Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 20th December 2011 – 6th May 2012

Anthony Friedkin (American, b. 1949)
Clockwork Malibu
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 15/16 x 18 5/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

While Anthony Friedkin has documented subjects as diverse as the marginalised gay community of San Francisco, convicts at Folsom Prison, and brothels in New York, it is the Southern California coastline that has remained a recurrent theme throughout his forty-five-year career. The Los Angeles native took up photography about the same time he learned to surf. His images of waves deftly communicate the primordial power and elusive mysteries that he ascribes to the ocean. This photograph of surfer Rick Dano on an early morning drive up the coast conveys a mood of quiet, anticipatory harmony.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

I have never particularly liked Los Angeles as a city. There seems to be something unappealing about the place, some energy lurking just beneath the surface that you can’t quite put your finger on. Maybe it is the comparison with the vivacious San Francisco just up the coast, the awful public transport or, more spookily, the lack of people on the street. People never walk anywhere in LA, it’s a car town. When I did walk on the street I felt vulnerable and surveyed with suspicion by people in cars, like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

These photographs confirm this feeling. Unlike the visual acoustics of the architectural photographs of Julius Shulman (photographs that mythologised this urban metropolis and then exported that idealised presence and Californian mid-century design to the rest of the world) these photographs have an unbelievably desolatory nature to them. They seem to be joyless and sorrowful, devoid of warmth, comfort, or hope – as though the human and the city were separated, as if we are separated from a loved one.

The row after row of tinderbox houses, the ubiquitous cars, the sense of emptiness, hopelessness and menace (see Gary Winogrand Los Angeles 1964, below – if looks could kill this would be it, the bandaged broken nose just perfect for the photograph) all paint a picture of despair. Even the supposedly quiet, anticipatory harmony of the photograph of surfer Rick Dano by Anthony Friedkin (1978, below top) is, to me, full of unresolved tension. The mist in the background hanging over the rocks, blocking out the view, the filthy hands and the bandaged little finger of the right hand, the downcast eyes, the impossibly long cigarette handing from his lips and most importantly the empty distance between the figure and the safety of the automobile. The tension in that distance and the downcast eyes says nothing to me of harmony but of isolation, sadness and regret.

Los Angeles is not my favourite city but it is a fascinating place none the less, as these photographs do attest.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
High School Beach
1945
Gelatin silver print
22.1 x 34.4cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon
© 1988 Centre for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation

Anthony Hernandez (American, b. 1947)
Automotive Landscapes #5: Los Angeles
1978
Gelatin silver print
11 3/4 x 17 1/8 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Anthony Hernandez

Hernandez started photographing what he refers to as “automotive landscapes” in 1977, using a 35mm camera until he realised that a large-format camera loaded with 5 x 7-inch negative film would provide the detail he desired. Taken from a slightly elevated vantage point, Hernandez’s image of an immobilised truck and its lone mechanic in front of a repair shop presents a sobering view of Los Angeles’s car-dominant culture.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Gary Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1964
Gelatin silver print
9 x 13 7/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1984 The Estate of Gary Winogrand

This image of a couple seated in a parked convertible in front of a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard simultaneously captures the glamour and seediness associated with Hollywood. Evoking a 1940s or ’50s film noir crime drama, a seeming tough guy and femme fatale continue their heated conversation, apparently oblivious to the traffic around them – and to the photographer observing them. A native of New York City, Winogrand studied painting at Columbia University and photography at the New School for Social Research before doing freelance commercial work. He photographed incessantly, using a 35mm camera to create wide-angled or tilted shots that are densely composed and layered with meaning. More than 2,500 rolls of film remained undeveloped at the time of his death in 1984.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

As part of the region-wide Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980 initiative, The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980, an exhibition of photographs from the permanent collection made by artists whose time in Los Angeles inspired them to create memorable images of the city, on view at the Getty Center from December 20, 2011 – May 6, 2012.

This exhibition features both iconic and relatively unknown work by artists whose careers are defined by their association with Los Angeles, who may have lived in the city for a few influential years, or who might have visited only briefly,” said Virginia Heckert, curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.

The photographs are loosely grouped around the themes of experimentation, street photography, architectural depictions, and the film and entertainment industry. Works featured in the exhibition are from artists such as Jo Ann Callis, Robert Cumming, Joe Deal, Judy Fiskin, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Man Ray, Edmund Teske, William Wegman, Garry Winogrand, and Max Yavno. Two of the works in the exhibition by Anthony Hernandez and Henry Wessel Jr. were acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, including several recent acquisitions inspired by the Pacific Standard Time initiative, the exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to familiarise themselves with a broad range of approaches to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to the photographic medium itself.

One of the most well-known works in the exhibition is Garry Winogrand’s photograph of two women walking towards the landmark theme building designed by Charles Luckman and William Pereira that has come to symbolise both Los Angeles International Airport and mid-century modern architecture in popular culture. Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand made some of his most memorable photographs in Los Angeles, where he chose to settle in the final years of his life. Also included in the exhibition is Diane Arbus’ dreamily lit photograph of Sleeping Beauty Castle at Disneyland park in Anaheim. Although technically not located in either the city or the county of Los Angeles, Disneyland – and Arbus’ photograph – continues to capture the notion of entertainment and fantasy that has come to be so intrinsically associated with the city.

Other photographers in the In Focus: Los Angeles exhibition who produced the majority of their most creative work in the city include Edmund Teske, with his experimentation in the darkroom and his complex double solarisation process; Robert Heinecken, with images that are equally complex but often incorporate existing printed materials, such as negatives; Anthony Hernandez, whose portraits of Angelenos on the street emphasise the isolation of the individual in an urban environment; and Anthony Friedkin, who combines his passions for surfing and the Southland beaches in his photographs. The inclusion of three photographs from Judy Fiskin’s earliest photographic series, Stucco (1973-1976), provided the impetus for a monographic presentation of the artist’s complete photographic work by Getty Publications. Entitled Some Aesthetic Decisions: The Photographs of Judy Fiskin and featuring an introductory essay by curator Virginia Heckert, the book will be published concurrently with this exhibition.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky)(American, 1890-1976)
Juliet with Mud Mask
1945
Gelatin silver print
35.6 x 27.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Man Ray Trust

William Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Foundations and Slabs, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.9 x 23.8cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

William Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Framing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 24.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

William Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Plaster and Roofing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 24.1cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Finished Housing, Lakewood, California
1950
Gelatin silver print
7 3/8 x 9 7/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

The reduced scale and regular spacing of shapes lend a toy-like quality to Garnett’s suite of prints depicting construction phases of tract housing in the Los Angeles County suburb of Lakewood. The deep shadows, overall patterning, and dramatic diagonals that slice through each composition introduce a sophisticated sense of design and abstraction. After studying photography at Art Center College of Design and military service during World War II, William Garnett learned to fly so that he could photograph his subjects from his Cessna 170-B airplane. Although he was hired by developers to document the construction of 17,500 affordable single-family residences in Lakewood, the majority of his aerial photographs depict the beauty of America’s landscape.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971)
A Castle in Disneyland
Negative, 1962; print, 1973
Gelatin silver print
24 x 24cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of Diane Arbus

Grant Mudford (Australian, b. 1944)
Los Angeles (US 257/10a)
Negative, 1976; print, 1980
Gelatin silver print
19 1/4 x 13 1/8 in
© Grant Mudford

After working for ten years as a commercial photographer, Sydney native Grant Mudford received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, enabling him to travel throughout the United States to pursue personal work. Mudford’s love of architecture – particularly the vernacular, often anonymous structures of urban America – is evident in the photographs he produced. His head-on depictions of the façades of simple commercial buildings are enlivened by signage, the play of light and shade, the placement of doors and windows, or, as in this image, the rich variety of textures.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Joe Deal (American, 1947-2010)
Backyard, Diamond Bar, California
1980
Gelatin silver print
11 3/16 x 11 1/4 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Joe Deal

Joe Deal rose to prominence in the mid-1970s when work he made as a graduate student at the University of New Mexico was included in the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape (1975). From 1976 to 1989, he taught photography at the University of California, Riverside, where he was instrumental in establishing a photography program and developing the university-affiliated California Museum of Photography. His photographs of Diamond Bar feature backyards of this primarily residential suburb located at the junction of the Pomona and Orange freeways in eastern Los Angeles County. Deal’s implementation of a slightly elevated perspective that eliminates the horizon line and provides a view into neighbouring yards effectively conveys the close quarters of life in a master-planned community.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Robert Heineken (American, 1931-2006)
Untitled (Studies #7)
1970
Gelatin silver print
9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The Estate of Robert Heineken

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles International Airport
1964
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 1984 The Estate of Garry Winogrand

“It is immediately apparent that no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture; nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.” ~ Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971

This exhibition features photographs – made between 1945 and 1980 – from the Museum’s collection that represent diverse responses to the city of Los Angeles as a subject and to photography as a medium for documentary and creative expression. It is loosely grouped around the themes of experimental photography, vernacular architecture, car culture, and fantasy and the film industry.

Both iconic and relatively unknown works are included. One of the best known is Garry Winogrand’s image of two women walking towards the Theme Building at L.A. International Airport (see image above). Though a quintessential New Yorker, Winogrand settled in Los Angeles near the end of his life.

Experimental Photography

With its reclining figure set against a patterned background, Robert Heineken’s image recalls the odalisques of French painter Henri Matisse (see image above). To Heineken, however, traditional subjects and techniques were of little interest. He created this camera-less photograph by using a page torn from a magazine as the negative. This allowed light to pass through and merge depictions on both sides of the page into a single image with reversed tones.

In 1963, Heineken founded the photography program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He forged new directions in photography, utilising strategies of manipulation and appropriation to address themes of consumer culture and sexual politics.

Vernacular Architecture

Judy Fiskin’s propensity to backlight her subjects makes it difficult to read the details in the modest examples of vernacular architecture found in Westside neighbourhoods of Los Angeles that she photographed for her Stucco series. Viewers may be inclined to squint against the harsh light of Southern California that Fiskin makes so palpable. Nevertheless, the small scale of her images, contained by the black edges of the negative, encourages close viewing.

After completing graduate studies in art history at UCLA, Fiskin joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts in 1977.

Car Culture

A native of Los Angeles, following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970.

For this image, Hernandez preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat (see image below).

Fantasy and the Film Industry

Los Angeles native Anthony Friedkin took up photography about the same time he learned to surf, and was already an accomplished photographer by age 16. He then studied at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Friedkin began working as a still photographer for motion pictures in 1975. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology (see image below).

Anonymous. “In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945-1980,” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 18/10/2024

Anthony Hernandez (American, b. 1947)
Los Angeles #3
1971
Gelatin silver print
7 3/4 x 11 13/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased in part with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Anthony Hernandez

Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the U.S. Army, Anthony Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. For this image, he preset his 35mm camera so that objects within a specific range would be in focus. Then, while walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, he swung the camera to his eye for a fraction of a second to capture fellow pedestrians as well as the ambient mood of a city more typically experienced from the driver’s seat. A native of Los Angeles, Hernandez has continued to photograph the city, addressing issues of community, shelter, and survival in his work.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Anthony Friedkin (American, b. 1949)
Film Can Library, Universal Studios
1978
Gelatin silver print
12 x 17 11/16 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Sue and Albert Dorskind
© Anthony Friedkin

Anthony Friedkin began taking photographs at a young age and had already published his work by the time he was 16. He nonetheless found it important to study photography seriously and did so at Art Center College of Design and the University of California, Los Angeles. Employment as a still photographer for motion pictures beginning in 1975 undoubtedly prepared him to create a portfolio of images of Universal Studios a few years later. His depiction of row after row of film cans might be viewed as a historical document of a medium that has been replaced by new technology. Friedkin’s continued commitment to shooting black-and-white film that he develops and prints in his own darkroom has become increasingly rare.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Darryl J. Curran (American, b. 1935)
Cocktails with Heinecken
about 1974
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 14 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Darryl J. Curran
© Darryl J. Curran

After completing his undergraduate degree in design at the University of California, Los Angeles, Darryl Curran entered the school’s newly established photography program, studying with Robert Heinecken, who is positioned toward the center of this image in a black turtleneck. The repeated printing of two frames is typical of Curran’s approach to the photographic medium and the ease with which he employs techniques and strategies derived from his background in printmaking and design. Another form of “mirroring” occurs in the placement of a Heineken beer bottle opposite Heinecken the artist. Curran founded the Department of Photography at California State University, Fullerton, where he taught from 1967 to 2001.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

Henry Wessel Jr. (American, 1942-2018)
Los Angeles
1971
Gelatin silver on Dupont Veragam paper print
7 15/16 x 11 7/8 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council of the J. Paul Getty Museum
© Henry Wessel

Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organised in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography. In this image, electrical and telephone lines tether a row of modest residences to a single utility pole.

Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty

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Exhibition: ‘Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographs’ at Jeu de Paume, Paris

Exhibition dates: 21st February – 29th April 2012

Curator: Gaëlle Morel

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
New York Stock Exchange, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
24 x 19cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

It is not her portraits or the road trip photographs, nor her scientific work for which Berenice Abbott will be remembered. Firstly, she will always be remembered as the person who photographed Eugene Atget in 1927 just before he died and who bought the remainder of his negatives (after the French government had bought over 2,000 in 1920 and another 2,000 had been sold after his death). She then tirelessly promoted Atget’s work helping him gain international recognition until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Secondly, she is remembered for her magnificent photographs of New York City and its urban environs, photographs that show the influence of Atget in their attention to detail and understanding of the placement of the camera, and imaging of old and new parts of the city (much as Atget had photographed old Paris before it was destroyed). However, these photographs are uniquely her own, with their modernist New Vision aesthetic, bold perspectives and use of deep chiaroscuro to enhance form within the photograph. Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-1939) eventually consisted of 305 photographs that document the buildings of Manhattan, some of which are now destroyed. As the text on Wikipedia insightfully notes:

“Abbott’s project was primarily a sociological study imbedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realise that their environment was a consequence of their collective behaviour (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favour of what she described as “fantastic” contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilised a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilised it (if she scorned it).”

In the text below Gaëlle Morel observes, “Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.”

While Abbott’s photographs are definitely modernist in nature I believe that today they can also be seen as deeply nostalgic, emerging as they do in the period after the Great Depression when the economy was on the move again, a peaceful time before the oncoming armageddon of the Second World War, closely followed by the fear of nuclear annihilation and the threat of communist indoctrination. They are timeless portraits of a de/reconstructed city. The images seem to float in the air, breathe in the shadows. This is the disappearance of the moment into the enigma of past, present, future – where the photograph becomes eternal, where the best work of both Atget and Abbott resides.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Treasury Building, New York City
1933
Gelatin silver print
51 x 40.5cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Architecture

“The tempo of the city is not that of eternity, nor that of time, but that of the ephemeral. That is why recording it is so important, in both documentary and artistic terms.”

“All the photographs of New York took a long time to make, because the camera had to be carefully positioned. There is nothing fortuitous about these photographs.”

The exhibition features a substantial collection from Abbott’s best known project, Changing New York (1935-1939). Commissioned by the Roosevelt administration as part of its response to the nationwide economic crisis, Abbott saw this piece of work as both a way of documenting the City and as a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs taken by Abbott are on show here, along with various documents providing insight into the background of this major photographic undertaking, including posters and views of the exhibition organised by the Museum of the City of New York in 1937, sketches and historical notes made by the team of journalists working with Abbott on the project, and proofs and dummies of the layout made by the photographer before she started work.

Abbott homes in on the contrasts between old and new elements in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “disappearance of the moment” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publisher, E.P. Dutton, offered to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text by the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and staunch supporter. Going against the women’s original ideas for an art book, Dutton produced a more standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only informative entries about the buildings in the pictures.

In the exhibition, this set of architectural photographs is rounded out by a selection of pictures of vernacular architecture taken by Abbott during a journey in the southern states of the US in the 1930s and when she was travelling along Route 1 in the 1950s. Here, portraits of farmers and wooden houses alternate with pictures of streets and local events.

Berenice Abbott Petit Journal

With over 120 photographs, plus a selection of books and documents never shown before, this is the first exhibition in France to cover the many different facets of the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), who is also famous for her international advocacy of Eugène Atget. She came to Paris in 1921 where she learnt her craft from Man Ray before opening her own studio and embarking on a successful career as a portraitist. Returning to New York City in 1929, she conceived what remains her best‑known project, Changing New York (1935-1939). This was financed by the Works Progress Administration as part of its response to the economic crisis sweeping the country. The photographs she took in 1954 when travelling along the US East Coast on Route 1 (the exhibition presents a previously unseen selection of these images) reflect her ambition to represent the whole of what she called the “American scene.” Furthermore, in the 1950s, she also worked on a set of images for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) designed to illustrate the principles of mechanics and light for educational purposes.

A committed member of the avant‑garde from the early 1920s, and a staunch opponent of Pictorialism and the school of Alfred Stieglitz, Abbott spent the whole of her career exploring the limits and nature of documentary photography and photographic realism. This exhibition shows the rich array of her interests and conveys both the unity and diversity of her work.

Portraits

Berenice Abbott moved to New York City in the early 1920s and went about becoming a sculptor. Mixing in the bohemian circles of Greenwich Village, she met writers and artists such as Djuna Barnes, Sadakichi Hartmann and Marcel Duchamp. She also posed for Man Ray. Economic hardship at home and the allure of what then seemed the cultural Eldorado of Europe impelled several of these artists to try their luck in Paris, and Abbott herself joined this group of American expatriates in 1921.

In 1923 she became the assistant of Man Ray, who had opened a portrait studio shortly after his arrival in France in 1921. While a fair portion of the studio’s clients were American tourists, Abbott found herself at the heart of the avant-garde scene – especially that of the Surrealists. Between 1923 and 1926 she thus learnt about darkroom techniques and portrait photography while at the same time picking up a broader intellectual and artistic education. She produced her portraits in Man Ray’s studio before opening her own in 1926. Success soon followed. Her clientele was a mixture of French cultural figures and American expatriates, of bourgeois, bohemians and literary types. Her portraits were on occasion manifestly influenced by Surrealism, and more generally show an interest in masquerade, play and disguise, but sometimes even in their use of overprinting and distortion.

The female models express a kind of sexual ambiguity, notably by their masculine haircut or clothes, deliberately exuding a sense of uncertainty with regard to their identity. In composing her portraits, Abbott developed a distinctive aesthetic, far removed from the usual commercial conventions. The absence of a set, with the background usually no more than a plain wall, helped to focus on the sitter and their posture, the position of their body and their facial expression. The use of a tripod and long-focus lenses placed at eye-height allowed her to avoid distortions and thus heighten the physical presence of the models. In early 1929 Abbott left Paris for New York City. Back in America she continued with the same activities, opening a new portrait studio and taking part in exhibitions of modernist photography, while also promoting the work of Eugène Atget, having bought part of his estate in 1928.

New York City

In the early 1930s, Abbott set about her project for a great documentary portrait of the City of New York, but had no luck when she approached institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Historical Society for funding. She assembled her first efforts in an album (eight pages of which are exhibited here) in order to convey the scale of her ambitious undertaking, and in 1934 exhibited her photographs of the City at the Museum of the City of New York in the hope of attracting sponsors. In 1935, support was at last forthcoming from the Federal Art Project, a programme set up to aid artists by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal; she now had the support of a team of researchers who produced an information pack with text and drawings to accompany each image. Entitled Changing New York, she conceived this commission as both a vast documentary record of the City and a personal work of art. Eighty of the 305 photographs constituting this project have been selected for the exhibition. These are accompanied by documents – a poster, exhibition views, sketches and historical notes, proofs, pages from the preparatory album and original editions – that help to convey the concerns and ambitions behind this major photographic undertaking.

Abbott focused on the contrasts and links between old and new in the City’s structure. Her images alternate between a New Vision aesthetic, characterised by an emphasis on details and bold perspectives, and a more documentary style that is frontal and neutral. Rather than the kind of nostalgic approach often brought to bear on a city’s landmarks and typical sites, this ensemble offers an exploration of the nature of modernity and focuses on the ways in which the past and future are temporarily linked together. Seeking to reinvent the forms and functions of photography in relation to the practice of documentary, Abbott sets out to capture the “vanishing instant” by juxtaposing motifs from a city subject to an unprecedented process of demolition and reconstruction.

The upshot of all this work was the publication of a book, Changing New York, in 1939. But there was considerable tension between the publisher, whose concerns were commercial, and the photographer, with her artistic ambitions. In 1938, hoping to take advantage of the fifty million visitors expected at the New York World’s Fair of 1939, the publishing house E.P. Dutton proposed to bring out a selection of one hundred images from the project accompanied by a text from the renowned art critic Elizabeth McCausland, who also happened to be Abbott’s companion and unfailing supporter. Straying far from the project originally envisaged by the two women, Dutton changed the presentation of the photographs and produced what was a standard tourist guide, breaking the City down into a series of tours, from south to north and from the centre outwards. The text, too, was shorn of its poetic and pedagogical dimensions, leaving only information about the buildings in the pictures.

The “American scene”

This set of architectural images is completed by a selection of vernacular photographs. In the summer of 1935, Berenice Abbott went on a road trip down to the Southern US in order to create a portrait of a rural world in crisis. Choosing the kind of documentary style that would be the hallmark of the photographic survey launched by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) that same year, she focused on the modest wooden houses and the farmers. Driving around these states with Elizabeth McCausland, Abbott took some two hundred photographs which the two women saw as part of an ambitious photographic portrait of America in book form, although in the end this was never published. A similar fate befell Abbott’s piece on the small towns and villages along Route 1, which she travelled in 1954. Covering approximately 6,500 kilometres as she followed this road along the East Coast of the US, she took some 2,400 photographs, taking in stalls, shops, portraits of farmers, diners and bars and dance halls. Her photography alternated between the documentary aesthetic and Street Photography. With Route 1, Abbott continued to pursue her ambition of representing the whole of the “American scene.”

Science

Abbott started photographing scientific phenomena in 1939. In 1944 she was recruited by the journal Science Illustrated, where she published some of her own pictures, as head of its photography department. Abbott took a committed, pedagogical approach, seeing her images as a vital bridge between modern science and the general public. In 1957, as a result of the anxiety about national science stirred by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik into outer space, at the height of the Cold War, the National Science Foundation set up a Physical Science Study Committee at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its role was to develop new textbooks for the teaching of science in schools and to use innovative photographs to illustrate the principles of quantum mechanics. Abbott was hired by MIT to produce photographs for the popularisation and teaching of the sciences. Using abstract forms to visually express complex mechanical concepts and invisible mechanical laws, she used black grounds to reveal principles such as gravity and light waves. The exhibition features a score of Abbott’s scientific and experimental images, as well as some of the books for which they were used. Harking back to the experiments of the avant-gardes, and in particular the Rayogram technique, she was able to produce visually attractive and surprising images that were also rich in discovery, thus combining documentary information with a sense of wonder.”

Text by Gaëlle Morel, curator of the exhibition, on the Jeu de Paume website

Presentation of the exhibition Berenice Abbott

The exhibition “Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), photographies” reveals for the first time in France the different stages of the career of this American photographer. This retrospective offers more than 120 photographs, original works and a series of unpublished documents. By presenting portraits, architectural photographs and scientific shots, the exhibition shows the multiple facets of a work often reduced to a few images.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Triborough Bridge, East 125th Street Approach, New York City, June 29, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
24.5 x 19cm
Museum of the City of New York. Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Broadway to the Battery, New York City, May 4, 1938
1938
Gelatin silver print
17.5 x 24cm
Museum of the City of New York
Museum Purchase with funds from the Mrs. Elon Hooker Acquisition Fund
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Flat Iron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, New York City
1938
Gelatin silver print
101.5 x 76cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, New York City, October 24, 1935
1935
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Sunoco Station, Trenton, New Jersey
1954
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Park Avenue and 39th Street, New York
1936
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5cm
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Gunsmith and Police Department Headquarters, 6 Centre Market Place and 240 Centre Street, New York City, February 4, 1937
1937
Gelatin silver print
19 x 24.5cm
Museum of the City of New York
Gift of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Happy’s Refreshment Stand, Daytona Beach, Florida
1954
Gelatin silver print
29.5 x 28cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Miner, Greenview, West Virginia
1935
Gelatin silver print
25 x 19cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Jean Cocteau with a revolver
1926
Gelatin silver print
35.5 x 28cm
Ronald Kurtz / Commerce Graphics.
© Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.

Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991)
Eugène Atget
Paris, 1927
Gelatin silver print
© Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics.

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde
Phone: 01 47 03 12 50

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 12am – 8pm
Saturday and Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Closed Monday

Jeu de Paume website

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Exhibition: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen: The Camera as a Mirror’ at the Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden

Exhibition dates: 18th February 2012 – 22nd April 2012

Curator: Magnus af Petersens

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

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled Film Still #56
1980
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures

Tracey Moffatt (Australian, b. 1960)
Something More #1
1997
Cibachrome print
© Tracey Moffatt/BUS 2012

Samuel Fosso (Cameroon, b. 1962)
Sans titre. De la série Années 70
1970-1980
Gelatin silver print
© Samuel Fosso, Courtesy JM Patras/Paris

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Patti Smith
1979
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Self Portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Malick Sidibé (Malian, 1936-2016)
Danser le Twist (Dance the Twist)
1965
Gelatin silver print

Seydou Keïta (Mali, 1921-2001)
Untitled #419
1950-1952
Gelatin silver print
© Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC

Seydou Keïta (Mali, 1921-2001)
Untitled #420
1950-1952
© Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC

This spring we will be showing more than forty photographs from the period 1950-90 taken by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Samuel Fosso, Tracey Moffatt, and Elina Brotherus. The exhibition focuses on the art of portrait photography and how the artist in his or her studio creates images that depict people not just as they actually are, but also as they would like to appear.

Moderna Museet’s collection of photography is among the foremost in Europe, it includes some of the most prominent figures in the history of photography. Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe are all big names in photography, artists whose work often revolves around concepts of identity, sexuality, and performativity. The photography studio is a place for masquerades and manipulations, a stage where various identities and roles can be tested. It therefore problematises the idea that a portrait is meant to convey some truth about the subject’s inner life. How do we distinguish a staged scene from reality? Is it even possible to make such a distinction? How free are we to form our own identity? If it’s a matter of choosing a role, what roles are available to us?

Andy Warhol’s Polaroid pictures, whose title, Ladies and Gentlemen, has also provided the name for the exhibition, are examples of his interest in – or rather his obsession with – celebrities. From industrial magnates to movie stars, from rock musicians to the “superstar” friends who hung out around the Factory, his fabled studio. In the world of pop art and popular culture, surface is everything. Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs are instead classically composed – stylised and aesthetically formed. In the controlled environment and lighting of the photo studio, he strives not for realism but for beauty. Here role-play becomes a part of the picture’s constructed character.

In Cindy Sherman’s suite of images called Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), she plays with film clichés. The scenes and characters in her photographs seem familiar, but in fact it’s always Sherman herself we see in the leading role. Using the camera as a mirror, she takes on and explores various roles. It’s a game of trying on identities that is familiar to teenagers in particular the world over, a game we play in an attempt to find ourselves, or rather to construct an individual identity. One of the many ways in which Sherman’s pictures have been interpreted is as a feminist critique of the limited number of roles available to women.

This exhibition also presents several works by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, and Samuel Fosso, studio photographers who work primarily with portrait photography. Keïta’s studio was next-door to a movie theater in Bamako, the capitol city of Mali. Sidibé takes pictures not just in his studio but also at weddings and other parties. His photographs from Bamako in the 1960s reflect the great hope that came with liberation from French colonial power. Fosso opened his studio in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, when he was still a teenager. He is best known for a series of self-portraits in which he dons a variety of outfits to assume different roles.

Press release from the Moderna Museet website

Elina Brotherus (Finnish, b. 1972)
Honeymoon (detail)
1997
© Elina Brotherus

Francesco Vezzoli (Italian, b. 1971)
Portrait of H.R.H The Princess of Hanover (Before & After Salvador Dalí)
2009
© Francesco Vezzoli/BUS 2012

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Gianni Agnelli
1972
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
John Chamberlain and Lorraine
1978
© Andy Warhol/BUS2012

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross)
1974
© Andy Warhol/BUS 2012

Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954)
Untitled
2008
© Cindy Sherman. Courtesy the Artist and Metro Pictures

Moderna Museet Malmö
Gasverksgatan 22 in Malmö

Moderna Museet Malmö is located in the city centre of Malmö. Ten minutes walk from the Central station, five minutes walk from Gustav Adolfs torg and Stortorget.

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 17
Mondays closed

Moderna Museet Malmö website

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Exhibition: ‘Henri Cartier-Bresson / Paul Strand, Mexico 1932-1934’ at HCB Foundation, Paris

Exhibition dates: 11th January – 22nd April 2012

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Mexico
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

“The American’s immobility contrasts with [the] Frenchman’s fluidity.”

Press releases should be very careful when making such sweeping generalisations. Personally I find the photographs of Cartier-Bresson the more static (both physical and psychological) of the two photographers. The compartmentalisation of space in Bresson’s photographs – the use of diagonals and verticals – is more fixed than in the sensuous Strand, the emotions more didactic and formalised even as they seek the spontaneity of photojournalism. The placement of the two figures in Strand’s Men of Santa Ana (1933, below) is superlative, with the central dividing column and combination of tones and textures, father and son(?), stares and postures. Cartier-Bresson’s Prostitute (1934, below) is simpler in pose and purpose but we must remember this was a twenty-six year old photographer still finding his voice in the world, whereas Strand was a much older person and a more experienced photographer.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Natcho Aguirre, Santa Clara, Mexico
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Calle Cuauhtemoctzin (two prostitutes), Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
The Spider of Love, Mexico City
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Mexico
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Juchitan
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Nets, Michoacan
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Near Saltillo
1932
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Bringing together such different works by two great masters in the history of photography is not self-evident. There are many points of convergence, but their styles are profoundly different. The American’s immobility contrasts with Frenchman’s fluidity. They both travelled to Mexico during the same period and they crossed paths in New York in 1935 when they joined the political filmmakers’ group Nykino (which later became Frontier Films) in order to explore filmmaking at a critical point in their respective careers.

In autumn 1932, Paul Strand (1890-1976) set out for Mexico by car at the invitation of the Mexican Ministry of Education. He exhibited his photographs there and had the pleasure of witnessing the popular success of his images. It was in the course of working in the streets of Mexico, a practice which he had abandoned for many years, that Strand took up a different documentary style. At that point, he received a proposal to make a series of films. In 1934, he shot Redes (released in English as The Wave), a ‘docu-fiction’ about the oppression of the fishermen in the village of Alvarado. The film was screened in Mexico in 1936, and subsequently in the United States and France. In 1950, fleeing the climate of McCarthyism in the United States, he came to France and ultimately settled in the village of Orgeval, where he remained until the end of his life.

In 1934, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), who was eighteen years younger than Strand, signed up for a French ethnographic mission which was supposed to take him to Argentina. In the end, the mission was suspended and the twenty-six-year-old photographer spent a year in Mexico, literally fascinated by the country. He worked for several newspapers there, moved in intellectual and artistic circles together with his sister and worried about his future. In March 1935, he exhibited his work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes with Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. The local press reacted favourably and the young Frenchman contacted New York art dealer Julien Levy – who had already exhibited him in 1933 – to suggest a show of his recent work. He left Mexico with the firm intention of becoming a filmmaker and thus headed straight for the Nykino group. Strand’s prints come from various international collections; those of Cartier-Bresson belong to the Fondation HCB archives.

Press release from the HCB Foundation website

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Prostitute, Calle Cuauhtemoctzin, Mexico
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Men of Santa Ana, Lake Patzcuaro Michoacan
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

From January 11 to April 22, 2012, the HCB Foundation will pay tribute to two great masters of photography: Henri Cartier-Bresson and Paul Strand. The perspective of their work on Mexico between 1932 and 1934 will be an opportunity for the public to discover two visions of the same country and especially two approaches to photography.

In the fall of 1932, Paul Strand (1890-1976) left the United States and a personal life in crisis for Mexico. It was at the invitation of Carlos Chavez, whom he had met a little earlier and now responsible for culture at the Ministry of Education, that Strand discovered this country of which he said “I thought of Mexico as something mysterious, dark and dangerous, inhospitable.” However, Strand remained in Mexico for two years until his return to New York in December 1934.

The support of Carlos Chavez proved to be very important and enabled Strand to exhibit for the first time in Mexico at the Sala de Arte of the Ministry of Education in February 1933. After this first success, he left in the spring of 1933 to investigate Mexican arts and crafts in the state of Michoacán. Fascinated by the indigenous culture and the piety of the inhabitants, he brought back from this mission portraits of religious statues, men, women and children in the streets, landscapes and architecture.

He was then appointed director of photographic and cinematographic activities for the Ministry of Education and was entrusted with the production of a series of films on Mexico. He then worked on the script for his first feature film Redes, which is intended as a docu-fiction based on the struggle of a group of men, fishermen, against a corrupt society. The actors of the film are mainly the inhabitants of the village of Alvarado. The realisation is complex but the film is finally screened at the Juarez de Alvarado theatre on June 4, 1936. Barely a year later, it is under the title The Wave that the American public discovers this film very largely influenced by Russian cinema. Unfortunately, the new Mexican government set up in 1934 with the election of Lazaro Cardenas abandoned the film series project and Strand therefore decided to return to New York. He then abandoned photography, joined the association of filmmakers Nykino, devoted himself to political cinema and became president of Frontier Film, Nykino’s new name.

In 1940, thanks to the financial support of Virginia Stevens, his new wife, he published “Photographs of Mexico”, a portfolio, published in 250 copies, of 20 carefully assembled photogravures. A copy will be presented in the exhibition.

In 1951, when the witch hunt was launched in the United States by McCarthy, Strand decided to settle in Orgeval, France, where he would spend the end of his life.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) landed in Mexico City in July 1934. He was part of an ethnographic mission led by Doctor Julio Brandan and supported by the Trocadéro Museum to follow the construction of a major Pan-American road. The mission got off to a bad start because the funding promised by the Mexican government was not forthcoming. The majority of the members of the expedition then returned to France, disappointed to see the project abandoned. But HCB decides to stay because “he feels a real crush on this country”. Nicknamed “the little Frenchman with shrimp cheeks” by Lupe Cervantes, his Mexican “fiancée”, Cartier-Bresson travels the country with his Leica. He therefore manages to survive in this country, befriends poets like Langston Hugues, Tonio Salazar or Natcho Aguirre, is passionate about muralists and their revolutionary frescoes, works for the press like Todo. He exhibited at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in March 1935 with the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. “When he left, he declared himself a Frenchman from Mexico.”

During his stay, Henri Cartier-Bresson maintains frequent contact with the New York gallery owner Julien Levy and invites him to exhibit his recent photographs. This project will be carried out in April 1935 under the title “Documentary and Antigraphic photographs”. On this occasion, he will find the Mexican Manuel Alvarez Bravo and meet Walker Evans whom he deeply esteems. As soon as he arrived in New York, Henri Cartier-Bresson turned to cinema, “I stopped photographing in 1935, when I was in New York. Photography has always been for me only one of the different means of visual expression. […] I therefore started, with Paul Strand and with others, to learn cinema. I changed tools. Thanks to financial help from his parents, he bought a 35mm camera and joined the Nykino group. He learned a lot from this group of committed filmmakers and on his return to France, he assisted Jean Renoir on several of his films (La vie est à nous [Life is ours], Une partie de campagne [A country party]). It was not until 1937 that he left for Spain to make documentaries on the Spanish front. (Spain Will Live, Victory of Life, and With the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain)

Putting these two photographers into perspective is not easy. The convergences are numerous but the styles vary profoundly. The fluidity of the French contrasts with the immobility of the American. Both travel to Mexico at the same time, both meet in New York in 1935, when they join the group of committed filmmakers Nykino, to try a cinematic experience in a key phase of their two careers.

The exhibition presents 90 black and white prints: the works of Paul Strand come from Spanish, American and Mexican collections; those of Cartier-Bresson, some of which are unpublished, come from the collection of the HCB Foundation. The exhibition will be presented from May 13 to September 2, 2012 at the Point du Jour Center d’art in Cherbourg.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by Steidl, with a preface by Agnès Sire and an essay by Clément Chéroux.

Press dossier from HCB Foundation website translated from the French by Google Translate

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Woman of Alvarado, Veracruz
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Cristo with Thorns, Huexotla
1933, printed 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Hidalgo
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man with Hoe – Los Remedios
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Man – Tenancingo
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Boy – Uruapan
1933
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976)
Church, Coapiaxtla
1933, printed 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Paul Strand

Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004)
Mexico
1934
Gelatin silver print
© Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

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: ‘Saul Leiter Retrospective’ at The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen Hamburg

Exhibition dates: 3rd February – 15th April 2012

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Joanna
c. 1947
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

“I always assumed that I would simply be forgotten and disappear from view.”

Saul Leiter

The second of two postings on the colour photography of Saul Leiter. The first posting was for the exhibition Saul Leiter: New York Reflections at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, October 2011 – March 2012. This exhibition is the first major retrospective of his work. At last this artist seems to be getting the recognition he deserves!

The prosaic nature of the titles of the photographs belies their complexity. They remind me of the refractions of Lee Friedlander, the colour fields of Mark Rothko, the emotional intensity of Abstract Expressionism and the impression of spontaneous, subconscious creation that is Surrealism. His photographs are the glorious spirit of the city writ large – unique, atmospheric and with great psychological use of colour and space. I can’t think of any other colour photographer of the era (or for that matter, any era) that occludes the picture plane as much as Leiter does, and to such psychological affect, as in the last two photographs in this posting. The viewer becomes like a Peeping Tom, a voyeur of the world. Leiter deserves to be one of the modern masters of colour photography. I am so glad that he hasn’t disappeared from view. The world would be a poorer place without his visualisation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Untitled (Self-portrait)
1950s
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Phone Call
c. 1957
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Taxi
1957
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Postmen
1952
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Walking
1956
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Shopping
c. 1953
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

“Leiter is a rare artist, one whose vision is so encompassing, so refined, so in touch with a certain lyrical undertone, that his best photographs occasionally seem literally to transcend the medium.”

Jane Livingston

House of Photography at Deichtorhallen will from February 3 to April 15, 2012 be highlighting the oeuvre of 88-year-old photographer and painter Saul Leiter in the world’s first major retrospective. The exhibition covers more than 400 works and brings together in marvellous combination his early black-and-white and colour photographs, fashion images, painted-over nude photographs, paintings and his sketchbooks, which have never gone on public view before. Then final chapter in the exhibition is dedicated to Saul Leiter’s most recent photographic works, which he continues to take on the streets in his neighbourhood in New York’s East Village.   Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh and it was not until a few years ago that his work received due recognition for its pioneering role in the emergence of colour photography. As early as 1946, and thus well before the representatives of New Color Photography in the 1970s (such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore) he was one of the first to use colour photography, despite it being despised by artists of the day, for his free artistic shots.

“The older photo-aesthetic views on the hegemony of black-and-white and the dating in photo history of the artistic use of color photography to the early 1970s need to be critically revisited. With Saul Leiter’s oeuvre, the history of photography essentially has to be rewritten,” comments curator Ingo Taubhorn.   Saul Leiter has always seen himself as both painter and photograph. In his painting and in his photographs he tends clearly to abstraction and a surface feel. Often there are large, deep black surfaces caused by shadows that take up as much as three quarters of the photographs. These are images that do not present passers-by as individuals, but as blurred colour impulses, behind panes of glass or wedges between house walls and traffic signs. He espouses a fluid transition between the abstract and the figurative in his paintings and photographs. Saul Leiter’s street photography, and in this genre his work is quite without precedent, is actually painting that has become photography, as Rolf Nobel writes in the book accompanying the exhibition.

On Saul Leiter

Saul Leiter discovered his passion for art at an early date and started painting as a teenager at the end of the 1940s. His family did not support him in his artistic endeavours as his father, a renowned Talmudic rabbi and scholar, always hoped his son Saul would one day follow him in the family tradition and become a rabbi. Leiter was self-taught, but by no means uneducated. He read and learned a lot about art, such that his knowledge and understanding constantly grew. In this way, he could be certain that his own thought and artistic efforts were duly related to the historical context, as Carrie Springer, curator at the Whitney Museum in New York, points out in the catalog.   In 1946, shortly after he had moved to New York, Leiter got to know Richard Poussette-Dart, who introduced him to photography, a medium that Leiter found very much to his liking and which he quickly made his own. Leiter soon resolved to make use of photography not only as a means of making art but as a way of earning a living. He started taking fashion photographs and thanks to his good eye, his playful sense of humour, and his pronounced sense of elegance, swiftly emerged as an extraordinary fashion photographer.  In the 1950s, LIFE magazine brought out the first photo-spreads of Saul Leiter’s first black-and-white images. For example, he took part in the exhibition on Always the young strangers (1953) curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1958 to 1967, Leiter worked for Harper’s Bazaar. All in all he was to spend some 20 years photographing for both the classic magazines and more recent ones, such as Esquire and Harper’s: Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen and Nova.

Saul Leiter was born in 1923 in Pittsburgh and has lived since 1946 in New York. For over 40 years, until her death in 2002 New York artist Soames Bantry was his partner. During the preparations for the Hamburg exhibition, Saul Leiter once remarked that he wished that Soames Bantry has received the same attention from the art world as he is now receiving. This spawned the idea of an homage to Soames Bantry, an exhibition in the exhibition at House of Photography that Saul Leiter has himself curated – with over 20 paintings: For Soames with Love Saul.   In his photographs, the genres of street life, portraiture, still lifes, fashion and architectural photography meld. He comes across his themes, such as shop windows, passers-by, cars, signs and (a recurrent motif) umbrellas, in the direct vicinity of his apartment in New York, where he has now lived for almost 60 years. The lack of clear detail, the blurring of movement and the reduction in depth of field, the compensation for or deliberate avoidance of the necessary light as well as the alienation caused by photographing through windows and by reflections all blend to create a language of colour fuelled by a semi-real, semi-abstract urban space. These are the works of an as good as undiscovered modern master of colour photography of the 1940s and 1950s. The Hamburg exhibition and the major monograph by Kehrer Verlag seek to prevent this happening.

Press release from The House of Photography website

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Red Umbrella
c. 1958
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Man with Straw Hat
c. 1955
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Pizza, Patterson
1952
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Canopy
c. 1957
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Through Boards
c. 1957
© Saul Leiter
Courtesy: Saul Leiter, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Deichtorstrasse 1-2 20095
Hamburg
Phone: +49 (0)40 32103-0

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm
Closed Mondays

Deichtorhallen Hamburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story’ at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Exhibition dates: 29th October 2011 – 7th April 2012

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Construction site with bulldozer, two men, including one in front holding child, large tank with hose, and car on right, possibly in construction site of Belmar Gardens
c. 1954
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

What an astonishing photographer this man was. These photographs are a revelation. African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”

While Harris is most famous for depicting an innovative and thriving black urban community – daily life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District – it is the less figurative, more abstract urban landscape work that I am interested in here. Hence I have put four outstanding photographs that I picked out from the Archive at the top of the posting.

Earlier photographs of the city from the 1940s, such as Large two story home with attic, porch, double entryway, and yard, with young child on steps alone, next to smaller two story home with porches on both stories (c. 1940-45, below) have a touch of Walker Evans about them. Note how in this photograph the eve of the large two story home roof touches the top of the negative (allowing an exit for the eye at the top of the image), beautifully balanced on the left-hand side by the intrusion of the roof of another out of frame building and its shadow cast on the ground. The spatial separation between this roof and the porch of the smaller two story home is critical, as is the punctum of the child standing on the stoop. There are beautiful spaces in this photograph, as the eye plays across its surface, taking in form and detail, light and shade, eventually escaping down the right hand side of the building to the sky beyond.

It is only when we get to the 1950s that Harris really seems to hit his straps in these photographs of the urban landscape. Personally, I can’t remember any other photographs like them. By this time he has developed his own signature, his own voice. And what a voice it is!

In the three remaining photographs at the top of the posting there is a conciseness to his vision of the world, a spatial spareness, even sparseness that is very eloquent. In Construction site with bulldozer (c. 1954, below), possibly a photograph of the site of Belmar Gardens, Pittsburgh’s first black-owned housing cooperative, the landscape is shot from below up a slight incline, bookended with raised bank at left and car at right framing the image plane and holding it together. But it is the space around the central figures as they look off into the distance that is so magical – the blackened, textural ground playing off the cloudless sky with single tree at left. That space in the foreground, between the bottom of the image and the figures is tensioned so well with the distance between the figures and the top edge of the negative: Harris has an intimate understanding of what he wants to achieve in this image – spatially and narratively. The hope of the future.

The same can be said for Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs (c. 1958, below). Again, there is a spareness to his rendition of space and a complexity to his imaging of tone. It is almost like there is a dividing line between night and day, between the city in snow and the city in darkness, the ying yang of existence. Observe the light car is in darkness and the dark car in light; the dark trees, the light telegraph post; the space between the cars which no car could ever fit through; and the smallness of the child walking down the street. Incredible. Again, there is a openness to Harris’ rendition of space in Young men playing sandlot baseball with steel mill in background (c. 1955, below). Let your eyes soak in the open sky; the verticals of dark chimneys, left and light chimneys, right; the building at left perched atop the embankment; the composition of the figures across the middle of the image, reminiscent of a piece of music; the open space of the baseball sandlot at the bottom of the photograph with faint white line delineation and figure at right holding up the edge of the image. This is a master at work.

In this mature style, Harris has no need to fill space with an urban mass or congeries. These are spaces that matter, spaces of matter but these spaces are not empty, negative spaces, but active, fluid spaces, the space of possibilities. He understands what he wants to say so well, he is so confident of his previsualisation of the urban spaces of the city they become uniquely his own – open, engaging, optimistic. This is his voice, his gift, his legacy to the world – for me, not so much the portraits of Afro-American culture, but the spaces of the city as a metaphor for change within that culture. His reading of the landscape is his unique field of vision: in the stillness of these photographs time no longer passes, for the author and for the viewer. His images transcend place and, as such, like Atget before him, he deserves to be recognised as an artist who captured a changing world. Further research on this aspect of his art would seem appropriate.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

I am most grateful to Tey Stiteler for allowing me to pick the photographs I wanted for this posting. This help was crucial as I wanted to talk about the less figurative work in the Teenie Harris Archive. Many thankx to the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Teenie Harris Archive for allowing me to publish the photographs and book pdf in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Large two story home with attic, porch, double entryway, and yard, with young child on steps alone, next to smaller two story home with porches on both stories
c. 1940-1945
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Young men playing sandlot baseball with steel mill in background
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Carnegie Museum of Art presents a groundbreaking retrospective of African American photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1998), featuring nearly a thousand of Harris’s most beautiful, appealing, and historically significant images. Harris’s photographs – made in his studio and for the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading Black newspaper of the time – chronicle a vibrant Black urban community during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. He captured the poetry of everyday common experience, as well as the extraordinary people who shaped the 20th century: entertainer Lena Horne, baseball star Jackie Robinson, and leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Carnegie Museum of Art was entrusted with the archive of nearly 80,000 Teenie Harris negatives in 2001. Drawing on 10 years of research into archive, Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story features immersive life-size projections combined with a newly commissioned jazz soundtrack. A large-scale chronology and a web-based interactive introduce visitors to the rich visual resources of the archive and offer access to firsthand accounts by Harris’s contemporaries. The final section of the exhibition is dedicated to an in-depth evaluation of Harris as an artist.

Text from the Carnegie Museum of Art website

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Three story brick row houses with mansard roofs, and small child on sidewalk of tree lined street with automobiles
c. 1958
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story, the first major retrospective exhibition of the work and legacy of African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, will be on view at Carnegie Museum of Art from October 29, 2011, to April 7, 2012.

The groundbreaking exhibition will celebrate the artist/photographer whose work is considered one of the most complete portraits anywhere of 20th-century African American experience. Large-scale, themed photographic projections of nearly 1,000 of Teenie Harris’s greatest images accompanied by an original jazz soundtrack will generate an immersive experience in the exhibition’s opening gallery. Subsequent galleries will present a chronological display of these photographs at a conventional scale, and give visitor access to the more than 73,000 catalogued and digitised images in the museum’s Teenie Harris Archive. The exhibition will offer an examination of Harris’s working process and artistry, and audio commentary on the man and his work by the people who knew him. In addition, the photographs and many of these materials will be accessible on Carnegie Museum of Art’s website.

“Since 2001, our museum has been the repository of the Teenie Harris Archive. This exhibition marks the culmination of a long effort to preserve and document an extensive collection of historically and artistically important images,” says Lynn Zelevansky, The Henry J. Heinz II Director of Carnegie Museum of Art. “We are honoured to present this retrospective of a photographer whose body of work gives so much to us.”

During his 40-year career as freelance and staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s most influential black newspapers, Teenie Harris (1908-1998) produced more than 80,000 images of Pittsburgh’s African American community. The photographs, taken from the 1930s to the 1970s, capture a period of momentous change for black Americans. His subjects ranged from the everyday lives of ordinary people to visits by powerful and glamorous national figures to Pittsburgh, the nation’s industrial centre. From birthday celebrations to civil rights boycotts, the distinctive vision of Harris’s photographs folds into the larger narrative of American history, art, and culture.

Charles “Teenie” Harris

Teenie Harris grew up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a neighbourhood once called “the crossroads of the world.” A serious photographer from the age of 18, he started his professional photographic career in 1937 when he opened a studio and began to take on freelance assignments. In 1941, Harris was appointed staff photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation’s preeminent black newsweekly. His images were disseminated nationally through the Courier, and played a key role in how African Americans visualised themselves.

Like the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC, James Van Der Zee in New York, and P. H. Polk in Alabama, Harris depicted an innovative and thriving black urban community, in spite of the segregationist policies and attitudes of mid-century America. His images captured daily life in the Hill – weddings, funerals, family portraits, parades, church events, street scenes, graduations – as well as of the great men and women who visited the neighbourhood, including Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson, John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lena Horne, and Muhammad Ali. Some of the country’s finest jazz musicians – Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Ahmad Jamal, Sarah Vaughan, and Duke Ellington – were photographed by Harris alongside bartenders, waitresses, and dancing crowds.

The longevity of Harris’s career offers an outlook on historic shifts that took place in the lives of African Americans everywhere. In the era of segregated baseball, for example, Harris photographed two legendary Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords (which Harris cofounded in the mid-1920s) and Homestead Grays. Later, when baseball’s color barrier was broken, he photographed African American major league baseball players like Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente along with their teammates. The pride and optimism evident in Harris’s photos of the Double V campaign from the World War II era (victory abroad, victory for racial equality at home), turned to growing moods of frustration and anger evident in images of militant protests in the late 1950s and 1960s. These photographs provide important insights to issues that are still pertinent today.

“Teenie Harris had great empathy with his subjects and a talent for storytelling,” says Lippincott. “His images transcend place. Powerful and personal, they connect today’s viewers with a proud past and a vibrant artistic and cultural heritage. We hope that through this retrospective and traveling exhibition, Harris will be established in the canons of art, history, and photography.”

About the Exhibition

Nearly 1,000 of Harris’s most striking and iconic photographs will be digitally projected as life-sized images in the opening gallery. The images, organised into seven sections – “Crossroads,” “Gatherings,” “Urban Landscapes,” “Style,” “At Home,” “The Rise and Fall of the Crawford Grill,” and “Words and Signs” – will be synchronised with an original jazz score produced by MCG Jazz, one of the nation’s top organisations dedicated to the preservation, presentation, and promotion of jazz music. A second gallery will feature a chronological installation of small prints of the projected images that will include a referencing system for in-depth exploration of each photograph through a bank of computers and books also located in the gallery. In addition, the computers will provide access to the interactive website that has been created for the show.

At the entrance to the third gallery, a mini exhibition of 12 fine-art-quality 16 x 20″ prints selected by 12 experts will be accompanied by their personal analyses of the meaning, significance, and beauty of the chosen images. This gallery will also feature a large-scale map showing the places Harris lived, worked, and photographed and a multimedia presentation called “Artist at Work” that demonstrates Harris’s technical skill and artistic vision, and shows how newspapers and publishers cropped and edited his work in order to tell a particular story. “Artist at Work” marries audio recordings of the stories and memories of Teenie Harris, as told by his family, friends, colleagues, and models, with a montage of projected images relating to their tales.

In addition to an exhibition-specific website, the museum is collaborating with the University of Pittsburgh Press on an illustrated book offering new and unpublished scholarship about Harris, his work, and his times that will impact the fields of American and African American art, culture, and history.

About the Teenie Harris Archive

In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art acquired the Teenie Harris archive from the Harris family and began a multiyear project to preserve, catalogue, digitise, and make the images available on the museum’s website for public view. Few of Harris’s negatives were titled and dated; since the acquisition of the archive, the museum has invited the public to help in the identification of the people, places, and activities in the photographs through a series of museum-based displays of his work, outreach presentations, meetings with oral historians, and online response forms that accompany the continually growing display of images on the museum’s website.

The Teenie Harris Archive Project is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which designated the archive a “We the People” project in the spring of 2007. “We the People” is an initiative to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Initial support for the Teenie Harris Archive Project was provided by the Heinz Endowments.

Press release from the Carnegie Museum of Art website

Teenie Harris Archive website

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Man lying with arms crossed and ferns on his lap, in cabin of truck
c. 1940-1945
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Wooden roller coaster, possibly at Rock Springs Park, Chester, West Virginia
c. 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Lena Horne reflected in mirror in dressing room at Stanley Theatre
c. 1944
Gelatin silver print
Heinz Family Fund
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Deserted Alley
1946-1970
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Charles “Teenie” Harris had a photographic mission: going beyond the obvious or sensational to capture the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens. Now, a new exhibit and online catalog is showing the depth of Harris’ work, an archive showing a major artistic achievement that influenced people around the country.

“His shots of everyday people are amazing. People seem to kind of jump off the page,” said Stanley Nelson, an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and MacArthur genius grant winner who has made a number of acclaimed films on African-American artists, business people, and workers. “They don’t have the sense of somebody kind of looking in and spying on the community. For me his pictures are very unique,” Nelson said.

Harris was a gifted basketball player as a young man, and helped start a Negro League baseball team, too. His brother was Pittsburgh’s biggest bookie, and that gave him access to people throughout the city. But he found his mission at the Pittsburgh Courier, which was distributed all over the country via a network of Pullman train porters. Through the paper Harris had endless opportunities to chronicle daily life and to meet the rich, famous, and powerful. Harris photographed Richard Nixon, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and many musical greats, such as Nat King Cole and Duke Ellington. “That was the black national paper of record at the time,” said Laurence Glasco, a professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh.

Many people stopped by the Courier offices because of its clout with African-Americans, Glasco said. Yet Harris neither pandered to nor looked down on celebrities, he added. “He really didn’t have a cult of celebrity. He wouldn’t cross a street to shake a celebrity’s hand. He was interested in them, but he really saw them as just people. And that really comes out in his photographs,” Glasco said. A young Muhammad Ali, for example, is shown picking up his mother and holding her in his arms. “He had an equal opportunity lens,” recalled Teenie’s son, Charles Harris. “He just liked people.”

The partnership with the Courier was a perfect match, since its reporters and editors were also pushing for equal rights. And true to Pittsburgh traditions, Teenie Harris was a hard worker, on call virtually 24-hours a day. “No matter what time it was, they could call. A lot of times he didn’t sleep,” his son said.

Louise Lippincott, the Carnegie Museum of Art Curator, worked closely with Harris in the last years of his life. “He had a very strong personal desire to complete a positive view of African-Americans and counter the negative stereotypes in the white press. On the other hand, there’s nothing sugarcoated,” said Lippincott. Glasco adds that Harris took pictures of very poor people without exaggerating their situation. “You can look at them and say, ‘These are real people; they happen to be very poor.’ They’re more than those clothes they’re wearing. They were first and foremost a person.” One picture shows a little girl with a big smile sitting on the floor of a newsstand, reading a comic book with a small dog on her lap. A key piece of history that Harris and the Courier covered heavily was African-Americans who served in World War II and returned home demanding that they be accorded rights equal to white soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

“The drive for civil rights really began in World War II,” Lippincott said, far earlier than many imagine. Yet the photographs are more than just a rich trove of mid-century American history. They emerge as art because Harris became a master of composition and for decades took each picture with a large-format camera that had to be hand-loaded with a single piece of film for each shot. “I remember being just shocked and amazed at what an incredible photographer he was. He just had this incredible eye,” said Nelson, who noted that Harris earned the nickname “One Shot” for his ability to deliver an assignment with one photograph.

Many of the pictures show a successful – and happy – black middle class. One young woman is depicted posing on the hood of a 1950s car, with steel mills in the background, while another simply kneels while playing with two small dogs. And even before the civil rights movement, there are many pictures showing black and white children and adults together. Glasco notes that even some controversial pictures seem to defy current expectations of what the past was like. In one, a man in a car has a cross-dressing male companion on each side.

“They’re happy, they’re proud, they’re smiling. It’s a joyful thing,” Glasco said of the men openly dressing as women. At an annual parade in Pittsburgh’s Hill district, one car was often filled with cross-dressers who waved at crowds, he added. Glasco once saw a Harris picture of cross-dressers next to contemporary pictures with the same subject, and was struck by the anger and hostility of the people in the new pictures, and the openness of the people in the older ones.

The Carnegie Museum of Art purchased Harris’ entire collection in 2001, through the Heinz Family Fund. The exhibit at the museum includes almost 1000 photographs, slide shows, and a jazz soundtrack commissioned especially for the show, which is up until next April. It’s also scheduled to travel to Chicago, Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta in the future. People who can’t get to one of those museums can view almost 60,000 Harris images that have been scanned and put online along with audio interviews of people who knew him.”

Kevin Begos. “Pa. exhibit showcases legendary black photographer,” Associated Press on the Boston.com website November 27, 2011 [Online] Cited 21/03/2012

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Group portrait of women wearing church choir robes, posed outside in yard, with other houses, garage, and woman in background, seen from above
c. 1938-1945
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Woman wearing one-piece skirted bathing suit reclining on swimming pool diving board
c. 1940-1945
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Charles “Teenie” Harris self-portrait in Harris Studio
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Heinz Family Fund
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Doris Clark (Moody) seated on Buick car with steel mill in background, Clairton
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Heinz Family Fund
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Group portrait of two women and two men, woman on right wearing dark dress with wide brimmed hat, in interior with wainscoting and pictures on wall
c. 1940-1945
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Herron Avenue at intersection of Milwaukee Street, Hill District
c. 1945-1949
Gelatin silver print
Heinz Family Fund
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Boxers, possibly Golden Gloves contenders, possibly including Robert “Bobby” Matthews second from left, lined up in boxing ring
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Workers demolishing roof of Crawford Grill No. 1, 1401 Wylie Avenue at Townsend Street, Hill District
1956
Gelatin silver print
Heinz Family Fund
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Teenie Harris (American, 1908-1998)
Protesters, including Ronald A. Crawley on left, with UNPC signs outside United Mine Safety Appliance Company, North Braddock Avenue and Meade Street, Homewood
October 1963
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Anonymous photographer
Charles “Teenie” Harris holding camera and standing in front of Flash Circulation office, 2132 Centre Avenue, Hill District
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
© Carnegie Museum of Art

Carnegie Museum of Art
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Phone: 412.622.3131

Opening hours:
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Thursday: 10am – 8pm
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Exhibition: ‘Made in America 1900-1950. Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada’, Ottawa, Ontario

Exhibition dates: 9th December 2011 – 1st April 2012

Edward Steichen  (American, 1879-1973)
Nocturne – Orangery Staircase, Versailles
1908
Purchased 1976
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Stunning photographs in this posting: Steichen’s  Nocturne – Orangery Staircase, Versailles (1908) is just sublime; Sheeler’s Side of a White Barn (1917) is early Modernist perfection, rivalling Paul Strand’s The White Fence, Port Kent (1916); Barbara Morgan’s photograph of dancer Martha Graham (1940) portraying, radiantly, her divine dissatisfaction; and the most beautiful portrait by Imogen Cunningham of Frida Kahlo (1931). Every time I see this portrait I nearly burst into tears – the light falling from the right and from the left onto the boards behind her, the texture of her cloak, the languorous nature of her hands, her absolute poise and beauty – looking straight into the camera, looking straight into your soul. What a beautiful women, such strength and vulnerability. A stunning photograph of an amazing women. The photograph just takes your breath away…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Arthur Leipzig  (American, 1918-2014)
Opening Night at the Opera, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
27 x 34.1cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
© Arthur Leipzig/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965)
Side of a White Barn, Pennsylvania
1917
Gelatin silver print
7 5/8 x 9 5/8 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum

“Lines and texture define this view of the side of a white barn. In the photographic rendering, the white barn is a soft gray, punctuated by knots in the wood and shadows cast by the uneven boards. In the lower right corner of the image, a small window, a fence, and a chicken standing atop a pile of hay add visual weight yet surrender to the repetitive, vertical domination of the structure. Like every other line, the horizontal line dividing the areas of wood and plaster is drawn without a straight edge.”

Text from the Getty Museum website

Jerome Liebling (American, 1924-2011)
Butterfly Boy, New York City
1949
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Andreas Feininger (American, 1906-1999)
Reflection on a Car
1980
Gelatin silver print
38 x 48.2cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Alfred Steiglitz (American, 1864-1946)
The Steerage
1907
Gelatin silver print

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago
c. 1946-1947
Gelatin silver print
Image: 26.1 x 25cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Benjamin Greenberg, Ottawa, 1981
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Barbara Morgan  (American, 1900-1992)
Martha Graham, Letter to the World, “Kick”
1940, printed c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
38.6 x 48.2cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU. Keep the channel open… No artist is pleased… There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

In the first five decades of the 20th century photography came into its own – both as an art form and as a tool to document social and political change. American photographers were exploring both the poetic and transformative expressiveness of the medium, as well as recording the growth and change of the country in its various phases of industrial development. On view until April 1, 2012, Made in America 1900-1950: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada looks at both approaches, and the divisions between the two, as they are necessarily porous and somewhat arbitrary.

“The Gallery’s collection is so rich in 20th century American photographs that it needs an exhibition in two parts and a catalogue in two volumes. This first presentation focuses on the period between 1900 and 1950,” noted NGC director Marc Mayer. “This comprehensive collection has been amassed in large part through the generosity of brilliant collectors.”

“Each of [the decades] is characterised by tremendous growth, change, and creative thought about the medium and its reception in the United States,” noted curator Ann Thomas in the catalogue, American Photographs 1900-1950.

It was a period of great technical and technological change: such as the introduction of the personal 35mm camera in the early 1920s, following the German model developed by Leica, and Ansel Adams’ and Fred Archer’s creation of the zone system to determine optimal film exposure and development.

Composed of over 130 photographs, two issues of Camera Work, one issue of Manuscripts, and several period cameras, the exhibition Made in America celebrates the exceptional contribution that American photographers made to the history of art in the 20th century. Made been 1900-1950, these photographs represent an extraordinarily fertile period in the evolution of photography. They include stunning works by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Lisette Model, Weegee, and members of New York’s Photo League.

Made in America is the fourth in a series of exhibitions and catalogues presenting the Gallery’s outstanding collection of international photographs. It follows Modernist Photographs (2007), 19th Century French Photographs (2010), and 19th Century British Photographs (2011).

Made in America 1900-1950: Photographs from the National Gallery of Canada explores a dynamic period in the history of photography when the medium was emerging as both an art form and a tool for documenting social change. Presenting 134 works from the National Gallery’s extraordinary collection of American photographs, this exhibition chronicles the evolution of the medium, beginning with Pictorialism and moving through modernism, straight photography and documentary work. On the walls are some truly magnificent, iconic works by the most influential photographers, among them Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage, Edward Steichen’s Nocturne – Orangerie Staircase, Versailles, Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico and Barbara Morgan’s Martha Graham, Letter to the World (Kick).

At the turn of the 20th century, American photographers were fully engaged in the Pictorialist aesthetic, creating pastoral landscapes, foggy street scenes and idealised portraits of women and children. With their soft focus and gentle lighting, the images convey a romantic moodiness. Pictorialist photographers often manipulated their negatives and prints to achieve painterly effects. Gertrude Käsebier’s Serbonne, for instance, is reminiscent of an Impressionist painting.

Around the mid-teens, artists such as Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Walker Evans came to reject the notion of photography imitating painting, and instead sought to take advantage of the medium’s inherent, unique characteristics, especially its ability to achieve sharp definition, even lighting and smooth surfaces. The result was ground-breaking modernist work such as Stieglitz’s Equivalent series, Alvin Langdon Coburn’s Vortograph and Charles Sheeler’s Side of White Barn.

Out on the west coast in the early 1930s, Group f.64 was committed to the ideal of pure, un-manipulated, or “straight” photography. Edward Weston’s nudes and juniper trees, and Imogen Cunningham’s portrait of Frida Kahlo demonstrate the hallmarks of f.64: crisp detail, sharp focus, and often a sensual minimalism.

The first decades of the 20th century also provided rich subject matter for documentary photographers, as social and economic changes dramatically transformed daily life. Lewis Hine’s photographs of immigrants and child labourers tell fascinating stories, as do images of the Depression by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The Photo League sent its members out into New York’s streets to capture ordinary people on film. Helen Levitt, Jerome Liebling and Sol Libsohn chronicled small dramas unfolding on sidewalks.

Visitors familiar with Ansel Adams’ grand, sublime landscapes might be surprised by his more contemplative series of foaming Pacific waves, titled Surf Sequence. Sharing the gallery space is Minor White’s poetic series Song Without Words, made along the same coast. Both demonstrate an almost cinematic approach to photograph-making and plunge the viewer into seaside reverie.

Press release from the National Gallery of Canada website

Alvin Coburn (American, 1882-1966)
Vortograph
1917
Gelatin silver print
11 1/8 × 8 3/8″ (28.2 × 21.2cm)
Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

The intricate patterns of light and line in this photograph, and the cascading tiers of crystalline shapes, were generated through the use of a kaleidoscopic contraption invented by the American / British photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, a member of London’s Vorticist group. To refute the idea that photography, in its helplessly accurate capture of scenes in the real world, was antithetical to abstraction, Coburn devised for his camera lens an attachment made up of three mirrors, clamped together in a triangle, through which he photographed a variety of surfaces to produce the results in these images. The poet and Vorticist Ezra Pound coined the term “vortographs” to describe Coburn’s experiments. Although Pound went on to criticise these images as lesser expressions than Vorticist paintings, Coburn’s work would remain influential.

Gallery label from Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925, December 23, 2012 – April 15, 2013.

Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934)
Serbonne
1902, printed 1903
From Camera Work, January 1903
Gum bichromate, halftone
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Frida Kahlo
1931
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Ralph Steiner  (American, 1899-1986)
Model T
1929, printed later
Gelatin silver print
Image: 24.2 x 19.7cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Citizen in Downtown Havana
1933
Gelatin silver print
25.1 x 20.1cm
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Gift of Phyllis Lambert, Montreal, 1982
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Exhibition: ‘The Photographs of Brett Weston’ at the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Exhibition dates: 23rd November 2011 – 25th March 25 2012

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Botanical
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston’s pictures are ageing well – the decorative aesthetic seems to have more currency today than previously when the values of his father were predominant. Perhaps this has to do with the continuing influence of the Bechers and the exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man Altered Landscape (1975). Although Weston photographs nature there is a beautiful, reductive minimalism to his photographs, an enticing simplicity of light and form that could be seen as decorative but today has taken on more symbolic weight; man and nature under threat, with hints of Atget and Wynn Bullock in the mix as well. Under that seeming simplicity are sophisticated photographs that take a good eye to capture and bring to life – what seems simple isn’t by any means. The light is beautiful, the sensitivity to subject present beyond doubt. His photographs will only gain greater currency in the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Snow
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Water
1970
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Water Reflection, Logging, Alaska
1973
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Lava, Hawaii
c. 1985
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 16 x 20 inches (40.64 x 50.8cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Over his long and prolific career, photographer Brett Weston (1911-1993) exemplified the modernist aesthetic. The son of famed photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), Brett Weston was a “natural” with the camera: he was still a teenager when he first received high-level, international recognition as a creative artist.

The Photographs of Brett Weston, Nov. 23, 2011, through April 1, 2012, at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, presents a condensed 40-print survey of his long and prolific career. While rare works from the Museum’s Hallmark Photographic Collection are also included, this exhibition celebrates a gift of 260 Weston prints from Christian K. Keesee, owner of the Brett Weston Archive in Oklahoma City.

“This generous gift from Mr. Keesee exemplifies the deep interest in our program on the part of leading collectors and estates across the nation,” said Keith F. Davis, senior curator of photography. “There is also a wonderful symmetry here: this gift of Brett Weston’s work compliments one of the earliest photography gifts to the Museum, when Mr. and Mrs. Milton McGreevy donated 60 Edward Weston prints in 1958.”

Brett Weston was one of photography’s greatest prodigies. After serving as his father’s apprentice, he achieved international recognition at the age of 17 through inclusion in a landmark exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany in 1929.

“Weston’s images are beautifully modulated, unmanipulated black-and-white prints,” said Davis. “He loved sharp lenses and precision cameras, and he applied this “purist” approach to a sustained exploration of the idea of abstraction.”

Weston always sought an energising balance between fact and form, the objective reality of the world and the purely graphic logic of pictorial shape and structure. In exploring the graphic language of form, Weston aimed to suggest the deeper possibilities, and mysteries, of familiar things.

Press release from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Magnolia Bud
1927
Gelatin silver print
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Los Angeles
1927
Gelatin silver print
Image: 9 5/8 x 6 7/8 inches (24.45 x 17.46cm)
Framed: 21 1/4 x 17 1/4 inches (53.98 x 43.82cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Building, Ivy, Tree, Sutton Place, New York
1945
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 10 x 8 inches (25.4 x 20.32cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Reflections through Window
1955
Gelatin silver print
Image and sheet: 9 9/16 × 7 3/16 inches (24.29 × 18.26 cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift of Hallmark Cards, Inc.
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Broken Window
c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Tree Root
c. 1980
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 14 x 11 inches (35.56 x 27.94cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Leaf
1982
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 20 x 16 inches (50.8 x 40.64cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Rock Wall
c. 1985
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 14 x 11 inches (35.56 x 27.94cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993)
Botanical
c. 1985
Gelatin silver print
Unframed: 14 x 11 inches (35.56 x 27.94cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection
© The Brett Weston Archive

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
4525 Oak Street
Kansas City, MO 64111

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 10am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977’ at the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 13th December 2011 – 11th March 2012

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

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924-1976)
Portrait of Maria Gilissen with Tripod
1967
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas with tripod
Approx. 66 x 43 x 24 inches

Mel Bochner (American, b. 1940)
Surface Dis/Tension
1968
Gelatin silver print on aluminum mount
48 x 46″

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
The California Map Project Part I: California
1969, exhibition copy 2011
Twelve inkjet prints of images and a typewritten sheet
Each image, 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in); sheet, 21.6 x 27.9cm (8 1/2 x 11 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
© John Baldessari

Lothar Baumgarten (German, 1944-2018)
The Origin of Table Manners
1971
Chromogenic print
45 x 57.5cm
Collection Sanders, Amsterdam

One of Baumgarten’s early works, The Origin of Table Manners is a wry illustration of the way in which colonial conquerors conflated Western notions of civility with notions of the civilised as part of their alibi for domination. Inspired by a text of the same name by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the work consists of a table draped in a crisp, white tablecloth and set with fine china, with porcupine quills and the feathers of large birds standing in for silverware. When it was first shown, it was installed in a tony French restaurant near Baumgarten’s Paris gallery.

Chris Wiley. “Exhibition Review – Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman Gallery” Nd on the Daylight Books website [Online] Cited 07/11/2024

Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935)
100 Boots
1971-1973
Fifty-one photolithographic postcards
Each 11.1 x 17.8cm (4 3/8 x 7 in)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment
Courtesy Ronald Fedlman Fine Arts, New York, NY
© Eleanore Antin

Ger van Elk (Dutch, b. 1941)
The Rose more Beautiful than Art, but Difficult, therefore Art is Splendid
1972
Slide projection, elven chromogenic slides projected onto watercolour in wooden frame
9 4/5 × 12 2/5 in | 25 × 31.5cm
Courtesy of the artist

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
1973
Portfolio of fourteen photolithographs
Each 24.7 x 32.7cm (9 11/16 x 12 7/8 in)
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
© John Baldessari

Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945)
Ausbrennen des Landkreises Buchen (The Burning of the Rural District of Buchen)
1974
Bound gelatin silver prints with ferric oxide and oil on woodchip paper
62 x 45cm
Hall colleciton

The 1960s and 1970s are recognised as the defining era of the Conceptual Art movement, a period in which centuries held assumptions about the nature of art itself were questioned and dissolved. Until now, the pivotal role that photography played in this movement has never been fully examined. The Art Institute of Chicago has organised the first major survey of influential artists of this period who used photography in ways that went far beyond its traditional definitions as a medium – and succeeded thereby in breaking down the boundaries of all mediums in contemporary art. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 – on view December 13, 2011 through March 11, 2012 – is the first exhibition to explore how artists of this era used photography as a hybrid image field that navigated among painting and sculpture, film, and book arts as well as between fine art and the mass media. More than 140 works by 57 artists will fill the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall in this major exhibition that will be seen only in Chicago.

Bringing to the fore work from the Italian group Arte Povera as well as artists from Eastern Europe who are rarely shown in the United States, Light Years also includes many pieces that have not been on public display in decades by such major artists as Mel Bochner, Tony Conrad, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Emilio Prini. To open the exhibition, the Art Institute has arranged a special outdoor screening of Andy Warhol’s Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. In a first for the United States, Warhol’s Empire will be projected from the Modern Wing’s third floor to be seen on the exterior of the Aon Center on Friday, December 9.

The acceptance of photography as fine art was an evolutionary process. Early 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism articulated a new set of standards for art in which photography played a major role. By the 1930s, modernist photography found a small but influential niche in museum exhibitions and the art market, and vernacular forms such as photojournalism and amateur snapshots became a source of artistic inspiration. Engagement with mass media, exemplified in Pop Art, became prominent in the 1950s. Yet only with the advent of Conceptual Art did artists with training in painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts begin to make and exhibit their own photographs or photographic works as fine art.

Some Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Valie Export took up photography seriously only for a few key months or years; others, like Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Jan Dibbets, and Annette Messager have worked in photography their entire careers. Photography showed the way forward from Minimal Art, Pop Art, and other movements in painting and sculpture. But it came with its own set of questions that these artists addressed with tremendous innovation. Questions of perspective, sequence, scale, and captioning which have a rich history in photography, were answered in entirely new ways and made into central concerns for art in general.

Photography in these artists’ hands was the antithesis of a separate and definable “medium.” It became instead “unfixed”: photobooks, photolithographs, photo canvases, photo grids, slide and film pieces, and even single prints all counted as valid creative forms. The variety of work showcased in Light Years is crucial to conveying the greatest contribution of the Conceptual era: to turn contemporary art into a field without a medium.

Light Years showcases a great number of works that have not been seen together – or at all – since the years around 1970. Victor Burgin’s Photopath, a life-size print of a 60-foot stretch of flooring placed directly on top of the floor that it records, has not been shown in more than 20 years and never in the United States. Likewise being shown for the first time in the U.S. are pieces by Italian artists Gilberto Zorio, Emilio Prini, Giulio Paolini, and others associated with the classic postwar movement Arte Povera. Paolini’s early photo-canvas Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto (1967), an icon of European conceptualism, has only rarely been shown at all after entering a private collection in the early 1970s. Mel Bochner’s Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup (1969) has not been seen since its presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in the now legendary 1970 exhibition Artists and Photographs, from which no visual documentation survives. Equally rare and important early works by Laurie Anderson, Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente, Tony Conrad, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, and many others make the show a revelation for those interested in key figures of new art in the 1960s and ’70s. A special emphasis is placed on artists from Hungary, a centre for photoconceptual activity that has long been overlooked in Western Europe and the United States.

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940-1994)
AW:AB =L:MD (Andy Warhol: Alighiero Boetti = Leonardo: Marcel Duchamp)
1967
Silk screen print with graphite on paper
58.8 x 58.8cm (23 5/16 x 23 5/16 in)
Colombo Collection, Milan
© Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011)
Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y. Material… Solar Energy. Skin Exposure Time. 5 Hours June 1970
1970
Two chromogenic photographic prints, plastic labelling tape, mounted together on green board with graphite annotations
Overall: 81 x 66cm (31 7/8 x 26 in)
Top photo: 20.1 x 25.8cm
Bottom photo: 20.2 x 25.5cm
Image/text area: 41.8 x 25.8cm
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
© Dennis Oppenheim Estate

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
Phone: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 11am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The Art Institute of Chicago website

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Exhibition: ‘Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 25th October 2011 – 11th March 2012

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Untitled [Street Scene, Double Exposure, Halle]
1929-1930
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.8 x 23.7cm (7 x 9 5/16 in)
Gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Another photographer whose work was largely unknown to me. His work can be seen to reference Pictorialism, Eugene Atget, Constructivism and Modernism, the latter in the last three photographs of the Bauhaus buildings at night which are just beautiful! The capture of form, light (emanating from windows) and atmosphere is very pleasing.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

P.S. Don’t be confused when looking at the photographs in the posting. Note the difference in the work of Lynonel and his two sons Andreas and Theodore (nicknamed Lux).

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.

Lucia Moholy (British born Czechoslovakia, 1894-1989)
Untitled [Southern View of Newly Completed Bauhaus, Dessau]
1926
Gelatin silver print
Sheet: 5.7 x 8.1cm (2 1/4 x 3 3/16 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Untitled [Train Station, Dessau]
1928-1929
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.7 x 23.7 cm (6 15/16 x 9 5/16 in.)
Gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Werner Zimmermann (German, 1906-1975)
In Der Werkstatt [In The Workshop]
About 1929
Gelatin silver print
7.9 × 11cm (3 1/8 × 4 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

T. Lux Feininger (American born Germany, 1910-2011)
Metalltanz
1929
Gelatin silver print
Image: 10.8 x 14.4cm (4 1/4 x 5 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of T. Lux Feininger

Widely recognised as a painter, printmaker, and draftsman who taught at the Bauhaus, Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956) turned to photography later in his career as a tool for visual exploration. Drawn mostly from the collections at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, October 25, 2011 – March 11, 2012, presents for the first time Feininger’s unknown body of photographic work. The exhibition is accompanied by a selection of photographs by other Bauhaus masters and students from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection. The Getty is the first U.S. venue to present the exhibition, which will have been on view at the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin from February 26 – May 15, 2011 and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich from June 2 – July 17, 2011. Following the Getty installation, the exhibition will be shown at the Harvard Art Museums from March 30 – June 2, 2012. At the Getty, the exhibition will run concurrently with Narrative Interventions in Photography.

“We are delighted to be the first U.S. venue to present this important exhibition organised by the Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum,” says Virginia Heckert, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum and curator of the Getty’s installation. “The presentation at the Getty provides a unique opportunity to consider Lyonel Feininger’s achievement in photography, juxtaposed with experimental works in photography at the Bauhaus from our collection.”

Lyonel Feininger Photographs

When Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) took up the camera in 1928, the American painter was among the most prominent artists in Germany and had been on the faculty of the Bauhaus school of art, architecture, and design since it was established by Walter Gropius in 1919. For the next decade, he used the camera to explore transparency, reflection, night imagery, and the effects of light and shadow. Despite his early skepticism about this “mechanical” medium, Feininger was inspired by the enthusiasm of his sons Andreas and Theodore (nicknamed Lux), who had installed a darkroom in the basement of their house, as well as by the innovative work of fellow Bauhaus master, László Moholy-Nagy.

Although Lyonel Feininger would eventually explore many of the experimental techniques promoted by Moholy-Nagy and practiced by others at the school, he remained isolated and out of step with the rest of the Bauhaus. Working alone and often at night, he created expressive, introspective, otherworldly images that have little in common with the playful student photography more typically associated with the school. Using a Voigtländer Bergheil camera (on display in the exhibition), frequently with a tripod, he photographed the neighbourhood around the Bauhaus campus and masters’ houses, and the Dessau railway station, occasionally reversing the tonalities to create negative images.

Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939 also includes the artist’s photographs from his travels in 1929-1931 to Halle, Paris, and Brittany, where he investigated architectural form and urban decay in photographs and works in other media. In Halle, while working on a painting commission for the city, Feininger recorded architectural sites in works such as Halle Market with the Church of St. Mary and the Red Tower (1929-1930), and experimented with multiple exposures in photographs such as Untitled (Street Scene, Double Exposure, Halle) (1929-1930), a hallucinatory image that merges two views of pedestrians and moving vehicles.

Since 1892 Feininger had spent parts of the summer on the Baltic coast, where the sea and dunes, along with the harbours, rustic farmhouses, and medieval towns, became some of his most powerful sources of inspiration. During the summers Feininger also took time off from painting, focusing instead on producing sketches outdoors or making charcoal drawings and watercolours on the veranda of the house he rented. Included in the exhibition are photographs Feininger created in Deep an der Rega (in present-day Poland) between 1929 and 1935 which record the unique character of the locale, the people, and the artistic and leisure activities he pursued.

In the months after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus, and prior to Feininger’s departure from Dessau in March 1933, he made a series of unsettling photographs featuring mannequins in shop windows such as Drunk with Beauty (1932). Feininger’s images emphasise not only the eerily lifelike and strangely seductive quality of the mannequins, but also the disorienting, dreamlike effect created by reflections on the glass.

In 1937 Feininger permanently settled in New York City after a nearly 50-year absence, and photography served as an important means of reacquainting himself with the city in which he had lived until the age of sixteen. The off-kilter bird’s eye view he made from his eleventh-floor apartment of the Second Avenue elevated train tracks, Untitled (Second Avenue El from Window of 235 East 22nd Street, New York) (1939), is a dizzying photograph of an American subject in the style of European avant-garde photography, and mirrors the artist’s own precarious and disorienting position between two worlds, and between past and present.

The Bauhaus

Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1928, changed the face of art education with his philosophy of integrating art, craft, and technology with everyday life at the Bauhaus. When Gropius’s newly designed building in Dessau was completed in December 1926, its innovative structure did more than house the various components of the school; it became an integral aspect of life at the Bauhaus and a stage for its myriad activities, from studies and leisurely pursuits to theatrical performances. From the beginning, the camera recorded the architecture as the most convincing statement of Gropius’ philosophy as well as the fervour with which the students embraced it. The photographs in this complementary section of the exhibition also examine the various ways photography played a role at the Bauhaus, even before it became part of the curriculum.

In addition to the collaborative environment encouraged in workshops, students found opportunities to bond during their leisure time, whether in a band that played improvisational music or on excursions to nearby beaches, parks, and country fairs. One of the most active recorders of life at the Bauhaus was Lyonel Feininger’s youngest son, T. Lux, who was also a member of the jazz band.

Masters and students alike at the Bauhaus took up the camera as a tool with which to record not only the architecture and daily life of the Bauhaus, but also one another. Although photography was not part of the original curriculum, it found active advocates in the figures of László Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy. With his innovative approach and her technical expertise, the Moholy-Nagys provided inspiration for others to use the camera as a means of both documentation and creative expression. The resulting photographs, which included techniques such as camera-less photographs (photograms), multiple exposures, photomontage and collages (“photo-plastics”), and the combination of text and image (“typo-photo”), contributed to Neues Sehen, or the “new vision,” that characterised photography in Germany between the two world wars.

It was not until 1929 that photography was added to the Bauhaus curriculum by Hannes Meyer, the new director following Gropius’s departure. A part of the advertising department, the newly established workshop was led by Walter Peterhans, who included technical exercises as well as assignments in the genres of portraiture, still life, advertisement, and photojournalism in the three-year course of study.”

Press release from the J.Paul Getty Museum website

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Untitled [Night View of Trees and Street Lamp, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau]
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.7 x 23.7cm (6 15/16 x 9 5/16 in)
Gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Andreas Feininger (American, 1906-1999)
Stockholm (Shell sign at night)
1935
Gelatin silver print
17.4 x 24.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Estate of Gertrud E. Feininger
© Estate of Gertrud E. Feininger

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Drunk with Beauty
1932
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.9 x 23.9cm (7 1/16 x 9 7/16 in)
Gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Bauhaus
March 22, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.8 x 23.9cm (7 x 9 7/16 in)
Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lyonel Feininger
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

T. Lux Feininger (American born Germany, 1910-2011)
Untitled (Georg Hartmann and Werner Siedhoff with Other Students)
1929
Gelatin silver print
© Estate of T. Lux Feininger

Lyonel Feininger and Photography

Lyonel Feininger took up the camera at the age of 58 in fall 1928. Despite his early skepticism about this “mechanical” medium, the painter was inspired by the enthusiasm of his sons Andreas and Theodore (nicknamed Lux), as well as by the innovative work of László Moholy-Nagy, a fellow master at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.

Photography remained a private endeavour for Feininger. He never exhibited his prints, publishing just a handful during his lifetime and sharing them only with family and a few friends.

Bauhaus Experiments in Photography

Although Feininger explored many of the experimental photographic techniques being practiced at the Bauhaus, he remained isolated and out of step with the rest of the school. Working alone and often at night, he created expressive, introspective, otherworldly images that have little in common with the playful student photography more typically associated with the school.

Using a Voigtländer Bergheil camera (on display in the exhibition), frequently with a tripod, he photographed the neighbourhood around the masters’ houses, the Bauhaus campus, and the Dessau railway station, experimenting with night imagery, reversed tonalities, and severe weather conditions.

Halle, 1929-1931

In 1929 Feininger created numerous photographic sketches to prepare for a series of paintings he was commissioned to make of the city of Halle, Germany.

A photograph of Halle included in the exhibition, Untitled (Bölbergasse, Halle), was the basis for one of these paintings, which is now lost. It was perhaps the most inventive and photographic of the Halle series, transforming a view of an unremarkable street into a dramatic, almost abstract composition through tight framing and an unusual perspective. The painting is visible in a 1931 photograph of the artist’s studio also included in the exhibition

Feininger also made many photographs of his Halle studio and the paintings he produced there. While many are purely documentary, others are sophisticated compositions that explore formal relationships between a particular painting and the space in which it was created, such as the one shown at right.

Feininger would never again use photography so extensively in connection with his paintings as he did in conjunction with the Halle series.

France, 1931

After completing his painting commission in Halle, Feininger spent several weeks in June and July of 1931 in France. In Paris and in the village of Bourron, he created images with his Voigtländer Bergheil camera as well as with his newly acquired Leica (also on display in the exhibition), in which he used 35 mm film for the first time. He also sketched and photographed Brittany on a bicycle tour with his son Lux, capturing views of the architecture and seaside.

In Paris, primed by his recent experience of photographing historic buildings in the streets of Halle, Feininger was drawn to architectural views and urban scenes. On returning from a day trip, he wrote to his wife Julia: “I wandered on foot through the city, flâné! Armed with both cameras, I made photographs… From ‘Boul-Miche’ I crisscrossed through the Quartier Mouffetard… through all possible old narrow and fabulous lanes and I hope that I snapped some very, very good things. Luckily the ‘Leica’ functioned flawlessly” (June 16, 1931, Feininger Papers, Houghton Library).

The Baltic Coast, 1929-1935

Beginning in 1892 Lyonel Feininger spent parts of his summers on the Baltic coast, where the sea and dunes, along with the harbours, rustic farmhouses, and medieval towns, became some of his most powerful sources of inspiration.

Every summer between 1929 and 1935, he used the camera to document family trips to Deep an der Rega (in present-day Poland), where the beach became a playground for his three athletic sons, Andreas, Laurence, and Lux. Feininger looked forward to his time in Deep and the restorative, transformative effect it always had on him.

Shop Windows, 1932-1933

From September 1932, when the National Socialist majority of the Dessau city council voted to close the Bauhaus, through March 1933, when he and his family left for Berlin, Feininger made a series of unsettling photographs that feature mannequins in shop windows. Feininger’s images emphasise not only the eerily lifelike and strangely seductive quality of the mannequins but also the disorienting, dreamlike effect created by reflections on the glass.

In the work shown here, the reflection seems to transport the languid central figure – “drunk with beauty” and oblivious to the camera – beyond the confines of the glass.

Germany to America, 1933 to 1939

Feininger came under increasing scrutiny by the National Socialists, who had stepped up their campaign against the avant-garde after rising to power in January 1933. He produced few paintings during this oppressive period, but continued to photograph regularly in spite of having little access to darkroom facilities. In 1937 he and his wife moved to the United States, renting an apartment in Manhattan – marking his permanent return to New York after an absence of nearly 50 years.

In the years that followed, photography remained an important part of Feininger’s life, though few prints exist from his time in America.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

T. Lux Feininger (American born Germany, 1910-2011)
Untitled (Bauhaus Band)
About 1928
Gelatin silver print
3 1/4 x 4 1/2 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum
© Estate of T. Lux Feininger

Photography at the Bauhaus

The exhibition Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928-1939 features a complementary selection of over 90 photographs from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection made at the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by the architect Walter Gropius. Students entered specialised workshops after completing a preliminary course that introduced them to materials, form, space, colour, and composition. Lyonel Feininger was one of the first masters appointed by Gropius.

The school moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, closing under pressure from the National Socialists in 1933.

The Bauhaus Building as Stage

Walter Gropius’s building in Dessau became an integral aspect of life at the Bauhaus. The camera recorded the architecture as the most convincing statement of Gropius’s philosophy of uniting art, design, and technology with everyday life, and captured the fervor with which the students embraced this philosophy.

Tight framing, dramatic use of light and shadow, and unusual angles from above and below underscored the dynamism generated by the program. The campus’s architecture was often incorporated into rehearsals and performances by the school’s theater workshop.

Masters and Students

Bauhaus masters and students alike took up the camera as a tool for documentation and creative expression.

Photography served as a medium to record student life at the Bauhaus. In addition to the collaborative environment encouraged in classes and workshops, students found opportunities to bond during their leisure time, whether in a band that played improvisational music, in excursions to nearby beaches, parks, and fairs, or at Saturday-night costume parties.

One of the most active recorders of life at the Bauhaus was Lyonel Feininger’s youngest son Theodore, nicknamed Lux, a student who also became a member of the jazz band.

László Moholy-Nagy

At the Bauhaus, photography found active advocates in the figures of László Moholy-Nagy and his wife Lucia Moholy. Hired in 1923 to head the metal workshop and teach the preliminary course, Moholy-Nagy promoted photography as a form of visual literacy and encouraged experimental techniques of what he called a “new vision,” which included dramatic camera angles, multiple exposures, negative printing, collage and photomontage (fotoplastik), the combination of text and image (typofoto), and cameraless photography (the photogram, made by placing objects on photosensitised paper).

Moholy-Nagy did not differentiate between commercial assignments and personally motivated projects; he used the same strategies in both sectors of his practice.

Walter Peterhans

A photography workshop was established at the Bauhaus in 1929, led by Walter Peterhans, a professional photographer and the son of the director of camera lens manufacturer Zeiss Ikon A.G. The three-year course of study included technical exercises as well as assignments in portraiture, still life, advertisement, and photojournalism.

In his own work, Peterhans created haunting still lifes and portraits that are at once straightforward and evocative. Titles such as Portrait of the Beloved, Good Friday Magic, and Dead Hare lend surrealistic overtones to the meticulous arrangements of richly textured, disparate objects that he photographed from above, resulting in ambiguous spatial relationships.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Walter Peterhans (German, 1897-1960)
Untitled (Composition with Nine Glasses and a Decanter)
1929-1933
Gelatin silver print
© Estate Walter Peterhans, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
Bauhaus
March 26, 1929
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.9 x 14.3cm (7 1/16 x 5 5/8 in)
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
“Moholy’s Studio Window” around 10 p.m.
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.8 x 12.8 cm (7 x 5 1/16 in.)
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871-1956)
On the Lookout, Deep an der Rega
1932
Gelatin silver print
Image: 17.7 x 12.7cm (6 15/16 x 5 in)
Gift of T. Lux Feininger, Houghton Library, Harvard University
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Irene Bayer-Hecht (American, 1898-1991)
Untitled [Students on the Shore of the Elbe River, near Dessau (Georg Muche, Hinnerk Scheper, Herbert Bayer, Unknown, Unknown, Marcel Breuer, László Moholy Nagy, Unknown, Xanti Schawinsky)]
1925
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7.5 x 5.4cm (2 15/16 x 2 1/8 in)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The J. Paul Getty Museum
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