev. Perry’s home to discuss how to commemorate the one year anniversary of Stonewall. Before the three left that evening, Christopher Street West was born and calls went out, “We are going to have a parade!” Soon after, Rev. Perry stunned his congregation announcing that MCC and GLF would sponsor the parade. Aware that some identifying graphic was needed, Morris took a pop bottle and sketched out a pin. Rev. Humphries set about getting together a steering committee.
As Rev. Perry remembers, “We went to the Los Angeles Police Commission to secure a permit. When we got there, we met a policeman. He informed us that our hearing wouldn’t come up until about 3.00pm. If we wanted to leave, we could. He informed us that the Police Commission was having lunch with the Parks Commission and they were going to be late in getting started. When we came back around 2.15pm they’d already passed everything on the agenda, except us. The committee asked me to act as spokesperson for our group. I didn’t know that Edward M. Davis, the chief of police of the City of Los Angeles, was going to be there. They started questioning me. It seemed like an eternity. Chief Davis then spoke up. He said, ‘Did you know that homosexuality is illegal in the state of California?’ I looked at him, and I said, ‘No, sir, it’s not.’ We then debated the issue. And he said, ‘Well, I want to tell you something. As far as I’m concerned, granting a parade permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.’ Finally, the motion was made. One commissioner said, ‘There’ll be violence in the streets.’”
Rev. Perry recalls, “They debated among themselves. The commission was against it, but they said, ‘We’re going to give the permit, if you can post two bonds, one in the amount of $1 million, one in the amount of $500,000. And you will post in cash the amount of $1,500 to pay for the policemen that it will take to protect you. And, you must have at least 3,000 people marching. If not, you go to the sidewalks.’ I thanked them and left. We called the American Civil Liberties Union and they then entered the case. We were determined to hold that parade on June the 28th!” The next day Rev. Perry met with Herbert Selwyn, an ACLU attorney. They appeared at the Police Commission the following Friday. The Commission dropped all of its specifications except the requirement to pay $1,500 for police protection.
The following Monday the California Superior Court ordered that CSW was to receive the parade permit but also required the police to provide whatever protection needed to maintain an order. In making his ruling, the judge said “all citizens of the State of California are entitled to equal protection under its laws”. The Los Angeles Police Department was ordered to protect the participants as they would any other group, and CSW would not pay any extra taxes or fees.”
With the court order secured, the ambitious team had exactly two days to throw together a parade. It was decided to march down Hollywood Boulevard from an assembly area near Hollywood and Highland, east to Vine Street and then back to their starting point. The parade was an opportunity to be proud, see and be seen, and experience, in a public setting, that you were not alone. The parade kicked off with a VW Microbus playing some recordings of marches over an amplification system. The order ran the gamut of just about anything you could name, from the Advocate Magazine’s float with a carload of men in swimsuits, to a conservative gay group in business suits from extremely conservative Orange County.
The Gay Liberation Front came marching down the street carrying banners and shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.” Another organisation marching was a group of friends carrying a large sign reading, “Heterosexuals for Homosexual Freedom.” It was a direct, welcome, and reassuring gesture.
What they didn’t know at the time was that while other cities were hosting marches, it was Los Angeles that held the world’s first TLGB Pride Parade. The success of the 1970 parade led immediately to talk of making the parade an annual event. The 1971 and 1972 parades had entries that created controversies; and disagreements within the steering committee lead to no parade being produced in 1973.”
Text from the LA Pride website [Online] Cited 10/10/2016. No longer available online
“The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), is an international Protestant Christian denomination. There are 222 member congregations in 37 countries, and the Fellowship has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities.
The Fellowship has Official Observer status with the World Council of Churches. The MCC has been denied membership in the US National Council of Churches, but many local MCC congregations are members of local ecumenical partnerships around the world and MCC currently belongs to several statewide councils of churches in the United States…
The first congregation was founded in Huntington Park, California by Troy Perry on October 6, 1968. This was a time when Christian attitudes toward homosexuality were almost universally unfavourable. The first congregation originally met in Perry’s Huntington Park home. The church first gained publicity by ads taken out in the Advocate magazine.
In 1969 the congregation had outgrown Perry’s living room and moved to rented space at the Huntington Park Women’s Club. It was at this point in time membership in the church grew to about 200 people. Due to discrimination the church was forced to move, and had a hard time finding a permanent place. During this period during the spring and summer of 1969 the church moved first to the Embassy Auditorium, and then a United Methodist Church for two weeks. The church ended up renting out the Encore Theatre in Hollywood from 1969 through 1971.
Within months of the first worship service, Perry began receiving letters and visits from people who wanted to start Metropolitan Community Churches in other cities. MCC groups from eight U.S. cities were represented at the first General Conference in 1970: Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, and Costa Mesa, California; Chicago, Illinois; Phoenix, Arizona; Kanohe, Hawaii; and Dallas, Texas. An MCC group existed in Miami, Florida, but did not send a delegate.
The church had its final move to a building it purchased at 2201 South Union Avenue in Los Angeles in early 1971. The building was consecrated on March 7, 1971. MCC worshiped there until January 27 of 1973, when the building was destroyed by what the Fire Department called a fire “of suspicious origin.”
The MCC has grown since then to have a presence in 37 countries with 222 affiliated churches. The largest presence is found in the United States, followed by Canada. The denomination continues to grow: In 2010, El Mundo reported that the first MCC congregation in Spain would be established in Madrid in October. It would be the first church to recognise and perform religious same-sex marriages in the country, as the Roman Catholic Church (the former state church) refuses to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies or adoptions.”
The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of a number of gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots, in which police clashed with gay demonstrators.
The American Gay Liberation Front (GLF) advocated for sexual liberation for all people; they believed heterosexuality was a remnant of cultural inhibition and felt that change would not come about unless the current social institutions were dismantled and rebuilt without defined sexual roles. To do this, the GLF was intent on transforming the idea of the nuclear family and making it more akin to a loose affiliation of members without biological subtexts. Prominent members of the GLF also opposed and addressed other social inequalities between the years of 1969 to 1972 such as militarism, racism, and sexism, but because of internal rivalries the GLF officially ended its operations in 1972.
“Because we were all involved with the court case, we really didn’t have much of a parade planned! Well, we got on the phones and started calling everybody. And, my goodness, that Sunday afternoon when we marched – thank God – we had a lot of people marching. We had about 50,000 people on the sidewalks. I had never seen more people with hats and dark shades on in my life. I was surprised that more of them didn’t get in the streets with us, but people were worried. They had jobs. They were concerned about being on television, being photographed. And yet, it was the best feeling in the world.”
“The Boys in the Band is a 1970 American drama film directed by William Friedkin. The screenplay by Mart Crowley is based on his Off Broadway play of the same title. It is among the first major American motion pictures to revolve around gay characters and is often cited as a milestone in the history of queer cinema.
The ensemble cast, all of whom also played the roles in the play’s initial stage run in New York City, includes Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard. Model/actress Maud Adams has a brief cameo appearance as a fashion model in a photo shoot segment in the opening montage of scenes.
The film is set in an Upper East Side apartment in New York City in the late 1960s. Michael, a Roman Catholic sporadically-employed writer, and recovering alcoholic, is preparing to host a birthday party for his friend Harold. Another of his friends, Donald, a self-described underachiever who has moved from the city, arrives and helps Michael prepare. Alan, Michael’s (presumably straight) old college roommate from Georgetown, calls with an urgent need to see Michael. Michael reluctantly agrees and invites him to come over.
One by one, the guests arrive. Emory is a stereotypical flamboyant interior decorator; Hank, a soon-to-be-divorced schoolteacher, and Larry, a fashion photographer, are a couple, albeit one with monogamy issues; and Bernard is an amiable black bookstore clerk. Alan calls again to inform Michael that he won’t be coming after all, and the party continues in a festive manner. But, unexpectedly, Alan has decided to drop by after all, and his arrival throws the gathering into turmoil.
“Cowboy” – a male hustler and Emory’s “gift” to Harold – arrives. As tensions mount, Alan assaults Emory and in the ensuing chaos Harold finally makes his grand appearance. In the midst of the scuffle, Michael impulsively begins drinking again. As the guests become more and more intoxicated, hidden resentments begin to surface, and the party moves indoors from the patio due to a sudden downpour.
Michael, who believes Alan is a closeted homosexual, begins a telephone game in which the objective is for each guest to call the one person whom he truly believes he has loved. With each call, past scars and present anxieties are revealed. Bernard reluctantly attempts to call the son of his mother’s employer, with whom he’d had a sexual encounter as a teenager, while Emory calls a dentist on whom he’d had a crush while in high school; both Bernard and Emory immediately regret having made the phone calls. Hank and Larry attempt to call one-another (via two separate phone lines in Michael’s apartment). Michael’s plan to “out” Alan with the game appears to backfire when Alan calls his wife, not the male college friend Justin Stewart whom Michael had presumed to be Alan’s lover. As the party ends and the guests depart, Michael collapses into Donald’s arms, sobbing. When he pulls himself together, it appears his life will remain very much the same.”
The highly quotable campy gay classic from the last days of the era before the Stonewall Riots. Michael (Kenneth Nelson) throws a birthday party for Harold (Leonard Frey) and invites their crowd of gay friends. In attendance are Donald (Frederick Combs), whose homosexuality has put him into therapy; Emory (Cliff Gorman), a flaming queen; Bernard (Reuben Greene), a black bookstore clerk; Hank (Laurence Luckinbill), a teacher who’s separated from his wife; and Larry (Keith Prentice), his boyfriend, who doesn’t think their relationship should mean that he has to stop sleeping around. Things are complicated by the arrival of Alan (Peter White), Michael’s presumably straight friend from collegee, and Cowboy (Robert La Tourneaux), a prostitute who is Emory’s birthday present for Harold.
Written by Mart Crowley and based on his play of the same name, directed by William Friedkin, who went on to direct The Exorcist. Tragically, several of the cast members are now dead from AIDS. Rated R for a lot of sex talk and a brief bare butt shot.
“Morris Kight (born November 19, 1919 – died January 19, 2003) was an American gay rights pioneer and peace activist. He is considered one of the original founders of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement in the United States…
In 1958, Kight moved to Los Angeles, where he was the founder or co-founder of many gay and lesbian organisations. The first such organisation was the ‘militant’ Committee for Homosexual Freedom or CHF, with Leo Laurence, Gale Whittington, Mother Boats and others, later to be renamed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in October 1969, the third GLF in the country (after New York and Berkeley). The name was used to show solidarity with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. By the next year, there were over 350 GLF organisations around the country. He also co-founded Christopher Street West gay pride parade in Los Angeles in 1970, Aid For AIDS in 1983, and the Gay Community Center in 1971, (now the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center), the Stonewall Democratic Club in 1975, and many others. Kight remarked that creating the Community Center was the achievement of which he was most proud.
Kight brought his experiences in political action into the realm of gay rights. One of the first actions by the LA GLF was against a local eatery called Barney’s Beanery. The restaurant, located in West Hollywood, not only had a sign above bar that said “Fagots [sic] Stay Out”, but also printed up matchbook covers with the same saying. Kight, along with Troy Perry and 100 activists protested outside, sending in protesters occasionally to order coffee and take up space at the tables. The protest was initially successful – the owner eventually handed Kight the sign in front of news cameras. But after the media left the owner replaced the sign, where it remained until West Hollywood’s first lesbian mayor, Valerie Terrigno, took it down when the city council passed an anti-discrimination ordinance. Perry vowed at the initial protest to never set foot in the place again until the owner apologised, which finally happened in 2005…
(The owner John Anthony put up a sign among the old license plates and other ephemera along the wall behind the bar that read “FAGOTS [sic] – STAY OUT”. Though the owner was known to be antagonistic towards gays, going as far as posing (in front of his sign) for a picture in a 1964 Life article on “Homosexuality in America” over a caption where he exclaims “I don’t like ’em…”, the sign was ostensibly put up as a response to pressure from the police who had a tendency towards discriminatory practices against homosexuals and consequently establishments that catered to the group… After the then-mayor, Valerie Terrigno, the entire city council and gay rights activists marched into Barney’s and relieved the wall of the offending sign in December 1984, it was held by Morris Kight for many years and now rests in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.
In September 2001, he made a video documentary with West Hollywood Public Access host James Fuhrman called “Early Gay and Lesbian History in Los Angeles”, which included his recollections of the Beanery protest and other actions. He had a longtime companion named Roy Zucheran. Three days before his death, he donated his memorabilia and archives to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. UCLA also has possession of some of his archives.”
“The International Imperial Court System (IICS) also known as the International Court System is one of the oldest and largest LGBT organisations in the world. The Imperial Court System is a grassroots network of organisations that works to build community relationships for equality and raise monies for charitable causes through the production of annual Gala Coronation Balls that invite an unlimited audience of attendees to be presented at Royal Court in their fanciest attire throughout North America along with numerous other fundraisers each year, all for the benefit of their communities. The Imperial Court System is the second largest LGBT organisation in the world, surpassed only by the Metropolitan Community Church.
The Imperial Court System in the United States was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1965 by José Sarria. Sarria, affectionately known as “Mama José” or similar among Imperial Court members, adopted the surname “Widow Norton” as a reference to Joshua Norton, a much-celebrated citizen of 19th-century San Francisco who had declared himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico in 1859. Sarria soon became the nexus of a fundraising group with volunteer members bearing titles of nobility bestowed by yearly elected figurehead leaders of Emperor and Empress. In the United States, the first court outside of San Francisco was in Portland, Oregon, which joined with San Francisco in 1971 to start the Court System, followed by Seattle, and then by Vancouver (by the self-proclaimed Empress of Canada, ted northe (who always spelled his name in the lower case), who founded the Canadian Court System in 1971, after being inspired by attending a ball in Portland OR, and thus became the International Court System). These empires operated and formed policies more-or-less independently until an Imperial Court Council led by Sarria was formed to prevent participation by groups that were not strictly and solely involved with charitable fundraising…
Titles
Each court holds an annual “coronation” (or “adornment” in the case of baronies and ducal courts) which is usually the chapter’s largest fundraiser and is attended by both local people and members of other chapters from across North America. The evening culminates with the ceremony in which the new monarch or monarchs are crowned. The method by which monarchs are selected varies from chapter to chapter, ranging from election by vote among the active membership in closed session to election by open vote of the community region in which individuals are residents… held between one week to up to six months before the coronation to election by all in attendance on the night of the ceremony.
The office of monarch is taken very seriously within the court system and requires a large commitment of the holder’s time and money. Accordingly, while the presence of an “imperial couple” is the norm, it is not uncommon for an emperor or empress to reign alone depending on the availability of suitably dedicated and charismatic candidates with the necessary resources to fulfil the requirements of a one-year reign.
In the most frequent case, several weeks after coronation the new monarch or monarchs present their court titles at a fundraiser called investitures. The titles given to members vary from one chapter to another and are primarily left to the discretion of the reigning monarch or monarchs, the fons honorum (fountain of honor) of their chapter. Typical titles awarded are Imperial Crown Prince, Grand Duchess, Marquess, Viscount, etc. Other appellations bestowed resemble offices or professions within a medieval or modern noble court rather than titles of nobility, such as “Court Jester” or “Chancellor of the Realm” and so forth. These titles may be as serious-sounding or as humorously campy as the monarchs wish.”
“It occurs to me that perhaps some (younger) people have heard the phrase “Beautiful Downtown Burbank” applied to Burbank, California, but aren’t aware of how the phrase got started.
It was first used on a television show, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” which premiered in 1968 on the NBC television network. NBC is, of course, located in Burbank. Gary Owens served as the announcer for it, and coined the phrase from the beginning, so the phrase dates from 1968. (Short video here.) It soon caught on and put Burbank on the map with television viewers all across the country. It wasn’t long before postcards began to be printed with this phrase.
The joke, of course, is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While there are many who insist that Burbank is indeed beautiful, others, like Frank Zappa, have claimed that the San Fernando Valley is the ugliest and most charmless place in the country. Whether that is the case, you may decide.
On June 28, 1970 – a year and a day after the spontaneous protest that took place in New York after the raid on the Stonewall Inn – large-scale parades were held in N.Y., L.A., and Chicago.
“Two side-by-side articles from The Advocate, July 22-August 4, 1970, offer descriptions and photos of the first parades and celebrations following the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Nancy Tucker wrote of the New York march, “Some two to three thousand homosexuals from cities around the East Coast gathered here on June 28 and marched from Greenwich Village to Central Park to demonstrate for ‘Gay Pride’ and ‘Gay Power.'”
Covering the Los Angeles Pride Parade, an accompanying article states: “The Gay Community of Los Angeles made its contribution to Americana on June 28. Over 1,000 homosexuals and their friends staged, not just a protest march, but a full blown parade down world-famous Hollywood Boulevard.””
The first-ever Gay Pride Parade was held in Los Angeles on June 28, 1970 to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Riots at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in New York City. The CSW parade was started by a number of Los Angeles gay activists, prominent among them Morris Kight, Reverend Troy Perry, and Bob Humphries. Although one of several gay pride parades that took place that day around the United States, this was the only “street closing” gay pride parade held in 1970 – something emulated by the other parades the following year. After several troubled years (no parade was held in 1973), the CSW parade returned in 1974, and originated yet another feature of the modern gay pride movement by adding a festival to its annual event. There was always a tense relationship between CSW, the businesses on Hollywood Boulevard and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), so in 1979 the parade and festival were moved to the more friendly environs of Santa Monica Boulevard, in the soon-to-be-incorporated (1984) City of West Hollywood. CSW is now celebrated every June in West Hollywood, and involves an all-weekend festival. This poster was for the second Christopher Street West Parade held in Los Angeles. No offset printshop was willing to print this poster until organisers contacted Peace Press. A workers’ collective founded by anti-Viet Nam War activists in 1967, Peace Press not only printed this poster, but were also enthusiastic about printing pamphlets about gay rights when arrested, drafted, etc.
Anonymous. “Christopher St. West,” on the Centre for the Study of Political Graphics website [Online] Cited 10/10/2016. No longer available online
Troy Deroy Perry Jr (born July 27, 1940) founded the Metropolitan Community Church, a Christian denomination with a special affirming ministry with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, in Los Angeles on October 6, 1968.
Founding the Metropolitan Community Church
In 1968, after a suicide attempt following a failed love affair, and witnessing a close friend being arrested by the police at the Black Cat Tavern, a Los Angeles gay bar, Perry felt called to return to his faith and to offer a place for gay people to worship God freely. Perry put an advertisement in The Advocate announcing a worship service designed for gays in Los Angeles. Twelve people turned up on October 6, 1968 for the first service, and “Nine were my friends who came to console me and to laugh, and three came as a result of the ad.” After six weeks of services in his living room, the congregation shifted to a women’s club, an auditorium, a church, and finally to a theatre that could hold 600 within several months. In 1971, their own building was dedicated with over a thousand members in attendance.
Being outspoken has caused several MCC buildings to be targeted for arson, including the original Mother Church in Los Angeles. Perry’s theology has been described as conservative, but social action was a high priority from the beginning of the establishment of the denomination. Perry performed same sex unions as early as 1970 and ordained women as pastors as early as 1972. MCC has over 300 congregations in 18 countries. The 2007 documentary film titled Call Me Troy is the story of his life and legacy, including the founding of MCC and his struggles as a civil rights leader in the gay community
Activism
Perry’s activism has taken many turns, including positions on a number of boards of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender organisations. He held a seat on the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations in 1973. Perry worked in political arenas to oppose Anita Bryant in the Save the Children campaign in 1977, that sought to overturn an anti-discrimination ordinance passed by the city of Miami. Unsuccessful in Miami, he also worked to oppose the Briggs Initiative in California that was written to ensure gay and lesbian teachers would be fired or prohibited from working in California public schools. The Briggs Initiative was soundly defeated in 1978, due in large part to grass-roots organising, which Perry participated in. Perry also planned the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979 with Robin Tyler.
In 1978 he was honoured by the American Civil Liberties Union Lesbian and Gay Rights Chapter with its Humanitarian Award. He holds honorary doctorates from Episcopal Divinity School in Boston, Samaritan College (Los Angeles), and La Sierra University in Santa Monica, California for his work in civil rights, and was recently lauded by the Gay Press Association with its Humanitarian Award. Rev. Perry was invited to the White House in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter to discuss gay and lesbian civil rights, and by President Bill Clinton in 1995 for the first White House Conference on HIV/AIDS. In 1997 he was invited to the first White House Conference on Hate Crimes. Perry was also a guest of the President that same year for breakfast in the state dining room in the White House, to be honoured with 90 other clergy for their work in American society.
On Valentine’s Day 2004 he spoke to a crowd of gay newlyweds at the Marriage Equality Rally at the California State Capitol. He retired as Moderator of the MCC in 2005, and the Reverend Elder Nancy Wilson succeeded him at an installation service on 29 October 2005. He remains active in public speaking and writing.
Reverend Bob Humphries founded the United States Mission, a non-sectarian religious organisation, in 1962 to provide social services to homeless residents of downtown Los Angeles. Branches of the Mission were also established in cities in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest. Beginning in the late-1960s the US Mission advocated for gay rights and social services in Southern California.
“Born on April 24, 1934, and raised in Bisbee, Arizona, Robert Humphries, was the kind of person who only comes along once in a 100 years. Finding an overwhelming need among the poor in Los Angeles he and a group of his friends, turned an ideal, into one of the oldest organisations still in existence in the Gay and Lesbian Community. Thus in 1962, the United States Mission was born. The Mission provides shelter, food, clothing, self-help, and transitional housing for those in need, as well as meals and other services to the elderly. His legacy lives on in facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento, Salinas, Modesto, Portland, Oregon, Seattle Washington, San Antonio Texas, Houston Texas, Phoenix Arizona, Kansas City Missouri, Omaha Nebraska, Pahoa Hawaii and the Missions Corporate headquarters in Fresno California.
Rev. Humphries was a pioneer in supporting the Gay Liberation Movement, co-founding and participating in the Christopher Street West March, he became a force in the fight for Civil Rights for all. He was often interviewed about his beliefs, and his program of “People Helping People,” he stated, “It’s not our purpose to build ivory towers for ourselves.” He preserved in his beliefs, and found many others who helped make his program become larger and stronger, and become the first organisation of its kind to be officially commended, not only be the mayor of Los Angeles, but the city council, Human Relations Commission and the California State Assembly. He had a remarkable, ability not to judge or give up on any one, and as he leaves behind no blood relatives, he will be mourned and dearly missed by the family, his forty years of ministry created.”
Reverend Bob Humphries died in Fresno, California, on January 30, 2002. He was 67.
TAO (Transvestite/Transsexual Action Organization)
“Aside from the EEF, only one transsexual organization had a national presence in the early 1970s. Angela Douglas was the force behind the group. From the mid-1960s Douglas, still living as a man, had scraped by as an aspiring rock musician and gadabout hippie, frequently high on various drugs. In 1969, shortly after she began to dress publicly as a woman, she joined the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, even though she did not consider herself to be gay. (She considered herself transsexual. Both before and after she lived as a woman, she was attracted primarily to women). She traveled around the country and participated actively in gay liberation protests and demonstrations. She split with GLF when she discovered the “anti-transvestic” attitudes of the gay men she encountered and when she found that GLF ignored the transsexuals who wanted to push for a clinic in Los Angeles. “I’d had my fill,” she wrote, “of insults from gays, all demanding I be a man and stop messing as a woman.” As the sexual liberation movement splintered into distinct groups for gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and transsexuals, Douglas started her own militant organisation, TAO, in Los Angeles, first for transvestites and transsexuals and then for transsexuals only.
At its founding in 1970, TAO stood for Transvestite/Transsexual Action Organization, and a year later Transsexual Action Organization. It used the same militant tactics found in gay liberation and other radical social movements. With her countercultural style, Douglas had an outspoken, in-your-face approach to political activism, and under her leadership TAO called for confrontational protests and sets demonstrations. In an early action, Douglas and another transsexual “blocked the entrance” to the theater showing the film Myra Breckinridge to protest the exploitative and ill-informed portrayal of a transsexual and also the used of a non transsexual actor (Raquel Welch) to play the transsexual role. TAO also protested when Los Angeles welfare officials refused to continue aid to men who dressed as women… As part of the more radical “second wave,” it spoke out against sexism and worked with women’s liberation groups and also maintained contact with the Gay Liberation Front. “As I progress as a transsexual,” Douglas wrote to Harry Benjamin, “I find myself more attune[d] to Women’s Liberation, in particular, the demands and ideas of gay women.” In a letter to Playboy magazine, published in 1970, Douglas explained that TAO supported “both gay liberation and women’s liberation: we believe that all victims of prejudice and discrimination must work together to change this society.”
Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 237-238.
Curators: Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) La Buena Fama Durmiendo (The Good Reputation Sleeping) 1939, printed c. 1970s Gelatin silver print Mat: 16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm) The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1973
The best fun I had with this posting was putting together the first twelve images. They seem to act as ‘strange attractors’, a feeling recognised by the curators of the exhibition if you view the first installation photograph by Anders Jones, below.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to photographer Anders Jones and the Duggal website for allowing me to publish the installation photographs in the posting.
Artists have always turned to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dreams have been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who pushed the technical limits of the medium to transform the camera’s realist documents into fantastical compositions. Whereas their modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, more recently contemporary photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through increasingly open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description.
This exhibition takes a cue from the artists it features by displaying a constellation of photographs that collectively evoke the experience of a waking dream. Here, a night sky composed of pills, a fragmented rainbow, a sleeping fairy-tale princess, and an alien underwater landscape illuminate hidden impulses and longings underlying contemporary life. Drawn entirely from The Met collection, Dream States features approximately 30 photographs and video works primarily from the 1970s to the present.
Near the end of Wagner’s second opera of the Ring Cycle, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, having attempted to help the sibling lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde against their father’s wishes, is punished for her betrayal. Wotan puts her to sleep and surrounds her with a ring of fire (she will be awakened in turn by her nephew Siegfried, the incestuous son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, in the third opera of the cycle).
Kiefer portrays the dormant Brünnhilde as French actress Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s film Mississippi Mermaid, using a photograph he snapped in a movie house in 1969. In the film, Deneuve plays a deceitful mail-order bride who comes to the island of Réunion to marry a plantation owner, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Aside from the parallels of love and betrayal in both the Ring Cycle and Truffaut’s film, Kiefer thought the choice of Deneuve for Brünnhilde both ironic and amusing: she was for him “the contrary of Brünnhilde. Very slim, very French, very cool, very sexy,” hinting that no man would go through fire to obtain Wagner’s corpulent, armoured Valkyrie.
Eugène Atget (French, Libourne 1857-1927 Paris) Versailles 1924-25 Salted paper print from glass negative Image: 17.5 x 21.9cm (6 7/8 x 8 5/8 in.) Sheet: 18 × 21.9cm (7 1/16 × 8 5/8 in.) Mat: 40.6 × 50.8cm (16 × 20 in.) Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005
From 1898 until his death in 1927, Atget exhaustively documented the remains of Old Paris: the city’s streets, monuments, interiors, and environs. Among the last entries in this self-directed preservationist effort was a series of images of landscapes and sculpture in the parks of Saint-Cloud and Versailles. Here, the photographer records a statue of a sleeping Ariadne, the mythical Cretan princess abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos. Atget’s simultaneously realistic and otherworldly photographs inspired the Surrealist artist Man Ray, who reproduced four of them in a 1926 issue of the journal La Révolution Surréaliste, thus presenting the elder photographer as a modernist forerunner.
As he traveled around the country in 1955-1956 making the photographs that would constitute his landmark book, The Americans, Frank’s impression of America changed radically. He found less of the freedom and tolerance imagined by postwar Europeans, and more alienation and racial prejudice simmering beneath the happy surface. His disillusionment is poignantly embodied in this image of a disheveled African-American man disengaged from the crowd and asleep in a foetal position amid the debris of an Independence Day celebration on Coney Island.
This was one of the last still photographs Frank made before he devoted his creative energy to filmmaking in the early 1960s. As such, it may be interpreted as an elegy to still photography; the lone figure functions as a surrogate for Frank himself, as he turned his back on Life – like photojournalism to concentrate on the more personal, dreamlike imagery of his films.
This photogram – made without a camera by placing a collage of transparencies on a photosensitive sheet of paper and exposing it to light – is part of a series portraying psychoanalysts and their patients. Here, a patient on a Freudian couch is seen from above; the figure, sheathed in patterns of Maori origin, appears to come apart at the seams under the analyst’s scrutiny.
Following in the tradition of Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, Goldin is her generation’s greatest practitioner of the “snapshot aesthetic” in photography – the intimate, diaristic mode that yields images that, in the right hands, are both spontaneous and carefully seen, tossed off and irreducibly right. In this early work, the artist has captured her friend as a Chatterton of the Lower East Side, lying across the back of a blue convertible with shirt open, eyes closed, and an empty can of Schaeffer beer by his side instead of arsenic – a contemporary vision of glamorous surrender for our own time.
Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940) Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey 1972 Gelatin silver print Mat: 18 × 18 in. (45.7 × 45.7cm) Gift of the artist, 1973
In the late 1960s, Tress began audio-recording children recounting their dreams and nightmares. He then collaborated with the young people, who acted out their tales for the camera, and published the resulting surreal images in the 1972 book The Dream Collector. Many of the children shared common nightmare scenarios such as falling, drowning, and being trapped, chased by monsters, or humiliated in the classroom. Here, a young boy clings to the roof of a home that has washed ashore as if after a flood. The desolate landscape evokes the sort of non-place characteristic of dreams and conveys feelings of loneliness and abandonment.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring at lower right, Nan Goldin’s French Chris on the Convertible, NYC (1979) Photo: Anders Jones
While obviously indebted to the deadpan photo-text combinations of Conceptualism, Calle’s art is as purely French at its core as the novels of Marguerite Duras and the films of Alain Resnais – an intimate exploration of memory, desire, and obsessive longing. The artist’s primary method involves a perfectly calibrated interplay between narrative and image, both of which steadily approach their object of desire only to find another blind spot-that which can never be captured through language or representation.
This work is the first segment of Calle’s first work, The Sleepers (1979), in which the artist invited twenty-nine friends and acquaintances to sleep in her bed consecutively between April 1 and April 9, during which time she photographed them once an hour and kept notes recording each encounter. All the elements of Calle’s art-from the voyeuristic inversion of the private sphere (rituals of the bedroom) and the public (the book or gallery wall) to the use of serial, repetitive structures-are present here in embryonic form.
Paul Graham (British, b. 1956) Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand 2011 Chromogenic print Image: 44 1/4 in. × 59 in. (112.4 × 149.9cm) Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel and Hideyuki Osawa Gift, 2015
Graham’s series, Does Yellow Run Forever?, juxtaposes three groups of photographs: rainbows arcing over the Irish countryside, the facades of pawn-and-jewellery shops in New York, and tender studies of his partner asleep. The thematic links between the images (the rainbow’s mythical pot of gold, the sparkling objects in the Harlem window display, and a sleeping dreamer) may seem obvious, even pat, but Graham’s photographs transmute those clichés into a constellation of deep feeling. These luminous vignettes evoke a sense of longing and pathos, the quest for something permanent amid the illusory and devalued.
The inevitable suggestion that the homeless, hungry man sprawled on the sidewalk might be dreaming of a finely dressed and improbably large salad links Brassaï’s photograph to the work of the Surrealists. Although he frequently depicted thugs, vagrants, and prostitutes, he did so without judgment or political motive; his were pictures meant to delight or perplex the eye and mind-not to prompt a social crusade.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing at left, Paul Graham’s Gold Town Jewellery, East Harlem, New York (2012); and at right, Paul Graham’s Senami, Christchurch, New Zealand (2011), both from the series Does Yellow Run Forever? Photo: Anders Jones
The psychological fluidity of the medium has been noted before by the Met. In 1993, to celebrate its purchase of the Gilman Collection, the curator Maria Morris Hambourg chose to call her exhibition The Waking Dream. The title came from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and suggested, in Hambourg’s words, “the haunting power of photographs to commingle past and present, to suspend the world and the artist’s experience of it in unique distillations.”
Conceptual latitude can benefit curators, giving them plenty of room to manoeuvre in making their selections, or it can be a detriment if a loose framework has so many sides that it won’t support an argument.
Dream States suffers from the latter, even though the leeway of the title allows splendid pictures in disparate styles to be displayed together. Organised by associate curator Mia Fineman and assistant curator Beth Saunders around a theme that isn’t notably pertinent or provocative, the show has no discernible reason for being. It isn’t stocked with recent purchases – fewer than ten of the works entered the collection in this decade – and it isn’t tightly edited. To quality for inclusion here a photograph need only depict someone lying down or with eyes closed. A “dream state” seems to be loosely defined. It can be as a starry or cloudless sky; a tree-less landscape; inverted or abstract imagery; or something blurry.
Born in the postwar baby boom, Goldstein grew up surrounded by the products of the rapidly expanding media culture-movies, television, newspapers, magazines, and advertisements of all kinds. Young artists such as Goldstein went on to be educated in the rigorous and reductive principles of Minimal and Conceptual art during the 1970s but knew from personal experience that images shape our sense of the world and who we are, rather than vice versa; they made their art reflect that secondhand relationship to reality.
In this early work, Goldstein has lifted, or “appropriated,” images of a deep sea diver, a falling figure, and a spaceman from unknown printed sources – isolating them from their original contexts and setting them at a very small scale against monochromatic backgrounds (green for sea, blue for sky, and white for space), as if the viewer were seeing them from a great distance. Because the viewer is unlikely to have seen such figures firsthand, that distance is not merely spatial but also epistemological in nature-the images trigger memories based not on original encounters but on reproductions of experience. The Pull – Goldstein’s only photographic work in a career that spanned painting, performance, film, and sound recordings – was included in “Pictures,” a seminal 1977 exhibition at Artist’s Space in New York, which also introduced the public to other young artists making use of appropriation, such as Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Troy Brauntuch.
Johnson works primarily with photography but also employs a variety of other media – sculpted figurines, dioramas, paint, ink, and bursts of glitter – to amplify the emotional power of her images. Glitter Bomb belongs to a series exploring the bacchanalian culture of summer music festivals. At once ominous and ecstatic, the image evokes the blissed-out mind-set of young revellers taking part in a modern-day rite of passage.
Wasow has a long-standing fascination with science fiction, apocalyptic fantasies, and documentation of unidentified flying objects. In his many pictures of mysterious floating disks and orbs, the artist courts doubt by running found images through a battery of processes, including drawing, photocopying, and superimposition, to create distortions. The resulting photographs play with the human propensity to invest form with meaning, offering just enough detail to spur the imagination.
This “portrait” of the artist’s wife, Laura, belongs to an ongoing series he calls “chemical celestial portraits of inner and outer space.” Tomaselli creates likenesses based on each sitter’s astrological sign and the star map for his or her date of birth. Placing sugar and pills on photographic paper and exposing it to light, he produces a photogram of the corresponding constellation and names the stars after the various drugs the subject remembers consuming, from cold medicine to cocaine. The result is an unconventional map of identity that cleverly weds the mystical and the pharmacological.
Bea Nettles (American, born Gainesville, Florida, 1946) Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards 1975 Photographically illustrated tarot cards Purchase, Dorothy Levitt Beskind Gift, 1977
The idea to create a set of photographic tarot cards came to Nettles in a dream during the summer of 1970, while she was on an artist’s residency in the mountains of North Carolina. She subsequently reinterpreted the ancient symbolism of the traditional tarot deck, enlisting friends and family members as models for photographs that she augmented with hand-painted additions. In 2007 the image Nettles created for the Three of Swords card was used as the disc graphic for Bruce Springsteen’s album Magic.
Installation view of the exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photography and Video at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showing Bea Nettles’ Mountain Dream Tarot: A Deck of 78 Photographic Cards (1975) Photo: Anders Jones
Artists often turn to dreams as a source of inspiration, a retreat from reason, and a space for exploring imagination and desire. In the history of photography, dream imagery has been most closely associated with the Surrealists, who used experimental techniques to bridge the gap between the camera’s objectivity and the internal gaze of the mind’s eye. While those modernist explorations were often bound to psychoanalytic theories, other photographers have pursued the world of sleep and dreams through deliberately open-ended works that succeed through evocation rather than description. The exhibition Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video presents 30 photographs and one video drawn from The Met collection, all loosely tied to the subjective yet universal experience of dreaming. The exhibition is on view at the Museum from May 16 through October 30, 2016.
Many of the works take the surrender of sleep as their subject matter. In photographs by Robert Frank, Danny Lyon, and Nan Goldin, recumbent figures appear vulnerable to the wandering gaze of onlookers, yet their inner worlds remain out of reach. Images of bodies floating and falling conjure the tumultuous world of dreams, and landscapes are made strange through the camera’s selective vision. Highlights include photographs by Paul Graham from his recent series Does Yellow Run Forever (2014); images from Sophie Calle’s earliest body of work, The Sleepers (1979), in which she invited friends and acquaintances to sleep in her own bed while she watched; and Anselm Kiefer’s Brünnhilde Sleeps (1980), a hand-painted photograph featuring French actress Catherine Deneuve recast as a Wagnerian Valkyrie. Also featured are recently acquired works by Shannon Bool, Sarah Anne Johnson, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli.
Dream States: Contemporary Photographs and Video is organised by Mia Fineman, Associate Curator; and Beth Saunders, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Grete Stern (Argentinian born Germany, 1904-1999) Sueño No. 1: “Articulos eléctricos para el hogar” (Dream No. 1: “Electrical Household items”) c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Image: 26.6 x 22.9cm (10 1/2 x 9 in.) Frame: 63.5 x 76.2cm (25 x 30 in.) Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2012
In 1948 the Argentine women’s magazine Idilio introduced a weekly column called “Psychoanalysis Will Help You,” which invited readers to submit their dreams for analysis. Each week, one dream was illustrated with a photomontage by Stern, a Bauhaus-trained photographer and graphic designer who fled Berlin for Buenos Aires when the Nazis came to power. Over three years, Stern created 140 photomontages for the magazine, translating the unconscious fears and desires of its predominantly female readership into clever, compelling images. Here, a masculine hand swoops in to “turn on” a lamp whose base is a tiny, elegantly dressed woman. Rarely has female objectification been so erotically and electrically charged.
With his large-scale photograms, Fuss has breathed new life into the cameraless technique that became the hallmark of modernist photographers such as Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s. He created this image by blowing thick clouds of smoke over a sheet of photographic paper and exposing it to a quick flash of light. Evoking the wizardry of a medieval alchemist, Fuss fixes a permanent image of evanescence.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Just look. Really look. And then think about that looking.
Minute, democratic observations produce images which nestle, and take hold, and grow in the imagination.
No words are necessary. This is a looking that comes from the soul.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“A lot of these pictures I take are of very ordinary, unremarkable things. Can one learn to see? I don’t know. I think probably one is born with the ability to compose an image, in the way one is born with the ability to compose music. It is vastly more important to think about the looking, though, rather than to try to talk about a picture and what it means. The graphic image and words, well, they are two very different animals.”
William Eggleston
“Eggleston is someone who has always tried to maintain emotional detachment in his work, photographing landscapes and inanimate objects with the same attention he would apply to people. He does not believe a photograph is a ‘window on the soul’ as we so often have it, nor does he think a viewer can ever truly understand a photographer’s thoughts and feelings from the pictures they make. Instead, he photographs ‘democratically’, which is to say, he gives even the smallest observations equal weight. His usual method is to capture people going about their business unawares, often performing ordinary tasks like eating in a restaurant or pumping petrol at a filling station. He photographs everyone the same, whether they are a celebrity, a member of his family, or a stranger.”
Curator Phillip Prodger
William Eggleston is a pioneering American photographer renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images. This exhibition of 100 works surveys Eggleston’s full career from the 1960s to the present day and is the most comprehensive display of his portrait photography ever. Eggleston is celebrated for his experimental use of colour and his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976 is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. Highlights of the exhibition will include monumental prints of two legendary photographs first seen forty years ago: the artist’s uncle Adyn Schuyler Senior with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi, and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi.
Also on display will be a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white prints from the 1960s. Featuring people in diners, petrol stations and markets in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee, they help illustrate Eggleston’s unique view of the world.
For Eggleston this photo is highly personal. Jasper Staples, the figure on the right, had been around him for his whole life as his family’s “house man”. Here he is next to his employer, Eggleston’s uncle, at a funeral. His exact mimicking of his boss’s posture and their shared focus on an event happening off-camera gives them a moment of unity. Yet the composition of the shot, with their balance and the open car door suggesting some ongoing action, is highly theatrical and might even put us in mind of a TV detective show.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
One of Eggleston’s most famous images, this pictures shows why he is known as the man who brought colour photography into the artistic mainstream. The subject, Marcia Hare, floats on a cloud-like bed of soft-focus grass, the red buttons on her dress popping out like confectionary on a cake. The dye-transfer technique which Eggleston borrowed from commercial advertising and turned into his trademark gives such richness to the colour that we are brought out of the Seventies and into the realm of Pre-Raphaelite painting. The ghost of Millais’s “Ophelia” sits just out of reach, a connection which the inscrutable artist is happy, as ever, to neither confirm nor deny.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“This is Devoe, a distant relative of mine (although I can’t remember exactly how), but also a friend. She is dead now, but we were very close. She was a very sweet and charming lady. I took this picture in the yard at the side of her house. I would often visit her there in Jackson. I remember I found the colour of her dress and the chair very exciting, and everything worked out instantly. I think this is the only picture I ever took of her, but I would say it sums her up. I didn’t pose her at all – I never do, usually because it all happens so quickly, but I don’t think I would have moved her in any way. I’m still very pleased with the photograph.”
“These two are strangers. I happened to be walking past and there it was, the picture. As usual I took it very rapidly and we didn’t speak. I think I was fortunate to catch that expression on the woman’s face. A lot of these pictures I take are of very ordinary, unremarkable things. Can one learn to see? I don’t know. I think probably one is born with the ability to compose an image, in the way one is born with the ability to compose music. It is vastly more important to think about the looking, though, rather than to try to talk about a picture and what it means. The graphic image and words, well, they are two very different animals.”
A previously unseen image of The Clash frontman Joe Strummer and a never-before exhibited portrait of the actor and photographer Dennis Hopper will be displayed for the first time in the National Portrait Gallery this summer. They will be included in the first museum exhibition devoted to the portraits of pioneering American photographer, William Eggleston it was announced today, Thursday 10 March 2016.
William Eggleston Portraits(21 July to 23 October) will bring together over 100 works by the American photographer, renowned for his vivid, poetic and mysterious images of people in diners, petrol stations, phone booths and supermarkets. Widely credited with increasing recognition for colour photography, following his own experimental use of dye-transfer technique, Eggleston will be celebrated by a retrospective of his full career, including a selection of never-before seen vintage black and white photographs from the 1960s taken in and around the artist’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.
The first major exhibition of Eggleston’s photographs in London since 2002 and the most comprehensive of his portraits, William Eggleston Portraits will feature family, friends, musicians and actors including rarely seen images of Eggleston’s own close relations. It will provide a unique window on the artist’s home life, allowing visitors to see how public and private portraiture came together in Eggleston’s work. It will also reveal, for the first time, the identities of many sitters who have until now remained anonymous. Other highlights include monumental, five foot wide prints of the legendary photographs of the artist’s uncle, Adyn Schuyler Senior, with his assistant Jasper Staples in Cassidy Bayou, Mississippi and Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi from the landmark book Eggleston’s Guide (1976).
Since first picking up a camera in 1957, Eggleston’s images have captured the ordinary world around him and his work is said to find ‘beauty in the everyday’. His portrayal of the people he encountered in towns across the American South, and in Memphis in particular, is shown in the context of semi-public spaces. Between 1960 and 1965, Eggleston worked exclusively in black and white and people were Eggleston’s primary subject, caught unawares while going about ordinary tasks. In the 1970s, Eggleston increasingly frequented the Memphis night club scene, developing friendships and getting to know musicians and artists. His fascination with club culture resulted in the experimental video ‘Stranded in Canton’, a selection of which will also be on view at the exhibition. ‘Stranded in Canton’ chronicles visits to bars in Memphis, Mississippi and New Orleans.
Eggleston’s 1976 show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is considered a pivotal moment in the recognition of colour photography as a contemporary art form. His work has inspired many present day photographers, artists and filmmakers, including Martin Parr, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Juergen Teller.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: “William Eggleston makes memorable photographic portraits of individuals – including friends and family, musicians and artists – that are utterly unique and highly influential. More than this, Eggleston has an uncanny ability to find something extraordinary in the seemingly everyday. Combining well-known works with others previously unseen, this exhibition looks at one of photography’s most compelling practitioners from a new perspective.”
Curator Phillip Prodger, Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery says, “Few photographers alive today have had such a profound influence on the way photographs are made and seen as William Eggleston. His pictures are as fresh and exciting as they were when they first grabbed the public’s attention in the 1970s. There is nothing quite like the colour in an Eggleston photograph – radiant in their beauty, that get deep under the skin and linger in the imagination.
Press release from the National Portrait Gallery, London
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008
This candid interview with photographer William Eggleston was conducted by film director Michael Almereyda on the occasion of the opening of Eggleston’s retrospective William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A key figure in American photography, Eggleston is credited with helping to usher in the era of colour photography. Eggleston discusses his shift from black and white to colour photography in this video as, “it never was a conscious thing. I had wanted to see a lot of things in colour because the world is in colour”. Also included in this video are Eggleston’s remarks about his personal relationships with the subjects of many of his photographs.
Text from the YouTube website
According to Eggleston talking on the above video, this was his first successful colour negative.
The photo that made Eggleston’s name, this image of a grocery-store boy lining up shopping carts is a prime example of his ability to capture the humdrum reality of life in mid-century America. Yet it is also something more: the delicacy of his motion, the tension in his posture, the concentration on his brow evoke a master craftsman at work. Despite Eggleston’s presence, he seems entirely unselfconscious: caught in perfect profile and sun-dappled like a prime specimen of American youth. Eggleston, hovering between documentarian and sentimentalist, creates a semi-ironic paean to America.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“I took this picture in front of the music school of the university in Memphis. She was waiting on an automobile to come pick her up. I remember she was studying the sheaves of music on her lap. Not one word was exchanged – I was gone before she had the chance to say anything to me and it happened so fast that she wasn’t even sure I had taken a picture. I didn’t make a point of carrying a camera, but I usually had one with me.”
The closest Eggleston came to taking traditional portraits was in a series he shot in bars in his native Memphis and the Mississippi Delta in 1973-4. The sitters in his Nightclub Portraits – anonymous figures plucked, slightly flushed, from their nights out – are not posing but instead are photographed mid-conversation, Eggleston capturing them at their most unguarded. What is remarkable about this example is the strange composure of the subject, the slightly ethereal sheen as the flash from the camera is reflected by her make-up. Eggleston’s precise focus picks out the individual threads of her cardigan. Something hyper-real and statuesque emerges from an ordinary night out.
Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
“I don’t know who this woman is, I simply saw her on the street. I never know what I am looking for until I see it. The images just seem to happen, wherever I happen to be. Was I attracted by the movement? I think I was attracted to the bright orange of her dress. She wasn’t raising her hand as a result of anything I did, but I think I must have been aware of the repeat made by her shadow in the frame – subconsciously at least – it needed to be in the picture.”
“Refusing to be pinned down to any viewpoint or agenda, Eggleston’s greatest strength is his almost enraging ambiguity. He is neither a sentimentalist nor a documentarian, neither subjective nor objective: he somehow captures that ephemeral moment we experience when we’re not quite sure why a memory sticks with us, why an otherwise mundane glance from a stranger seems to take on a greater significance.
His refusal to think of himself as a portraitist is what gives this exhibition such wry power. Here is a photographer who makes no distinctions, viewing every subject from cousins to coke cans with the same inscrutable gaze. When approached about the idea of a portrait show, the NPG’s Philip Prodger recalls, Eggleston expressed surprise because he didn’t “do” portraits. Prodger reframed the exhibition as a series of photos that just happened to have people in them. “That makes sense”, Eggleston deadpanned.
The unvarnished Americana for which he is so famous – brash logos and a hint of rust – can contain something uneasy, even threatening, precisely because Eggleston maintains a blithe poker-face about his feelings on his subjects. Walking through this exhibition is to meet more placards marked “Untitled” than you can handle. The names of previously anonymous sitters, revealed specially for this exhibition, are hardly likely to make things much more concrete for the viewer. Rather we are let in on an extraordinary experience, moving between the mysterious faces of a transitional moment in American history, not quite sure whether some greater revelation is bubbling under the surface.”
Extract from Fred Maynard. “William Eggleston, the reluctant portraitist,” on the 1843 Magazine / The Economist website July 26th, 2016 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016. No longer available online
Curators: Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) A group of Contrabands at Haxall’s Mill, Richmond, Virginia, on June 9, 1865 (detail) 1865 Stereo view
‘I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance’
Former New York slave Sojourner Truth (which literally means “itinerant preacher”) strategically deployed photography as a form of political activism. This deployment is part of a long tradition of photography being used in the African American struggle for political change, from before the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.
Standing six feet tall and speaking with a thick Dutch accent (due to her having been born of slave parents owned by a wealthy Dutch patroon in Ulster County, New York) Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883), the name she adopted on June 1, 1843, devoted her life to women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Driven by a deep religious conviction she was a evangelist, feminist and abolitionist who possessed enormous charisma – “Harriet Beecher Stowe attested to Truth’s personal magnetism, saying that she had never “been conversant with anyone who had more of that silent and subtle power which we call personal presence than this woman.” “During the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) after the American Civil War, “Truth barely supported herself by selling a narrative of her life as well as her “shadows,” photographs of herself.” (Sojourner Truth, Black History)
What is interesting, as author Nell Irvin Painter observes in the accompanying video in this posting, is how Truth controlled the dissemination of her own image – her shadow – as a means of self promotion. As the press release states, “Truth could not read or write, but she had her statements repeatedly published in the press, enthusiastically embraced new technologies such as photography, and went to court three times to claim her legal rights. Uniquely among portrait sitters, she had her photographic cartes de visite copyrighted in her own name and added the caption ‘I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance’. Sojourner Truth, foregrounding her self-selected proper name, her agency, and her possession of self.” As the exhibition brochure observes, “Sojourner Truth’s very terms, “substance” and “shadow,” were economic as well as photographic metaphors in the fierce debates about money: shadow was aligned with the abolition of slavery, substance with proslavery and anti-black sentiment. Sojourner Truth knew this opposition very well.” Her speech, authorship, and recourse to law coexist with her image.
Her possession of self is intimately tied to the photographic depiction of her bodily form. She sells the photograph to support the body and, as her agency, the images become a form of self-actualisation. In this sense the image that she controls becomes her holistic body, for she never displays her injured hand or the scars on her back that she were inflicted on her during slavery. These photographs are how she would like to see herself, how she portrays and promotes herself to others and for this reason they are amazing documents to study. What a human being, to have that perspicacious nature – from Latin perspicax, perspicac- ‘seeing clearly’ – to clearly see her place in the world and to clearly understand how to project her image into the world using new technologies such as photography. For someone who could not read or write this clear seeing in the use of photography at such an early time in the history of photography is almost incomparable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Truth is powerful and it prevails.
I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.
Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff.
If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.
It is the mind that makes the body.
Sojourner Truth
Cicely Tyson performs Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?”, originally delivered extemporaneously in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.
Unknown photographer (American) Carte de visite of Sojourner Truth with a photograph of her grandson, James Caldwell, on her lap 1863 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
On July 4, 1863, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Truth announced her grandson’s enlistment in the famous 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first all-black volunteer infantry. “Her faith is strong that God’s hand is in this war, and that it will end in the destruction of slavery, which day she hopes to live to see. The enlisting of the coloured people she considers the most hopeful feature of the war.”
Truth was very proud of her grandson James Caldwell, whom she described as “a tall, able-bodied lad” determined to redeem white people from God’s curse and to save the nation. Truth also expressed her frustration that she herself could not lead “the coloured troops”; instead she “can only send you her shadow.” Even at this early date, Sojourner Truth conceived of her “shadows” as the means to raise money. The article ends: “We are sure that many of our readers will thank us for informing them that Sojourner will send her photograph by mail to any one who will write her enclosing 50 cents and a 3-cent stamp. Letters to be directed to Battle Creek, Michigan.”
Sojourner Truth believed in paper and words: the paper currency created by the Federal government to support the war; the newspapers in which she had her letters published; the cartes de visite that she sold to support herself, labeled and copyrighted; the stamps that could send her paper photographs across the country to supporters; the tax stamps that the government required again to raise funds on behalf of the Union cause.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Sojourner Truth Quotes, Speech, Biography, Education, Facts, History
Sojourner Truth (/soʊˈdʒɜːrnər ˈtruːθ/; born Isabella (“Bell”) Baumfree; c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son, in 1828 she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?,” a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect; whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.
In 2014, Truth was included in Smithsonian magazine’s list of the “100 Most Significant Americans of All Time”.
Text from the YouTube website
Synopsis
Born in New York circa 1797, Sojourner Truth was the self-given name, from 1843 onward, of Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. Her best-known speech on racial inequalities, “Ain’t I a Woman?” was delivered extemporaneously in 1851 at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention.
Born into slavery
Born Isabella Baumfree circa 1797, Sojourner Truth was one of as many as 12 children born to James and Elizabeth Baumfree in the town of Swartekill, in Ulster County, New York. Truth’s date of birth was not recorded, as was typical of children born into slavery, but historians estimate that she was likely born around 1797. Her father, James Baumfree, was a slave captured in modern-day Ghana; Elizabeth Baumfree, also known as Mau-Mau Bet, was the daughter of slaves from Guinea. The Baumfree family was owned by Colonel Hardenbergh, and lived at the colonel’s estate in Esopus, New York, 95 miles north of New York City. The area had once been under Dutch control, and both the Baumfrees and the Hardenbaughs spoke Dutch in their daily lives.
After the colonel’s death, ownership of the Baumfrees passed to his son, Charles. The Baumfrees were separated after the death of Charles Hardenbergh in 1806. The 9-year-old Truth, known as “Belle” at the time, was sold at an auction with a flock of sheep for $100. Her new owner was a man named John Neely, whom Truth remembered as harsh and violent. She would be sold twice more over the following two years, finally coming to reside on the property of John Dumont at West Park, New York. It was during these years that Truth learned to speak English for the first time…
Fighting for abolition and women’s rights
On June 1, 1843, Isabella Baumfree changed her name to Sojourner Truth, devoting her life to Methodism and the abolition of slavery. In 1844, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Northampton, Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists, the organisation supported a broad reform agenda including women’s rights and pacifism. Members lived together on 500 acres as a self-sufficient community. Truth met a number of leading abolitionists at Northampton, including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and David Ruggles.
Although the Northampton community disbanded in 1846, Sojourner Truth’s career as an activist and reformer was just beginning…
Advocacy during the Civil War
Sojourner Truth put her reputation to work during the Civil War, helping to recruit black troops for the Union Army. She encouraged her grandson, James Caldwell, to enlist in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. In 1864, Truth was called to Washington, D.C., to contribute to the National Freedman’s Relief Association. On at least one occasion, Truth met and spoke with President Abraham Lincoln about her beliefs and her experience.
True to her broad reform ideals, Truth continued to agitate for change even after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865, Truth attempted to force the desegregation of streetcars in Washington by riding in cars designated for whites. A major project of her later life was the movement to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves. She argued that ownership of private property, and particularly land, would give African Americans self-sufficiency and free them from a kind of indentured servitude to wealthy landowners. Although Truth pursued this goal forcefully for many years, she was unable to sway Congress.
Death and legacy
Sojourner Truth died at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, on November 26, 1883. She is buried alongside her family at Battle Creek’s Oak Hill Cemetery. Until old age intervened, Truth continued to speak passionately on the subjects of women’s rights, universal suffrage and prison reform. She was also an outspoken opponent of capital punishment, testifying before the Michigan state legislature against the practice. She also championed prison reform in Michigan and across the country. While always controversial, Truth was embraced by a community of reformers including Amy Post, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony – friends with whom she collaborated until the end of her life.
Truth is remembered as one of the foremost leaders of the abolition movement and an early advocate of women’s rights. Although she began her career as an abolitionist, the reform causes she sponsored were broad and varied, including prison reform, property rights and universal suffrage. Abolition was one of the few causes that Truth was able to see realized in her lifetime. Her fear that abolitionism would falter before achieving equality for women proved prophetic.
Text from “Sojourner Truth Biography: Civil Rights Activist, Women’s Rights Activist (c. 1797-1883),” on Biography.com website [Online] Cited 28/09/2016. No longer available online
Unknown photographer (American) Captioned carte de visite of Sojourner Truth (front) 1864 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
In 1864 Truth began to inscribe her cartes de visite with a caption, her name, and a copyright: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. SOJOURNER TRUTH.” Truth’s use of the first-person present tense “I sell” declares her ownership of her image: to sell it, she must own it. Most significantly, by using this caption Sojourner Truth knowingly aligned her photographs with paper money.
Sojourner Truth’s very terms, “substance” and “shadow,” were economic as well as photographic metaphors in the fierce debates about money: shadow was aligned with the abolition of slavery, substance with proslavery and anti-black sentiment. Sojourner Truth knew this opposition very well. She was making cheap paper notes, printed and reproduced in multiples, featuring her portrait. She had invented her own kind of paper currency, and for the same reasons as the government: in order to produce wealth dependent on a consensus that representation produces material results, to make money where there was none, and to do so partly in order to abolish slavery.
During the Civil War, a ferocious debate raged about whether paper could represent value like coin. Paper greenbacks – the first federally issued banknotes in American history – were attacked by those who believed that money was not a representation but a “substance.” Hard money advocates (naively) believed that gold was value, not its representation… Like paper bills, cartes de visite functioned during these years as currency and as clandestine political tokens.
The photographs of Sojourner Truth register only her appearance, not her commanding presence. They are shadows, and some are more elusive and mute than others. Yet the printed words – name, caption, and copyright – remain forthright: her speech, authorship, and recourse to law coexist with her image. Those printed words force us to acknowledge the illiterate woman’s authorship, as well as her eloquence, her agency, and her legal claim to property, even as we value these humble objects. [The image above and verso below] is one of two known cartes de visite of Sojourner Truth that bear not only the caption, name, and copyright, but also a tax stamp that dates the photograph to 1864. Tax stamps were created to raise money for the Union cause, although they were attached to only a very small percentage of purchased photographs.
In all her seated portraits, Truth carefully chose the items she held in her lap: initially, the photograph of her heroic missing grandson and thereafter, her knitting. We must take her choices seriously. During the Civil War knitting acquired new patriotic connotations. No longer merely a feminine domestic art, knitting had become a public duty; newspapers published pleas for sewing and knitting societies to devote themselves to serving the cause.
During the Civil War, Truth was determined to teach her skills to the emancipated slaves, often Southern field hands, living in Freedmen’s Villages. A Union officer reported that Truth would say, “Be clean, be clean, for cleanliness is a part of godliness.” He paraphrased Truth’s beliefs: “[T]hey must learn to be independent – learn industry and economy – and above all strive to show people that they could be something. She urged them to embrace for their children all opportunities of education and advancement. In fact, she talked to them as a white person could not, for they would have been offended with such plain truths from any other source […] She goes into their cabins with her knitting in her hand, and while she talks with them she knits. Few of them know how to knit, and but few know how to make a loaf of bread, or anything of the kind. She wants to teach the old people how to knit, for they have no employment, and they will be much happier if usefully employed.”
Truth associated knitting with industry and advancement, not gentility. With real savvy, she informally introduced the craft to freed slaves by demonstrating the skill, not just telling her audience to learn it. The many cartes de visite that feature her knitting sustain this demonstration.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Captioned carte de visite of Sojourner Truth (back) 1864 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Unknown photographer (American) Captioned carte de visite of Sojourner Truth c. 1864-65 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents , on view July 27 through October 23, 2016. The exhibition features a large selection of photographic cartes de visite of the famed former slave, as well as other Civil War era photographs and Federal currency, none of which have been exhibited before.
The exhibition is organised by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley and author of “Enduring Truths. Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance” (University of Chicago Press, 2015), the first book to explore how Truth used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. Many of the photographs included in the exhibition were a recent gift from Professor Grigsby to BAMPFA.
Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained renown in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator. This exhibition showcases the photographic carte de visite portraits of Truth that she sold at lectures and by mail as a way of making a living. First invented by French photographer André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in 1854, cartes de visite are similar in size to the calling cards that preceded them, approximately two-and one-half by four inches, and consist of albumen photographs made from glass negatives glued onto cardboard mounts. By the end of the 1850s, the craze for the relatively inexpensive cartes de visite had reached the United States. Americans who could never have afforded a portrait could now have their likeness memorialised. Combined with the emergence of the new US postal system, these cards appealed to a vast nation of dispersed peoples.
Truth could not read or write, but she had her statements repeatedly published in the press, enthusiastically embraced new technologies such as photography, and went to court three times to claim her legal rights. Uniquely among portrait sitters, she had her photographic cartes de visite copyrighted in her own name and added the caption ‘I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance’. Sojourner Truth, foregrounding her self-selected proper name, her agency, and her possession of self.
This exhibition places Truth’s cartes de visite in context by reconstructing the flood of paper federal banknotes, photographs, letters, autographs, stamps, prints, and newspapers that created political communities across the immense distances of the nation during the Civil War. Like the federal government that resorted to the printing of paper currency to finance the war against slavery, Truth was improvising new ways of turning paper into value in order to finance her activism as an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights.
Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery is organised by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley, with the assistance of UC Berkeley undergraduate Ryan Serpa. The photographs included in the exhibition were a recent gift from Professor Grigsby to BAMPFA.
Press release from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
W. Arren (American, photographer/publisher?) Carte de visite of Frederick Douglass c. 1879 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Frederick Douglass (American, c. 1818 – 1895)
Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratoryand incisive antislavery writings. In his time he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported women’s suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or recent immigrant. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the American Constitution. When radical abolitionists under the motto “No Union With Slaveholders”, criticised Douglass’ willingness to dialogue with slave owners, he famously replied: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
Frederick Douglass was also a runaway slave and eloquent abolitionist. Douglass and Truth both believed in the liberatory power of modernisation and both were confident that the new medium of photography would contribute to their society’s redefinition of the status of black men and women. Of all modern inventions, photography, Douglass argued, would have the most far-reaching impact. He devoted two public lectures to photography, in 1861 and 1865, arguing that self-possession requires recognition from others. Douglass had 160 portraits made between 1841 and 1895. Like most sitters and unlike Truth, Douglass allowed the photographer’s name to be printed at the bottom of this carte de visite instead of his own.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Carte de visite of John Sharper c. 1863 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
John N. Sharper, a printer by trade, enlisted in the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery Regiment (Colored) at Providence, Rhode Island on October 30, 1863. He was listed as being 5-foot8, of “dark complexion,” with black hair and black eyes. He was born in New York State about 1841. He signed his own enlistment papers. The 14th Rhode Island was later re-designated the 11th U.S. Colored Artillery.
Sharper was born at Herkimer, New York (west of Albany) on May 24, 1841. In 1860, at age 18, he was still living in Herkimer with his parents, Samuel and Jane, and working as a printer’s apprentice. Sharper’s unit was assigned to the Department of the Gulf, where its elements were stationed in New Orleans, Port Hudson, Brashear City (now Morgan City), Louisiana and Fort Esperanza on Matagorda Island, Texas. In the winter of 1864-65 Sharper was detached from his unit to work at post headquarters as a printer. Sharper was discharged for disability at New Orleans on September 11, 1865 for phthisis pulmonalis, another term for consumption or tuberculosis. He died on April 5, 1866, and is buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Herkimer.
His parents, Samuel and Jane, applied for a pension on as dependents of his. There is a page on Ancestry that shows Sharper married to an Esther Thomas (c. 1846 to c. 1929), but cites no documentation.
AndyHall. “Private John N. Sharper, 11th U.S. Colored Artillery,” on the Civil War Talk website May 31, 2014 [Online] Cited 01/10/2016
The Bureau of United States Colored Troops was established as a separate office within the War Department on May 22, 1863. Maj. Charles W. Foster was appointed the bureau chief, with the title assistant adjutant general. African-descent regiments organised before the new bureau was established were not the first regiments mustered into the Bureau of United States Colored Troops. Most would retain their state designation until 1864, when they would be designated United States Colored Troops. In June 1863, the first regiment was officially mustered into the Bureau of United States Colored Troops. Organised in Washington, D.C., the regiment was designated the 1st United States Colored Infantry.
Text from the Civil War Trust website
According to government archives, by the end of the Civil War some 179,000 black men had served in the US Army (constituting 10% of the Union Army) and 19,000 had served in the US Navy. 40,000 died during the war, often from infection and disease. When Sojourner Truth made the photograph in which she displays a framed portrait of her grandson, who had just joined the first all-black regiment, she offered an alternative to images, such as Nast’s, that mocked and emasculated the black men and boys who fought to end slavery. Photographic portraits made counter arguments, showing us alert and serious black men, even boys, who were determined to fix their likenesses as soldiers willing to lose their lives to win the war against slavery.
Portraits can socially elevate but painted portraits were not affordable for the majority of Americans. Nineteenth-century photography, especially cartes de visite and tintypes, brought portraiture within the reach of many more people. African Americans seized the opportunity to have their “likeness” made. Tintypes also made it possible to adorn sitters with precious gold jewellery applied as strokes of paint. Glistening paint ornamented sitters with sparkling accessories – gold rings, necklaces, buttons, military belt buckles – and fancy ornamental enclosures framed persons as worthy.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Carte de visite of amputee on chair late-19th century Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
J. W. Black (American, photographer) Captioned carte de visite of Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence 1863
Several extensive series of cartes de visite were made of rescued slave children, especially those who appeared to be white like this child, Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence.
In the cartes de visite of the “redeemed slave child” Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence, captions make claims to possession of the child and her portrait, claims problematically resembling slavery. If Sojourner Truth boldly filed a copyright in her own name, the 1863 copyright on these photographs is in the name of the child’s “redeemer,” Catherine S. Lawrence, who gave the fair-skinned little girl her surname (and also had her baptised by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother, Henry Ward Beecher). Catherine Lawrence had Fannie photographed at least a dozen times in a wide range of costumes and settings. Although most cartes show her lavishly dressed, one unusual example shows the little girl barefoot, as if in transition from her status as poor slave to affluent and “passing” adoptee. Like the word “redeem” itself, this carte de visite combines Christian, economic, and legal claims. Its extremely unusual copyright betrays the financial transaction that redefined the “redeemed” slave child as adoptee.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Captioned carte de visite of Frank, Frederick, and Alice 1865
On back: “The CHILDREN OF THE BATTLE FIELD. This is a copy of the Ferrotype found in the hands of Sergeant Humiston of the 154th N.Y. Volunteers as he lay dead on the Battle Field of Gettysburg. The copies are sold in furtherance of the National Sabbath School effort to found in Pennsylvania an Asylum for dependent Orphans of Soldiers; in memorial of our Perpetuated Union. Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown, 912-914 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia. This picture is private property, and can not be copied without wronging the Soldier’s Orphans for whom it is published. Philadelphia, Sept. 23, 1865. J. Frances Bourns.
As the text on the back of this card makes clear, this portrait of beloved offspring had initially been found without names on the body of an unidentified fallen soldier. The photograph was reproduced and circulated as a carte de visite in order to determine the soldier’s identity. This early form of mass communication ultimately worked and his family was found. Subsequently, new cartes de visite included the children’s names, Frank, Frederick, and Alice, and were circulated in order to raise money on behalf of a school for orphans.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Portrait of a Marshall Bachelder and Cornelia (Weatherby) Bachelder c. 1865 Tintype with hand-colouring 6 1/2 x 8 3/8 in. Courtesy Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
“Marshall Bachelder was born in Holly, Orleans, NY state, August 31, 1835, and died July 30, 1921. He came to Michigan at the age of 17 with his parents and settled on a farm in Greenbush township, Clinton County. He enlisted in the 8th Michigan Infantry in 1861 and served until the end of the war. He was married to Cornelia Weatherby in 1864, who survives him.” (as of 1921).
Cartes de visite were multiples and allowed sitters to share their portraits with others, sometimes sending them by mail. By contrast, tintypes were unique images like daguerreotypes, but far less expensive. This haunting hand-coloured tintype portrait of a couple contrasts a remarkably vivid young woman with a pale ghost-like soldier whose body, hair, and eyes have been drawn in. Whether his image was radically retouched in order to dress him in uniform is unclear from the photograph itself. Tintypes were made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal covered with a dark lacquer or enamel – they were unique direct images (no negatives were used).
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) The Innocent Cause of the War (stereo view detail) c. 1865 Courtesy of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby Stereo view
A Union soldier looks at a young black boy in tattered clothing leaning on a pole at left. The caption turns the boy into “the innocent cause” for which the Civil War was fought. Stereo views were two photographs made from slightly separated lenses, reproducing the two-and-one-half-inch distance between our eyes; when seen through a viewer, they suggest three-dimensional space. Fairly inexpensive, they were very popular from the Civil War era through the early twentieth century. Stereo views were collected by individuals, and they also served as educational tools in schools and libraries.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Carte de visite (Donation Cake) late-19th century Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Little is known about this Civil War carte de visite except that it commemorates fundraising, a bake sale from one hundred and fifty years ago.
Sayre and Chase (Newark, Ohio) Pro-Union carte de visite commemorating the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry and Generals Charles Robert Woods and William Burnham Woods c. 1865 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Most cartes de visite were portraits but some represented the war, depicting landscapes, battle sites, military prisons, and still lifes. This carte, made by Sayre and Chase of Newark, Ohio, displays the scarred battle flag of the 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry as well as a sword, scabbard, and officer’s sash hanging from a line perfunctorily stretched across the studio. Leaning against the floorboards are two large, framed albumen photographs of Union generals, Charles Robert Woods (at right), who organised the 76th Ohio, and his brother William Burnham Woods. Both survived the war, and astonishingly both became Supreme Court justices. Within this scene, the framed photographic portraits are not cartes de visite but larger prints deemed worthy of frames, not merely inclusion in an album. Photography’s registration of “what has been” (its indexicality) serves as a form of evidence: here scarred inanimate objects testify to the violence of war and connote both courage and suffering.
Text from the exhibition brochure
The 76th Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry (or 76th OVI) was an infantry regiment of the Union Army during the American Civil War. The regiment served in the Western Theater, primarily as part of the XV Corps in the Army of the Tennessee.
During its term of service, the 76th Regiment Ohio Volunteer Infantry participated in forty-four battles. While 270 men, including five officers, died from disease or accidents, an additional ninety-one men, including nine officers, received mortal wounds. Beyond these deaths, another 241 men suffered battlefield wounds but survived.
Charles Robert Woods (February 19, 1827 – February 26, 1885) was a career United States Army officer and a Union general during the American Civil War. He is noted for commanding the relief troops that first attempted to resupply Fort Sumter prior to the start of the conflict, and served with distinction during the war.
William Burnham Woods (August 3, 1824 – May 14, 1887) was a United States Circuit Judge and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court as well as an Ohio politician and soldier in the Civil War.
J.P. Soule (American, photographer) John Sowle (publisher) Captioned carte de visite (Emancipation) c. 1863 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, gift of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
The women abolitionists of Indiana who selected the costume Truth wears in the adjacent photograph (no. 5) may have been inspired by pictures of female personifications carrying flags. For example, this carte de visite, entitled Emancipation, personifies the nation as a white woman who wraps an immense flag around two kneeling slaves.
The printing press
During the Civil War, the printing press itself came to stand for the Republican cause. The printing of money was even represented in a number of cartes de visite. Rightly paranoid that his paper reproduction could be mistaken for a counterfeit bill despite its smaller size, the printer of the “Twenty-Dollar Bill” fills the card’s back with text establishing its credentials as an authorised – and copyrighted – “souvenir.”
In The Northern Star, four photographically reproduced, wrinkled one-dollar bills and one two-dollar bill rotate around the mirroring heads of Salmon Chase – Secretary of the Treasury, Republican, and abolitionist – and Abraham Lincoln. Between the two men’s heads at the centre of the card is a barely comprehensible poem that ends with the line: “And Chase the money makes you know.” In the spatial configuration of the image, Chase is the Northern Star, the moneymaker, yet the inverse is true as well: the money makes you know Chase. Each one-dollar bill spinning around the central axis features his profile portrait. By contrast The Southern Cross mocks the Confederacy for its lack of “change” to “meet their bills.”
Sojourner Truth was making a form of paper currency and her cheap paper notes, printed and reproduced in multiples, featured her portrait. This was no insignificant achievement. Like Chase she had put her face on paper that stood for economic value; like Chase she was publicising her self and her politics with her portrait. Truth had invented her own kind of paper money and for the same reasons as the Republican government: in order to produce wealth dependent on a consensus that representation produces material results, to make money where there was none, and to do so partly in order to abolish slavery.
Text from the exhibition brochure
Unknown photographer (American) Captioned carte de visite (Learning is Wealth. Wilson, Charley, Rebecca & Rosa, Slaves from New Orleans) c. 1864 Albumen print mounted on cardboard 4 x 2 1/2 in. Courtesy Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
Part of the fundraising series devoted to the freed slaves of New Orleans, this carte de visite poses the formerly enslaved adult Wilson Chinn reading to Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa, freed children. Especially poignant is another paler, most likely later version, in which the caption is misspelled as ‘Lerning is Wealth’. Wealth, the caption proposes, derives from literacy, not slavery. Other cartes de visite of Wilson Chinn emphasize his abuse under slavery, displaying menacing chains at his feet and branded letters on his forehead, his former owner’s initials: “V. B. M.” The letters on Chinn’s forehead turn him into surface on which is inscribed the literacy of others. In this carte Wilson’s head is turned so we do not see that the man who reads from a book is likewise inscribed as a text; none of the children look to the alternative printing on his forehead.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
BAMPFA is located at 2155 Center Street between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue, in downtown Berkeley Phone: (510) 642-0808
Exhibition dates: 3rd September – 1st October, 2016
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Drag queen wearing cut out dress 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 28.5 x 28.5cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
This end of (life) cycle is the last body of work that Polixeni Papapetrou will make. It is the completion of an imaginative, bold and strong body of work that stretches from the late 1980s through to this series, Eden. Papapetrou has remained true to her vision as an artist, one that documents performative identities within constructed landscapes.
In the series Eden Papapetrou again cleverly stitches together space and time: flowers stitched together in wreaths; prints of period dresses; and further prints in the backdrop made from postwar backcloth. This “fabrication” of the picture plane has been a constant throughout the artistic life of Papapetrou. If we look at the formal construction of an early work, Drag queen wearing cut out dress (1993, below), we can still see the same concerns for flattened perspective in this new series. The wrapping up of space (fabric, dress, flowers, body) in an intricately overlapping, planar field of view with no vanishing point.
The work desires to celebrate the beauty of nature and honour its transience through the symbology of beauty and death associated with flowers. But for me, the use of facsimiles or simulacra – prints of flowers on dresses and repeated patterns of flowers on cloth – diminishes the relationship between the sitters and the flowers, thus undermining the conceptualisation of the series. The sitter is no longer embedded in the cycles of life and, on this level, the work fails to engage with the idea of, how we are nature. The sitters exist in a masked reality (like the wreaths in front of the girls faces), which is a masquerade or act, a disguise which takes us away from our true being. As in much of Papapetrou’s work, camouflage – to hide or disguise the presence of (a person, animal, or object) – is to the fore, but this time these photographs fail to transcend their origins as studio set pieces.
Further, I have never been a great fan of “dead pan” photography and what I find curious here is the closed nature of the girls. They are stiff, focused inwards, looking off into nowhere. They don’t feel that they are in a state of reflection. For a series that seeks to show “the condition of becoming from childhood to adolescence to adulthood”, the photographs seem to lack the energy vital for such a journey. The exuberance of nature doesn’t seem to extend beyond the prints and flowers. As I said of her work in an earlier posting, “what springs to mind, with the use of masks to disguise youth positioned within the decorous landscape, is the notion of “passing”. Passing on (as in dying), passing through (as in travelling), in passing (as in an aside) and just “passing” (passing yourself off as someone or something else) to hide your true character or feelings.” Like a bower bird collecting colourful things for its nest, there are bits of all of that and more in this new series.
This is not my favourite body of Papapetrou’s work. No matter. What we should do is honour this talented and determined artist for creating memorable images over the years, for following her passion and her heart with courage and conviction. For the rest of my life I will always remember the spaces, the ambiguous vistas, the fantastical archetypes, the fables of her work. Images of drag queens and Dreamkeepers, Ghillies and goblins are etched in my memory. I will always remember them. You can’t ask much more from the work of an artist than that.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Poli and Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower – no soul but perfectly beautiful. Perhaps for my sins I shall be made a red geranium!”
Oscar Wilde
The loss of Eden is personally experienced by every one of us as we leave the wonder and magic and also the pain and terrors of childhood.
Dennis Potter
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Blinded 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni stitches space together in the same way that flowers are stitched together in a wreath – the one wand entwined within the space of the other – or vines or branches are woven on a trellis. The very word bower derives from a knot, a bow (as Shakespeare acknowledges with his ‘pleached bower’),[1] a tying together around an armature, where strands are interwoven, locked in, both strengthened and encumbered with their unity. They are ‘Together intertwin’d and trammel’d fresh’,[2] as the romantic poet Keats expressed it in his Endymion, a heady poem itself enmeshed with flowers and vine. In Polixeni’s photographs, however, the trammelled armature is the human herself…
In Eden, Polixeni weaves together much more than space but metaphor, metaphors of growth, nature, life-cycles, the sacred, the ideal; and even the all-over aesthetic field constitutes a kind of metaphor, the rhapsodic, the imaginary, the connected. The space that she has created is almost nothing but a metaphor, ‘her close and consecrated bower’;[13]…
Polixeni’s bower is fantastic in old and new ways: old, because it has forms of painting and sculpture within it where blooms and other plant-matter are brought together; and new because they gesture to a place so far beyond the studio…
This exclusivity along gender lines, like the image of the unicorn in the garden of a virgin, is also metaphoric: it stands for the preserve of the individual, the quintessentially safe place that is the interior, the inner realm of thought, the preserve of an unaffected psyche, an emotional haven, a bower of immanence. It has love in it, but deferred, otherworldly, imaginary and eternal.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Delphi 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
The name Delphoi comes from the same root as δελφύς delphys, “womb” and may indicate archaic veneration of Gaia… In Greek mythology, Gaia (/ˈɡeɪ.ə/ or /ˈɡaɪ.ə/ from Ancient Greek Γαῖα, a poetical form of Γῆ Gē, “land” or “earth”) also spelled Gaea, is the personification of the Earthand one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother of all life: the primal Mother Earthgoddess.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Heart 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Flora 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
In Roman mythology, Flora (Latin: Flōra) was a Sabine-derived goddess of flowersand of the season of spring – a symbol for nature and flowers (especially the may-flower). While she was otherwise a relatively minor figure in Roman mythology, being one among several fertility goddesses, her association with the spring gave her particular importance at the coming of springtime,as did her role as goddess of youth. Her name is derived from the Latin word “flos” which means “flower”. In modern English, “Flora” also means the plants of a particular region or period.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Psyche 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Psyche (/ˈsaɪkiː/, Greek: Ψυχή, “Soul” or “Breath of Life”). The basic meaning of the Greek word ψυχή (psūkhē) was “life” in the sense of “breath”, formed from the verb ψύχω (psukhō, “to blow”). Derived meanings included “spirit”, “soul”, “ghost”, and ultimately “self” in the sense of “conscious personality” or “psyche … Portrayals of Psyche alone are often not confined to illustrating a scene from Apuleius, but may draw on the broader Platonic tradition in which Love was a force that shaped the self.
Colourful, abundant and compelling, Polixeni Papapetrou’s new series Eden arose out of a commission by the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) in Melbourne to create works in response to the Melbourne General Cemetery. Papapetrou, photographed flowers obtained from the cemetery against a black backdrop to invoke ideas about mourning and remembrance. For Papapetrou, whose own plot is in the cemetery, and who, through illness, has faced her own mortality, it was a challenging and thought provoking assignment.
The commission led Papapetrou to delve into the language of flowers. The history of art is replete with images of flowers and they have a rich metaphorical resonance. In true Papapetrou spirit, what she has created in Eden, following on from the CCP work, is positive, philosophical and beautiful. Eden invites us to celebrate the beauty of nature and honour its transience. We, like flowers, are subject to seasons of growth, blossoming, and wilting. The young women in the photographs, in the Springtime of their lives, are surrounded by flowers; on backdrops, on dresses; held or worn, they adorn and overrun them. The lush colours and patterns are interrupted only by the faces and arms of the sitters, their expressions solemn and thoughtful, in contrast to the extravagance of the blooms.
Papapetrou has returned to photograph these subjects, including her daughter Olympia, at different stages of their lives. Eden uses the language of flowers to explore life itself, reflecting on the young womens’ metamorphosis from child to adolescent and adolescent to adult, and a oneness with the world, fertility and the cycles of life. They are enclosed in a floral embrace that symbolises their unity and acceptance of this miraculous thing we call life.
In addition to Eden, we will also exhibit a small selection of Papapetrou’s early Phantomwise works. These large-scale black and white photographs feature her young daughter Olympia between the ages of four and six wearing Victorian masks and performing various identities. As with Eden, these early works consider the potential for metamorphosis and the ambiguity between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’, an ambiguity inherent in photography itself.
Press release from Stills Gallery
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Amaranthine 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
The word is taken from ancient Greek and means everlasting or immortal (the same as the amaranth flower)
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Amaryllus 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Eden 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Traditionally, the favoured derivation of the name “Eden” was from the Akkadian edinnu, derived from a Sumerian word meaning “plain” or “steppe”. Eden is now believed to be more closely related to an Aramaic root word meaning “fruitful, well-watered.” The Hebrew term is translated as “pleasure” in Sarah’s secret saying in Genesis 18:12
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Rhodora 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Ralph Waldo Emerson (American, 1803-1882) “The Rhodora” from Poems 1847
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Spring 2016 From the series Eden Pigment print 127.3 x 85cm Courtesy of the artist and STILLS Gallery, Sydney
Exhibition dates: 17th June – 25th September, 2016
Curator: Julian Cox
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-portrait, Chicago 1965/1995 Gelatin silver print montage Image: 31.2 x 27.8cm (12 1/4 x 10 15/16 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
This man is a living legend. What a strong body of socially conscious work he has produced over a long period of time. Each series proposes further insight into the human condition – and adds ‘value’ to series that have gone before. It is a though the artist possesses the intuition for a good story and the imagination to photograph it to best advantage, building the story over multiple encounters and contexts to form a thematic whole.
In a press release for a currently showing parallel exhibition titled Journey at Edwynn Houk Gallery the text states, “Continuing in the tradition of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Lyon forged a new style of realistic photography, described as “New Journalism,” where the photographer immerses himself in his subject’s world.” This reference to immersion is reinforced by the second quotation below, where “the power of Lyon’s work has often derived from his willingness of immerse himself entirely in the cultures and communities he documents.”
While the observation is correct that the artist immerses himself in the cultures and communities he documents, this is different to the tradition of Robert Frank and to a lesser extent, Walker Evans. Frank was a Swiss man who imaged his impressions of America on a road trip across the country. His “photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society” which pictured the culture as both alienating and strange, “skeptical of contemporary values and evocative of ubiquitous loneliness”. This is why The Americans had so much power and caused so much consternation when it was first released in 1959 in America, for it held up a mirror to an insular society, one not used to looking at itself especially from the position of an “outsider” – where the tone of the book was perceived as derogatory to national ideals – and it didn’t like what it saw. The American Walker Evans was also an outsider photographing outsiders, journeying through disparate towns and communities documenting his impressions how I can I say, subjectively with an objective focus, at one and the same time. He never immersed himself in the culture but was an active observer and documenter, never an insider.
Lyon was one of the first “embedded” social documentary photographers of the American street photography movement of the 1960s who had the free will and the social conscience to tell it like it is. His self-proclaimed “advocacy journalism” is much more than just advocacy / journalism. It is a vitality of being, of spirit, an inquiry of the mind that allows the artist to get close, both physically and emotionally, to the problems of others through becoming one with them – and then to picture that so that others can see their story, so that he can “change history and preserve humanity.” But, we must acknowledge, that humanity is mainly (good looking) males: outlaw motorcycle clubs, mainly male prisons, mainly male civil rights, tattoo shops, and male Uptown, Chicago. Women are seemingly reduced to bit-players at best, singular portraits or standing in the background at funerals. This is a man’s world and you better not forget it…
Having said that, can you imagine living the life, spending four years as a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. How exhilarating, how enmeshed with the culture you would become – the people, the travel, the ups and downs, the life, the danger – and then when you get photographs like Funny Sonny Packing with Zipco, Milwaukee (1966, below) with the manic look in Funny Sonny’s eyes, how your heart would sing. If I had to nominate one image that is for me the epitome of America in the 1960s it would be this: Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville (1966, below): all Easy Rider (an 1969 American road movie) encapsulated in one image. The structure and modernism / of the two bridges frames / the speeding / wicked bike / helmet lodged over the headlight; the man / wearing a skull and crossbones emblazoned jacket / helmet-less / head turned / behind / hair flying in the wind / not looking where / he is going / as though his destiny: unknown.
Danny Lyon IS one of the great artists working in photography today. He is a rebel with his own cause. Through his vital and engaging images his message to the future is this: everyone has their own story, their own trials and tribulations, each deserving of empathy, compassion, and non-judgemental acceptance. Prejudice has no voice here, a lesson never more pertinent than for America today as it decides who to elect – a woman who has fought every inch of the way or a narcissistic megalomaniac who preaches hate to minorities.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Whitney Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Closeness, both physical and emotional, is a recurring theme throughout the 175 works in “Message to the Future,” Lyon’s Whitney Museum retrospective, a quietly brilliant affair curated with panache by Julian Cox. (Later this year, the show will travel to the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco, which organized it; Elisabeth Sussman oversaw the Whitney installation.) We see here a photographer who was witness to a changing America and, occasionally, other places in the world. Since the early ’60s, Lyon has been infiltrating outsider groups – talking to and photographing bikers, Texas prison inmates, and hippies, and learning from them by becoming close with them. It’s as if Lyon has no sense of personal space. That, as this revelatory show proves, is his greatest attribute…
Lyon is a deft stylist who cares deeply about his subjects, to the point of exchanging letters with them for years after taking their pictures. What results is something more intimate, more political, and, in some ways, better than traditional photojournalism – a fuller portrait of America since the ’60s.”
“Self-taught, and driven by his twin passions for social change and the medium of photography, the power of Lyon’s work has often derived from his willingness of immerse himself entirely in the cultures and communities he documents. This was evident early on in his series ‘Bikeriders’ (1968; reissued in 2003 by Chronicle Books), which evolved from four years spent as a member of the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club. And ‘Conversations with the Dead’ derived from his close study of the Texas prison system; it also revealed Lyon’s novel and distinctive approach to the photobook, which often sees him splicing images with texts drawn from various sources, including interviews, letters, and even fiction.”
Text from the Edwynn Houk Gallery website [Online] Cited 21/09/2016. No longer available online
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait, New Orleans, 1964 1964 Gelatin silver print 18.2 x 12.2cm (7 3/16 x 4 13/16 in.) Collection of the artist
In his 1981 book, “Danny Lyon: Pictures From the New World,” he wrote of starting out in the early ’60s. “Photography then seemed new and exciting, and all America, which I regarded with mystery and reverence, lay before me.”
That sense of newness and excitement fills the show. What we’re discovering now, Lyon was discovering then – not just seeing or observing, but discovering, with the sense of revelation that brings. Mystery and reverence are here, too, but complicatedly. Framing them – debating with them? – are the clarity of precision the camera affords and a skepticism born of a forthrightly ’60s sensibility. Several photographs of the Occupy movement attest to how vigorous that sensibility remains…
He was working as a documentarian but not a photojournalist. That’s an important distinction. These images are implicitly polemical – inevitably polemical, too. Rarely in our nation’s history has the distinction between what’s right and what’s wrong been as clear cut. Yet then as now, people matter more to Lyon than any ideological stance. Outsiders attract Lyon and populate the show: civil rights demonstrators, transgender people (in Galveston, Texas, of all places), lower Manhattan demolition crews, inmates, undocumented workers, Indians, Appalachian whites transplanted to Chicago, motorcycle gangs…
Enclosure and entrapment are not for Lyon – nor, for that matter, is the absence of people (a very rare condition in his work). A larger restlessness in Lyon’s career reflects the energy so often evident within the frame – within the frame being another form of enclosure and entrapment. The South, Chicago, lower Manhattan, Texas, New Mexico, China, Haiti, Latin America share space in the show. Even so, sense of place doesn’t signify as much for Lyon as a sense of a place’s inhabitants. More likely he’d say that the two are indistinguishable. Looking at his pictures, you can see why he’d think so.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Arrest of Eddie Brown, Albany, Georgia 1962 Gelatin silver print Image: 22 x 31.7cm (8 5/8 x 12 1/2 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Eddie Brown former gang leader and movement activist is arrested.
“The first sit-in arrests I see and photograph are those of Eddie Brown, a former Albany gang leader, and a visitor from the North. Both have volunteered to be arrested for the photographs. The picture of Eddie Brown, calmly being carried off by the Albany police, is widely distributed as the image of the classic non-violent arrest, Georgia.”
~ Danny Lyon
“Eddie Charles Brown, Jr., a great-souled human being committed to fighting the oppression of all people from Mississippi to South Africa, died at his home on November 23, 2011. In political circles, Ed was respected for his enduring commitment to our people. As a consequence of his tireless devotion to, and success in advancing the culture and economic progress of poor black folk, Ed Brown was widely recognised as among the most, incorruptible, responsible, resourceful and effective of the activist leaders of the Movement. As his SNCC colleagues said of him, “More than most, Ed’s life embodies and exemplifies to a remarkable degree, the principle of undying love for our people both here and in the Motherland.” …
A native of Louisiana, Ed was born on August 19, 1941, in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge to Thelma Warren and Eddie Charles Brown, Sr. Ed’s historical efforts to fight segregation and all forms of oppression as well as to empower Black people started in 1960 as a young student at Louisiana’s Southern University. He and 16 other classmates confronted the University and staged a sit-in protesting the racial segregation prevalent in Louisiana at the time. After he and the others were arrested, expelled and banned from enrolling in any university in Louisiana Ed began the ongoing struggle for justice, which would define his entire life. This expulsion led Ed to Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1961, where he landed on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement. Ed was an active member of the Nonviolent Action Group, the SNCC affiliate at Howard.
As a leader and field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) he fought to win constitutional rights for Blacks and all disenfranchised people. Ed always proclaimed that he was “fighting fire with a feather,” but he knew he would prevail because he often said, ironically, he was protected by “asbestos gloves.””
The most comprehensive retrospective of the work of American photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon in twenty-five years debuts at the Whitney on June 17, 2016. The first major photography exhibition to be presented in the Museum’s downtown home, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is organised by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it will make its West Coast debut at the de Young Museum on November 5, 2016. The exhibition assembles approximately 175 photographs and is the first to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker. The presentation also includes a rare look at works from Lyon’s archives, including vintage prints, unseen 16mm film footage made inside Texas prisons, and his personal photo albums. A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice.
Photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon (b. 1942) has over the past five decades presented a charged alternative to the sanitised vision of American life presented in the mass media. Throughout, he has rejected the standard detached humanism of the traditional documentary approach in favour of a more immersive, complicated involvement with his subjects. “You put a camera in my hand,” he has explained, “I want to get close to people. Not just physically close, emotionally close, all of it.” In the process he has made several iconic bodies of work, which have not only pictured recent history but helped to shape it.
Lyon committed intensively to photography from the beginning. In 1962, while still a student at the University of Chicago, he hitchhiked to the segregated South to make a photographic record of the civil rights movement. He went on to photograph biker subcultures, explore the lives of the incarcerated, and document the architectural transformation of Lower Manhattan. He has travelled to Latin America and China, and has lived for years in New Mexico; the work he has made throughout these journeys demonstrates his respect for the people he photographs on the social and cultural margins.
Message to the Future, shaped in collaboration with the artist, incorporates seldom-exhibited materials from Lyon’s archive, including rare vintage prints, previously unseen 16mm film footage made inside the Texas prisons, his personal photo albums, and related documents and ephemera. In his roles as a photographer, filmmaker, and writer, Lyon has reinvented the expectations for how the still photographic image can be woven together with journalism, books, films, and collage to present a diverse record of social customs and human behaviour. His work, which he continues to make today, reveals a restless idealist, digging deep into his own life and those of his subjects to uncover the political in the personal and the personal in the political.
Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art
Civil rights
In the summer of 1962, Lyon hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, to witness demonstrations and a speech by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the most important organisations driving the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. Inspired to see the making of history firsthand, Lyon then headed to the South to participate in and photograph the civil rights movement. There, SNCC executive director James Forman recruited Lyon to be the organisation’s first official photographer, based out of its Atlanta headquarters. Traveling throughout the South with SNCC, Lyon documented sit-ins, marches, funerals, and violent clashes with the police, often developing his negatives quickly in makeshift darkrooms.
Lyon’s photographs were used in political posters, brochures, and leaflets produced by SNCC to raise money and recruit workers to the movement. Julian Bond, the communications director of SNCC, wrote of Lyon’s pictures, “They put faces on the movement, put courage in the fearful, shone light on darkness, and helped make the movement move.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Sit-In, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 24cm (6 3/8 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) The Leesburg Stockade, Leesburg, Georgia 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.5 x 26cm (6 7/8 x 10 3/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Abernathy, Shuttlesworth (SCLC), King and Wilkinson (NAACP) 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Voting Rights Demonstration, Organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Selma, Alabama October 7, 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.3 x 26.8cm (7 3/16 x 10 9/16 in.) Sheet: 27.8 x 35.4cm (10 15/16 x 13 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Sheriff Jim Clark Arresting Demonstrators, Selma, Alabama October 7, 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.4 x 27cm (7 1/4 x 10 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.8 x 35.4cm (10 15/16 x 13 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased with funds from the Photography Committee
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Stokely Carmichael, Confrontation with National Guard, Cambridge, Maryland 1964 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.5 x 22.2cm (6 1/2 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; purchase with funds from Joan N. Whitcomb
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Woman Holds Off a Mob, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Bob Dylan behind the SNCC office, Greenwood, Mississippi 1963 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Arrest of Taylor Washington, Atlanta 1963 Gelatin silver print 24 x 16cm (9 7/16 x 6 1/4 in.) Collection of the artist
Atlanta, Georgia. High school student Taylor Washington is arrested at Lebs Delicatessen. His eighth arrest.
“One of Taylor Washington’s numerous arrests is immortalised as he yells while passing before me. The photograph became the cover of SNCC’s photo book, The Movement, and was reproduced in the former Soviet Union in Pravda, captioned “Police Brutality USA.””
~ Danny Lyon
The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s was a widespread effort to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans. News coverage of sit-ins and freedom rides dominated the cultural and political landscape of the United States. At this time Danny Lyon was in his early 20s and an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. After meeting John Lewis, the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’s) in Cairo, Illinois, Lyon then traveled to Mississippi, to cover voter registrations, and soon he was present at almost all of the major SNCC events during the movement. Lyon served as SNCC’s photographer from 1962 to 1964 and later documented his experiences in his book Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Text from the Minneapolis Institute of Art Collection website
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) The March on Washington August 28, 1963 Gelatin silver print 29.8 x 20.8cm (11 3/4 x 8 3/16 in.) Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Anne Ehrenkranz
Galveston
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Pumpkin and Roberta, Galveston, Texas 1967 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.8 x 16.1cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Prisons
In 1967, Lyon applied to the Texas Department of Corrections for access to the state prisons. Dr. George Beto, then director of the prisons, granted Lyon the right to move freely among the various prison units, which he photographed and filmed extensively over a fourteen-month period. The result is a searing record of the Texas penal system and, symbolically, of incarceration everywhere.
Lyon’s aim was to “make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be in reality.” This meant riding out to the fields to follow prisoners toiling in the sun, as well as visiting the Wynne Treatment Centre, which housed primarily convicts with mental disabilities. He befriended many of the prisoners, listening to their stories and finding the humanity in their experiences, and still maintains contact with some of them.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Weight Lifters, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 22.4 x 33.2cm (8 7/8 x 13 1/16 in.) Sheet: 27.7 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) New Arrivals from Corpus Christi, The Walls, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.4 x 32cm (8 7/16 x 12 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Contents of Arriving Prisoner’s Wallet, Diagnostic Unit, The Walls, Huntsville, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.3 x 17.5cm (9 9/16 x 6 3/4 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Six-Wing Cell Block, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 x 24cm (6 5/16 x 9 7/16 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Charlie Lowe, Ellis Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.2 x 23.8cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Shakedown, Ellis Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print 21.6 x 31.3cm (8 1/2 x 12 1/4 in.) Museum of Modern Art, New York; purchase
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Shakedown, Ramsey Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 17 x 24.2cm (6 5/8 x 9 9/16 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Convict With a Bag of Cotton, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Two Inmates, Goree Unit, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.8 x 24cm (6 5/8 x 9 91/6 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
The destruction of Lower Manhattan
In late 1966 and into the summer of 1967, starting from his loft at the corner of Beekman and William Streets near City Hall Park, Lyon documented the demolition of some sixty acres of predominantly nineteenth-century buildings below Canal Street in lower Manhattan. With funding from the New York State Council on the Arts, he photographed most of the buildings that would be torn down to make way for the World Trade Center. Lyon recalled later: “I wanted to inhabit [the buildings] with feelings and give them and their demise a meaning.”
Moving from the outside of the buildings to their deserted interiors, Lyon also took pictures of the workers involved in the demolition. The photographs, together with Lyon’s journal entries, became a book, published by Macmillan in 1969 and dedicated to his close friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero. The volume’s significance lies in part in its depiction of a city – and, more broadly, a culture – cannibalising its own architectural history for the sake of development.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) View South from 100 Gold Street, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 18.3 x 18.2cm (7 1/4 x 7 3/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait in Susquehanna Hotel, Third-Floor Room with Grass, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 18.2 x 18.2cm (7 3/16 x 7 3/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Ruins of 100 Gold Street, New York 1967 Gelatin silver print 23.6 x 23.4cm (9 5/16 x 10 7/16 in.) Collection of Melissa Schiff Soros and Robert Soros
The Bikeriders
Lyon purchased his first motorcycle – a 1953 Triumph TR6 – in 1962, after spending weekends watching college friend and motorcycle racer Frank Jenner compete at informal dirt track races across the Midwest. When he returned to Chicago in 1965 after leaving SNCC, Lyon joined the hard-riding, hard-drinking Chicago Outlaws Motorcycle Club and began making photographs with a goal to “record and glorify the life of the American bike rider.” With clubs like the Hells Angels making headlines for their criminal and vigilante activities at the time, bike riders were simultaneously feared for their anarchism and romanticised for their independence.
Riding with the Outlaws, Lyon attempted to capture their way of life from the inside out. Their unapologetic pursuit of freedom and libertine pleasures compelled him to get close to them as people. Lyon’s images are intimate and familiar, whether taken during rides or at clubhouse meetings. He also used a tape recorder to document the bikers speaking for themselves, unobtrusively capturing their collective voice. The resulting photographs were gathered into the now classic book of the same name, published in 1968, combining his pictures with an edited transcription of the interviews.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Racer, Schererville, Indiana 1965 Gelatin silver print 13.9 x 20.3cm (5 1/2 x 8 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville 1966 Gelatin silver print 20.3 x 31.8cm (8 x 12 1/2 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Route 12, Wisconsin 1963 Gelatin silver print 15.6 x 23.8cm (6 1/8 x 9 1/8 in.) Silverman Museum Collection
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Sparky and Cowboy, Schererville, Indiana 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 23.9cm (6 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Untitled (Close Up of Cal on the Road) 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Renegade’s funeral, Detroit 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Funny Sonny Packing with Zipco, Milwaukee 1966 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Kathy, Chicago 1965 (printed 1966) Gelatin silver print 25.8 x 25.5cm (10 1/8 x 10 1/16 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Cal on the Springfield Run, Illinois 1966 (printed 2003) Cibachrome print Image: 22.8 x 32.5cm (9 x 13 1/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Cowboy, Rogue’s Picnic, Chicago 1966 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.5 x 15.9cm (9 1/4 x 6 1/4 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Benny, Grand and Division, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print 24.5 x 17.2cm (9 5/8 x 6 3/4 in.) Collection of the artist
New Mexico and the West
Lyon headed west from New York in 1969. Tired of the hectic pace of the big city and in search of new surroundings, he settled in Sandoval County, New Mexico. He developed a great admiration for the region’s close knit communities of Native Americans and Chicanos. Lyon’s photographs and, increasingly, his films reflected his growing understanding of the cross-cultural flow between these disparate groups and how they interacted with the geography of the Southwest.
With the help of his good friend, a migrant labourer named Eduardo Rivera Marquez, Lyon built a traditional adobe home for his family in Bernalillo, in the Rio Grande Valley just north of Albuquerque. As Lyon’s family grew, his children also became a frequent subject, often depicted against the dramatic Western landscape. Though Lyon moved back to New York in 1980, New Mexico would remain a centre of gravity for the artist, who returned every summer with his family to photograph and make films.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Eddie, New Mexico 1972 Gelatin silver print Image: 23 x 34.5cm (9 x 13 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Navajo Boy, Gallup, New Mexico 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.3 x 33.8cm (9 1/8 x 13 5/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Maricopa County, Arizona 1977 Gelatin silver print Image: 22.8 x 33.5cm (9 x 13 3/16 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Stephanie, Sandoval County, New Mexico 1969/1975 Gelatin silver print (decorated) Image: 16.7 x 25cm (6 9/16 x 9 3/4 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Paso, Texas 1975 (printed 2015) Pigmented inkjet print Image: 27.9 x 40.6cm (11 x 16 in.) Sheet: 33 x 45.7cm (13 x 18 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Paso, Texas 1975
Films and montages
Lyon started making 16mm films in earnest in the 1970s, focusing on marginalised communities and injustice as he had in his photographs. His subjects included Colombian street kids in Los Niños Abandonados (1975) and undocumented workers from Mexico in El Mojado (1974) and El Otro Lado (1978). Lyon has explained that after leaving the Texas prisons he struggled to move forward, feeling that there were “no more worlds to conquer” in creating photography books. Filmmaking became the means by which he could continue to make sense of the beauty and inequality he saw in the world around him.
Lyon did not give up photography completely, however. He turned to assembling family albums and creating collaged works that he describes as montages, referencing the filmmaking practice of juxtaposing disparate images to form a continuous whole. Lyon’s montages combine multiple images and materials sourced from his archives. Initially meant as vehicles for reflection and, in the case of the albums, as family heirlooms, these deeply personal works bridge past generations of his family with his present.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Los Niños Abandonados 1975
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Mojado 1974 New Mexico, colour, 14 minutes [The Wetback] English and Spanish with subtitles A portrait of a hard-working undocumented labourer from Mexico produced by J.J. Meeker
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) El Otro Lado 1978 Mexico and Arizona, colour, 60 minutes [The Other Side] Spanish with English subtitles An honest film infused with poignant beauty, without political rhetoric
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Dear Mark 1981, New York and France, colour and b&w, 15 minutes A comedy in which the artist’s voice has been replaced by Gene Autry’s Lyon’s homage to his friend, sculptor Mark di Suvero, from footage shot in 1965 and 1975.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Soc Sci 127 1969 Houston, color and b&w, 21 minutes A comedy – Danny Lyon’s first film with the late great Bill Sanders and his “painless” tattoo shop.
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Willie 1985 New Mexico, color, b&w, 82 minutes Willie is a realistic film made in Bernalillo, home of Willie Jaramillo and filmmakers Danny and Nancy Weiss Lyon Defiantly individual and implacable in the face of authority, Willie is repeatedly thrown into jail for relatively minor offences. The filmmakers gain access to jail cells, day rooms, lunatic wards, and the worst cellblock in the penitentiary where Willie is locked up next to his childhood friend and convicted murderer, Michael Guzman.
Knoxville
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Knoxville 1967 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Knoxville, Tennessee 1967 Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Leslie, Downtown Knoxville 1967 Gelatin silver print Image: 28.7 x 19.1cm (11 1/4 x 7 1/2 in.) Mount: 56.2 x 45.7cm (22 1/8 x 18 in.) Art Institute of Chicago; gift of Mr. Danny Lyon
Tattoo
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Bill Sanders, Tattoo Artist, Houston, Texas 1968 Gelatin silver print Image: 20.7 x 20.7cm (8 3/16 x 8 3/16 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
Chicago
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Two youths in Uptown, Chicago, Illinois, a neighborhood of poor white southerners 1974
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Children at an apartment entrance 1965 From series Uptown, Chicago Gelatin silver print
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Kathy, Uptown, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 23.9cm (9 1/2 x 9 3/8 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Uptown, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.4 x 16.4cm (6 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.) Mount: 50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.) Collection of the artist
New York
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Subway, New York 1966 (printed 2015) Pigmented inkjet print Image: 23.7 x 24.1cm (9 5/16 x 9 1/2 in.) Sheet: 28.8 x 29.2cm (11 5/16 x 11 1/2 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Self-Portrait in Mary Frank’s Bathroom, New York 1969 Gelatin silver print Image: 15.6 x 23.5cm (6 1/8 x 9 1/4 in.) Sheet: 20.3 x 25.2cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from Joanna Leonhardt Casullo, Niko Elmaleh, Lauren DePalo, Julia Macklowe, and Fern Kaye Tessler
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) John Lennon and Danny Seymour, The Bowery, New York 1969 (printed c. 2005) Gelatin silver print, printed later Image: 22.3 x 33.3cm (8 13/16 x 13 1/8 in.) Sheet: 27.6 x 35.4cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Mark di Suvero and Danny Lyon, Hyde Park, Chicago 1965 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.9 x 16.2cm (9 3/8 x 6 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.) Collection of the artist
Colombia
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Mary, Santa Marta, Colombia 1972 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.1 x 25.3cm (6 3/4 x 10 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Tesca, Cartagena, Colombia 1966 (printed 2008) Cibachrome print Image: 25.7 x 25.7cm (10 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.) Sheet: 35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.) Collection of the artist
The most comprehensive retrospective of the work of American photographer, filmmaker, and writer Danny Lyon in twenty-five years debuted at the Whitney on June 17, 2016. The first major photography exhibition to be presented in the Museum’s downtown home, Danny Lyon: Message to the Future is organised by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where it will make its West Coast debut at the de Young Museum on November 5, 2016.
The exhibition assembles approximately 175 photographs and is the first to assess the artist’s achievements as a filmmaker as well as a photographer. The presentation also includes many objects that have seldom or never been exhibited before and offers a rare look at works from Lyon’s archives, including vintage prints, unseen 16mm film footage made inside Texas prisons, and his personal photo albums.
A leading figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon has distinguished himself by the personal intimacy he establishes with his subjects and the inventiveness of his practice. With his ability to find beauty in the starkest reality, Lyon has presented a charged alternative to the vision of American life presented in the mass media. Throughout, he has rejected the traditional documentary approach in favour of a more immersive, complicated involvement with his subjects. “You put a camera in my hand,” he has explained, “I want to get close to people. Not just physically close, emotionally close, all of it.” In the process he has made several iconic bodies of work, which have not only pictured recent history, but helped to shape it.
“We are delighted to partner with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on Danny Lyon: Message to the Future,” stated Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. “Since the early 1960s, Lyon’s photographs and films have upturned conventional notions of American life. The Whitney has long championed Lyon’s work and we are thrilled to present this retrospective, which encompasses more than half a century of important work.”
In 1962, while still a student at the University of Chicago, Lyon hitchhiked to the segregated South to make a photographic record of the Civil Rights movement. His other projects have included photographing biker subcultures, exploring the lives of individuals in prison, and documenting the architectural transformation of Lower Manhattan. Lyon has lived for years in New Mexico, and his commitment to personal adventure has taken him to Mexico and other countries in Latin America, China, and the less-traveled parts of the American West.
“Danny Lyon is one of the great artists working in photography today,” said Julian Cox, Founding Curator of Photography for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and Chief Curator at the de Young Museum. “Lyon’s dedication to his art and his conviction to produce work underpinned by strong ethical and ideological motivations sets him apart from many of his peers.
Press release from the Whitney Museum of American Art
Ongoing activism
Lyon’s first encounter with Latin America was through a trip to Colombia in February 1966, during which he photographed extensively in and around Cartagena. In the 1970s and 1980s, Lyon’s self-described “advocacy journalism” took him to Bolivia, where he captured the hard lives of rural miners; Mexico, where he photographed undocumented workers moving back and forth across the U.S. – Mexico border; back to Colombia, where he made the film Los Niños Abandonados, chronicling the lives of street children; and to Haiti, where he witnessed firsthand the violent revolution overthrowing Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship.
More recently, Lyon made six trips between 2005 and 2009 to Shanxi province in northeast China. Aided by a guide, he photographed the people living in this highly polluted coal-producing region. As in his work in the civil rights movement and the Texas prisons, Lyon’s photographs from his travels are examples of his advocacy journalism, part of his effort to “change history and preserve humanity.”
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Port-au-Prince, Haiti February 7, 1986 Gelatin silver print Image: 21.3 x 32.1cm (8 3/8 x 12 5/8 in.) Sheet: 27.9 x 35.6cm (11 x 14 in.) Collection of the artist
Occupy
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Occupy Demonstration on Broadway, Los Angeles 2011 Inkjet print Image: 24.5 x 32.9cm (9 5/8 x 12 15/16 in.) Sheet: 32.7 x 40cm (13 x 15 3/4 in.) Collection of the artist
Danny Lyon (American, b. 1942) Occupy Oakland, City Hall, Oakland 2011 Pigmented inkjet print Image: 24.6 x 33cm (9 3/4 x 13 in.) Sheet: 27.3 x 38cm (10 3/4 x 15 in.) Collection of the artist
Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 Phone: (212) 570-3600
Curators: Dr Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915 at Tate Britain, and Dr Hope Kingsley, Curator, Education and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography, with Tim Batchelor, Assistant Curator at Tate Britain
Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) Haymaker with Rake c. 1888, published 1890 From Pictures of East Anglian Life portfolio Photogravure on paperImage: 277 x 196mm Victoria and Albert Museum Gift from the photographer
An interesting concept for an exhibition. I would have liked to have seen the exhibition to make a more informed comment. Parallels can be drawn, but how much import you put on the connection is up to you vis-à-vis the aesthetic feeling and formal construction of each medium. It is fascinating to note how many of the original art works are photographs with the painting following at a later date, or vice versa. Photographically, Julia Margaret Cameron and John Cimon Warburg are the stars.
Photographs have always been used by artists as aide-mémoire since the birth of photograph. Eugené Atget called his photographs of Paris “Documents pour artistes”, declaring his modest ambition to create images for other artists to use as source material … but I take that statement with a pinch of salt. Perhaps a salt print from a calotype paper negative!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Tate for allowing me to publish the art work and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tate Britain presents the first major exhibition to celebrate the spirited conversation between early photography and British art. It brings together photographs and paintings including Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic and British impressionist works. Spanning 75 years across the Victorian and Edwardian ages, the exhibition opens with the experimental beginnings of photography in dialogue with painters such as J.M.W. Turner and concludes with its flowering as an independent international art form.
Stunning works by John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, JAM Whistler, John Singer Sargent and others will for the first time be shown alongside ravishing photographs by pivotal early photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron, which they inspired and which inspired them.
John Everett Millais (English, 1829-1896) The Woodman’s Daughter 1850-51 Oil paint on canvas 889 x 648mm Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Proserpine 1874 Oil on canvas Support: 1251 x 610mm Frame: 1605 x 930 x 85mm Presented by W. Graham Robertson 1940
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (American born England, 1869-1933) The Odor of Pomegranates 1899, published 1901 Photogravure on paper Tate
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (American born England, 1869-1933)
Zaida Ben-Yusuf (21 November 1869 – 27 September 1933) was a New York-based portrait photographer noted for her artistic portraits of wealthy, fashionable, and famous Americans of the turn of the 19th-20th century. She was born in London to a German mother and an Algerian father, but became a naturalised American citizen later in life. In 1901 the Ladies Home Journal featured her in a group of six photographers that it dubbed, “The Foremost Women Photographers in America.” In 2008, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibition dedicated solely to Ben-Yusuf’s work, re-establishing her as a key figure in the early development of fine art photography…
In 1896, Ben-Yusuf began to be known as a photographer. In April 1896, two of her pictures were reproduced in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, and another study was exhibited in London as part of an exhibition put on by The Linked Ring. She travelled to Europe later that year, where she met with George Davison, one of the co-founders of The Linked Ring, who encouraged her to continue her photography. She exhibited at their annual exhibitions until 1902.
In the spring of 1897, Ben-Yusuf opened her portrait photography studio at 124 Fifth Avenue, New York. On 7 November 1897, the New York Daily Tribune ran an article on Ben-Yusuf’s studio and her work creating advertising posters, which was followed by another profile in Frank Leslie’s Weekly on 30 December. Through 1898, she became increasingly visible as a photographer, with ten of her works in the National Academy of Design-hosted 67th Annual Fair of the American Institute, where her portrait of actress Virginia Earle won her third place in the Portraits and Groups class. During November 1898, Ben-Yusuf and Frances Benjamin Johnston held a two-woman show of their work at the Camera Club of New York.
In 1899, Ben-Yusuf met with F. Holland Day in Boston, and was photographed by him. She relocated her studio to 578 Fifth Avenue, and exhibited in a number of exhibitions, including the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon. She was also profiled in a number of publications, including an article on female photographers in The American Amateur Photographer, and a long piece in The Photographic Times in which Sadakichi Hartmann described her as an “interesting exponent of portrait photography”.
1900 saw Ben-Yusuf and Johnston assemble an exhibition on American women photographers for the Universal Exposition in Paris. Ben-Yusuf had five portraits in the exhibition, which travelled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, D.C. She was also exhibited in Holland Day’s exhibition, The New School of American Photography, for the Royal Photographic Society in London, and had four photographs selected by Alfred Stieglitz for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901, Scotland.
In 1901, Ben-Yusuf wrote an article, “Celebrities Under the Camera”, for the Sunday Evening Post, where she described her experiences with her sitters. By this stage she had photographed Grover Cleveland, Franklin Roosevelt, and Leonard Wood, amongst others. For the September issue of Metropolitan Magazine she wrote another article, “The New Photography – What It Has Done and Is Doing for Modern Portraiture”, where she described her work as being more artistic than most commercial photographers, but less radical than some of the better-known art photographers. The Ladies Home Journal that November declared her to be one of the “foremost women photographers in America”, as she began the first of a series of six illustrated articles on “Advanced Photography for Amateurs” in the Saturday Evening Post.
Ben-Yusuf was listed as a member of the first American Photographic Salon when it opened in December 1904, although her participation in exhibitions was beginning to drop off. In 1906, she showed one portrait in the third annual exhibition of photographs at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, the last known exhibition of her work in her lifetime.
Many photographers trained as painters. They set up studios and employed artists’ models, skilled at holding poses for the time it took to take a picture. Later in the century, improved photographic negatives required shorter exposure times and it became easier to stage and capture difficult positions and spontaneous gestures.
Painters and illustrators used photographs as preparatory studies and as substitutes for props, costumes and models, and art schools created photographic archives for their students. Photographs commissioned and sold by institutions such as the British Museum made classical sculpture and old master paintings more accessible, inspiring both painters and photographers.
Henry Wallis (British, 1830-1916) Chatterton 1856 Oil paint on canvas Support: 622 x 933mm Frame: 905 x 1205 x 132mm Tate Bequeathed by Charles Gent Clement 1899
Chatterton is Wallis’s earliest and most famous work. The picture created a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, accompanied by the following quotation from Marlowe:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough.
Ruskin described the work in his Academy Notes as ‘faultless and wonderful’.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was an 18th Century poet, a Romantic figure whose melancholy temperament and early suicide captured the imagination of numerous artists and writers. He is best known for a collection of poems, written in the name of Thomas Rowley, a 15th Century monk, which he copied onto parchment and passed off as mediaeval manuscripts. Having abandoned his first job working in a scrivener’s office he struggled to earn a living as a poet. In June 1770 he moved to an attic room at 39 Brooke Street, where he lived on the verge of starvation until, in August of that year, at the age of only seventeen, he poisoned himself with arsenic. Condemned in his lifetime as a forger by influential figures such as the writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797), he was later elevated to the status of tragic hero by the French poet Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863).
Wallis may have intended the picture as a criticism of society’s treatment of artists, since his next picture of note, The Stonebreaker (1858, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery), is one of the most forceful examples of social realism in Pre-Raphaelite art. The painting alludes to the idea of the artist as a martyr of society through the Christ-like pose and the torn sheets of poetry on the floor. The pale light of dawn shines through the casement window, illuminating the poet’s serene features and livid flesh. The harsh lighting, vibrant colours and lifeless hand and arm increase the emotional impact of the scene. A phial of poison on the floor indicates the method of suicide. Following the Pre-Raphaelite credo of truth to nature, Wallis has attempted to recreate the same attic room in Gray’s Inn where Chatterton had killed himself. The model for the figure was the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), then aged about 28. Two years later Wallis eloped with Meredith’s wife, a daughter of the novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866).
Frances Fowle. “Chatterton,” on the Tate website December 2000 [Online] Cited 16/02/2023
James Robinson The Death of Chatterton 1859 Two photographs, hand-tinted albumen prints on paper mounted on card Collection Dr Brian May
THIS STEREOCARD IS NOT IN THE EXHIBITION
James Robinson The Death of Chatterton (detail) 1859 Two photographs, hand-tinted albumen prints on paper mounted on card Collection Dr Brian May
THIS STEREOCARD IS NOT IN THE EXHIBITION
One of the most famous paintings of Victorian times was Chatterton, 1856 (Tate) by the young Pre-Raphaelite-style artist, Henry Wallis (1830-1916). Again, the tale of the suicide of the poor poet, Thomas Chatterton, exposed as a fraud for faking medieval histories and poems to get by, had broad appeal. Chatterton was also an 18th-century figure, but Wallis set his picture in a bare attic overlooking the City of London which evoked the urban poverty of his own age. The picture toured the British Isles and hundreds of thousands flocked to pay a shilling to view it. One of these was James Robinson, who saw the painting when it was in Dublin. He immediately conceived a stereographic series of Chatterton’s life. Unfortunately Robinson started with Wallis’s scene (The Death of Chatterton, 1859). Within days of its publication, legal procedures began, claiming his picture threatened the income of the printmaker who had the lucrative copyright to publish engravings of the painting. The ensuing court battles were the first notorious copyright cases. Robinson lost, but strangely, in 1861, Birmingham photographer Michael Burr published variations of Death of Chatterton with no problems. No other photographer was ever prosecuted for staging a stereoscopic picture after a painting and the market continued to thrive…
Robinson’s The Death of Chatterton illustrates the way this uncanny quality [the ability to record reality in detail] distinguishes the stereograph from even the immaculate Pre-Raphaelite style of Wallis’s painting of the same subject. The stereograph represented a young man in 18th-century costume on a bed. The backdrop was painted, but the chest, discarded coat and candle were real. Again, the light and colour appear crude in comparison with the painting but the stereoscope records ‘every stick, straw, scratch’ in a manner that the painting cannot. The torn paper pieces, animated by their three-dimensionality, trace the poet’s recent agitation, while the candle smoke, representing his extinguished life, is different in each photograph due to their being taken at separate moments. The haphazard creases of the bed sheet are more suggestive of restless movement, now stilled, than Wallis’s elegant drapery. Even the individuality of the boy adds potency to his death.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Beata Beatrix c. 1864-1870 Oil on canvas Support: 864 x 660mm Frame: 1212 x 1015 x 104mm Presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple 1889
Rossetti draws a parallel in this picture between the Italian poet Dante’s despair at the death of his beloved Beatrice and his own grief at the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who died on 11 February 1862. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) recounted the story of his unrequited love and subsequent mourning for Beatrice Portinari in the Vita Nuova. This was Rossetti’s first English translation and appeared in 1864 as part of his own publication, The Early Italian Poets.
The picture is a portrait of Elizabeth Siddall in the character of Beatrice. It has a hazy, transcendental quality, giving the sensation of a dream or vision, and is filled with symbolic references. Rossetti intended to represent her, not at the moment of death, but transformed by a ‘sudden spiritual transfiguration’ (Rossetti, in a letter of 1873, quoted in Wilson, p.86). She is posed in an attitude of ecstasy, with her hands before her and her lips parted, as if she is about to receive Communion. According to Rossetti’s friend F.G. Stephens, the grey and green of her dress signify ‘the colours of hope and sorrow as well as of love and life’ (‘Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Portfolio, vol. 22, 1891, p. 46).
In the background of the picture the shadowy figure of Dante looks across at Love, portrayed as an angel and holding in her palm the flickering flame of Beatrice’s life. In the distance the Ponte Vecchio signifies the city of Florence, the setting for Dante’s story. Beatrice’s impending death is evoked by the dove – symbol of the holy spirit – which descends towards her, an opium poppy in its beak. This is also a reference to the death of Elizabeth Siddall, known affectionately by Rossetti as ‘The Dove’, and who took her own life with an overdose of laudanum. Both the dove and the figure of Love are red, the colour of passion, yet Rossetti envisaged the bird as a messenger, not of love, but of death. Beatrice’s death, which occurred at nine o’clock on 9th June 1290, is foreseen in the sundial which casts its shadow over the number nine. The picture frame, which was designed by Rossetti, has further references to death and mourning, including the date of Beatrice’s death and a phrase from Lamentations 1:1, quoted by Dante in the Vita Nuova: ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ (‘how doth the city sit solitary’), referring to the mourning of Beatrice’s death throughout the city of Florence.
Frances Fowle. “Beata Beatrix,” on the Tate website December 2000 [Online] Cited 16/02/2023
In late 1865, Julia Margaret Cameron began using a larger camera. It held a 15 x 12 inch glass negative, rather than the 12 x 10 inch negative of her first camera. Early the next year she wrote to Henry Cole with great enthusiasm – but little modesty – about the new turn she had taken in her work. Cameron initiated a series of large-scale, closeup heads that fulfilled her photographic vision. She saw them as a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture. Cameron also continued to make narrative and allegorical tableaux, which were larger and bolder than her previous efforts.
In this image, Cameron concentrates upon the head of her maid Mary Hillier by using a darkened background and draping her in simple dark cloth. The lack of surrounding detail or context obscures references to narrative, identity or historical context. The flowing hair, lightly parted lips and exposed neck suggest sensuality. The title, taken from a line in the poem ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ from Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King’, transforms the subject into a tragic heroine.
Mid-nineteenth century innovations in science and the arts became part of intense debates about ‘truth’ – variously defined as objective observation and as individual artistic vision. Inspired by artist and critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite circle took a new approach to nature, discovering meaning in details previously overlooked, ‘rejecting nothing, selecting nothing’.
As the quality of paints and lenses improved, painters and photographers tested the bounds of perception and representation. They moved out of the studio, to explore light and other atmospheric effects as well as geological subjects, landscape and architecture. New photographic materials like glass plate negatives and coated printed papers offered greater accuracy and photography became a valuable aid for painters.
John Brett (British, 1831-1902) Glacier of Rosenlaui 1856 Oil on canvas Height: 445 mm (17.52 in) Width: 419 mm (16.5 in) Tate Britain Purchased 1946 Photo: Tate, London, 2011
Thomas Ogle (British, 1813 – about 1882) The Bowder Stone in Our English Lakes, Mountains and Waterfalls as seen by William Wordsworth by A.W. Bennett Published 1864 Tate
View taken by Thomas Ogle of the Bowder Stone in Borrowdale, Cumbria, illustrating Our English Lakes, Mountains, And Waterfalls, as seen by William Wordsworth (1864). The book juxtaposes photographs of the Lake District with poems by the English Romantic poet. The Bowder Stone, an enormous boulder, was probably deposited by glaciation during the last Ice Age. It rests in Borrowdale, a valley of woods and crags in the Lake District whose scenic beauty inspired artists, writers and poets of the Romantic Movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Wordsworth (1770-1850) was among them, and the photograph of the Bowder Stone accompanies his poem, Yew-Trees (1803), from which the following passage is taken:
“…But worthier still of note Are those fraternal four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks! – and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwined fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved, – Nor uninformed with phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane; – a pillared shade, Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged Perenially – beneath whole sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries, ghostly shapes May meet at noontide – Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight – Death the skeleton And Time the shadow…”
Text from the British Library website [Online] Cited 18/09/2016
Atkinson Grimshaw (English, 1836-1893) Bowder Stone, Borrowdale c. 1863-1868 Oil on canvas Support: 400 x 536mm Frame: 662 x 709 x 100mm Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1983
Tate Britain uncovers the dynamic dialogue between British painters and photographers; from the birth of the modern medium to the blossoming of art photography. Spanning over 70 years, the exhibition brings together nearly 200 works – many for the first time – to reveal their mutual influences. From the first explorations of movement and illumination by David Octavius Hill (1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (1821-1848) to artful compositions at the turn-of-the-century, the show discovers how painters and photographers redefined notions of beauty and art itself.
The dawn of photography coincided with a tide of revolutionary ideas in the arts, which questioned how pictures should be created and seen. Photography adapted the Old Master traditions within which many photographers had been trained, and engaged with the radical naturalism of JMW Turner (1775-1851), the Pre-Raphaelites, and their Realist and Impressionist successors. Turner inspired the first photographic panoramic views, and, in the years that followed his death, photographers and painters followed in his footsteps and composed novel landscapes evoking meaning and emotion. The exhibition includes examples such as John Everett Millais’s (1829-1896) nostalgic The Woodman’s Daughter and John Brett’s (1831-1902) awe inspiring Glacier Rosenlaui. Later in the century, PH Emerson (1856-1936) and TF Goodall’s (c. 1856-1944) images of rural river life allied photography to Impressionist painting, while JAM Whistler (1834-1903) and Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966) created smoky Thames nocturnes in both media.
The exhibition celebrates the role of women photographers, such as Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869-1933) and the renowned Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879). Cameron’s artistic friendships with George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1830-94) are recognised in a room devoted to their beautiful, enigmatic portraits of each other and shared models, where works including Cameron’s Call, I Follow, I Follow, Let Me Die and Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix are on display.
Highlights of the show include examples of three-dimensional photography, which incorporated the use of models and props to stage dramatic tableaux from popular works of the time, re-envisioning well-known pictures such as Henry Wallis’s (1830-1916) Chatterton. Such stereographs were widely disseminated and made art more accessible to the public, often being used as a form of after-dinner entertainment for middle class Victorian families. A previously unseen private album in which the Royal family painstakingly re-enacted famous paintings is also exhibited, as well as rare examples of early colour photography.
Carol Jacobi, Curator British Art 1850-1915, Tate Britain says: “Painting with Light offers new insights into Britain’s most popular artists and reveals just how vital painting and photography were to one another. Their conversations were at the heart of the artistic achievements of the Victorian and Edwardian era.”
Painting with Light: Art and Photography from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Modern Age is curated by Dr Carol Jacobi, Curator of British Art 1850-1915 at Tate Britain, and Dr Hope Kingsley, Curator, Education and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography, with Tim Batchelor, Assistant Curator at Tate Britain. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Tate Publishing and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.”
Press release from Tate Britain
‘Whisper of the Muse’
As the nineteenth century progressed, some artists moved away from the clarity and detail that had been the aim of earlier Pre-Raphaelite art, turning instead to a search for pure beauty. The aesthetic movement, as this tendency came to be known, emphasised the sensual qualities of art and design and explored imaginative themes and effects.
In London and on the Isle of Wight, a community of artists forged closer links between the visual arts, music and literature. This circle included the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, painters George Frederic Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the poet Alfred Tennyson. Rossetti and Cameron worked with similar subjects, many inspired by Tennyson’s poetry. Together with Watts they developed a newly-intimate form of portraiture, exploring emotional and psychological states. They also shared models, whose striking looks introduced new types of modern beauty.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Whisper of the Muse 1865 Photograph, albumen print on paper 325 x 238mm Wilson Centre for Photography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (English, 1828-1882) Mariana 1870 Oil on canvas Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museum Collection
Into Light and Colour
In the second half of the nineteenth century Japanese culture became an important influence in Britain. Japanese goods were sold in London in new department stores such as Liberty, while the Japanese Village, established in Knightsbridge in 1885, attracted more than a million visitors.
Japanese props and motifs appeared in art and design and the vogue for Japanese prints inspired painters and photographers. Painters experimented with new colour palettes, flattened picture planes and condensed, cropped formats, innovations also important to later British impressionist works. Such experiments in light and colour were paralleled in photography with the 1907 introduction of the autochrome, the first practical colour photographic process.
John Cimon Warburg (British, 1867-1931) Peggy in the Garden 1909, printed 2016 Photograph, transparency on lightbox from autochrome Royal Photographic Society / National Media Museum / Science and Society Picture Library
John Cimon Warburg (1867-1931) British photographer born to a wealthy family dedicated his whole life to photography. In 1897, he joined the Royal Photographic Society. During his photographic career, John Cimon Warburg used a wide range of photographic processes, but excelled especially in autochromes. Best known for his atmospheric landscapes and its fascinating studies of his children, Warburg lectured and written about the process and explained his autochromes the annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society.
Text from the Autochrome website [Online] Cited 18/09/2016. No longer available online
Patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903, Autochrome produced a colour transparency using a layer of potato starch grains dyed red, green and blue, along with a complex development process. Autochromes required longer exposure times than traditional black-and-white photos, resulting in images with a hazy, blurred atmosphere filled with pointillist dots of colour.
John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925) Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 1885-1886 Oil paint on canvas 1740 x 1537 mm Tate. Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1887
The inspiration for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose came during a boating expedition Sargent took on the Thames at Pangbourne in September 1885, with the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey, during which he saw Chinese lanterns hanging among trees and lilies. He began the picture while staying at the home of the painter F.D. Millet at Broadway, Worcestershire, shortly after his move to Britain from Paris. At first he used the Millets’s five-year-old daughter Katharine as his model, but she was soon replaced by Polly and Dorothy (Dolly) Barnard, the daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnard, because they had the exact hair-colour Sargent was seeking.
He worked on the picture, one of the few figure compositions he ever made out of doors in the impressionist manner, from September to early November 1885, and again at the Millets’s new home, Russell House, Broadway, during the summer of 1886, completing it some time in October. Sargent was able to work for only a few minutes each evening when the light was exactly right. He would place his easel and paints beforehand, and pose his models in anticipation of the few moments when he could paint the mauvish light of dusk.
As autumn came and the flowers died, he was forced to replace the blossoms with artificial flowers. The picture was both acclaimed and decried at the 1887 Royal Academy exhibition. The title comes from the song The Wreath, by the eighteenth-century composer of operas Joseph Mazzinghi, which was popular in the 1880s. Sargent and his circle frequently sang around the piano at Broadway. The refrain of the song asks the question ‘Have you seen my Flora pass this way?’ to which the answer is ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’.
Unknown photographer H.R.H. Princess Alexandra, H.R.H. Princess Victoria & Mr. Savile, “Two’s company and three’s none” in Tableaux Vivants Devonport c. 1892-1893 Bound volume. Displayed open at Marcus C. Stone’s ‘Two’s Company, Three’s None” Photograph, albumen print on paper 360 x 480 x 58mm – book closed Wilson Centre for Photography
Unknown photographer H.R.H. Princess Alexandra, H.R.H. Princess Victoria & Mr. Savile, “Two’s company and three’s none” in Tableaux Vivants Devonport (detail) c. 1892-1893 Bound volume. Displayed open at Marcus C. Stone’s ‘Two’s Company, Three’s None” Photograph, albumen print on paper 360 x 480 x 58mm – book closed Wilson Centre for Photography
The relationship between landscape painting and photography continued to develop into the twentieth century. The etchings and nocturnes of James Abbott McNeill Whistler inspired photographers, who adopted his atmospheric subjects and aesthetics. While photography had achieved a technical sophistication that allowed photographers to produce highly resolved, realistic images, many chose to pursue soft-focus effects rather than detail and precision. Such photographs paralleled the unpeopled landscapes of painters like John Everett Millais and the gas-lit cityscapes of John Atkinson Grimshaw.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903) Three Figures Pink and Grey 1868-1878 Oil paint on canvas Support: 1391 x 1854mm Frame: 1701 x 2158 x 75mm Tate Purchased with the aid of contributions from the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers as a Memorial to Whistler, and from Francis Howard 1950
This picture derives from one of six oil sketches that Whistler produced in 1868 as part of a plan for a frieze, commissioned by the businessman F.R. Leyland (1831-1892), founder of the Leyland shipping line. Known as the ‘Six Projects’, the sketches (now in the Freer Art Gallery, Washington) were all scenes with women and flowers, and all six were strongly influenced by his admiration for Japanese art. Another precedent for these works was The Story of St George, a frieze that Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) executed for the artist and illustrator Myles Birket Foster (1825-1899) in 1865-1867. The series of large pictures was destined for Leyland’s house at Prince’s Gate, but never produced, and only one – The White Symphony: Three Girls (1867) was finished, but was later lost. Whistler embarked on a new version, Three Figures: Pink and Grey, but was never satisfied with this later painting, and described it as, ‘a picture in no way representative, and in its actual condition absolutely worthless’ (quoted in Wilton and Upstone, p. 117). He followed the original sketch closely, but made a number of pentimenti which suggest that the picture is not simply a copy of the lost work. In spite of Whistler’s dissatisfaction, it has some brilliant touches and a startlingly original composition.
Although the three figures are clearly engaged in tending a flowering cherry tree, Whistler’s aim in this picture is to create a mood or atmosphere, rather than to suggest any kind of theme. Parallels have been drawn with the work of Albert Moore, whose work of this period is equally devoid of narrative meaning. The design is economical and the picture space is partitioned like a Japanese interior. The shallow, frieze-like arrangement, the blossoming plant and the right-hand figure’s parasol are also signs of deliberate Japonisme. Whistler has suppressed some of the details in the oil sketch, effectively disrobing the young girls by depicting them in diaphanous robes. The painting is characterised by pastel shades, a ‘harmony’ of pink and grey, punctuated by the brighter reds of the flower pot and the girls’ bandannas, and the turquoise wall behind. It has been suggested that Whistler derived his colour schemes, and even the figures themselves, in their rhythmically flowing drapery, from polychrome Tanagra figures in the British Museum, which was opposite his studio in Great Russell Street.
The 1880s brought a renewed interest in landscape. Rural scenes provided common ground for British painters and photographers. Their distinctive style derived from French realism and impressionism, which had been introduced by independent galleries, and by artists such as George Clausen and Henry La Thangue who studied in Paris. This new approach was shared by their friend and fellow painter Thomas Goodall, and influenced his collaboration with the photographer Peter Henry Emerson. Emerson and Goodall’s first project, a photographic series on the Norfolk Broads, focused on the life of working people, as described in their album Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads, published in 1887.
In the 1880s Clausen devoted himself to painting realistic scenes of rural work after seeing such pictures by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884). In this picture he shows a family of field workers topping and tailing swedes for sheep fodder. It was painted at Chilwick Green near St Albans, where the artist had moved in 1881. He uses subdued colouring to capture the dull light and cold of winter, and manages to convey the hard reality of country work. Such unromanticised scenes of country life were often rejected by the selectors of the Royal Academy annual exhibitions.
Thomas Frederick Goodall (British, 1856-1944) and Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936) Setting the Bow-Net, in Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads 1885, published 1887 Book – open at The Bow Net Photograph, platinum print on paper 300 x 420mm (book closed) Private collection
Thomas Frederick Goodall (British, 1856-1944) The Bow Net 1886 Oil paint on canvas 838 x 1270mm National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery
Roger Fenton (British, 1819-1869) The Water Carrier 1858 Albumen Print, Wilson Center for Photography
In the late nineteenth century, painters and photographers pursued the representation of an idealised beauty, inspired by Italian Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Themes of allegory and myth were widely explored in the arts at this time, particularly in Britain in the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.
At the turn of the century painting and photography were part of a wider artistic search for harmony between subject matter and expression. Artists found inspiration in each other’s practice and continued to share ideas through illustrated books and journals. This spirit of collaboration and interchange led photographer Fred Holland Day to claim that ‘the photographer no longer speaks the language of chemistry, but that of poetry’.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Regent’s Canal c. 1904-1905, published 1909 Photogravure on paper Image: 206 x 161 mm Frame: 508 x 406 mm
Wilson Centre for Photography
Arthur Hacker (English, 1858-1919) A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus 1910 Oil on canvas 710 x 915mm Royal Academy of Arts, London
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Leicester Square (The Old Empire Theatre) 1908, published 1909 Photogravure on paper Image: 206 x 172mm Frame: 508 x 406mm Wilson Centre for Photography
Edward Linley Sambourne (English, 1844-1910) Ethel Warwick, Camera Club, 2 August 1900 Photograph, cyanotype on paper Dimensions Image: 165 x 120mm Frame: 507 x 855mm 18 Stafford Terrace, The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Tate Britain Millbank, London SW1P 4RG United Kingdom Phone: +44 20 7887 8888
Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) St. Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic c. 1926 Silver gelatin print
A poetry of the everyday
Josef Sudek, a one-armed man lugging around a large format camera, is one of my top ten photographers of all time.
His photographs, sometimes surreal, always sensitive, have a profound sensibility that affect the soul. Melancholy and mysterious by turns, they investigate the inner life of objects which stand as metaphors for the inner life of the artist. A form of healing after his horrific injuries and the loss of his arm during the First World War, the photographs purportedly look outwards upon the world but are actually interior meditations on life, death and the nature of being. Light emerges from the darkness; understanding from tribulation; and Sudek, in Jungian terms, integrates his ego into his soul through the process of (photographic) individuation – whereby the personal and collective unconscious (his hurt and damage) are brought into consciousness (eg. by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche and, in Sudek’s life, was integral to his healing from the vicissitudes of war.
Using Pictorialism as the starting point for his exploration of the world, Sudek never abandons the creation of “atmosphere” in his photographs, even as the images become modernist, surrealist and offer a new way of seeing the world. Having myself photographed extensively at night, and from the interior of my flat, I can understand Sudek’s fascination with both locations: the quiet of night, the stillness, the clarity of vision and thought; the interior as exterior, the projection of interior thoughts onto an external surface reflected back into the camera lens. “Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.” Except the cloak of darkness is not impenetrable, as light cannot exist without darkness.
Pace, his photographs are breath / taking. They are exhalations of the spirit.
Sudek’s ability to transcend the literal, his ability to transform the objectal quality of photography ranks him as one of the top photographers of all time. He synthesises a poetry of objects, a poetry of the everyday, and projects the folds of his mind onto the visual field (through “tears” of condensation on the window, through labyrinths of paper and glass, such as in Labyrinth on my table, 1967, below). As a form of self-actualisation – the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming – Sudek’s photographs interrogate that chthonic darkness that lurks in the heart of everyone of us, our dark night of the soul.
In that process of discovery (who am I, what kind of human being am I, how can I heal myself), he finds redemption.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects, to relate something mysterious: the seventh side of a dice. Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.”
Josef Sudek
Josef Sudek at Jeu de Paume
“The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, exhibition at Jeu de Paume Paris, from 07 June 2016 until 25 September 2016
Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolin, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity.
The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside.
Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
Text from the Jeu de Paume Vimeo website
On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
As a photographer, Sudek was particularly concerned with the quality of the photographic print, an essential component in terms of the expressive potential of an image. His mastery of the pigment printing process enabled him to produce highly atmospheric and evocative images, thereby reaping all of the reflective and descriptive power of the gelatin silver print. The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography.
The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography. Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.
Like many artists of his generation marked by their experience of war, Sudek expresses a particularly acute awareness of the dark and tormented aspects of human existence – feelings that would inspire some of his most melancholy and most moving pictures. A photograph taken at night, through the glass pane of his window, shows a city plunged into darkness during the Occupation of the Second World War, and communicates a sentiment of unspeakable despair – a dramatic illustration of Sudek’s technical ability to transcend the literal.
The first part of the exhibition features images that herald the photographer’s later work, showing his early landscapes, portraits of fellow patients at Invalidovna, the Prague hospice for war invalids like Sudek, his hesitant foray into modernism, and his interior shots of St. Vitus Cathedral. Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart. The exhibition “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek” provides a fascinating panorama of the work of this unique artist.
Text from the Jeu de Paume website
Beginnings
Sudek’s first photographic prints – small and largely assembled in albums – were mainly views of the countryside taken along the Elbe River when he travelled from Prague to Kolín to visit his mother between 1916 and 1922.
Using processes such as gelatin silver and bromoil he showed a talent for printing his pictures in a style that favoured soft edges and broad swathes of tone. Here Sudek was not so much studying the effects of light as he was observing the conventions of Pictorialism, a photography movement that straddled the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, and was based on a strong Romantic ethos. Pictorialist photographers enhanced atmospheric effects with such processes as carbon and gum bichromate. Sudek began using the carbon process regularly and in a personally expressive manner in the late 1940s.
His Invalidovna and St. Vitus Cathedral series in Prague, begun in the first half of the 1920s, show him exploring interior spaces where light emphasises both the profane and the sacred. The play of bands of sunlight and darkness is a central feature of the composition and, indeed, of the life of the photograph.
“… [Sudek] referred to photography as meteorology to describe the significance of the atmosphere, and how a photographer must predict the right conditions for photographing and enlarging prints. His work became sharper with richer tones, and his compositions became more illusive. The foregrounds and backgrounds of his photographs, particularly in his “Window” series began to oscillate. These achievements were perhaps made more attainable by his focus on inanimate objects over which he had more control than living things. Most of his cityscapes became deserted, as he directed his camera at statues or replaced what would have been a living subject with such emulative sculptures.
In effect, Sudek’s substitution of the inanimate for the animate brought the objects he photographed to life in his mind. He called the enormous decaying trees in the woods of Bohemia “sleeping giants” and would take portraits of masks and statuary heads, transforming them into frozen, worn grotesqueries. His personification of objects is even more vivid in his studio photography, particularly after 1939, the oncoming of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Prague. As the city was oppressed by German troops, the artist retreated into his studio and insulated himself sentimentally with still lifes. To an interviewer, he explained, “I love the life of objects. When the children go to bed, the objects come to life. I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects.” He devoted endless hours to arranging and photographing the everyday – apples, eggs, bread, and shells – and special objects given to him by friends, such as feathers, spectacles, and watches, which he called “remembrances” of that person. A photograph from his series “Remembrances of Architect Rothmayer, Mr. Magician,” for example, portrays objects respectfully placed in a row on a desk, as if artifacts from an archeological site, from which the history of a life or character of a man could be divined.
“Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations,” Sudek said, “so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings.” This statement is perhaps telling of Sudek’s relationship to death and life, as a result of the loss of his arm and the manner in which he suffered the loss. In the 1963 film, “Zit Svuj Zivot” (Living Your Life), a documentary portrait of Sudek by Evald Strom, we see a sensitive man describing his efforts to photograph the reality of the objects around him, not as if he were bringing the objects to life, but as if it was his purpose to represent the lives of objects as they truly are. Of the image of a vase of wildflowers, he says “This is a photograph of wildflowers, my attempt to photograph wildflowers,” and of an old lamp, “This is a celebrated lamp; it holds a lot of memories.””
Ashley Booth Klein, “Josef Sudek and The Life of Objects,” in Obelisk Vol. 2 Issue 1, Winter 2015 [Online] Cited 18/09/2016. No longer available online
“Josef Sudek: The World at My Window” is the first exhibition in France since 1988 to cover Sudek’s entire career and spotlight the different phases of his work. Coming in the wake of several exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume devoted to Eastern European photographers of the early twentieth century, among them André Kertész and Francois Kollar, this one comprises some 130 vintage prints by the Czech artist. Bringing to bear a vision at once subjective and timeless, Sudek captures the ongoing changes in Prague’s natural world and landscapes.
His early profession as a bookbinder came to an abrupt halt when he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in Bohemia and sent to the Italian front. After the First World War he came back to Prague wounded; the loss of his right arm meant abandoning bookbinding, and he turned to photography. After revisiting the battlefield in Italy once more he returned, in despair, to Prague: “I found the place,” he recounted, “but my arm wasn’t there. Since then I’ve never gone anywhere. I didn’t find what I was looking for.”
A study grant enabled him to train at the state-run school of graphic arts in Prague, where he mixed with practitioners of Pictorialism, a photographic movement aiming at achieving colour and texture effects similar to those of painting. He started concentrating on architectural details, always waiting until the light was absolutely perfect. Little by little he gave up the Pictorialist ambiences of his views of St Vitus’s cathedral, opting for a pure, straightforward approach which the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz summed up as “maximum detail for maximum simplification”.
During the Second World War Sudek began photographing the window giving onto his garden, the result being the celebrated Window of My Studio series. He then shifted his focus to the accumulated jumble of objects in the studio, producing a further series titled Labyrinths. Light was an inexhaustible theme in his work, orchestrating the seasons, making the invisible visible and transporting us into another world. As if to escape the leaden context of the War and then of Communism, Sudek took refuge in music, especially that of his compatriot Leoš Janáček. A true music lover, he gradually built up a substantial collection of recordings which he played to his friends during improvised concerts in his studio.
The second half of his career saw Sudek abandon photography’s traditional subjects as he explored the outskirts of Prague with his black view camera on his shoulder. Known as “the poet of Prague”, he became an emblematic figure in the Czech capital. Discreet and solitary, he gradually withdrew from the city’s art scene, leaving his studio only to prowl the streets at night with his imagination as his guide.
Sudek’s photographs rarely include people; his focus was more on empty urban and rural spaces. Fascinated by the streets of Prague, the city’s deserted parks and public gardens, and the wooded Bohemian landscapes his mastery of light rendered sublime, he preferred the un-enlarged contact print as a means of preserving all the detail and authenticity of the places he roamed through. His work moved towards experiments with light. In photographs shot through with simplicity and sensitivity, Sudek foregrounds a kind of poetry of the everyday, using the interplay of light and shade to achieve a kind of fluctuation between interior and exterior.
Sudek was not content with making single, unrelated images. He generally worked in projects or series, creating extended visual explorations of the phenomena and scenes he viewed – often from the closed window of his studio, which separated his private studio-home from the exterior world. In the series From My Window it was the endlessly varying states of transformation of droplets of water that he watched streaming down his windowpane. His images invite us to contemplate, with great fascination, the physical cycles of water and the phenomenon of rivulets coursing down a surface – like human tears. Reminding us even of [Paul] Verlaine’s “There is weeping in my heart like the rain upon the city…” Sometimes the melancholy mood of these images is leavened by a rose in a vase on the windowsill or tendrils of leaves announcing the arrival of spring.
There is weeping in my heart like the rain falling on the town. What is this languor that pervades my heart?
Oh the patter of the rain on the ground and the roofs! For a heart growing weary oh the song of the rain!
There is weeping without cause in this disheartened heart. What! No betrayal? There’s no reason for this grief.
Truly the worst pain is not knowing why, without love or hatred, my heart feels so much pain.
Sudek’s preoccupation with darkness dates to the Nazi Occupation of Prague from March 1939 until the end of the war. Experiencing his city plunged into nights of enforced darkness Sudek explored the absence of light in his pictures. We know that this was more than a technical exercise, for he wrote “Memories” and “Restless Night” on the verso of one nocturnal photograph dated 1943.
The curfews imposed on citizens at the time made it unlikely that Sudek ventured out into the city after dark during wartime. Neither agile nor inconspicuous with his large-format camera slung over his increasingly hunched back, Sudek would have risked his life had he done so. The small courtyard of his studio on Ujezd street was hidden from the road, however, and one or two lights in neighbouring apartments served as beacons. Well after sundown he would photograph the syncopated play of blurs of light against the wall of impenetrable blackness.
The spirit of place
Sudek visited and photographed places that held either personal or spiritual significance for him: the landscape along the Elbe River, Invalidovna, St. Vitus Cathedral, his studio, Prague’s complex streets and open squares, the majestic Prague Castle, the city’s surrounds, and Frenštát pod Radhoštĕm where he spent summers with friends. Hukvaldy, home of Leoš Janaček, the composer whose music he loved, was a particularly favoured haunt. This was true also of the ancient Mionší Forest where he navigated his way through dense brush and forests by way of shortcuts that he created and playfully named. The Beskid Mountains also served as spiritual retreat. Although he was an urbanite in many respects, Sudek’s love of nature and sense of despair for its desecration is strongly expressed in Sad Landscapes, his series of images made in the Most region where industrialisation ravaged the countryside in the 1950s.
The life of objects
Sudek collected everything. Today he would be known as a hoarder. But his obsession served him well, for out of the chaos of his small studio and living spaces he carefully selected a variety of these objects to photograph. From delicate feathers to crumpled paper and tinfoil, multi-faceted drinking glasses, flowers, fruit, seashells, envelopes, flasks, frames, prisms, candelabras, string and shoe moulds, the subjects ranged from the mundane to the exotic. Once chosen, the set-up was lovingly composed – often in subtly changed configurations with other objects – and carefully lit before being memorialised in either pigment or gelatin silver prints.
Entitled “The Intimate World of Josef Sudek”, this exhibition is the first of this scale to revisit the life and work of Josef Sudek (Kolín, 1896 – Prague, 1976) within its socio-geographical and historical context: Prague during the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when the Czech capital was a veritable hub of artistic activity. The exhibition features a selection of 130 works spanning the totality of Sudek’s career, from 1920 to 1976, and allows the public to examine the extent to which his photography was a reflection of his personal relationship to the surrounding world. On display are works that are the result of Sudek’s photographic experiments carried out within the privacy of his own studio, images of the garden seen from his window, and photographs of adventures further afield. The artist enjoyed meandering through the streets of Prague and its surrounding suburbs, and made frequent excursions to the nearby countryside. Sudek’s enduring fascination with light, and its absence, is at the root of some of the most haunting photographs of the twentieth century. Nature, architecture, streets and objects are magnified by his sensitivity and mastery of the effects of light, contrasting with the impenetrable cloak of darkness.
As a photographer, Sudek was particularly concerned with the quality of the photographic print, an essential component in terms of the expressive potential of an image. His mastery of the pigment printing process enabled him to produce highly atmospheric and evocative images, thereby reaping all of the reflective and descriptive power of the gelatin silver print.
The exhibition presents work from Sudek’s early career, but also features photographs from a pivotal period of experimentation and innovation, beginning in the 1940s. Focusing on the technical and formal aspects of the medium of photography, Sudek created pigment prints, halftone prints, puridlos (photographs between two windows) and veteše (photographs inserted into old frames), techniques which allowed him to transform the objectal quality of photography. The loss of his right arm during the First World War and the difficulties he now encountered in transporting his view camera did not dampen his passion for photography.
Sudek’s studio window became an object of abiding fascination – rather like the surface of a canvas – reflecting moments of exquisite tenderness and hope when a flowering branch brushed against its pane, or of poignant melancholy when he observed the world beyond his window transformed by the playful infinity of mist. His room with a view allowed him to capture, on film, his love of Prague. His photographs demonstrate both a precision and a depth of feeling, fitting odes to the rich history and architectural complexity of the Czech capital.
Like many artists of his generation marked by their experience of war, Sudek expresses a particularly acute awareness of the dark and tormented aspects of human existence – feelings that would inspire some of his most melancholy and most moving pictures. A photograph taken at night, through the glass pane of his window, shows a city plunged into darkness during the Occupation of the Second World War, and communicates a sentiment of unspeakable despair – a dramatic illustration of Sudek’s technical ability to transcend the literal.
Through images that recount the narrative of his life, the viewer gains access to Sudek’s inner world, and an insight into his immediate environment, the views and objects he loved, his studio and garden. His endless walks in Prague found expression in the views of the city and its surroundings, as well as in photographs of its more sordid “suburbs”, a subject explored by other Prague artists. The eastern and northern areas of Bohemia, the Beskid Mountains and the Mionší forest were other destinations close to the photographer’s heart.
Text from Jeu de Paume
New ways of seeing
Although more influenced by prevailing photographic conventions in the beginning, Sudek came to show an openness to experimenting with new ways of composing and printing his images. In the late 1920s, Sudek photographed objects designed by modernist Ladislav Sutnar, thus creating angled views of furniture with reflective surfaces and ceramics of pure form.
Sudek’s most successful foray into modernism is his experimentation with grotesque (surreal) subjects such as mannequins, decaying sculptures and the accoutrements of the architect Otto Rothmayer’s garden. There is little doubt that in the fragmented figurative sculptures Sudek was recalling some of the human devastation that he witnessed on the battlefields of the First World War.
This is a magnificent exhibition, well paced and beautifully hung in the gallery spaces. It is gratifying to see a “blockbuster” at the National Gallery of Victoria that does not rely on papered walls or patterned floors, that just allows the work to speak for itself. There is an excellent chronological trajectory to the work, showcasing the holistic development of the artist in one interweaving arc: from the early history paintings, where Degas is educating himself not only in the history of art but also in the practicalities of the history of painting (how actually to paint) … through to the late, bravura pastels.
Pastel is Degas’s strongest medium and it was incredible to observe close up how he could make pastel look like oil paint and vice versa. My favourite was Femme à la toilette [Woman at her toilette] (c. 1894, below) were the flattened perspectival image disintegrates before your eyes: “As well as reflecting the artist’s love of Japanese woodblock prints with their frequently intimate subject matter, in this late drawing Degas applied his vivid pigments with an almost sculptural intensity, building them up as though modelling form with his fingers.” Abstraction eat your heart out.
His “impressions” of reality rely on a keen eye, a wonderful understanding of space and the refractions of light, and the use of depth of field. The paintings I like best were not of the ballet, but rather the everyday “observational” paintings of the theatre box, a conversation and, particularly, The laundress ironing (c. 1882-86, below) with its simplified planar colour fields that run in different directions. These “punctures” of reality, or punctum to use a photographic term, elevate mundane everyday occurrences into a revelatory state – as though these encounters were taken from the flow of space and time, one frame out of a non-linear narrative.
The paintings of women at the toilettes are not voyeuristic but show a love and passion for an intimacy with women which he perhaps never achieved in real life, brought forth in observations of the female form “that challenged conventional notions of feminine beauty in their depiction of non-idealised jolie-laide (unconventionally beautiful) models”. Melbourne arts blogger Natalie Thomas observes that, “”Women and girls are everywhere in this show, but strangely absent too,” writes Thomas. Despite the fact the majority of Degas’ work explores femininity and the female body, the show, she says, fails to provide a female perspective.” (Natalie Thomas quoted in Shad D’Souza, “Gender and the NGV: ‘More white male artists than you can shake a stick at’,” on The Guardian website 15 September 2016 Cited 16/09/2016).
While I agree with Natalie Thomas that these paintings fail to provide a contemporaryfemale perspective, that is not all that these paintings are about. Of course, they are a privileged white male gaze looking upon the body of a female and we must accept and acknowledge that is what they are. But that is just one element of their narrative. It’s all very well critiquing the work from the present day and saying there is no female perspective, but in the era in which these “sensational” paintings emerged – it was an epoch where the privileged, powerful male gaze could look upon the female body. Yes, please look at the paintings from a contemporary perspective while understanding the conditions under which they were created, and then try to say something more interesting about them: the perspective, the colours, the form, the position of the painter, the framing of the scene, the possible disappearance of the artist to the sitter, as though the camera (his eyes) had disappeared: where someone is so used to the other being there, that they are natural (do not act or perform), unselfconscious in front of them. Then, and only then, do the paintings perhaps become something else – about women, their lives and habits / habitats. A different perspective from trotting out the usual “we are objectified / subjugated / defiled” trope.
The sculptures are the revelation of the exhibition. Again, the male gaze pushing and prodding at the female form… except, these sculptures seem to erupt from within – like bubbling hot mud that seems to emanate from deep within the artist, erupting into the glorious form of the female body. Dark and mysterious, I would have loved to have seen one of the wax models, just one, to see the colour and feel the fragility of that form, over the robustness of the bronze.
And finally to the last room, the late works. There is an essentialness to the late work, the form stripped bare, heavily applied pastel in layers, dark heavy outlines with the frame filled with an “orgy of colours” – he “developed an expressive use of colour and line that may have arisen due to his deteriorating vision.” But he could still feel what he was doing and we can feel it too: the working of the medium, the working of the theme to its final resolution.
While I didn’t know much about the work of Degas other than the ballet pictures before this exhibition – after three visits, perhaps I know just a little more.
Edgar Degas was born in 1834 into a wealthy banking family. Unlike many of his contemporaries, his family were supportive of his artistic talent and desire to become an artist.
Degas resisted being labelled an ‘Impressionist’ yet was at the core of the movement’s most important manifestations. Classically trained, Degas initially aspired to be a painter of historical narratives. As he matured, however, he made the depiction of daily life the central focus of his art. He was drawn primarily to the human figure engaged in movement and work, sketching on the spot then working up his finished compositions indoors in his studio. Degas’ obsession with the theatre and ballet in particular enabled him to explore his fascination with artificial light, which set him apart from the other Impressionists who preferred to work out-of-doors capturing the transient effects of natural daylight.
Degas absorbed many diverse influences, from Japanese prints to Italian Mannerism, and reinterpreted them in innovative ways. Degas obsessively revisited and experimented with his favourite themes which saw him fashion varied and unusual vantage points and asymmetrical framing. His depictions of ballet dancers alone number in the hundreds. Such endeavours helped him to achieve the innovative and distinctive style which is explored in Degas: A New Vision.
Degas served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and began to experience eyesight deterioration by the late 1880s. He increasingly took up sculpture as his eyesight weakened. In his later years, he was preoccupied with the subject of women bathing unselfconsciously and developed an expressive use of colour and line that may have arisen due to his deteriorating vision.
Degas continued working to as late as 1912. He died five years later in 1917, at the age of eighty-three.
[Dancers (Fan, design)] belongs to a group of fans made in the late 1870s that reflect Degas’s fascination at this time with Japanese art. Highly aestheticised, these fans show how Degas took advantage of this unusual format to explore new compositional possibilities. Here, for example, the balletic action taking place on stage competes for the viewer’s attention with the theatre’s screening machinery, as well as with the group of black-clad abonnés (subscribers with back stage passes) gathered in the wings in the middle distance.
In contrast with his numerous ballet works, Degas produced relatively few studies of the spectators at the Opera and other theatrical venues. Theatre box is one of his most captivating studies of the magical effects created by artificial stage lighting. Its contrast between the shadowy reality of the viewer in her dimmer theatre box and the vividly illuminated fantasy being performed before her onstage is as compelling as it is radical.
When exhibited at the fifth ‘impressionist’ group exhibition in Paris in 1880, this pastel attracted the attention of the critic Charles Ephrussi, who wrote glowingly of how it shoed ‘a profound knowledge of the relations between tones, producing the most unexpected and curious effects: the wine-coloured draperies of the spectator’s box and the yellowish glow of the footlights are projected onto the face of a diminutive theatre-goer, who thus finds herself illuminated by violet and brilliant yellow; the impression is strange, but captured with perfect reality’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Theatre box 1880 Pastel and oil on cardboard on canvas 66.0 x 53.0cm The Lewis Collection
The time that Degas spent overseas in New Orleans made him surprisingly nostalgic for everything he had left behind in Paris. The simple reason he gave was that ‘One loves and gives art only to the things to which one is accustomed’. Although delighted by the new sights and sensations he experienced in New Orleans, he felt that ‘ new things capture your face and bore you by turns’. With these words, Degas expressed what would become his credo for the rest of his career.
After this time, Degas refused invitations to travel to exotic locales and put aside the search for new subjects, focusing instead on the same themes: dancers, rockets, women in the bath. The novelty of what he had discovered in America also led him soon afterwards to retreat into himself. seeing inspiration in introspection. For Degas the exotic could be found perfectly well at home, especially in the new evening venues of 1870s Paris, the café-concerts. He delighted in exploring the tension and psychological preparation that lay behind the surface glamour of stage performances conducted within an artificial other-reality.
Wall text from the exhibition
All that gesture in theatre summon, or that the agile and mendacious tongue of ballet speaks to those who comprehend the silent eloquence of limbs in motion.
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The dance rehearsal c. 1870-1872 Oil on canvas 40.6 x 54.6cm The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. Gift of anonymous donor, initiated 2001, completed 2006
While the friendships he established in the 1860s with musicians such as Désiré Dihau, a bassoon player with the Paris Opéra, brought Degas into the orbit of ballet performances in the French capital, the full extent of his access to this world prior to the mid-1880s remains unknown. This may explain why his many depictions of dancers practising backstage in rehearsal rooms in the 1870s were his own studio inventions rather than accurate depictions of the Opéra’s foyers de la danse.
Degas’ favourite theatrical venues – the Opéra in the rue le Peletier that was destroyed by fire in October 1873 and its replacement, the Palais Garnier, which opened in 1875 – were both located in the 9th arrondissement, close to his studio. Degas exhibited ballet compositions at the ‘impressionist’ group exhibitions from 1874 onwards, all the while resisting the label, arguing that his own art was Realist and meticulously crafted in the studio instead of spontaneously created before nature. When the Galeries Durand-Ruel began acquiring Degas’ paintings in 1872, the artist’s first sales at this time were of ballet subjects. Unlike the romantic perspective through which these scenes are viewed today, Degas’ contemporaries recognised in them a rejection of the surface glamour of ballet’s front of house in favour of a serious study of the gritty reality of life backstage. There, junior impoverished dancers jostled for attention from their trainers, all too frequently prostituting themselves on the side so they could afford to stay in competition for coveted stardom.
While The rehearsal and other similar depictions such as The dance class, c. 1873, are ostensibly based on direct observations of dance rehearsals at the Paris Opéra in the rue Le Peletier, their different treatments of architecture hint at the degree to which Degas constructed their compositions from memory. This painting shows a radical cropping of the spiral staircase at left connecting the stage level to the rehearsal room, down which the disembodied limbs of young ballerinas descend. In the background to the right the celebrated dance instructor Jules Perrot can be seen.
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Dancers on the stage (detail) c. 1899 Oil on canvas 76.0 x 82.0cm Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon Legs Jacqueline Delubac, 1997
Dancers on the stage looks back to the experiments with pictorial space and repoussoir compositional staging that had so characterised Degas’s ballet works of the 1870s and early 1880s. Repoussoir was a favourite technique for Degas, a technique in which an object place prominently in the foreground of a work serves to emphasise the recession of physical space in the rest of the composition. In an unusual choice for the artist, Degas shows here a dress rehearsal on stage. The attention of the dancers is focused upon the diminutive figure of the dave master in the far left background whose presence ignites a diagonal magnetism that animates the whole painting.
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Dancer with bouquets c. 1895-1900 Oil on canvas 180.3 x 152.4cm Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr, in memory of Della Viola Forker Chrysler
Sculptures
Although Degas exhibited only one sculpture during his lifetime, The little fourteen-year old dancer, he worked in this medium in privacy in his studio from the 1860s until the 1910s. His primary subjects were thoroughbred racehorses, female dances and women at the toilette, and he modelled his sculptures in wax, over steel wire and cork armatures. Never satisfied, he made, destroyed and remade them repeatedly. As Degas’s eyesight deteriorated in his later years, making three-dimensional figures fulfilled a physical and emotional need that transcended any desire to perfect a finished object; he allegedly side that sculpture was ‘a blind man’s trade’.
After Degas’s death in 1917, some 150 wax sculptures were found in his studio, some broken but many intact. His heirs subsequently authorised the casting in bronze of seventy-four of the most intact of Degas’s sculptures. While many of Degas’s original wax sculptures still survive, they are too fragile to travel. These bronzes allow wider audiences today to engage with some of the most beautiful sculptures of the nineteenth century.
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The tub 1888-89, cast 1919-32 Bronze 22.5 x 45.0 x 42.0cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 26 (cast S) Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) The masseuse c. 1896-1911, cast 1919-32 Bronze 43 x 38 x 30cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 55 (cast S) Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Seated woman wiping her left side c. 1901-11, cast 1919-32 Bronze 35 x 30.5 x 30.4cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 46 (cast S) Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Dancer adjusting the shoulder strap of her bodice 1882-95, cast 1919-32 Bronze 35.2 x 15.9 x 11.8cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 64 (cast S) Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Assis Chateaubriand Donated by Alberto José Alves, Alberto Alves Filho and Alcino Ribeiro de Lima
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Dancer looking at the sole of her right foot (Second study) c. 1900-1910, cast 1919-1937 or later Bronze 47.3 x 24.3 x 20.8cm Czestochowski/Pingeot 59 (cast T) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Leigh Clifford AO and Sue Clifford, 2016
Walter Sickert recalled Degas speaking of his obsession with observing women at their most private moments. He wanted to look at their private activities through keyholes, according to Sickert: ‘He said that painters too much made of women formal portraits, whereas their hundred and one gestures, their chatteries, &c., should inspire an infinite variety of design’. The Conversation reflects the artist’s love of Japanese woodblock prints and their frequently intimate subject matter. The specifics of setting are only alluded to in this exquisite pastel, the emphasis being placed instead upon the close relationship between these two elegant Parisiennes.
In 1875 pastel became one of Degas’s favourite techniques. Gustave Moreau had introduced him to this medium during their time together in Italy during the late 1850s, and the increasing interest in pastel in artistic circles during the 1870s influenced Degas’s choice to explore its potential. At the eighth and last ‘impressionist’ group exhibition in 1886 Degas exhibited a suite of pastel studies of women bathing that challenged conventional notions of feminine beauty in their depiction of non-idealised jolie-laide (unconventionally beautiful) models. George Moore wrote tellingly of these nudes: ‘The effect is prodigious. Degas has done what Baudelaire did – he has invented un frisson nouveau (a new sensation)’.
Because intimate access to female ablutions was rarely experience by husbands in bourgeois married life at the time, it was assumed by critics and audiences that Degas’s female nudes were performing their toilettes in a brothel setting. The close observation of undressed women engaged in private acts of washing and drying themselves led Degas’s ongoing status as a bachelor to become a topic of speculation in both the art world and wider social circles.
The repetitive work involved in a woman’s daily maintenance of her hair appealed greatly to Degas. As early as 187 he asked whether he could observe Geneviève Halévy, a cousin of his old school friend Ludovic, performing this private tasks. Woman at her toilette is a fascinating study of a woman’s labour-intensive morning routine, drawn with a sense of pathos and human frailty. As well as reflecting the artist’s love of Japanese woodblock prints with their frequently intimate subject matter, in this late drawing Degas applied his vivid pigments with an almost sculptural intensity, building them up as though modelling form with his fingers.
Broken staccato heralds its approach, strong, steaming breath, as early as the dawn, kept to its straining pace by stable lad, the fine colt gallops throwing up the dew.
Edgar Degas
Racecourses: 1860s
Horse racing was Degas’s first recurrent modern subject, and preceded his dance classes and opera scenes. In 1861 Degas visited Ménil-Hubert in the Normandy countryside, the family estate of his old school friend Paul Valpinçon, situated near to the Haras-le-Pin stud and the Argentan racecourse. The recreational sports of horse racing and the steeplechase now offered him scope for exploring contemporary narrative painting. In pre-mechanised Europe, horses were as ubiquitous as the car is today. They were an essential part of life, whether for work or pleasure, and Degas was accordingly fascinated by these magnificent creatures. They feature in his earliest sketchbooks when he carefully copied equestrian subjects after the Parthenon frieze sculptures and the Italian Old Masters Paolo Uccello and Benozzo Gozzoli; and he continuously drew, painted and sculpted horses until his death.
Degas’s approach to depicting horses embodies his lifelong methodology. He studied and copied how they were represented by specialist animalier artists, as well as by the Old Masters, and he spent many hours observing and examining them. How he portrayed horses changed over time and his earliest works reveal a slightly tentative and clichéd manner as he struggled for perfection. As his art evolved, his images of horses became more innovative and remarkable: he attained great precision in their appearance yet the rendering remained tactile and lively. He also perfectly captured the physical relationship between rider and horse through all the different poses they struck, whether at rest or in full flight. Few artists have reproduced the grace, power and elegance of horses as well as Degas.
Wall text from the exhibition
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Out of the paddock (Racehorses) c. 1871-1872, reworked c. 1874-1878 Oil on wood panel 32.5 x 40.5cm Private collection
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Before the race c. 1883-1990 Pastel 49 x 62cm (sheet) Private collection
Photography
By the time he began making photographs in 1895, Degas was 61 years old and the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition was a decade behind him. Daniel Halévy, son of his old friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy, introduced Degas to photography, prompting the artist to acquire a camera that required glass plates and a tripod. In a burst of creative energy that lasted less than five years, he made a body of photographs of which fewer than 50 survive…
Exactly why Degas took up photography remains unknown. Clearly, photography provided a new pair of eyes during the period when his eyesight was failing. The illness and death of his sister, Marguerite, in 1895 and his brother Achille in 1893 may also have played a role. Photographs were for Degas a powerful tool of memory to recall his loved ones, and the activity of photographing bound him closely to an extended family-the Halévys-that embraced him in his time of grief…
Degas often illuminated his subjects with a single bright light source. The figures seem to emerge from darkness. In a series of individual portraits he made of Daniel and Louise Halévy in the autumn of 1895, each sitter is pictured in the same armchair in their home, under this Rembrandtesque light. They are seen in original contact prints (about 3 x 4 inches) and in enlargements. Altogether, these images show the artist’s picture-making process and reveal Degas’ manipulations of space, scale, focus, and emotional effect. In Louise Halévy Reading to Degas (J. Paul Getty Museum), another enlargement from a contact print done about the same time, Degas conveys unusual intimacy. It shows a vulnerable man’s dependence upon a friend in reading the newspaper at a time when his eyesight was failing.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website. No longer available online
“These days, Degas abandons himself entirely to his new passion for photography,” wrote an artist friend in autumn 1895, the moment of the great Impressionist painter’s most intense exploration of photography. Degas’s major surviving photographs little known even among devotees of the artist’s paintings and pastels, are insightfully analysed and richly reproduced for the first time in this volume, which accompanies an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France.
Degas’s photographic figure studies, portraits of friends and family, and self-portraits – especially those in which lamp-lit figures emerge from darkness – are imbued with a Symbolist spirit evocative of realms more psychological than physical. Most were made in the evenings, when Degas transformed dinner parties into photographic soirees, requisitioning the living rooms of his friends, arranging oil lamps, and directing the poses of dinner guests enlisted as models. “He went back and forth … running from one end of the room to the other with an expression of infinite happiness,” wrote Daniel Halévy, the son of Degas’s close friends Ludovic and Louise Halévy, describing one such evening. “At half-past eleven everybody left; Degas, surrounded by three laughing girls, carried his camera as proudly as a child carrying a rifle.”
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) Self-portrait with Zoé Closier Probably Autumn 1895 Gelatin silver print 18.2 x 24.2cm (image and sheet) Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Pastel entitled Les Jupes Rouges, depicting three ballet dancers in red skirts – in posing practice.
Throughout his career Degas produced more than 700 works in pastel. In the 1870s he often worked ‘wet’, employing pastel à l’eau (crushing pastel sticks to powder which, mixed with water, could be applied with a brush) to create smooth, seamless textures. By the mid 1890s he worked increasingly with layers of pastel cement together over applications of fixative. This created shimmering optical effects that celebrated the crumbly texture of the pastel medium.
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dimanche après-midi à l'île Kolín' [Sunday afternoon at Kolín island] c. 1922–1926](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-dimanche-aprc3a8s-midi-c3a0-l_c3aele-kolc3adn-vers-1922e280931926-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dimanche après-midi à l'île Kolín' [Sunday afternoon at Kolín island] c. 1922–1926")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Portrait de mon ami Funke' [Portrait of my friend Funke] 1924](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-portrait-de-mon-ami-funke-1924-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Portrait de mon ami Funke' [Portrait of my friend Funke] 1924")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1948](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931948-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1948")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940–1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931954-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940–1954")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-la-fenc3aatre-de-mon-atelier-vers-1940e280931950-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Fenêtre de mon atelier' [The window of my studio] c. 1940-1950")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Quatre saisons: l'été' [Four seasons: summer] c. 1940-1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-quatre-saisons-l_c3a9tc3a9-vers-1940e280931954-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Quatre saisons: l'été' [Four seasons: summer] c. 1940-1954")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Dernière Rose' [The Last Rose] 1956](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-la-dernic3a8re-rose-1956-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'La Dernière Rose' [The Last Rose] 1956")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin Royal' [The Royal Garden] c. 1940-1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-le-jardin-royal-vers-1940e280931946-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin Royal' [The Royal Garden] c. 1940-1946")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] 1950](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-1950-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] 1950")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-vers-1950e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-prague-pendant-la-nuit-vers-1950e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Prague pendant la nuit' [Prague at night] c. 1950-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin de Rothmayer' [The Rothmayer Garden] 1954-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-le-jardin-de-rothmayer-1954e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Le Jardin de Rothmayer' [The Rothmayer Garden] 1954-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dans le jardin' [In the garden] 1954-1959](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-dans-le-jardin-1954e280931959-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Dans le jardin' [In the garden] 1954-1959")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe sur ma table' [Labyrinth on my table] 1967](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-labyrinthe-sur-ma-table-1967-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe sur ma table' [Labyrinth on my table] 1967")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe de verre' [Glass Maze] around 1968-1972](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/sudek-labyrinthe-de-verre-vers-1968e280931972-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Labyrinthe de verre' [Glass Maze] around 1968-1972")
![Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Sans titre (Nature morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre)' [Untitled (Still life on the windowsill)] 1951](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/josef-sudek-sans-titre-nature-morte-sur-le-rebord-de-la-fenc3aatre-1951-web1.jpg "Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976) 'Sans titre (Nature morte sur le rebord de la fenêtre)' [Untitled (Still life on the windowsill)] 1951")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Danseuses, éventail [Dancers (Fan, design)]' 1879 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/installation-al.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Danseuses, éventail [Dancers (Fan, design)]' 1879 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917 'La Loge [Theatre box]' 1885 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-am.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917 'La Loge [Theatre box]' 1885 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'La Loge [Theatre box]' 1880 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-an.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'La Loge [Theatre box]' 1880 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'La Baigneuse [The bather]' c. 1895](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-bp.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'La Baigneuse [The bather]' c. 1895")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at he toilette] c. 1895-1900 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-bd.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at he toilette] c. 1895-1900 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at her toilette] c. 1894 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-be.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at her toilette] c. 1894 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at her toilette] c. 1894](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/exhi036044-web.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Femme a la toilette [Woman at her toilette] c. 1894")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at right, 'Femme au Tub' [Nude woman drying herself] c. 1884-1886](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-bh.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Degas: A New Vision' at the National Gallery of Victoria International, Melbourne showing at right, 'Femme au Tub' [Nude woman drying herself] c. 1884-1886")
![Edgar Degas. 'Femme au Tub [Nude woman drying herself]' c. 1884-1886 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-bi.jpg "Edgar Degas. 'Femme au Tub [Nude woman drying herself]' c. 1884-1886 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Chevaux de courses [Racehorses]' c. 1895-1899 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/installation-bf.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Chevaux de courses [Racehorses]' c. 1895-1899 (installation view)")
![Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Chevaux de courses [Racehorses]' c. 1895-1899](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/exhi039831_web.jpg "Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917) 'Chevaux de courses [Racehorses]' c. 1895-1899")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
You must be logged in to post a comment.