Exhibition: ‘Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle’ at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 19th May, 2024

Exhibition curator: Clément Chéroux, director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera
1950
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

To see ourselves as others see us

This exhibition attempts to reconcile the two sides of the work of American photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig, 1899-1968) – “First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life” – by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is a critically coherent investigation into the omnipresence of the spectacle in modern society.

The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle:

“Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation… The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.””1

While both halves of Weegee’s photographic work picture the spectacle, I believe that they are a different but connected order of being. Like yin and yang, Weegee’s scenes of chaos “Murder is my business” and “photo-caricatures” emerge from the same psyche but image equal opposites which both repel, attract and complement each other.

Weegee’s photographs which tell stories for the New York press are external representations or emanations captured from the world around us, whereas his later photo-caricatures of public personalities feel to me to be internalised, dream-like representations of his own feelings towards the celebrity people he observed and photographed as much as they are offer insights into their personality.2 Thus, Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.

Personally I don’t think that it is necessary to reconcile both halves of Weegee’s work. The bodies exist for what they are: perceptive insights into the existence and spirit of the world and the human race, spec(tac)ular images that mirror a social relation among people which don’t necessarily have to be conflated one with the other.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Debord, Guy (1994)[1967] The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books), p. 4 quoted in “The Society of the Spectacle,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 10/05/2024

2/ “external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality”
“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

Many thank to the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The curious […], they’re always in a hurry […], but they still find the time to stop and look.

Weegee

“Crime was my oyster,” Weegee wrote in his 1961 memoir, Weegee by Weegee. “I was friend and confidant to them all. The bookies, madams, gamblers, call girls, pimps, con men, burglars and jewel fencers.” … Weegee’s photos from the 1930s and ’40s defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of gangsters, bums, slumming swells and tenement dwellers.”

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

“Weegee is not the first nor the only person to have taken interest in people watching. Not long before him, in 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed spectators at the Coronation of George VI for Ce Soir. And a quarter century prior, in 1912, Eugène Atget photographed passers-by observing a solar eclipse at Place de la Bastille. But Weegee took the idea even further. He systematised it. He made it a principle he never shied from applying at the first opportunity. It’s a way of placing things at a distance, pushing the viewers to ask themselves about the manner in which they look, making them aware of the fact that they themselves, like the people watching in the photo, are in a voyeuristic position. It’s also a critique of how American society transforms news into spectacle.”

Clément Chéroux

The specular image, then, is accompanied by anxiety-anxiety that it will “soon dissolve like a cloud.” It is the nature of visions (apparitions) to dissolve before our very eyes without disclosing their secrets, just as dream-images are quickly forgotten upon awakening.

Craig Owens. “Posing,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985, p. 12

There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular, its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera (1950, above); at second left, “Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York (c. 1943, below); at third left bottom, Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York (c. 1939, below); at fourth left, Self-portrait (1950,below); at fifth left, Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide (1944, below); at sixth left, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (1942, below); and at eighth left, Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee Himself: “I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unidentified photographer
Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-portrait
1950
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee Tells How

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was a New York city freelance news photographer from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here he talks about his career and gives advice to those wanting to become news photographers.

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces
1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver)
1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee’s Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, above); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York] (1941, below)

Off Road: “Sudden death for one… sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.

Wall text from the exhibition

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]
1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at right, Weegee’s photograph Henry Rosen (left) and Harvey Stemmer (centre) cover their faces with handkerchiefs after their arrest for bribery and conspiracy to fix a US college basketball match (25 January 1945)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Holiday Accident in the Bronx
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Exhibition

How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Biography

Weegee was born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At the immigration station Ellis Island, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the lab of ACME Newspictures agency.

Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, connected to Police radio, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the Police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice. In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales.

In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as a technical advisor, sometimes as an actor. He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques used to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.

Text from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Performer Jimmy Armstrong (c. 1943, below); at second left, Ladies keep their money in their stockings… (1944, below); and at centre, Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn (1940, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Performer Jimmy Armstrong
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Ladies keep their money in their stockings…
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

“There is no cover charge nor cigarette girl, and a vending machine dispenses cigarettes. Neither is there a hat check girl. Patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lively floor show… the only saloon in the Bowery with a cabaret license.”

Weegee

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn
1940
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Courtesy Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Sleeping at the Circus, Madison Square Garden, New York
1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre left, Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera (1943); In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night (1943); and at centre right, The Critic (1943, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
The Critic
November 22, 1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

Even his most popular photograph was a set-up, says Wallis: “The Critic, which was taken in 1943, was surely staged and shows the wealthy Mrs George Washington Cavanaugh and Lady Decies arriving at the opera, greeted by a staggering drunk who seems to be mocking them and who Weegee reportedly rounded up at Sammy’s bar on the Bowery.

“This picture is a good example of how Weegee previsualized a scene, developed a punchy satirical narrative, and staged the picture. The Critic was widely reproduced at the time, and even shown at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Boo Paterson. “Big guns to big top: Weegee at circus,” on the Boo York City website [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

In Weegee’s day similar culture clashes happened at Sammy’s Bowery Follies (267 Bowery, between East Houston and Stanton Streets), which from 1934 to 1970 attracted what The New York Times once described as a mixed crowd of “drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten.” …

Among the regulars, he wrote in his 1945 book, “Naked City,” was a woman they called Pruneface and a midget who walked the streets dressed as a penguin to promote cigarettes. When the midget got drunk, Weegee wrote, he “offered to fight any man his size in the house.”

Weegee held two book parties there. At the photography center Mr. George showed me silent-film footage taken in 1946 at the party for Weegee’s second book, “Weegee’s People.” Pretty uptown blondes and dowagers in pearls mingle with toothless crones and panhandlers, as models parade in their foundation garments, and a man with a flea circus puts his tiny performers through their paces.

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing his photographs in magazine layouts

“Il Fotografo cattivo”, Epoca, Vol. XIII, No. 636, December 1962
© International Center of Photography. Collection privée Paris

Weegee Looks At Dali

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats

Custom milliners often go to extremes. This spring, the have outdone themselves by creating 1957 version of the most exaggerated hats of the last fifty years. Here again are the flapper cloche, the slouch had Garbo wore in the ’30’s, the heavy veiling of the early 1900’s, the turban of the World War I era, the perennial mad profusion of fruit and flowers. Look had Michael A. Vaccaro photograph examples of these hats as they really are. Then camera artist Weegee turned out satirical prints, with these startling results.

Look magazine 1957

WAIT. Don’t reach for a drink. Don’t reach for your glasses. And don’t – please don’t – write us an indignant letter. What you think you see on these pages is there, all right. It’s the work of a zany photographer named Weegee (few know his first name) who has a wicked sense of caricature and an outrageous sense of humor.

The subjects were not photographed under water. Wedge simply prints his negatives through bubbles glass, wire screens, press, kaleidoscopes or whatever gives him the characterization he is after. It’s a sort of three-way-stretch technique in which Weegee is assisted by photographic color expert Mike Lavelle.

The results of Weegee’s impudent manipulation of reality are both perceptive and astonishing: Faces take on a certain ga-ga verity; external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality. Weegee calls this “Photo-Caricature.” There was a man who might have enjoyed revelations like these. His name was Bobbie Burns and he wrote in one of his poems: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us.”

“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

“”Modern Women Aren’t Human!’ … If You Don’t Believe It … This Man Tells Why” in the National Enquirer, 1967

There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs – glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres – to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Their First Murder
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Drowning victim, Coney Island
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Mrs Bernice Lythcott and her son Leonard looking through a window broken by stones thrown by thugs, Harlem, New York
October 18, 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]
May 23, 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, Weegee knew the slums, like those children seeking coolness on the fire escape ladder. He produced “real social documents” on the living conditions of the poor.

“In Central Park the lawns were crowded before darkness with family groups,” reported the July 10, 1936 New York Times; the temperature had reached an astounding 106 degrees the day before. “On the Lower East Side traffic was seriously impeded as small armies of persons emerged from tenement houses with chairs, boxes and even beds which they set up in the streets.”

And from the Times on August 4, 1938, when the mercury hit 93 degrees:

“More than 3,000 persons slept on the sand at Coney Island and Brighton Beach to escape the heat last night, the police estimated. Ten additional patrolmen were assigned to the area to prevent molestation of the sleepers, many of whom brought blankets and sheets.”

Anonymous. “How New Yorkers survived hot summer nights,” on the Ephemeral New York website Nd [Online] Cited 14/04/2024

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Simply adding boiling water
1943
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Lovers at the Palace Theater
c. 1953
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Anthony Esposito, Booked on Suspicion of Killing a Policeman
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

At noon Fifth Avenue was crowded. Alfred Klausman, middle-aged office manager of a linen firm, walked across the street from his office to the bank on the corner and drew the weekly pay roll: $649.

As the genial, round-faced Klausman walked back, two men silently threaded through the crowd behind him, two strange, grey-coated creatures washed up from the depths of New York City’s criminal world. One was Anthony Esposito, 35, a long-nosed, horse-faced hoodlum who had been in & out of New York’s prisons and reformatories for 16 years, had once been deported to Italy and sneaked back in. His brother William, 29, had robbed drunks, snatched pocketbooks, done a seven-year stretch in Sing Sing. Their father had served time for forgery. Their brother was in Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N. Y. for parole violation. Their lives had been spent in squalor, petty crime, prison and torpid, hard-eyed loafing.

Klausman entered the elevator to his office. The Esposito brothers stepped in after him. Between the second and third floors they drew revolvers from their overcoat pockets, ordered the operator to stop, face the door. He heard Klausman cry “No! No! No!” – then one of the gunmen put his revolver to Klausman’s head and pulled the trigger.

They ordered the operator to take the elevator down, ducked out into the street, disappeared into B. Altman’s big department store.

Out into the street the operator yelled “Holdup! Murder!” The cry spread. Two patrolmen raced from the corner, into the store, a long way behind.

Down the crowded aisles of the store darted the Espositos, through the block-long building. At the far entrance they climbed into a cab, put a gun at the driver’s head. But Madison Avenue was jammed with traffic; they were trapped. “Get going. Make it fast. Get moving or we’ll kill you.” Back in the store panic was spreading as police with drawn revolvers moved down the aisles shouting, “Get down!” The cab stalled behind a bus. Like men leaping over a cliff, the brothers jumped out into the traffic. At sight of the two running men, waving revolvers, people flattened themselves against the buildings or ducked to the sidewalk. A taxi driver ran to Patrolman Edward Maher, directing traffic on the corner, yelled “Stick-up!” and pointed at the fleeing men. Maher raced after them, only 20 feet behind, afraid to shoot into the crowd. Motorists left their cars and joined the chase. Maher saw a clear space, shot twice, and William Esposito staggered sideways, fell face downward, one arm outstretched, one twisted under him, apparently dead.

A little crowd collected around him. Patrolman Maher held the gunman by the overcoat, started to turn him over, turned to warn the crowd away. “Back up, please,” he said, “someone’s liable to get hurt.” As he rolled William over, the gunman’s .38 came up. William Esposito pulled the trigger and Patrolman Maher slumped over, dead.

The crowd surged back, then forward. A taxi driver named Leonard Weisberg leaped on the prone gunman. He grabbed for the revolver, missed. Esposito jerked it back a few inches, fired again. Weisberg, clutching his throat, gasping for breath, fell to the sidewalk.

Esposito, still lying down, drew another gun from his overcoat pocket. Two men leaped on him. Then the crowd closed in, kicking and beating.

Anthony ran on when his brother fell. Behind him the police fired into the air. He shot a few times, wildly, apparently to clear crowds out of his way on Fifth Avenue. He ducked into Woolworth’s, bowling over the women shoppers. He plunged to the basement, put away his guns, walked up again to hide in the crowd – and met six policemen at the head of the stairs, went down with revolver butts thudding on his skull.

The Espositos went to the hospital, to the lineup, to indictment for murder. Leonard Weisberg, recovering from his throat wound, was promised a new cab of his own, and won a hero’s praise. The Nazi press gleefully played up the crime as evidence of democratic depravity.

Anonymous. “National Affairs: SLAUGHTER ON FIFTH AVENUE,” in TIME Monday, Jan. 27, 1941 on the TIME website [Online] Cited 14/04/2024

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 – 1968 New York)
[Outline of a Murder Victim]
1942
Gelatin silver print
33.9 x 27.4cm (13 3/6 x 10 13/16 in.)
Gift of Bruce A. Kirstein, in memory of Marc S. Kirstein, 1978
© Weegee / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Harry Maxwell shot in a car
1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Hopper’s Topper” Hedda Hopper Hollywood
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Marilyn Monroe, Distortion
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Friedsam Collection, Frankfurt am Main

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Charlie Chaplin, Distortion
1950
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-Portrait
1963
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (author)
Textual, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (editor)
January, 2024 (release)
ISBN 9782845979901
208 pages
55 euros

This book accompanies the exhibition Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle presented from January 30, 2024 to May 19, 2024 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

There is a Weegee conundrum. His photographs fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are his images of news items taken in New York during the 1940s, in a documentary, direct and raw approach. And on the other, photographs of starlets, politicians and other socialites taken in Hollywood in the following decade, for which he willingly resorted with special effects. Declaring himself “bewitched by the mystery of the murders,” Weegee stood out for his ability to arrive promptly at the crime scene or to wait for the salad baskets to arrive on the steps of the police stations to capture the defendants on the spot. Nevertheless, he strives to bring onlookers, often from the working classes, into his framework, or even to be interested only in them. Made up of around a hundred photographs – the best known, but also many images never highlighted – this book shows the coherence of Weegee’s work based on a radical and incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle, borrowing from an unexpected empathy towards the disadvantaged.

Weegee (1899-1968) was an American photojournalist known for his images of a New York marked by crime. In 1941, New York’s Photo League dedicated an exhibition to him which was followed by that of MoMA in 1943. He published his first book Naked City in 1945 and his autobiography Weegee by Weegee in 1961.

Hardcover
20 x 26cm
Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany,
Clément Chéroux and Cynthia Young.
Texts in French

Translated from the French by Google Translate from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed Mondays

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation website

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Exhibition: ‘Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit’ at the KBr Photography Center KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 12th May, 2024

Curator: Drew Sawyer

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Self-portrait
Nd
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

What have you got to say?

We must acknowledge the importance of the Consuelo Kanaga, a strong, compassionate human being, an under recognised photographer. What a trailblazer for future female and male photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott and Milton Rogovin.

Kanaga is a story teller. Her photographs are strongly modernist, realist compositions. The portraits are direct and revealing, no external flourishes necessary in capturing the essence of the person; her landscapes, dark and brooding atmospheric iterations of land and spirit.

Consuelo Kanaga:

~ one of the pioneers of modern American photography

~ one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper (1918)

~ a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others

~ passionate about social justice … social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality… especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

~ maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League

~ focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair

~ interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement

~ became very active in civil rights and took part in and photographed many demonstrations and marches in the 1960s

Whatever type of photograph Kanaga took (and there are many) her photographs are always perceptive = having or showing sensitive insight.

The sensitivity of Hands (1930, below); the tired eyes and clasped hands of the Widow Watson (1922-1924 below) contrasting with the mannerist hands of the boy staring off camera; the stoicism of the mother in Tree of Life (1950, below) with her children’s faces in deep shadow coupled with the subconscious symbology of the unyielding, white brick wall behind; and the dark mesa of Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico (Nd, below) hello Georgia O’Keeffe … all reflect Kanaga’s superb handling of shadow and light, of energy and spirit.

“Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional.”1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024

Many thankx to the Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“One of America’s most transcendent yet, surprisingly, least-known photographers.”

Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe (1992). Consuelo Kanaga, An American Photographer. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 21-40.

“I could have done lots more, put in much more work and developed more pictures, but I had also a desire to say what I felt about life. Simple things like a little picture in the window or the corner of the studio or an old stove in the kitchen have always been fascinating to me. They are very much alive, these flowers and grasses with the dew on them. Stieglitz always said, “What have you got to say?” I think in a few small cases I’ve said a few things, expressed how I felt, trying to show the horror of poverty or the beauty of black people. I think that in photography what you’ve done is what you’ve had to say. In everything this has been the message of my life. A simple supper, being with someone you love, seeing a deer come around to eat or drink at the barn – I like things like that. If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”

Margaretta K. Mitchell (1979). Recollections: Ten Women of Photography. NY: Viking Press. pp. 158–160.

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is the first exhibition in Europe to present a comprehensive retrospective of the entire career of the American Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978). The exhibition covers six decades of her professional dedication to photography.

Passionate about social justice, Kanaga was more interested in people and their problems than in photography: social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality…, especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

Consuelo Kanaga was one of the few women who became a professional photojournalist, and as early as the 1910s in the United States. She was also one of the few who maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, both in San Francisco and in New York, and whose friendship and professional support opened the way for important women photographers such as Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, among others.

Despite the fame she achieved during her lifetime, her work is still surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to make a conclusive contribution to the recognition that Kanaga’s work undoubtedly deserves.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Fire, New York
1922
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (Downtown New York)
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1920s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
c. 1925
Toned gelatin silver print with graphite
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 × 5 in. (10.2 × 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Louise Emma Augusta Dahl-Wolfe (November 19, 1895 – December 11, 1989) was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. At Harper’s Bazaar she pioneered a new standard in colour photography. …

Among the celebrated fashion photographers of the 20th century, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an innovator and influencer who significantly contributed to the fashion world. She was most widely known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar. Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the ‘female gaze’ in the fashion industry and credited for creating a new image of strong, independent American women during World War II.

From 1943, Dahl-Wolfe introduced the “New American Look” to fashion photography, which Vicki Goldberg describes as “all clean hair, glowing skin and a figure both lithe and strong”. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as “environmental” fashion photography. The outdoor settings helped to evoke “a mood of freedom and optimism” associated with women’s liberation. Her photographs brought a new naturalism to fashion photography which had previously been dominated by a stiff and haughty “European” or “Germanic” studio style. Dahl-Wolfe described it as “that heavy, heavy look, with everybody looking very clumsy”. Her methodology in using natural sunlight and shooting outdoors became the industry standard even now.

Her models appear to pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them. In fact the poses are highly, constructed with an “almost abstract formal perfection” which she credited partly to the influence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Dahl-Wolfe innovatively used colour in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance. Compared to other photographers at the time who were using red undertones, Dahl-Wolfe opted for cooler hues and also corrected her own proofs, with one example of her pulling proofs repeatedly to change a sofa’s colour from green to a dark magenta.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
House Plant
1930
Bromide print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Kenneth Spencer
1933
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Kenneth Spencer (25 April 1913 – 25 February 1964), was an American operatic singer and actor. Spencer starred in a few Broadway musicals and musical films in the United States during the 1940s. Frustrated with the racial prejudice he experienced in the United States as a black man, Spencer moved to West Germany in 1950 where he had a successful singing career. He also appeared in a number of German films. His career was cut short when he died in the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 304.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Clapboard Schoolhouse
1930s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

A Pioneer of Realism

Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) was one of America’s most important photographers. Yet largely because she disdained wealth, fame and self-promotion, her transcendent images have never received the acclaim they deserve. The photographs on this page appear in the first major retrospective of her work, “Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer,” which will open Friday at the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Astoria, Ore., Kanaga was hired in 1915 as a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle but quickly became more interested in the work of the paper’s photographers. She took a job in the darkroom and was eventually named a staff photographer.

Inspired by the images in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, she left the newspaper and moved to New York in 1922. She soon became closely associated with such photographers as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Louise Dahl. In 1932, Miss Kanaga was represented in the landmark “f.64” exhibition in San Francisco, the first major photography show that stressed realism over romanticism.

Her talent was rooted in an almost mystical belief that photography was a sacred trust — she felt obligated to capture the true essence of her subject. Her drive to fulfill this trust helped Kanaga, who was white, to understand the lives of blacks and to produce some of the most moving works ever done in African-American portraiture. She was equally talented in still-life and landscape photography, and her feeling for urban architecture was stimulated by her involvement with the socially committed New York Photo League during the 1930’s.

She continued to work into her 70’s, despite suffering from emphysema and cancer, which were probably caused by the chemicals used in creating her prints. Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional. Consuelo Kanaga died virtually unknown in 1978, but her talent endures.

Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Sargent Johnson
1934
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Sargent Claude Johnson (November 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked with a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, oil, stone, terra-cotta, watercolour, and wood.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1930s
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Horse’s Eye
1930s
Gelatin silver print
4 × 3 1/2 in. (10.2 × 8.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Bowery
1935
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Angelo Herndon
1936
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Angelo Braxton Herndon (May 6, 1913 – December 9, 1997) was an African-American labor organiser arrested and convicted of insurrection after attempting to organise black and white industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. The prosecution case rested heavily on Herndon’s possession of “communist literature”, which police found in his hotel room.

Herndon was defended by the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party of America, which hired two young local attorneys, Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and John H. Geer, and provided guidance. Davis later became prominent in leftist circles. Over a five-year period, Herndon’s case twice reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Georgia’s insurrection law was unconstitutional, as it violated First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. Herndon became nationally prominent because of his case, and Southern justice was under review. By the end of the 1940s he left the Communist Party, moved to the Midwest, and lived there quietly.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1936
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 × 5 in. (10.2 × 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Two Women, Harlem
c. 1938
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (New York)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

For the first time in Spain and Europe, Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features the work of this North American photographer spanning her entire career. Kanaga (1894-1978) is considered today a key figure in the history of contemporary photography, both for her contribution toward the recognition of women in this field and for the intensity with which her images confront the spectator with the great social issues of our time, particularly the conditions of African Americans in the United States.

The exhibition

Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features six decades of work by this key figure in the history of modern Photography. With this new project, Fundación MAPFRE renews its commitment to promote the work of women photographers. On this occasion, despite having garnered much notoriety in life, the artist’s work is today surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to contribute conclusively toward the recognition that Kanaga’s oeuvre undoubtedly deserves.

Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978) was truly passionate about social justice. She was most interested in people and issues such as marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, and inequality, particularly in relation to African Americans in the United States. These were some of the fundamental matters she addressed through her work. Likewise, she also defended the formal and poetic possibilities of photography as an art form.

An unconventional figure, Kanaga was able to become a professional photojournalist in the United States as early as the 1910s. She was also one of the few women involved in the avant-garde circles both in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League, whose friendship and professional support paved the way for other important women photographers. However, gender inequalities and social conventions limited her ability to dedicate herself completely to her artistic work. Kanaga worked full time jobs during many years and was only able to practice her art on weekends. She repeatedly put her career on hold for her partners; these are but a few reasons why her work is not more recognised today.

Organised around the Brooklyn Museum’s collection – the institution that has preserved the artist’s archive – the exhibition features nearly 180 photographs and a wide range of documentary material; contextualising Consuelo Kanaga’s work while focusing on some of her most iconic images and her portrayal of African American life in the 1930s through her photography.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Drew Sawyer, former Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.

Keys

New Negro Movement: From the late 19th century, magazines and novels published by black men and women began to emerge as a response to the prevailing racism in cities such as San Francisco, Washington, and New York. This literary explosion was the precedent of what became known as the New Negro Movement, which developed in Harlem, New York, between 1920 and 1930; a movement that also lent its name to the most comprehensive anthology dedicated to said cultural renaissance, written by Alain Locke and considered at the time as “the fundaments of the black canon”. Not only did black artists flourish during this time, white artists were also encouraged to join this movement in defence of the freedom, rights, and equality of African Americans through culture.

Kanaga Photojournalist: In 1915, when she was only 21 years old, Consuelo Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she learned photography in order to illustrate her assignments: “For my articles requiring photographs, I went with the photographer to help make the pictures more interesting,” she later recalled. “The editor liked the results and encouraged me to learn photography, ‘from scratch’.” In 1918 she began to work as a photographer for the newspaper and was also hired by the Daily News the following year. Kanaga was undoubtedly one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper; as her friend Dorothea Lange remarked: “she was the first newspaper photographer I’d ever met. She was a person way ahead of her time.”

Kanaga and Women Photographers: Kanaga’s career was interwoven with a solid and broad circle of women photographers who she cultivated special relationships with over the course of five decades. She was a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others, who she advised and shared her company and connections in the art world with. These women inspired her and likewise she was an inspiration for them. Despite the fact her accomplishments were as relevant as those of her colleagues, her oeuvre received much less attention. Kanaga spent little time self-promoting since she was always more interested in cultivating the affective bonds with the people closest to her.

Biography

Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was born on May 15th, 1894, in Astoria, Oregon. The daughter of a lawyer who was interested in agriculture and of the writer Mathilda Carolina Hartwing, she helped her parents with tasks related to editing from a very young age, eventually leading her to study journalism. In 1915 she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. Three years later, she became staff photographer. Kanaga met Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange at the California Camera Club and became interested in artistic photography thanks to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. Between 1927 and 1928 she travelled through Europe and northern Africa. Throughout her adult life, she lived both in San Francisco and New York, was married three times, and established her first portrait studio in San Francisco in 1932. She also participated in the f.64 Group and her images were exhibited for the first time at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1932. Kanaga participated in West Coast liberal politics. After returning from New York in 1935, she became associated with the Photo League in 1938. Edward Steichen defended her photography and included her work in the renowned exhibition The Family of Man in 1955. In 1974 Kanaga held a solo exhibition at the Lerner-Heller gallery in New York and in 1976 she produced a small yet relevant retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1977 she exhibited her work at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York. She passed away at her Yorktown Heights (New York) home in 1978. One year later, Kanaga’s work was included in the exhibition Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at the ICP and was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1992, where most of her work is currently preserved.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
After Years of Hard Work (Tennessee)
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Young Girl in Profile
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Tennessee
1950
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Barbara Deming
c. 1964
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Barbara Deming (1917-1984) was one of the most dearly loved civil rights and feminist activists of her time. Born in New York City in 1917 and educated there at the Friends Meeting House Quaker School, she later studied literature and drama at Bennington College and earned a master’s degree in drama from Case Western Reserve University in 1941.

Deming began her career as a poet, professional writer, and film critic, and turned to political writing and human rights activism in the middle of her life. …

In the 1960s Deming joined demonstrations against Polaris submarines, took part in the 1962 San Francisco-to-Moscow walk for peace, and attended the International Peace Brigade in Europe. Protesting nuclear-weapons testing at the Atomic Energy Commission led to her first experience with being jailed for civil disobedience, this time at the Women’s House of Detention in New York City.

Acting on her belief that the struggles for racial equality and for peace were one effort, Deming marched in the bi-racial Nashville-to-DC walk for peace alongside SNCC members. In 1963 she joined black activists protesting segregation in Alabama and Georgia as well as attended the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In 1964 she participated in the 2800-mile Quebec-Guantanamo walk for peace and freedom, a racially integrated protest over US actions in Cuba. During this march, she was arrested and jailed in Albany, Georgia, an experience she describes in her book Prison Notes.

Deming participated in political actions whenever and wherever individual rights and human dignity were being threatened. In 1965-1967 Deming traveled to North and South Vietnam to protest the war. In the 1970s she demonstrated for gay rights and feminist causes. In 1983 she was arrested on the march through Seneca Falls, organised by the Women’s Peace Encampment to protest the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe. Despite failing health, she was once again jailed.

Anonymous. “Barbara Deming,” on the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund website Nd [Online] Cited 03/04/2024

Photojournalism and the City

After having opted for journalism, influenced perhaps by her parents, Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915, where she learned to produce photographs for her articles encouraged by the newspaper editor. In 1918 she became staff photographer, and the following year was hired by the Daily News, another San Francisco newspaper.

Between 1920 and 1950 she worked for newspapers and magazines in Denver and New York, capturing scenes of urban life and images of economic and racial inequality; as in The Widow Watson (1922-1924 below), which was taken while she was working for the newspaper New York American and depicts a woman suffering from tuberculosis next to her son.

Photojournalism led Kanaga to become aware of photography’s potential as an art form. Around 1918 she joined the California Camera Club in San Francisco. Not only did she gain access to a dark room and photographic equipment, but also books and magazines on the medium. The publication Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz and the works of New York and San Francisco photographers, such as Arnold Genthe, who portrayed street scenes and urban architecture in their images, influenced her greatly.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Widow Watson
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portrait Gallery

Kanaga began to produce portraits for additional income as a complement to her journalistic work, initially in San Francisco and later in New York. She opened her first studio in the early 1920s and was able to support herself and her partners financially for the rest of her life by taking photographs of wealthy clients and friends who were part of the avant-garde movements in San Francisco and New York. Thus, the portrait became the main focus of Kanaga’s creative production. It is also important to note that while most of her work as a photojournalist was lost, her portraits remain well represented among the negatives and prints that have been preserved.

Influenced by Stieglitz, in her portraits Kanaga experimented with poses, cropping, lighting, and printing in order to highlight the expressive capabilities of her images. Aside from flash, she used dark room techniques such as over-and underexposure, manipulating exposure times in specific parts of a photographic print to accentuate the contrast between light and shade, which generated a theatrical effect. The artist also frequently toned her prints with metals such as gold, adding pencil or graphite to highlight certain features.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

North Americans Abroad

One of the fundamental experiences in Kanaga’s formative development was her time in Europe and northern Africa between 1927 and 1928, made possible through the financial support of the patron Albert M. Bender. Kanaga spent close to a year travelling through France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Tunisia, taking photographs and visiting museums, monuments, and churches. The artist also sought opportunities to learn modern photographic techniques. In Kairouan (Tunisia) she came into contact with a community of ex-pat artists and produced three photo albums portraying the city and its people, consolidating her interest in portraiture.

Consuelo Kanaga began to express her opinions on racism in the United States during these trips. A subject she would explore in more depth through photography during the 1930s. “I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people.”

Photography and the American Scene

Beyond portraiture, Kanaga practiced numerous genres and styles throughout her career. Like other North American artists, she was attracted to what she encountered in the “American Scene”; naturalist and descriptive representations of national and regional heritage and everyday life. Kanaga mostly focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair.

Her first portraits of African Americans were aligned with the New Negro Movement that arose in the 1920s and 30s. Black intellectuals and artists tried to redefine and celebrate African American identities through cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive policies. Likewise, they advocated for the creation of inspiring images of their community and of negritude at a time when lynchings and racial terror were some of the most pressing legal and ethical issues. Within this context, Kanaga’s photographs can be considered a true statement of intent: Hands (1930 below) is the first preserved photograph that captures her anti-racist ideals. She also portrayed the singer Kenneth Spencer, the poet Langston Hughes, and the painter and ceramist Sargent Johnson, among others.

Along with her interest in African American communities, Kanaga became interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement that emerged in the Soviet Union and Germany during the 1920s. After moving to New York in 1935, she took photographs for leftist publications and became involved with the Photo League. At a time marked by the will to promote solidarity among workers beyond race and gender, Kanaga focused on the experiences of African Americans and Workers in particular.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Hands
1930
Gelatin silver print
23 1/16 × 29 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (58.6 × 73.8 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portraits of Artists

Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Kanaga produced portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians. She met many of them thanks to her relationship with several photography clubs and collectives, as well as during her trips through the United States and Europe. Her images include portraits of the photographers Alfred Stieglitz and W. Eugene Smith, the painters Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, and of designers such as Wharton Esherick.

Conversely, Kanaga’s career was especially linked to a solid and broad circle of women photographers whose relationships she cultivated throughout her time as an artist. She was a great supporter and confidant for a series of photographers who often photographed each other, such as Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Louse Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Wharton Esherick
1940
Bromide print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Wharton Esherick (July 15, 1887 – May 6, 1970) was an American sculptor who worked primarily in wood, especially applying the principles of sculpture to common utilitarian objects. Consequently, he is best known for his sculptural furniture and furnishings. Esherick was recognised in his lifetime by his peers as the “dean of American craftsmen” for his leadership in developing nontraditional designs and for encouraging and inspiring artists and artisans by example. Esherick’s influence is evident in the work of contemporary artisans, particularly in the Studio Craft Movement. His home and studio in Malvern, Pennsylvania, are part of the Wharton Esherick Museum, which has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1993.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Trips to the Southern United States

Between the late 1940s and early 60s, Kanaga went on numerous trips through the southern United States where she continued to photograph black children and workers. While in Florida, she produced a series of photographs dedicated to black families and farmhands working in recovered swamp lands known as mucklands. During those trips, she took one of her most renowned photographs titled She is a Tree of Life (1950 below), which depicts a stoic mother with her son and daughter on either side. In 1950 she also photographed self-taught black artist William Edmondson next to his carved stone sculptures.

In 1964, amidst the struggle for freedom of Black Americans in the United States, the activist and writer Barbara Deming invited Kanaga to photograph the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace in protest of United States actions against Cuba. During the march, Deming and other activists were arrested for demanding that all demonstrators be allowed to walk together on a “white only” sidewalk. The book Prison Notes, published by Deming in 1966, includes photographs by Kanaga.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
She is a Tree of Life
1950
Gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Studies of Nature

In 1940 Kanaga and her husband, the painter Wallace Putnam, purchased a house outside the city, in Yorktown Heights, seventy kilometres north of Manhattan. They moved there permanently in 1950. Meanwhile, Kanaga continued taking photographs for household magazines in order to support herself and her husband financially. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, after having her work exhibited in important exhibitions during the 1940s, Kanaga’s artistic output decreased during the following two decades. Nevertheless, she photographed the natural environment surrounding her house and in 1948 one of the pictures she took of the pond in their back yard was included in the exhibition In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Catalogue

The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition has been published in English, Spanish, and Catalan by Fundación MAPFRE and the Brooklyn Museum. It features an essay by the show’s curator Drew Sawyer and texts by Shalon Parker, Ellen Macfarlane, and Shana Lopes. The publication includes a complete overview of the artist’s life and work.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
4 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (12.1 x 19.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape with Farmhouse)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
3 5/8 x 4 3/4 in. (9.2 x 12.1cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

KBr Photography Center
Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 93 272 31 80

(Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)

Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): Closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11am – 8pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Exhibition: ‘One Life: Frederick Douglass’ at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington

Exhibition dates: 16th June, 2023 – 21st April, 2024

Curator: John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1841
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
Collection of Gregory French

In this first known photographic image of Douglass, taken only one year after the first commercial daguerreotype studio opened in the United States, he appears somewhat dazed or “statue-like,” as he might have said. In 1841, the exposure time for a daguerreotype of this size could run up to fifteen seconds, depending on the time of day and the amount of available daylight in the daguerreotypist’s studio.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

I seem to be envisioning the nineteenth-century at the moment, which is a condition entirely more pleasurable than contemplating the dreadful state of the world at the moment with its environmental desecration, greed, killing of animal and human life and the unconscionable conduct of governments. Ego, greed, religion, power, masculinity, war, nationalism, possession. A toxic mix.

Here we have photographs of a majestic human being, a former slave, social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman – who fought for freedom, who fought against discrimination and racism. And still it goes on today…

“A new memorial to Emmett Till was dedicated on Saturday in Mississippi after previous historical markers were repeatedly vandalized. The new marker is bulletproof.

Till, 14, was kidnapped, beaten and killed in 1955, hours after he was accused of whistling at a white woman. His body was found in a river days later. An all-white jury in Mississippi acquitted two white men of murder charges…

This is the fourth historical marker at the site. The first was placed in 2008. Someone tossed it in the river. The second and third signs were shot at and left riddled with bullet holes. The new 500lb steel sign has a glass bulletproof front.”1

His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, held an open casket funeral in Chicago to let the world see how badly her son had been beaten and mutilated. “There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.”

At the end I’ll be glad when I have left this world because I am so disappointed with the human race. High hopes indeed.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Associated Press. “Emmett Till: new memorial to murdered teen is bulletproof,” on The Guardian website Sun 20 Oct 2019 [Online] 06/04/2024

Many thankx to the National Portrait Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The bullet-riddled historical sign for Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager whose 1955 slaying helped propel the civil rights movement

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Unidentified artist (formerly attributed to Elisha Livermore Hammond)
Frederick Douglass
c. 1845
Oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Frederick Douglass became the most influential African American of the nineteenth century by turning his life into a testimony on the evils of slavery and the redemptive power of freedom. After he escaped from bondage in 1838, Douglass quickly emerged as an outspoken advocate for equality and abolition. Aware of the power of telling one’s own story, he frequently spoke about his life, published three genre-defining autobiographies, and founded the influential newspaper, The North Star, in 1847. Douglass also posed for countless photographs, which he considered less susceptible to artists’ racial prejudices.

This painting was likely based on the engraved frontispiece of Douglass’s first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), a gripping account of his struggle for freedom. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass went on to address the psychology of slavery and the racism that continued to define the lives of the newly free.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
Frederick Douglass
c. 1845
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Onondaga Historical Association Museum, Syracuse, NY

Douglass likely sat for this daguerreotype in the Boston studio of Southworth & Hawes before he left for England in August 1845. The Twelfth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, held at Faneuil Hall in December 1845, offered for sale “an excellent Daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass,” according to The Liberator (January 23, 1846). The daguerreotype was “the gift of Mr. Southworth” and “elicited much attention.” John Chester Buttre created an engraving from the daguerreotype, which appeared in Autographs for Freedom (1854), a gift book edited by Douglass’s friend Julia Griffiths to raise money for his North Star newspaper.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
Frederick Douglass (detail)
c. 1845
Whole-plate daguerreotype
Onondaga Historical Association Museum, Syracuse, NY

Augustus Washington (American, c. 1820–1875)
John Brown 1800-1859
c. 1846-1847
Quarter-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchased with major acquisition funds and with funds donated by Betty Adler Schermer in honor of her great grandfather, August M. Bondi

One of the nation’s first African American daguerreotypists, Augustus Washington was also a prominent abolitionist in Hartford, Connecticut, when he made this portrait of the militant abolitionist John Brown. At the time, Brown was working to establish a “Subterranean Pass Way,” a network of armed men in the Alleghenies for conducting fugitives to freedom in Canada.

In Washington’s daguerreotype, Brown apparently holds the Pass Way flag and pledges allegiance to his scheme, which never materialised. In 1853, Washington and his family emigrated to Liberia, the former West African colony founded by the American Colonization Society, which gained independence in 1847.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), the preeminent African American voice of the nineteenth century, is remembered as one of the nation’s greatest orators, writers, and picture makers. Born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was the son of Harriet Bailey, an enslaved woman, and an unknown white father. He escaped bondage in 1838 and changed his surname to Douglass.

Over six decades, Douglass published three autobiographies, hundreds of essays, and a novella; delivered thousands of speeches; and edited the longest-running Black newspaper in the nineteenth century, The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly). During the Civil War, he befriended and advised President Abraham Lincoln and met every subsequent president through Grover Cleveland. He was also the first African American to receive a federal appointment requiring Senate approval (U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia).

Douglass became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century and remains a public face of the nation. As an art critic, he wrote extensively on portrait photography and understood its power. He explained how this “true art” (as opposed to pernicious caricatures) captured the essential humanity of each subject. True art was an engine of social change, he argued, and true artists were activists: “They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction.”

Curatorial Statement

Organised into seven sections, this exhibition highlights the long arc and significance of Frederick Douglass’s life: from slave and fugitive to internationally acclaimed abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and statesman after the Civil War. We come to recognise his influences in the Civil War and postwar eras; and the significance of his afterlife, in which his portraits and writings continue to inspire people to seek “all rights for all,” one of his mottos. The range of objects shown here reflects Douglass’s openness to new forms of media and technology to advance the cause of human rights.

John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Douglass’ ascension into the most preeminent African American voice in the 1800s and one of the handful of most influential and famous Americans in the nation’s history owes itself equally to his merits and good fortune.

“Douglass had an extraordinary work ethic, he was immensely curious and dedicated,” Stauffer explained. “And physically strong and tall – over six feet, a half-foot taller than the average man – which helped him survive slavery.”

Size does matter. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were also comparative giants for their day. American presidents, on average, stand a great deal taller, literally, than the average citizen.

Douglass’ physical size and strength allowed him to outlast a sadistic “slave breaker,” Edward Covey, in a protracted fight as a teen. After suffering numerous whippings, Douglass stood up to the man. As long as he lived, he referred to the fight as the turning point in his life as a slave.

“He was also lucky to have been born and raised in the upper South and not sold into the Deep South or murdered for his rebelliousness as a slave and his constant battles against slavery and racism as a free man,” Stouffer added. “Had he been born in the Deep South, where most enslaved people lived, his chances of escaping to free soil would have been almost nil.”

Douglass’ circumstances were hardly favourable, but he did win something of a genetic and geographic lottery at birth.

He also caught a rare break, learning to read and write as a young boy, skills most slaveowners prohibited.

“In Baltimore, Douglass asked his mistress, Sophia Auld, to teach him to read, which she did, having never overseen an enslaved person before,” Stouffer said. “Her husband, Hugh Auld, found out and told her in front of Douglass, ‘if you learn him to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and this accomplished, he’ll be running away from himself.’ Hearing this, Douglass ‘understood the direct pathway to freedom,’ as he said.”

Chadd Scott. “Art, Activism And Frederick Douglass At National Portrait Gallery,” on the Forbes website Aug 22, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/04/2024

Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1850 (after c. 1847 daguerreotype)
Sixth-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

When sitting for a photograph, Douglass would pose as an artist or performer, forming part of a pas de trois with the photographer and the camera. He always dressed up and, as the activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton noted, often appeared “majestic in his wrath.”

Before the mid-1860s, Douglass typically stared into the camera lens with a dramatic look. He wanted the focus on himself. Here, he fills the frame, appearing as an accomplished, dignified activist, and projecting a visual voice of democracy. Through his images, voice, and writings, Douglass sought to “out-citizen” whites, many of whom questioned African American rights.

In the years following his escape from bondage in 1838, Frederick Douglass emerged as a powerful and persuasive spokesman for the cause of abolition. Douglass’s effectiveness as an antislavery advocate was due in large measure to his firsthand experience with the evils of slavery and his extraordinary skill as an orator whose “electrifying eloquence” astonished and enthralled his audiences. Convinced that a peaceful end to slavery was impossible, Douglass embraced the Civil War as a fight for emancipation and called for the enlistment of black troops. Throughout the decades that followed, he remained a tireless champion for civil rights.

In 1845, when the publication of his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass revealed biographical details that could have led to his capture as a fugitive from slavery, Douglass left the United States for an extended stay in Great Britain. He was warmly welcomed by British abolitionists, who raised the funds to purchase his freedom, thereby enabling Douglass to return to the United States in 1847 as a free man. In this daguerreotype, believed to date from the time of his return, Douglass confronts the camera with an intensity that became the hallmark of his photographic portraits.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Ezra Greenleaf Weld (American, 1801-1874)
Fugitive Slave Law Convention, Cazenovia, New York
1850
Half-plate copy daguerreotype
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Set Charles Momjian

On August 21, 1850, two days after the Senate passed the Fugitive Slave Act [Passed on September 18, 1850 by Congress, The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was part of the Compromise of 1850. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and trying escaped slaves], about two thousand abolitionists convened near Gerrit Smith’s home. Douglass presided as president. Participants approved Smith’s “Letter to the American Slaves,” urging captives to avenge their enslavers. “You are prisoners of war in an enemy’s country,” Smith declared.

Here, Douglass sits at the edge of the table next to Theodosia Gilbert, the fiancée of William Chaplin, who was in prison for aiding fugitives. Behind Douglass stands Gerrit Smith [see photo below], in mid-speech, gesticulating. On either side of Smith, in checkered shawls and day bonnets, are Mary and Emily Edmonson, whose freedom had been orchestrated by Chaplin.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Ezra Greenleaf Weld, known simply as “Greenleaf,” operated a daguerreotype studio in Cazenovia, New York, during a time of intense social and political turmoil. He opened his first studio in his home in 1845, when America began to witness the volatile events that led to the Civil War. At that time, instruction manuals on the daguerreotype process were widely available, and most small towns had at least one studio. In an 1850 advertisement in his local newspaper, Greenleaf offered “Miniatures executed in the finest style, and put in Rings, Pins, Lockets and cases, of great variety size and price.”

Greenleaf seems to have been very successful with his daguerreotype business. By 1851 he had leased new quarters on the top floor of a building, where he placed a skylight to receive northern light for his studio sessions. During the Civil War years, he made numerous pictures in and around Cazenovia.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Southworth & Hawes (active 1843–1862)
William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879
c. 1851
Half-plate daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

After escaping enslavement, Douglass subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, and read it as devoutly as his bible. “The paper became my meat and drink,” he recalled.

Garrison promoted Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, which made him famous and prompted him to flee to the British Isles to avoid capture and re-enslavement. British friends then purchased his freedom, and he returned to the United States in 1847, a free man. Wanting to launch his own paper, Douglass soon moved his family to Rochester, New York, a railroad and antislavery hub that lacked an abolitionist paper. The move ruptured his friendship with Garrison until after the Civil War.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present One Life: Frederick Douglass, an exhibition exploring the life and legacy of one of the 19th century’s most influential writers, speakers and intellectuals. Douglass was a radical activist who devoted his life to abolitionism and rights for all. This exhibition shows the intimate relationship between art and protest through prints, photographs and ephemera. One Life: Frederick Douglass is guest curated by John Stauffer, the Sumner R. and Marshall S. Kates Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and consulting curator Ann Shumard, the National Portrait Gallery’s senior curator of photographs.

“Frederick Douglass was the preeminent African American voice of the 19th century and among the nation’s greatest orators, writers and picture-makers,” Stauffer said. “Born into slavery, he became a leading abolitionist, civil rights activist and the most photographed American of the 19th-century, a public face of the nation. This comprehensive exhibition includes objects from all phases of his life as a way to highlight the power of his remarkable impact. It explores his friendship with President Abraham Lincoln, for example, as well as his enduring influence on artists and activists in the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Douglass was born on the Eastern shore of Maryland in 1818. Having escaped slavery in 1838, he traveled to New York, where he married Anna Murray. After the couple moved to Massachusetts, he began attending abolitionist meetings. Douglass went on to publish three autobiographies and a novella, deliver thousands of speeches and edit the longest continually running Black newspaper of the 19th century, The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’ Paper and Douglass’ Monthly). As a political insider and policy influencer during the Civil War, he befriended and advised President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass changed traditional rules of representation by explaining how “true art” could be an engine of social change.

The exhibition will showcase over 35 objects, including the ledger documenting Douglass’ birth in February 1818; a pamphlet of his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” oration; two of his three autobiographies – My Bondage and My Freedom and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself; a letter from Douglass to Lincoln; portraits of activists in Douglass’ circle, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; portraits by the prominent Black photographers Augustus Washington and Cornelius Marion Battey; and portraits of the Black leaders Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes, all of whom carried on his legacy.

Press release from the National Portrait Gallery

Ezra Greenleaf Weld (American, 1801-1874)
Gerrit Smith 1797-1874
c. 1854
Two-thirds daguerreotype
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of an anonymous donor

Gerrit Smith, the upstate New York abolitionist and philanthropist, was a close friend of Douglass from the late 1840s to the Civil War. In 1846, Smith gave away 120,000 acres of land in the Adirondacks, known as “Timbuctoo,” to three thousand Black residents of New York State. Smith welcomed Douglass to New York with a deed for forty acres and provided crucial financial support to his newspaper. “You not only keep life in my paper but keep spirit in me,” Douglass wrote. Smith helped convert Douglass into a political abolitionist, one who interpreted the Constitution as an antislavery document.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Unidentified photographer
John Brown 1800-1859
c. 1857 (after c. 1855 daguerreotype)
Salted paper print
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Douglass described John Brown as someone who, “though a white gentleman, is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.” They became friends, and in 1859, Brown urged Douglass to join him in raiding the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Douglass, however, refused and told Brown he thought he was entering a “steel trap.” Brown and sixteen others were killed, either during the raid or after they were found guilty of treason. Douglass later credited Brown with starting the war that ended slavery.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Frederick Douglass believed that Brown’s “zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine – it was as the burning sun to my taper light – mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

Douglass, Frederick (1881). John Brown. An Address at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College, May 30, 1881. Dover, New Hampshire: Dover, N. H., Morning Star job printing house. p. 9. Retrieved March 9, 2022

Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
c. 1860
Salted paper print
Image: 6 × 4.5cm (2 3/8 × 1 3/4″)
Sheet: 10.1 × 7.9cm (4 × 3 1/8″)
Mount: 17 × 13.6cm (6 11/16 × 5 3/8″)
Mat: 45.7 × 35.6cm (18 × 14″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Douglass’s visual persona continually evolved, which undermined one of the key intellectual foundations of chattel slavery and racism that cast the self as fixed, unable to rise. Perhaps the most noticeable markers of Douglass’s continual evolution are his hairstyle and facial hair. In this salted paper print, he experiments with a mid-scalp part, unique among the 168 separate photographs. Five years later, in a carte de visite, he sports a ponytail, also distinct from his typical hairstyle.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Douglass’ words were powerful; his image, arguably, more so.

“Douglass, along with most Americans, believed that photography was a ‘truthful’ representation and the great democratic art,” Stouffer explained. “He also recognised that the sitter had agency in the outcome of a photographic portrait. He understood his role as an artist or performer, part of a pas de trois with the photographer and the camera. He always dressed up. His photographic portraits, along with those of numerous other African Americans, starkly contrasted the racist caricatures of Blacks created by whites.”

A long American tradition of white artists caricaturing African Americans in prints and paintings influenced public perception. White painters in the antebellum era almost always cast the devil as a Black man. Monkeys and happy slaves were other tropes.

Douglass, meanwhile, always presented himself, in dress, pose, and expression, as a dignified and respectable citizen.

“Photography was a truth-telling medium he emphasised. It bore witness to African Americans, and all humans, essential humanity, and it countered the racist caricatures by whites drawing freehand,” Stouffer said. “Douglass argued that photography inspired people to eradicate the sins of their society. It led them to activism. It stemmed from the power of imagination, which allowed people to appreciate photographs as accurate representations of some greater reality. It encouraged them to realise their ideals in an imperfect world.”

As Douglass put it: “Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers – and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be in the reflection of what is, and endeavour to remove the contradiction.”

This is a key message of the exhibition.

“Poets, prophets, and reformers were artists and activists. Activism inspired art and vice versa. Poets, prophets, and reformers saw their community or nation as it was – with all its gross inequalities, injustices, and prejudices – and they contrasted it with what ought to be. The contradiction inspired them to remove structural inequalities, injustices, and prejudices,” Stouffer explained. “Douglass and most other abolitionists, along with many antislavery advocates, considered themselves poets, prophets, and reformers. As a group, they sat for their photographic portraits with greater frequency, distributed them more effectively, and were more taken with photography, than other groups.”

Douglass went so far as to say that “the moral and social influence of pictures” was more important than “the making of its laws.”

Chadd Scott. “Art, Activism And Frederick Douglass At National Portrait Gallery,” on the Forbes website Aug 22, 2023 [Online] Cited 21/04/2024

Johnson, Williams &. Co. (active 1860s and 1870s)
James McCune Smith 1813-1865
c. 1860
Albumen silver print
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division; The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

James McCune Smith (April 18, 1813 – November 17, 1865) was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.

In addition to practicing as a physician for nearly 20 years at the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan, Smith was a public intellectual: he contributed articles to medical journals, participated in learned societies, and wrote numerous essays and articles drawing from his medical and statistical training. He used his training in medicine and statistics to refute common misconceptions about race, intelligence, medicine, and society in general. He was invited as a founding member of the New York Statistics Society in 1852, which promoted a then new science. Later he was elected as a member in 1854 of the recently founded American Geographic Society. He was never admitted to the American Medical Association or local medical associations,[1] very likely as a result of the systemic racism that Smith confronted throughout his medical career.

He has been most well known for his leadership as an abolitionist: a member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, with Frederick Douglass he helped start the National Council of Colored People in 1853, the first permanent national organisation for blacks. Douglass called Smith “the single most important influence on his life.” Smith was one of the Committee of Thirteen, who organised in 1850 in Manhattan to resist the newly passed Fugitive Slave Law by aiding refugee slaves through the Underground Railroad. Other leading abolitionist activists were among his friends and colleagues. From the 1840s, Smith lectured on race and abolitionism and wrote numerous articles to refute racist ideas about black capacities.

Both Smith and his wife were of mixed African and European descent. As he became economically successful, Smith built a house in a mostly white neighbourhood; in the 1860 census he and his family were classified as white, along with their neighbours. (In the census of 1850, while living in a predominately African-American neighbourhood, they had been classified as mulatto.) Smith served for nearly 20 years as the physician at the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York. After it was burned down in July 1863 by a mob in draft riots in Manhattan, in which nearly 100 blacks were killed, Smith moved his family and practice to Brooklyn for their safety. Many other blacks left Manhattan for Brooklyn at the same time. The parents stressed education for their children. In the 1870 census, his widow and children continued to be classified as white.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Unidentified photographer
Sojourner Truth c. 1797-1883
1864
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 8.7 × 5.6cm (3 7/16 × 2 3/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Sojourner Truth was possibly more famous for her carte-de-visite photographs than for her actual presence at abolition meetings. Her carefully chosen images made her a familiar figure to millions of viewers. They depicted a respectable matron. Truth’s famous maxim that she included with her portrait, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” links her image (shadow) to her actual self (substance) and to the growing demand for photographs during the war years.

Truth’s image becomes an extension of herself and her nation. The yarn forms the contours of the eastern United States, with Florida’s panhandle and Texas clearly visible. As a representative American woman, Truth’s piety, simplicity, and abolitionism were shaping the United States.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

L. Schamer (active c. 1870)
Louis Prang Lithography Co. (active 1856-1899)
Representative Women
1870
Lithograph
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

This portrait unites seven leading female suffragists. Clockwise from the top are portraits of Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Maria Child, Susan B. Anthony, and Sara Jane Lippincott, who surround Anna Dickinson, the most popular woman on the lecture circuit; in a sense, Douglass’s counterpart. The visual power of the image stems from its ability to reveal both the cohesiveness of the movement and the strong personalities within it.

Douglass knew these women and, as a leading male advocate for women’s rights, often collaborated with them and attended their conventions. But when Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869, granting suffrage to Black men but not to women, their cohesion crumbled. Anthony and Stanton argued that white women should have suffrage before Black men. Douglass supported the amendment but continued to advocate for women’s suffrage.

Between 1860 and 1880, it became common for American reformers to gather on stages – then called lyceums – to promote abolition, temperance, education reform, and women’s rights. Lyceum associations allowed suffragists to speak. In their lectures, suffragists addressed men and women of diverse backgrounds – across state, racial, and economic divides – and reached wider audiences than through women’s organisations alone.

Representative Women is a combinative portrait that brings together seven women who were active on the lecture circuit. The visual power of the image stems from its ability to reveal both the cohesiveness of the movement and the strong individual personalities within it. Clockwise from the top are portraits of Lucretia Coffin Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore, Lydia Maria Francis Child, Susan B. Anthony, and Sara Jane Lippincott, who surround the central figure of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson. At the time, Dickinson was more popular than Mark Twain and held the distinction of being the highest paid woman on the lecture circuit.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

NOT IN THE EXHIBITION BUT IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

Unidentified photographer
Frederick Douglass
1856
Quarter-plate ambrotype
Image/Sight: 8.8 × 6.7cm (3 7/16 × 2 5/8″)
Mat (brass): 10.8 × 8.3cm (4 1/4 × 3 1/4″)
Case open: 12 × 19.2 × 1.3cm (4 3/4 × 7 9/16 × 1/2″)
Case closed: 12 × 9.5 × 1.9cm (4 3/4 × 3 3/4 × 3/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired through the generosity of an anonymous donor

In the years following his escape from bondage in 1838, Frederick Douglass emerged as a powerful and persuasive spokesman for the cause of abolition. His effectiveness as an antislavery advocate was due in large measure to his firsthand experience with the evils of slavery and his extraordinary skill as an orator. His “glowing logic, biting irony, melting appeals, and electrifying eloquence” astonished and enthralled his audiences. As this ambrotype suggests, Douglass’s power was also rooted in the sheer impressiveness of his bearing, which abolitionist and activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton likened to that of “an African prince, majestic in his wrath.”

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

George Francis Schreiber (American, 1803-1892)
Frederick Douglass
1870
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 9.4 x 5.9cm (3 11/16 x 2 5/16″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Donald R. Simon

George Kendall Warren (American, 1834-1884)
Frederick Douglass
1876
Albumen silver print
Image/Sheet: 9.7 × 5.7cm (3 13/16 × 2 1/4″)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery
8th and F Sts NW
Washington, DC 20001

Opening hours:
11.30am – 7.00pm daily

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website

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Exhibition: ‘Dorothea Lange: Seeing People’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington Part 2

Exhibition dates: 5th November 2023 – 31st March 2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Untitled (La Estrellita, “Spanish” Dancer), San Francisco, California
1919
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.7 x 14.6cm (7 3/4 x 5 3/4 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Estrellita Jones
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Stella Hurtig Jones was a famous American vaudeville performer who traveled the world as a flamenco and tango dancer during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One of Lange’s earliest professional portraits, the composition uses the soft focus and diffused light that characterises pictorial photography, popular among celebrities. Lange photographed Hurtig Jones as herself, rather than as her stage persona La Estrellita (The Little Star), perhaps in recognition of her recent retirement. As European travel waned during World War I and movies replaced vaudeville as mass entertainment, the allure of traditional Spanish dance diminished. La Estrellita married, started a perfume business, and moved from Hollywood to the Bay Area.

Label text from the exhibition

Full of the world

Just when you think that you know the work of an artist photographs emerge that you have never seen before, photographs that challenge the canon of famous images on which the reputation of the artist rests. Such is the case in this two part posting on the work of social documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965). See Part 1 of the posting.

In this posting it is not the famous photographs such as White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California (1933); Nettie Featherston, Wife of a Migratory Laborer with Three Children, near Childress, Texas, from The American Country Woman (June 1938); Near Coolidge, Arizona. Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field (November 1940, printed c. 1965); and Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother) (March 1936) which impress the senses, for their affect is known well enough.

Rather, it is the relatively unknown early Pictorialist photographs, the earthy photographs of Irish people, and photographs that challenge the formalist construction of images of the disintegration of families and communities during the Great Depression – images that are far more avant-garde and experimental than I would have expected from Lange – which shine in the mind’s eye (in one’s imagination or memory).

The ethereal Pictorialist portraits (this posting) with their asymmetrical construction, trembling? vibrational? negative space, luminous light and low depth of field are a delightful surprise… as are the 1950’s Irish portrait photographs (Part 1 of the posting) full of earthy, brooding darkness – with faces that are “pure Ireland.” What intensity in these images, clearly and empathetically seen.

But it is the abstract figurative studies in which I am most interested… images that disrupt Lange’s normative representation in her social documentary photographs of humanity and their resilience. In photographs such as On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering (1938, below) and Jake Jones’s Hands, Gunlock County, Utah (1953) – taken fifteen years apart but which could have been taken the same day, on a theme the artist was obviously interested in – Lange dissects the body, closing in on gnarled hands, weatherbeaten hats as metaphor for a tough life, well lived. These are images in which we see very little (as opposed to Barthes assertion that in photography’s realism a photo is an image in which we see everything) … but implicitly understand the sublime blur of legend of these workers and their hats.

Other photographs dial up the figurative abstraction. Demonstration, San Francisco (1934, below) is a study of light, shape and form, an almost Constructivist image of fragments and negative space: hand, pole, amorphous mass of shoulder, face turned away, hat and declarative “FEED US!” banner; San Francisco Waterfront (1934) is a beautifully rendered abstract pictorial space evidencing the despair of humanity through light and form: witness, the clasped hands at rear like sentinels, the thumb pointing left… while below, covered head in hand, the thumb points vertically to the surmounted ear, which echoes the cropped ear and hair at the bottom of the photo, while to the right the two buttons of the jacket lead us to the ascending column of four buttons back to the portentous, clasping, guarding hands above. A masterpiece of photographic pictorial construction. Further, with their radical pictorial construction and cropping of the picture frame, masterpieces such as Dispossessed Arkansas farmers (1935) are truly avant-garde and experimental photographs for their time, something I don’t normally associate with the work of Dorothea Lange. As my friend Jonathan Kamholtz observes of the photographs I have been discussing, Lange “tended to lose interest in the backgrounds. The pictorial space is really very shallow. This contributes to their theatricality – not in the sense that they are false or artificial, but that each one displays character, costume, fate.”

Forearmed with this knowledge, I start looking at her well known images with fresh eyes… and its all there in more subtle form: the low angle of the camera looking up at the subject, the geometric shape of hands and arms, the solid blocks of bodies filling the picture frame, the sculptural, abstract shape of bodies in fields (Migratory Field Worker Picking Cotton in San Joaquin Valley, 1938), the flattening of bodies one against another (May Day, San Francisco, California, 1934) and the disassociation of human identity through the occlusion of faces (This man is a labor contractor in the pea fields of California 1936, below; Damaged Child, Shacktown 1936, below; Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato 1939, below).

Dorothea Lange was an incredibly intelligent and passionate artist who removed her ego from the act of taking photographs, who lost herself in the visual experience in order to take photographs to effect social change, who connected with the world in order “to experience love, hate, and passion in every form in one’s body.”1

“That the familiar world is often unsatisfactory cannot be denied, but it is not, for all that, one that we need abandon,” she argued. “We need not be seduced into evasion of it any more than we need be appalled by it into silence… Bad as it is, the world is potentially full of good photographs. But to be good, photographs have to be full of the world.”2

And full of the spirit of the artist.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Carl Jung quoted in Nicos Hadjicostis. Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler. Bamboo Leaf Press, 2016, p. 42.

2/ Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon, “Photographing the Familiar,” Aperture 1, no. 2 (1952), 15.

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“When you enter into the visual world, detaching yourself from all the holds on you… it is a mental disengagement so that you live, for maybe two or three hours, as completely as possible a visual experience, where you feel that you have lost yourself, your identity.”

Dorothea Lange quoted in Dyanna Taylor and Public Broadcasting Service (U.S.), directors. American Masters – Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. Kanopy Streaming, 2014.

“The researcher ought to hang up exact science and put away the scholar’s gown, to say farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, madhouses, and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels, and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society, the stock exchanges, the socialist meetings, the churches, the revivals and ecstasies of the sects, to experience love, hate, and passion in every form in one’s body.”

Carl Jung quoted in Nicos Hadjicostis. Destination Earth: A New Philosophy of Travel by a World-Traveler. Bamboo Leaf Press, 2016, p. 42.

During her long, prolific, and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s work through the lens of portraiture, highlighting her unique ability to discover and reveal the character and resilience of those she photographed.

Featuring some 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasising her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism.

“Five years earlier I would have thought it enough to take a picture of a man, no more. But now, I wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world.”

“A single photographic print may be “news,” a “portrait,” “art,” or “documentary” – any of these, all of them, or none.”

“The whole world is a museum. To walk through the streets, as though down a museum corridor. … To step into a supermarket as though setting forth in the National Gallery – is an experience and an exercise in vision.”

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Untitled (Fleishhacker Portrait)
1920
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.4 x 15.1cm (6 1/16 x 5 15/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Maynard Dixon and Son Daniel
1925
Gelatin silver print
Image: 13.8 x 10.8cm (5 7/16 x 4 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 15.1 x 11cm (5 15/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 12 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 13 1/4 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2000.50.1 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Portrait of Adele Raas, San Francisco
1927
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.5 x 12.7cm (6 1/8 x 5 in.)
Mat: 14 x 12 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 13 1/4 in.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of the Raas Family
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Untitled (Portrait of William)
1929
elatin silver print
Image/sheet: 25 x 20cm (9 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 18 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Hopi Man, Arizona
1923, printed 1926
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.4 x 19.7cm (7 1/4 x 7 3/4 in.)
Mount: 19.3 x 20.4cm (7 5/8 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mat: 15 1/4 x 15 in.
Frame (outside): 16 1/2 x 16 1/4 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XP.912.4
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Lange embraced the chance to experiment outside her studio. In August 1923, she visited Walpi Village of the Hopi Nation with her then-husband Maynard Dixon, an avid outdoor painter. She had begun to crop some of her portraits to accentuate a gaze, hand, touch, or torso – a way of capturing the essence of a person, paradoxically showing less to reveal more.

When printing Hopi Man, Lange focused so closely on the subject’s face that his features resemble a map of his experience. She undercut her own effort to reach meaningfully across the cultural divide, however, because she did not record the man’s name or any other information about him. As a portrait, Hopi Man risks picturing a type or class of person rather than this individual’s character.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Clausen Child and Mother
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15.6 x 21cm (6 1/8 x 8 1/4 in.)
Mat: 14 x 17 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 18 1/4 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Henri Cartier-Bresson, by exchange

Lange frequently photographed the subject of mother and child, a long-standing Western art historical tradition rooted in depictions of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and modernised and secularised in high-end portrait studios. Here Frances Clausen stares directly at the camera while her mother, Gertrude, sits in shadow, looking away. Lange focuses on the child’s inquisitive gaze, as well as her affectionate bond to and emerging independence from her mother. Lange’s expertise photographing children – acquired from her early studio work – led to some of her most important photographs made during the Great Depression, displayed in the next galleries.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Maynard Dixon
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 14.1 x 13.4cm (5 9/16 x 5 1/4 in.)
Mount: 16.4 x 14.2 cm (6 7/16 x 5 9/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Maynard Dixon (January 24, 1875 – November 11, 1946) was an American artist. He was known for his paintings, and his body of work focused on the American West. Dixon is considered one of the finest artists having dedicated most of their art to the U.S. Southwestern cultures and landscapes at the end of the 19th-century and the first half of the 20th-century. He was often called “The Last Cowboy in San Francisco.”

Through his work with the Galerie Beaux Arts, a cooperative gallery in San Francisco, Dixon played a pivotal role ensuring the West Coast supported the work of local, modern artists. He was married for a time to photographer Dorothea Lange, and later to painter Edith Hamlin.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Native American Girl, Taos, New Mexico
1931
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 5.3 x 5.3cm (2 1/16 x 2 1/16 in.)
Mount: 13.2 x 10.5cm (5 3/16 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mat: 10 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 11 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

In summer 1931, escaping the Depression-era turmoil of San Francisco, Lange and Dixon bought their first car and drove to New Mexico with their children. Her few surviving photographs from this trip reveal significant steps in her transition away from studio portraiture and toward a more straightforward approach to photographing people. A series of pictures portrays this unidentified Indigenous girl in a direct documentary style. Although her expression reveals few emotions, she looks squarely at the lens in one photograph and seems comfortable in front of the camera.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Native American Girl, Taos, New Mexico
1931
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 5.4 x 5.4cm (2 1/8 x 2 1/8 in.)
Mount: 13.3 x 10.4cm (5 1/4 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mat: 10 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 11 1/4 x 15 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Dorothy Brett, Painter, Taos, New Mexico
1931
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 8.6 x 8.2cm (3 3/8 x 3 1/4 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 12 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Lange met Dorothy Brett in 1931 when the photographer and her family spent several months in Taos. Born into an aristocratic British family, Brett rebelled against their expectations, attending art school and becoming a painter. In London she befriended writers associated with the Bloomsbury group, including D. H. Lawrence, who was recruiting people to go to New Mexico to form a utopian society. Brett was the only person who followed him, but she was so enchanted with the area that she lived there for the rest of her life.

Label text from the exhibition

Hon. Dorothy Eugénie Brett (10 November 1883 – 27 August 1977) was an Anglo-American painter, remembered as much for her social life as for her art. Born into an aristocratic British family, she lived a sheltered early life. During her student years at the Slade School of Art, she associated with Dora Carrington, Barbara Hiles and the Bloomsbury group. Among the people she met was novelist D.H. Lawrence, and it was at his invitation that she moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1924. She remained there for the rest of her life, becoming an American citizen in 1938.

Her work can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., in the Millicent Rogers Museum and the Harwood Museum of Art, both in Taos. Also at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, New Mexico and in many private collections.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Demonstration, San Francisco
1934
Gelatin silver print
Image: 12.1 x 14.3cm (4 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 12.1 x 14.3cm (4 3/4 x 5 5/8 in.)
Mount: 14.6 x 23.8cm (5 3/4 x 9 3/8 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Joseph M. Cohen Gift, 2005

In 1934, as Lange began to forge a new documentary practice, she sought “to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world.” With no clients to please, she drew on insights she had learned from modernism, especially its celebration of close-up studies and dramatic angles. Like other artists, she also found that signs – such as the protest poster declaring “… FEED US!” – could root a photograph in a specific time and place and give agency to those she depicted, allowing them to speak. With carefully composed pictures like this one, Lange was acknowledging the power of modernist photography to tell stories in simple, dynamic ways.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Andrew Furuseth
1934
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.5 x 19.6cm (8 1/16 x 7 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 21.1 x 20.3cm (8 5/16 x 8 in.)
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Andrew Furuseth was an American labor leader known for organising seamen during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He helped create the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and the International Seamen’s Union, heading both as their president. Lange met 80-year-old Furuseth around the time of the San Francisco waterfront strikes of 1934. She had been photographing labor organisers and protesters at May Day events around the city while Furuseth was working to help moderate the seamen’s anger to avoid a damaging strike. Her portrayal of Furuseth in profile against a dark background – eyes closed, deep in thought – emphasises his years of experience and a weary strength.

Label text from the exhibition

Andrew Furuseth (March 17, 1854 – January 22, 1938) of Åsbygda, Hedmark, Norway was a merchant seaman and an American labor leader. Furuseth was active in the formation of two influential maritime unions: the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific and the International Seamen’s Union, and served as the executive of both for decades.

Furuseth was largely responsible for the passage of four reforms that changed the lives of American mariners. Two of them, the Maguire Act of 1895 and the White Act of 1898, ended corporal punishment and abolished imprisonment for deserting a vessel.

Furuseth was credited as the key figure behind drafting and enacting the Seamen’s Act of 1915, hailed by many as “The Magna Carta of the Sea” and the Jones Act of 1920 which governs the workers’ compensation rights of sailors and the use of foreign vessels in domestic trade. In his later years, he was known as “the Old Viking”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Street Meeting, San Francisco
1934
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 23.5 x 17.5cm (9 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 13 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Stenographer with Mended Stockings, San Francisco, California
1934, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34 x 26.6 cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 27.8 cm (13 7/8 x 10 15/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Lange’s portrait of a Depression-era stenographer omits her face to focus on her dark, creased dress, tattered hosiery, and woven shoes. Her stockings are stitched up the front, mended to keep them – and her – going for another day or two. They reveal the grit and fortitude of San Francisco’s working women during a time when jobs were scarce and people had to conserve all their resources in the face of financial insecurity.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Wandering Boy, Camp Carlton, California
1935
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34 x 25.1cm (13 3/8 x 9 7/8 in.)
Sheet: 35.3 x 28 cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mount: 38.1 x 28 cm (15 x 11 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Black sharecropper with twenty acres. He receives eight cents a day for hoeing cotton. Brazos river bottoms, near Bryan, Texas
June 1938, printed c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 19.2cm (9 1/2 x 7 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.3 x 20.5cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) created some of the most groundbreaking portraits of the 20th century. Through pictures of labourers, demonstrators, refugees, migrant farmers, the unjustly incarcerated, and others, Lange captured the spirit of human endurance while recording some of the profound social inequities of the period. Her work expanded the boundaries of portraiture and helped spark the development of modern documentary photography.

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s art through the lens of portraiture and highlights her capacity to spotlight the humanity and resilience of those she photographed. She began her career as a studio portrait photographer, and even as she ventured far outside her studio people remained key to her mission. Focusing on Lange’s abiding concern for those in need, this exhibition reveals her lifelong investigation into how photography – and portraits in particular – could help bring about collective change.

One of the most important documentary photographers of her time, Lange sought to transform how we see and understand one another. Motivated by an ever-growing interest in social justice, she was also an intrepid reporter who traveled extensively in the United States and around the world to create indelible and influential photographs. This exhibition illuminates the centrality of portraiture in Lange’s career and its role in exposing the impacts of economic disparity, climate change, migration, and war – issues that remain equally urgent today.

Wall text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Unemployed Man, San Francisco, California
1934, printed before 1950
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.8 x 19.1cm (9 3/4 x 7 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25.2 x 19.6cm (9 15/16 x 7 11/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
This man is a labor contractor in the pea fields of California. “One-Eye” Charlie gives his views. “I’m making my living off of these people (migrant laborers) so I know the conditions,” San Luis Obispo County, California
February 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 19.7cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migratory Pea Pickers, Nipomo, California
March 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.4 x 24.5cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.3 x 25.7cm (8 x 10 1/8 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Post Office and Postmistress, Widtsoe, Utah
April 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.4 x 19.3cm (9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.3cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 13 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

When Lange photographed Widtsoe, Utah, for the Resettlement Administration, the town’s population had dwindled to 17 families. Cycles of drought devastated the region’s agricultural economy and the RA stepped in to buy out landowners and relocate them. Signs of desolation are evident in this portrait of the town’s postmistress at the post office. Perched on cinder blocks, surrounded by dusty earth, the building appears to teeter – an effect intensified by Lange’s skewed composition. The stoic presence of the postmistress, who is posed neatly within the doorframe, hints at the stabilising role women often play in Lange’s compositions.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Plantation Owner, Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi
June 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.7 x 24.1cm (7 3/8 x 9 1/2 in.)
The Art institute of Chicago, Purchased with funds provided by Vicki and Thomas Horwich

In 1938, a cropped version of this photograph was featured in the publication of Archibald MacLeish’s book-length poem Land of the Free. The cropped photograph focused attention on the “plantation owner” and erased four of the Black men, leaving just one silhouetted in the background. MacLeish’s poem proclaims, “All you needed for freedom was being American” – yet Lange’s original picture, and the subsequent cropped version, reveals the fallacy of this sentiment. Both point to how African Americans were barred from achieving the freedom that MacLeish claims was available to all Americans. Paul Taylor appears at the far left edge interviewing the owner.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Drought Refugees from Oklahoma Camping by the Roadside, Blythe, California
August 17, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24 x 19.1cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
Mount: 33.02 x 28.26 cm (13 x 11 1/8 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

As a result of droughts and erosion that destroyed tillable land and crops in Oklahoma and Arkansas, thousands of farmers moved west with their families to start their lives over in places such as Blythe. Zella, Jess, and Jesse Power were among these families. It is not clear when the Powers began their move to California, but Jesse was born in Blythe, so Zella may have been pregnant during their journey. Lange’s field notes indicate that the Powers were a family of seven; an older sibling’s foot may be glimpsed in the lower right. With her furrowed brow and slumped posture, Zella exemplifies the difficulties faced by migrant mothers seeking better lives for themselves and their families in places that did not promise immediate relief.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Child Living in Oklahoma City Shacktown [Damaged Child, Shacktown]
August 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.2 x 19.4cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.)
Mat: 17 x 14 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase

This photograph of a bruised girl with a hollow gaze is one of many Lange made depicting the exploitation of migrant children during the Great Depression. The portrait suggests the range of emotional and physical harm children experienced as they, too, struggled to survive economic hardship.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Eighty-year-old woman living in squatters’ camp on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. “If you lose your pluck you lose the most there is in you – all you’ve got to live with”
November 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24.4cm (7 1/2 x 9 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.3 x 25.5cm (8 x 10 1/16 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Young Cotton Picker, San Joaquin Valley, California
November 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 18.4cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.)
Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Alabama Plow Girl, near Eutaw, Alabama
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.1 x 19.4cm (7 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.)
Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Alfred Stieglitz Society Gifts, 2001

Lange travelled to the American South in 1936 while employed by the Resettlement Administration. Near Eutaw, Alabama, she photographed Black tenant farmers like this shoeless girl plowing a field in the punishing summer heat. In the South, Lange witnessed the oppressive working conditions endured by Black tenants, who farmed land predominantly held by white owners and often struggled to access New Deal resources. Southern Black farmers faced undue difficulty during the Depression as economic disaster exacerbated the oppression and poverty produced by the region’s racist agricultural system.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migratory Workers Harvesting Peas near Nipomo, California
Spring 1937
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.4 x 24.5cm (7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.6 x 25.4cm (8 1/8 x 10 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in. frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Country store on dirt road. Sunday afternoon. Note the kerosene pump on the right and the gasoline pump on the left. Rough, unfinished timber posts have been used as supports for porch roof. Black men are sitting on the porch. Brother of store owner stands in doorway, Gordonton, North Carolina
July 1939, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.5 x 34.3cm (9 5/8 x 13 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25.6 x 35.4cm (10 1/16 x 13 15/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 20 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 21 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Rainey Curry Baynes II, the store owner’s brother, leans in the doorway conversing with five Black men. On the far right is Arthur Thorpe, and the man wearing overalls is Joe Carrington. The men appear relaxed in Baynes’s presence, but it is unclear whether their demeanour is genuine or for the benefit of Lange’s camera. They may have been sharecroppers or tenant farmers indebted to the Baynes brothers, or simply customers of the store.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato. One of Chris Adolph’s Younger Children. Farm Security Administration Rehabilitation Clients
August 1939
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.83 x 25.4cm (8 3/16 x 10 in.)
Collection of the Oakland Museum of California, Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
End of Shift, Richmond, California
1942, printed 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image: 75.7 x 59.5cm (29 13/16 x 23 7/16 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase

Fortune magazine commissioned Lange to document the bustling shipyards in Richmond, north of Oakland, where newly desegregated defence firms were rapidly constructing transport, cargo, and warships for the United States Navy. With its tight cropping and dynamic configuration, End of Shift focuses on the rushing legs and torsos of shipbuilders leaving a wartime facility. Lange expressed the urgency of their work in defence production without showing their individual features. The angled composition and complex interplay of light and shadow demonstrate Lange’s understanding of how modern design techniques could convey the force and energy of a group working together on a project critical to the nation’s defence.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Street Encounter, Richmond, California
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
Image: 21.7 x 17.9cm (8 9/16 x 7 1/16 in.)
Frame (outside): 18 3/4 x 15 3/4 in.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.)

Dressed for work as a welder, this woman was one of thousands who moved to Richmond, California, during the early 1940s to seek employment in the expanding wartime shipbuilding yards. On assignment for Fortune magazine, Lange documented the upheaval wrought by Richmond’s rapidly growing population and diversifying workforce. Lange’s field notes described this picture as an “Item on race relations. Scene on main street. The girl was a taxi driver in New Orleans. She came to Richmond with her husband two years ago.” Recognising the power of words in her pictures, Lange included a sign that could be read as “Serve You” or “Serve Your Country,” but which actually says “Serve Yourself” – a wry comment on the national unity promoted by the era’s patriotic propaganda.

Label text from the exhibition

Early Portraits

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, Dorothea Lange learned photography in New York City before embarking in 1918 on a round-the-world trip. When forced to cut her journey short and find employment in San Francisco, she secured a position at the photo-finishing counter of a variety store. She soon opened her own portrait studio and worked among a cohort of bohemian artists and intellectuals including Imogen Cunningham, Consuelo Kanaga, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and the painter Maynard Dixon, who would become her first husband.

Bay Area high-society and cultural figures became Lange’s clients and the subjects of her studio portraits. These early pictures combine elements of the pictorial style in which she was trained, such as soft focus and diffused light, with an emerging modernist aesthetic that included dramatic cropping and unusual angles. She used light, shadow, and carefully constructed poses to articulate the character, attitude, and individuality of her models: “I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.”

Poverty and Activism

Although she had a highly successful studio practice, Lange in 1933 was compelled by the nation’s worsening economic conditions to rethink her occupation and carry her cameras into the city. “There in my studio I was surrounded by evidence of the Depression,” she said. “I remember well standing at that one window and just watching the flow of life. … I was driven by the fact that I was under personal turmoil to do something.”

Out in the streets during the early years of the Great Depression, Lange saw poverty, breadlines, strikes, and labor demonstrations. Her photographs from this period portray the unemployment and unrest that plagued San Francisco, and also document the activism of workers who organised to change their conditions. In 1934, Lange met the agricultural economist Paul Taylor. The two formed an important professional and personal partnership (they married the following year). Lange soon shifted her attention to the plight of migrant farmers, who were moving to California to seek work.

The Great Depression

As the Great Depression deepened, Dorothea Lange focused her lens on the families who had fled westward in the face of economic hardship caused by depleted land and failed farm tenancy in the South and Midwest. When she was working for government agencies, she documented the success of rural cooperatives and the unsanitary conditions in California migrant camps while striving to humanise the large numbers of people seeking shelter and employment. For Lange, portraiture offered a way to visualise the impacts of migration, racism, and environmental change, as well as the legacy of slavery, to gain public support for government aid programs.

During this period Lange cemented her style of documenting people. Her empathetic, highly detailed, and sharply focused depictions show labourers within their living and working environments. Some subjects are alone, but many are seen with family and other members of their communities. These photographs provided evidence of economic disaster and bore witness to the resulting human tragedy while underscoring her subjects’ strength and resilience. This powerful merging of portraiture and documentary photography expanded the boundaries of both traditions, transforming them in ways that resonate deeply today.

World War II

During World War II, Dorothea Lange focused on the impact of the war on Americans at home as well as the nation’s complicated racial dynamics. Nowhere is this seen more acutely than in her portraits of individuals of Japanese ancestry who were forced to abandon their homes in response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order (see nearby panel).

Lange also recorded the epochal shifts in California’s social fabric sparked by the growing defence industries, which helped rebuild the economy. Hired by Fortune magazine, she documented the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, where well-paid jobs attracted African Americans, Native Americans, and women into what had previously been a white male-dominated workforce. Yet as the population of Richmond quickly swelled, and as these newly empowered groups began to assert themselves, the changes also provoked housing shortages and social unrest.

Postwar America

Despite frequent health struggles, in the 1950s Dorothea Lange pursued photographic stories about a variety of American communities in the western United States. These include a project about urban life, for which she roamed the Bay Area; Three Mormon Towns, a collaboration made with Ansel Adams and Paul Taylor in Utah for Life magazine; and an environmental critique produced with photographer Pirkle Jones about the flooding of a Northern California town to create a reservoir. Wide-ranging in subject matter, Lange’s photographs reveal an extraordinary ability to portray the continued transformation of the American West and shine a light on the environmental and human consequences of the postwar economic boom.

World View

Dorothea Lange began working globally in 1954. Her first trip overseas was to Ireland, where she documented the kinship and community of country villages for Life magazine. Her husband, Paul Taylor, began consulting on international economic development for the US State Department and, in 1958, they traveled abroad for eight months, visiting Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other countries; in the early 1960s, the couple traveled to Venezuela and Egypt. Continuing to concentrate on portraiture, Lange found a new sort of beauty and serenity in these foreign environments as well as ties to the economic and social disparities she had photographed in the United States. While photographs taken during these trips confirm her ongoing creativity in the face of declining health, profound cultural differences made it more difficult for Lange to connect with people.

Lange devoted the last years of her life to her family and to organising a retrospective exhibition of her photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She passed away in late 1965, but her legacy continues in the enduring resonance of her photographs and the new generations of photographers who use portraiture and documentary styles to prompt social change.

Travel

Beginning in 1922, Lange traveled with her first husband, artist Maynard Dixon, to Arizona and New Mexico, where she produced portraits of Indigenous Americans. The few photographs that remain from these excursions show Lange testing new strategies. She started to experiment with portraits that featured just a fragment of a person – their hands or face, for example – perhaps inspired by the modernist work of photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whom she had met in 1923. She also shed the soft-focus pictorial style of her earlier studio portraits in favour of a more direct approach. Although Lange interacted only briefly with the Indigenous people she photographed, she witnessed some of the “harsh and unjust treatment” they faced. The sensitivity and experimentation seen in these early photographs helped establish Lange’s expansive concept of portraiture, which impacted her later work.

The Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration

From mid-1935, Dorothea Lange worked for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration (RA), reorganised as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937. Created to revitalise the country’s faltering agricultural economy, the RA helped farmers acquire land through low interest loans, administered projects on soil conservation and reforestation, and supported resettlement for those who could no longer work their land.

To document and report on its efforts, the RA established a historical division. Led by economist Roy Emerson Stryker, it enlisted some of America’s finest documentary photographers, including Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn. Stryker hired Lange on the strength of her earlier photographs documenting agricultural conditions for the state of California. In pictures of migrant labourers in California, tenant farmers in Alabama, drought refugees from Oklahoma, and others, Lange recorded the work and aspirations of the agencies. She covered a wide range of socially engaged stories that highlighted themes of human struggle and resilience, but the federal agencies – eager to garner widespread public and congressional support – discouraged depictions of racial oppression.

Migrant Mother March 1936

Human Erosion in California depicts a mother and three children at a migrant labor camp. Lange carefully composed the portrait to capture the woman’s face – prematurely etched by years of labor and worry – and her daughters embracing her. Migrant Mother, as the photograph is commonly known, has been compared to a Renaissance-era Madonna and child and described as an icon of 20th-century art, revered for its empathetic portrayal. Lange did not record the mother’s name. Only in 1978 was she finally identified as Florence Owens Thompson, a woman of Cherokee descent from Oklahoma. At the time of the photograph, Owens Thompson and her family were driving back home from California, where her husband had been working in a sawmill. When their car broke down, they were stranded at a nearby pea pickers’ camp. First published in a newspaper editorial urging government aid for migrant labourers, Migrant Mother prompted support from the state and the picture become an emblem of the power of photography to bring about social change. It also raises questions about the ethics of documentary photography and the dynamics between photographer and subject. Lange recalled that Owens Thompson “seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.” Owens Thompson, however, received little benefit and was never given a copy of the photograph.

Executive Order 9066

In February 1942, months after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The order paved the way for the removal of more than 120,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry – the majority of whom were American citizens – from the West Coast to inland incarceration camps. Denying individuals their civil liberties, the government registered and tagged people before loading them onto buses and transporting them to rudimentary “assembly centers” and, eventually, one of 10 detention camps spread across seven states. The last camp closed four years after Roosevelt issued the order.

Soon after the initial order, the government’s War Relocation Administration (WRA) hired Lange to document this process. Opposed to the government’s actions, Lange believed it was important to record for history “what we did.” Through poignant portraits, she also depicted the resilience of Japanese Americans forced to abandon the lives and businesses they had built and face incarceration. Fearing that Lange’s portraits would elicit too much sympathy, the WRA did not release the photographs during the war.

Documentary Portraiture

Lange’s work during the 1930s synthesised her ideas about portraiture and documentary photography. With new purpose, she used the techniques, compositional strategies, and social skills she had cultivated in her portrait studio to frame the people and events she recorded. By 1940 she had distilled her understanding of documentary photography as an art form that “records the social scene of our time. It mirrors the present and documents for the future.”

Yet these photographs were also documents that followed the government’s New Deal economic doctrine – they emphasised getting the country back on its feet through perseverance, hard work, regulatory reforms, and government relief. This mix of presumed objectivity, propaganda, and documentary storytelling in service of a critical national agenda proved to be particularly powerful. As photography historian Beaumont Newhall later wrote, Lange was “resolved to photograph the now, rather than the timeless; to capture somehow the effects on people of the calamity which overwhelmed America.”

Lange’s Titles

You will notice Lange’s varied approach to titles across her career. Sometimes she simply used someone’s name or the location where a picture was made. Other titles describe or poetically evoke what she saw. Lange also created elaborate captions, often taken from interviews or conversations with those whom she photographed. This was an experimental documentary technique, which relied on Lange’s memory and prolific note taking. These long captions are seen especially in work she made for government agencies during the 1930s and 1940s.

Lange and her editors frequently retitled photographs when exhibiting or publishing them. For this exhibition, we have used Lange’s original titles when known. In a few instances we have updated language in original titles to reflect contemporary usage.

Wall text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migrant Agricultural Worker’s Family, Nipomo, California
March 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26.67 x 34cm (10 1/2 x 13 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 27.94 x 35.56 cm (11 x 14 in.)
Mat: 18 x 22 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 23 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Florence Owens Thompson

Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother) captures the worry, need, and insecurity of everyday Americans during the Great Depression. It is one of the most recognisable American photographs. And it almost wasn’t taken.

In spring 1935, Lange was driving home from a long trip photographing migrant worker camps when she passed a sign pointing toward a pea pickers camp. Lange had already taken many photographs of pea pickers. She tried to convince herself that she didn’t need any more. But about 20 miles later, she turned around.

We don’t know exactly what happened when Lange doubled back – this time, she didn’t take notes. And she didn’t ask many questions. Lange assumed that she had come upon a mother and her three children, there among the waves of workers coming to pick peas, California’s cash crop.

But that wasn’t true. Florence Owen Thompson was traveling with her family from elsewhere in California. The family had set up a camp on the side of the road while her husband and son went into town to resolve some car troubles. When they returned, she mentioned a photographer had taken some photos. Thompson never expected one of those photographs to immortalise her as the “Migrant Mother.” Decades later she wrote a letter to the editor of her local paper expressing irritation with her likeness being misused. In a later interview, Thompson expressed regret at ever allowing Lange to take the photo saying, “I wish she hadn’t taken my picture. I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.”

Anonymous. “The Real Lives of People in Dorothea Lange’s Portraits,” on the National Gallery of Art website November 03, 2023 [Online] Cited 25/02/2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother)
March 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34.1 x 26.8 cm (13 7/16 x 10 9/16 in.)
Mount: 34.8 x 27.1 cm (13 11/16 x 10 11/16 in.)
Frame (outside): 28 5/8 x 22 5/8 x 1 3/8 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California
July 1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26.4 x 33.7cm (10 3/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 28 x 35.3cm (11 x 13 7/8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 20 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 21 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Grandfather and Grandchildren Awaiting Evacuation Bus, Hayward, California
1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26.4 x 22.7cm (10 3/8 x 8 15/16 in.)
Sheet: 35.4 x 27.8cm (13 15/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
Frame (outside): 20 3/4 x 16 7/8 in.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.)

In the spring of 1942, Dorothea Lange requested another leave from her Guggenheim fellowship when she was hired to document the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 in February1942, which allowed military commanders to set up security zones wherever they thought necessary, with the full authority to remove anyone from these areas regardless of nationality or age. In March, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, announced that all persons of Japanese ancestry would have to leave the Pacific Coast military zone, which included California, western Oregon and Washington, and southern Arizona. Though no specific charges were placed against any individuals, approximately 120,000 men, women, and children – more than two-thirds of them native-born American citizens – were ordered to abandon their homes and businesses and be relocated to internment camps established by the federal government. Two of the ten camps, Manzanar and Tule Lake, were in California as were twelve of the preliminary holding areas called assembly centers. The U.S. Army was responsible for gathering the Japanese Americans and retaining them in the makeshift assembly centers – race tracks, fairground exhibition halls, empty automobile showrooms – until the camps were ready. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was established in March 1942 to oversee management of the camps. In a letter dated 1 April1942 to Moe, Lange requested a postponement of her Guggenheim fellowship explaining: the Japanese (aliens and citizens) are being evacuated from California. The War Relocation Authority has asked me to make photographic documentation of this situation. It’s too worth-while to refuse… It interrupts my fellowship, but is in line with my work.

For the next four months, Lange documented the internees as they were evicted from their homes and businesses, tagged and labeled, and then shuffled by trains and motor convoys to various assembly centers before they were incarcerated. She photographed at only one of the actual internment camps, Manzanar, in the desert of Owns Valley in Southern California. Although Lange was a government employee while recording what is now universally acknowledged as a gross violation of justice, her sympathies were with the Japanese Americans.

Scope and Content

Lange was hired by the San Francisco Regional Office of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) in early April 1942 as a photographer investigator to document the evacuation of Japanese Americans from Northern California. Lange completed her work at the end of July 1942. It has been estimated that of the approximately 13,000 existing photographs taken for the federal government, Lange made over 700. Because of the political nature of her relocation photography, she was required to turn over to the WRA all of her negatives, prints, and undeveloped film; thus, very little of this material is contained within the museum’s archive. Following the end of the war, a complete file of Lange’s WRA negatives and prints was placed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with a duplicate set of prints placed at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Anonymous. “Guide to the Lange (Dorothea) Collection 1919-1965,” on the Online Archive of California website Nd [Online] Cited 25/02/2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, Oakland, California
March 1942
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24.4cm (7 1/2 x 9 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.3 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.)
Mat: 14 x 18 in. frame (outside): 15 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

On December 8, 1941, a day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Tatsuro Masuda, the 25-year-old American-born owner of the Wanto Company store in Oakland, posted a sign on his building: “I AM AN AMERICAN.” Masuda’s bold assertion of his national identity did little good. In March 1942, Masuda, a University of California graduate, closed the store that his father had founded 26 years earlier. In August 1942, he and his family were incarcerated at the Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. They were not released until October 1944. They never returned to Oakland.

Label text from the exhibition

Tatsuro Masuda

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942. The order forced the unjust incarceration of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent (the majority of whom were American citizens). The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document this process. Lange was horrified by what she witnessed. She chronicled her subjects in a sympathetic light, so much so that her photographs were censored during the war.

Lange began by photographing Japanese Americans as they prepared to abandon their homes. She took this picture of a grocery store on a street corner in Oakland, California, in March 1942, a month after the executive order was issued.

Tatsuro Masuda ran the Wanto Company store (look for its name on the windows), opened by his father in 1900. Fearful of growing anti-Japanese sentiments, Masuda paid for the “I AM AN AMERICAN” sign to be installed the day after Pearl Harbor. By the time Lange took the photograph, Masuda decided to close the store. Japanese Americans were forced to sell or relinquish any property they couldn’t carry with them. He moved to Fresno with his new wife, Hatsue Kuge. In August the couple (now expecting their first child) were incarcerated at Gila River War Relocation Center in Arizona. Their second child was born at Gila, as well. They weren’t released until October 1944.

Anonymous. “The Real Lives of People in Dorothea Lange’s Portraits,” on the National Gallery of Art website November 03, 2023 [Online] Cited 25/02/2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Richmond, California
1944, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17 x 16.8 cm (6 11/16 x 6 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 25.2 x 20.2 cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Richmond, California from City Life
1952
Gelatin silver print
Image: 25 x 21cm (9 13/16 x 8 1/4 in.)
Sheet: 28.1 x 23.4cm (11 1/16 x 9 3/16 in.)
Mat: 17 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 18 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Anne Carter Johnson, Saint George, Utah
1953
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 18.8cm (7 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 25.2 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.)
Mat: 14 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Self-Portrait in Window, Saint George, Utah
1953
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 23.8 x 18.6cm (9 3/8 x 7 5/16 in.)
Mount: 24.2 x 19.1cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
Mat: 16 x 13 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Among the places Lange visited for the Life magazine photo-essay Three Mormon Towns (produced with Ansel Adams and Paul Taylor) was Saint George, Utah. A formerly secluded pastoral community, the area had grown into a town with gas stations and motels to accommodate visitors to nearby Zion National Park. The town’s modernisation infringed upon the community’s prior isolation from mainstream American culture, and Lange feared that some of its early pioneer principles might be lost. Perhaps equating her own fragile health with the town’s vulnerability, Lange photographed her face and camera reflected in the window of a dilapidated building, calling the picture a self-portrait.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Jake Jones’s Hands, Gunlock County, Utah
1953
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 16.6 x 12.8cm (6 9/16 x 5 1/16 in.)
Mount: 17.1 x 13.7cm (6 3/4 x 5 3/8 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 12 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Annie Halloran’s Hands
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.3 x 19.4cm (7 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.3 x 20.3cm (8 x 8 in.)
Mat: 15 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 16 x 15 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Family Portrait from Death of a Valley
1956
Gelatin silver print
Image: 27.1 x 25.7cm (10 11/16 x 10 1/8 in.)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Merrily Page
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

These family portraits were abandoned in a home in Monticello, California, when residents were forced to relocate. The Napa County town was destroyed and flooded in 1957 after the creation of Lake Berryessa, a reservoir formed by the new Monticello Dam. Lange made this photograph for the series Death of a Valley, a collaboration with photographer Pirkle Jones, reproduced in a 1960 edition of Aperture magazine. Lange’s “portrait” of forsaken family photographs communicates a sense of lost memories and the human costs of development. It demonstrates not only Lange’s prescient environmentalism but also her long-standing concern for the disintegration of families and communities.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Korean Child
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image: 14.7 x 11.1cm (5 13/16 x 4 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 16 x 12.4cm (6 5/16 x 4 7/8 in.)
Mount: 19 x 14cm (7 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 12 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Lange and Taylor traveled to South Korea in 1958 and encountered people still reeling from a divisive war. When visiting a classroom, Lange focused on a group of excited students. But when she printed Korean Child for her 1966 retrospective exhibition, she radically cropped her negative to concentrate on one boy’s serene features. Since her early portraits of the 1920s, Lange had used dramatic cropping to shape the meaning of her photographs. Here, by isolating the boy’s calm face from the chaos surrounding him, she created a more universal exploration of the innocence of childhood in a nation then torn by war and poverty.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Indonesian Woman
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 12 x 9.5cm (4 3/4 x 3 3/4 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 12 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Bad Trouble over the Weekend, Steep Ravine, California
1964, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.3 x 15.2cm (9 9/16 x 6 in.)
Sheet: 25.1 x 20.4cm (9 7/8 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

For years, Lange and Taylor spent many weekends with their children and grandchildren at a rented cabin on Steep Ravine above Stinson Beach, just north of San Francisco. Bad Trouble over the Weekend was made during one such stay near the end of Lange’s life – she had already been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She cropped the photograph to focus on her daughter-in-law Mia Dixon’s hands, which cradle her unseen face. The gesture and the caption suggest the emotional weight of Lange’s flagging health, although she provided few narrative details. The photograph communicates both a personal and a universal connotation of “trouble,” telling an ambiguous story for viewers to imagine and, perhaps, identify with.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Pledge to the Flag, San Francisco
1942, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 31.7 x 13.9cm (12 1/2 x 5 1/2 in.)
Mat: 22 x 16 in.
Frame: 23 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

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Exhibition: ‘Casa Susanna’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Exhibition dates: 23rd December, 2023 – 14th April, 2024

Co-curators: Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator of Photography and photography art historian, writer and curator Isabelle Bonnet

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna at Casa Susanna
1964-1969
Gelatin silver print
Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

A very private club / This is me

There has been much written about these photographs of crossdressers at Casa Susanna and the issues surrounding them – for example, privacy of the individuals; gender roles in culture; oppression, criminalisation and anti-cross-dressing laws; how they were mainly white and from a higher socio-economic background (1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood); and celebrity adulation – to name but a few. I will let you read the text below to find out more.

What I will say is that it is a delight to see these intimate snapshot photographs of humans, being who they want to be without prejudice… “the healthy expression of fun and joy.”

“Most guests at Casa Susanna were married, and considered themselves heterosexual men who enjoyed cross-dressing, but many others later identified as transgender and lived out their lives as women, including Virginia Prince and Susanna herself.” (Wikipedia)

“Photography was essential to them,” said Michel Hurst. “Photography was proof that they existed.”

The photograph Large group in the living room with Louise Lawrence (1963, below) shows a large group of crossdressers in a New York apartment. Attached to the photograph is a note: “This is me” with an arrow pointing to a crossdresser in the photo.

I find it poignant that “This is me” possesses a double meaning: being both a photographic representation of the person and also how they would like to be seen as a crossdresser, a declamation of the freedom to express themselves in the light of day … without the fear of being arrested or institutionalised, losing their jobs and being ostracised by their families and communities.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Art Gallery of Ontario for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

For the first time, three photography collections of Casa Susanna will be brought together, including the one from Cindy Sherman, Betsy Wollheim, and the AGO, which acquired the albums previously owned by Swope and Hurst. The show delves deeper into the narratives and ideals of the community’s protagonists, illuminating their radical approach to femininity and the importance of photography in sustaining identity and ideology.

From the mid-1950s until 1969, Susanna Valenti and her wife, Marie, operated two resorts for masculine-to-feminine cross-dressers in upstate New York: the Chevalier d’Eon Bungalows and Casa Susanna. The resorts provided a safe haven for visitors to explore alternative forms of gender expression. Guests spent weekends revelling in the freedom to dress in women’s clothing and accessories – something they could not do in day-to-day life – talking, performing skits, sharing fashion and makeup tips, and photographing one another. The snapshots, taken by the participants themselves, are typically candid and full of camaraderie: groups of friends at parties, enjoying a summer afternoon, celebrating birthdays. But many also feature individuals playing different female roles, including the femme fatale and the matron, highlighting a keen awareness of image, appearance, and gender roles in the culture.

The quiet banality of these scenes belies the violence and ridicule the subjects might have faced in the world at large. At the time, laws in Canada and the U.S. criminalized queer life. In New York, for instance, if an individual wore fewer than three items of clothing of their supposed gender, they could be arrested on charges of “sexual deviancy.” For decades, anti-cross-dressing laws were a flexible tool used by police to enforce normative notions of gender. These laws have now been repealed, human rights laws have been passed, and trans visibility has increased dramatically in recent years.

Anonymous. “Casa Susanna,” on the Contact Photography Festival website, May 2016 [Online] Cited 10/03/2024

“The resort itself is secluded, way off the highway. The guests are never introduced to each other by their real names. Each gives a first name (a girl’s name of course) and that’s all. Discretion is a “must”… But to make things really fool proof, the management of the Resort maintains most cordial and friendly relations with the town’s chief of Police. He protects us!! ~ Susanna Says,” May 1960

“To take TV pictures it isn’t always necessary to stand in front of the camera making believe we are some sort of Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor… we decided to register on film the healthy expression of fun and joy that pervades a TV gathering… candid camera style… unposed and unexpected…these show the TV as she really looks to others. ~ Susanna Says,” December 1965

“Through these wonderfully intimate shots-perhaps never intended to see the light of day outside the sanctum of the “house”-Susanna and her gorgeous friends styled era-specific fashion shows and dress-up Christmas and tea parties. As gloriously primped as these documentary snaps are, it is in the more private and intimate life at Casa Susanna, where the girls sweep the front porch, cook, knit, play Scrabble, relax at the nearby lake and, of course, dress for the occasion, that the stunning insight to a very private club becomes nothing less than brilliant and awe inspiring in its pre-glam, pre-drag-pose ordinariness and nascent preening and posturing in new identities. It is not glamour for the stage but for each other, like other women who dress up to spend time with friends, flaunting their own sense of style. There is an evident pleasure of being here, at Casa Susanna, that is a liberation, a simplification of the conflicts inherent in a double life.”

Michel Hurst and Robert Swope. “About The Casa Susanna Book,” on the Simon & Schuster website Nd [Online] Cited 16/03/2024

But there was just one catch: no openly homosexual men were allowed. Living and working at a time when both gender expression and sexuality were criminalized, Tornell and Valenti restricted admittance to self-professed heterosexual men and their wives. The presence of wives signified deference to patriarchal notions of heterosexual gender roles, simultaneously averting unfounded fears of the presence of queer desires that upended the status quo. …

“Virginia Prince was a polarising figure in the queer and trans communities because she stuck to very rigid ideas of crossdressing: that you were a straight man who sometimes liked to wear women’s clothing,” says Sophie Hackett. “Her whole project was to normalise it but not everyone wanted to adhere to those dictates or the Ladies Home Journal kind of femininity that she and Susanna advocated.”

Miss Rosen. “Inside case Susanna,” on the Blind Magazine website July 12, 2023 [Online] Cited 14/03/2024

CASA SUSANNA | Trailer | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS

In the 1950s and ’60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised. Told through the memories of those who visited the house, CASA SUSANNA provides a moving look back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live out of the shadows.

Casa Susanna: An Inside Look

York University Professor, Michael Gilbert, also known as Miqqi Alicia, is a life-long cross-dresser who spoke with us about Casa Susanna, a safe haven and resort for cross-dressers in upstate New York during the ’50s and ’60s.

Susanna and Marie

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna in a pink, green and yellow dress, sitting with friends
1960s
Chromogenic print
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Susanna in black lingerie
1960s
Chromogenic print
© Art Gallery of Ontario

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna looking in the mirror
1955-1963
Chromogenic print
8.9 × 12.8cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Susanna standing in the road
October 1964
Chromogenic print
Sheet: 13.5 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
© Art Gallery of Ontario

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna in a shiny gown on the stage at the Chevalier d’Eon, Hunter, NY
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
14 x 9cm
Collection of Cindy Sherman

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna, Edith, and Marie with a man holding a cable release, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print
11 × 8.5cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Exhibition overview

From the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, a network of crossdressers found refuge in the Catskills region of New York State. Susanna with her wife Marie created safe spaces at two modest resorts for guests to freely crossdress en femme at a time of strictly defined gender roles. Guests used photography to build their femme identities and their network. These snapshots – candid, playful, and at times staged, blending family and fashion photography conventions – have since come to be known collectively as the Casa Susanna photographs.

Casa Susanna brings together for the first time three collections of photographs created by this network of crossdressers: from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim. Seen together, these 250 images, provide insight into this historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today. These affirming photographs circulated among crossdressers by mail, as well as in the pages of Transvestia, a community magazine, copies of which will also be on view

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication that brings together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, adding another important account of the ways photographs have served to build queer communities. Co-published by Editions Textuel, it includes essays by co-curators French photo historian, Isabelle Bonnet and AGO Curator of Photography, Sophie Hackett, as well as noted American scholar of trans history Susan Stryker.

Casa Susanna is coproduced by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Rencontres D’Arles.

New York City / Parties

Unknown photographer (American)
Large group in the living room with Louise Lawrence
1963
Chromogenic print
8.8 × 19cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Gloria in Susanna and Marie’s New York City apartment
1960-1963
Chromogenic print
8.9 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna and two friends showing some leg in Susanna and Marie’s New York City apartment
1960s
Gelatin silver print
9 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Susanna and three friends on stage
July 1961
Chromogenic print
Sheet: 6.1 × 8.6cm (2 3/8 × 3 3/8 in.)
Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
© Art Gallery of Ontario

Unknown photographer (American)
Vicky in the living room in a white evening gown, New York City apartment
January 1962
Chromogenic print
12.5 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

“If the photographs had been revealed 50 years prior, people like Susanna Valenti, Katherine Cummings and Diana Merry-Shapiro could have been arrested or institutionalized, lost their jobs and been ostracized by their families and communities. For more than a century, cross-dressing was criminalized in the United States through statutes like “masquerade laws,” which were used to persecute many forms of gender expression in public spaces under the guise of limiting prostitution and “immoral performances” – an echo of the drag-show bans currently being passed in Tennessee and other states. …

More recently, several states have introduced laws to limit or ban drag shows as part of a wider attack on LGBTQ+ rights around the country. Nearly 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been filed in state legislatures this year, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking legislation across the country. An Associated Press analysis showed lawmakers have been motivated to file these bills by a handful of conservative interest groups, not constituent demand.”

Maria M. Silva. “Casa Susanna, a onetime underground Catskills LGBTQ+ haven,” on the Times Union website June 15, 2023 [Online] Cited 05/03/2024

“Some of these snapshots are black and white, some in colour. The photographer was often either the subject herself (using a self-timer or cable release, both relatively new at the time) or a trusted member of the community (easily obtainable in group settings). Initially, many would develop the pictures themselves rather than risk involvement of an external lab. As the Polaroid instant camera became more affordable it revolutionized photography for this community, which was a critical tool for them to image / imagine themselves for their own use or for sharing with others in their society. …

Some pictures were taken at home, or in a hotel room, with the curtains carefully drawn, to ensure privacy and create a little world where freedom was momentarily possible. They are typically deliberately posed, with a definite sense of happiness and an aura of breaking a constricting taboo. Other photographs were shot at one of the resorts, often outdoors. The joy here is quite evident, with a strong quality of relief. The pictures taken later on seem to become less performative, and show people simply being.

In constructing their female appearance and persona, the subjects here (who were almost all white) leaned heavily on 1950s stereotypes of white, middle-class womanhood. There would seem to be an irony in that they thereby leveraged a patriarchy that oppressed them. However, from my perspective, their goal (which I instinctively understand) was to externalize an inner truth in a way that was meaningful to them, that could be seen by select others, and by themselves in a mirror or in their photographs; and in this they were successful.

One display was a case containing a distinctive snapshot and a short biography for each of 18 different individuals who appear in the pictures. These are poignant reminders of the humanity of this community and the serious challenges that they faced. And it provided positive proof that my intuition from 2014 was correct, my personal sisterhood was indeed there. First, I hasten to stress that even without physical transition one can still be a woman, it is an internal identification; however, when someone assigned male at birth followed that path (especially during that era) it is very suggestive of a female gender. With that in mind, it was personally moving to find that one of the 18, whose name was Gloria, and who happened to be a millionaire, used her fortune to support women seeking (pioneering at that time) gender affirmation surgery in Mexico, before, during and afterwards; and that two others, Kate and Irène, successfully underwent the procedure.”

Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer from London, Ontario, Canada.

Jennifer Wenn. “Casa Susanna, at the Art Gallery of Ontario,” on the Centred.ca website January 4, 2024 [Online’ Cited 05/03/2024

Casa Susanna

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Daphne sitting on a lawn chair with Ann, Susanna, and a friend outside, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY
1964-1968
Chromogenic print
8.9 × 10.8cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Photo shoot with Lili, Wilma, and friends, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY
1964-1967
Chromogenic print
8.4 × 10.8cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer
Lili on the diving board, Casa Susanna, Hunter, NY
September 1966
Chromogenic print
12.8 × 8.8cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Chevalier

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna and Felicity in the kitchen, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
1960-1963
Chromogenic print
6.4 × 8.4cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Halloween 1962: Virginia at left, Felicity at right at Chevalier D’Eon Resort
1962
Photo © AGO

Of particular note is the gathering of 71 transvestites at the Chevalier D’Eon Resort for Halloween 1962, held a day after the New York police unusually raided the annual National Variety Artists costume ball and 30 cross-dressed “men” were arrested. The guests at Chevalier D’Eon Resort included Virginia Prince, Katherine Cummings, Felicity Chandelle, Darrell Raynor and Gail Wilde, and psychologists Hugo Beigel and Wardell Pomeroy. Raynor, Cummings and Beigel later wrote about the event.

Both Virginia and Susanna were upset by one guest who not only did not bother to shave, he also smoked a cigar. This brought Susanna closer to Virginia’s point of view that a cultivation of ‘inner femininity’ distinguished true transvestites from drag queens and fetishists. She expressed this opinion in her column several times. Initially ‘fetishism’ had been equated with partial dressing, but FPE increasingly identified as fetishistic those who fully dressed as female but failed or didn’t bother to fashion themselves as truly feminine. A few years later Sheila Niles would propose the term ‘whole girl fetishist’.

Anonymous. “Susanna Valenti (192? – 1996) translator, broadcaster, activist” on the A Gender Variance Who’s Who website 1st February 2012 [Online] Cited 11/03/2024

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Carlene playing scrabble, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
1955-1963
Gelatin silver print
10.7 × 8.6cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Susanna by the Chevalier d’Éon sign, Hunter, NY, November
1960
Chromogenic print
12.6 × 8.9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Edith Eden (American)
Audrey, Edith, and Irene in the front yard, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
1960-1963
Gelatin silver print, 8.8 × 11.2 cm. Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015. Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Audrey, Edith, Susanna, and Doreen on stage at the Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
July 1961
Chromogenic print
6.1 × 8.6cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Anita and Gloria on stage, Chevalier d’Éon
1960s
Chromogenic print
12 × 8.2cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

This winter, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Rencontres D’Arles present Casa Susanna, an exhibition of snapshots taken by members of the earliest known American crossdressing network, which operated in upstate New York from the mid-1950s through the end of the 1960s. Co-curated by Sophie Hackett, the AGO’s curator of photography and Dr. Isabelle Bonnet, a photography historian and independent curator, this is the first museum exhibition dedicated to what are collectively known as the Casa Susanna photographs and features previously unseen images.

“These joyful snapshots provide insight into a historically significant crossdressing scene, allowing us to develop an understanding of this world and its connection to the lives of trans and crossdressing people today,” says Sophie Hackett, AGO Curator of Photography. “Looking at these snapshots, I am not only touched by their familial atmosphere and conviviality, but also reminded of the ways photography has been – and continues to be – used as a powerful tool for affirming personal identity and forging community.”

“At a time when trans people – and more broadly, 2SLGBTQ+ people – are attacked from many sides, I think that this exhibition and this book serve a public purpose: the story of the members of Casa Susanna, which is that of thousands of people across the world throughout the centuries, call for respect and tolerance,” says Dr. Isabelle Bonnet. “The personalities that gradually emerged during my research, notably those of Gloria, Kate, Vicky, Felicity, Gail, Susanna and Marie, filled me with admiration and I hope to pass it on to those who come to see the exhibition.”

Bringing together three collections of amateur photographs for the first time – from the AGO’s holdings, from the personal collection of artist Cindy Sherman, and from the collection of Betsy Wollheim, the exhibition tells the story of a community of men, including Wollheim’s own father, who regularly met at two upstate New York retreats organized by Susanna Valenti and her wife Marie, where they were free to safely dress as women and express their feminine identities. Organised thematically, the exhibition shines a spotlight on many of the community’s leading figures and describes how and where they came gathered and the feminine ideals they celebrated.

Snapshots of and by the community – all White, upper middle-class professionals – reveal days spent dressing up, swimming, playing cards, and generally enjoying life as women. The photographs bring to light the type of femininity they aspired to, drawn from images in their visual culture, for instance widely seen in magazines like Ladies Home Journal: traditional and appropriate, even as the crossdressers defied the strict gender prescriptions of their time. The exhibition includes copies of Transvestia magazine, a clandestine publication founded by Virginia Prince in 1960 that provided a vital forum for connection, information, and images to crossdressers across the United States and beyond. It also highlights the radical nature of this community, and the role photographs played in affirming and sustaining trans identities.

A leader in the presentation and research of vernacular photography, the AGO has acquired numerous collections showcasing historically underrepresented photographers, makers, and subjects, among them the Casa Susanna Collection. First discovered at the 26th Street flea market in New York City by furniture dealers Michel Hurst and Robert Swope in 2004, the AGO’s collection of 340 Casa Susanna photographs – acquired in 2015 – originally belonged to Susanna Valenti.

Accompanying the exhibition is a 480-page illustrated publication, edited by co-curators Sophie Hackett and Isabelle Bonnet. Bringing together recent research, an expansive selection of photographs, and pages of Transvestia, Casa Susanna was shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2023. Published by Editions Textuel in both English and French, Casa Susanna is available at shopAGO for $73.

Press release from the Art Gallery of Ontario

Feminine Identity

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Lee in a white dress, Chevalier d’Éon, Hunter, NY
October 1961
Chromogenic print
12.1 × 8.3cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Christmas card, Gloria in a red suit at home, Clarion, Michigan
1962
Chromogenic print
17.7 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015. Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Gloria in a red suit at home, Clarion, Michigan
1962
Chromogenic print
17.7 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Donna (Buff/Cynthia) in a navy dress in Susanna and Marie’s New York City apartment
1960s
Chromogenic print
12.9 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Unknown photographer (American)
Beverly Holding a Copy of Vogue
1960’s
Gelatin Silver Print
10.8 x 8.5cm
Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
© Art Gallery of Ontario

Attributed to Andrea Susan
Bobbie at the mirror
1960s
Chromogenic print
12.7 × 9cm
Purchase, with funds generously donated by Martha LA McCain, 2015
Photo © AGO

Isabelle Bonnet, Sophie Hackett
Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968
Thames and Hudson Ltd, January 2024
480 pp softback

[This book] Brings together a wealth of research and an expansive selection of photographs to create an enduring account of America’s first known trans network, Casa Susanna.

In the 1950s and 60s, an underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men found refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to express their true selves and live for a few days as they had always dreamed – dressed as and living as women without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised for their self-expression.

This book opens up that now-lost world. The photographs – mostly discovered by chance in a New York flea market in 2004 – chronicle the experiences of men who dressed as women, gender nonconforming people, and trans women in states of relaxation, experimentation, connection and joy. All of this was made possible by Susanna Valenti who – on her own journey toward womanhood – created Casa Susanna, a protected space where others could crossdress and live freely as women. Supplementing the images are excerpts from Transvestia, a magazine that allowed those who had been cast out by a rigidly binary society to connect in a different medium.

The people who came to Casa Susanna found a spot where they could explore and celebrate their own and each other’s femininity, as they could not do elsewhere. Their creations are also a reminder that there were, and still are, many ways to explore the boundaries of gender.

Isabelle Bonnet is an independent curator, currently completing a thesis in history / visual culture devoted to the crime scene in contemporary photography. Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Susan Stryker is professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.

Text from the Thames & Hudson Australia website

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968 book cover

Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968 book text

Transvestia magazine covers, pp. 68-69 from the book Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968

Transvestia magazine pages, pp. 102-103 from the book Casa Susanna: The Story of the First Trans Network in the United States, 1959-1968

Art Gallery of Ontario
Musée des beaux-arts de l’Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
Toronto Ontario Canada M5T 1G4

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 10.30am – 5.00pm
Closed Mondays

Art Gallery of Ontario website

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Exhibition: ‘Dorothea Lange: Seeing People’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington Part 1

Exhibition dates: 5th November 2023 – 31st March 2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Child of Impoverished Black Tenant Family Working on Farm, Alabama
July 1936
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20 x 19.2cm (7 7/8 x 7 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.2cm (10 x 7 15/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

A humungous two-part posting on the work of American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) which features over 110 of her photographs many of which were unknown to me.

Of course, the posting features the photographs for which she is rightly famous (Migrant Mother; White Angel Breadline; Nettie Featherston; Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field; Once a Missouri farmer, now a Migratory Farm Laborer) but others are a surprise for the senses, especially the Irish portrait photographs.

See my comment on the photographs in Part 2 of the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The portrait is made more meaningful by intimacy – an intimacy shared not only by the photographer with his subject but by the audience.”

Dorothea Lange

“The power of her pictures – their ability to speak to the character and resilience of those she photographed – lies not only in her desire to effect social change, but also in her deep humanism, her abiding interest in people, and the skills and insights she learned as a portrait photographer.”

Sarah Greenough

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California
1933
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 34 x 26.5cm (13 3/8 x 10 7/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

A growing desire to capture the Depression’s impact drew Lange to the White Angel Jungle, a San Francisco soup kitchen run by Lois Jordan, the “White Angel.” There Lange photographed this downtrodden man leaning on a barricade, his jaw clenched, shoulders hunched, back to the crowd, and eyes covered by the brim of his hat. Though anonymous, he drew Lange’s sympathetic eye and became a symbol of the nameless masses who faced economic hardship as the United States plunged deep into financial crisis.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Street Demonstration, San Francisco
1934
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.4 x 19.1cm (9 5/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
Mount: 27.9 x 20.2cm (11 x 7 15/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Diana and Mallory Walker Fund and Robert Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund, in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Photography at the National Gallery of Art
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

In spring and summer 1934, a longshoremen’s strike gripped San Francisco and demonstrations took place throughout the city. Protesters also advocated for Japanese unions, which were being threatened by anti-labor forces in Japan. Lange wrote in her notes, “This was just before the New Deal during a time when Communists were very active. A few blocks away … soup was being distributed daily to the unemployed.”

Lange focused on a lone policeman standing before a crowd of protesters holding placards in English and Japanese. The policeman projects authority through his firm stance, crisp uniform, and shiny badge, creating a barrier between the photographer and the crowd.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Mexican Workers Leaving for Melon Fields, Imperial Valley, California
June 1935, printed 1940s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 45 x 58cm (17 11/16 x 22 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 50.2 x 67.5cm (19 3/4 x 26 9/16 in.)
Mat: 24 x 28 in.
Frame (outside): 25 x 29 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

In the summer of 1935, Lange traveled with Paul Taylor, working with his research team on a study of migrant labourers funded by California’s State Emergency Relief Administration. Mexican farm labourers, like this trio of cantaloupe harvesters, saw wages plummet during the Depression as thousands of westbound American migrants flooded the labour market. Angling her camera upward, Lange silhouetted the workers against a hazy sky, producing a striking group portrait. Working together solidified Lange and Taylor’s professional relationship, which developed into a romantic partnership and marriage later that same year.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Once a Missouri farmer, now a Migratory Farm Laborer. San Joaquin Valley, California
February 1936, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 44.6 x 39.5cm (17 9/16 x 15 9/16 in.)
Mat: 26 x 22 in.
Frame (outside): 27 x 23 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Although this farm labourer from Missouri seems to be alone behind the wheel of his car, he is actually seated beside his wife, in the passenger seat. Her overcoat and right arm are easily overlooked at the bottom left. By focusing only on the driver, with his gaunt features and intense gaze, Lange heightens our sense of his isolation to create an evocative portrait of a man grappling with the consequences of dislocation. The photograph also calls attention to the automobile as a means of transport and escape for some Depression-era migrants.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Former Tenant Farmer on Relief Grant in the Imperial Valley, California
March 1937
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 9.5 x 9cm (3 3/4 x 3 9/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 12 3/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Eighteen-Year-Old Mother from Oklahoma, now a California Migrant
March 1937
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.9 x 24.5cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/8 in.)
Sheet: 20.6 x 25.5cm (8 1/8 x 10 1/16 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Displaced Tenant Farmers, Goodlett, Hardeman County, Texas
July 1937, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24 cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 20.3 x 25.2 cm (8 x 9 15/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

During the 1930s, machines began to replace people in some cotton-growing regions like Hardeman County in Northeast Texas; consequently, many tenant farmers were evicted from their land. Already reckoning with severe drought and economic depression, these “tractored out” farmers were forced to seek work as day labourers, a precarious livelihood offering little security. In this picture, five displaced tenant farmers congregate outside the screened porch of a small house. Although they are united by a common plight, each man seems utterly alone, unable to find solace or support within an eroding agricultural system.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Nettie Featherston, Wife of a Migratory Laborer with Three Children, near Childress, Texas, from The American Country Woman
June 1938
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34 x 26.8cm (13 3/8 x 10 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 28cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mount: 45.4 x 38.3cm (17 7/8 x 15 1/16 in.)
Mat: 22 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 23 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

When Lange photographed her on a North Texas farm, 40-year-old Nettie Featherston was accustomed to a life of hard labor and poverty. She and her family had left Oklahoma seeking work in California when they ran out of money in Texas and found work picking cotton. Lange’s portrait reveals a gaunt survivor of the Dust Bowl, her right arm echoing the shape of the storm cloud behind her – a symbol of the difficult road ahead for migrant families looking for work. Reflecting on the photograph of herself years later, Featherston said, “It seems like … I have too much on my mind. I can just be burdened so bad, awful burdens they’ll be.”

Label text from the exhibition

Nettie Featherston

Lange met Nettie Featherston while working on that same FSA project. Like Turpen, Featherston’s family had been forced off their farm in Oklahoma. On their way to California to find work, they ran out of money and found themselves stranded in Childress, Texas.

The Featherstons sold their car for money to buy food. That left them with no way out of the dry and dusty landscape we seen behind Featherston. She looks desperate and distraught. “This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all,” she told Lange.

Decades later photographer and author Bill Ganzel tracked down Featherston. Then in her 80s, she still remembered how difficult that time had been. “Your kids would cry for something to eat, and you couldn’t give it. We cooked with black-eyed peas until I never wanted to ever see another black-eyed pea.”

Anonymous. “The Real Lives of People in Dorothea Lange’s Portraits,” on the National Gallery of Art website November 03, 2023 [Online] Cited 25/02/2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Arkansas mother come to California for a new start, with husband and eleven children. Now a rural rehabilitation client. Tulare County, California, from The American Country Woman
November 1938, printed 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 35.5 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering
1938, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 32 x 26.3cm (12 5/8 x 10 3/8 in.)
Mat: 20 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Lange wrote in her field notes that a “hat is more than a covering against sun and wind … it is a badge of service … linking past and present.” This artfully cropped photograph of James Abner Turpen, a 70-year-old Texas tenant farmer, focuses on Turpen’s hand as his fingers curl around the brim of a hat. Both hand and hat are weathered, aged by time and work, and portray Turpen without showing his face.

Label text from the exhibition

James Abner Turpen

From 1936 to 1939, Lange worked for the Resettlement Administration (which later became the Farm Security Administration). In Texas she documented the impacts of mechanisation on farmers. In the town of Goodlett she met James Abner Turpen, a 70-year-old tenant farmer who was about to be “tractored out” of his farm. Realising that agricultural machines like tractors could replace many farmers, landowners would evict their tenant farmers.

Turpen’s sons had already been tractored out. In her caption, Lange recorded his distress. “What are my boys going to do?” he asked. He believed the government was partly to blame. “They’re not any up there in Congress but what are big landowners and they’re going to see that the program is in their interest.”

Lange cropped one image to focus on Turpen’s weathered hand grasping his hat. The photograph is titled On the Plains a Hat Is More Than a Covering. But curator Philip Brookman inspected the image closely and compared it with others to confirm that Turpen is the subject.

Anonymous. “The Real Lives of People in Dorothea Lange’s Portraits,” on the National Gallery of Art website November 03, 2023 [Online] Cited 25/02/2024

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Migratory Field Worker Picking Cotton in San Joaquin Valley, California from An American Exodus
November 1938, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

This photograph of hard stoop labor appeared in Lange and Paul Taylor’s 1939 book An American Exodus. According to Taylor’s field notes, “These pickers are paid seventy-five cents per hundred pounds of picked cotton. Strikers organising under CIO union (Congress of Industrial Organizations) are demanding one dollar. A good male picker, in good cotton, under favourable weather conditions, can pick about two hundred pounds in a day’s work.”

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Cotton Pickers and Farm Owners, Bakersfield, California
1938, printed c. 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 20.32 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Yazoo Delta, Mississippi from An American Exodus
1938, printed 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 34.2 x 44.7cm (13 7/16 x 17 5/8 in.)
Mat: 20 x 24 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 25 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Edison, Kern County, California. Young migratory mother, originally from Texas. On the day before the photograph was made, she and her husband traveled 35 miles each way to pick peas. They worked 5 hours each and together earned $2.25. They have two young children… Live in auto camp.
April 11, 1940, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 30.1 x 24cm (11 7/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
Mount: 30.8 x 24 cm (12 1/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Children of the Weill Public School Shown in a Flag Pledge Ceremony, San Francisco, California
April 1942, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image: 23.5 x 17.4 cm (9 1/4 x 6 7/8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
End of Shift, 3:30, Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California
September 1943
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24 x 19 cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32 cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
War Babies, Richmond, California
1944, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 26.4 x 25.6cm (10 3/8 x 10 1/16 in.)
Mat: 18 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

While in Richmond, Lange photographed not only shipyard workers but also local people on the street, such as this pair of young mothers. Cradling swaddled infants, with a knee-high toddler between them, the two women personify the prosperity and growth generated by the wartime boom, which brought renewed economic stability to many Californians. Lange’s pictures from Richmond capitalise on the symbolism presented by the backdrop of expanding production. In this photograph, for example, cruciform utility poles seem to watch over the women and children like industrial guards, symbolically guiding them away from the poverty of the Depression years.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Lyde Wall, friend and neighbor, who makes “the world’s best apple pie,” and knows everything going on for miles around, Berkeley, California, from The American Country Woman
1944
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 35.1 x 27.9cm (13 13/16 x 11 in.)
Mount: 35.2 x 28 cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mat: 22 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 23 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

During her prolific and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines Lange’s decades-long investigation into how portrait photography could embody the humanity of the people she depicted. It demonstrates how her photographs helped shape contemporary documentary practice by connecting everyday people with moments of history – from the Great Depression through the mid-1960s – that still resonate with our lives in the 21st century. Featuring 101 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasising her work on various social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism. The exhibition is on view from November 5, 2023, through March 31, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

“Throughout the course of her 50-year career, Lange created an intensely humanistic body of work that sought to transform how we see and understand people,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art. “Merging her skills as a portrait artist, a social documentary photographer, and a storyteller, she helped redefine photography through images that emphasise social issues.”

About the Exhibition

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People examines how Lange’s portraits have shaped our contemporary understanding of documentary photography as well as its importance to her vision and creative practice. Divided into six thematic sections, the exhibition features portraits ranging from her early career as a San Francisco studio photographer – the earliest work is from 1919 – and her powerful coverage of the Great Depression through expressive photographs of everyday people and communities during the 1950s and early 1960s.

Among the works on view are portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and early 1930s; later depictions of striking labourers, migrant farmworkers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans denied their civil rights during World War II, and postwar baby boomers; and portraits of people in Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, and Venezuela that Lange made in the decade before her death in 1965.

Lange began her career as a commercial studio photographer in San Francisco in 1918. Her studio became a gathering spot for artists who had serious discussions about photography and art. In 1920 she married Maynard Dixon, a painter of western subjects, who encouraged Lange to take her photography outside. She accompanied him on trips through the American Southwest, photographing rural landscapes and Dixon at work, along with the Indigenous communities he was portraying.

She started to work in the streets of San Francisco in 1933, making photographs such as White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California (1933) that capture the effects of the Great Depression and the plight of the city’s dispossessed men and women. Lange also photographed labor organisers and protesters at May Day events around San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza: she focused on the protesters speaking, listening, or holding signs, and vowed to produce prints within 24 hours, as in May Day, San Francisco, California (1934). She also documented ensuing strikes, creating portraits of speakers and demonstrators with placards as well as photographs of the police presence in works such as Street Demonstration, San Francisco (1934). When she met the labor economist Paul Schuster Taylor in 1934, Lange began to photograph the plight of migrant farmers who had moved to California from the South and Midwest seeking new livelihoods.

From 1935 to 1943, while working for the for the US Resettlement Administration, Farm Security Administration, and War Relocation Authority, Lange focused on the resilience of Depression-era families, farmworkers, rural cooperative communities, migrant camps, and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans in the early days of World War II. The resulting images illustrate the human and economic impact wrought across the United States by farm tenancy, racism, the legacy of slavery, climate change, and migrations. These portraits, sometimes combined with interviews, added a personal element to Lange’s stark pictures of makeshift housing and agricultural fields and cemented her documentary style.

During World War II Lange produced one of her most powerful series for the War Relocation Authority, depicting the forced incarceration of California’s Japanese Americans at Manzanar, in works on view such as Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California (July 1942). She also photographed the shifts in California’s social fabric as its rising economy – sparked by growing defence industries – drew African Americans from the South and women into previously male-dominated and segregated businesses such as shipbuilding. In the 1950s, Lange continued to pursue stories about people and their communities for personal projects, as well as for Life magazine, that include her first photographs from Europe. Asia, South America, and North Africa.

Exhibition Publication

Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press, this 208-page illustrated volume explores Dorothea Lange’s decades-long investigation of how photography, through articulating people’s core values and their sense of self, helped to expand our current understanding of portraiture and the meaning of documentary practice. Lange’s sensitive, humane portraits of often-marginalised people galvanised public understanding of important social problems in the 20th century.

Compassion guided Lange’s early portraits of Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as her depictions of striking workers, migrant farmers, rural African Americans during the Jim Crow era, Japanese Americans in internment camps, and the people she met while traveling in Europe, Asia, Venezuela, and Egypt. Drawing on new research, Philip Brookman, Sarah Greenough, Andrea Nelson, and Laura Wexler, examine Lange’s roots in studio portraiture and demonstrate how her influential and widely seen photographs addressed issues of identity as well as social, economic, and racial inequalities – topics that remain as relevant for our times as they were for hers.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Mexican American Child, San Francisco
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 34 x 29.8cm (13 3/8 x 11 3/4 in.)
Mat: 16 x 20 in.
Frame (outside): 16 1/2 x 16 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Maynard and Dan Dixon
1930, printed c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 20.32 x 25.4 cm (8 x 10 in.)
Mat: 14 x 17 in.
Frame (outside): 15 1/4 x 18 1/4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

In fall 1919 Lange met Maynard Dixon, a painter and illustrator of western subjects and one of the best-known artists in California. Early the following year, Lange and Dixon were married. Their first son, Daniel, was born in 1925 and their second, John, in 1928. This intimate portrait presents a close-up view of Dixon’s hands holding Dan in a gentle embrace, with the boy’s tiny fingers quietly resting on top of his father’s. Here Lange directed their pose to express both character and personal narrative, which recalls her training in New York portrait studios, as well as Alfred Stieglitz’s “portraits” of Georgia O’Keeffe that focused on her hands to convey her personality.

Label text from the exhibition

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands
1917
Silver-platinum print
National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Mary Ann Savage, a Faithful Mormon All Her Life, Toquerville, Utah
1931, printed c. 1950
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 35.2 x 27.9cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mount: 38.2 x 28cm (15 1/16 x 11 in.)
Mat: 22 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 23 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Mary Ann Savage
was a faithful Mormon all her life.
She was a plural wife.
She was a pioneer.
She crossed the plains in 1856
with her family
when she was six years old.
Her mother
pushed her little children
across plain and desert
in a hand-cart.
A sister died along the way.
“My mother wrapped her in a blanket
and put her to one side.”

From Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
San Francisco Waterfront
1934
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 11.8 x 9.1cm (4 5/8 x 3 9/16 in.)
Mat: 14 x 11 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 12 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
May Day, San Francisco, California
1934, printed c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24 x 19 cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32 cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Dispossessed Arkansas farmers. These people are resettling themselves on the dump outside of Bakersfield, California from An American Exodus
1935
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.1 x 18.8cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 25.3 x 20.7cm (9 15/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Black Woman Working in Field near Eutaw, Alabama
1936
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 20.5 x 13.8cm (8 1/16 x 5 7/16 in.)
Mount: 21.2 x 14.5 cm (8 3/8 x 5 11/16 in.)
Mat: 15 x 12 in.
Frame (outside): 16 x 13 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Calipatria (vicinity), California. Native of Indiana in a migratory labor contractor’s camp. “It’s root hog or die for us folks.”
February 1937
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 24.1 x 19.1 cm (9 1/2 x 7 1/2 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Line of men inside a division office of the State Employment Service office at San Francisco, California, waiting to register for unemployment benefits
January 1938, printed c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19 x 24cm (7 1/2 x 9 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.08 x 20.32cm (9 7/8 x 8 in.)
Mat: 14 x 17 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 18 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Funeral Cortege, San Joaquin Valley, California
1938, printed early 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20 x 19 cm (7 7/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25.08 x 20.32 cm (9 7/8 x 8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Hitch-hiking from Joplin, Missouri, to a sawmill job in Arizona. On U.S. 66 near Weatherford, western Oklahoma
August 12, 1938, printed c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24 x 19.5cm (9 7/16 x 7 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 25.4 x 20.32cm (10 x 8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 13 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama from The American Country Woman
1938, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 20.3 x 27.9cm (8 x 11 in.)
Mat: 14 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 15 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

This formerly enslaved woman, whom Lange does not name, would have witnessed several events that transformed the nation. She would have experienced the tragedy of chattel slavery in the United States and the victory for enslaved people in the South through Emancipation, as well as the ups and downs of Reconstruction, the passage of Jim Crow laws that permitted segregation, and the Great Depression. The dilapidated home, falling and standing simultaneously, suggests her own perseverance amid a lifetime of racial, gender, and class oppression.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama from The American Country Woman
1938, printed c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24 x 19cm (9 7/16 x 7 1/2 in.)
Sheet: 25 x 20cm (9 13/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
Mat: 16 x 13 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 14 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Lange’s portraits of Depression-era people have inspired other artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, to remember that time. In Survivor, Catlett translated the power of Lange’s photograph of a formerly enslaved woman into a linocut, an image cut into a linoleum block, inked, and then pressed onto paper, which prints it in reverse from the original.

Label text from the exhibition

Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915-2012)
Survivor
1983
Linocut
National Gallery of Art
Purchased as the Gift of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in Honor of Mary Lee Corlett

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Member of the congregation of Wheeley’s church who is called “Queen.” She is wearing the old-fashioned type of sunbonnet. Her dress and apron were made at home. Near Gordonton, North Carolina from The American Country Woman
July 1939, printed no later than 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image: 38.7 x 31.9cm (15 1/4 x 12 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 39.5 x 34.1cm (15 9/16 x 13 7/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Wheeley’s Church was a congregation of Primitive Baptists, conservative practitioners located primarily in the South. Lange had a knack for building rapport with people from various religious communities and worked to gain their trust and respect to make photographs. This portrait features one church member, “Queen” Bowes, a devout widow shaded by her elaborate sunbonnet. Lange captured her stern expression, with piercing eyes and a tightly closed mouth that hid her false teeth.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Scandinavian Homesteader, Great Plains, South Dakota from The American Country Woman
1939, printed 1950s
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 25.9 x 26.6cm (10 3/16 x 10 1/2 in.)
Mat: 18 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Near Coolidge, Arizona. Migratory cotton picker with his cotton sack slung over his shoulder rests at the scales before returning to work in the field
November 1940, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 31.5 x 41cm (12 3/8 x 16 1/8 in.)
Mat: 24 x 20 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 25 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Edison, Kern County, California. Young girl looks up from her work. She picks and sacks potatoes on large-scale ranch
April 11, 1940
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.7 x 24cm (7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 20.2 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.)
Mat: 13 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 14 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Riley Savage, Toquerville, Utah
1953, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 27.9 x 21.5cm (11 x 8 1/2 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Riley Savage, son of Mary Ann Savage (pictured in the photograph nearby), was a third-generation Mormon settler whose grandmother had crossed the plains to the Utah Territory in 1856.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Man Walking Down a Country Road from the Kenneally Family Farm, County Clare, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 31.2 x 26cm (12 5/16 x 10 1/4 in.)
Mat: 19 x 17 in.
Frame (outside): 20 x 18 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Man Walking Down a Country Road from the Kenneally Family Farm, County Clare, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 26.5 x 21.5cm (10 7/16 x 8 7/16 in.)
Mat: 18 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Nora Kenneally, Widow, County Clare, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 22.6 x 28.5cm (8 7/8 x 11 1/4 in.)
Mount: 47.8 x 37.8cm (18 13/16 x 14 7/8 in.)
Mat: 22 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 23 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Patrick Flanagan on Tubber Green, County Galway, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954, printed no later than 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 30.7 x 28.4cm (12 1/16 x 11 3/16 in.)
Mat: 19 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 20 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Irish Child, County Clare, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image: 25.4 x 25.4cm (10 x 10 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 27.9 cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mat: 16 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

On assignment for Life magazine in 1954, Lange spent six weeks in Ireland with her son, Dan Dixon – her first time overseas. They stayed in Ennis, a small town in County Clare, and traveled extensively; Lange took some 2,400 photographs. Twenty-two of these were featured in Life the following year. Lange enjoyed working in Ireland and was particularly fond of this portrait of a smiling girl in a rain bonnet, which she pinned to a corkboard in her home kitchen. “Isn’t that a beautiful face?” she declared. “That’s pure Ireland.”

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
A Young Girl in Ennis, County Clare, Ireland from The Irish Countryman
1954, printed c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
Image: 30.9 x 29cm (12 3/16 x 11 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 34.1 x 29.3cm (13 7/16 x 11 9/16 in.)
Mount: 35 x 29.7cm (13 3/4 x 11 11/16 in.)
Mat: 19 x 17 in.
Frame (outside): 20 x 18 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Rebecca Dixon Chambers, Sausalito, California from The American Country Woman
1954
Gelatin silver print
Image: 22 x 29.6cm (8 11/16 x 11 5/8 in.)
Mount: 47.7 x 37.5cm (18 3/4 x 14 3/4 in.)
Mat: 20 x 18 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 19 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Hand of Dancer, Java, Indonesia
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image: 34 x 26.5cm (13 3/8 x 10 7/16 in.)
Sheet: 35.2 x 27.9 cm (13 7/8 x 11 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

During a 1958 trip to Indonesia with Paul Taylor, Lange observed a practice session of traditional gamelan music and Javanese dance. In this photograph, she focused on a gesture known as Ngrayung / Nangreu. Although such gestures can carry different meanings depending on the choreography, each highly controlled movement is believed to embody an expression of the soul and requires deep concentration.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Vietnam
1958
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 26.3 x 31cm (10 3/8 x 12 3/16 in.)
Mat: 16 x 20 in.
Frame (outside): 17 x 21 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Venezuela
1960
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 35.5 x 23.4cm (14 x 9 3/16 in.)
Mat: 20 x 16 in.
Frame (outside): 21 x 17 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Lange joined Taylor on a trip to Venezuela, where he was consulting on agrarian reform. Here, she captured a man holding an axe in one hand and a machete in the other – blades used to clear corn stalks in the field. The presence of these sharp tools, along with the man’s torn clothing and bare feet, hint at the physical and economic vulnerability of farm labourers working on the land.

Label text from the exhibition

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Egypt
1963
Gelatin silver print
Image: 30.2 x 19.6cm (11 7/8 x 7 11/16 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14 in.
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965)
Egypt
1963
Gelatin silver print
Image: 23.1 x 33.9cm (9 1/8 x 13 3/8 in.)
Mat: 18 x 14
Frame (outside): 19 x 15 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
© The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 31st October, 2023 – 18th February, 2024

Warning: This posting contains photographs of male nudity and sexual activity.

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland 1971

Arthur Tress: fantastical photographer

Definition of ‘fantastical’
1. strange, weird, or fanciful in appearance, conception, etc.
2. created in the mind; illusory.

I honour the work of Arthur Tress. Strange and wonderful, like something out of a fairytale or a nightmare, Arthur Tress’ ‘imaginary’ stories take the viewer out of themselves and into a different realm of being and believing. His staged, performative “magic realism” photographs – featuring the inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction – emerge from the psyche of the artist, from his deepest thoughts, feelings and dreams.

Taking advice from that another gay photographer, American Duane Michals (who works in sequences of images to tell stories), Michals told Tress that “a photograph can be anything”. As Michals insightfully observes,

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see…

Everything we experience is in our mind. It is all mind. What you are reading now, hearing now, feeling now…

There is not one photography. There is no photography. The only value judgment is the work itself. Does it move, touch, fill me?”1

It’s all in the mind.

Tress discovered his own way to tell stories, his own signature style, that was completely different from anything being accomplished in New York at the time by (for example) Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, Diane Arbus, David Wojnarowicz, or Nan Goldin. Through the transmutation of metal into gold, or dream into photograph, Tress placed himself outside the trendy happenings of the Big Apple. In images such as the early Woman with Coin Operated Binoculars, Coit Tower, San Francisco (1964, below) – redolent of what was to follow – the disturbing Boy with Root Hands, New York (1970, below), Bride and Groom, New York, New York (1970, below) and Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, below), Tress reaches out an illuminates the dreams, desires and fears of children and adults.

What is disappointing is that neither the media images nor the accompanying text include any images from or text about what I feel is one of Tress’ strongest bodies of work, his photographs of gay fantasies. Can we not include these images for fear of upsetting delicate conservative sensibilities? I don’t know whether there were any included in the exhibition either, having not seen the presentation in person.

Again, created from the artist’s fantasies and imagination these works posses a tremendous élan vital, a celebration of sexuality and life. They also possess intelligence and wit a plenty. Witness, Band-aid Fantasy (1978, below) which is clever and sensitive in its fetishisation of the removal of a Band-aid from a friend; or the look on the face of Superman and the male subject in Superman Fantasy (1977, below) where one cock belongs to both: the penis of the male “standing” in for that of the super man, standing in for the always hidden power of Superman’s cock represented by the (irony: cut-out cardboard) phallic armoured body of the hyper-masculine hero, desired by the male with his lustful look. The photograph makes me laugh. If you are so further inclined, there are six pages of these wonderful gay fantasies on the Stanford Libraries Arthur Tress Photograph Collection web pages. Well worth a visit.

To my mind, Arthur Tress has always been an underrated artist. A courageous and dedicated photographer who forged an extra-ordinary magical path, it is a pleasure to see his work exhibited at the Getty.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Duane Michals June 20, 1976 September 1, 1976

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“Tress credits his friend and fellow photographer Duane Michals with opening his eyes to the possibilities of his chosen medium in the 1960s, back when Tress’ photographs hewed more closely to the prevalent “documentary” style of the day. “He said a photograph can be anything,” Tress says, describing Michals’ approach. “It can be a sequence, you can write on the photograph, paint on it, make collages, tell a story. In the ’60s, that was revolutionary.”

As it turned out, Tress was a receptive audience for Michals’ manifesto. By the time the Brooklyn native had secured his breakthrough assignment in 1969 to photograph what he describes as the “endangered folk cultures” of Appalachia, Tress was already pushing against the dispassion of the documentary style.”

Ben Marks. “How One Artist Makes New Art From Old Coloring Books and Found Photos,” on the Collectors Weekly website August 26th, 2021 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

The first exhibition to chronicle the early career of Arthur Tress, one of the most innovative American photographers of the postwar era. During his first decade as an emergent professional in the New York photography world (1968-1978), his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from the inner worlds of fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland
1971
From the series Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

One of Tress’s best known images from his Dream Collectors photobook, the photograph depicts a child emerging out of a discarded roof on a pier in Ocean City, Maryland. The effectiveness of this composition is remarkable given that Tress stumbled on the site and the subject by chance.

Wall label

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Boy in Flood Dream, Ocean City, Maryland (1971, above)

Installation views of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing works from his Shadows series in the bottom image

Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty

Drawn from his imagination, dreams, and queer identity, Arthur Tress’s photography presents a surrealist world with fantastical subjects In the field of staged photography, Arthur Tress (American, born 1940) was a trailblazer, directing his subjects in fictional and often surreal scenes.

The first exhibition to chronicle his early career, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows, on view October 31, 2023 – February 18, 2024 at the Getty Center, examines how his artistic practice evolved from being rooted in the social documentary tradition to a bold new approach drawing inspiration from fantasies, daydreams, and nightmares.

“Tress’s early work from his Dream Collector and other related series constitutes a remarkable artistic achievement and a major contribution to the history of post-war photography and the photo book,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “In a series of increasingly radical projects, Tress delved deeply into the worlds of surrealism and the unconscious, establishing himself as one of the most interesting mavericks of his generation.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tress began his career as a documentary photographer in the late 1960’s, focusing his lens on the people of New York and the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. Initially concerned with such societal issues as poverty, pollution, and lack of open space for urban recreation, by the mid-1970s he began channeling his creative energy into more personal artistic projects that reflected his imagination, dreams, and his own queer identity.

This exhibition presents highlights from Tress’s major photographic projects dating from 1968 to 1978: Appalachia: The Disturbed Land; Open Space in the Inner City; The Dream Collector; Shadow; Theater of Mind; and The Ramble.

Tress’s early work is rooted in the social documentary tradition, recalling photographs made by Depression-era artists for the U.S. government. Tress’s Appalachia: The Disturbed Land captures scenes of poverty and environmental degradation in coal mining communities. The work was originally exhibited at the Sierra Club’s gallery in New York where it garnered positive reviews.

Tress’s next major project, Open Space in the Inner City, also reflects his concern for the environment as well as his interest in documenting problems facing young people. Set primarily in New York City and its environs, the photographs show polluted streetscapes and waterways, housing projects, junkyards, factories, and parking lots, and include both candid and posed images of children, families, and commuters. A central theme of the series is the general lack of open space for recreation.

Appearing as his first major photo book in 1972, The Dream Collector visualises children’s fantasies and nightmares. This body of work cemented Tress’s reputation for staging macabre and fantastic subjects at a time when the photography world was largely dedicated to prosaic realism.

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series of photographs centered on his own shadow. The images reproduced in his photobook Shadow trace the mystical dream journey of an individual soul through birth, death, and enlightenment. Tress chose to use a wide-angle lens that alters the perspective and imparts a dreamlike quality. His only light source was the sun, which made early morning or late afternoon the ideal times to shoot, as the raking light lengthened the shadows, making them more dramatic.

In Theater of the Mind Tress explored his personal anxieties as well as the complexities of family relationships. He convinced his subjects to play out dramatic and sometimes disturbing scenes for the camera which were informed by the artist’s own psychic intuitions. Afterwards, when he shared the photographs with them, his sitters often remarked on his having illuminated an important but hitherto hidden aspect of their family dynamic.

One of Tress’s most personal bodies of work is an extraordinary series depicting the Ramble, a wooded section of Central Park in New York City known as a gay cruising ground. The Ramble was a personal photographic project that he did not exhibit or publish, as doing so could have exposed his subjects to embarrassment, harassment, or violence. Tress was still struggling with his sexuality at this time and making these pictures helped allay his anxieties, giving him something else to focus on in the Ramble aside from his own furtive sexual encounters.

“By revisiting an energetic decade of professional and personal work from 1968 to 1978, this exhibition enabled me to see more clearly how these early explorative years marked the beginning of a very personal vision, unique to myself, as an emerging photo artist – a peculiar combination of documentary realism and emotional responsiveness to the hidden mysteries of everyday life,” says Arthur Tress.

“I’m excited to have this amazing opportunity both in our exhibition and its accompanying catalogue to share an extraordinary body of work that is not well known to the general public, and to narrate the remarkable story behind Tress’s early career that has remained untold,” says Jim Ganz, senior curator in the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs.

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows is curated by Jim Ganz with Paul Martineau, curator in the Department of Photographs. Related programming includes Magic Realism: An Evening with Arthur Tress, where Tress will discuss his bold approach to photography, and the world premiere of Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge, an immersive journey into the life and unique vision of acclaimed photographer Arthur Tress. The exhibition is also accompanied by a catalogue, Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows.

Anonymous. “Arthur Tress’s Magic Realism Comes to Getty,” on the Getty website Oct 18, 2023 [Online] Cited 28/10/2023

Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge – Trailer

Trailer for feature length documentary about fantasist/surrealist photographer Arthur Tress. Directed by Stephen B. Lewis

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman with Coin Operated Binoculars, Coit Tower, San Francisco
1964
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Not sure whether this photograph is in the exhibition. Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl and Moon Dream, New York, New York
1968
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl with Doll’s Head, Capels, West Virginia
1968
From the series Appalachia: The Disturbed Land
Gelatin silver print
20.4 × 15.7cm (8 1/16 × 6 3/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of the Ottersons
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress Appalachia: The Disturbed Land proof sheet 1968

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Hockey Gloves (Hockey Glove Fantasy)
1968
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

A Kind of Magic

Photographer Arthur Tress’s “shaman vision quest dream journey”

Photographer Arthur Tress revels in the weird and fantastic – a hand sticking out of a bus seat, boys blending in with trees, children and adults playing against backdrops of rubble and trash – dark, spooky, unnerving images.

Tress, who spent time in his early career as a documentary photographer and traveled widely, staged his photographs to set a mood and tell a story.

Tress is one of the foremost practitioners of staged photography. He’s well known for his surreal photobooks, especially The Dream Collector (1972), but his career began earlier, in the 1960s, with commercial projects that encouraged his artistic development and anticipated his later fantastical works.

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows (out now from Getty) looks closely at the artist’s early career, from 1968 to 1978, from his travels abroad through his return to the United States, stopping in Sweden, Russia, Appalachia, New York, San Francisco, and many other places. The images and quotations below are drawn from the exhibition catalog and take you into his world.

Tress traveled to Appalachia several times early in his career, and he became increasingly passionate about accurately representing the character of the destitute yet beautiful region and its people. Photographs curator Mazie Harris writes that the twisted branches and lonely image reflect the region’s “barren future.”

In 1969 Tress photographed “the Ramble,” known as a gay cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. But he never published this work, says photographs curator James Ganz, “because doing so could have exposed the photographer and his subjects to embarrassment or harassment.” Even the act of taking these pictures was dangerous at the time. This body of work is a deeply personal, intimate expression and probing of Tress’s identity as a gay man and also reflects much about the culture of the time and the anxieties, fears, and longings experienced by members of his community.

The image Hobby Horses, Harlem River, Bronx, New York (1970, below) is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.

While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York (1969, below) which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The work Shadow, Cannes, France (negative 1974; print 1975, below), featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”

“[This] photograph of my father in a snowstorm is, in fact, a kind of surrogate self-portrait that mirrors my own hollow fearfulness about my own body’s decline and disappearance into a cold emptiness,” Tress wrote in a 2022 letter to curator Paul Martineau. [Last Portrait of My Father, New York, New York, 1978 below]

In 1970 Tress wrote about the magical properties of a photograph, and, surely, he is a visual magician, an artist possessed of a creative vision and intuition that allows him to connect to his subjects in a deep, revelatory way. Tress’s images pull you into his imagined, constructed worlds. His work is mysterious, surprising, surreal, and dreamlike. His images, the product of personal experiences and feelings, are universal in their play on and exploration of human fears, desires, and longings. He once described his series Shadow as a “shaman vision quest dream journey.”

Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
My Face in Store Window, New York, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Cemetery, Queens, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Burnt-Out Furniture Store, Newark, New Jersey
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

In July 1969, while photographing the site of the Newark race riots that had occurred two summers earlier, Tress wrote to his sister that the police took him in for questioning. “They could have arrested me for being in the abandoned buildings – so I was very polite to them.”

Wall label

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
13 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Trixy Castro
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

While Tress was at work on what would become his Dream Collector series, he sought the advice of famed children’s author Maurice Sendak, who is most widely known for the book Where the Wild Things Are. At the end of their visit, Tress offered Sendak the choice of one of Tress’s photographs, and Sendak picked Wild Man of the Forest, Central Park, New York, which “evoke[s] the archetypal figure of the medieval wild man of the woods.”

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman in Railroad Yard, Brooklyn, New York
1969
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of David A. Cohen and Laurie K. Cohen
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy on Bike Crossing Williamsburg Bridge, New York
1969
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
40.2 × 50cm (15 13/16 × 19 11/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Gregory V. Gooding
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Men Cruising, Central Park, New York
1969
From the series The Ramble
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Dog Walker, Central Park, New York
1969, printed 2007
From the series The Ramble
Gelatin silver print
Collection David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Young Man in Woods, Central Park, New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Central Park (Rambles), New York City
1969
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Gay Activists at First Gay Pride Parade, Christopher Street, New York
Negative 1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Bruce at Dawn, Paper Flower Maker, East Village, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Friends Playing Cards, Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Root Hands, New York
1970
From the series Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Teenage Boys, Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, New York
1970, printed later
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Jon and Ellen Vein Family
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hobby Horses, Harlem River, Bronx, New York
1970
Gelatin silver print
8 7/8 x 7 13/16 in.
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

The above image is part of Tress’s series Open Space in the Inner City (1969-1971). It shows his environmentalism, which he cultivated throughout his travels, especially in his exploration of Appalachia. Having settled in New York after living in Sweden, Tress was shocked by the rampant urban blight and crowding in the city and how few open spaces there were for people to play, thrive, and live. His series helped bring attention to this widespread civic issue and was shown by institutions like the Sierra Club and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy with Basketball, Bronx, New York
1970
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
34 × 26.6cm (13 3/8 × 10 1/2 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Woman in Shopping Center Parking Lot, Lackawanna, New York
1970
From the series Open Space in the Inner City
Gelatin silver print
23.3 × 19.6cm (9 3/16 × 7 11/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Minette as Gloria Swanson in Ruins of Fox Theater, Brooklyn, New York
1971
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boy in Tin Cone, Bronx, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hand on Train, Staten Island, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl With Dunce Cap, P.S. 3, New York, New York
1972
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
26.4 × 26.4cm (10 3/8 × 10 3/8 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing Hockey Player, New York (1972, below)

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hockey Player, New York
1972
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Shadow, Cannes, France
Negative 1974; print 1975
Gelatin silver print,
19.4 × 19.2cm (7 5/8 × 7 9/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of John V. and Laure M. Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Between 1972 and 1975 Tress created a series and photobook called Shadow. The above work, featuring the artist and shadows cast by a sculpture of birds, appeared toward the end of the book in a section titled “Magic Flight.” Curator of photographs Paul Martineau says this picture – juxtaposed with other images of imprisoned shadows – symbolises freedom and “traces a mystical dream journey of an individual soul from the past to the present and into the future, through birth, death, and enlightenment.”

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Dream Therapist, Harold Ellis, New York, New York
1975
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Girl Running Away from Dinosaur, Santa Cruz, CA
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Last Portrait of My Father, New York, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
15 1/8 x 14 7/8 in.
Collection of David Knaus
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Rachel Barth. “A Kind of Magic,” on the Getty website Nov 07, 2023 [Online] Cited 10/11/2023

Installation view of the exhibition Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles showing the work Bride and Groom, New York, New York 1970 (below)

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Bride and Groom, New York, New York
1970
From the series Theater of the Mind
Gelatin silver print
41.7 × 40.2cm (16 7/16 × 15 13/16 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Gregory V. Gooding
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Hermaphrodite between Venus and Mercury, East Hampton, New York
1973
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Self-Portrait with Lobster, Bar Harbor, Maine
1974
Gelatin silver print
17.7 x 17.7cm
Collection of the artist

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Boot Fantasy, New York
1977
Gelatin silver print
26 x 26cm
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of David Knaus

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Superman Fantasy
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Drill Fantasy
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Men, Two Rooms
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Band-aid Fantasy
1978
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Lumberjack Fantasy
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of education, research, review and comment

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Two Surfers, Ft. Lauderdale
1980
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Arthur Tress (American, b. 1940)
Child’s Dream of Redwood Monster, Santa Cruz, California
1971
From the series The Dream Collector
Gelatin silver print
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Arthur Tress Archive LLC

Child’s Dream of Redwood Monster, Santa Cruz, CA, 1971 on the cover

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book

Edited by James A. Ganz, with contributions by Mazie M. Harris and Paul Martineau

This richly illustrated volume is the first critical look at the early career of Arthur Tress, a key proponent of magical realism and staged photography.

Arthur Tress (b. 1940) is a singular figure in the landscape of postwar American photography. His seminal series, The Dream Collector, depicts Tress’s interests in dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and the unconscious and established him as one of the foremost proponents of magical realism at a time when few others were doing staged photography.

This volume presents the first critical look at Tress’s early career, contextualising the highly imaginative, fantastic work he became known for while also examining his other interrelated series: Appalachia: People and Places; Open Space in the Inner City; Shadow; and Theater of the Mind. James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, and Paul Martineau plumb Tress’s work and archives, studying ephemera, personal correspondence, unpublished notes, diaries, contact sheets, and more to uncover how he went from earning his living as a social documentarian in Appalachia to producing surreal work of “imaginative fiction.” This abundantly illustrated volume imparts a fuller understanding of Tress’s career and the New York photographic scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 31, 2023, to February 18, 2024.

James A. Ganz is senior curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“Along with several others of his cohort, Arthur Tress spearheaded the resurgence of the directorial mode in the 1970s, as well as his generation’s engagement with previously taboo subject matter. With his unique blend of documentary and surrealist approaches, he has made a major contribution to his medium.”

~ A. D. Coleman, photography critic and historian

264 pages
9 1/2 x 11 inches
17 color and 198 b/w illustrations
ISBN 978-1-60606-861-8
hardcover

Getty Publications
Imprint: J. Paul Getty Museum

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows book cover

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 30-31

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 40-41

Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows pp. 82-83

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘Photography: Real & Imagined’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne Part 1

Exhibition dates: 13th October 2023 – 4th February 2024

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this posting contains images and names of people who may have since passed away.

O. G. Rejlander (British born Sweden, 1813-1875)
No title (The Virgin in prayer)
c. 1858-1860
Albumen silver photograph
20.2 × 15.4cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2002
Public domain

This is an ambitious, complex but flawed exhibition of photographic works from the NGV Collection. Further comment in Part 2 of the posting…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the NGV for allowing me to publish the media images in the posting. Other photographs in the posting are public domain. All installation images are by Marcus Bunyan.

Photography: Real and Imagined examines two perspectives on photography; photography grounded in the real world, as a record, a document, a reflection of the world around us; and photography as the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion. On occasion, photography operates in both realms of the real and the imagined.

Highlighting major photographic works from the NGV Collection, including recent acquisitions on display for the very first time, Photography: Real and Imagined examines the complex, engaging and sometimes contradictory nature, of all things photographic. The NGV’s largest survey of the photography collection, the exhibition includes more than 300 works by Australian and international photographers and artists working with photo-media from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Text from the NGV website

Installation view of the entrance to the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne with introduction wall text to the right
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Introduction

Photography was once described by writer and critic Lucy Lippard as having ‘a toe in the chilly waters of verisimilitude’. Photographs, Lippard posits, may be a close – rather than exact – reflection of truth. This proposition raises a raft of questions. Is reality so uncomfortable that we only engage with it partially, or out of necessity? Can a photograph show the truth, and if it does, whose truth is it showing – the photographer’s, the subject’s or the viewer’s? If truth is the end game, what does this mean for creative practice and other types of photography? The suggestion that photography is only partially, and somewhat uncomfortably, engaged with the notion of truth highlights the complexity encountered when trying to nearly encapsulate any selection of photographs.

Through works from the NGV Collection, Photography: Real and Imagined teases out connections between iconic and lesser known photographs, putting them in a dialogue with one another that both explores and transcends the time in which they were made. It dos not set out to be a history of photography, but historical context does inform the content, leading to nuanced discussions of past and present, real and imagined.

Introductory wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Mike and Doug Starn’s Invictus (1992); and at left works by John Kauffmann, Norman Deck and Edward Steichen (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The sun was the light source that enabled the earliest photographs to be made in the 1830s. More than 150 years later the sun is the subject of this photographic sculpture by Mike and Doug Starn that embraces the possibilities of light and its potential effects on photography, in terms of both producing an image and as a force contributing to its irreparable damage. In the centre of their installation, the circular form of a sun seems to pulse and leach out of the layers of exposed orthographic film, which is stretched and layered across steel beams and held with pipe clamps and tape.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, John Kauffmann’s The Cloud (c. 1905, below); at bottom left, Kauffmann’s The grey veil c. 1919; at top right, Norman Deck’s Sunset, Parramatta River (1909); and a bottom right, Edward Steichen’s Moonrise (1904)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The cloud
c. 1905
Gelatin silver photograph
28.2 × 37.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr John Bilney, 1976
Public domain

John Kauffmann (Australian, 1864-1942)
The grey veil
c. 1919
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1990
Public domain

The Yarra River, the Princes Bridge and the Melbourne city skyline beyond shimmer in this photograph by John Kauffmann. And yet, they are not the image’s subject. Using a highly refined Pictorialist treatment, a reduced tonal range and luminous mid tones, the artist has manipulated light to the extent that the feeling and atmospheric qualities become the focus of the image – it is the impression that is paramount. With the choice of title, too, the photograph moves away from a specific documentation of place or time.

Wall text from the exhibition

Norman Deck (Australian 1882-1980)
Sunset, Parramatta River
1909
Gelatin silver photograph
30.5 × 24.9cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Joyce Evans, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at centre, David Thomas’ The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (2010-2011), with at right works by David Noonan, Hiroshi Sugimoto, László Moholy-Nagy and Susan Fereday (see below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Thomas (British, b. 1951, Australia 1958- )
The Movement of Colour (White), Taking a Monochrome for a Walk (London) (installation view)
2010-2011
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of an anonymous donor through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2015
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“It was made during a residency at the Centre for Drawing Research at Wimbledon School of Art University of the Arts London… and plays on Paul Klee’s definition of drawing as taking a line for a walk on a page… this is taking a monochrome for a walk in the world where the monochrome becomes a key for seeing other colours… an interval in the world. It also suggests the ideas of movement in time and feelings of impermanence.”

~ David Thomas

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top right, David Noonan’s Untitled (1992); at bottom left, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Winnetka Drive-In, Paramount (1993); at top right, László Moholy-Nagy’s Fotogram, 1925 (1925); and at bottom right, Susan Fereday’s Untitled (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Light and time are both the means and subject of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Drive-In Theaters series. To produce the images, the artist directs his camera at the movie screen. Once the film starts, Sugimoto opens the lens shutter of his large-format camera and shuts it the moment the movie ends. The result is a visual condensation of the moving images and projected light of the film for its duration into a vivid, hovering rectangle of virtually pulsating light and, in the case of this drive-in cinema, the surrounding human-made and astronomical light, too.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Noonan’s Untitled (1992)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946, Germany 1920-1934, England 1935-1937, United States 1937-1946)
Fotogram, 1925
1925
Gelatin silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1985
Public domain

From 1922 to 1943 László Moholy-Nagy experimented extensively with the photogram process – he was passionate about the optical effects and inherent properties of these camera-less images freed from a purely representational mode. In this work a pale shape, an organic swathe, streams across a page while curved shapes dance at the base. A halo above emits small geometric patterns. The work is a celebration of abstraction of the image – of the effects of playing with light, objects and photographic paper in a darkroom.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Barbara Kasten’s Composition 8T (2018, below); and at right, Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Composition 8T
2018
Digital type C print
160.0 x 121.9cm (image and sheet)
ed. 1/1
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2018
© Barbara Kasten, courtesy Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf

This photograph from Barbara Kasten’s Collisions/Compositions series continues her practice of creating architectural spaces in the studio using a range of materials, such as plexiglas and mirrors, which she lights and photographs at close range. Influenced by Constructivism and the teachings of the Bauhaus, specifically the work of László Moholy-Nagy, Kasten has experimented with the parameters of abstract photography for around five decades. She has written of her ongoing fascination with light in the creation and conceptual development of her photographs, saying, ‘The interdependency of shadow and light is the essence of photographic exploration and an inescapable part of the photographic process’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lydia Wegner’s Purple square (2017)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Todd McMillan’s Equivalent VIII (2014); and at right, Sue Pedley’s Sound of lotus 1 (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at back second left, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Thomas Ruff’s Portrait (V. Liebermann D) (1999); and at right, Ruff’s Portrait (A. Koschkarow) (2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The earnest gazes of the man and woman in these two monumental photographs by Thomas Ruff are so calm and serene that they bely the intense experience of viewing their enlarged faces. Applying a standardised approach – similar to a generic passport photograph – these portraits have a timeless quality that invites you to attempt to ‘read’ their faces and to search for clues as to the inner state of the person. Ruff, however, lets nothing slip. The faces are known to the artist but remain anonymous to the viewer.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Robert Rooney’s AM-PM: 2 Dec 1973-28 Feb 1974 (1973-1974) (detail)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Featuring some of the most iconic photographs ever created alongside contemporary approaches to the photographic medium, Photography: Real & Imagined is the largest survey of the NGV’s Photography collection in the institution’s history and features more than 270 photographs by Australian and international practitioners.

Four years in the making, this landmark exhibition features photographs from across the 200-year period since the invention of photography in the 19th century, including work by leading international photographers including Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gilbert & George and Nan Goldin, alongside Australian photographers Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Mervyn Bishop, Polly Borland, Destiny Deacon and Darren Sylvester.

Through twenty-one thematic sections, this large-scale exhibition explores the proposition that a photograph can be grounded in the real world, recording, documenting and reflecting the world around us; or be the product of imagination, storytelling and illusion; and on occasion operate in both realms. The thematic sections explore subject matter such as light, place and environment, consumption, conflict, community, and death.

Exhibition highlights include Mervyn Bishop’s important photograph of former Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, pouring sand into the open palm of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari. The 1975 image captures the historic meeting between these two figures where Lingiari received the crown lease of his ancestral lands. Also on display is Joe Rosenthal’s World War II photograph Raising the flag on Iwo Jima, 1945, in which American marines raise their country’s flag over the Japanese Island. Both Bishop and Rosenthal’s photographs were staged, or re-constructed for better pictorial effect, illustrating the fluid space between the real and imagined.

The exhibition also presents fashion and advertising photography, including key examples by Lilian Bassman, Athol Smith, Horst P. Horst and Dora Maar. These images showcase a world of designer fashion and high-end products, which set a standard in advertising that continues today. Ilse Bing’s Surrealist inspired photograph commissioned by Elsa Schiaparelli to launch her new perfume Salut in 1934 is a highlight of the exhibition.

Highlighting an area of focused collecting for the NGV, the exhibition recognises the work of women practicing in the early 20th century, including Barbara Morgan whose acclaimed photo montage City shell, 1938, shows an unexpected view of the then recently completed Empire State Building.

Through to the current day, Photography: Real & Imagined presents contemporary photographers of the 21st century including Zanele Muholi, Richard Mosse and Alex Prager. Highlights include Cindy Sherman’s celebrated self-portrait in the guise of Renaissance aristocrat. Also on display will be the oldest photographic work in the NGV Collection, an early 19th century portrait by Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of the medium, as well as examples of daguerreotypes, unique images on silver plated copper sheets that are amongst the earliest forms of photography.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication – the most ambitious book published on the NGV Photography Collection, generously supported by the Bowness Family Foundation. The publication comprises essays from NGV Senior Curator of Photography, Susan van Wyk, Susan Bright and David Campany; alongside texts by Curator of Photography, Maggie Finch and external authors from Australia, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia.

Regular introductory talks for students are held on weekdays during term times, and free drop-by guided tours each Thursday and Sunday at 10.30am during the exhibition period.

Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: ‘This exhibition celebrates the collections and achievements of the NGV’s photography department, which has presented more than 180 exhibitions in its 55-year history. The exhibition is a testament to the strength of the NGV Collection, with so many key examples of the history of photography represented, from the earliest examples from the 19th century, through to contemporary images being produced right now in the twenty-first century. We are grateful for the support of the many donors and philanthropists, such as the Bowness Family Foundation, who have helped to grow and strengthen the NGV’s photography collection.’

Press release from the NGV

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne at top left, O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below); at bottom left, Henry Peach Robinson’s Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot (1859); at centre, Ruth Hollick’s Thought (1921); and at right Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (1988) from the History Portraits series 1988-1990
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Describing the complex conundrum presented by Cindy Sherman in this photograph, photographer and curator Patrick Pound once wrote: ‘Fake chested and with a face like a mask, here Cindy Sherman is costumed to the max. She stares out like a disapproving Renaissance figure who has just walked off set from a Peter Greenaway extravaganza. Here we have a photographer looking like a painting that walked out of a film. Sherman’s photographs speak of the fragilities of the visage in an image-saturated world where information and construction slip into foreplay. In Sherman’s photographic world gender and identity is a compilation album. There is a toughness to the excess that is all her own’.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing O. G. Rejlander’s The Virgin in prayer (c. 1858-1860, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Henry Peach Robinson (English, 1830-1901)
Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot
1859
Albumen silver photograph
24.3 × 19.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

In the 1850s Henry Peach Robinson was renowned for producing elaborately staged narrative images based on scenes from popular literary sources. He was particularly interested in Arthurian legends and drew upon these stories as inspiration for some of his most admired photographs. Elaine watching the shield of Lancelot is based on Alfred Tennyson’s version of the story of Lancelot and Elaine. Peach Robinson has recreated the scene in which the lovelorn Elaine gazes dreamily at the shield of Lancelot. She is shown as a woman who has shunned reason and propriety and abandoned herself to the intensity of her emotions, making this photograph both a tragic love story and a cautionary narrative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977)
Thought
1921
Gelatin silver photograph
37.4 × 25.3cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania 1975 from the Artists and Photographs folio 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1959, German-born artists Bernd and Hilla Becher began travelling throughout Europe to create photographic typologies of vanishing industrial architecture (a practice they continued for more than four decades). While predominantly documenting German structures and landscapes, they occasionally worked overseas. This image, four views of a coal tipple, was taken on their first trip to North America in the mid 1970s. The Bechers constructed a system for comparing structures: photographed from a consistent angle, with virtually identical lighting conditions, printed at the same size and often displayed in grids.

Wall text from the exhibition

Edward Ruscha (American, b. 1937)
Twentysix Gasoline Stations (installation view)
1963, published 1967
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 48 pages, printed cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Robert Rooney through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2009
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

With the first publication of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, and his subsequent artist books, Edward Ruscha’s work was influential in initiating the widespread interest in photographic book publishing that continues today. Ruscha’s use of photographs as a means of recording – a seemingly unemotional, detached cataloguing of the world – and simply as a ‘device to complete the idea’ influenced the interest in serial imaging adopted by many conceptual artists. Ruscha’s use of the book format was also crucial, providing a transportable way of presenting art in varied contexts that existed as a type of ‘map’ to be read and interpreted, with the subject matter becoming less important than the documentation as a whole.

Wall text from the exhibition

John Baldessari (American 1931-2020)
Fable: A Sentence of Thirteen Parts (with Twelve Alternate Verbs) Ending in a Fable (installation views)
1977
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithography on concertina fold-out in cross formation, folded paper cover
9.8 × 14.0 × 1.8cm (closed) 70.0 × 126.5cm approx. (overall, opened)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Friends of the Gallery Library, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Conceptual artist John Baldessari, is renowned for his often-playful investigations into ideas of language, image and authenticity, once said: ‘I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? … And then I also had a parallel interest in photography … I could never figure out why photography and art had separate histories. So I decided to explore both’. Taking art off the walls and requiring someone to unfold and activate it is a central idea of this artist’s book. A visual puzzle, it invites an interaction between looking and reading, creating your own fables as you jump from image to word to image again.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eve Sonneman (American, b. 1946)
Real time (installation view)
1968-1974, published 1976
Artist’s book: photo-offset lithograph and printed text, 46 folios, printed paper cover, glued binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Supporters of Photography, 2021
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Eve Sonneman’s photobook Real time includes paired photographs, each separated by a black line border. The diptychs allow for the occurrence of movement and gestures and changes between the artist’s camera clicks. The ordered presentation, however, takes the images away from a straight documentary reading and to a consideration of their ‘objectness’. After first showing the photographs at MoMA, New York, then photography curator, John Szarkowski, set up a mentorship for Sonneman with the photographer Diane Arbus. As Sonneman recalled: ‘[Arbus] loved my pictures and we got along great. For two years she helped me edit’. Sonneman then published the images through the newly established Printed Matter in New York in 1976.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Carol Jerrems and Virginia Fraser’s book A Book About Australian Women (published 1974); at top centre, Nan Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (published 1986); and at bottom left, Tracey Emin’s Exploration of the Soul (published 1994)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Harold Cazneaux’s book The Bridge Book (published 1930); and at top right, Lee Friedlander’s book The American Monument (published 1976)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934)
The American Monument (installation view)
Published by The Eakins Press Foundation, New York, 1976
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Berenice Abbott (American 1898-1991, worked in France 1921-1929)
Changing New York (installation view)
Published by E. P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1939
Half-tone plate and letterpress text
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934); at bottom left, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s book Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (published 1930); at top right, Bill Brandt’s book Perspective of Nudes (published 1961); and at bottom right, Germaine Krull’s book Nude studies (Études de nu) (published 1930)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Photographs today are often viewed in galleries in frames, hung on walls. Many photographs, however, were originally created for display in combination with text and graphic design; to be laid out on a page and reproduced in different formats; to be held, worn on the body, published, and shared.

With recognition of these expanded histories of photography, and the contemporary resurgence in publishing, this exhibition includes artist books, magazines and photobooks that use the photographic image in print, publishing and design. These two cases include examples that show the influence of Surrealism, the New Objectivity and Constructivist graphic design in dynamic modern publications.

Artist and author Martin Parr has described the photobook as the ‘supreme platform’ for photographers to share the work with a broad audience. The 1920s to the 1970s were arguably the most important period for the publication of photobooks. These two cases include examples that show the influence of modernist, humanist and documentary photography traditions in innovative publications from this time. These include exhibition catalogues, examples of first edition books, publications published in larger un-editioned print runs and coveted collectable limited-edition books and portfolios.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Man Ray’s book Photographs by Man Ray Paris 1920-1934 (published 1934) with at right, Man Ray’s Anatomies (1930, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) (American, 1890-1976)
Anatomies
1930
Gelatin silver photograph

Please note: this photograph is not in the exhibition

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Aveux non Avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) (installation view)
Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, 1930
Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 leaves of plates, paper cover, stitched binding
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Aveux non Avenus, by the celebrated poet, writer, sculptor and photographer Claude Cahun, was published in 1930 by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris, in an edition of five hundred. The book comprises a series of texts in French: poems, literary aphorisms, recollections of dream sequences and philosophical thoughts, ideas and meanderings. Pierre Mac Orlan, a French novelist who wrote the preface to the book, described Mademoiselle Claude Cahun’s text as ‘de poèmes-essais et d’essais-poèmes’, or ‘poem-essays and essay-poems’, and said that overall ‘the book is virtually entirely dedicated to the word adventure’

The alliterative title presents a conundrum for English translation – ‘aveux’ meaning ‘avowals’ or ‘confessions’, and ‘non avenus’ meaning ‘voided’ – and is variously translated as Disavowals, Denials, and Unavowed confessions, among other things. Curator Jennifer Mundy has written that the title suggests ‘an affirmative expression immediately followed by some form of negation or retraction’.

Ambiguities around the title aside, there is a strong visual aspect to the book too. The texts are each demarcated with a complex and fantastical photogravure created by Cahun’s partner, Marcel Moore. These photogravure (where an image from the negative of a photograph is etched into a metal plate, similar to printmaking) are collages made up of photographic images of, and by, Cahun. Throughout the book, graphic devices of stars, eyes and lips are also used to separate sections of text. Aveux non Avenus, which has been described as an anti-realist or surrealist-autobiography of the multi-disciplinary Cahun, exists as a potential critique of the autobiography format altogether, is wonderfully irreducible.

Maggie Finch and Isobel Crombie. “Claude Cahun,” in the 2019 July/August edition of NGV Magazine on the NGV website 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 28/01/2024

Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972)
Untitled
1930
In Aveux non avenus 1930
published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris
illustrated book: heliographs
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Nude Studies (Études de Nu) (installation view)
Published by Librarie des arts décoratifs, Paris, 1930
24 photogravures, letterpress on paper, white cloth-backed orange paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2022
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Bill Brandt (English born Germany, 1904-1983)
Perspective of Nudes (installation view)
Published Bodley Head, London, 1961
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932)
Art Forms in Nature: Examples from the Plant World Photographed Direct from Nature (installation view)
Published by A. Zwemmer, London, 1929
Half-tone plate
Shaw Research Library, National Gallery of Victoria
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Karel Teige typographer (Czechoslovakia 1900-1951)
Karel Paspa photographer (Czechoslovakia 1862-1936)
ABECEDA (Alphabet) (installation view)
Published by J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Photomontage
National Gallery of Victoria
Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery Library endowment, 2017
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1958) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958)
USSR in Construction, no. 12 (Parachute issue) (URSS en Construction) (installation view)
1935
Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover
National Gallery of Victoria
Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Eliza Hutchinson’s No. 9 (2010); at bottom left, Ewa Narkiewicz’s Copper flax #4 (1999); at centre top, Harry Nankin’s The first wave: fragment 2 (1996); at centre bottom, Peter Peryer’s Seeing (1989); and at right, Aaron Siskind’s New York (1950)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In much the same way that tactile writing systems such as braille are impenetrable to those with vision, a photograph printed in two dimensions can be incomprehensible for people with vision impairment. Each system presents a conversion – of letters, texts and illustration – into raised dots on a page; of visible wavelengths of light into an image on a light-sensitive surface. Each relies on an irreversible alteration of the surface. Seeing, the title of this Peter Peryer photograph, infers an action – seeing something. Yet the conversion into a photographic image draws attention to the impenetrability of both acts.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at centre, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (installation view)
1999
From the Twilight series 1998-2002
Type C photograph
121.9 × 152.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Kaiser Bequest, 2000
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Anne Zahalka (Australian, b. 1957)
Sunday, 2:09pm
1995, printed 2019
From the Open House series 1995
Colour cibachrome transparency, light box
121.7 × 161.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018); and at right, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at rear from left to right, Gregory Crewdson’s Untitled (1999) from the Twilight series (1998-2002); at second left, Malerie Marder’s Untitled (2001); and centre, Anne Zahalka’s Sunday, 2:09pm (1995); and at right, Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Alex Prager’s Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street) (2013, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Alex Prager (American, b. 1979)
Crowd #11 (Cedar and Broad Street)
2013
Inkjet print
149.7 × 142.0cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Contemporary Photography, 2014

Alex Prager’s staged photographs openly reference the aesthetics of mid-twentieth century American cinema, fashion photography and the photographs of Cindy Sherman. Her images resemble film stills and are packed with emotion and human melodrama. Working with actors, directing their placement and interaction to create a hyperreal dramatisation of crowd behaviour, Prager’s narrative tableaux pair the banal and fantastic, the everyday and the theatrical, real life and cinematic representation. In this image we have a bird’s eye view of a mass of people crossing the road. We can see the patterns of movement, contact and avoidance and a suggestion of the narrative possibilities of the interacting crowd.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at second right, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Zoë Croggon (Australian, b. 1989)
Fonteyn (installation view)
2012
Digital type C print
102.8 × 99.9cm
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2013
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Loretta Lux’s The Drummer (2004, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Loretta Lux (German, b. 1969)
The drummer
2004
Cibachrome photograph
45.0 x 37.7cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2006
© Loretta Lux. VG Bild-Kunst/Copyright Agency, 2023

Loretta Lux is known for her eerie, hyperreal photographs of children. The luminous pallor of the boy’s skin and the subtle tonal range throughout the photograph is achieved through Lux’s delicate use of digital manipulation to reduce the palette in her image. Lux’s history as a painter informs photographs such as this, which seem to owe as much of a debt to Old Master paintings as modern technology. Her skilful combination of photographic reality and painterly effect gives the image a profoundly disconcerting quality that is reminiscent of the fantastical (and disturbing) character of Oskar, the little drummer boy, in the Günter Grass novel The Tin Drum (1959).

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at bottom left, Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée (c. 1938, below); at top centre, André Kertész’s Satiric Dancer, Paris (1926, below); and at right, Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Raoul Ubac (Belgian, 1909-1985)
Penthésilée
c. 1938
Gelatin silver photograph
31.0 × 41.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013

From the mid 1930s onwards Surrealist photographer Raoul Ubac experimented with collage, photomontage and solarisation. These processes disrupted the surface of his photographs, enabling him to create new and fantastic realities and introducing an element of chance into his image making. Penthésilée is from his most important series of photographs. The image is based on the story of Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons, who was killed by Achilles while fighting alongside the Trojans. To represent this mythic battle Ubac created this complex photomontage by cutting up, collaging, rephotographing and solarising photographs of nude female figures. The resulting image has an uncanny sense of movement suggesting the height of battle.

Wall text from the exhibition

André Kertész (Hungarian 1894-1985, France 1925-1936, United States 1936-1985)
Satiric Dancer, Paris
1926, printed c. 1972
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1973

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Max Dupain’s Impassioned clay (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Max Dupain (Australian 1911-1992)
Impassioned clay
1936
Gelatin silver photograph
50.4 × 36.7cm irreg.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
William Kimpton Bequest, 2016
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Pat Brassington’s Rosa (2014); and at right, Yvonne Todd’s Werta (2005)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Yvonne Todd selects her subjects, most often young women, from ‘call outs’ seeking certain types, people encountered on the street, or modelling agencies where she invariably chooses those with little or no industry experience. In her studio Todd uses costumes, heavy make-up and wigs to style her models. Costuming is an important aspect of Todd’s practice; her interest lies in in what she describes as, ‘the way they carry character and narrative connotations’. Todd’s finished photographs are heavily reworked using Photoshop so that they appear obviously artificial. This overt use of artifice shifts her images from simply being nostalgic recreations to being strangely familiar and undeniably creepy.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Robyn Stacey’s Nothing to see here (2019) and at back centre, Polly Borland’s Untitled (2018)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Robyn Stacey (Australian, b. 1952)
Nothing to see here
2019
From the Nothing to See Here series 2019
Lenticular image
155.5 × 119cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2020

This large-scale lenticular photograph shows the face of a woman projected onto a curtain. The curtain suggests a hidden cinema screen; however, Robyn Stacey’s curtains cannot be pulled back. From one viewpoint a beautiful face with eyes softly closed as if in sleep appears, but as you move past the image you can only see the curtain. The curtain becomes what the artist described as ‘a membrane between reality and allegory’ and acts as the screen as the portrait appears and disappears.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Polly Borland’s lenticular photograph Untitled (2018) from the MORPH series
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Polly Borland (Australia, b. 1959)
Untitled
2018
From MORPH series 2018
Inkjet print on rice paper on lenticular cardboard
216.0 × 172.7 × 13.0cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2019
© Polly Borland

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000); and at centre right, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Narelle Autio (Australian, b. 1969)
Untitled (installation view)
2000
From The Seventh Wave series 1999-2000
Gelatin silver photograph
90.0 × 134.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2001
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back centre, Selina Ou’s Convenience (2001); and at right, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at back left, Ben Shahn’s Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking 1935; and back right, Lewis Hine’s Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts 1912; and at right in the cabinet, Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Ben Shahn (Lithuanian 1898-1969, United States c. 1925-1969)
Young cotton picker, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Schools for coloured children do not open until January 1st so as not to interfere with cotton picking (installation view)
1935, printed c. 1975
Gelatin silver photograph
21.7 × 32.8cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940)
Finishing garments, 10 Hanover Ave., Boston, Massachusetts
1912
Gelatin silver photograph
11.4 × 16.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Kusakabe Kimbei’s album (Landscape and portraits) (1880s-1910s)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below); at top right, Heather George’s Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952); and at bottom right, Fred Kruger’s Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk (1876, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Thomson’s The crawlers (1876-1877, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

John Thomson (Scottish 1837-1921)
The crawlers
1876-1877
From the Street Life in London series 1877
Woodbury type
11.5 × 8.7cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Felton Bequest, 1977
Public Domain

Heather George (Australian 1907-1983)
Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (installation view)
1952, printed 1978
From the Northern Territory series 1952
Gelatin silver photograph
Purchased, 1980
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In 1952 the Australian magazine Walkabout included a series of images made by photojournalist Heather George at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. The vast pastoral lease on the lands of the dispossessed Gurindji people would later become famous as a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples, but when George visited, it was a place of entrenched, officially sanctioned discrimination. In George’s photograph, the Gurindji stockmen appear overshadowed by the stockyards in the foreground, perhaps reflecting the attitude of pastoralists who, having been granted leases, took advantage of people living on Country, exploiting them as an unpaid workforce.

Wall text from the exhibition

Fred Kruger (German 1831-1888, Australia 1860-1888)
Group of Aborigines in hop gardens, Coranderrk
1876
Albumen silver photograph
13.3 × 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mrs Beryl M. Curl, 1979
Public domain

In 1876 Fred Kruger was commissioned to produce two series of photographs at Coranderrk, a settlement and working farm established to rehouse dispossessed people of the Kulin Nation. One of the many subjects he photographed was the productive farmland and the activities of the community working the land. Kruger’s photograph shows a multigenerational group of people in the lush Arcadian setting of the hop garden, but what it obscures is the reality of exploitation and poverty that afflicted First Nations people in this place. Kruger’s photographs met a brief to promote the so-called ‘civilising’ work of colonial authorities but in doing so represented a largely imagined reality and created an effective form of propaganda.

Wall text from the exhibition

Selina Ou (Australian, b. 1977)
Convenience (installation view)
2001
From the Serving You Better series 2001
Type C photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds arranged by Loti Smorgon for Contemporary Australian Photography, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Kusakabe Kimbei’s Vegetable peddler (1880s, below); at bottom left, David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below); at top centre, Rennie Ellis’ Between strips, Kings Cross (1970-1971, below); at bottom centre, Brassai’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below); and at right, Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)
Vegetable peddler
1880s
Albumen silver photograph, colour dyes
20.6 × 26.3cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gerstl Bequest, 2000
Public domain

Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei established his studio in 1881, making photographs for the domestic and tourist markets. Most of the photographs in this elaborate album are conventional, staged domestic scenes; picturesque views of popular tourist attractions; and street scenes. This image, however, stands alone in the album as an unusual view of contemporary life. Despite the women weavers wearing traditional dress and working hand-operated looms, the factory in which they are working is lit by electric lights and they are supervised by men wearing European-style dress. Unlike its companion works in Kimbei’s album, this photograph speaks to the industrialisation that was part of the Meiji-era modernisation in Japan.

Wall text from the exhibition

Kusakabe Kimbei (Japanese, 1841-1934)

Kusakabe Kimbei (日下部金兵衛; 1841-1934) was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name

Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant. In 1881, Kimbei opened his own workshop in Yokohama, in the Benten-dōri quarter. From 1889, the studio operated in the Honmachi quarter. By 1893, his was one of the leading Japanese studios supplying art to Western customers. Many of the photographs in the studio’s catalogue featured depictions of Japanese women, which were popular with tourists of the time. Kimbei preferred to portray female subjects in a traditional bijinga style, and hired geisha to pose for the photographs. Many of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.

Around 1885, Kimbei acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma’s negatives of Nagasaki. Kimbei retired as a photographer in 1914.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Wadelton’s Richmond hairdresser (1979, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955)
Richmond hairdresser
1979
Gelatin silver photograph
13.4 × 20.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of David Wadelton through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015
© David Wadelton

Rennie Ellis (Australian, 1940-2003)
Between strips, Kings Cross
1970-1971; 2000 {printed}
from the Kings Cross series 1971
gelatin silver photograph
37.1 x 24.1 cm (image) 40.3 x 30.4 cm (sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 2005
© Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Brassaï’s Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix (La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet)) (1932, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Brassaï (Hungarian-French, 1899-1984)
Washing up in a brothel, Rue Quincampoix
(La Toilette, rue Quincampoix (Bidet))
1932; printed c. 1979
from The secret of Paris in the 30s series 1931–1935
Gelatin silver photograph
20.5 × 29.2cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1980
Public Domain

In the 1930s Brassaï became well-known for his photographs of the nightlife of Paris, but it was the sex workers, along with other characters of the city’s underbelly, who excited his imagination. Reflecting on this time, he wrote, ‘Rightly or wrongly, I felt at that time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its remote past’. This photograph presents a matter-of-fact view – there is nothing exotic or erotic about the woman washing herself as her client ties his shoes and prepares to leave.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Wolfgang Sievers’ Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne (1949, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Wolfgang Sievers (Australian born Germany, 1913-2007)
Shiftchange at Kelly and Lewis engineering works, Springvale, Melbourne
1949; printed 1986
Gelatin silver photograph
49.4 × 40.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1986
© National Library of Australia

Wolfgang Sievers arrived in Australia in 1938, bringing photographic equipment, rigorous training in modernist photography, a firmly held belief in the union of art and industry, left-leaning political views, and the self-declared desire to ‘assist this country through my knowledge as thanks for the freedom I can enjoy here’. The human face of industrial Australia is captured in Sievers’s celebrated photograph of the change of shift at a Melbourne engineering works, showing a sea of men and women surging into work. The upturned, smiling faces of the masses speaking to Sievers’s firmly held belief in the dignity of work.

Wall text from the exhibition

Rosemary Laing (Australian, b. 1959)
welcome to Australia (installation view)
2004
Type C photograph
110.8 × 224.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This photograph by Rosemary Laing makes an obviously ironic statement, as curator Kyla MacFarlane notes: ‘The title and compositional beauty of this photograph … purposefully jar against its subject matter – the remote Woomera Immigration Detention and Processing Centre in South Australia. Photographing the site while the sun sits low in the sky, Laing observes the Centre’s mechanisms of containment and surveillance – a violent presence on the red dirt and gravel road, and sun-tinged, cloudless sky of its remote location’. The photograph’s formal emptiness reflects the lack of freedom imposed on those seeking asylum and the loss of their civil liberties once detained.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at left, Rosemary Laing’s welcome to Australia (2004, above); and at right, four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Dorothea Lange’s Towards Los Angeles, California (1936, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Dorothea Lange (United States 1895-1965)
Towards Los Angeles, California
1936; c. 1975 {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
39.6 x 39.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1975

In this photograph Dorothea Lange has ironically juxtaposed the aspiration of clean, comfortable train travel with the exhausting reality of the unemployed traversing America in search of work in the 1930s. Renowned for making photographs that combine empathy and clear-eyed observation, Lange also believed that photographs and text should be presented together to amplify the messages carried in both mediums. She understood that captions ‘fortified’ her photographs and that they should ‘not only (carry) factual information, but also add clues to attitudes, relationships and meanings’. Although it doesn’t have a caption, the opportunistic combination of image and text in this image highlights the gulf between the haves and have nots.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at top left, Alfred Stiegliz’s The steerage (1907, below); at bottom left, David Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney (1966, below); at centre, Charles Nettleton’s Hobsons Bay railway pier (1870s, below); at top right, Maggie Diaz’s The Canberra, Port Melbourne (1961-1967); and at bottom right, Paul Haviland’s Passing steamer (1910)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Alfred Stieglitz (American 1864-1946, Germany 1881-1990)
The steerage
1907, printed 1911
Photogravure
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz was a pioneering photographer, publisher and gallery director. The steerage, arguably his most important photograph, is regarded as his first great modernist work. The composition, with its compressed space, apparent lack of horizon and striking diagonal lines, is suggestive of avant-garde painting of the time. Showing the densely packed lower decks of the of the transatlantic steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stieglitz’s oblique reference to the return movement of unsuccessful immigrants to America offers an insight into the social outcomes and complexities of mass global migration in the early twentieth century.

Wall text from the exhibition

David Moore (Australia, 1927-2003)
Migrants arriving in Sydney
1966
Gelatin silver photograph
26.7 × 40.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1991
© Estate of David Moore

David Moore was Australia’s pre-eminent photojournalist of the 1960s. His work was regularly seen in leading local and international magazines. Moore’s Migrants arriving in Sydney, was commissioned and published by National Geographic in 1966. This now iconic image shows the climactic moment when a ship carrying migrants to Australia docks at Sydney harbour. The tightly framed photograph reveals a range of emotions on the faces of a group of people about to disembark and begin a new life. “We must do more than record the sensational, the bizarre, and the tragic. The lens of the camera must probe, with absolute sincerity, deep into the lives of ordinary men and women and show how we work and play.” David Moore, 1953

Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website

THIS IS NOT CORRECT NGV!

In 2015, Judy Annear [Head of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales] said of this famous photograph: “It’s great to consider that it’s not actually what it seems.” Years after the photo was published, it emerged that four of the passengers in it were not migrants but Sydneysiders returning home from holiday.

Charles Nettleton (English 1825-1902, Australia 1854-1902)
Hobsons Bay railway pier
1870s
Albumen silver photograph
12.8 × 19.2cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1992
Public domain

Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016)
The Canberra, Port Melbourne
1961-1967, printed 2014
Pigment print
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015

As a young woman, Maggie Diaz had been fascinated by the work of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her photographs are a ‘slice of life’ offering similar insights into the everyday experiences of people wherever she encountered them. The ship she photographed at Melbourne’s Station Pier in the 1960s was The Canberra, the largest of the passenger ships sailing between Britain and Australia at that time. Often bringing British migrants on assisted passages, the ship also held personal significance for Diaz: as a migrant from the United States, she travelled one-way from the US to Australia on The Canberra’s maiden voyage in 1961.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing four photographs from Michael Cook’s Civilised series (2012)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Michael Cook (Australian / Bidjara, b. 1968)
Civilised #11
2012
From the Civilised series 2012
Inkjet print
100.0 x 87.5cm
ed. 3/8
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2013
© Michael Cook and Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin

Bidjara artist Michael Cook poses a question in his Civilised series: ‘What makes a person civilised?’ In these photographs he represents the ways Europeans – English, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonists – responded to First Nations people when they arrived on these shores. The artist asserts that his Civilised series ‘suggests how different history might have been if those Europeans had realised that the Aborigines were indeed civilised’.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at right, Narelle Autio’s two photographs Untitled from The Seventh Wave series (1999-2000)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing at third left bottom, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Sunday on the banks of the Marne (1938, below); at fourth left top, Gabriel de Rumine’s Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens (1859, below); at fourth left bottom, Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below); at centre top, John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below); at top right, Eugène Atget’s The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides) (1898, below); and at bottom right, Roger Scott’s Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show (1972? 1975? below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing David Goldblatt’s The playing fields of Tladi, Soweto, Johannesburg, August 1972
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Harold Cazneaux (Australian born New Zealand, 1878-1953)
Fairy Lane steps
1910
Bromoil print
24.8 × 18.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1979
© The Cazneaux family

Harold Cazneaux was one of the most important and influential Australian photographers of the early twentieth century. He had a great love of the natural world but early in his career also found a rich subject in the inner-city streets of Sydney. Cazneaux made photographs that appear lively and spontaneous, although given the limitations of the equipment at the time they are almost certain to have been staged to a degree. His charming studies of children at play in city streets transformed the bleak, impoverished urban environments of inner-city Sydney into a wonderful playground.

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Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Helen Levitt’s New York (Boys fighting on a pediment) c. 1940
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York (Boys fighting on a pediment)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
31.8 × 21.1cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Public domain

Francis Bedford (attributed to) (English, 1815-1894)
Fairy Glen, Betws-y-Coed
(Ffos Noddyn, Betws-y-Coed)
c. 1860
from the No title (Stephen Thompson album) (1859 – c. 1868)
Albumen silver photograph
13.7 × 17.8cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased from Admission Funds, 1988
Public domain

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Sunday on the banks of the Marne, Juvisy, France
1938; (1990s) {printed}
Gelatin silver photograph
29.1 x 43.9 cm (image)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2015
2015.566
© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

In 1938 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed a group of people picnicking on the banks of the river Marne. It is a celebratory image showing a quintessential aspect of everyday life in France: long Sunday lunches. But it also reveals something of the revolutionary politics of the period and their profound influence on Cartier-Bresson in the 1930s. In 1938 the left-wing Popular Front swept into power in France and the newly elected government mandated two weeks paid leave for all workers. At the time, Cartier-Bresson worked for the Paris-based communist press and was commissioned by Regards magazine to photograph an extended series that looked at the social impact of this initiative.

Wall text from the exhibition

Gabriel de Rumine (European, 1841-1871)
No title (Caryatid porch of Erechtheum, Acropolis, Athens)
1859
Albumen silver photograph
25.7 × 35.8cm irreg. (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented by the National Gallery Women’s Association, 1995
Public domain

Installation view of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing Lee Friedlander’s Mount Rushmore (1969, below)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Lee Friedlander (born United States 1934)
Mount Rushmore
1969; printed c. 1977
Gelatin silver print
18.3 × 27.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1977
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York

Installation views of the exhibition Photography: Real & Imagined at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne showing John Williams’ Clovelly Beach, Sydney (1969, below)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016)
Clovelly Beach, Sydney
1969; printed 1988
Gelatin silver photograph
25.6 × 25.4cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased, 1989
© John Williams

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
The roller coaster, Invalides funfair (Montagnes russes, fête des Invalides)
1898
From the Festivals and Fairs series in the Art in Old Paris series 1898-1927
Albumen silver photograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Patrick Pound through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2020
Public domain

Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944)
Ghost train, Sydney Royal Easter Show
1972? 1975?
Gelatin silver print
30.4 × 45.6cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Gift of Mr James Mollison, 1994
© Roger Scott

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
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Exhibition: ‘Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 15th October, 2023 – 4th February, 2024

Curators: The exhibition is curated by Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs, with Andrea Coffman, collection manager in the department of photographs, both at the National Gallery of Art.

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
Cathédrale de Chartres – Portique du Midi XIIe Siècle
c. 1854, printed c. 1857
Photogravure
Image: 53 x 73cm (20 7/8 x 28 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 59.3 x 80cm (23 3/8 x 31 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, The Sarah and William L Walton Fund

The under appreciated photogravure process, which prints photographs in ink on paper, produces images of luscious lucidity.

In the “photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper.” (Press release)

The prints are tonally rich and have a smooth, continuous tonal range and, depending on the choice of paper and inks, can be produced in a variety of colours and textures. While the process is time-consuming and labour-intensive nothing – except perhaps a platinum print developed in Amidol or alike whose negative has been developed in Pyro developer – comes close to the beauty and tonality of the gravure. “This intricate, painstaking and time-consuming method produces images with rich tones and a sense of light, depth, and realism.”

“The process offers the most sophisticated photomechanical means to reproduce large editions while still retaining the warm blacks and subtle shades of gray. It thrived into the 1930s, but World War II brought an end to its popularity due to costs and availability. As the spirit of hands-on experimentation returned to photography in the 1960s, Jon Goodman (b. 1953) is credited with its revival, and is lauded for creating sumptuous portfolios of the works of famed photographers Paul Strand (1890-1976) and Edward Steichen (1879-1973).”1

Some of the most beautiful photographs ever made are printed in the photogravure process. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946), that pioneering artist, publisher and teacher, used them extensively in his influential quarterly photographic journal Camera Work (1903-1917).

One of my favourite photographs of all time, Paul Strand’s Wall Street (1915) is known only in two vintage platinum palladium prints, but is more commonly seen in reproduction as a photogravure print, notably in Stieglitz’s Camera Work Number 48 October 1916 (see below). “Wall Street became one of his most famous images because of his willingness to reproduce it in various photographic media and at different periods throughout his career.” (Philadelphia Museum of Art website)

Thus the reproducibility of the photogravure process led to the wider distribution of beautiful photographs. Crucially these hand printed photomechanical prints still retain an aura – of reality, presence and the hand of the artist, spirit if you like – unlike many reproductions in later photography books.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Robin O’Dell. “The Photogravure Process,” on the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts website Nov 15, 2020 [Online] Cited 26/01/2024

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
New York [Wall Street]
Negative 1915; print 1916
Photogravure
From Camera Work. Number 48. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) publisher
Image: 13 × 16.2 cm (5 1/8 × 6 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 27.8 × 19.7 cm (10 15/16 × 7 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Please note: As far as I know, this photograph is not in the exhibition.

Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners searched for and perfected a method to produce identical photographic prints in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, yielded some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the story of the first 100 years of this process. Artists and scientists working across Europe from the 1840s through the 1870s were dismayed to discover that identical silver-based photographic prints were not only difficult to make but also faded quickly. Building on one another’s discoveries, innovators such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Fizeau, and Charles Nègre perfected a way to etch a photographic image into a copperplate and print it in ink. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, photographers such as James Craig Annan and Peter Henry Emerson utilised this process to demonstrate the artistic nature of photography while somewhat later photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Laure Albin-Guillot used the technique to create large, bold pictures that they disseminated widely. Including 46 photogravures and 5 bound volumes illustrated with photogravures, many never before exhibited, Etched by Light shows how these works, through their proliferation, have helped shape our collective visual experience.

Bisson Frères. Louis-Auguste Bisson (French, 1814-1876) and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson (French, 1826-1900)
Notre-Dame
1850s
Heliogravure on chine colle
Sheet: 35.7 x 27.3cm (14 1/16 x 10 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Joseph Cundall (British, 1818-1895) and Robert Howlett (British, 1831-1858)
Crimean Braves – Men of the Trenches and Battlefields in the Crimea
1856
Photogalvanograph proof on chine collé
Plate: 31 x 25cm (12 3/16 x 9 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 55.8 x 38cm (21 15/16 x 14 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
Public domain

Peter Henry Emerson (British, 1856-1936)
A Winter’s Morning
1887
Photogravure
Image: 17.7 x 28.7cm (6 15/16 x 11 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 21.5 x 32.4cm (8 7/16 x 12 3/4 in.)
Mount: 40 x 50.8cm (15 3/4 x 20 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Carolyn Brody Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
The Poacher – A Hare in View
1888
Photogravure
Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
The Poacher – A Hare in View (detail)
1888
Photogravure
Image: 28.5 x 23.7cm (11 1/4 x 9 5/16 in.)
Sheet: 30.5 x 25.7cm (12 x 10 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Public domain

James Craig Annan (British, 1864-1946)
A Black Canal
1894
Photogravure
Image: 9.1 x 12.6cm (3 9/16 x 4 15/16 in.)
Sheet: 9.6 x 12.8cm (3 3/4 x 5 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund and Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936)
Marsh Leaves
Published 1895
1 vol: ill: 16 photogravures on wove paper
Page size: 28.4 x 18.4cm (11 3/16 x 7 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Harvey S. Shipley Miller and J. Randall Plummer, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Spring
1899
Photogravure overmatted and mounted on gray wove paper
Image (sight): 12.9 x 13cm (5 1/16 x 5 1/8 in.)
Mat: 28.5 x 19.5cm (11 1/4 x 7 11/16 in.)
Mount: 38 x 27.8cm (14 15/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift
Public domain

Mathilde Weil (American, 1872-1942)
Beatrice
1899
Photogravure in sepia on chine collé mounted on cream wove paper
Image: 16.7 x 9cm (6 9/16 x 3 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 18.8 x 10.4cm (7 3/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mount: 37.8 x 27.8cm (14 7/8 x 10 15/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Anonymous Gift

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Edge of the Woods, Evening
1900
Photogravure
Image: 14.5 x 10.1cm (5 11/16 x 4 in.)
Sheet: 28.5 x 19.8cm (11 1/4 x 7 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Public domain

Clarence H. White (American, 1871-1925)
Morning
c. 1905
Photogravure
Image: 20.2 x 15.5cm (7 15/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
Mount: 20.7 x 16.2cm (8 1/8 x 6 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art Washington, Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
Public domain

Etched by Light: Photogravures from the Collection, 1840-1940 tells the fascinating story of the search to find and perfect a way to print photographs in ink. The process, which came to be called photogravure, resulted in some of the most beautiful photographs ever made – featuring delicate highlights, lush blacks, a remarkably rich tonal range, and a velvety matte surface. Presenting 40 photogravures and 4 bound volumes illustrated with them (many recently acquired and exhibited here for the first time), Etched by Light shows how this process enabled photographs to circulate widely and help shape our collective visual experience. The exhibition is on view from October 15, 2023, through February 4, 2024, in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art.

“Discover an intriguing chapter in the history of photography, as innovative practitioners developed a method to produce photographic prints in ink,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. “Including photogravures from the National Gallery’s collection, this exhibition shows the pivotal role photogravures played in the history of photography by enabling the creation and widespread dissemination of tonally rich and lasting prints.”

About the Exhibition

From its very beginnings, photography revolutionised the way pictures were made and knowledge about the visual world was disseminated. But in the early 1840s, artists and scientists working across Europe discovered that it had drawbacks. The daguerreotype process, developed by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, created astonishingly vivid images, but each one was unique and could only be copied by making another photograph. William Henry Fox Talbot’s negative / positive process held more promise, but his silver-chloride prints faded when exposed to light. Early practitioners also learned that it was hard to make numerous identical prints that could be tipped into books or journals, owing to variabilities in the paper and chemicals that were used to make prints. Such obstacles, at least initially, frustrated their hopes of fully realising the potential of this new medium.

Divided into three sections, Etched by Light traces the search – unfolding across 100 years – for a process to print photographs in ink, which were more stable than traditional silver-based photographic prints. It moves from the experiments in the 1840s and 1850s by French and British photographers such as Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau, Charles Nègre, and Talbot, who discovered the chemical and technical components necessary to print photographs in ink, to the successful solution invented by Talbot in the 1850s and perfected by Karl Klíč in 1879. In their photomechanical process, which came to be called photogravure, a photographic image is etched into a printmaking plate, ink is rubbed into the etched surface, a damp sheet of paper is laid on top of the plate, and both are put through a printing press to transfer the ink to paper. Favoured from the mid-1880s through the 1930s, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, and still popular today, photogravures have a smooth, continuous tonal range, although an extremely fine grain is evident under magnification.

The exhibition also shows how photographers working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Peter Henry Emerson and Alfred Stieglitz, exploited the photogravure process for its artistic potential. They highlighted the individuality of their pictures through their choice of paper and inks, and even manipulated the photographic image itself. They also utilised the reproducibility of the process, inserting their photogravures into limited edition books, portfolios, and journals that they circulated in an effort to prove the artistic merit of photography.

The exhibition concludes with the work of modernist photographers, such as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Laure Albin Guillot, Man Ray, and Margaret Bourke-White, who used the process to enlarge small negatives, creating big, bold, and sometimes colourful photogravures. Circulating their photogravures widely in books and portfolios, as well as commercial advertisements, these artists demonstrated that photography could tackle new subjects, revitalising our view of life, art, and science, and in the process revealing critical new insights about the world around us.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
Trafalgar Square
1909
Photogravure
Image: 21.2 x 16.2cm (8 3/8 x 6 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 21.7 x 16.7cm (8 9/16 x 6 9/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
Brooklyn Bridge
c. 1910
Photogravure
Image: 19.9 x 14.7cm (7 13/16 x 5 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 21.2 x 15.3cm (8 3/8 x 6 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
The Battery
c. 1909
Photogravure
Image: 16 x 15.56cm (6 5/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 17.3 x 16.4cm (6 13/16 x 6 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Robert B. Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Street – Design for a Poster / The Street – Fifth Avenue
1896? / 1901-1902?, printed 1903
Photogravure
National Gallery of Art
Public domain

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on cream moderately thick smooth wove Japanese paper
Image: 33.2 x 26.4cm (13 1/16 x 10 3/8 in.)
Sheet: 46.3 x 31.9cm (18 1/4 x 12 9/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
Old and New New York
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper
Image: 33.3 x 25.7cm (13 1/8 x 10 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 40.3 x 28.3cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
After Working Hours – The Ferry Boat
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure
Image: 33.6 x 25.9cm (13 1/4 x 10 3/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 28.1cm (15 7/8 x 11 1/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art
Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The City of Ambition
1910, printed in or before 1913
Photogravure on beige thin slightly textured laid Japanese paper
Sheet (trimmed to image): 34 x 26cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/4 in.)
Mount: 43.3 x 32 cm (17 1/16 x 12 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection

Anne Brigman (American, 1859-1960)
The Cleft of the Rock
1912
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mark Katzman and Hilary Skirboll

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British born United States, 1882-1966)
The Tunnel Builders
1913
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 17cm (8 1/4 x 6 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Funds from John S. Parsley and Nancy Nolan Parsley

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Électricité
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Le Monde
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
La Ville (The City)
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Le Souffle (Breeze)
1931
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.2cm (10 1/4 x 7 15/16 in.)
Mount: 37.5 x 27.5cm (14 3/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert B. Menschel

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Virgin, Sand Felipe, Oaxaca
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26.4 x 20.7cm (10 3/8 x 8 1/8 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Men of Santa Anna, Michoacan
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 16.1 x 12.7cm (6 5/16 x 5 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy, Uruapan
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 25.7 x 20.5cm (10 1/8 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo, Tiacochoaya, Oaxaca
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.4cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 26 x 20.5cm (10 1/4 x 8 1/16 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Coapiaxtla
1933, printed 1940
Photogravure
Image: 16.2 x 12.7cm (6 3/8 x 5 in.)
Sheet: 40.4 x 31.7cm (15 7/8 x 12 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934)
Plate 35
1933
Photogravure
Image: 21 x 16cm (8 1/4 x 6 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon

Doris Ulmann (American, 1882-1934)
Plate 47
1933
Photogravure
Image: 16 x 21cm (6 5/16 x 8 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

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National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
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Exhibition: ‘Nan Goldin’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Exhibition dates: 8th July 2023 – 28th January 2024

Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Putting a spell on you

In a February 2017 posting on Art Blart on Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency I commented:

“There is little love and tenderness here, little magic or generosity of spirit. Goldin’s attitude to the world at the time seems to be one of hostility and resentment. It’s all very well portraying the underbelly of society – the depravity, violence and degradation – but if your point of departure is one of anger and animosity, this is always going to be reflected in your art. I remember going out with my friends partying in the 1980s, the drugs, the sex, the pushing it to the edge, but you know what – we cared about each other. Nothing could be further from the truth in Goldin’s hedonistic (not heuristic) approach to her aura. …”

Over six years later it was time to reevaluate my feelings towards the work by looking again. Had my feelings changed in the intervening years? Or was I just being an obtuse human at the time who couldn’t see what everyone else could see, the genius of the work?

I have reflected long and hard on my feelings in relation to these photographs. Perhaps I was too close to the subject matter, that the series cut too close to the bone: many years of partying in London taking drugs, so many friends and lovers lost to HIV/AIDS. But that is not the case.

The problem for me with this work is its rather sad detachment from life and a pervading sadness attached to each of these photographs. While Goldin announces that “For me it is not a detachment to take a picture” I feel the opposite is true: Goldin seems uber detached when taking these photographs. The artist goes “diving for pearls” hoping to create some magical, random psychological subtexts where the subconscious is made visible, but she doesn’t ever know whether it’s her or the camera’s subconscious that is revealed or who (the camera or the artist) is doing the work. So much for knowing thyself, being responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.

While the diaristic photographs of this “seminal” body of work feature intimate moments of love and loss, moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering captured in photographs of “unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism” where is the real Goldin in all of this observational performance (Goldin says her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’.) I’ll just leave that one there…

What I would really like to see is the full 700 slide sequence, live, with the music that was supposed to go with these slides. I want to feel the context of these photographs and their intimacies in the flesh with the freshness and passion of what was happening at the time in New York:

Images and words and music

the real memory
the real experience

HIV/AIDS
death
life
bitterness
love
anger
immediacy

Mark Morrisroe
David Wojnarowicz
Peter Hujar
Cookie Mueller
Keith Haring
Kiki Smith

addiction
music with the ballad of sexual dependency = I put a spell on you
witness… to life, to the hurt
conformity and denial
rebellion

Each period reframes issues surrounding gender, sex, drug use and death … and what it means to be free. These images would feel totally different in 1980s New York but today, they feel cold, desperate and sad and I can’t identify with them or their photographic pathology, their study of suffering.

Have my feelings changed towards this work six years on. Yes they have. I more fully appreciate their photographic snapshot composition, their colour, their diaristic bravado. But I still don’t like their energy…. nor their masochistic indulgence.

Perhaps I just want to feel the real memory, the real experience (the energy and atmosphere of being in New York at the time) not viewed through the prism of this distanced, distancing monologue.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The photographs in Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency depict the everyday lives, often in intimate detail, of people in Goldin’s immediate community during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Please be advised that works of art in this exhibition depict explicit nudity, sexual acts, drug use, and the impacts of violence against women. Viewer discretion is advised. This exhibition is not suitable for children under the age of 15.

‘For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.’

Nan Goldin

‘The people who have been photographed extensively by me feel that my camera is as much a part of their life as any other aspect of their life with me. It then becomes perfectly natural to be photographed. It ceases to be an external experience and becomes a part of the relationship, which is heightened by the camera, not distanced. The camera connects me to the experience and clarifies what is going on between me and the subject.’

Nan Goldin, wall text from the exhibition

“Since David Armstrong and I were young he always referred to photography as “diving for pearls.” If you took a million pictures you were lucky to come out with one or two gems. … I never learned control over my machines. I made every mistake in the book. But the technical mistakes allowed for magic. … Random psychological subtexts that I never would have thought to intentionally create. The subconscious made visible – though whether mine or the camera’s I don’t know …”

Nan Goldin. “Diving for Pearls,” quoted in Hilton Als. “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress,” on The New Yorker website, July 4, 2016 [Online] Cited 18/11/2021

‘Nan Goldin’s nostalgic snapshots depict intimate moments of bohemian sex, transgression, beauty, spontaneity, and suffering. Her frames are marked by unflinching candour, rich hues, and a keen sense of empathy and lyricism. Goldin’s most famous work, ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’ (1985), is a slideshow that presents nearly 700 images from her life in New York [and around the world] during the 1970s and ’80s; throughout the reel, the artist lies in bed with her lover, drag queens kiss in bars, and the AIDS epidemic ravages the photographer’s community.’

Anonymous text from the Artsy website

All The Beauty And The Bloodshed Official Trailer

Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.

Installation views, Nan Goldin: the ballad of sexual dependency, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri / Canberra, 2023
Photos: Karlee Holland

The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. Nan Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – began life as a slide show screened in the clubs and bars of New York where Goldin and her friends worked and played. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which has recently become part of the National Gallery’s collection.

Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place, and do so in a way that has real social purpose. Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths. The ballad has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.

Goldin refers to The ballad as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships—relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

Text from the NGA website

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark tattooing Mark, Boston
1978
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Couple in Bed, Chicago
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Buzz and Nan at the Afterhours, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Flaming car, Salisbury Beach, N.H.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian’s face, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Brian in bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Suzanne in the green bathroom, Pergamon Museum, East Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Millie with the cheeseburger radio at home, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Edwidge behind the bar at Evelyne’s, New York City
1985
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Greer on the bed, New York City
1983
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Dieter on the train, Sweden
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian with the Flintstones, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Cookie and Vittorio’s wedding, New York City
1986
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Twisting at my birthday party, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce on top of French Chris, Fire Island, N.Y.
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
French Chris on the convertible, New York City
1979
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Philippe H. and Suzanne Kissing at Euthanasia, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Rise and Monty Kissing, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Heart-Shaped Bruise, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Nan and Dickie in the York Motel, New Jersey
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin is one of the world’s most influential photographers and her iconic series of 126 photographs The ballad of sexual dependency is a defining artwork of the 1980s. The National Gallery recently acquired the last, complete edition of this cornerstone work, which will be shown at the Gallery from 8 July.

Decades in the making, Goldin’s extended photographic study of her chosen family – her ‘tribe’ – is a deeply moving portrayal of life in the 1970s and 1980s, as the artist and her loved ones navigate a time of unrelenting energy and extremes.

National Gallery Curator of Photography Anne O’Hehir said Goldin’s rich and evocative series explores themes of sexual identity, community, and love and loss against the backdrop of New York City and has shaped a generation who’ve fallen in love with the unvarnished intimacy of her storytelling.

‘Goldin takes photographs to connect, to keep the people she loves in her memory. She is committed to the idea that photography can faithfully record a time and place and do so in a way that has real social purpose,’ O’Hehir said.

‘Using a documentary, snapshot style, she lays bare her life in the manner of a family album. We see her alongside her friends and lovers as they live their lives – hanging out, falling in and out of love, having children. But this is a community that would soon be decimated by HIV / AIDS and drug-related deaths.

‘The ballad of sexual dependency has become as much a testament to how much Goldin and her community have lost, as it is a record of the look and feel of a past time.’

O’Hehir said this engaged and at times moving series urges you to empathise with stories and experiences that are rarely depicted. ‘Goldin is committed to making public that which is usually hidden and private, and to the truthful recording of her life,’ O’Hehir said.

Goldin refers to The ballad of sexual dependency as her ‘public diary’, stating that her photographs ‘come out of relationships, not observation’. The work’s overriding themes, she has stated, are those of love and empathy and the tension between autonomy and interdependence in relationships – relationships in which all genders struggle to find a common language.

The ballad of sexual dependency began its life as a slideshow presented by Goldin at parties and in clubs and bars in New York City’s downtown art scene. The slide show was then distilled to a series of 126 photographs, which are now part of the national collection.

The opening of The ballad of sexual dependency at the National Gallery coincides with the release of Goldin’s acclaimed documentary All The Beauty And The Bloodshed on DocPlay. Directed by Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All The Beauty And The Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about Goldin’s life, work and activism, focussing on her recent fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The biographical film will also be screened at the National Gallery on Saturday 22 July.

Nan Goldin’s The ballad of sexual dependency is free and will be on display at the National Gallery in Kamberri / Canberra from 8 July 2023 – 28 Jan 2024. This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th Anniversary celebrations and continues the Know My Name gender equity initiative. Nan Goldin’s exhibition The ballad of sexual dependency is supported by DocPlay, the streaming home of the world’s best documentaries.

Curator: Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

Press release from the National Gallery of Australia

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
The Hug, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Mark Dirt, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Thomas shaving, Boston
1977
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Scarpota at the Knox bar, West Berlin
1984
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Brian on the Bowery roof, New York City
1982
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
C.Z. and Max on the beach, Truro, Mass.
1976
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Vivienne in the green dress, New York City
1980
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953)
Bruce with his portrait, New York City
1981
From the series The ballad of sexual dependency, 1973-1986
Cibachrome print
National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra
Purchased 2021 in celebration of the National Gallery of Australia’s 40th anniversary, 2022
© Nan Goldin

“Ballads of Sexual Dependency” Nan Goldin poster

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency Slide Show by Nan Goldin poster

National Gallery of Australia
Parkes Place, Canberra
Australian Capital Territory 2600
Phone: (02) 6240 6411

Opening hours:
Open daily 10.00am – 5.00pm
(closed Christmas day)

National Gallery of Australia website

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