“In the cinematic quality of Sternfeld’s photographs lies everlasting revelation into the human condition as we live and die on this, our one Earth.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Joel Sternfeld – along with artists like William Eggleston, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Stephen Shore and Saul Leiter among others – was a pioneer of colour photography, his large format photographs picturing American contemporary life and identity.
His elegant, luxurious, and slightly twisted if not surreal look at the American landscape and life can be seen as “a darkly funny, bleak, but not unromantic vision of America.” Sternfeld, “peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience.”
Both utopian and dystopian at one and the same time, Sternfeld’s photographs have both a quiet eloquence and an unsettling kick in the pants within the same image, for example updating the historical lineage of Walker Evans (documentary) and Robert Frank (outsider) in colour photographs framing the uneasy nature of American life.
Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980, below) reformulates in colour the tract housing photographs of Bill Owens, William A. Garnett or Robert Adams. His Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia (April 1983, below) comments sublimely, subliminally, to the ongoing racism in the genteel South. “There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied… The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems.”1
Sternfeld’s photographs are full of felt insecurities and idiosyncrasies.
The crumpled car indicative of the alienated landscape the barefoot youth is growing up in that is Kansas City, Kansas (May 1983, below); the family with their myriad possessions in a battered Ford pickup truck heading who knows where (riffing on the FSA photographs of the 1930s) in Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); the migrant family “existing” in their wooden shack in South Texas (January 1983, below); and the baby protected, isolated, left to its own devices in Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below) as the family peers over the precipice into the existential depths.
On and on and on we go… from exhausted renegade elephants to realtors in the desert to abandoned uranium mines to limousines and glaciers. The real and the absurd, ludicrous even, living cheek by jowl, on the edge of oblivion.
There is one particular image of Sternfeld’s that is my favourite and that I think sums up the art of this wonderful artist: After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below). To me it perfectly pictures the dichotomy of American life. The have and have nots. The large expensive car and the beautiful, probably gated, community homes – and the desire for money that provides that lifestyle – dashed away by a force of nature, sweeping both the lifestyle, homes and car into the ravine, like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510), the ‘garden of lusts’ (and desires for money, home, possessions) descending into the hell of the chthonic earth. Be careful what you wish for.
Sternfeld’s work is worthy of our kind, calm meditation for in the stillness and cinematic quality of his photographs lies everlasting revelation into the human condition as we live and die on this, our one Earth.
Many thanks to the Bruce Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Joel Sternfeld doesn’t just capture America; he exposes it. With each photograph, he peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience. A pioneer in colour photography, Sternfeld’s lens turns everyday scenes into striking narratives where beauty meets decay, and hope intersects with abandonment. His images, timeless, yet hauntingly relevant – a cross-country journey that invites us to look deeper and question what lies beneath the surface.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects offers a rare encounter with Joel Sternfeld’s profound exploration of the American Dream – its triumphs, fractures, and quiet absurdities. Since its first release in 1987, this series has stood as a seminal work in colour photography, redefining the medium and reshaping our perception of American landscapes. Like his contemporaries William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld used colour to move beyond documentation, crafting layered narratives that invite both reflection and critique. On view through January 5, 2025, Sternfeld’s lens frames America as it is – flawed, resilient, and enduringly hopeful.
In Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Sternfeld confronts us with a haunting testament to industrial intrusion on sacred land. The muted pinks and warm ochres spread across the landscape, evoking the natural beauty of the Navajo Nation’s desert. Yet, at its heart, the photograph holds a darker, fractured reality – the scars of industry etched deeply into the land, an intrusion upon both the environment and the community’s heritage. Sternfeld’s light is gentle yet harsh, and his careful composition balances the serenity of nature against the unease of contamination. It’s a scene that commands attention, evoking reverence while quietly asking us to grapple with the unsettling impact of human intervention.
Coeburn, Virginia brings Sternfeld’s eye for subtle irony to life within the seemingly serene environment of a small town. Here, the frame captures the tension between the landscape’s lushness and signs of quiet disrepair houses sitting precariously against a verdant backdrop, hinting at lives lived in the margins. Through muted earthy tones and a sparing splash of green, Sternfeld avoids romanticising rural life, instead highlighting the fragile balance between nature’s persistence and the impermanence of human structures. The result is a scene that feels both intimate and detached, inviting us to see Coeburn not as a forgotten place but as a testament to resilience and transience.
In Canyon Country, California, Sternfeld turns his lens to the sublime – a canyon that feels at once vast and void, a sprawling testament to the untouched beauty of the American West. Here, the land stretches endlessly, exuding a calm that contrasts sharply with the bustling, culturally charged image of California we often imagine. Sternfeld’s framing, balanced with a quiet geometry, amplifies the canyon’s emptiness while subtly pointing to the tension between this natural expanse and the human inclination to intrude, consume, and commercialise. It’s a scene that invites introspection, leaving viewers to consider California as both escape and spectacle, a space layered with expectation yet stripped bare.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects invites us to traverse Sternfeld’s America – a land as haunting as it is beautiful. With a careful eye for color, geometry, and narrative tension, Sternfeld transforms these landscapes into timeless scenes, at once grounded and surreal. Each photograph holds a sense of melancholic grandeur, inviting viewers not just to observe but to confront the quiet dramas embedded in America’s vast, varied, and vulnerable terrain. In Sternfeld’s vision, America is an open road of paradoxes – where beauty meets desolation, and where each mile reveals a new truth we can’t ignore.
Giuliana Brida. “Oct 30 Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects | The Bruce Museum,” in Musee: Vanguard of Photography Culture on the Bruce Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 28/11/2024
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Kansas City, Kansas, May 1983 (below); at centre, Putney, Vermont, October 1978; and at right, Canyon Country, California June 1983 (above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at centre, Sternfeld’s A Bus Stop in Tucson, Arizona (July 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Bikini Contest, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (March 1983, below); and at right, The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); and at right, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s South Texas (January 1983, below); at second left, Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, above); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, above); at second right, Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); and at right, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left centre, Sternfeld’s Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); at centre, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below); and at right, Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington (June 1979, below)
Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects has come to be regarded as one of the important early monuments of colour photography. Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was one of a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore, who in the 1960s and 1970s began exploring the potential of colour photography as a fine art.
Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of colour and a distinctive personal vision. Inspired by the photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he embarked on an ambitious quest to document America, traversing the continent from 1978 to 1983 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. American Prospects is the result.
Although Sternfeld saw deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he also went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery. His goal was not to document the failure of the American Dream, but to record what was great, vital, and regenerative about this nation. On one hand, Sternfeld’s imagery includes damaged landscapes and industry in decline. He delights in the curious, bizarre, and accidental in the everyday. Scenes of an elephant collapsed on the road or a firefighter buying a pumpkin while a fire rages in the background convey a sense of absurdity. And yet underlying the series is a vision of a beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of the variety and resiliency of the American people. Even today, Sternfeld is optimistic about the American prospect: “America has a tremendous capacity to right itself,” he noted recently. Sternfeld’s vision is as complicated as the nation. His images are deep, rich, and powerful specifically because they are complex and conflicted, at once both critical and affectionate.
Guest curated by Robert Wolterstorff, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects will mount more than forty large scale colour prints, among them many of the most iconic images from the series, along with others that have never before been exhibited. It coincides with a new edition of American Prospects published by Steidl Press.
Text from the Bruce Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Earl Garvey Realtor, The Mojave Desert, California (July 1979, below); and at right, Wyoming (1994)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Abandoned Freighter, Homer Alaska (July 1984, below); and at second right, Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984); and at right, Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Navajo Nation (1982)
Beauty, sadness and humor are woven through complex portraits of America in “Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects.” On view at the Bruce Museum Oct. 3, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, the exhibition is an ode to the artist’s 1987 landmark photography book, “American Prospects,” and coincides with a new edition published by Steidl Press. The Bruce mounted more than 40 large-scale color prints, ranging from Sternfeld’s most iconic images to never-before-exhibited photographs.
Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was an early adopter of color photography as fine art. He explored the medium’s potential in the 1960s and 70s with a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt and Stephen Shore. Sternfeld initially focused on New York street photography and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. Longing to explore beyond the confines of the urban grid, the award supported his purchase of a Volkswagen camper and a wooden 8 x 10 view camera, his tools as he embarked on a multi-year quest to capture scenes across the country.
The work of documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank inspired Sternfeld to observe people and places across the United States and record what was great, vital and regenerative about the nation. Despite sensing deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery, delighting in the curious, bizarre and accidental moments in everyday life.
Sternfeld traversed the nation from 1978 to 1987, taking thousands of photographs. His large-format view camera accommodated 8 x 10-inch sheets of color negative film, with a small shutter opening that achieved great depth of field. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston used the same methods in their famous black-and-white photographs, producing razor-sharp detail and an infinite range of tones. Sternfeld’s pictures were composed carefully around color harmonies, often focusing on pastel hues of two or three dominant colors and were guided by a strong sense of geometry and order despite the visual chaos of life they portrayed.
The resulting images revealed beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, damaged landscapes and industry in decline and the variety and resiliency of the American people. The artist has referred to the underlying theme of his work as the utopian vision of America contrasted with the dystopian one. The first edition of “American Prospects” featured 55 images created from four-colour plates that capture both America’s beauty and its flaws. The book was published to wide acclaim and is regarded as an important early monument of color photography.
“Joel Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of color and a distinctive personal vision,” said guest curator Robert Wolterstorff, the former Susan E. Lynch executive director of the Bruce Museum. “His powerful images are imbued with a sense of irony and depict a vision of Americans that is as complicated as the nation, inviting contemplation on ideas of paradise versus reality through modern conceptions of landscape.”
“American Prospects” includes a 1978 photograph of a farm market in McLean, Virginia that depicts a uniformed fireman shopping for pumpkins as a house fire rages in the background, the autumnal colours coordinating with the flames. Published in Life magazine, the absurd image is one of the most recognised scenes of Sternfeld’s career. Other subjects include an elephant collapsed on a road in Washington state, clouds approaching a busy waterpark in Florida and the landing of the space shuttle Columbia at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
Sternfeld’s work captures details of specific moments in time, serving as an archive for the future as well as a caution toward photography’s manipulative power. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Sternfeld said, “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say.”
Sternfeld is based in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rome Prize. His work has been exhibited in institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), the Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco).
Press release from the Bruce Museum
Joel Sternfeld short biography
Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.
Ever since the publication of his landmark study, American Prospects in 1987 his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).
On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.
Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site… It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).
All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.
His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation – they are an archive for the future.
Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Brattleboro, Vermont (October 1978)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Roadside Rest Area, White Sands, New Mexico (September 1980); and at right, The Eagles of Kayenta, Junior High School at Football Practice, Kayenta, Arizona, Navajo Nation (August 1986)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Portage Glacier, Alaska (August 1984, below); and at right, Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s After a Tornado, Grand Isle, Nebraska (June 1980, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Grafton, West Virginia (February 1983); and at right, Prince Manufacturing, Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania (November 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Buckingham, Pennsylvania (August 1978); and at right, Pendleton, Oregon (1980)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980); and at right, Lake Oswego, Oregon (June 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at right, Sternfeld’s Near Interlochen, Michigan (February 1981)
“in the derivation of the word “autopsy” we may understand that these photos are as much our discontinuous nature (we die) as they are about the pictured bodies.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
I’ve posted on this exhibition once before when it was shown at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. While there some photographs that are the same in both postings there are new photographs to admire here. So, let’s have some fun with the text!
I started playing around with ideas in my head… and instead of the “autopsy of the spectacle” – an examination to discover the cause of the spectacle – I inverted that statement to make it the “spectacle of the autopsy”.
What immediately came to mind when I did this was the spectacle, the spectacular, painting that is Rembrandt’s early masterpiece The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632, below), that tableau – French, late 17th century (in the sense ‘picture’, figuratively ‘picturesque description’) – of figures, spectators, gathered around the corpse of the “criminal Aris Kindt (alias of Adriaan Adriaanszoon), who was convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging.”1
Fast forward a few centuries to the “Murder is my business” photographs of Arthur Fellig (alias Weegee) and I again observe spectators gathered around the body of a corpse, either physically examining it or wilfully ignoring it (Drowning victim, Coney Island c. 1940, below), where the men “examine” the drowning victim surrounded by men that stare and the women who smiles for the camera. With the crowd behind, all are physically and metaphorically drawn in to the spectacle of the autopsy and the presence of the camera. “”Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well.”
In other photographs such as Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below) and Body of Dominic Didato (1936, below) Weegee’s camera becomes the spectator, standing in for us as we crane our necks to get a better view of the action. Together, the camera and the viewer, perform what could be seen as a form of “necropsy” – from the Greek words nekros (meaning “corpse”) and opsis (meaning “to view”), and together they mean “to look at the dead body with naked eyes” – that is, a macroscopic examination of a dead body.
Witness, and we do stand witness in Weegee’s photographs looking at dead bodies with naked eyes, the perspectival viewpoint of the bodies of both Andrew Izzo and Dominic Didato similar to the elongated perspective in the painting by Rembrandt, the shading of the face in that painting – the umbra mortis (shadow of death) – now supplanted by the reversed body, head shaded / covered in blood, surmounted with out flung gun and boater.
While these photographs fail “to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief, horror (as if the pictorial repetition of events were a way of understanding these events, being able to live with them)”2 finally, in the derivation of the word “autopsy” – and in the spectacular images of Weegee – we may begin to understand that these photographs are as much about us, the spectator and viewer, and our discontinuous nature (we die) as they are about the pictured bodies. For the meaning of the word autopsy – early 17th century (in the sense ‘personal observation’): from modern Latin autopsia, from Greek, from autoptos ‘self-revealed’, from autos ‘self’ + optos ‘seen’ – reveals as much about ourselves as it does the object of our attention.
Looking at mortality with naked eyes, our self-revealed, our self seen, reflected back to us in the photographs of Weegee.
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Weegee knew the power of imagery to speak to larger truths about human nature and society. He captured New York as it truly was: gritty, raw, and filled with contrasts. His work turned the everyday violence and chaos of the city into art, making the mundane extraordinary. In Weegee’s own words, “I picked a story that meant something.” He had an instinct for identifying moments that held deeper significance, even if they were just snapshots of daily life in a chaotic metropolis.”
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 Oil on canvas 216.5cm x 169.5cm (85.2 in x 66.7 in) Mauritshuis, The Hague
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid showing at right Weegee’s Self-portrait, Distortion (1955, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid showing at left Weegee’s Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below); at second left, [Outline of a Murder Victim] (1942); and at right, Body of Dominic Didato, (1936, below)
Dominick Didato, aka Terry Burns, who you see above in a photo made by Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, lies dead on a New York City street where he was gunned down today in 1936. He was killed for interfering with rackets run by Lucky Luciano. It was a low percentage play. Luciano was literally the most powerful mobster in the U.S. at the time, and as the saying goes, you come at the king, you best not miss.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
The work of Arthur H. Fellig, known as Weegee (Zolochiv, Ukraine, 1899 – New York, 1968), is, in a sense, an enigma that this exhibition seeks to unravel. His photographs of the underworld and the fringe circles of New York nightlife in the 1930s and 1940s quickly gained wide international recognition. However, the same cannot be said for the photographs he took after settling in Hollywood in 1948: images of Californian high society and the social life of major film celebrities, whom he often portrayed in a markedly ironic or satirical manner, sometimes (as in the case of the “photocaricatures”) as a result of his later work in the laboratory. At the time, critics emphasised the radical opposition between the two periods, openly praising the former and dismissing the latter. In these photographs of his Californian experience (1948-1951), Weegee expressed his critical vision of society and culture from a perspective that anticipated the well-known cultural and social analyses of ‘the society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord).
Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle aims to show the profound coherence that, beyond their stylistic and thematic differences, links these two stages, as well as to highlight the relevance of the critical perspective from which Weegee’s images expose the features and mechanisms of our time as a ‘society of the spectacle’.
Exhibition organised by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE.
The above photo shows the murder scene of a mid-level gangster named Joseph “Little Joe” La Cava, and occurred in New York City on Mulberry Street at the Feast of San Gennaro today in 1939. We’ll go out on a limb and say the festive atmosphere took a fatal hit too. Luckily, the celebration usually went for a week, so we suppose it was salvaged. La Cava was gunned down along with Rocco “Chickee” Fagio… Also interesting, cops being cops, the flatfoot closest to La Cava looks incongruously jocular as he chats with a higher-up. If this wasn’t the most unforgettable Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy’s history it had to be close.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
“Distraught and pale with grief, Irma Twiss Epstein, 32-year-old nurse, whose own baby died 18 months ago, is booked on a homicide charge in the death of a baby whose crying, she said, ‘drove me crazy.’ Miss Epstein, Bronx Maternity Hospital nurse, is accused of giving a powerful drug to the 20 hour-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Castro Vallee, whose only other child died after birth 11 years ago. Another infant, 4 days old, was revived by nurses and doctors after Miss Epstein was found in a hallway hysterically sobbing: ‘eyedropper, baby.’ Hospital records showed she entered service there in 1940 and after nine months took a leave of absence to have a baby. Police said she had been in Bellevue’s psychopathic ward two years ago for observation after tasking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She told police at Morrisania Station she expected to be married soon.”
PM Daily, December 23, 1940 quoted on the International Center of Photography website
A pivotal figure of American photography in the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur H. Fellig, known by his pseudonym Weegee (Zolochiv, 1899 – New York, 1968) was an immensely popular artist thanks to the news photographs he took in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. This new exhibition aims to reveal a lesser-known facet of his career: the work he did between 1948 and 1951 in Hollywood, where he focused on the “society of the spectacle”.
Key themes
High-impact photographs
Some of Weegee’s photographs were veritable “visual punches”. This is true of the pictures he took of murders, corpses, fires and prisoners during the years spent covering crimes and accidents in New York, as well as of his later work, like the series showing circus artist Egle Zacchini being fired from a cannon at a speed of 100 metres per second, or his photo-caricatures of Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy and other prominent personalities. His images almost always had a powerful impact on viewers, making them think not only about the scene they were contemplating but also about how they were looking at it.
The society of the spectacle
First published in 1967, Society of the Spectacle is one of the most important books by the philosopher Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International. It paints an incisive portrait of contemporary society, presumably replaced by its represented image. Throughout the work, Debord critically exposes the theory and practice of the spectacle, explaining how it governs our experience of time, history, goods, territory and happiness. In the twenty-first century, when immediacy reigns supreme, Debord’s ideas resound as the severest, most lucid assessment of the meanness and bondage of a society – the society of the spectacle – in which we all live.
Critique of the society of the spectacle
Class consciousness and empathy for the disadvantaged permeate Weegee’s work, as he never forgot his humble beginnings. Yet his most famous images are snapshots of accidents, fires and murders, in which he underscores the idea that bystanders are also spectators of the tragedies they contemplate, watching a scene in much the same way as cinema-goers watch Hollywood films (which are not all that different to the events captured by Weegee’s camera). He also used trick photography to critique the image of actors, singers, broadcasters, politicians and other public figures.
Weegee’s “satires”, as he called them, were visionary, appearing several years before the Situationist International first posited its theories. As Clement Che roux, curator of the exhibition, has pointed out, during his first period in New York, Weegee proved that the tabloids were selling news as a spectacle, and after 1945 he exposed how the media system radically spectacularised celebrities.
Biography
Weegee was born Usher Felig on 12 June 1899 to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, now in western Ukraine. At the age of ten he travelled to the United States to be reunited with his father, and immigration officers on Ellis Island registered him as Arthur Fellig. At 14, having settled into New York’s Lower East Side, a poor neighbourhood at the time, he left school and started working to help support his family. After trying several jobs, he became an itinerant photographer. He subsequently worked for the photographers Duckett & Adler and later in the ACME Newspictures agency laboratories. In 1935, he went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. He began using the pseudonym Weegee around 1937, and in 1941, the year he joined the Photo League (a group of freelance photographers who firmly believed in the emancipating power of images and fought for social justice), he started signing his prints as “Weegee the Famous”. In 1943, his work was included in a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 1945 he compiled his best photos in a book titled Naked City, which was a huge critical and commercial success. In the spring of 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood, where he worked in cinema as a technical consultant and occasionally as an actor. In addition to photographing parties, he devised several trick photography techniques and used them to caricature celebrities. After four years on the West Coast, in December 1951 he returned to New York, although he did not resume his former practice. From that moment until his death on 26 December 1968, Weegee mainly capitalised on his fame to publish more books, do lecture tours, and widely circulate his photo-caricatures in the press.
The exhibition
There is a mystery in Weegee’s work which the exhibition now on view at Fundacio n MAPFRE aims to unravel. From very early on, the artist was internationally renowned for his photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s and printed in the New York tabloids: corpses, fires, detainees in police wagons, etc. But Weegee had another group of works which, at first glance, might seem diametrically opposed to his reportage: the photo-caricatures of public figures created in Hollywood between 1948 and 1951. Critics highlighted the opposition between these two periods, praising the former and rejecting the latter. Weegee: Autopsy of the Spectacle attempts to reconcile both bodies of work by showing that, stylistic differences aside, they are fundamentally consistent in their portrayal of the “society of the spectacle” which was taking shape in the United States at that time.
In his early years, the artist photographed lurid, violent subjects, but those shots were often deeply ironic and exposed the “spectacular” nature of the depicted events. His images were printed in newspapers, and Weegee often included spectators or fellow photographers – individuals gawking at a traffic accident or murder scene – in the fore or background of his compositions. In a consistent manner, during the second part of his career the artist mocked the Hollywood spectacle: the short-lived fame, the adoring crowds who flocked to see “celebrities”, and the banal society scene. Weegee personally edited and altered these ironic, satirical images in the lab, anticipating the theories of the Situationist International and the critique of the society of the spectacle and its commodification, and always acted in consonance with his own political convictions.
The exhibition curated by Clement Che roux, director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, features over one hundred photographs and a variety of documentary material. With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, the itinerary is divided into three sections and offers a sweeping overview of his work.
The spectacle of news reportage
In 1935, Weegee went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. Thanks to a radio tuned to the police frequency which he installed in his car – basically a mobile office where he kept everything he needed to take photos – Weegee was always one of the first to arrive at the scene of a crime, fire or traffic accident. It was the Prohibition era, and gang violence was rampant in New York. Every night for ten years, Weegee covered the city’s accidents and crimes with flash photographs and, starting in 1940, did the same for the NP Daily, a newspaper with Marxist leanings. As the artist himself confessed, “Murder is my business.”
In addition to fires and crimes, during this period Weegee also took highly expressive portraits of the individuals who emerged from police wagons after a raid. At a time when it was considered criminal for a man to wear women’s clothes, some of those detainees tried to hide their faces while others basked in the attention, exiting the vehicle as if making a stage entrance. With these images, the artist emphasised the idea that social relations and the world in general were becoming pure spectacle.
At the same time, Weegee never forgot his roots as the son of poor Jewish immigrants and was keenly aware of the living conditions of the most destitute. For this reason, he also captured homeless people and acts of racial and everyday discrimination against the underprivileged, making his photographs “genuine social documents”.
The society of spectators
“The Curious Ones” is the title of a chapter in Naked City, the compilation of Weegee’s best photographs that he published in 1945. Thanks to that book, which was a huge critical and commercial success, he began to attend New York’s important society events much more frequently, photographing them exactly as he would a crime or accident scene. This is illustrated by two images taken in New York on 22 November 1943, The Critic and In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night. The artist was particularly interested in representing human emotions and tried to prevent his subjects from altering their expressions to pose for the camera. Little by little, he began to portray the witnesses to events that happened after dark in New York City, attempting to reflect the entire range of possible human reactions to a tragedy, from astonishment to nervous laughter or tears. Other photographers who came to the same scenes also caught his interest, prompting him to reflect on the very act of taking photos.
With all this repertoire, Weegee showed how ordinary individuals became voyeurs by treating the scene of the crime as a theatrical stage. Recalling the moment in 1939 when he took the photograph Balcony Seats at a Murder, he explained, “The detectives are all over […]. To me this was drama. This was like a backdrop. I stepped back about a hundred feet. I used flash powder and I got this whole scene. The people on the fire escapes, the body, everything!”
The comedy of the spectacular
In 1967, Guy Debord wrote that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” in his book Society of the Spectacle. Weegee, who understood this very well, photographed every sight that struck him as out of the ordinary. Fascinated by the makeup of crowds, he portrayed them enjoying a peaceable Sunday afternoon at the beach on Coney Island or celebrating the end of World War II in Chinatown; but he was also drawn to carnival and circus attractions and to cinemas, where he photographed movie-goers in the dark, engrossed in the film on screen.
Tired of murders and crime scenes, in 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood and traded the direct, documentary-style photography he had practised in New York for manipulated images that required hours in the lab. During his stint in California, he turned his lens upon actors, singers, broadcasters and society figures. His vision of these individuals was not usually very flattering, photographing them from behind or in awkward situations. In some cases he would later distort the images using a kaleidoscope, photomontage or multiple exposure. Weegee created what he called “photo-caricatures”, a tradition that started among amateur photographers in the late nineteenth century and was originally known as “photographic amusements”, although he stated in his autobiography that his photo-caricatures had never been done before. Though a celebrity himself, the artist used photography to criticise the star system.
Catalogue
The exhibition, organised by Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in partnership with Fundacion MAPFRE, is accompanied by a publication titled Weegee. Autopsia del espectáculo, in which the majority of the images on display are reproduced. The catalogue contains a text by Clement Che roux, the show’s curator and director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and two more essays by Cynthia Young, a curator specialised in photojournalism, and Isabelle Bonnet, a lecturer at the Sorbonne and photography expert. The writer, curator and photography lecturer David Campany has also made an important contribution to the volume, in which he compares Weegee and Stanley Kubrick based on their collaboration on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The original edition in French was published by Éditions Textuel with Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Spanish-language edition has been co-published with Fundación MAPFRE.
There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948 and 1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his career. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
The News Spectacle
“News photography is my meat.” After many years as a printer for press agencies, Weegee started his own business as a photojournalist in 1935. In order to be the first to arrive at the site of a murder, fire, or traffic accident, he set up a radio in his car, tuned to the police frequency. For a decade, using a flash, he took photographs of news in New York every night.
Weegee Himself
“I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.
Murder Is My Business
“I used to be an expert on murder.” From 1935 to 1945, Weegee spent his nights roaming the city looking for shocking images. Even after Prohibition, New Yorkers’ dreams were punctuated by explosion sounds caused by rival gangs settling scores. The photographer learned to create expressive images which the booming tabloids were particularly fond of.
Off Road
“Sudden death for one…, sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents, introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.
The Tragedy of Fire
“Murders and fires (my two best sellers, my bread and butter).” In the darkness of the city, like a moth to a flame, Weegee took photographs of fires. The urban landscape of New York, with its many substandard buildings, provided him with many such opportunities. The combination of fire, smoke and gushing water offered a particularly photogenic spectacle that the press adored.
On The Spot
“The Parade never ceases as the ‘pie’ Wagons unload.” When he wasn’t in the field, Weegee waited at the entrance of the police station for the prison wagon to return with its load of offenders arrested in the night. At a time when it was a criminal act for a man to dress as a woman, some tried to hide their faces, while others took the opportunity to step out of the wagon as if onto a stage.
In Flagrante Delicto
“When criminals tried to cover their faces, it was a challenge to me. I literally uncovered not only their faces, but their black souls as well.” Faced with Weegee’s scrutinising lens, defendants often tried to conceal their identities. In his autobiography, the photographer recounts the many stratagems he developed to oblige them to reveal themselves. Clearly, they didn’t always work.
Social Documents
“The people in these photographs are real.” Coming from a Jewish family who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century, experiencing extreme poverty upon their arrival, Weegee was quite aware of standards of living among the underprivileged. He took photographs of ordinary forms of discrimination, people with small trades, and the homeless. His photographs can be seen, in his own words, as “veritable social documents.”
Society of the Spectators
“The Curious ones” is a chapter title from Weegee’s best-seller: Naked City. The photographer takes an interest in people who, like himself, indulge unreservedly in the act of looking. He often includes them in the scenes he photographs, framing them in close-up to create veritable portraits of on-lookers. His work is a particularly striking testimony to the society of spectators developing in the United States at the time.
Meta Photo Co.
“I have no time for messages in my pictures.” Yet Weegee often included other photographers in his compositions as if, through this mise en abyme, he was inciting people to reflect on what it meant to take a photograph. An image from 1942, published in PM’s Weekly, is a good example. Three reporters and the words “Meta Photo Co.” on a window in the background of the photograph indicate there is something to be learned here about photography itself.
The Critic
“‘What is the best picture you ever took?’ Without hesitation I answer, ‘A picture I took at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. I consider this to be my masterpiece.'” The circumstances were contrived. Weegee went to a working-class neighbourhood to pick the woman up, then brought her to the entrance of this gala. The image illustrates the widening gap between the rich and the poor under American capitalism. It also reflects the critical power of a simple look.
Looking at Death
“I stepped back far enough to take in the whole scene: the puzzled detectives examining the body, the people on the fire escape, watching… it was like a stage setting.” Balcony seat at a murder: by including spectators in many of his images, Weegee imagines crime scenes as theatrical scenes, underscoring how American society transforms news into spectacle.
Spectators
“When I take a picture of a fire, I forget all about the burning building and I go out to the human element.” After years of tirelessly documenting events of the New York night, Weegee began taking photographs of the individuals who witnessed them. He was thus able to take portraits of groups expressing the full range of human reactions to tragedy, from surprise and tears to nervous laughter.
Out of Frame
“The curious […] ones always rushing by […] but always finding time to stop and look at.” On July 28, 1945, at 9:40 a.m., as a thick fog enveloped New York, a small plane crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Weegee photographed spectators trying to catch a glimpse of it. People discovering his photographs in newspapers found themselves in the same position as these observers, a voyeuristic one.
Seeing in the Dark
“It’s hard to photograph people and get natural expressions. The minute they see the camera, they ‘freeze’ up on you.” Weegee was especially interested in depicting emotions on the faces of observers. Concerned that his presence would change their reaction, he had the ingenious idea of taking their photographs in the darkness of a theatre using infrared film. The result is a series of stunning portraits of wide-eyed spectators.
She Gestures of Art
“I used the same technique […] whether it was a murder, a pickpocket, or a society ball.” Following the success of his book Naked City, Weegee was routinely invited to high society events in New York, which he took pleasure in photographing as news items. In October 1945, at the opening of an exhibition by painter Stuart Davis at the MoMA, he captured the strange gestures of the art world.
The Theatre of the Spectacular
“Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well. He took photographs of all that was visually uncommon: crowds at Coney Island, fairground attractions, stars, acrobats, clowns… and finally, himself. A few years before the Situationist International, he pioneered a visual form of critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
In the Company of Crowds
“And this is Coney Island on a quiet Sunday afternoon […]. A crowd of over a MILLION is usual and attracts no attention.” On a Brooklyn beach, in Times Square or in Chinatown celebrating victory over Nazi power, Weegee never missed the opportunity to photograph crowds. Beyond “mass ornament,” theorised a few years earlier by Siegfried Kracauer, he was fascinated by the ways in which the people constitute themselves as images.
The Cannonball Woman
“Punch in Pictures.” That’s how one magazine described an article on Weegee. The scoop-hunter knows better than anyone else how to produce hard-hitting images. In 1943, Weegee photographed circus performer Egle Zacchini, nicknamed Miss Victory, or The Cannonball Woman, shot out of a cannon at 360 feet per second. As war was raging in Europe, it was a strange metaphor for the role of women in the conflict.
A Circus Community
“Someday they, too, will be stars.” Weegee especially enjoyed hanging around behind the scenes of fairgrounds in the suburbs. He photographed the way a performer at Sammy’s Bar placed her money in her stocking. Elsewhere, a dwarf with a forced smile, a melancholy clown slumped in his dressing room, what remains of the parade after the crowd passes by. Many of his photographs display the ambiance of a sad party.
Photo-caricatures
“I was tired of gangsters lying dead with their guts spewed in the gutter, of women crying at tenement-house fires, of automobile accidents […]. I was off to Hollywood.” In the City of Angels, Weegee not only photographs the celebrities he meets, he delights in making caricatures of them with what he calls his “elastic lens,” now mocking the star system.
The Spyglass
“I have used the camera to provoke good old-fashioned belly laughs.” In 1963, Weegee was invited to the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. The director was a great fan of Weegee, and had begun his own career as a press photographer. On set, Weegee applied a new technique for the tubular distortion of faces, as if one were looking through the small end of a spyglass.
Trick Inventory
“Their originality was such that they sold like hot cakes.” This is how Weegee described his photo-caricatures, the first of which appeared in papers in 1947. For 20 years and up until his death in 1968, he would regularly publish these works. Around fifty of the publications are known today. There are most likely many more. In his daily work, the photo-caricature came to definitively replace the news item.
Weegee, Ouija
“I’m called Weegee which comes from Ouija.” The pseudonym Weegee refers to the name of a board used in seances to decipher messages from the beyond. Weegee liked to describe himself as a “psychic photographer”, able to predict in advance where a story will take place. On the scene, he said he photographed using his “third eye.” Whether clairvoyant or voyeur, Weegee was able to see, better than anyone else, transformations in American society.
I wrote this philosophical text as a flow of consciousness, a layered exposition of my thoughts on space, photography, identity and belonging. I hope I have done the subject justice… in freedom.
within, bridge and fissure
The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space. So observes Wendy Garden.1
The spaces that bodies move in, through and over are fluid spaces, permeable spaces, fragmentary and transitory spaces. They are also spaces of displacement and distance which form a kind of ‘alienation’ which derives from the Latin alienare: to render foreign, other.2
Thus the “border” between one and the other – that fluid penumbra (a peripheral or indeterminate area or group), that oscillation of energy across the line – must be constructed to be legible and fixed by those that seek to control such spaces, through the imposition of a coded representation of space itself.3 The border wall between Mexico and America is one such imposition of a coded representation of space which, seeks to control an/other. It is a “direct translation of ideology and temporality into material and spatial culture”3 which masks as much as it represents, through a selective representation of history and memory.
Through systems of surveillance (e.g. CCTV, aerial surveillance, phone taps) and control (e.g. police, government, the judiciary), in which one reinforces the other in a never ending circle, and in the of naming of the ‘other’ (Foucault) – those with privilege embedded and thus emboldened within colonial and imperial systems seek to confirm hegemonic structures of power: for example, who can travel where, who has access adequate to health care, who is seen as an ill/legal alien. “Although Foucault rarely alludes to it in a clear-cut manner, what he describes in Discipline and Punish is the formation of the discursive regime of surveillance which is a central element in the expression of the modern state.”4
But we can counter this narrative.
In his influential book Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996), the American postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja (1940-2015) proposes the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. Firstspace “is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality.”5 Much early photographic practice is rooted in Firstspace, in the passive representation of an undeniable truth, the veracity of the image and its representation of the referent: this existed because it was captured by the camera.
Thirdspace on the other hand, “contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism.”6
Thus photographic Thirdspace is an amorphous space of both the real and imagined and is the vibration of energy, doubled! – the real and imagined spaces of everyday life, and the real and imagined spaces of photography through which we can contest the contexts of becoming, belonging.
These Thirdspaces of the real and imagined are not spaces of universalising totality which then would be constitutive of history or memory, but in-between spaces in which differences, memories and histories are not denied or negated, hidden, forgotten or repressed. It is not the segregation of black and white, either/or, but the grey areas in-between that interest me: those fluid zones of difference – think Tarkovsky’s film Stalker 1979, in which a guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone.
“The Thirdspace – in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history”a – allows that none of these couples, such as the phenomenal and the noumenal, can be divided by an either/or attitude. “This… does not mean differences are denied, instead, it most of all means the inevitable reciprocity of any pair of definitions. In such a case both leave a mark on the other. It is a question of both-and – how each of the pair influences the other”b.”7
Both leave a mark on each other. And it is in this marking that social and political relations can be reconfigured, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”8 Thus, the physical aspects as well as the attitudes and habitual practices of ‘space’, the arrangements of space and the socialisation of space, “is an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all ‘space’ is social space ….”9
Following, we can say that social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent (Soja).
“Social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. Cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. While elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. Behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, cultural resistance by Maori.
Indeed, dominant ideologies such as those which are religious, political, economic, ethnic or racial, continually define or redefine ‘deviance’ or ‘otherness’ to maintain their power and landscapes of dominance. Space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and of order and propriety.”10
But as Wael Salah Fahmi insightfully observes, we must not fall into the idea that juxtapositions of social space are just alternating choices of “either/or” or acts of simple resistance: “But “juxtaposition” might imply alternating choices, an “either/or.” Perhaps instead we might think of Lefebvre’s image of interpenetrating spaces, one violating another, yet rising up from within the very “fundament” of the space that wishes to ignore its existence. Here, perhaps, is a spatial dialectic that does not fall into a binary opposition of simple resistance.”11
Spaces that rise up from within each other!
Change that emanates from within through the actions and innovations of social agents… human beings, artists!
Here, the thoughts of that glorious Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco (b. 1960) – quoted by Jean Fisher – whose work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing are particularly cogent.
“Two imperatives are set in motion: to alter the perceptions of those with privileged access to hegemonic structures of power, and to change the sense of disempowerment of those deprived of political agency. “What is more fundamentally at stake than freedom,” Fusco argues, “is power – the power to choose, the power to determine value, and the right of the more powerful to consume without guilt”: entitlements that Eurocentric cultures have assumed for themselves at the expense of others. These aims are advanced through an exploration of the relationship between the politics and practices of cultural difference and social inequity, in which intellectual, experiential, and artistic alliances are built across nationalistic and geographical boundaries …””12
As Wael Salah Fahmi notes, “spaces constantly juxtapose themselves one against the other” – in real life, in art, in photography. The media saturated world of the “total flow” of images is resistant to interpretation, yet in real life – and in this exhibition – the juxta/position (mapping of space), juxta/posing (posing for the camera) of one space against another, “of image to image calls to attention a line of conflict, either fissure or bridge.”13
The images in this posting draw our attention to fissures (George Rodriguez, Susan Meiselas, Ada Trillo) and bridges (Graciela Iturbide, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke). They also possess a multivalent narrative, allowing the work to be accessible to different interpretations, meanings, and values: a new door or path opens up on the basis of very diverse needs and objectives. These images, untraceable gifts from photography itself, are marks of candour and authenticity, both descriptions of a stable object and the fleeting glance (Firstspace and Thirdspace) interacting upon each other. They are an investigation into our fluid identity and shifting place in our worlds.14
In spatial dialectics and in the nuances of contradictions we proceed onwards, paying no heed to the dangers which lie ahead, journeying on to fulfil our desires: to be seen, to be heard, in our difference and uniqueness, enacting change from within.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,435
PS. My friend and Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gertsakis insightfully observes, “The philosophical arguments resonate with the vacillation of the photograph meanings/non-meanings. Spaces that implode from within to further generate the unknown which even in definition become dispersed. The photography around the border/wall is beautiful as well as tortuous as well as unspoken.”
Well said Liz 🙂
Footnotes
1/ Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007
2/ Rob Shields. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 40-41.
3/ Ibid., pp. 79-80.
4/ Jon Stratton. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19
5/ Garden, Op cit.,
6/ Garden, Op cit.,
7/ A: Edward W. Soja. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57; B: Mika Hannula. “Third space – a merry-go-round of opportunity,” on the Kiasma Magazine website No. 12, Vol. 4, 2001 [Online] Cited 01/05/2016. No longer available online quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
8/ Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 24
9/ Shields, Op cit., pp. 154-155
10/Alexander Trapeznik. “Introduction,” from Public History Review, Vol. 13, 2006, p. 2
11/ Wael Salah Fahmi. “Reading of Post Modern Public Spaces As Layers Of Virtual Images and Real Events,” from The 37th International Planning Congress “HONEY, I SHRUNK THE SPACE” Planning in the Information Age. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 16-20 September, 2001
12/ Jean Fisher. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 226-227
13/ Wael Salah Fahmi, op cit.,
14/ Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
Many thankx to the Cleveland 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.
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there […]”
Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power
“Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality.
For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. …
Photographic space can create a spatial reality which allows those who access it to contest, enlarge or in someway recreate their experiences of Firstspace. It never attempts to close off subjectivity or pin identity down, but rather allows fluid and transitory experiments with other ways of being that can then be carried over and inform experiences of Firstspace.”
Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counter-narratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.
Capitalising on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website
George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937) Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights 1970 Gelatin silver print
Photojournalism from the US-Mexico border currently emphasises stark, divisive images: walls, fences, surveillance devices, border patrols, “coyotes,” and crossing migrants. Yet some of the most compelling artwork dealing with this region attests to several generations of cross-border familial relationships, personal identities that carry markers of both countries, and hybrid cultures that meld influences from the United States, Mexico, and farther south in Latin America. This more complex work demonstrates how border residents have resisted being defined by the border and its conflicts, concentrating instead on a deterritorialised notion of home, along with a sense of self that often transcends both nationalism and gender politics.
The photographs and video works included in Picturing the Border offer a more nuanced portrayal of life in the borderlands. The exhibition positions the US-Mexico border as a cultural framework and highlights how Latinx photographers – many of whom are border residents themselves – have instead formulated alternative photographic vocabularies with regard to place, identity, and race. Photographs range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, extended family gatherings, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US border patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s.
The exhibition is accompanied by an important scholarly publication that brings new insights to the subject of Latinx photography and the history of the US-Mexico border. Picturing the Border has also brought about the opportunity to grow our permanent collection in this area, precipitating recent acquisitions by Laura Aguilar and the donation of an important work by Ada Trillo, who has witnessed firsthand the perils of the unbelievably extensive journey migrants have taken from Central America to the United States.
Although Cleveland is far from the southern border, stories of global migration are woven throughout the CMA’s encyclopeadic collection as well as throughout the community in Northeast Ohio. Picturing the Border puts faces on stories and brings to life the various threads that stitch together an ever-growing understanding of, and empathy for, the migrant experience.
Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. “Picturing the Border,” on the Cleveland Museum of Art website June 1, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Opening on July 21, 2024, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, this free exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2025. From intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol, this one-of-a-kind exhibition presents photographs taken by both border residents and outsiders, many of whom are Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican, and tells the story of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present.
“Borders have long been spaces of contention,” says Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art. “The mainstream media in the United States tends to present nationalistic narratives about imminent threats at the border. This reductive and divisive narrative does not often portray the identities, languages, cultures, and social ties among communities. The photographs featured in this exhibition tell a different story that can serve as a counter-narrative and timely new perspective on life in this region.”
The earliest images in Picturing the Border form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. In addition, they showcase artists who were ahead of their time in presenting ideas about spaces and exclusion as they relate to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identities in the United States.
Exhibition catalogue
A beautifully illustrated 134-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Picturing the Border by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, with contributions from Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
The US-Mexico border has undergone dramatic changes over the past six decades, becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised, and militarised, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mainstream and conservative news coverage has often reinforced or exacerbated such developments, characterising the border as out of control and describing migrants in derogatory terms, in the process fuelling xenophobic sentiment.
A foil to this reductive and dehumanising narrative, this presentation of Latinx photography offers more nuanced portrayals of life in the borderlands. Ranging from the 1970s to the 2020s, images by Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, and Laura Aguilar, as well as emerging artists such as Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro display alternative photographic vocabularies regarding place, identity, and race. With subject matter spanning from intimate domestic portraits and youth counterculture to border crossings and clashes involving the US Border Patrol, this richly illustrated volume also features scholarly essays and new work by fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, providing new insights on this fraught and misunderstood region.
Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as series from 1986 Los Angeles is perhaps the best encapsulation of the show’s thesis. The women in Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles told Iturbide that they wanted to be photographed under a mural of some mariachis. In fact, these were images of Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Pancho Villa. We might as well admire their freedom from context. After all, isn’t America all about freedom?
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Rosario y Boo Boo en su casa, Los Angeles (Rosario and Boo Boo in their home, Los Angeles) 1986 Gelatin silver print
“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesising who you are… So you make your own image, interpreting.”
As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.
This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico – risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of gruelling travel. …
Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”
Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo Hardcover/Sewn bound 192 pages/30.5 x 24.8cm Language: English ISBN: 978-94-91525-93-3 November 2021
Every day, thousands of people leave in processions from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador via Mexico for America because of flaring violence, murder (on women) and poor economic conditions in their own country. A journey covering hundreds of kilometres, often on foot, full of fear of being arrested and sent back. Some people even ‘disappear’. Under the Trump administration, despite fierce opposition, ‘The Wall’ was built to keep these immigrants out of ‘The Northern Triangle’, making their passage into America even more perilous.
Photographer Ada Trillo considers it her mission to portray this distressing situation. In ‘La Caravana del Diablo’ she doesn’t look away but confronts us. Ada shows that each of these thousands of migrants is a human being. A human being with a family, with fear, hope and dreams.
More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.
This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed – or tried to cross – the border.
Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.
In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].
But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking – the primary approach from the media – but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.
[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994. [4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57. [5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.
Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.
Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it – the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.
Exhibition dates: 24th August – 29th December, 2024
Organiser: art2art Circulating Exhibitions
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Poling the Marsh Hay c. 1885 Platinum print on paper
Id est / that is
Voluptuous = relating to or characterised by luxury or sensual pleasure
Sensual = late Middle English (in the sense ‘sensory’): from late Latin sensualis, from sensus (see sense)
Sense = various; including:
~ a reasonable or comprehensible rationale i.e. the latent and emerging Modernism inherent in Photo-Secession photographs
~ the way in which a situation [in this case the “reading” of a photograph] can be interpreted i.e. the interpretation of Photo-Secession photographs as either Pictorialist, Modernist or a combination of both
~ a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something i.e. the feeling of the photographer towards the object of their attention, revealed in the print, whether that be a nude, a building, pears and an apple or the side of a white barn
~ to be aware of (something) without being able to define exactly how one knows i.e. to be able to detect, recognise, and feel that ineffable “something” that emanates from the object of (y)our attention… in the act of creativity, in the act of seeing
Bringing something to our senses
Thus, the older I get the more I appreciate the faculty of feeling, thought and meaning that is revealed in these revolutionary photographs.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Quotes on Walls
“Why, Mr. Stieglitz, you won’t insist that a photograph can possibly be a work of art – you are a fanatic!”
Luigi Palma de Cesnola, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reportedly said to Alfred Stieglitz, 1902
“The painter need not always paint with brushes, he can paint with light itself. Modern photography has brought light under control and made it as truly art-material as pigment or clay. … The photographer has demonstrated that his work need not be mechanical imitation. He can control the quality of his lines, the spacing of his masses, the depth of his tones and the harmony of his gradations. He can eliminate detail, keeping only the significant. More than this, he can reveal the secrets of personality. What is this but Art?”
Arthur Wesley Dow, 1921
“The photographer’s problem therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium… without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. … Photography is only a new road from a different direction but moving toward the common goal, which is Life.”
Paul Strand, 1917
Pictorial photography owes its birth to the universal dissatisfaction of artist photographers in front of the photographic errors of the straight print. Its false values, its lack of accents, its equal delineation of things important and useless, were universally recognised and deplored by a host of malcontents… I consider that, from an art point of view, the straight print of today is not a whit better than the straight print of fifteen years ago. If it was faulty then it is still faulty now.”
Robert Demachy, 1907
“Gum, diffused lenses, (ultra) glycerining, were of experimental interest once. … Most of these are of more value historically than artistically. The prints are neither painting (or its equivalents) nor photographs. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. It will be straight and beautiful – a true photograph.”
Alfred Stieglitz, 1919
Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography celebrates an intrepid group of photographers, led by preeminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who fought to establish photography as fine art, coequal with painting and sculpture at the turn of the 20th century. The Photo-Secession movement took cues from European modernists – who seceded from centuries-old academic traditions – to demonstrate photographic pictures’ aesthetic, creative, and skilful value as art. An homage to Stieglitz, Photo-Secession includes some of the very images that established the appreciation of photography’s artistic merits.
The UMFA will present this exhibition concurrently with Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to draw attention to the cyclical dialogue between painting and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, photographers manipulated their images at various stages of production to imitate painterly effects, while painters worked and reworked their oils to imitate the immediacy of photography, demonstrating a remarkable reciprocity between these two art forms.
Text from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts website
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing the work of Heinrich Kühn Image courtesy of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing at centre from left to right, Bernard Shea Horne Doorway Abstraction; Drahomir Josef Ruzicka The Arch, Pennysylvannia Station c. 1920; Arnold Genthe Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico c. 1920; William E. Dassonville The Great Highway, San Francisco c. 1905
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing from top left to right, Edward Steichen Lotus, Mount Kisco 1915; Edward Steichen Calla Lily c. 1921; Edward Steichen Three pears and an apple c. 1921; Edward Steichen Blossom of White Fingers c. 1923
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing in the display cabinet issues of the magazine Camera Work, 1903-1917. Edited by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen
The Role of Camera Work
One of the key platforms for the Photo-Secession movement was the influential journal Camera Work, edited by Stieglitz and Steichen. Published from 1903 to 1917, Camera Work featured the work of Photo-Secessionists alongside essays and critiques that championed the artistic potential of photography. The journal played a crucial role in shaping public and critical perceptions of photography, providing a space for photographers to showcase their work and engage in intellectual discourse.
This exhibition celebrates 26 intrepid artists at the turn of the 20th century who sought to establish photography as a fine art equal to long-established media like painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. This movement in the United States centred on the group dubbed the Photo-Secession. While each of the Photo-Secessionists had their distinctive approaches, their works are hand-crafted photographic prints of traditional artistic subjects, such as landscape, portraiture, figure study, and still life. This combination of painterly imagery and printmaking is also known as Pictorialism.
The passionate leader and tenacious advocate of the Photo-Secession was Alfred Stieglitz, who advanced the visions of the most ambitious photographers of the time, including Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White. Stieglitz tirelessly promoted art photography through his exhibition space in New York City – the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and later called simply 291 – as well as through the journals he edited – Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917).
This exhibition also covers the breakup of the Photo-Secession, as some photographers rejected Pictorialism while others remained staunchly committed to it. The Photo-Secession itself irrevocably split apart around 1917. Artists led by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand switched to Straight Photography, an approach involving sharp focus and direct printing of the original shot. Artists led by Käsebier and White continued to innovate through painterly approaches using soft focus and manipulated prints.
The works in this exhibition represent some of the most influential artists and iconic images of the period as well as superb examples of a variety of photographic printing techniques, including platinum, gum-bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil.
All works of art this exhibition are from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. This exhibition is organised by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.
The Rebirth of Art Photography in Europe
In the first few decades after the invention of photography in 1839, painters played an instrumental role in the development of this new medium. Artist-photographers like D.O. Hill in Edinburgh and Gustave Le Gray in Paris exhibited their photographs alongside paintings, drawings, and prints. The novelty of the photograph led to the proliferation of portrait studios and mass-produced views of famous monuments or exotic locales for the tourist trade. By the 1860s photography was considered a bourgeois technical profession. The Kodak camera, first issued in 1888, further popularised photography with its roll film, simple controls, and reasonable cost of one dollar (about $33 today).
Even as more and more individuals could access the means to make photos, artist-photographers advocated for the status of their medium and demanded a differentiation between their work and the products of point-and-shoot cameras. In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson published the book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, which proposed a role for landscape photographers equal to esteemed painters like Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet. Emerson’s publication was a clarion call for a new generation of artistic photographers, and Pictorialism was born.
Pictorialist photographers enthusiastically pursued their new movement, pioneering soft-focus lenses and manipulatable printing methods. Soon they were forming regional clubs across Europe and resumed exhibiting their prints as art. The photographers that formed the t in London were particularly active and influential, and Pictorialism spread to other cultural centres like Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
Alfred Stieglitz and the American Pictorialist Movement
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, but educated largely in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) watched the flowering of European Pictorialism with a mixture of aesthetic appreciation and fierce competitiveness, writing in 1892:
“Every unbiased critic will grant that we [American photographers] are still many lengths in the rear, apparently content to remain there, inasmuch as we seem to lack the energy to strive forward – to push ahead with that American will-power which is so greatly admired by the whole civilised world.”
Energised by European Pictorialism, Stieglitz championed juried photographic salons in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He also edited a series of increasingly ambitious journals about Pictorialist photography, starting with The American Amateur Photographer in 1893, then Camera Notes in 1897, and finally Camera Work starting in 1903. He inaugurated and named the Photo-Secession movement through the landmark exhibition he curated in 1903 at the National Arts Club in New York, which comprised 162 works by 32 artists. The name “Photo-Secession” referred to European avant-garde artistic movements, and in his own words, “Photo-Secession actually means a seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph.” Eventually European artists would also be invited to join the Photo-Secession.
In 1905 Stieglitz opened a space at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later simply called 291. It was the first retail gallery devoted to photography. He supported the venture with his own resources and generous assistance from others, and Edward Steichen was his steadfast associate. By 1915 Stieglitz was also showing avant-garde painting and sculpture at 291, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Constantin Brâncuși. Thus, he sought to demonstrate the idea that all art forms were on par with and informed one another.
Close Collaborations and the Sudden End of the Photo-Secession
From 1907 to 1910 Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White closely collaborated on photographs and a landmark photography exhibition. In 1907 they made a series of 60 nudes, Stieglitz posing the models and White focusing the camera and making most of the prints. The following year, Stieglitz devoted an entire issue of Camera Work to White. In 1910 Stieglitz and White co-curated the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at Buffalo’s Albright Gallery (now Albright Knox Gallery). This historic project that included over 600 prints is now regarded as the apex of the Photo-Secession. It was also the final monument of the movement, as each of the major Pictorialists, White included, broke away from Stieglitz in the years that followed.
Significant reasons for the end of the Photo-Secession were Stieglitz’s authoritarian personality and disdain for photographers who needed to earn a living rather than exclusively pursue art for art’s sake. Philosophical differences also explain the rupture. Stieglitz had come to believe that Pictorialism had run its course. The irony was that the Photo-Secession had established photography as fine art through images that imitated other art forms by manipulation at every stage of the process – from lens to negative to print. Their pictures to varying degrees used methods that denied the very essence of photography. Stieglitz asserted that it was time to abandon the “painterly photograph” and to champion photography as fine art with compelling pictures that were truly photographic.
Late Pictorialism and the Clarence White School
As the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz’s partner for 30 years, acknowledged, “He was either loved or hated – there wasn’t much in between.” For reasons both personal and professional, most of the leading Photo-Secessionists chose not to follow Stieglitz and Paul Strand into Straight Photography. Many clustered instead around Clarence White, who in his gentle and encouraging manner was the antithesis of Stieglitz. In 1914 White founded the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City. In 1916 White along with Gertrude Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn co-founded Pictorial Photographers of America; this new society welcomed members of all backgrounds and published the new journal Photo-Graphic Art.
The Clarence White School continued to be a locus for the training of new photographers until 1940, under the guidance of White’s widow Jane White after his death in 1925. Among the most prominent students of Clarence White are Karl Struss, Anne Brigman, Laura Gilpin, and Doris Ulmann, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. Other notable pupils of White include Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge, and Dorothea Lange.
Straight Photography, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand
The final section of this exhibition focuses on Straight Photography and two of Alfred Stieglitz’s most notable protégés, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. Between them, they pioneered leading branches of 20th-century American photography.
With the entry of the United States into World War I, both Steichen and Strand were drafted into the U.S. Army. Steichen was a photographer for the Army Air Service Signal Corps in Europe, and Strand was an X-ray technician in the Army Medical Corps. In the years immediately after WWI, they each turned their attention to photographing the natural world: flowers and fruit in Steichen’s case, and toadstools, grasses, and ferns in Strand’s. Both would return to photographing their gardens in the final years of their lives.
Outside the naturalist realm, Steichen and Strand’s paths diverged.
Steichen, an extrovert, pioneered modern fashion and advertising photography for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. Later he was named Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he organised the landmark exhibition, Family of Man, which traveled to 37 countries on six continents and was seen by an estimated nine million people.
Strand, an introvert, traveled to remote places around the world, documenting the landscape, architecture, and people, his work exuding a respect for the dignity of the labouring class, which he absorbed from his mentor, Lewis Hine. Overall, Strand’s profoundly humanist scenes of everyday life influenced a generation of socially conscious photographers who documented the 20th-century crises of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, World War II, and more.
Heinrich Kühn
In the late 19th century, European Pictorialism was divided into two camps. On the one side were the purist photographers who, aside from a softening of the lens, opposed extensive manipulation of the negative or the print for artistic effect. On the other side were those who derided “button-pushers” and viewed the “straight” photograph as merely the raw material from which to create an artistic print through elaborate handiwork.
The leader of this latter camp was Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944). Eschewing Modernist tendencies, he chose traditional subject matter of painting from the 17th through 19th centuries: still life, figural studies, and genre scenes. His preference for gum-bichromate and bromoil printmaking techniques, which allowed for extensive manipulation, were intended to provoke the reaction in the viewer: is that really a photograph?
Born in Dresden, Kühn moved to Innsbruck, Austria, after youthful studies in science and medicine. Thanks to a sizeable inheritance, he could devote himself to artistic photography, joining both the Linked Ring in London and Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in the United States. A trans-Atlantic correspondence with Stieglitz began in 1899 and lasted three decades. They congratulated one another on their latest triumphs and encouraged each other through professional and personal disappointments. In 1909, with Stieglitz’s assistance, Kühn organised the International Photographic Exhibition in Dresden, one of the high points of Pictorialism.
Later in life, Kühn filed multiple patents in photochemistry and camera technology related to Pictorialist photography, but none earned him any money. Tastes had changed, and the painterly photograph had become a quaint curiosity.
Gertrude Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) was 37 years old, married, and had three children by the time she began studying art at the Pratt Institute. She had originally purchased a camera to make portraits of her children, but Pratt encouraged its women students to earn a living in the arts. By 1897 she opened a one-room commercial portrait studio in New York City. Her ambition was to make “not maps of faces, but likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.”
Recognition for Käsebier’s talent and ability came swiftly. In 1898 the painter William Merritt Chase, judging the Philadelphia Photographic Salon, called her work “as fine as anything that [Anthony] Van Dyck has ever done.” For Stieglitz, who organised her first solo show in 1899 at the Camera Club of New York, Käsebier was “beyond dispute the leading portrait photographer in this country.” That year, she sold one of her photographs for the unheard-of sum of $100 (almost $3,800 today).
However, by the time that the Brooklyn Museum honoured Käsebier with a career retrospective in 1929, Pictorialist photography had fallen so far out of fashion that the exhibition was not even reviewed in major journals.
Clarence Hudson White
Clarence Hudson White (1871-1925) was a modest, soft-spoken, entirely self-taught genius from America’s heartland. Raised in the small town of Newark, Ohio, he eked out a living as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocer; each week he saved enough to purchase two glass plates for his camera. He specialised in gorgeously back-lit domestic interior scenes featuring his friends and members of his close-knit extended family.
White’s contributions to the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon were so highly praised that, like Gertrude Käsebier, he was appointed a judge for the following year. The annual salons of the Newark Camera Club that he organised featured the nation’s preeminent Pictorialists and were the direct precursor to Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession. Indeed, the 1900 salon featured his friend and latest discovery, Edward Steichen of Milwaukee.
From 1907 onwards, both in New York City and during summers in rural Maine, White was also America’s foremost teacher of photography. Many of the leading American photographers of the 20th century studied at the Clarence White School.
Paul Strand
In 1915 Alfred Stieglitz found in the young Paul Strand (1890-1976) the leader of a remarkable new direction in photography. Strand had been a senior at the Ethical Culture High School in 1907 when he first visited Gallery 291 on a class trip with his photography teacher, Lewis Hine, whose poignant documents of immigrants and child labor were staples of the Progressive Movement. Eight years later, after thousands of hours in the darkroom at the New York Camera Club, Strand returned to 291 with a portfolio of platinum prints that pointed the way to a new era. Stieglitz deemed them “brutally direct, devoid of all flim-flam, devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism’. These photographs are the direct expression of today.” Stieglitz not only offered Strand an exhibition at 291, but also devoted the final two issues of Camera Work exclusively to him.
What was so compelling and inspiring to Stieglitz in Strand’s photography? His portfolio contained pictures of urban street life and architecture, as well as powerful close-ups of weathered New York faces (influenced by Lewis Hine), boldly composed still lifes, and shadow abstractions taken on a porch in Twin Lakes, Connecticut.
As for photography’s future, Strand and Stieglitz saw eye to eye. In his essay in Camera Work, Strand called for the universal adoption of Straight Photography “without tricks of process or manipulation.” In a provocative lecture at the Clarence White School, Strand condemned “this so-called pictorial photography, which is nothing but an evasion of everything photographic.”
Works by Emerson, Post, Evans, and Sutcliffe
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (British, 1853-1941) The Water Rats 1886 Platinum print on paper
Sutcliffe was a member of the British photographic society the Linked Ring, which sought to make their work recognised as fine art. He operated a portrait studio in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire but is remembered for his charming, naturalistic depictions of local life. This photograph resulted in his excommunication by local clergy for its “corrupting” effects. Today this is his best-known photograph, regarded as a study of pure childhood joy.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Poplars on a French River c. 1900 Platinum print on paper
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Gathering Water Lilies c. 1885 Platinum print on paper
In addition to his photographic work, Emerson wrote persuasively that photography could match – and even surpass – painting as an emotive art form. His writings were influential to the young Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he corresponded over four decades.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Thiollier
Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) Landscape in Bugey c. 1885 Carbon print on paper
From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Kühn
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Nude in Morning Sun c. 1920 Multiple bromoil transfer print on Japanese tissue paper
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Female torso in sunlight c. 1920
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Walter at Easel c. 1909 Gum-bichromate print on paper
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Still Life with Fruit and Pottery c. 1896 Gum-bichromate print on paper with an applied watercolour wash
Kühn’s still lifes deliberately recall paintings from earlier centuries. This scene – his first published image – contains similar elements to 17th-century still-life compositions. He even included insects, which are traditional references to mortality called memento mori (reminders of death). Can you spot the housefly?
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Portraits by Steichen
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) George Frederic Watts, London 1901 Varnished platinum print on paper
This dramatic profile portrait of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter was the first in what Steichen termed his “Great Men” series. Steichen wrote about his approach to portraiture, “I aim for the expression of something psychological. I am not satisfied with the mere reproduction of features and expression.”
Published in Camera Work, 14, 1906
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Photographer’s Best Model: George Bernard Shaw, London 1907 Platinum print on paper
Steichen was elated after his photographic sitting with Shaw, writing to Stieglitz: “Well I’ve seen and done Shaw (photographically of course). He’s the nicest kind of fellow imaginable – genial and boyish – there is a little of the sardonic about him as you see him but when you get the camera at him you are tempted with possibilities in that way. He seems to know a lot about photography and certainly skilfully bluffs you into believing he knows it all.”
Published in Camera Work, 42/43, 1913
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Glossary of Photographic Printing Methods and Terms from the History of Photography
Gelatin Silver Print
For over a century, from the 1880s until the digital era, the gelatin silver print was the most common technique for producing black-and-white photographs. The paper is coated with a binder layer of gelatin incorporating light-sensitive silver chloride or silver bromide. The paper is exposed under a negative, either by contact-printing or through an enlarger, then chemically developed, stopped, fixed, and dried. In the process, the silver salts are reduced to metallic silver, which carries the image. The overall color of the print can be altered through toning.
Cyanotype
A sheet of paper is sensitised in a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate. After contact-printing under a negative, the iron compounds form an insoluble blue (“cyan”) dye known as Prussian blue. Apart from its occasional artistic use, the only regular use of the cyanotype was in copying architectural plans, thus called “blueprints.”
Platinum or Palladium Print
A platinum print is produced by sensitising a sheet of paper with platinum and iron salts. The sheet is then contact-printed under a negative until a faint image is visible. The print is developed in a potassium oxalate solution that dissolves unexposed iron salts and transforms the platinum salts into metallic platinum, which intensifies the image. Mercury chloride can be added to the solution to give a warmer tone. Unlike a silver print, where the image lives in a gelatin binder layer on top of the paper (akin to a watercolour), the image in a platinum print is embedded in the paper fibres (akin to an oil painting). The rich mid-tone range and matte surface made the platinum print the favoured medium for the Pictorialist photographers, from P.H. Emerson onward. When the price of platinum spiked during World War I, palladium was introduced as a more affordable (and generally warmer-toned) substitute.
Pigment Prints
The following processes are known as pigment prints, because the photographic image is carried by inks or pigments, rather than by metallic particles like silver, iron, or platinum.
Gum Bichromate Print
A sheet of paper is coated with diluted gum-arabic mixed with coloured pigment and light-sensitive potassium bichromate. During exposure under a negative, the bichromate causes the coloured gum-arabic to harden in proportion to the amount of light received. The areas not exposed to light remain soluble in water, and the print is developed by washing away the soluble areas, leaving a positive image on the paper. The prints can be exposed and reprinted numerous times with different coloured pigments, as well as manipulated by brushing away more pigmented gum during the washing stage.
Bromoil (Transfer) Print
This process does not begin with a negative, but rather with a gelatin silver print that is bleached in a solution of potassium bromide. The bleaching removes the silver-based image and selectively hardens the underlying gelatin in proportion to the image density. The sheet is then hand-coloured with an oil-based ink, which is selectively absorbed depending on the hardness of the gelatin: the softer areas contain more water, which repels the oil-based ink. An inked print is sometimes used as a kind of printing plate for transferring the image to another sheet of paper (a bromoil transfer print).
Photogravure
This is a sophisticated photomechanical process used for reproducing photographs in ink in a large edition. It is a form of intaglio printing, in which a photographic image is acid-etched into a copper plate. The relief image is then inked and printed. Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work was largely printed in photogravure.
The Photo-Secession
This was the brief but influential artistic movement led by American Alfred Stieglitz during the years 1902–1915 that championed photography as an art form that was as aesthetic, creative, and skilful as traditional media like painting, drawing, watercolour, and printmaking. The European artistic movement Secessionism inspired the name Photo-Secession, and both movements were committed to Modernism by seceding from centuries-old academic traditions.
Pictorialism / Pictorialist
The approach to photography in which artists sought to make images that imitated the tradition of paintings through photographic prints. Pictorialist photographers used soft focus lenses and manipulated both their negatives and printing media to create their prints.
The Linked Ring
Also known as the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, this photographic society founded in 1892 in London promoted photography as a form of art and was influential for the American society of the Photo-Secession.
Straight Photography
The approach to photography in which artists use sharp focus and print directly from their negatives with minimal or no manipulation.
Camera Notes
Camera Notes was the journal of the Camera Club of New York, edited by Alfred Stieglitz from 1897 to 1902. Under Stieglitz’s editorship, the purposes of Camera Notes were “to take cognisance also of what is going on in the photographic world at large, to review new processes and consider new instruments and agents as they come into notice; in short to keep our members in touch with everything connected with the progress and elevation of photography.”
Camera Work
Camera Work was the journal about contemporary photography that Alfred Stieglitz edited and published with the assistance of Edward Steichen from 1903 to 1917. The goal of this journal “devoted largely to the interests of pictorial photography” was “to issue quarterly an illustrated publication which will appeal to the ever-increasing ranks of those who have faith in photography as a medium of individual expression, and, in addition, to make converts of many at present ignorant of its possibilities.”
This glossary has been edited from primary sources and text by Ina Schmidt-Runke, Meike Harder, and Andreas Gruber.
The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography
By Adelaide Ryder, head photographer and digital assets manager at the UMFA
The Birth of the Photo-Secession Movement
This fall the Utah Museum of Fine Arts will exhibit Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography. This exhibition of art photography from the early 20th century will be on view from August 24 to December 29, 2024. Who were the Photo-Secessionists and why was their work so pivotal to the advancement of photography as an art form?
In the mid-19th century photography was regarded as a complex technical field that only a trained professional could do. By the 1880s, however, the hand-held camera had become affordable and easy to use, and the “snapshot” became commonplace. Smaller, easier-to-use cameras and the ability to send the film off to a lab for development gave the public accessibility to the medium in a new way. This technological advancement greatly affected the professional photography business, as people began to question the skills needed to make a photograph when “anyone could push a button.”
How did photographers respond to this shift in aesthetics and business? Many searched for ways to use photography to express abstract ideas or subjective points of view, shifting from using photography to document objective likeness to illustrating subjective conditions or the subject’s inner state. This helped elevate the photographer’s status, as the expressive ability of the person behind the camera became as important as the subject. Photographers embraced symbolism and started printing with complex techniques like gum bichromate to elevate their craft above the basic snapshot. Two significant movements were born from this struggle to gain recognition as a legitimate form of artistic expression rather than simply a means of mechanical documentation: Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession.
The camera was seen as a tool, and many felt that photographs visually lacked the “artist’s hand,” an essential factor in calling something “art.” The Photo-Secession movement, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902, aimed to change this perception. Stieglitz and his contemporaries believed photography deserved the same artistic consideration as painting and sculpture. They aimed to elevate photography to fine art, emphasizing the photographer’s vision and creativity over mere technical skill. Stieglitz said the Photo-Secession was founded “loosely to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavour to compel its recognition, not as a handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.” (Camera Work, no. 6, April 1904.)
The Photo-Secession movement emerged from the broader Pictorialist movement, which dominated photographic art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While both movements sought to establish photography as an art form, the Photo-Secessionists emerged with their own philosophy.
Similarities
Artistic Expression: The Photo-Secession and Pictorialism emphasized the photographer’s role as an artist rather than a mere technician. They believed that photography should convey the photographer’s vision and emotional intent.
Aesthetic Quality: Both movements valued the aesthetic quality of photographs. They often employed techniques like soft focus, manipulation of light, and careful composition to create visually striking images.
Influence of Painting: Both were heavily influenced by the aesthetics of painting, particularly Impressionism and Symbolism. They sought to create images that were painterly in style, blurring the lines between photography and traditional fine arts.
Differences
Philosophical Focus: Pictorialism focused on creating images that looked like paintings, often using elaborate darkroom techniques to achieve a painterly effect. Photo-Secession, while also influenced by painting, emphasised the photographer’s personal expression and the inherent qualities of the photographic medium, sometimes even embracing the “snapshot” aesthetic if it helped to illustrate more hidden ideas and thoughts.
Technical Innovation: The Photo-Secessionists were more open to embracing the amateur artist and experimentation in techniques and technologies, whereas the Pictorialists held on to the traditional hierarchy of the European artistic schools of the time. Photo-Secessionists saw innovation as a means to expand photography’s artistic potential.
Subject Matter: Pictorialists focused on romanticized and idealized subjects, such as landscapes, portraits, and allegorical scenes. The Photo-Secessionists, on the other hand, explored a wider range of subjects, including urban scenes, modern life, and abstract forms. They embraced art movements like Cubism and Futurism, reflecting a broader and more progressive vision of art.
Exhibition and Display: The Photo-Secessionists were disenchanted with the outdated salons and gate-keeping ways of many photo schools commonly practiced in Europe. They began publications like The American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, and Camera Work to help give a platform to young photographers and people practicing these new ways of image making.
Alfred Stieglitz was a driving force behind the Photo-Secession movement. His passion for photography galvanized his dedication to promoting it as an art form. He saw photography as a means of personal expression. He helped catapult the idea that image-making can happen in the darkroom, during the printing process, as much as in the camera.
Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage (1907, below) is one of the most iconic images in the history of photography. This powerful image captures the crowded lower deck of a transatlantic steamer, where people traveled in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. The Steerage is celebrated for its striking composition, which combines geometric shapes and human forms to create a dynamic and balanced visual narrative. Stieglitz considered this photograph one of his most outstanding achievements, as it encapsulated his transition to straight photography, which embraced photographs looking like photographs rather than the painterly qualities of Pictorialism. This photograph shows his ability to convey the complexity and depth of human experience through a single image. The photograph is a masterpiece of visual artistry and a compelling social document, reflecting the conditions and aspirations of early 20th century immigrants.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Steerage 1907 Hand-pulled photogravure on paper
This photograph has become the iconic image of the Photo-Secession and has legendary status. In June 1907 he sailed to Europe to visit family and booked a first-class cabin. On a stroll around the ship, he encountered a bustling scene of labourers and their families traveling in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. With a single four-by-five-inch glass plate left in his camera, Stieglitz shot what would be regarded as a definitive masterpiece of both photography and Modernism.
About making this picture Stieglitz recalled: “There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow of the steamer. To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone. On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck. A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Hand of Man 1902 Hand-pulled photogravure on paper
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier: The Master of Portraiture
Gertrude Käsebier was known for her compelling portraits and allegorical imagery. Käsebier’s work transcended traditional portrait photography by infusing her images with a deep sense of intimacy and character. She believed that a photograph should reveal the inner essence of its subject, and her portraits are renowned for capturing the personality and spirit of the people she photographed.
Käsebier’s approach to portraiture was both innovative and empathetic. This image from the UMFA’s permanent collection is a perfect example of how she photographed women and children, presenting them with dignity and respect at a time when they were not the usual subjects of portraiture. Her work challenged conventional representations and highlighted her subjects’ emotional depth and individuality.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Untitled (Billiard Game) c. 1909 Platinum print on paper
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mother and Two Children 1899 Platinum print on paper
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Serbonne (A Day in France) 1901 Platinum print on paper
Both Pumpkin Pie, Voulangis and Serbonne (A Day in France) were set in France in 1901, when the artist was chaperoning art students. The young man in both scenes is Edward Steichen at age 22, whose interest in photography was then budding.
Serbonne is Käsebier’s chaste reference to Édouard Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863. An example of ultra-soft focus, this photo was reproduced in the inaugural issue of Camera Work, which was devoted to Käsebier.
Published in Camera Work, 1, 1903
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Heritage of Motherhood 1904 Gum-bichromate print on paper
This portrays the children’s book author Agnes Rand Lee in mourning after the sudden death of her daughter from illness. A contemporary photographer and critic deemed this image “one of the strongest things that Käsebier has ever done, and one of the saddest and most touching that I have ever seen.” Käsebier extensively manipulated the gum-bichromate process to make this print appear like a charcoal drawing.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mother and Child c. 1900 Multiple gum-bichromate print on paper
The subject of mother and child was a frequent one for Pictorialists, especially Käsebier and Clarence White. The contrast between the tiny infant and the mighty tree gives this image additional symbolic meaning.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Picture Book 1903 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz had a print of this photograph in his personal collection, which he bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Published in Camera Work, 10, 1905
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Evans
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Aubrey Beardsley 1893 Platinum print on paper
Evans, a member of the British art photography group the Linked Ring, was close friends with prominent authors and artists, such as George Bernard Shaw and Aubrey Beardsley. Portrayed here around age 20, Beardsley was a talented artist, designer, and illustrator, whose promising career was cut short by tuberculosis just five years after this photo was made.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Alvin Langdon Coburn in Eastern Clothing 1901 Platinum print on paper
Coburn was a precocious young American artist. An eighth birthday gift of a Kodak camera sparked his interest in photography. By age 16 Coburn had moved to London to work with his cousin the photographer F. Holland Day, whose portrait by Gertrude Käsebier is in this exhibition. After being included in a landmark exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society, Coburn returned to New York and apprenticed with Käsebier. By the tender age of 20, he became a founding member of the Photo-Secession and launched an international career dividing his time between New York, London, and Paris.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Dow
Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922) Silhouetted Trees c. 1910 Cyanotype print on paper
A painter, printmaker, and photographer, Dow is mainly remembered today as a pioneering educator who taught in New York at the Pratt Institute, Art Students League, and Teacher’s College of Columbia University. Among Dow’s students were Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Dow also hired Clarence White to teach photography at Columbia, thereby launching White’s important teaching career.
From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Haviland
Paul Burty Haviland (American, 1880-1950) Ship Deck 1910 Platinum print on paper
Haviland was an amateur photographer from a young age and grew up immersed in the arts. His grandfather was an early photography critic in Paris, and his father owned Haviland porcelain factory in Limoges, France. As the New York representative of the family business, Haviland happened to meet Alfred Stieglitz in 1908. Just two years later he became associate editor of Camera Work and helped financially support Stieglitz’s gallery 291.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Struss
Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) Cables 1912 Gelatin silver print on paper
Struss was a star pupil of Clarence White and became a favourite of Alfred Stieglitz and the youngest member of the Photo-Secession. He is best known for his compelling cityscapes of New York, including the view of the Singer Building through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and the dramatic Flatiron Building, Twilight.
Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) Flatiron Building, Twilight c. 1915 Gelatin silver print on paper
Struss eventually broke away from Stieglitz and cofounded the society of the Pictorial Photographers of America along with Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier in 1916. He … accepted a job as a cameraman for filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Struss would become one of the most prolific Hollywood cinematographers with 150 films, an Academy Award, and three Academy nominations to his credit.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Nudes by Stieglitz and White
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) Reflected Nude 1909 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) Nude Posed in Doorway (Miss Thompson) 1907 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Torso 1907 Palladium print on paper
This is likely the most widely reproduced nude by Photo-Secession artists.
After their personal and professional rupture, Stieglitz wrote White a letter that specifically referred to their collaboration in 1907. Stieglitz insisted “that my name be not mentioned by you in connection with either the prints or the negatives” and further instructed White to erase his name from any prints they had jointly signed. Despite this vitriol, Stieglitz retained in his personal collection two prints of The Torso, one of them jointly signed in pencil.
Published in Camera Work, 27, 1909
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Images of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1918 Palladium print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe (Fixing Hair) 1919-1921 Palladium print on paper
Over two decades, Stieglitz made over 300 photos of O’Keeffe, producing an extraordinary and candid portrait of the artist. She recalled, “I was photographed with a kind of heat and excitement and in a way wondered what it was all about.” The directness and intimacy of this series of photos differ from the idealised nudes that Stieglitz and White made together during the heyday of the Photo-Secession.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by White
Clarence Hudson White: The Romantic
Clarence Hudson White was celebrated for his romanticised and intimate approach to photography. His 1904 image The Kiss perfectly illustrates his unique style. This platinum print on paper captures a tender moment with a soft focus and gentle lighting. The Kiss portrays an intimate scene imbued with a sense of emotional depth. White’s use of the platinum printing process, which provides a broad tonal range and exquisite detail, enhances the image’s delicate and dreamlike quality. His work reflects the movement’s early emphasis on creating photographs that evoke the emotional and aesthetic qualities of fine art while also paving the way for future explorations in photographic expression.
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Bubble 1898 Platinum print on paper
This image was exhibited at the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon to great acclaim. Fellow photographer and critic Joseph Keiley commented, “Like most of Mr. White’s pictures, it is a well nigh perfect piece of composition whose subject with subtle poetry stimulates and leaves much to the imagination.”
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Mirror 1912 Platinum print on paper
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Kiss 1904 Platinum print on paper
This is one of White’s best known photographs. Despite his separation from White, Stieglitz kept prints of both The Kiss and The Bubble in his personal collection throughout his life.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by followers of White
Anne Brigman: The Feminine Mystic of Photo-Secession
Anne Brigman was known for her evocative and mystical imagery. She often placed herself within her compositions, challenging traditional gender roles and expectations. Her connection to the Photo-Secession movement was cemented through her association with Alfred Stieglitz, who published her work in Camera Work and admired her innovative spirit.
Brigman’s 1911 photograph The Pine Sprite exemplifies her distinctive style. The image features a nude female figure intertwined with the natural landscape, blending the human form seamlessly with the rugged environment. This work reflects Brigman’s themes of femininity, nature, and freedom, aligning with the Photo-Secessionist emphasis on personal expression and artistic experimentation. Brigman’s contributions highlighted the movement’s inclusive spirit, showcasing how female photographers could assert their voices and artistic visions in a male-dominated field.
Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Shadow on My Door (Self Portrait) 1921 Gelatin silver print on paper
Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Pine Sprite 1911 Gelatin silver print on paper
Brigman was for a long time the only Californian member of the Photo-Secession. She was a free spirit and pagan whose woodsy nudes inspired by fantasy and folklore were frequently reproduced in Camera Work.
Laura Gilpin (American, 1891-1979) Ghost Rock, Garden of the Gods, Colorado 1919 Palladium print on paper
An amateur photographer from Colorado Springs, Gilpin moved to New York to study with Clarence White in 1916. This photograph was one of Gilpin’s first successes after returning home in 1919, the beginning of her decades-long career as one of the most notable photographers of the West and Southwest.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
In 1916 Gilpin enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Two years later, she returned to her native Colorado Springs and became one of the few women to pursue landscape photography.
This is her depiction of the Garden of the Gods, a scenic rock formation in Colorado Springs. It captures the stillness and otherworldly quality of the area. The photograph also reflects an emphasis on the evocation of mood rather than on descriptive detail.
Text from the National Gallery of Art Facebook page
Edward Steichen
Edward J. Steichen: The Innovator
Edward J. Steichen, a close associate of Stieglitz, brought a unique perspective to the Photo-Secession movement. Steichen was not only a photographer but also a painter, which influenced his photographic style. He experimented with various techniques, including soft focus and manipulation of light, to create both ethereal and visually striking images.
An avid gardener, Steichen propagated and grew a bountiful garden at his French country house. This image of a calla lily is rendered with exquisite detail and tonal richness. Steichen’s botanical images showcase his ability to find harmony between nature and art. His meticulous composition and sensitivity to light transform a simple flower into a work of art, reflecting his painterly approach to photography. His botanical works contributed to the Photo-Secession movement by highlighting the artistic potential of natural forms.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Lotus, Mount Kisco 1915 Gelatin silver print on paper
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Calla Lily c. 1921 Platinum print on paper
Steichen had previously photographed flowers in compositions that placed delicate floral arrangements next to women figured as ideals of feminine beauty. In contrast, here he presents the lotus and calla lily in sharp focus and as singular subjects without overt metaphorical meaning.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Three Pears and an Apple 1921 Gelatin silver print on paper
On making this picture Steichen wrote: “I was particularly interested in a method of representing volume, scale, and a sense of weight. In my small greenhouse I constructed a tent of opaque blankets. From a tiny opening, I directed light against one side of the covering blanket, and this light, reflected from the blanket, was all. I made a series of exposures that lasted more than two days and one night. As the nights were cool, everything, including the camera, contracted and the next day expanded. Instead of producing one meticulously sharp picture, the infinitesimal movement produced a succession of slightly different sharp images, which optically fused as one. Here for the first time in a photograph, I was able to sense volume as well as form.”
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Blossom of White Fingers c. 1923 Gold-toned gelatin silver print on paper
This study of the graceful hands of Steichen’s wife with ultra-soft focus and high-key lighting and printed on gold-toned gelatin paper is one of the rare instances of Steichen using Pictorialist methods after the end of the Photo-Secession.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Backbone and Ribs of a Sunflower c. 1920 Gelatin silver print on paper
Steichen was a knowledgeable botanist and spent five decades photographing the life cycle of sunflowers. This is one of his earliest studies of the plant. He became fascinated with spirals in nature, writing, “I found some form of the spiral in most succulent plants and in certain flowers, particularly in the seed pods of the sunflower.”
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Advertising Study for Coty Lipstick 1929 Gelatin silver print on paper
Steichen is credited as a founding figure of modern advertising and fashion photography. From 1923 to 1938, he served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. He had extensive experience in graphic design and advertising from his youth and earlier career. He had designed posters as a young man for a lithographic printer in Milwaukee. As Alfred Stieglitz’s associate on Camera Work from 1903 to 1917, Steichen produced the logo, typeface, and page layouts.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Strand
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Central Park 1915-1916 Platinum print on paper
Urban life preoccupied Strand and in the 1920s would become a central subject of Modernist photographers around the world. From a Central Park overpass Strand identified this interesting composition with the bright, sinuous path dividing the picture plane. The decisive moment to snap the shutter occurred with the appearance of the two advancing figures and their angular shadows.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Speckled Toadstool, Georgetown, Maine 1927 Waxed platinum print on paper
Strand continued to use platinum printing long after most other photographers adopted gelatin silver papers, which were more efficient and versatile and had a glossier surface. His prints in platinum are highly regarded for capturing minute detail and a wide range of tonal values.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cobweb in the Rain, Georgetown, Maine 1928 Gelatin silver print on paper
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works of Straight photography
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Side of White Barn, Bucks County 1917 Gelatin silver print on paper
A painter and photographer, Sheeler became a close friend of Alfred Stieglitz as the Photo-Secession dissolved. This photographic study of line, shape, and tone recalls the hard-edged style of Sheeler’s paintings. Only the chickens appearing at the bottom edge give a sense of scale to the barn.
Alvin Langdon Coburn: The Avant-Garde Creator
Alvin Langdon Coburn pushed the boundaries of photography with his innovative Vortographs, created in 1916-1917. These images are considered some of the first abstract photographs, born from Coburn’s desire to create art that combined the physical with the spiritual. By placing a vortoscope, a triangular arrangement of mirrors and prisms, over a camera’s lens, Coburn created complex images of kaleidoscopic and geometric patterns that simplify the photograph to the essential elements of light and form. This technique broke away from traditional photographic representation, emphasising form, structure, and abstraction. The Vortographs were influenced by the Vorticist movement, which celebrated dynamic and abstract art. Coburn’s pioneering work with these images marked a significant departure from Pictorialism, embracing modernist principles and demonstrating the artistic potential of photography beyond mere depiction. The Vortographs stand as a testament to Coburn’s visionary approach and contributions to the evolution of photographic art.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British American, 1882-1966) Vortograph 1917 Gelatin silver print on paper
Coburn was one of the Photo-Secessionists who rejected Pictorialism. In his 1916 essay “The Future of Pictorial Photography,” he called for abstraction in photography, concluding, “it is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts, and with her infinite possibilities, do things stranger and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.” Coburn created vortographs like this by placing a devise with three mirrors between his camera and subject. When he exhibited them to great fanfare in London in 1917, Ezra Pound proclaimed: “The Camera is freed from Reality!”
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Utah Museum of Fine Arts University of Utah campus Marcia and John Price Museum Building 410 Campus Center Drive
“It was Link’s ability to capture the spirit and essence of the tableaux vivants, the “living picture”, that brings these static scenes alive.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition Dates: 3rd June – 7th December, 2024
Curator: Unknown
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Swimming pool, Welch, West Virginia 1958, printed c. 1987 Gelatin silver print
What a pleasure it is to present the work of the renowned American photographer O. Winston Link (1914-2001) on this archive. I’ve only ever posted on one exhibition of his work before, way back in 2009.
I’ve always loved steam trains ever since I was denied a Hornby train set as a kid. I love their scale, design, colour, noise, smell … and their muscularity. As a machine emerging from the early days of the Industrial Revolution there is something so essential and raw about them.
Link’s elaborately staged, choreographed even, large format photographs in which he employs large banks of synchronised flash lights to capture the locomotives in action, mainly at night – have a visceral effect on me, stirring up deep passions for this primordial machine.
Link’s previsualisation was strong. As Tom Garver observes, “Winston Link innately possessed what has been called photographic vision, the ability to visualise photographs before they are created and to recognise in the process that what one sees, no matter how interesting, does not necessarily translate into an interesting photograph.”
It was Link’s ability to capture the spirit and essence of the tableaux vivants, the “living picture”, that brings these static scenes alive. You can almost reach out and touch these Jurassic trains, these workhorses trundling through small American communities. Again, Tom Garver insightfully notes that “there was this great intense spirit to really document and record this, to capture it. I think what I didn’t realise is how much we were capturing a whole way of life that was disappearing. Not only steam locomotives versus diesel locomotives but this isolated small town individualised kind of America that was vanishing.”
The spirit of the thing itself.
As Minor White says in one of his ‘Three Canons’:
Be still with yourself Until the object of your attention Affirms your presence
Then you look at magnificent photographs such as Locomotive Driving Wheels (1955, printed 1993?, below) with its low perspective of the enormous wheels and the light falling on the metal; the dark, disturbing creatures in Coaling Locomotives, (Puff of Steam) Shaffers Crossing Yards, Roanoke, Virginia (1955, below) like fire breathing dragons; or the incongruous sight of the train as big as the buildings and running right next to them in Main Line on Main Street, North Fork, West Virginia, August 29, 1958 (1958, printed 1997, below) – and you go… YES!
This artist gets it. He gets he gets it he gets it. And he has the skill and this really great intense spirit and the dedication to apply that skill and spirit… in order to capture the presence of these vanishing machines and worlds.
O. Winston Link … thank you.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center, Haverford College for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I can’t move the sun – and it’s always in the wrong place – and I can’t even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting.”
O. Winston Link
“Winston’s spirit so imbued the project that it was never really work. It was such a pleasure, there was also that kind of tingle that this was high adventure. You know, you had to get it. There were times when we would be absolutely exhausted, I remember once, we arrived at a place to tape record in this case, we got there at six and discovered that the train had left at five, we got there the next day at five and discovered it had left at four, we got there at four and that time it didn’t come until midnight. So, we sat there and waited and talked about what we were doing and about life and how it was changing and the many varieties of architecture and construction and the quality of things, how they were disappearing. So, there was this great intense spirit to really document and record this, to capture it. I think what I didn’t realise is how much we were capturing a whole way of life that was disappearing. Not only steam locomotives versus diesel locomotives but this isolated small town individualised kind of America that was vanishing.”
Tom Garver, Curator and Museum Director, a former assistant for Link’s photo projects.
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Tom Garver at the General Store, Husk (Nella), North Carolina, 1957 1957 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Haverford Chemistry Lecture 1952 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Locomotive Driving Wheels 1955, printed 1993? Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) J. O. Hayden with His Grease Gun, Bluefield Lubritorium 1955 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Ralph White, Abingdon Branch Train Conductor, and Laundry on the Line, Damascus 1955 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Coaling Locomotives, (Puff of Steam) Shaffers Crossing Yards, Roanoke, Virginia 1955 Gelatin silver print
The exhibition consists of photographs by O. Winston Link (1914-2001) of steam locomotion on the Norfolk and Western Railroad from 1955 to 1960 and photographs taken by Link in 1952 of Haverford College for publicity purposes. Thomas “Tom” Haskell Garver (1934-2023) Haverford class of 1956 first met Link in 1952. Garver recalled that first meeting like this. “Link, a New York photographer, created admissions brochure photos at Haverford in 1952. After graduation, I was studying in New York City and worked part time for him for about a year. This included three trips with Winston to work on his documentation of the last years of steam powered railroading.”
Garver, an accomplished museum administrator and curator, stepped in when Link needed a friend and supporter. Forty years after Garver first met Link his life was marred by tragedy. Conchita Mendoza Link, his second wife, who also was her husband’s agent, fabricated a story that Link suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease in an attempt to steal from Link payments for his work. Mrs. Link was also found to have stolen many of Link’s negatives and prints from which she pocketed the money from their sale. Mrs. Link was criminally charged, found guilty, and sentenced to prison in 1996. Garver began to assist again Link by becoming his business agent. After Link’s death Garver became the organising curator of the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. The Last Steam Railroad in North America, published in 1995 by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. and authored by Garver is the definitive publication on Link and his photography.
Garver wrote in the book: “These photographs are, in every way, works of art,” … “Winston Link innately possessed what has been called photographic vision, the ability to visualise photographs before they are created and to recognise in the process that what one sees, no matter how interesting, does not necessarily translate into an interesting photograph. The thing photographed and a photograph of it are coequal neither in interest, nor in appearance.” Garver’s efforts were instrumental on so many levels in gaining recognition for Link’s photographs as they are now recognised as some of the greatest photographs of the 20th century.
Tom Garver was a great supporter of Haverford College in all manner of ways. As an active member of the class of 1956 with each reunion cycle he compiled Class of 1956 Collective Biography. Furthermore, in his case, that also meant contributing hundreds of art photographs to the Fine Art Photography Collection. Manuscripts including letters from Paul Strand and George Segal and documentary photographs of American scenes by Charles Currier, who was the subject of Garver’s Master’s thesis to further support Special Collections at Haverford. Among this bounty of collections of photographs are a choice selection of O. Winston Link’s black and white, and colour photographs. This exhibition is a fitting memorial to a loyal and generous alumnus.
Text from the Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center, Haverford College website
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Hotshot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia, 1956 1956, printed 2001 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Archie Stover, Crossing Watchman 1956 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Winston Link, George Thom and Night Flash Equipment: All Flashbulbs Firing 1956 Gelatin silver print
Preserving the Golden Age of Railroads
In the 1950s, O. Winston Link, a photographer with an astute affinity for technical photography and a fond fascination with trains, set out to record the last steam locomotives operating in the country. After contacting the Norfolk and Western Railway and gaining access to the company’s premises, Link would begin recording the last surviving fleet of locomotives against the night sky, preserving the golden age of railroads and the remaining vestiges of American 20th-century industry. …
Staunton, Virginia
In 1955, O. Winston Link would begin exploring a series of photographs that would have a lasting impact on the medium’s history. After accepting a job that would take him to Staunton, Virginia, Link noticed the Norfolk and Western Railway, the last major steam railroad in the country. The company was ceasing operations as an industry-wide change from steam to diesel was in effect. Link was further impressed by the human connection to the railroad, a thread of sparsely spread communities that lived near the tracks. The photographer noticed not only the facilities and locomotives but the trackside communities that were profoundly immersed with the steam locomotives and rail transportation.
From 1955 to 1960, Winston Link returned to Virginia around 20 times. He photographed the clouds of steam and massive steel bodies of the locomotives passing through the Virginian and Appalachian communities, documenting some of the last days of the steam engine. In this unique quest, Link traveled by night covering a large swath of area, from Virginia and North Carolina to Maryland. With his preference for capturing the locomotives at night and prior experience with highly technical photographs for corporate clients, Link had the aptitude to develop a unique flash photography system. His unique system rigged flashbulbs, sometimes up to 80 of them, to fire simultaneously and allow the camera to capture the high-speed trains moving past his frame at night. As to why he chose to take his pictures at night, the photographer notedly said:
“I can’t move the sun – and it’s always in the wrong place – and I can’t even move the tracks, so I had to create my own environment through lighting.” ~ O. Winston Link
O. Winston Link’s perseverance in recording the nightly locomotives that passed Appalachia made him a pioneer not only for his subject matter but also as a trailblazer in night photography. Most likely inspired by his legendary predecessor, the Hungarian-French photographer Brassai, who captured the underbelly of Paris by night, Winston Link’s contributions to the preservation of American history helped chronicle these once, one-of-a-kind towns. Whether at the drive-in, splashing in the river below a railway bridge, pumping gas trackside by a passing locomotive, or directing a train through the quiet night of the rural countryside, Link’s pictures conserve small towns, whose lives revolved around the coming and going of steam engines. Through the rising pillars of steam, the sounds of bells and whistles announcing the arrival of the steam engines, and the camaraderie of community members in his pictures, Winston Link preserves a romantic, golden age of American railroads. When asked what about steam engines he found so appealing, Link said:
“I guess it’s because of the places they go. They’re always going through some mountains, through the valleys, and through the rivers, and forests, it’s always country. And I’ve lived in New York City, in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where you didn’t have anything like that. So, it’s always great to get on a train and take a long trip. I suppose that’s part of it. And the sounds that it makes, the smells that it has. It has a bell in it, it has air pumps, and it has valves that are releasing shots of steam every now and then. It has a turbo, which has a whine to it. It has a beautiful whistle, the old steam engines had different whistles, all had different characteristics and different sounds. And they had smells from hot grease and oil, the smell of coal smoked, the soft coal, has a nice smell to it as long as you don’t get it blasted in the face, as long as you’re far away from it, its Ok. It’s things like that. The sound of the wheels, the sound of the drivers, you can tell exactly what’s happening to the engine, and how fast its going, if the rods are lose, it makes different sounds. So, it has all these characteristics. The diesel engine is great, it’s very efficient, there’s nothing like them but, it’ll never replace a steam engine.” ~ O. Winston Link, 1980s
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Main Line on Main Street, North Fork, West Virginia, August 29, 1958 1958, printed 1997 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Hawksbill Creek Swimming Hole, Luray, Virginia, 1956 1956 Gelatin silver print
Further O. Winston Link photographs from the Norfolk and Western Railroad
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Y-6 Locomotive on the Turntable, Shaffers Crossing Yards, Roanoke, Virginia 1955, printed 1994 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Norfolk and Western Railway 1955 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Locomotive 261 1955 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Train #2 arrives at the Waynesboro Station, Waynesboro, Virgnia, April 14, 1955 1955, printed 1996 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Sometimes the Electricity Fails, Vesuvius, Virginia, 1956 1956, printed 1988 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Maud Bows to the Virginia Creeper 1956 Gelatin silver print
O. Winston Link (American, 1914-2001) Birmingham Special, Rural Retreat, Virginia, 1957 1957, printed 1986 Gelatin silver print
1948 Norfolk and Western Railway – Land of Plenty Norfolk and Western magazine ad with system map 1948 Duke University Libraries Public domain
Haverford College 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA 19041
“In looking through the body of work I feel what is envisioned by the photographer in his images is a wonderful empathy for the miners and their families in the situation of their becoming.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Mrs. Manuel Alcala and son in corner of their kitchen. The family lives in company housing project for miners. National Fuel Company, Monarch Mine, Broomfield, Boulder County, Colorado July 2, 1946 National Archives Public domain
The history of today and every day
Continuing Art Blart’s support of photographers with a social conscience, this latest posting complements recent postings on the exhibitions Miners’ Strike 1984-85, and Roger Mayne: Youth. In the United States of America this type of attuned social documentary photography has a long history, both prior to and after Russell Lee’s photographs were taken.
From Danish-American social reformer Jacob Riis’ who used his “photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City” to the famous American sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine whose images “were instrumental in bringing about the passage of the first child labor laws in the United States”, onward to the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information (FSA / OWI) between 1935-1944,* (notably Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott) which “form an extensive pictorial record of American life” … and thus to these photographs taken by Russell Lee just after the end of the Second World War. Lee’s photographs were then followed by Gordon Parks‘ photographs of racial intolerance, Marion Palfi‘s photographs of American injustice, Milton Rogovin‘s photographs of “the forgotten ones” and, more recently, James Nachtwey‘s photographs of drug use in America. Of course, there are many other photographers who could be mentioned.
It has been a fascinating journey to engage with over 1000 of Russell Lee’s Coal Survey photographs that are available in the National Archives Catalog to try to fully understand the vision of this artist during the 1946 project picturing miners in their homes, mines, and communities. “Lee provided the photographs for the study which included 90 communities in 22 states… Over the course of the survey, Lee took over 4000 photographs, more than 200 of which are included in the exhibit.”
As with any large of body of work the quality of the photographs varies incredibly – some poor, others prosaic, some insightful, others powerful portraits, some dynamic, others occasionally revelatory. This is only to be expected. In the selection in this posting I have chosen what I think are the best photographs from the 1000 photographs available online. Please note, these photographs are not necessarily in the exhibition.
In looking through the body of work I feel what is envisioned by the photographer in his images is a wonderful empathy for the miners and their families in the situation of their becoming. What Lee pictures are communities that support each other but which are under stress.
Having worked through the Second World War to aid the American war effort, men and women were hard at work in a dangerous job, the families were living in run down houses owned by the coal mining companies, were buying food at the company store, were borrowing money on their earnings from the company to survive and living a subsistence life – having the minimal resources necessary for survival, having just enough food or money to stay alive. Rickety wooden houses with no running water [The only houses with running water inside in this camp are those in which their tennants [sic] have made the installations at no expense to the company], dead animals in streams where water is gathered, roofs lined with newspaper, children with no shoes, men holding serpents praying to an unseen god.
I believe that Lee’s most powerful photographs in the project are the images of the miners at work. There is an intimate directness to these photographs of working men and women. Nothing extraneous, nothing superfluous, just an honest directness picturing their everyday lives, in tiredness, laughter, and desperation.
In these photographs of miners we can see that Lee loved his diagonals, horizontals and verticals in the construction of the image plane. Right to left diagonals in J. M. Hawkins (left) former pharmacists mate in the U.S. Navy and Wm. Smith, former Marine, read notice on the bulletin board at the mine (July 9, 1946, below) and Women pick foreign matter out of coal (July 9, 1946, below); left to right diagonals in Miners boarding buses which will take them to washhouse from lamp house where they have checked out (August 20, 1946, below) and Miners checking in at the lamp house at completion of morning shift (August 22, 1946, below); and verticals in James Robert Howard has gotten his safety lamp at lamp house (August 13, 1946, below).
My two favourite photographs in the posting are both crackers. Firstly, Miners waiting at drift mouth for the afternoon man trip. Koppers Coal Divison, Kopperston Mines, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia (August 22, 1946, below) in which the languid easiness of the men’s postures are perfectly assimilated within the structure of the buildings and rocks to form an almost Renaissance tableaux of figures. And secondly, Miners bring in their checks and see the sign that there is no Saturday work. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky (September 13, 1946, below) in which the languorous flow of bodies moves as in the stillness of a quietly flowing river, revealing a reversed “N” and misspelt “to-morrow” as if the morrow will bring more heartache.
What clarity of vision, what panache in the execution of that vision. You could only wish to be such an accomplished artist taking pictures of the history of yesterday that still have relevance today and every day.
* FSA photographers: Arthur Rothstein (1935), Theodor Jung (1935), Ben Shahn (1935), Walker Evans (1935), Dorothea Lange (1935), Carl Mydans (1935), Russell Lee (1936), Marion Post Wolcott (1936), John Vachon (1936, photo assignments began in 1938), Jack Delano (1940), John Collier (1941), Marjory Collins (1941), Louise Rosskam (1941), Gordon Parks (1942) and Esther Bubley (1942) * OWI photographers: David Bransby (1942), John Collier (1943), Marjory Collins (1943), Jack Delano (1942-1943), Howard Hollem (1941-1943), Fenno Jacobs (1942), Alfred Palmer (1941-1943), William M. Rittase (1942), John Rous (1941), Mark Sherwood (1942), Arthur Siegel (1942), John Vachon (1942-1943), Miscellaneous photographers (Jack Downey, Andreas Feininger, unidentified)
Many thankx to the National Archives for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs have been digitally cleaned and balanced by Marcus Bunyan. Please note the photographs in this posting are not necessarily in the exhibition.
“I’m taking pictures of the history of today.”
Russell Lee
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) The Sergent Family on their front porch. Reading from L. to R., Franklin D., Louis, Lucy, Mr. Blaine Sergent, Bobbie Jean, Mrs. Sergent, Wanda Lee and Donald. Mr. and Mrs. Sergent have two married sons living nearby, Rufus, who lives next door and is a coal cutter in the same mine and Junior who lives and works at Verda Mine several miles away. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky September 15, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) The Sergent Family on their front porch. Reading from L. to R., Franklin D., Louis, Lucy, Mr. Blaine Sergent, Bobbie Jean, Mrs. Sergent, Wanda Lee and Donald. Mr. and Mrs. Sergent have two married sons living nearby, Rufus, who lives next door and is a coal cutter in the same mine and Junior who lives and works at Verda Mine several miles away. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky (detail) September 15, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) The Blaine Sergent family’s house. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky September 15, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey is an exhibition of photographs of coal communities by American documentary photographer Russell Lee. These images tell the story of labourers who helped build the nation, of a moment when the government took stock of their health and safety, and of a photographer who recognised their humanity.
About the Exhibit
Power & Light is free and open to the public. The exhibition features more than 200 of Russell Lee’s photographs of coal miners and their families in the form of large-scale prints, projections, and digital interactives from a nationwide survey of housing and medical and community facilities of bituminous coal mining communities. The survey was conducted by Navy personnel in 1946 as part of a strike-ending agreement negotiated between the Department of the Interior and the United Mine Workers of America. The full series of photographs, which numbers in the thousands, can only be found in the holdings of the National Archives. These images document inhumane living and working conditions but also depict the joy, strength, and resilience of the miners’ families and communities.
Note: All photograph captions are original, as provided by the photographer. Unless otherwise noted, the images are in the holdings of the National Archives, Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War.
Power & Light features Russell Lee’s 1946 coal survey photographs of miners in their homes, mines, and communities.
About Russell Lee
Russell Werner Lee (1903-1986) was born in Ottawa, Illinois. Originally trained as an engineer, he was methodical in his work, but approached his subjects with warmth and respect. The quiet Midwesterner put people at ease, enabling him to capture scenes of surprising intimacy. Many of his photographs reveal worlds through small details – keepsakes on the mantel, lined and calloused hands. What may be most distinctive about these images is their reflection of the photographer’s compassion for his subjects. Despite their plight, it is their strength, dignity, and humanity that strike the viewer.
If you recognise Lee’s photos – but not his name – you’re not alone.
Although the coal survey photos represent some of Lee’s finest work, his best-known photographs are from an earlier project. Lee was one of several photographers hired by the federal government in the 1930s to document the toll of the Great Depression and drought on rural Americans. While he worked alongside famous colleagues including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Lee eschewed celebrity. His aim was to inspire social change, believing visual evidence of struggle and hardship could generate support for reforms.
Text from the National Archives Museum website
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Miners’ wives and children on the front porch of a typical, fifty year old house. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine, abandoned after explosion [in] Dec. 1945, Four Mile, Bell County, Kentucky (Original Caption) September 4, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee: Home
Lee’s photographs of miners at home reflect his respect for their individuality and resourcefulness, his fascination with families, and his meticulous attention to the details of everyday life.
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Gonzalla Sullivan, miner, with his two children and another child who lives in the neighborhood. Koppers Coal Division, Federal #1 Mine, Grant Town, Marion County, West Virginia June 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Quarters of Japanese miner who lives in company housing project. Hudson Coal Company, Hudson Mine, Sweet Mine, Carbon County, Utah July 4, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) The only houses with running water inside in this camp are those in which their tennants [sic] have made the installations at no expense to the company. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia (Original Caption) August 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) There are ten children in the Lawson Mayo family, the older taking care of the youngest ones. Three of the daughters are now attending high school in Mullens and have part time jobs during summer months. Mullens Smokeless Coal Company, Mullens Mine, Harmco, Wyoming County, West Virginia (Original Caption) August 23, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Mrs. John Whitehead, wife of miner, and two of her children (or grandchildren) in the kitchen of her three room house. Mr. and Mrs. John Whitehead, their six children and six grandchildren live here. This house, built on company owned land was built by Mr. Whitehead’s half brother at no expense for materials or labor to the company; the builder (half brother) was to receive the use of the house rent-free for three years and at the end of this period the ownership of the house would revert to the company. The brother moved away at the end of one year, receiving no cash settlement from the company. The house now rents for $6 monthly. It has no running water, no electricity, access is over a mountain trail; there are three rooms. Coleman Fuel Company, Red Bird Mine, Field, Bell County, Kentucky (Original Caption) August 31, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Mrs. John Whitehead, wife of miner, and two of her children (or grandchildren) in the kitchen of her three room house. Mr. and Mrs. John Whitehead, their six children and six grandchildren live here. This house, built on company owned land was built by Mr. Whitehead’s half brother at no expense for materials or labor to the company; the builder (half brother) was to receive the use of the house rent-free for three years and at the end of this period the ownership of the house would revert to the company. The brother moved away at the end of one year, receiving no cash settlement from the company. The house now rents for $6 monthly. It has no running water, no electricity, access is over a mountain trail; there are three rooms. Coleman Fuel Company, Red Bird Mine, Field, Bell County, Kentucky (Original Caption) (detail) August 31, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Houses along the railroad tracks. Fox Ridge Mining Company, Inc., Hanby Mine, Arjay, Bell County, Kentucky August 31, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Mrs. Edna Lingar getting wash water from dirty stream; stock wade this stream, privies drain into it, garbage decay in it, a dead animal was in the stream about fifteen feet above where she was getting water. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva, Mine, abandoned after explosion, Four Mile, Bell County, Kentucky (Original Caption) September 4, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee: Mines
Russell Lee was attentive to miners’ issues, documenting deductions to their pay, lost work days, perilous conditions, and the union meetings where they fought for a better deal.
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Telesfro Deluna, miner, walking on crutches. He is recovering from a foot injury in mine a accident. He has received medical care at this company owned hospital. Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, Pueblo, Colorado July 1, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) J. M. Hawkins (left) former pharmacists mate in the U.S. Navy and Wm. Smith, former Marine, read notice on the bulletin board at the mine. Union Pacific Coal Company, Reliance Mine, Reliance, Sweetwater County, Wyoming July 9, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Women pick foreign matter out of coal as it is carried on conveyor thru tipple. Union Pacific Coal Company, Stansbury Mine, Rock Springs, Sweetwater County, Wyoming (Original Caption) July 10, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) James Robert Howard has gotten his safety lamp at lamp house. Of the 232 employees at this mine, 60% are Negroes. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia (Original Caption) August 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Miners boarding buses which will take them to washhouse from lamp house where they have checked out. Koppers Coal Divison, Kopperston Mine, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia August 20, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Miners waiting at drift mouth for the afternoon man trip. Koppers Coal Divison, Kopperston Mines, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia August 22, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Miners checking in at the lamp house at completion of morning shift. Koppers Coal Division, Kopperston Mines, Kopperston, Wyoming County, West Virginia August 22, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Furman Currington and his son, miners. Black Mountain Corporation, 30-31 Mines, Kenvir, Harlan County, Kentucky September 6, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Miners bring in their checks and see the sign that there is no Saturday work. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky (Original Caption) September 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Blaine Sergent, left, comes out of the mine at the end of the day’s work. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky September 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Rufus Sergent, married son, who is now coal cutter and general all around miner. Rufus did not like school and quit before finishing grade school. He went to work in the mines ten years ago when he was thirteen years old. P V & K Coal Company, Clover Gap Mine, Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky September 15, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Changing shifts at the mine portal in the afternoon. Inland Steel Company, Wheelwright #1 & 2 Mines, Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky (Original Caption) September 23, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Harry Fain, coal loader. Inland Steel Company, Wheelwright #1 & 2 Mines, Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky September 23, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Harry Fain, coal loader, drills coal with hand auger. Powder charges are then placed and ignited. Inland Steel Company, Wheelwright #1 & 2 Mines, Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky September 24, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Mining the Catalog – Exploring records from the Exhibit Power & Light
In March, a new exhibit opened at the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. titled “Power & Light: Russell Lee’s Coal Survey.” The exhibit features over 200 photographs of miners and mining communities in the 1940’s from Record Group 245: Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War.
Russell Lee began his work for the federal government during the Great Depression when he was one of the photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration to document rural poverty. He later photographed the forced relocation of Japanese Americans to detention camps.
The photographs that are the subject of our exhibit come from Lee’s final project for the federal government. In 1946, he was sent to document the lives of coal miners and their communities by the Truman administration. The United Mine Workers’ 400,000 members had gone on strike demanding safer working conditions, improved health benefits, and better pay. As part of the agreement that ended the strike, the federal government agreed to survey the miners’ living conditions.
The photographs, which are part of the series “Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry,” show homes with backyard outhouses that were often owned by the mining companies themselves and rented to the miners. We also see miners and their families going about their everyday tasks, having fun in recreation halls, and playing outside.
Lee provided the photographs for the study which included 90 communities in 22 states. The program led to improvements in the mining communities, including the building of 13 new hospitals. Over the course of the survey, Lee took over 4000 photographs, more than 200 of which are included in the exhibit. Over 1000 of the photographs are available in the Catalog. Lee focused on three major themes for the project: home, mines, and community, capturing a moment of mid-century American life. His photographs show not just miners but their families, their homes, and their churches.
Text from the National Archives Catalog email
Russell Lee: Community
To fulfil the mandate of the survey, Lee photographed sanitary, medical, and recreational facilities and services. But he also captured moments of joy and connection that characterised the strong community bonds forged by the miners.
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Some of the members of the baseball team of Exeter-Warwick Mines. Kingston Pocahontas Coal Company, Exeter Mine, Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia (Original Caption) August 10, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Children of miner living in company housing project. Note the homemade baby buggy made of a powder box. Union Pacific Coal Company, Reliance Mine, Reliance, Sweetwater County, Wyoming (Original Caption) August 10, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Children of miners on the fence in front of the Howard house. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia (Original Caption) August 13, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) The meat and vegetable and fruit department in the company store. Raven Red Ash Coal Company, No. 2 Mine, Raven, Tazewell County, Virginia August 29, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Handling serpents at the Pentecostal Church of God. Company funds have not been used in this church and it is not on company property. Most of the members are coal miners and their families. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky September 15, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Local UMWA union meeting is held on Sunday morning in schoolhouse. Inland Steel Company, Wheelwright #1 & 2 Mines, Wheelwright, Floyd County, Kentucky (Original Caption) September 22, 1946 National Archives Public domain
Lee’s next big project, and the topic of the National Archives Power & Light exhibit, came after the war. It was Lee’s last, large federally funded photo documentation project. In 1946 the Truman administration made a promise to striking coal miners that if they resumed work, the federal government would sponsor a nationwide survey of health and labor conditions in mining camps. Lee became an instrumental member of the survey.
Lee’s survey photos give an unprecedented accounting of medical, health, and housing conditions in coal-mining communities. Located in remote areas, these communities were not normally accessible to outsiders. Lee’s photographs demonstrate the difficult circumstances in which miners and their families lived but also show us the strength and resilience of these mining communities.
The National Archives has the complete series of more than 4,000 images, the bulk of which were taken by Russell Lee. They feature mining communities in several states, including Utah, West Virginia, Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming.
His photographs cover a complete range of activities in mining communities including: interior and exterior shots of both company-owned and private dispensaries; miners at work; mining grounds, equipment, and wash houses; women in the home; children at play; recreation facilities, churches, schools, and clubs; scenes of mining townspeople in and around company stores and town streets; family portraits; members of the medical survey group inspecting grounds and speaking to mine company administrators; and local mine operators and union officials.
The images are great primary sources, particularly because of the way Lee documented his photographs. In his extensive cataloging, he recorded the elements and details of home, workplace, and community, giving us an even greater glimpse into the daily life of miners and their families.
The Department of the Interior used many of Lee’s photographs when it published the final report in 1947, “A Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry,” and its supplemental report titled “The Coal Miner and His Family.”
Curators: Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist
Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the installation In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region)
There are some stunning photographs in this exhibition but their “formula” is well known – aerial photographs of the blighted landscape etched by both geological and human forces (a la Edward Burtynsky, Richard Woldendorp et al) paired with objective, frontal “dead pan” portrait photographs (a la Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra et al), both forms of topographical mapping (of the land and of the face) – images which attempt to interrogate “the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants.”
This is strong work but it begs the question: what fresh insight are these photographs giving us into the object of the photographers attention, other than the specifics of “American Southwest” and “Indigenous inhabitants” which turn out to be conceptually and visually generic? Is it necessary for everything to be new again or can work such as this stand in its own right and not just be an echo of what has come before. For the general public the work might seem fresh and new but for the informed observer this is well trodden, indeed trampled ground.
The press release states that “The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.” I don’t feel that with these photographs. Where is the art that expresses through a partnership with the photographer the eloquent, unique voice of the Indigenous inhabitants of this ancestral landscape, its spirit and its fire?
As with any art please make up your own mind.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Denver Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing the opening wall text (below)
Thirst | Exposure | In Place presents photographs from three projects Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to 2023. The portraits, landscapes, and testimonies make visible the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Exposure examines the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Dine Bikeyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists form Princeton University to address the region’s hazardous waste and pollution left by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.
In place evokes the enduring landscape of the Bears Ears region in Utah, while Thirst presents a selection from a new series about the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking due to dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds may carry clouds of toxic sediment from the lake bed – by-products from mining, agriculture, and urban development – across the valley and beyond.
Opening wall text from the exhibition
Denver Art Museum Talk with Fazal Sheikh March 9, 2024
Photographer Fazal Sheikh speaks about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place. His photographs address the consequences of industrial land use, engage questions about water use and climate change, and reflect on the ongoing relationship between people and nature. Sheikh discusses the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed, and his collaborations with writers, scientists, and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work.
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake 2022
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Text from the Denver Art Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Exposure 2019
“The medicine men told our men not to work in the mines, that it was dangerous, but the men needed to support their families and had no choice … My husband, John Guy, worked in the mines like my father. He would arrive home during his lunch break with his clothes caked in uranium dust, and I cleaned those clothes in our home every day. The children played on the tailings pile, but no one from the company ever told us the dangers they were being exposed to.”
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region), 2017-2020
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change. Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place will open March 10, 2024, and will be on view through October 20, 2024, in the museum’s Photography galleries, located on level 6 of the Martin Building, and will be included with general admission.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
“Through expansive aerial shots and intimate portraits, Fazal Sheikh documents these regions and their people with solidarity and honesty,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “The Colorado Plateau is a region deeply impacted by climate change and economic development. This exhibition offers a nuanced view into the past, present and future lives of its inhabitants.”
Sheikh is best known for his deeply humane photographs of refugees and migrants displaced by war and famine. Focusing on the United States for the first time, Sheikh explores how Indigenous people and the lands they call home have been affected by industrial growth and government policy.
“The aerial photographs in this exhibition remind us of the great age and natural beauty of the Colorado Plateau,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the DAM and curator of this exhibition for Denver. “They create an awareness of deep human and geological time and raise questions about the future of the region. In that context, Sheikh’s portraits and accompanying text affirm local communities’ need to protect their sacred spaces and encourage wider recognition of that need.”
The DAM exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections:
Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds carry clouds of toxic sediment – by-products from mining, agriculture and urban development – from the lakebed, across the valley and beyond.
Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Diné Bikéyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists from Princeton University – to address hazardous waste and pollution left across the region by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to their culture, spirituality and health.
In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. Visitors are surrounded by images made at a close distance and from high in the air. Sixty-three large colour photographs show the tremendous geological variety and the long cultural continuities of the Four Corners region.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Jonah Yellowman, spiritual advisor for the Utah Diné Bikéyah intertribal coalition and one of its founding members, will present an offering that represents his Navajo (Diné) spirituality and a deep connection to the land. This offering will be present in the gallery during the run of the exhibition.
Sound recordings taken from seismometer readings by University of Utah geologist Jeffrey Ralston Moore will resonate throughout the gallery space. They represent the otherwise inaudible vibrations of rock formations on the Colorado Plateau.
Taken together, the photographs and collaborations in Thirst | Exposure | In Place lay bare the indelible marks etched on the landscape by geological and human forces. Sheikh asks us to witness the consequences of what has passed and imagine what is yet to come.
Sheikh will speak about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition in a lecture event at the DAM on March 9, 11am – 12pm. The lecture will take place in the Sharp Auditorium, in the lower level of the museum’s Hamilton Building. Sheikh will discuss the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed and his collaborations with writers, scientists and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work. This exhibition follows the Denver Art Museum’s 2017 presentation of Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is organised by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition is presented by Jane Watkins, with additional support from the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.
The exhibition was curated in Denver by Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist.
“Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 20th March – 8th September, 2024
Curators: Philipp Engel and Francesc Muñoz
Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster
An offer you can’t refuse
“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)
To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.
This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a
“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1
The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2
Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,
“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)
The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.
In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4
Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.
Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5
Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.
Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991
2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””
David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.
4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.
Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream
Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.
Introduction
Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976) Chandler, Arizona 2006 From Mowing the Lawn portfolio Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.
The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.
With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.
Text from the CCCB website
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Land. Provincetown 1976 Archival pigment print Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Dusk. New Jersey 1978 Archival pigment print Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.
Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) [Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family] 20th December 1957 Film negative Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress) Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Dream House) 2002 Digital C-print 29 x 44 inches
American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.
Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Julianne Moore (Dream House) 2002 Digital C-print 29 x 44 inches
Sections of the exhibition
Planning A Dream
When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.
From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.
This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans) 1835 Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924 Public domain
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective) 1855 Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper 25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924 Public domain
Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.
After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892) Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield 1857 Lithograph 14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924 Public domain
Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti) Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J. 1860 The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection The New York Public Library Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson 1856-1871 Hand coloured lithograph Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail) 1856-1871 Hand coloured lithograph Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction 1874 Hand coloured lithograph Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Public domain
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York c. 1900 Lithography Library of Congress
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York (detail) c. 1900 Lithography Library of Congress
Anonymous photographer Bain News Service (publisher) Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park 1910 Glass negative Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Public domain
Anonymous photographer Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont 1917 Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey
Anonymous photographer General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama 1939 New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library Public domain
Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail 1950 Courtesy Historic New England
Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota c. 1950 Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis
The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”
The Suburban Room
The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.
And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.
Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.
As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.
Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978)
Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites Detroit 1942 Library of Congress Public domain
General Electric advertisement It’s a promise 1945 Private collection, Barcelona
Anonymous photographer Aerial view of Levittown 1949 Courtesy Levittown Public Library
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines 1947-1962
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details) 1947-1962
Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters Time, January 18, 1960 Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
John Cheever Time, March 27, 1964 Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) New Kids in the Neighbourhood 1967 Lithograph Norman Rockwell Museum Collection
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California 1972 Gelatin silver Bill Owens Archive, Milan
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.) 1972 Gelatin silver Bill Owens Archive, Milan
The Residential Nightmare
And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.
To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.
Todd Hido (American, b. 1968) Untitled #2214 1998 From the series House Hunting
Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969) Untitled (Elsa) 2005 Left Behind series Courtesy of the artist
Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing the work of Gabriele Galimberti from the series The Ameriguns with at top right, Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas 2021; and at bottom right, Eric Arnsberger (30) and Morgan Gagnier (22) – Lake Forest, California 2021
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas 2021 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida 2021 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.
Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976) Annunciation 2023 Oil on aluminium panel Courtesy of the artist
Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.
As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.
Text from the Alberto Ortega website
Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993) Observations from McMansion Hell 2023 Digital print on palboard Courtesy of the artist
McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …
The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.
The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.
This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.
This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.
Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976) Proxy (Haven Ln.) 2012 Mixed media Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #16 2015-2017 From the series Traces Digital printing Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.
In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.
Anonymous. “Weronika Gęsicka: A Disconcerting Idyll,” on the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation website Nd [Online] Cited 13/08/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #52 2015-2017 From the series Traces Digital printing Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972) Contemporary Suburbium 2017 Digital printing on baryta paper Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985) The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition 2019 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.
The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.
Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.
Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.
Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936) The rocking chair (El balancí) 1913 Oil on canvas National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona
For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.
Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.
The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.
Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.
Anonymous. “Torné Esquius. Poetics of the Everyday,” on the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya website 2017 [Online] Cited 13/08/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated” 1955 Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia
Barcelona Metropolitan Area Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat 2015
Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997) Mira-sol alert 2023 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.
With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Sant Quirze del Vallès 2023 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Els Trullols Park-1 2023 Digital printing Courtesy of the artist
The Curators
Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.
Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).
Press release from the CCCB
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona Phone: (+34) 933 064 100
Opening hours: From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00 Closed Monday
I have so many exhibitions to post within the next few weeks that you get two postings this weekend and next weekend!
It’s always a pleasure to see the work of Gregory Crewdson – stylish, stylised, hyperreal, dead pan, cinematic, panoramic large-scale transcendent photographs.
Many thankx to the Albertina Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs for the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) is one of the world’s most renowned photographers. Since the mid-1980s, Crewdson has been using the backdrop of small American towns and film sets to create, like a director, technically brilliant and colourfully seductive photographs that focus on human isolation and the abysses of society. The enigmatic scenes self-reflexively raise questions about the boundary between fact and fiction but can also be related to socio-political developments.
Watch this emotional video of the artist in the middle of his exhibition at the Albertina Museum.
Gregory Crewdson. Retrospektive | Mit Kurator Walter Moser
Curator Walter Moser on Cregory Grewdson’s unique work
Gregory Crewdson | Mit Co-Kuratorin Astrid Mahler
“Gregory Crewdson’s latest series is set in the fictional small town of ‘Eveningside’. It is the last part of a trilogy in which Crewdson addresses the socio-political conditions of his country and the failure of the American Dream,” says co-curator Astrid Mahler about the last part of our major retrospective of the world-famous photographer Gregory Crewdson.
What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.
Gregory Crewdson
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) is one of the world’s most renowned photographers. Since the mid-1980s, Crewdson has been using the backdrop of small American towns and film sets to create, like a director, technically brilliant and colourfully seductive photographs that focus on human isolation and the abysses of society. The enigmatic scenes self-reflexively raise questions about the boundary between fact and fiction but can also be related to socio-political developments.
The retrospective at the Albertina comprises a total of nine groups of works, created over the last three and a half decades and conceived serially. Starting with his Early Work (1986-1988), the exhibition includes Crewdson’s best-known series such as Twilight (1998-2002), which depicts scenes shaped by cinematic language, with people being confronted by unexplainable phenomena in their everyday lives. The impressive, mysterious large-scale scenes from the Beneath the Roses series (2003‒2008) deal with people’s isolation and alienation from their environment. The most recently completed group of works Eveningside (2021-2022) portrays an unheroic image of a fictional small town of the same name in atmospheric black and white. Following Cathedral of the Pines (2013-2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018-2019), Eveningside represents the final part of a trilogy through which the artist examines the social decline of society far removed from the American dream.
Crewdson’s large-scale pictures are preceded by months of planning; they are created with the participation of hundreds of people from casting, wardrobe and art departments, plus technical specialists. Production photographs taken in parallel illustrate the highly elaborate process of design, culminating in an extensive post-production process in which the final photographs are assembled from multiple shots.
As a generous gesture, the exhibition is accompanied by a significant donation to the Albertina’s photo collection. This extensive assimilation of works strengthens the focus of the collection on contemporary photography.
Early Work was created as Crewdson’s final project at Yale University’s School of Art. Among other places, Gregory Crewdson photographed the series in the US state of Massachusetts, mostly in the small town of Lee, which is very close to the family’s summer home. Due to his personal connection to this region, the artist still realises almost all of his photographic projects in the Massachusetts area. In the photographs, Crewdson arranged the town’s residents in the context of their domestic settings. Using relatively modest technical devices at the time, he transformed the real places into mysterious, uncanny scenes with the help of artificial lighting. Introverted protagonists rendered in tightly cropped views present typically American suburbs as places of human isolation and oppression. David Lynch’s surreal masterpiece Blue Velvet, in which the main character encounters human abysses behind the idyllic façade of a small town, served as a major model. The film, which came out in 1986, turned out to be stylistic inspiration for Crewdson and also became an important source of reference for his subsequent series. Crewdson also dealt with more documentary positions, such as those of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. On their journeys across the United States, they enhanced everyday motifs with symbolic meaning through close-up views and vibrant colours. Especially Eggleston employed these means to allude to disconcerting aspects in society.
Natural Wonder, 1991-1997
Inspired by the dioramas in natural history museums, for Natural Wonder Gregory Crewdson built three-dimensional models in his studio, which he then photographed. The pictures show enigmatic rituals and cruel incidents happening in nature, which take place against the backdrop of the suburbs without people realising. For example, birds sit around a mysterious circle of eggs, or nature takes possession of a decaying animal carcass. As a metaphor for suppressed anxieties and traumas, the depicted landscape functions as a mirror of the unconscious and the human psyche. In Crewdson’s series, autobiographic elements – his father was a psychoanalyst – and overriding social themes characteristically coincide. The symbolism of Natural Wonder has essentially been inspired by cinematography: in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds (1963), the eponymous animals, suddenly infesting an idyllic world, symbolise dysfunctional relationships and human fears. In Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch eliminates the line between reality and illusion, between the familiar and the eerie, between idyll and violence through the motif of a prepared robin or of a severed human ear covered with ants, which is found in a meadow.
Hover, 1996/1997
In Hover, his third series, Gregory Crewdson abandons the aesthetic achievements of earlier works: he takes pictures in black and white from a bird’s-eye view with the help of a crane. The strategy characteristic of Crewdson’s work to merely adumbrate a narrative while abstaining from resolving it and keeping it in mysterious suspense reaches an early climax in Hover. With a distanced, objectifying gaze he shows familiar occurrences in a small town as they tip over into the unusual. The recurring motif of the circle refers not only to popular science fiction movies and works of land art, but also quotes Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), in which the circle is considered a metaphor for romantic obsession.
Gregory Crewdson now began to plan his sessions in advance and in great detail. As were other series, Hover was shot in the real place of Lee with the aid of residents performing as protagonists. Occasionally, Crewdson still resorted to improvisation; for example, he called the police for the purpose of integrating the police car into the photograph.
Twilight, 1998-2002
Twilight is one of Gregory Crewdson’s most well-known works. It is informed by cinema even more than earlier series. In its scenes, which are mostly set at dusk, Crewdson resorts to the fantastic as the principal theme. Inexplicable phenomena intrude into everyday life. Familiar objects are repurposed, and people give the impression of being exposed and unprotected because of their nudity.
Similar to a film production, a crew of about sixty took part in Twilight. In this series, Crewdson arrived at his characteristic repertoire of motifs, such as open cars, windows, and mirrors, which he varied and put together like vocabulary and would also use for subsequent works. Crewdson began to fully concentrate on the mise-en-scène, leaving the technical implementation of the shots to Richard Sands for the first time – a practice continued to this day. This high-profile director of photography from the world of cinema has worked with Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, among others.
The photographs, which Crewdson refers to as “single-frame movies,” contain multiple references to classical painting and popular culture, a telling example of the latter being Steven Spielberg’s science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Gregory Crewdson’s postmodern approach becomes manifest in these images: starting out from the idea that reality is no longer “authentic” but merely experienced through the media, the recognisable references reveal the staging they are based on.
Beneath the Roses, 2003-2008
In Beneath the Roses, the surreal, uncanny atmosphere of earlier series gives way to an essentially melancholic and psychologising key tone. The protagonists, captured in desolate surroundings, are shown frozen and motionless. Lonely, isolated, and without interacting, they appear totally alienated. Especially for his interior shots, Gregory Crewdson borrows from Edward Hopper’s painting. Situations of human introspection in anonymous, everyday architectural settings that both suggest intimacy and accommodate a voyeuristic gaze are unmistakable parallels.
Beneath the Roses is the most elaborate series in Gregory Crewdson’s oeuvre, which he originally developed as an idea for a film and to which more than one hundred specialists from casting, costume design, technical, and art departments contributed over the extensive period during which the series was realised. As in Twilight, he staged the interior shots in studios, whereas outdoor shots were taken in real places he had profoundly transformed according to his ideas. The artist meticulously prepared the shoot with architectural models, storyboards, scene scripts, and location shots. The focus was particularly on the choice of props, which appear both quintessentially American and timeless. Using different aperture settings, Crewdson took multiple photographs of each scene. In postproduction, which lasted over several months, he combined forty to fifty negatives, so that the constant depth of field in the final picture gives a hyperrealist impression.
Sanctuary, 2009
Sanctuary was created after the monumental large-scale project Beneath the Roses (2003-2008). The series marks a period of transition during which Gregory Crewdson put new artistic approaches to the test. When staying in Rome in 2009, he visited the Italian city of cinematography Cinecittà, where, in its film sets, his first group of works was realised outside the United States. He completed the project within two months with a small team and little technical and financial input. In Sanctuary, Crewdson heightened the tension between reality and fiction known from earlier series by making the sets as such the actual subject. The black-and-white photography accentuates the morbid appeal of the sets as ruins. In contrast to Crewdson’s usual practice of conveying loneliness and isolation with the aid of performers, in Sanctuary he creates an essentially melancholic atmosphere through the complete absence of people. In particular, the artist makes palpable the discrepancy between the hustle and bustle of past film shoots and the now ghostly desolation.
Cathedral of the Pines, 2013/2014
Cathedral of the Pines was created after a period of personal and artistic crisis. In the midst of the mighty pine forests near the city of Becket in Massachusetts, where Gregory Crewdson has lived since 2010, he discovered the eponymous path that became the starting point for this series. Cathedral of the Pines is one of the artist’s most personal groups of work. For the first time, he engaged persons from his family and circle of friends as performers. Moreover, he staged his interiors in real houses, working with a comparatively small team and a minimum of artificial light.
Cathedral of the Pines examines the subject of the human condition through the relationship between human beings and landscape. The nocturnal atmosphere of earlier series gives way to cool daylight and cold colours: completely in the nude or only partially covered and staring absent-mindedly, his performers seem frozen and withdrawn into their own emotional worlds. By placing windows prominently, Crewdson contrasts the relationship between interior and exterior space, as well as interior and exterior light. With its references to the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century – such as compositions by Caspar David Friedrich – or seventeenth-century Dutch painting – such as the art of Jan Vermeer – the motif of the window is also in the tradition of a symbol of contemplation and unfulfilled yearning.
An Eclipse of Moths, 2018/2019
Gregory Crewdson photographed An Eclipse of Moths during Donald Trump’s presidency, thus formulating his analysis of society as sociopolitical criticism. In the city where the series was shot, Pittsfield in Massachusetts, the majority of the population had worked for the local General Electric plant and many lost their jobs after the firm had closed down. In addition to high unemployment, the company left behind a devastated environment. Crewdson describes the situation of neglected postindustrial places through the contrast between light atmospheres rendered in vibrant colours and desolate motifs of everyday life. Potholed streets or dilapidated houses symbolise the fragility and frailty of a society that has lost its footing.
Different from Cathedral of the Pines (2013/2014), his previous series, in An Eclipse of Moths Crewdson returned to the cinematographic widescreen format. The artist depicted his protagonists as small figures in proportion to their surroundings and at a distance from one another. He frequently arranged his seemingly disoriented protagonists around street lamps, comparable to the eponymous moths circling around the light in the darkness. Apart from a multitude of props, he also used smoke and artificially sprinkled streets for this series so as to masterfully stage his light effects.
Eveningside, 2021/2022
Gregory Crewdson’s most recent series is set in a fictitious small town called Eveningside. Its imaginary geography is made up of various places in western Massachusetts the artist had used as scenes for earlier works. After Cathedral of the Pines (2013/2014) and An Eclipse of Moths (2018/2019), this atmospheric work in black and white constitutes the final part of Crewdson’s trilogy, which deals with the sociopolitical dark sides of a society removed from the American dream. In Eveningside, the artist often depicts people going about their work. Frozen in absolute standstill, they seem caught in their respective social contexts.
Crewdson’s arrangements ingeniously position the protagonists in space through lighting influenced by film noir and motifs like shopwindow and mirror. The artist shows their faces in reflections from irritating and slightly shifted perspectives with the aid of montage. Windows frame the protagonists as pictures within the picture und underscore the act of image-making as a self-reflexive practice.
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-fire-in-loft-building.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-black-buick.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-after-the-opera.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945")
![Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ask-58_ccp_bernal_ag182-20230302-110020.jpg "Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016")
![Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) 'Miners' wives and children on the front porch of a typical, fifty year old house. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine, abandoned after explosion [in] Dec. 1945, Four Mile, Bell County, Kentucky' (Original Caption) September 4, 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/lee-miners-wives-and-children.jpg "Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) 'Miners' wives and children on the front porch of a typical, fifty year old house. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine, abandoned after explosion [in] Dec. 1945, Four Mile, Bell County, Kentucky' (Original Caption) September 4, 1946")
![Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) 'The only houses with running water inside in this camp are those in which their tennants [sic] have made the installations at no expense to the company. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia' (Original Caption) August 13, 1946](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/lee-the-only-houses-with-running-water.jpg "Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) 'The only houses with running water inside in this camp are those in which their tennants [sic] have made the installations at no expense to the company. Gilliam Coal and Coke Company, Gilliam Mine, Gilliam, McDowell County, West Virginia' (Original Caption) August 13, 1946")
![Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) '[Image from LOOK - Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]' 20th December 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/brooks-image-from-look-a.jpg "Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) '[Image from LOOK - Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]' 20th December 1957")
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