Category: american photographers

Denver Art Museum website

Exhibition: ‘Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place’ at the Denver Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 20th October, 2024

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)' 2017-2020 from the exhibition 'Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place' at the Denver Art Museum, March - October, 2024

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)

From the installation In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region)

2017-2020

Pigmented inkjet print

© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

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 view of the exhibition 'Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place' at the Denver Art Museum showing the opening wall text

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

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 (American, b. 1965) From the series 'Thirst: Great Salt Lake' November 2022 from the exhibition 'Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place' at the Denver Art Museum, March - October, 2024

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake
November 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965) From the series 'Thirst: Great Salt Lake' November 2022November 2022

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake
November 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

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

Installation view of the exhibition 'Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place' at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series 'Exposure' 2019

Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Exposure 2019

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Mexican Hat Uranium Mill Disposal Cell, Mexican Hat, Utah, 37°8’0.88″N/109°52’28″W
From the series Exposure 2017
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Norman Sam (Diné), Lifelong Shepherd, Montezuma Creek, Aneth Chapter, Southeastern Utah
From the series Exposure 2019
Pigmented inkjet print. Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Lola Yellowman (Diné), Widow of Uranium Miner John Guy, Cane Valley–Monument Valley, Navajo Nation
From the series Exposure 2019
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Lola Yellowman’s Testimony

“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.”

Wall text from the exhibition

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Chapita Wells Oil and Gas Field, Uintah Range, Utah, 40°4’10″N/109°27’26″W
From the series Exposure 2017
Pigmented inkjet print
Yale University Art Gallery, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
Jonah Yellowman (Diné), Spiritual Advisor to Utah Diné Bikéyah, Cane Valley – Monument Valley, Navajo Nation
From the series Exposure 2022
Pigmented inkjet print
Image courtesy and © Fazal Sheikh

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

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.

“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.

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.

Fazal Sheikh (American, b. 1965)
From the installation In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region)
2017-2020
Pigmented inkjet print
© and courtesy Fazal Sheikh

Denver Art Museum
100 W 14th Ave Pkwy,
Denver, CO 80204, United States
Phone: (720) 865-5000

Opening hours:
Open daily from 10am – 5pm, 10am – 8pm on Tuesdays

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB website

Exhibition: ‘Suburbia. Building the American Dream’ at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB

“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 from the exhibition 'Suburbia. Building the American Dream' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB, March - September, 2024

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 from the exhibition 'Suburbia. Building the American Dream' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB, March - September, 2024

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.

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.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Suburbia. Building the American Dream' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB

Installation view of the exhibition 'Suburbia. Building the American Dream' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Charlotte Brooks

Installation view of the exhibition 'Suburbia. Building the American Dream' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing visitors looking at satellite images of US cities and suburbs that show their grid layout

Installation views of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing in the second image photographs by Charlotte Brooks (below); and in the bottom image, visitors looking at satellite images of US cities and suburbs that show their grid layout
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

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.

Text from the Mutual Art website

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' 1856-1871 (detail)

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' c. 1900 (detail)

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

© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

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.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Post-Suburbia?

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.

Text from the Ronchini Gallery website

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

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

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.

Text from the Penguin Books website

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984) 'Berwyn, Illinois' 2023 (detail)

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois (detail)
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Sprawl Reaches Our Shores

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' 1913

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.”

Text from the Dalpine website

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

The Albertina Museum website

Exhibition: ‘Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective’ at the Albertina Museum, Vienna

Exhibition dates: 29th May – 8th September 2024

Curators: Walter Moser and Astrid Mahler

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' From the series 'Early Work' 1986-1988 from the exhibition 'Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective' at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, May - Sept 2024

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Early Work, 1986-1988
Digital pigment print
39 x 58cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

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.

For an analysis of Crewdson’s work please see my text Downfall of a dream: (n)framing the enigma in Gregory Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses (2012)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

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.

Text from the Albertina Museum website

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' From the series 'Natural Wonder' 1991-1997 from the exhibition 'Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective' at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, May - Sept 2024

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Natural Wonder, 1991-1997
Digital pigment print
30 x 39 7/8 in.
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) 'Untitled' From the series 'Hover' 1996-1997 from the exhibition 'Gregory Crewdson. Retrospective' at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, May - Sept 2024

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Hover, 1996-1997
Digital pigment print
51 x 61cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Twilight, 1998-2002
Digital pigment print
122 x 152cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Twilight, 1998-2002
Digital pigment print
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Beneath the Roses, 2003-2008
Digital pigment print
144 x 223cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Beneath the Roses, 2003-2008
Digital pigment print
144 x 123cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Exhibition Texts

Early Work, 1986-1988

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.

Text from The Albertina Museum press release

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled
From the series Sanctuary, 2009
Digital pigment print
72 x 90cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
The Mattress
From the series Cathedral of the Pines, 2013-2014
Digital pigment print
94 x 127cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
The Basement
From the series Cathedral of the Pines, 2013-2014
Digital pigment print
94 x 127cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Redemption Center
From the series An Eclipse of Moths, 2018-2019
Digital pigment print
127 x 225cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Starkfield Lane
From the series An Eclipse of Moths, 2018-2019
Digital pigment print
127 x 225cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Madeline’s Beauty Salon
From the series Eveningside, 2021-2022
Digital pigment print
88 x 117cm
The Albertina Museum, Vienna
Permanent loan, Private Collection
© Gregory Crewdson

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Chau Chak Wing Museum website

Exhibition: ‘The Staged Photograph’ at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney

Exhibition dates: 22nd April, 2023 – 4th August, 2024

Curator: Jan Brazier

James Elliott (British) 'A Week after the Derby' c. 1855-1860 from the exhibition 'The Staged Photograph' at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney, April 2023 - August 2024

James Elliott (British)
‘A Week after the Derby’
c. 1855-1860
Hand-coloured stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

A short text this week as I’m not well.

What a delightful exhibition – a clean installation showcasing some beautiful, contemplative, witty and humorous images on an interesting subject.

The pathos of A Week after the Derby (c. 1855-1860, above); the gruesome humour of A Pair of Drawers (c. 1895, below); the Australian humour of The Great Australian Bite (Bight) (c. 1895, below). Staged for the camera, posed for the viewer, possessed of innocence, national pride and the delightful joy of living.

To flesh out the posting I have added bibliographic information for the artists and publishers where possible.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Chau Chak Wing Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

From costume portraits to comic and sentimental stereographs

This exhibition presents staged photographs taken between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, illuminating the popular culture of the time.
These photographs were created in the photographic studio, with its painted backgrounds and props, where people came to have fancy dress or special outfits captured. Studio photographers also created tableaux, using posed models to stage scenes to tell stories, sentimental or comic. The most popular format was the stereograph. Even the home backyard became a stage for family portraits, posed in the manner of the studio.

Featuring enlarged reproductions, and original examples of glass negatives and stereographs from the historic photograph collection, The Staged Photograph is a fascinating delve into an unfamiliar photographic history.

Text from the Chau Chak Wing Museum website

Installation view of the exhibition 'The Staged Photograph' at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney

Installation views of the exhibition The Staged Photograph at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney with the exhibition texts in the bottom photograph to be seen below…

The Staged Photograph

Created in the theatrical space of the 19th century photographic studio, a staged photograph used the artifice of painted backgrounds and props against which to pose costumed sitters or models arranged in a tableau.

Sitters often used this studio stage to capture a special fancy dress or other costume worn to be photographed either on the way to, or sometimes after, the ball. From the time of the popular cartes-de-visite of the 1860s into the early 20th century, these private memories, storied in albums or framed on walls, give us rare visuals of the costumes worn.

The studio photographer also found a business line in selling staged fictional scenes, which told a story or posed a humorous moment. The most popular were the genre or narrative stereographs, featuring scenes of everyday life, sentimental or comic. Beginning in the late 1850s, this market changed from a middle-class parlour entertainment to a broader popular entertainment, and the views depicted reflect this change as a new century began.

With the advent of easier amateur photography through the Kodak revolution, rather than visiting the studio, the home photographer found a stage in the backyard. Family members were posed in the manner of the studio, with a suspended curtain on the washing line or a pot plant on a stand, often still capturing a special fancy dress costume.

This exhibition explores a range of these staged photographs, a window into popular culture of the time, revealing cultural and social values.

Costume Portraits

Photographers’ studios were theatrical spaces, with props and backgrounds that could give context to a fancy dress or other costume. In Sydney in 1879, photographer E. Riisfeldt advertised that he had ‘specially painted 12 SCENES by one of the finest scenic artists, suitable for any fancy costume’. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1879)

Costume balls were a popular feature of Sydney life from the 1830s. Balls were held to raise money for charities, including children’s fancy dress balls and poster balls, popular from 1900 in Australia where costumes featured in advertisements.

While there are long accounts in newspapers of the attendees, with lists of names and costumes worn, photography offered the possibility of capturing what an outfit looked like.

Wall text from the exhibition

James Elliott (British) 'Broken Vows' c. 1857 from the exhibition 'The Staged Photograph' at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at The University of Sydney, April 2023 - August 2024

James Elliott (British)
‘Broken Vows’
c. 1857
Hand-coloured stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

James Elliott operated in London from approximately 1856 to 1861 and produced stereocards. According to Michael Pritchard’s Directory of London Photographers 1841-1908 he operated from two London addresses simultaneously: 9, Albany Court Yard and 48, Piccadilly.

Most famous for several hundred outstanding genre, usually beautifully tinted, on SCMs; most were elaborate studio sets, with large casts and complex accessories; several were in sets, such as “The Eve of Waterloo”; “The Wedding”, etc.; made views of England, esp. London on SCMs, which are much rarer and fairly ordinary. Often but not always used label with his name, or blind-stamp; views were extensively pirated both in England and US; he also pub. photos by W.M. Grundy.

Credit: National Stereoscopic Association with corrections and additions by Alan Griffiths and others.

Text from the Luminous-Lint website

Mark Anthony (Marc Antoine Gaudin) (French, 1804-1880)(attributed)
[Staged scene featuring five women, their fingers pointing upwards]
England c. 1855-1865
Half stereograph (single image)
Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum
Donated by Alison Skeels, 1982

Freeman Brothers, Sydney (Australian)
[Portrait of two girls in fancy dress]
c. 1855-1865
Carte-de-visite
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney

One of the largest and most celebrated Sydney photographic studios was run by the Freeman Brothers, whose skilful portraits were much admired. This pair of entrepreneurial photographers used the latest processes, building a large, well-appointed studio and actively promoting their work through display in international exhibitions. James Freeman was also extremely well versed in the potential uses of the medium, delivering a comprehensive lecture on the topic to a Sydney society in 1858.

Text from the exhibition Colony: Australia 1770-1861 at NGV Australia 2018

Freeman and Co was established by the professional photographers William and James who arrived in Sydney from London in 1853 and 1854 respectively. Trading as Freeman Brothers, the pair opened Freeman’s Sydney Gallery of Photographic Art in 1855, specialising initially in daguerreotype portraits. James Freeman is credited with introducing the ambrotype process to the colony in 1856, and the company adopted this medium after this date. By the 1860s, the studio was busy producing carte de visite portraits, amassing nearly 30,000 negatives by 1870. In 1866 the brothers collaborated with the renowned English photographer Victor Prout, capitalising on his fine reputation in the colony and advertising themselves as ‘photographers to their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales and His Excellency the Governor.’ After William Freeman retired around 1890, the company passed into the hands of employee William Rufus George. Under George’s management in the 1890s the firm targeted a wealthy clientele, producing expensive platinum prints. The company still operates in Sydney, specialising in corporate, wedding, architectural and portrait photography.

Text from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website

G.H. Nicholas, Sydney (Australian)
[Portrait of a child holding a stereoscope]
c. 1870
Carte-de-visite
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Judith Mackinolty, 1982

These unique photos offer an intriguing insight into pop culture history

The Chau Chak Wing Museum presents The Staged Photograph, an exhibition exploring images from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries from Australia, Britain and the United States.

Australians embraced photography long before smartphone cameras enabled us to capture and curate every moment of our lives.

A new exhibition of rarely seen images at the Chau Chak Wing Museum transports us to a time when costumes had to be captured in a studio, and when fictional photographs, posing models in a story or comic scene, were sold and bought for home entertainment.

The Staged Photograph presents images taken between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, by professional and amateur photographers, from Australia, Britain and the United States.

Exhibition curator Jan Brazier said: “The Staged Photograph is a fascinating dive into an unfamiliar photographic history. Its images are a diverse and intriguing insight into the role staged photographs played in our lives and the popular culture of the time.”

Studio: from the ballroom to bath soap

Costume balls were immensely popular from the 1830s. From the 1860s, families in their fancy dress costumes or special outfits could be professionally photographed in a studio complete with props and a painted background.

“These photos were private memories kept in frames or the family album, where undoubtedly many are still to be found,” said Jan Brazier.

Communities held balls to raise money for good causes and from 1900 they included the ‘poster ball’ when businesses would pay fundraisers to have someone wear a costume festooned with advertisements for their products. These balls were as popular in high society as in country towns and suburbs. Costumes for Sunlight Soap, Silver Starch laundry powder, Jelline jelly crystals and Silver Drop self-raising flour can be seen in the exhibition.

Stereograph, mass home entertainment

The ‘online’ experience of the 19th century, the stereograph used two nearly identical photographs to create a 3D image when seen through a viewer called a stereoscope. Originally a middle-class activity, with the family gathering in the parlour to enjoy the images, it became more affordable by the 1890s and the mass home entertainment of its time. Its transformation saw millions of stereographs in use worldwide.

Views of exotic locations were by far the most popular stereographs for ‘armchair travelling’, but commercial photographers also created fictional scenes using actors and props to tell highly theatrical stories. Sentimental and comical scenes were big sellers.

Some of the most popular themes are still familiar – love, courtship, marriage, children and drunkenness – but others are of their time, taken from vaudeville jokes or the prejudices of the age. Both Irish servant women and African American plantation workers were held up to racist ridicule. One popular genre was college girls taking part in dormitory ‘larks and pranks’. Another was financial ruin from horse racing.

“The visual humour revealed in these stereographs provides a way for us to understand and interrogate a previous era’s cultural and social values,” said Jan Brazier.

The Home Studio

Home photography took off when smaller, more portable cameras became available, and the Kodak revolution arrived in the early 20th century. Amateur photographers captured special family moments using the backyard as a set. Family members posed as if in a studio, with a suspended curtain on the washing line or a pot plant on a stand, often still capturing a special costume. There was also a practical reason to work outdoors: better light.

Our photographic collection

All photographs are drawn from the Macleay Collections of the Chau Chak Wing Museum. These photographs are some of the more than 60,000 in the University’s social history photograph collection. The majority were donated and cover the mid-19th to 20th century.

“It doesn’t surprise me the Museum’s historical photographic exhibitions are so popular as people make a direct connection with our past ways of seeing ourselves. Anyone interested in Australia’s photography, history and early pop culture will enjoy this current exhibition,” Jan Brazier said.

Text from the Chau Chak Wing Museum website

Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher)
‘A Pair of Drawers’
c. 1895
Stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher)
‘You Hussy, let my Husband alone’
c. 1895
Stereograph (single image)
Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

The Rose Stereograph Company

The publishing output of this long-lived firm (which operated from about 1880 until it went into liquidation in 2017) was phenomenal, and when the remains of what must have been a vast photographic archive went on sale in June 2021 with Lloyds Auctions…

According to a brief history by postcard collector Leo Fitzgerald, the Rose story began when Cornish sea captain William Rose came to the Victorian Ballarat gold fields from California and married Grace Ash at Ballarat in 1861. The couple’s son, George, was born in 1862 at the town of Clunes. He worked in his father’s shoe shop in Chapel Street, Prahran, between 1877 and 1880 (apparently producing his earliest photos from those premises) and began spending his Sundays selling photos to picnic parties in the Dandenong hills. Finding his niche in photography, he moved to a new address at Armadale and founded his own firm publishing stereographic views. Over the years he travelled to many countries and recorded numerous important historic events with his stereographic camera equipment, opening offices in Sydney, Wellington and London. His images from Korea have become especially celebrated in Korea, where they represent an extremely rare glimpse of the nation in 1904, before the onset of the destruction wrought by the wars of the 20th century. …

Collector and researcher Ron Blum, whose excellent books built on Leo Fitzgerald’s work, wrote that George’s son Walter took over the business sometime before 1931, selling it in that year to long-time employees Edward Gilbert and Herbert Cutts… George’s wife, Elizabeth, died in 1929, and both George’s sons died before him. With no longer any legal interest in the company he had founded, George kept on taking photographs for the old firm, travelling around Australia in a mobile darkroom and camping along the way. He worked almost until his death in 1942, aged 80… The Rose Stereographic Company continued under the stewardship of Herbert “Bert” Cutts, who brought his son Neil into the business in the 1950s.

Greg Ray. “The Rose Stereograph Company: a snapshot,” on the Photo Time Tunnel website July 16, 2021 [Online] Cited 23/09/2023. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Rose Stereograph Company, Melbourne (Australian)(publisher)
‘The Great Australian Bite (Bight)’
c. 1895
Stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

George Rose was born in Clunes, Victoria, in 1861. He did not follow his father into boot-making, but was interested in astronomy and natural history. He was unconventional, of rather eccentric and Bohemian character. After moving to Melbourne in 1876, George developed his skills as a photographer, especially in the stereoscopic field – what is known as 3D photography today. He founded the Rose Stereographic Company in 1880. In 1901 George recorded the celebrations for the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York, and in the following years travelled across Australia and over 35 countries taking three-dimensional photos. By 1907 his business employed six people – two males and four females; at its peak, staff numbered around 20. In 1913 the Rose Stereographic Company began manufacturing “real photo” postcards. George’s son Walter managed the company, allowing his father to concentrate on taking the photographs. In 1931 the business was sold to two long-time employees, Edward Gilbert and Herbert (Bert) Cutts. George Rose died of cancer in 1942, having outlived both his sons, but the business remained in the Cutts family for many years before it finally closed down in March 2017.

Information from the book George Rose – The Postcard Era by Ron Blum.

C.H. Graves, Universal Photo Art Co (American)
‘How Bridget served the POTATOES UNDRESSED. ‘I’ll not take off another STITCH if I lose me JOB’ ‘
c. 1897
Stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

The Universal Photo Art Company was one of several business titles under which photographer Carlton Harlow Graves sold his photographs late in his career. He was the son of Jesse Albert Graves, an important early worker who was based in the Delaware Water Gap area of Pennsylvania in the 1860-1880 time frame and produced some 500 generally fine scenic views of the western part of the state. Carlton learned the photographic art from his father and moved to Philadelphia to began producing on his own in about 1880. In his early years, he seems to have taken all the views which he published, but he soon began to buy or pirate images from others. Stereoviews issued under his own name are extremely rare.

At its peak, The Universal Photo Art Company seems to have been a rather substantial outfit. In addition to the headquarters offices and production facilities in Philadelphia, there was a western branch in Naperville, Ill., under F. A. Messerschmidt as general manager. There are numbers listed to almost to 5,000, although the number of individual photos actually used is only about 1,300. By the late 1890’s, C. H. Graves company became a major publisher offering “Art Nouveau Stereographs” on light gray curved mounts. His trade list offered excellent views of hunting scenes, Jamaica, Japan, Java, New York City, Palestine and others. To compete with low priced lithographs and copies, Graves offered his “Universal Series” or “Universal Views” on black mounts with no credit to himself. These have the number and the title in the negative and were sold at a reduced price from the regular “Art Nouveau” issues. Graves also offered boxed sets but they were not sold in the quantities of Underwood and Underwood, the Keystone View Company and H. C. White. The company seems to have been active until about 1910 when its stock of negatives were sold to Underwood & Underwood and presumably went from there to the Keystone View Company with the rest of the Underwood photos.

Paul Rubinstein. “Universal Photo Art Company,” on the Yellowstone stereoviews website Nd [Online] Cited 07/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

C.H. Graves, Universal Photo Art Co (American)
‘Rocky Mountain telephone line’
1895-1905
Stereograph (single image)
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

Keystone View Company (American)
‘Bliss disturbed’
c. 1903
Stereograph
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by Sandra Savides, 2014

The Keystone View Company was founded in 1892 in Meadville, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. by amateur photographer B. L. Singley (Benneville Lloyd Singley). The trade list at the end of 1892 consisted of only a hundred titles but by 1940 they had commercially produced more than 40,000 titles. …

The views sold by the company in the U.K. from 1898 to 1906 were distributed under the name ‘The Fine-Art Photographers’ Publishing Co.’ and included instructions on how to view them with a ‘Realistiscope’; the company were manufacturing and selling stereoscopes from 1898 onwards.

There was an increased popularity of stereographs between 1898 and 1906, during which Keystone (like Underwood & Underwood) entered the box-set market. Along with topographical, nature, events and genre-view scenes, Keystone also began an Educational department in 1898 which issued sets illustrating geography, commerce, technology, history and natural studies.

After 1920 the Keystone View Company was the major global publisher of stereoviews, between 1915 and 1921 they had bought the negatives of nearly all of their competitors. With offices all over the world at this time the company was successful, especially from the sales of World War I stereoview sets.

The Keystone View Company maintained regular production right up until 1939 but continued to manufacture views for optometric purposes, with individual orders for stereoviews being filled up until the early 1970s.

Rebecca. “Keystone View Company,” on The Stereoscopy Blog 3rd January 2021 [Online] Cited 07/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Lorna Studios, Glebe (Australian)
[Sunlight Soap Girl]
1905-1915
Cabinet card
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated from Lydia Bushell, 1983

George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian)
[Four children in fancy dress featuring the products, Jelline and Silver Drop Flour]
1910-1930
Glass negative, half-plate
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by R. Hawkins, 1988

George Henry Hawkins, Sydney (Australian)
[Lily dressed in costume as ‘Victoria’]
1910-1930
Glass negative, quarter-plate
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by R. Hawkins, 1988

J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian)
[Portrait of a young Jean Cunningham and Master Hurlstone in English court costumes]
c. 1914-1920s
Glass negative
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by J. Park, 1981

Scottish-born John Gartly Park (1878-1945) established his photographic studio at his home in Francis Street, Leichhardt around 1914. He was active in the local community, a member of the Loyal Orange Lodge, and a choir and orchestra conductor for the lodge and church.

His collection of glass negative portraits includes a small number of sitters in costume. Posed against Park/s decorative studio background during and after the First World War years, we are reminded of the popularity of fancy dress events, of which these images are rare photographic evidence. Surnames of his sitters are scratched into the edge of the negatives providing clues as to the identities.

The Park Collection was donated by his son, John Park in 1981.

Wall text from the exhibition

J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian)
[Portrait of Miss Orr in fancy dress as Britannia]
c. 1914-1920s
Glass negative
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by J Park, 1981

J.G. Park, Leichhardt (Australian)
[Portrait of Miss Larsen wearing a Silver Star Starch costume]
c. 1914-1920s
Glass negative Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by J. Park, 1981

Oliver Emery, Sydney (Australian)
[Three boys posed outside against a makeshift backdrop]
c. 1914-1930
Glass negative, half-plate
Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney
Donated by O. Emery, 1983

Chau Chak Wing Museum – The University of Sydney
Level 1, University Place, Camperdown, NSW 2006
Phone: 02 9351 2812

Opening hours:
Monday to Friday (until 9pm Thursdays) 9am – 5pm
Saturday and Sunday 12 – 4pm
Closed public holidays

Exhibition: ‘The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“These photographs awaken in the consumer a desire to possess the object of the camera’s attention, the aesthetisication of the object as a form of “readymade” available for immediate consumption.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 11th March – 4th August, 2024

Curator: Virgina McBride, Research Associate in the Department of Photographs at The Met

Anton Bruehl (American born Australia, 1900-1982) 'Four Roses Whiskey: Worth Reaching For' 1949 from the exhibition 'The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - August, 2024

Anton Bruehl (American born Australia, 1900-1982)
Four Roses Whiskey: Worth Reaching For
1949
Laminated photomechanical printer’s proof
26.1 x 27.4cm (10 1/4 x 10 13/16 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Estate of Anton Bruehl

Meticulously staged by the pioneering colour photographer Anton Bruehl, this work was part of a series showing the whiskey in many exciting scenarios: the glass appeared to travel by train and cruise liner, as well as hot air balloon. Bruehl’s pictures ran as ads in LIFE and Newsweek, conjuring worldly associations for his client, the Kentucky distiller Four Roses.

Against all odds, these eye-catching scenes were not darkroom fabrications – Bruehl arranged them by hand, with the help of miniaturists, set dressers, and a celebrity florist.

Testing appetites for novelty, illusion, and abundance against the limits of good taste, he wagered that this crisp construction would quench your thirst, then melt into hot air.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Instagram page

Anton Bruehl was born in 1900 of German émigré parents in the small town of Hawker, Australia. By 1919, when he moved to the United States to work as an electrical engineer, he was a skilled amateur photographer. A show of student work from the Clarence H. White School of Photography at the Art Center, New York, in 1923 convinced Bruehl to quit his engineering job to become a photographer. White taught Bruehl privately for six months and then asked him to teach at his school, including its summer sessions in Maine. White’s sudden death, in 1925, prompted Bruehl to open a studio, at first partnering with photographer Ralph Steiner and then with his older brother, Martin Bruehl; it was immediately successful. Specializing in elaborately designed and lit tableaux, Bruehl won top advertising awards throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. A favourite of Condé Nast Publications, he developed the Bruehl-Bourges colour process with colour specialist Fernand Bourges, which gave Condé Nast a monopoly on colour magazine reproduction from 1932 to 1935.

Text from the MoMA Object: Photo website

What a thoughtful, stimulating and well presented exhibition which contains some absolutely beautiful product photographs. These photographs awaken in the consumer a desire to possess the object of the camera’s attention, the aesthetisication of the object as a form of “readymade” available for immediate consumption.

It’s such a pity that for some of sections – such as “The Array”, “The Montage”, and “The Ideal user” – I only have one or two media image to illustrate the theme.

I have included in the posting a wonderful photograph from my own collection – a postcard with a real photograph on the front by an unknown photographer, showing a proprietor standing by the front door of his shop advertising the wares for “Howard, Watchmaker & Jeweller”, no date – probably British from 1890s-1910s due to his attire, the typeface on the front of the shop, and how “jewellery” is spelt. In the window there is an effusive display of clocks, watches, rings and Prince Albert watch chains.

My favourite photographs in the posting are the portrait of The Silver Merchants (c. 1850, below); the photograph of a tombstone from the Vermont Marble Tombstone Catalogue (1880s, below); the hand-coloured photograph by the Schadde Brothers of High Grade Jelly Eggs, from a Brandle & Smith Co. Catalogue (c. 1915, below); and the sublime Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co. photograph Automotive Component (February 22, 1927, below)

Through these product photographs we begin to understand how, “The conventions of the past inform these norms and explain the advertisements that we see in our daily lives.” And how we have lost that spark of creativity, use of colour and form and appreciation of beauty in product photography that was the essence of what has gone before.

For those that are interested, I have included some expressive quotations on the complexity of the relationship between the construction of the self, commodities and consumer culture at the bottom of the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

“Consumer capitalism, with its efforts to standardise consumption and to shape tastes through advertising, plays a basic role in furthering narcissism. The idea of generating an educated and discerning public has long since succumbed to the pervasiveness of consumerism, which is a ‘society dominated by appearances’. Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the very things the narcissist desires – attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity – through the consumption of the ‘right’ kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.”

Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 172.

Unknown photographer (British?) 'Howard – Watchmaker and Jeweller' 1890s-1910s?

Unknown photographer (British?) 'Howard – Watchmaker and Jeweller' 1890s-1910s? (verso)

Unknown photographer (Brtish?)
Howard – Watchmaker and Jeweller (front and verso)
1890s-1910s?
Silver gelatin photograph on postcard
Collection of Marcus Bunyan

This photograph is not in the exhibition

“”Product photography is, now, completely inescapable – it follows you around and stalks you on social media – and that condition is very interesting,” said [curator] McBride. The conventions of the past inform these norms and explain the advertisements that we see in our daily lives…

When I visited the exhibition, I was lucky enough to meet Drew, an advertisement photographer who spoke to me about her impressions of The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography. “As someone who works in advertising photography, I find it quite interesting how I think we’ve lost some of the creativity that I see here in this imagery, as far back as the 1920s. It makes me wonder about how I could implement or think about new ways of composition or exploring basic objects in a more exciting way. I’m curious about how these objects were received as advertisements back then. Now, I think we see them more as fine art, so it is interesting to think about what our advertising images could look like twenty years from now.” Drew was strong in her belief that much of the beauty and wonder of advertisement photography has been lost over the decades.

In the 1920s, rising industrial output and consumer demand led executives to seek ways to make their products stand out in a crowded market. Applied psychology shifted managers’ focus to the consumer’s mind, emphasizing the need to persuade consumers that they could find individuality and personal meaning in standardized goods. Consumers “believe what the camera tells them because they know that nothing tells the truth so well.” …

The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography exposes the truth in an entirely new way. It exposes the secrets of photography and how the truth shifted through years of capitalism and consumerism, demanding different sales strategies from producers… [By the 1950s] As the American capitalist market demanded printed ads and mass consumption increased, photographers lost their creative control, with advertisement directors taking up the mantle. There is a straightforward appeal and very little left to the imagination.”

Ayana Chari. “A Review of the Met Museum’s ‘The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography’,” on The Science Survey website July 10, 2024 [Online] Cited 26/07/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But these familiar trappings of everyday life will be, at times, unrecognisable – so altered by the camera as to constitute something entirely new. Enticing consumers with increasingly experimental approaches to the still life genre, the photographs featured transform everyday objects into covetable commodities. The camera abstracts them from functional use, at times distorting them through dizzying perspectives and modulations of scale. Spanning the first century of photographic advertising, the exhibition will illustrate how commercial camerawork contributed to the visual language of modernism, suggesting new links between the promotional strategies of vernacular studios and the tactics of the interwar avant-garde. Corporate commissions by celebrated innovators, including Paul Outerbridge, August Sander, and Piet Zwart, will appear alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications, united by a common cause: to snatch the ordinary out of context, and sell it back at full price.

The exhibition is made possible by The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Installation view of the exhibition 'The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Installation view of the exhibition 'The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing at right, introductory wall text to the exhibition (below) and F. D. Hampson's Panama Hats, from a Sloan-Force Co. Catalogue c. 1916 (below)

Installation views of the exhibition The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing at right in the bottom image, introductory wall text to the exhibition (below) and F. D. Hampson’s Panama Hats, from a Sloan-Force Co. Catalogue (c. 1916, below)

Introduction to the exhibition

The photographs in this exhibition do not depict rare or special things. They show toothpaste, tombstones, and hats. But here these familiar trappings of everyday life are, at times, unrecognisable – so altered by the camera as to constitute something entirely new. The Real Thing charts these tactics across the first century of photographic advertising.

If functional objects can be difficult to see, the camera is uniquely equipped to bring them into focus. Excised from mundane contexts and ushered into the studio, they assume new allure, independent of their value or means of production. For early retailers and ad agencies, photography bolstered consumer confidence; the medium offered unprecedented realism, and better still, an aura of truth. Beginning in the late 1850s, new demand for manufactured goods subsidised commercial photography, and the industry grew quickly, spurred by evolving technologies of image reproduction. In the decades that followed, photographers’ increasingly experimental still lives adapted modernism for the mass market.

In the spirit of early photo manuals and how-to guides, the exhibition unfolds thematically, exploring a range of approaches to what is today termed product photography. Pictures from across the commercial section – made in storerooms, corporate studios, and avant-garde ateliers – entice buyers and invent needs, transforming everyday objects into covetable commodities. Works by celebrated innovators appear here alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications, united by a common cause to snatch the ordinary out of context and sell it back at full price.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation views of the exhibition The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing at right, Irving Penn’s Theatre Accident, New York (1947)

The Inventory

Installation view of the exhibition The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing the section The Inventory including at second left, Fashions 1837-1887, by William Charles Brown (1888, below); and at third right, Vermont Marble Tombstone Catalogue (1880s, below)

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) 'Articles of Glass' before June 1844 from the exhibition 'The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March - August, 2024

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
Articles of Glass
before June 1844
Salted paper print from paper negative
Image: 13.2 x 15.1 cm. (5 3/16 x 5 15/16 in.)
Frame: 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and Harrison D. Horblit Gift, 1988
Public domain

Talbot’s negative-positive photographic process, first made public in 1839, would change the dissemination of knowledge as had no other invention since movable type. To demonstrate the paper photograph’s potential for widespread distribution – its chief advantage over the contemporaneous French daguerreotype – Talbot produced The Pencil of Nature, the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. With extraordinary prescience, Talbot’s images and brief texts proposed a wide array of applications for the medium, including portraiture, reproduction of paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts, travel views, visual inventories, scientific records, and essays in art.

This photograph and the plate preceding it, “Articles of China,” were offered as examples of photography’s usefulness as a tool for creating visual inventories of unprecedented accuracy. Talbot wrote: “The articles presented on this plate are numerous: but, however numerous the objects – however complicated the arrangement – the Camera depicts them all at once.”

Unknown photographer (American)
Case manufactured by Hiram Studley (American, active 1840s)
The Silver Merchants
c. 1850
Daguerreotype
Image: 2 3/16 × 2 3/4 in. (5.5 × 7cm)
Case: 3 1/8 × 3 11/16 × 9/16 in. (8 × 9.3 × 1.5cm)
Approx. 6 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. open
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Joyce F. Menschel Gift, 2017
Public domain

The first product photographs doubled as portraits. Posing with their wares, peddlers demonstrated a standard of work and an assurance of quality. The daguerreotype, a direct-positive image on silver-plated copper, offered all manner of workers an increasingly affordable likeness. Here, silver dealers make the most of the medium, modelling careful attention to their inventory. They examine pocket watches, pendants, and fobs splayed in a sales case. Plying their trade before the camera, they mirror the work of the era’s newest silver merchants: photographers themselves.

Ludwig Belitski (German, 1830-1902)
Pitcher and Two Glasses, Venetian, 15th Century
1854
Salted paper print from glass negative
8 3/4 × 6 15/16 in. (22.2 × 17.7cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Fund, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016
Public domain

Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880)
[Plaster Casts of Bishops’ Miters, South Porch, Chartres]
c. 1855
Salted paper print from paper negative
Image: 22 x 32.5cm (8 11/16 x 12 13/16 in.)
Frame: 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Howard Gilman Foundation Gift, 2002
Public domain

When early photographers turned to the material world of things, it was often to document property or record cultural heritage. Their efforts reveal the camera’s remarkable capacity to abstract and transform the objects before its lens. In 1855, Charles Nègre accepted a commission to make architectural studies of Chartres Cathedral as part of a larger initiative to preserve and promote French patrimony. A complement to his sweeping views of sculpted facades, this still life monumentalises the site’s smaller details. It shows plaster replicas of ecclesiastical headgear, taken from the cathedral exterior. These are simulacra of simulacra, yet Nègre recasts them anew, registering their textured surfaces in a splendid study of shadow and mass.

Unknown maker (American)
Man Demonstrating Patent Model for Sash Window
Late 1850s-1860s
Tintype with applied colour
4.8 x 3.6cm (1 7/8 x 1 7/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bequest of Herbert Mitchell, 2008
Public domain

Pine & Bell (photographic studio) (American, active 1860s, Troy, New York)
William H. Bell (American born England, Liverpool 1831-1910 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
George W. Pine (American, active 1860s, Troy, New York)
[Display of Hats and Accessories of 1868]
1868
Albumen silver print from glass negative
Image: 3 9/16 × 2 1/8 in. (9 × 5.4 cm)
Mount: 3 11/16 in. × 2 3/8 in. (9.3 × 6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
William L. Schaeffer Collection, Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary

Unknown photographer
[E. Adkins Gun Merchant]
c. 1874
Ambrotype
6.3 x 7.5cm (2 1/2 x 2 15/16 in.) visible
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of Charles Wilkinson, 1965
Public domain

Unknown maker (American)
Rock Island Stove Company Catalogue
1878-1883
Albumen silver prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library Fund, 2003
Public domain

Unknown maker (British)
Fashions 1837-1887 by William Charles Brown (British, active late 19th century)
1888
Woodburytypes
22.5 x 17cm (8 7/8 x 6 11/16 in.)
Approx. 9 x 14 in. open
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Joyce F. Menschel Photography Library Fund, 2011

In the back of this catalogue from Queen Victoria’s milliner, a disclaimer confirms that no British songbirds were sacrificed for its production. Nevertheless, a flock of hats in fine feather fills this page spread, flaunting designs fit for the royal family. The deluxe volume is illustrated with woodburytypes, an early photomechanical process with a rich tonal range to register varied velvets, silks, straws, and plumes. Hatstands and supports have been edited out of these images to suspend the specimens midair. Surreal to modern eyes, the effect accentuates the hats’ commodity status and implies inventory soaring out of stock.

Frank M. Sutcliffe (British, 1853-1941)
[Display of Whitby Seascape Photographs]
c. 1888
Albumen silver print
Image: 4 1/4 × 5 1/2 in. (10.8 × 14 cm)
Sheet: 6 15/16 × 9 1/2 in. (17.7 × 24.1 cm)
Frame: 11 x 14 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, Anonymous Gift, 2023
Public domain

“Choose one subject, anything will do,” Frank Sutcliffe advised aspiring photographers. If his career-spanning preoccupation with the British seaside town of Whitby seemed myopic to some peers, it allowed him to cultivate a distinctive brand. This typology of seascapes testifies to his years of work along the town harbour, where he weathered storms and punishing wind in pursuit of the perfect view. Pinned up for purchase at an exhibition, his photographs here become products. This rudimentary style of display seems to have served him well; at one such showcase, he counted the Prince of Wales among his customers.

Unknown (American)
[Vermont Marble Tombstone Catalogue]
1880s
Albumen silver prints
Approx. 17 1/4 x 4 in. open
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jefferson R. Burdick Bequest, 1972
Public domain

“When you are met with a flood of tears, the best thing to do is politely say that you will call again,” advised one traveling salesman in the tombstone trade. For Cyrus Creigh, a thirty-something Virginian who sold stones from this annotated catalogue, such considerations were part of the job. In each new town, he might solicit names of bereaved families from undertakers and local cemetery staff. Slipped from a suit pocket and proffered door-to-door, his book of bluntly descriptive photographs sold surviving relatives a modicum of consolation. The stones, posed in a corporate studio and silhouetted in darkness, assume a solemn universality, as if any of their blank faces might soon bear a familiar name.

Schadde Brothers (American, active Minneapolis, 1890s-1910s)
Alvin J. Schadde (American, 1872-1937)
Herman T. Schadde (American, 1874-1937)
[High Grade Jelly Eggs, from a Brandle & Smith Co. Catalogue]
c. 1915
Gelatin silver print with applied colour
Image: 8 1/4 × 9 3/4 in. (21 × 24.8cm)
Frame: 18 x 20 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2013

Schadde Brothers (American, active Minneapolis, 1890s-1910s)
Alvin J. Schadde (American, 1872-1937)
Herman T. Schadde (American, 1874-1937)
[Satinettes, Filled Confections and Ye Old Style Stick Candy, from a Brandle & Smith Co. Catalogue]
c. 1915
Gelatin silver print with applied colour
Image: 8 1/2 × 10 5/8 in. (21.6 × 27cm)
Frame: 18 x 20 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2013

This trade catalogue tricks the eye to tempt the tongue. An artisan has coloured its black-and-white prints, illustrating each sugar stripe and speckled bean. Philadelphia confectioner Brandle & Smith understood that their candy was its own best advertisement, and at one point even induced a museum to accession it for display. Wider distribution was achieved by the salesmen who carried catalogues across the country, taking bulk orders from local shops. Here, the limitations of hand-colouring work to their advantage. Because sweets in jars proved too tricky to tint, the satinettes and candy sticks seem to burst into brilliant colour as they spill from their packaging, satiating the viewer and assisting the sale.

F. D. Hampson (American, 1871-1947)
Panama Hats, from a Sloan-Force Co. Catalogue
c. 1916
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.5 x 23.4 cm (7 5/16 x 9 3/16 in. )
Frame: 16 x 20 in.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001

Like satellites, these straw hats hover in a void. Their absence of context invites imaginative projection: how easy to envision this or that model touching down on one’s head. Popularised by association with the new Panama Canal, the hats were photographed for a St. Louis sales catalogue. Their spare, surreal configuration anticipates an avant-garde approach; in the coming years, disembodied hats would pop up in works by Max Ernst and Hans Richter, evoking the callous consumer – a bourgeois icon ripe for critique. Here, such premonitions of modernism serve practical ends. Suspended together, their varied brims and bands elicit comparison, demanding scrutiny. In an era of exponentially increasing consumer choice, such photographic displays could make anyone into a connoisseur.

Ralph Bartholomew Jr. (American, 1907-1985)
[Soap Packaging]
1936
Carbro print
32.8 x 25.7cm (12 15/16 x 10 1/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© Estate of Ralph Bartholomew, Courtesy Keith de Lellis Gallery, NY

If mouthwatering soap seems a contradiction in terms, commercial photographer Ralph Bartholomew Jr. confounds the senses with eye candy to rival the confections nearby. Photographed two decades later, this work did not depend on paint for its delectable palette. It is an example of the early carbro process – a complex tricolor printing technique that gained popularity in the 1930s, as art directors courted Depression-era audiences. Brilliant colour is essential here, in a photograph likely commissioned to sell not the soap but its packaging. Marketed to producers in an array of trade publications (including Modern Packaging, and the industry-specific standby Soap), fine paper wrappers were a booming industry unto themselves. Here, Bartholomew parades his bedecked bars across a page of newsprint showing stock prices to suggest that in this market, even cleanliness was a commodity.

Bartholomew was a successful commercial photographer best known for his innovative use of stop-action and multiple exposure techniques in advertising and editorial work. He made this photograph while he was a student at the Clarence H. White School of Photography.

The Array

Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971)
RCA Speakers
1933
Gelatin silver print
Image: 33.3 x 23.3 cm (13 1/8 x 9 3/16 in.)
Frame: 22 1/2 x 18 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Warner Communications Inc. Purchase Fund, 1976

In a single voice, the assembled speakers broadcast the scope and influence of American radio. Commissioned by audio manufacturer RCA Victor, this photograph is one component of a monumental photomural for the NBC rotunda at Rockefeller Center. Amplified to a height of ten feet, this and other views of radio technology comprised a work of corporate propaganda to rival those public projects Margaret Bourke-White had recently seen on tours of the Soviet Union. She completed the mural at breakneck speed, often working through the night to photograph equipment at regional stations (lest she risk electrocution during daytime transmission hours). Seeking a visual analogue to audio, she captured the speakers in staccato sequence, their scalloped shapes reverberating beyond the frame.

On March 11, 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography, an exhibition exploring how commercial camerawork contributed to the visual language of modernism. The photographs featured depict the familiar trappings of everyday life – from toothpaste to tombstones to hats – but at times these subjects will be unrecognisable, so altered by the camera as to constitute an entirely new view.

Spanning the first century of photographic advertising, The Real Thing unites more than 60 works from across the commercial sector. In these photographs, artists – some famous, some forgotten – transform common objects into covetable commodities. Corporate commissions by celebrated innovators, such as Paul Outerbridge, August Sander, and Piet Zwart, appear alongside obscure catalogues and trade publications. Bringing these photographs together, the exhibition reveals links between the promotional strategies of vernacular studios and the radical tactics of the interwar avant-garde.

“This dynamic exhibition looks anew at the commercial history of photographs in the Museum’s collection,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “By embracing this discerning lens, we gain a renewed appreciation of the intricacies and aesthetics of our everyday surroundings.”

“Not many of the photographers in this exhibition would have identified as fine artists, but their inventive commercial work harnesses the artistic potential of the camera to persuade and enchant,” added the show’s curator, Virginia McBride, Research Associate in the Department of Photographs. “Now that photography’s place in museums no longer needs defending, The Real Thing considers how working photographers, in corporate studios and industrial storerooms, advanced modern art’s visual revolution.”

The first advertising photographs were published in albums and used to peddle products door to door. For early retailers and ad agencies, photography offered unprecedented realism and, better still, an aura of truth; the medium’s perceived objectivity bolstered consumer confidence. Beginning in the late 1850s, new demand for manufactured goods subsidised commercial photography, spurred by evolving technologies of image reproduction. In the decades that followed, increasingly inventive approaches to the still life, from dizzying perspectives to extreme modulations of scale, adapted modernism for the mass market. Historically framed as avant-garde experimentation, this work is rarely acknowledged in its original context of commercial enterprise. This exhibition resituates such innovation within the realm of advertising and investigate its unlikely origins.

Drawn entirely from The Met collection and featuring many photographs from The Ford Motor Company Collection of modernist European and American photography, the exhibition brings together a wide range of photographic media. Included are proof prints, tear sheets, and sample books used by travelling merchants, along with photomontages and rare examples of early colour printing. Such masterworks as André Kertész’s elegant study of a fork and Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach’s surrealist-inflected advertisements for hair dye and gloves are presented together with the projects of overlooked studios and anonymous makers. Debuting dozens of objects from the Department of Photographs that have never before been shown, and introducing timely new acquisitions, the exhibition considers photography in an expanded field of commercial practice.

The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography is organised by Virgina McBride, Research Associate in the Department of Photographs at The Met.

Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Grit Kallin-Fischer (German, 1897-1973)
KPM Ceramics
1930
Gelatin silver print
6 5/8 × 4 3/16 in. (16.8 × 10.7cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Funds from various donors, 2023

The Isolated Object

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Ide Collar
1922
Platinum print
Image: 11.8 x 9.3 cm (4 5/8 x 3 11/16 in.)
Frame: approx. 14 x 17 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

“I have attempted to interpret the beauty of the simplest and humblest of objects,” Paul Outerbridge Jr. wrote in 1922. Inspired by his teacher Clarence H. White’s artistic vision for applied photography, Outerbridge regarded the aperture as a kind of canvas in which to arrange compositions with absolute balance. In this, his first commercial assignment, he achieved such equilibrium by custom-cutting a grid of linoleum squares to the scale of his subject. When published as an ad in Vanity Fair, the photograph was ensnared in a scrollwork frame. Such a Victorian flourish seems incongruous today, but at the time, a picture as stark as this seemed to need dressing up. Nevertheless, Marcel Duchamp was said to have clipped the ad and pinned it to his studio wall, apprehending the mass-market collar’s readymade style.

Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Co. (American)
Automotive Component
February 22, 1927
Gelatin silver print
7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (19 × 24.1 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Purchase, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, by exchange, 2024

Fay Sturtevant Lincoln (American, 1894-1975)
Pass & Seymour Switch Plate
c. 1949
Gelatin silver print
Image: 23.8 x 17.9 cm (9 3/8 x 7 1/16 in.)
Frame: approx. 20 x 16 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

Please resist the urge to flip this light switch. Photographed at close range, the switch plate is so crisply articulated that it tempts touch. Fay Sturtevant Lincoln captures the sculptural quality of this mundane fixture, revealing a keen eye for the texture and detail of domestic life. Now coveted for their retro cachet, molded Bakelite furnishings like this one were ubiquitous in the late 1940s. Though Lincoln was better known for views of glamorous art deco interiors, his attention to the vernacular architecture of homes and offices offers an intimate view of everyday design.

Murray Duitz (American, 1917-2010)
A.S. Beck “Executive” Shoe
1957
Gelatin silver print
Image: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. (31.8 x 22.9cm)
Frame: 20 x 16 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gift of the artist, 1975
© Estate of Murray Duitz

The Unfamiliar Thing

Installation view of the exhibition ‘The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing the section The Unfamiliar Thing including at third left, August Sander’s Osram Light Bulbs (c. 1930, below); and at third right, H. Raymond Ball’s Pocket Comb (1930s, below)

Edward J. Steichen (American born Luxembourg, Bivange 1879 – 1973 West Redding, Connecticut)
[“Sugar Lumps” Pattern Design for Stehli Silks]
1927
Gelatin silver print
25.3 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

For a project promoting not sugar but silk, Edward Steichen devised textile patterns from photographs of everyday objects. His arrangements of sugar cubes, matches, and mothballs were printed onto Stehli’s “Americana” line of dress fabrics. The success of these designs speaks to the proliferation and popularity of object photography – a genre so culturally ingrained that, by the late 1920s, it could become a fashion phenomenon. Steichen helped shape these conditions in his influential role as chief photographer for Condé Nast. The Stehli project reflected his populist vision for commercial photography, at least insofar as these chic silks ever reached the mainstream.

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
[Osram Light Bulbs]
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
Image: 29.5 x 22.9 cm (11 5/8 x 9 in.)
Frame: 22 1/2 x 18 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Photography itself makes the case for artificial light in this commission for the German manufacturer Osram. Leveraging the camera’s codependence on their products, the lightbulb company sought out experimental practitioners, including August Sander, to promote the transformative potential of illumination. Sander is best known as the great portraitist of German society between the wars, but the commercial projects that supported his studio remain obscure. With a simple shift in perspective, he radically reorients viewer and subject, abstracting a spiral staircase into a swirl of pearls. His hypnotic image reveals how the shock and pleasure of modernist aesthetics – of looking for its own sake – could seamlessly convey the joys of consumption.

H. Raymond Ball (American, 1903-1983)
Pocket Comb
1930s
Gelatin silver print
Image: 25.2 x 19.8 cm (9 15/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
Frame: 20 x 16 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

The Montage

César Domela (Dutch, 1900-1992)
[Ruthsspiecher Tanks]
1928
Gelatin silver print
Image: 19.3 x 16.6 cm (7 5/8 x 6 9/16 in.)
Frame: 17 x 14 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Unknown (American)
[Montage for Packard Super Eight]
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
Image: 22.9 x 18.6 cm (9 x 7 5/16 in.)
Frame: 17 x 14 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

The Tableau

Installation view of the exhibition The Real Thing: Unpackaging Product Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York showing photographs from the section The Tableau including at left, André Kertész’s Fork (1928, below); and at second and third right, ringl + pit’s Dents (c. 1934) and Komol (1931, below)

André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985)
Fork
1928
Gelatin silver print
7.5 x 9.2cm (2 15/16 x 3 5/8 in.)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© The Estate of André Kertész / Higher Pictures

As a dinner party wound down in his friend Fernand Léger’s Paris studio, André Kertész found an unlikely tableau left on the table. In this chance encounter between fork and plate, he locates an incidental elegance. The photograph was never intended as an ad – Kertész instead chose it to represent his work in a series of European photography shows. On the exhibition circuit, it came to exemplify a strain of New Vision photography characterised by its clear-eyed reassessment of ordinary things. Only after this did Kertész grant permission for its use in a German silverware campaign. In the ad layout, the photograph was credited and uncropped – atypically presented as a true work of art. The truth of the ad was another question: despite its German rebranding, this fork remained a French department-store product.

ringl + pit (German active 1930-1933)
Grete Stern (German, 1904-1999)
Ellen Auerbach (German 1906-2004)
Komol
1931
Gelatin silver print
Image: 35.9 x 24.4 cm (14 1/8 x 9 5/8 in.)
Frame: 20 x 15 5/8
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
© ringl+pit, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery

Grancel Fitz (American, 1894-1963)
Ipana Toothpaste
c. 1937
Gelatin silver print
Image: 12.9 x 32.5cm (5 1/16 x 12 13/16 in.)
Frame: approx. 12 x 20 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

The Ideal User

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
The Coffee Drinkers
1940
Carbro print
Image (overall): 27 x 38cm (10 5/8 x 14 15/16 in.)
Mount: 40.7 x 50.7cm (16 x 19 15/16 in.)
Frame: 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 in.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987

With a background in staging and an unwavering belief in the power of images to inspire a better life, Paul Outerbridge Jr. was well suited to the directorial tasks of advertising photography. For A&P Grocery’s Eight O’Clock Coffee, he orchestrated this scene in the display kitchen of a department store, painstakingly diagramming the setup in advance.

“How’d you learn to make such swell coffee, Dick?” the copy teased, when the ad ran in LIFE magazine. Such work exceeds the sum of its parts, selling more than just a jolt of caffeine. The after-dinner air of repose courts camp, conjuring an intimate blend of leisure and power. With it, Outerbridge offers the consumer the chance to be a man among men, all for the price of a can of coffee.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Some expressive quotations about the construction of the self, commodities and consumer culture

“Although the value of commodities is materially embodied in them, it is not visible in the objects themselves as a physical property. The illusion that value resides in objects rather than in the social relations between individuals and objects Marx calls commodity fetishism. When the commodity is fetishized, the labour that has gone into its production is rendered invisible.”

Rosemary Hennessey. “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture,” Chapter 6 in Nicholson, Linda and Seidman, Steven (eds.,). Social Postmodernism – Beyond Identity Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 161-162.

“When the commodity is dealt with merely as a matter of signification, meaning, or identities, only one of the elements of its production – the process of image making it relies on – is made visible. The exploitation of human labour on which the commodities appearance as an object depends remains out of sight.”

“The processes of capitalist relationships reproduce themselves in the consciousness of man and, in turn, reproduce a society that reflects an image of man as the seller and buyer of work, talent, aspiration and fantasies.”

Frankl, G. The Failure of the Sexual Revolution. Hove: Kahn and Averill, 1974, p. 26 quoted in Evans, David. Sexual Citizenship, The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 47.

“What was achieved was unprecedented scientific and technical progress and, eventually, the subordination of all other values to those of a world market which treats everything, including people and their labour and their lives and their deaths, as a commodity.”

John Berger and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 99.

“Consumption produces production … because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house were no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption. Only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch.”

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. On Literature and Art. New York: International General, 1973, p. 91 quoted in Wolff, Janet. The Social Production of Art. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, p. 95.

“… the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure. It not only promises to palliate all the old unhappiness to which flesh is heir; it creates or exacerbates new forms of unhappiness – personal insecurity, status anxiety …”

Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1978, p.73.

“Consumer culture is notoriously awash with signs, images, publicity. Most obviously, it involves an aestheticization of commodities and their environment …

Firstly, problems of status and identity … promote a new flexibility in the relations between consumption, communication and meaning. It is not so much that goods and acts of consumption become more important in signalling status (they were always crucial) but that both the structure of status and the structure of meaning become unstable, flexible, and highly negotiable. Appearance becomes a privileged site of strategic action in unprecedented ways.

Secondly, the nature of market exchange seems intrinsically bound up with aestheticization. As indicated above, commodities circulate through impersonal and anonymous networks: the split between producer and consumer extends beyond simple commissioning (where a personal relationship still exists) to the production for an anonymous general public … Haug (1986) theorizes this in the notion of ‘commodity aesthetics’: the producer must create an image of use value in which potential buyers can recognize themselves. All aspects of the product’s meaning and all channels through which its meaning can be constructed and represented become subject to intense and radical calculation.

This gives rise to some of the central issues of sociological debate on consumer culture. On the one hand, the eminently modern notion of the social subject as a self-creating, self-defining individual is bound up with self-creation through consumption: it is partly through the use of goods and services that we formulate ourselves as social identities and display these identities. This renders consumption as the privileged site of autonomy, meaning, subjectivity, privacy and freedom. On the other hand, all these meanings around social identity and consumption become objects of strategic action by dominating institutions. The sense of autonomy and identity in consumption is placed constantly under threat.”

Don Slater. Consumer Culture and Modernity. London: Polity Press, 1997, p. 31.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Phone: 212-535-7710

Opening hours:
Thursday – Tuesday 10am – 5pm
Closed Wednesday

Exhibition: ‘Man Ray. Liberating Photography’ at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne

Exhibition dates: 29th March – 4th August, 2024

Curator: Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée, with contributions from independent scholar Wendy A. Grossman

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Dora Maar' 1936 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Man Ray. Liberating Photography' at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne, March - August, 2024

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Dora Maar
1936
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Henriette Theodora Markovitch (22 November 1907 – 16 July 1997), known as Dora Maar, was a French photographer, painter, and poet. Maar is very well known for her role as Picasso’s lover, subject, and muse. He abused her. Maar photographed the successive stages of the creation of Guernica. It is the gelatin silver works of the surrealist period that remain the most sought after by admirers: Portrait of Ubu (1936), 29 rue d’Astorg, black and white, collages, photomontages or superimpositions.

Man Ray is hailed as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, but I admit I have no real liking for most of his work.

I remember seeing the first large-scale exhibition of Man Ray’s photography to have been presented in Australia at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004. In text about the exhibition the NGV states, “Man Ray produced some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century: eloquent portraits, dreamy solarised nudes, divine fashion photography and enigmatic images that continue to delight and astonish… A superb technician and a highly inventive artist, Man Ray always denied that he had any ability with the camera or in the darkroom. However, as the exhibition reveals, this is clearly not the case. The exhibition emphasises Man Ray’s techniques of framing, cropping, solarising and use of the photogram to present a new ‘surreal’ way of seeing, which continues to fascinate audiences today.”1

I came away from that exhibition thinking what a great technician Man Ray was, almost like a photographic scientist, an alchemist from another world conjuring small, intense images of clinical focus, but where was the emotional power of the images, where was their … what am I trying to enunciate … where was their vibrational energy. They were ice cold.2

I feel that Man Ray’s greatest artistic expression, his greatest music, were his photograms, “which he coined “rayographs” after himself. He explained that working with light in the darkroom allowed him to free himself from painting.” (Press release) As Man Ray himself said of his rayographs, “Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidised residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an experiment. They are the result of curiosity, inspiration, and these words do not pretend to convey any information.”3

“What the rayographs do not deny, however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality (because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance). Through an alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper, representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects themselves, in the surface of the paper.”4

(See a section of my paper “The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s Rayographs in a Digital Future” (2004) below in the posting).

On a final note, while it is fantastic to see such a large group of Man Ray’s photographs together in one space I am amazed, flabbergasted even, at the blue and yellow colour scheme on the floor of the gallery. What were they thinking? How can you appreciate black and white images, which are never actually black and white but always have subtle colours of either brown and blue, warm and cool, which need to be appreciated in a neutral colour space … when throughout the gallery your eye is constantly overwhelmed (by reflection from the gallery lights or subconsciously, even) by a sea of blue and yellow tiles. It makes no sense aesthetically, empirically or emotionally.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anonymous. “Man Ray,” on the National Gallery of Victoria website Nd [Online] Cited 18/07/2024

2/ This coldness can be seen in the photographs from the book at the bottom of the posting, where borders frame faces and are inverted, where objects in rayographs are paired opposite objective portraits, surface representations and human visage.

3/ Man Ray quoted in Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image (London: Gordon Fraser, 1980), 213 quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s Rayographs in a Digital Future,” published in The University of Queensland Vanguard Magazine: ‘Man Ray: Life, Work and Themes’, 2004, Triad series #2, pp. 40-46. ISBN 0-9756043-0-9

4/ Bunyan, op cit.,

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

“There is no eggshell, no thermometer or metronome, no brick, bread or broom that [Man Ray] cannot and does not change into something else. It is as if he discovers the soul of each conventional object by liberating it from its practical function…. [Man Ray] just cannot help to discover and reveal things because his whole person is involved in a process of continuous probing, of a natural distrust in things being “just so”.”

Hans Richter 1966

Installation view of the exhibition 'Man Ray. Liberating Photography' at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne

Installation view of the exhibition 'Man Ray. Liberating Photography' at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne showing at right, Man Ray's 'Nude, Kiki de Montparnasse' 1927; 'Artichokes in Bloom' 1934; and 'Still life Plaster Venus with Fruit' c. 1936

Installation views of the exhibition Man Ray. Liberating Photography at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne, showing in the bottom image at right, Man Ray’s Nude, Kiki de Montparnasse 1927; Artichokes in Bloom 1934; and Still life Plaster Venus with Fruit c. 1936
© Khashayar Javanmardi and Photo Elyse Plateforme

“To be totally liberated from painting and its aesthetic implications” was the first avowed aim of Man Ray (United States, 1890-1976), who began his career as a painter. Photography was one of the major breakthroughs of modern art and led to a rethinking of notions of representation. In the 1920s and 30s, the photographic medium came to the forefront of the avant-garde movement, and Man Ray soon made a name for himself with his virtuosity. As a studio portraitist and fashion photographer, but also as an experimental artist who explored the potential of photography with the people around him, Man Ray was a multi-faceted figure. Considered one of the 20th century’s major artists, close to Dada and then Surrealism, he photographed Paris’ artistic milieu between the wars.

Exhibition

Curated from a private collection, the exhibition explores the artist’s extensive social contacts while presenting some of his most iconic works. In addition to providing a dazzling who’s who of the Parisian avant-garde, the works also highlight the innovations in photography made by Man Ray in Paris in the 1920s and 30s.

Artist

He took his first photographs in New York in the 1910s, but it was in Paris that his career took off. Even before opening his studio in Montparnasse in 1922, Man Ray worked for a year in his hotel room. The photographer’s reputation grew, and before long, the artist’s studio was flourishing. Fashion photographs alternated with portraits of the artistic figures of the day who had made Paris’ notoriety: Marcel Duchamp, whom he met in New York in 1915 and who introduced him to the Parisian artistic elite, as well as Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, among others, who posed for the photographer. His portraits also included Ballets Russes dancers and guests at the Count de Beaumont’s ball.

As soon as he arrived in Paris in the summer of 1921, Man Ray immediately became part of the Parisian intelligentsia of the Roaring Twenties. He met Jean Cocteau, who was himself a fixture of the Parisian art scene, André Breton, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst. He also met Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Arnold Schoenberg and James Joyce, whom he photographed for the Anglo-American bookshop Shakespeare and Company. But Man Ray was not merely content to have celebrities pose in his studio or to explore the female nude genre by working with those he considered his muses, such as Lee Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse, Meret Oppenheim and Adrienne Fidelin.

Creative Process

Man Ray also experimented in the darkroom, transforming the photographic medium into a powerful tool of artistic expression, even going so far as to do away with the camera when, in 1921-1922, he began creating photograms, which he coined “rayographs” after himself. He explained that working with light in the darkroom allowed him to free himself from painting, so convinced was he of the visual power of his experiments. Also in the 1920s, he experimented with the moving image and produced four films. The rhythm and freedom offered by the cinema complemented his photographic work, in which he saw a close relationship between film and poetry. This is why he gave his film Emak Bakia (1926) the subheading of “cinépoème”. Without ever abandoning portraiture, he experimented with other techniques in the 1930s: solarisation, overprinting and other distortions.

From the outset, photography has been more than a simple process of reproduction. For him, images were not taken fleetingly, but meticulously realised indoors. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson who opted for the spontaneous gesture and saw the street as a privileged playground, Man Ray composed and staged his photographs. The studio provided him with a space in which to explore his imagination. Some of the themes dear to the Surrealists can be found in his work: femininity, sexuality, strangeness, the boundary between dream and reality. His nude studies were part of his artistic research, which he developed in close collaboration with his companions who were part of the Parisian art scene. Kiki de Montparnasse – the woman with the f-holes of a violin on her back – whose real name was Alice Prin, was a dancer, singer, actress and painter who posed for artists such as Chaïm Soutine and Kees van Dongen. Lee Miller, a fellow New Yorker like him, had begun a modelling career in the United States but wanted to move to the other side of the camera. She met the photographer in Paris in 1929 when she was 22-years old, and became active in the Surrealist movement. More than a muse, she became his collaborator, learning photography at his side. Together, they discovered the technique of solarisation. Another artist with whom Man Ray had a professional and romantic relationship was the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, who was close to the Surrealist scene before pursuing an independent career as an artist.

Man Ray loved the freedom his photographic creations afforded him, and portraits and fashion photography enabled him to earn a living. It was in his studio that he embarked on a series of visual experiments. His portraits, which are relatively classical in style, testify not only to his commercial success, but also to his great sociability. Artists from Montparnasse, Surrealists, fashion and nightlife celebrities, patrons of the arts, Americans in Paris – the entire artistic elite – passed through his studio, as was the case with Nadar in the 19th century. Almost 50 years after Man Ray’s death, his photographs continue to fascinate us. His impact on the history of the medium is undeniable, and he served as an inspiration to photographers of the caliber of Berenice Abbott, Bill Brandt and Lee Miller. Man Ray remains one of the most famous photographers of the 20th century. He never stopped creating, without prejudice or constraint.

Press release from the Photo Elysee

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Noire et blanche' 1926 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Man Ray. Liberating Photography' at the Photo Elysee, Lausanne, March - August, 2024

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Black and White
1926
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Larmes (Tears)
1930
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Head, New York
1920
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse
Around 1925
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Nancy Cunard
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century’s most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon – who were among her lovers – as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian diplomat, orator, and statesman V. K. Krishna Menon.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Jacqueline Goddard
c. 1932
Solarised gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Jacqueline Goddard (French, 1912-2003)

Jacqueline Goddard, née Barsotti (1912-2003), was a favourite model of the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray in Paris during the 1930s.

As Jacqueline Barsotti, she had arrived in Montparnasse at the age of 17, a tall beauty with unruly fair hair. She was soon frequenting La Coupole and other haunts of the fashionable artists of the day. Many years later, by which time she was living on the Isle of Wight, she wrote a personal memoir in which she recalled her experiences and offered some piquant observations about the personalities she had come to know. …

Jacqueline Barsotti became a close friend of Man Ray, and of his former mistress, Kiki de Montparnasse. Of Man Ray she reported, “He was not handsome, his nose had no opinion and went all over the place. He always seemed to be meditating, and was seldom light-hearted. It was a great pity that he did not smile a lot. That little grin of his changed him altogether.” Kiki, without makeup, “looked like a potato”.

Another of Man Ray’s mistresses was the American photographer, Lee Miller. On the night that Lee Miller left Man Ray, Jacqueline Barsotti walked with him in the rain through Montparnasse cemetery before they returned to his studio, where he arranged a table with a bottle of poison, a gun and a rope. Then, as Man Ray sat at the table, Jacqueline herself took the picture of the artist contemplating suicide.

When Man Ray presented her with a book of his photographs, he proposed the inscription, “To the most beautiful girl I have ever photographed”; she demurred. So he suggested, “To the only one I did not sleep with”; Jacqueline Barsotti said that this would compromise his other models. Likewise, she rejected “To the most inspiring one” as “a compliment for me, but rude to others”. In the end he had to settle for “With all my love, Man Ray”.

She insisted that she and Man Ray were never lovers: “He was 50 when I was merely 17. I was tall, he was short. I was supposed to be very nice to look at, he was not.” After his death, Man Ray’s wife Juliette gave Jacqueline a lithograph of his self-portrait, inscribing it, “To Jacqueline that did not”.

Anonymous. “Jacqueline Goddard,” obituary on The Telegraph website, 25 July 2003 [Online] Cited 01/05/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Paul Eluard and André Breton
1939
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Few names in the history of photography are as illustrious at that of Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzsky (1890-1976) in the United States. Studio portraitist, fashion photographer and experimental artist, he explored the many potentialities of photography at a time when the medium was asserting itself as the very expression of modernity. Mingling with the Paris art scene of the early 20th century, and a close friend of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he was one of the few photographers to be mentioned among the Dada artists and Surrealists.

When Man Ray decided to become a professional photographer, it was primarily because he saw it as a way to earn a living. His studio rapidly became a gathering place for the entire Parisian art scene of its day: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Robert Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, among others. His work includes portraits of the artists, writers and intellectuals in his circle, including Coco Chanel, Paul Éluard, James Joyce, Elsa Schiaparelli, Igor Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf. Not just content to have celebrities pose in his studio, he tried his hand at staging and photographing his female models – Lee Miller, Kiki de Montparnasse and Meret Oppenheim – in a variety of different settings. Following his encounter with the famous fashion designer Paul Poiret, Man Ray also worked as a fashion photographer for French and American Vogue, as well as for Harper’s Bazaar.

Man Ray, whose career spanned more than 60 years, saw the medium as a creative tool that would allow him to go beyond the representation of reality. While always exploring abstraction, he also made relatively traditional portraits of the artists who surrounded him – a circle to which he was introduced by Marcel Duchamp just after he arrived in Paris. He is the creator of Violon d’Ingres [Ingres’s Violin] – the iconic photograph taken in 1924 that can be found in every art history book published in the 20th century. Man Ray remains an important name in the worlds of art, fashion and pop culture, with so many artists referring to the photographs of this iconic figure of modern art.

Curated from a private collection, the exhibition explores the artist’s extensive social contacts while presenting some of his most iconic works.

1. PROOF AND PRINT, A QUESTION OF VOCABULARY

The question of Man Ray’s prints has remained a source of fascination throughout the history of photography. His work went through a series of successive generations of prints over the course of the 20th century, starting with prints made shortly after the photograph was taken: contact prints and more refined prints that highlight his artistic choices. From the 1950s onwards, Man Ray reinterpreted certain photographs to produce new prints, sometimes changing the framing. He also enlisted the services of various photographic laboratories such as Picto, and, in particular, the renowned printer Pierre Gassman, whose lab produced many posthumous prints.

The prolific nature of Man Ray’s work is reflected by some 12,000 negatives from his studio archive that were added to the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The experimental and pioneering nature of Man Ray’s work raises a number of particular questions, especially in relation to the photograms that he produced and reproduced, contradicting their primary characteristics as unique works. All these elements make it more difficult to determine the artist’s intention as well as the aesthetic and historical value of his works, compared to other, more linear authors. The way we refer to Man Ray’s photographs is therefore important, and the notions of proof, print and original are paramount.

Proof

A term from the world of printmaking and sculpture, it was adopted at the birth of photography by François Arago in his 1839 lecture. It designates the object obtained from a matrix, in photography, from a negative.

Original proof

Any copy made under the control of the artist or the holders of his or her moral rights and whose history can be traced. In the absence of this relationship, the object is considered a reproduction and not an original work.

Contact print

A print obtained by placing the negative directly on photosensitive paper. It is generally for the photographer’s use only and is used as a reference for an archiving system and as a tool to read newly printed photographs for the first time. A distinction must be made between contact prints, which are the same size as the negative and on which Man Ray generally cropped his photographs, and contact sheets, which allow the viewer to see the entire photographic film.

Vintage print

A print made during the period when the photograph was taken, and whose formal characteristics (format, tonality, contrast, inscriptions) reflect the artist’s intention. Sometimes, authors – as in the case of Man Ray – revisit their archives and produce new prints from an old negative, years after it was produced. This is known as a late print, or even a posthumous print when made by the artist’s beneficiaries after his or her death. All the posthumous prints in this exhibition are by Pierre Gassman.

Countertype

Countertype is obtained by re-photographing a photographic image. Man Ray often countertyped his original photograms for distribution and even sale.

2. STUDIO

‘To be totally liberated from painting and its aesthetic implications’ was the first avowed aim of Man Ray, who began his career as a painter.

Photography was one of the major breakthroughs of modern art and led to a rethinking of representation. In the 1920s and 30s, the photographic medium came to the forefront of the avant-garde movement, and Man Ray soon made a name for himself with his virtuosity. His photographs were not taken fleetingly, but rather meticulously produced in the studio. Unlike some photographers who see the street as a privileged playground, Man Ray composed and staged his photographs. The studio provided him with a space in which to explore his imagination.

3. ELITE

From the moment he arrived in Paris in the summer of 1921, Man Ray was part of the Parisian intelligentsia of the Roaring Twenties. Even before opening his studio in Montparnasse in 1922, he worked from his hotel room. His reputation as a photographer grew rapidly. He photographed Marcel Duchamp, whom he had met in New York in 1915, and who introduced him to the Parisian artistic elite and to many other painters such as Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. He met Jean Cocteau, who was himself a fixture of the Parisian art scene, as well as André Breton, Francis Picabia, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse and Max Ernst, plus many intellectual figures of his day, including Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Arnold Schönberg and James Joyce.

4. MUSES

Through photography, a medium with multiple possibilities, the Surrealists sought not to reproduce reality, but to sublimate it. Love, as seen primarily by men, was an example of this idea of transformation. An essential notion for Luis Buñuel and Paul Éluard, love was a means of escaping reality and evoking the extraordinary. Femininity, sexuality and the fine line between dream and reality were dominant themes in Man Ray’s work when he was exploring the female nude, having those he considered to be his muses pose for his camera. He photographed Lee Miller, a fellow New Yorker who had begun a career as a model but wanted to move to the other side of the camera; Alice Prin, known as Kiki de Montparnasse, the woman with the fholes of a violin on her back, dancer, singer, actress and painter; and the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, who was close to the Surrealist scene before pursuing an independent career as an artist, and with whom he also had a professional and romantic relationship. In the late 1930s, Man Ray had his partner, Adrienne Fidelin, known as Ady, a dancer from Guadeloupe, pose for him.

5. EXPERIMENTATIONS

Man Ray also experimented in the darkroom, transforming the photographic medium into a powerful tool of artistic expression, even going so far as to do away with the camera when, in 1921-1922, he began creating photograms, which he coined ‘rayographs’ after himself. He described this darkroom work as a way of freeing himself from painting, so convinced was he of the visual power of his experiments. By placing objects directly onto photosensitive paper, he could play with shadows and light, fascinated by the abstractions created by this technique and that produced a unique work of art. He experimented with other techniques in the 1930s: solarisation, double exposures and different forms of distortion.

6. CINEMA

For the Surrealists, cinema, an art form that had emerged 20 years earlier, represented a means of transcending reality. Silent, dreamlike and highly suggestive, it resisted interpretation. In the 1920s, Man Ray tried his hand at the moving image, making four films. The rhythm and freedom offered by cinema complemented his photographic production, in which he saw a close relationship between film and poetry. For this reason, he gave his film Emak Bakia (1926) the subheading of ‘cinépoème’.

Texts: Nathalie Herschdorfer, Sarah Bourget and Wendy A. Grossman
English translation: Gail Wagman
Proofreading: Hannah Pröbsting

Exhibition texts from the Photo Elysee

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Bottle-holder by Marcel Duchamp
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Flowers
1925
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

In my early paper titled “The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s ‘Rayographs’ in a Digital Future” published in The University of Queensland Vanguard magazine special edition ‘Man Ray: Life, Work & Themes’ (2004) I wrote:

The rayographs

After his arrival in Paris Man Ray started experimenting in his darkroom and discovered the technique for his rayographs by accident. With the help of his friend the Surrealist poet Tristan Tzara, he published a portfolio of twelve rayographs in 1922 called ‘Les champs délicieux’ (The delicious fields). “This title is a reference to ‘Les champs magnétiques’, a collection of writings by André Breton and Philippe Soupault composed from purportedly random thought fragments recorded by the two authors.”1 The rayographs are visual representations of random thought fragments, “photographic equivalents for the Surrealist sensibility that glorified randomness and disjunction.”2 Man Ray, “denied the camera its simplest joy: the ability to capture everything, all the distant details, all the ephemeral lights and shadows of the world”3 but, paradoxically, the rayographs are the most ephemeral of creatures, only being able to be created once, the result not being known until after the photographic paper has been developed. In fact, for Man Ray to create his portfolio ‘Les champs délicieux’ (The delicious fields), he had to rephotograph the rayographs in order to make multiple copies.4

Man Ray “insisted in nearly every interview that the rayograph was not a photogram in the traditional sense. He did something that a photogram didn’t; he introduced depth into the images,”5 which denied the images their photographic objectivity by depicting an internal landscape rather than an external one.6 What the rayographs do not deny, however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality (because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance). Through an alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper, representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects themselves, in the surface of the paper. …

Finally, within their depth of field the rayographs can be seen as both dangerous and delicious, for somehow they are both beautiful and unsettling at one and the same time. As Surrealism revels in randomness and chance these images enact the titles of other Man Ray photographs: ‘Danger-Dancer’, ‘Anxiety’, ‘Dust Raising’, ‘Distorted House’. The rayographs revel in chance and risk; Man Ray brings his fantasies to the surface, an interior landscape represented externally that can be (re)produced only once – those dangerous delicious fields.7

Marcus Bunyan. “The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s Rayographs in a Digital Future,” in The University of Queensland Vanguard Magazine: ‘Man Ray: Life, Work and Themes’, 2004, Triad series #2, pp. 40-46. ISBN 0-9756043-0-9

Footnotes

1/ Greenberg, Mark (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 28 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

2/ Perl, Jed (ed.,). Man Ray: Aperture Masters of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1997, pp. 11-12 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

3/ Ibid., pp. 5-6 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

4/ Greenberg, Mark (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 28 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

5/ Ibid., p. 112 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

6/ Ibid., p. 28 quoted in Bunyan, op cit.,

7/ Marcus Bunyan. “The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s Rayographs in a Digital Future,” in The University of Queensland Vanguard Magazine: ‘Man Ray: Life, Work and Themes’, 2004, Triad series #2, pp. 40-46. ISBN 0-9756043-0-9

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Fashion photograph
c. 1935
Gelatin silver print
© Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich. All rights reserved
Without permission from ProLitteris, the reproduction or any use of the individual and private consultation are prohibited

Man Ray. Liberating Photography book cover

Man Ray. Liberating Photography

Nathalie Herschdorfer, Wendy Grossman

Published in connection with an exhibition opening at Photo Elysée in spring 2024, this book presents more than one hundred and fifty of Man Ray’s portraits, primarily from the 1920s and ’30s.

Man Ray (1890-1976) was a man both of and ahead of his time. With his conceptual approach and innovative techniques, he liberated photography from previous constraints and opened the floodgates to new ways of thinking about the medium.

A close friend of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he was one of the few photographers to be mentioned among the Dada artists and surrealists. He also worked as a fashion photographer, first for Vogue and later for Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Renowned as the creator of Ingres’s Violin – a photograph from 1924 that broke records when it was sold for $12.4 million in 2022 – Man Ray remains an influential figure in the worlds of art, fashion, and pop culture, with many other artists referencing his work.

Published in connection with an exhibition at Photo Elysée and in the centennial year of the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, Man Ray presents more than one hundred and fifty of Man Ray’s portraits, primarily from the 1920s and ’30s. It includes portraits of the leading lights of the Paris art scene, among them Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso, as well as a selection of his fashion work. As an innovator of photographic techniques and compositional form, Man Ray found the studio portrait – be it of the artists and writers with whom he had longstanding friendships or of the objects and sculptures he collected – to be the playground in which he could express the visual wit and experimentation for which he is renowned.

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 224
Artwork: 153 black-and-white illustrations
Size: 7.75 in x 9.5 in
Forthcoming: September 10th, 2024
ISBN-10: 0500028117
ISBN-13: 9780500028117

Buy the book now

Man Ray. Liberating Photography book pages

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Photo Elysee website

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

Exhibition: ‘Nineteenth-Century Photography Now’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July, 2024

Curators: the exhibition is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant

At left, Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters 1872; and at right, Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) After Manet 2003 from the ‘Identity’ section of the exhibition

Magdalene Keaney, curator of the exhibition Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, observes that the exhibition “poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice…”

As does this exhibition:

~ Everything emerges from something. One must be “mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” (Moriyama)

~ History often repeats itself in different forms.

~ Memory often returns in fragmentary form.

~ The wisdom and spirit of the past speaks to the practitioners of the future.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

NB: Transubstantiation, an un/explainable change in form, substance, or appearance (from the Latin roots trans, “across or beyond,” and substania, “substance”)

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

“Ms. Hellman, a former associate curator, inspired by her work with the Bayard materials, conceived “Nineteenth-Century Photography Now” as a way to access the influence that early photographers still have. The exhibition includes work from the past by 23 named and three anonymous photographers plus an additional 16 included in an album; there are 21 present-day artists. It is organised around five themes: Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape and Circulation. The picture that serves as an introduction to the show is “Untitled ‘point de vue'” (1827) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a faded heliograph on pewter, that Daido Moriyama keeps a reproduction in his studio; the wall text quotes him saying, “it serves as a gentle daily reminder to be mindful of the origins and essence of photography.” There are two photographs by Mr. Moriyama prompted by Niépce’s bit of primitive technology.”

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. These interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters' 1872 from the exhibition 'Nineteenth-Century Photography Now' at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April - July, 2024

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Florence after the Manner of the Old Masters
1872
Albumen silver print
Image: 34 x 25.6cm (13 3/8 x 10 1/16 in.)
Mount: 43.3 x 32.4cm (17 1/16 x 12 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Portrait of Florence Fisher posing with a rose stem with the leaves attached. She holds the rose in place with one arm folded across her chest.

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
After Manet
2003
From the series May Days Long Forgotten
Chromogenic print
Object: 84.3cm (33 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Carrie Mae Weems

The black and white photograph – one from the nine-part series May Days Long Forgotten – depicts four African American girls in summer dresses, with garlands in their hair, reclining on a lawn. The piece is mounted in a circular frame prepared by the artist, and is number five of an edition of eight.

Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833)
Untitled ‘point de vue’
1827
Heliograph on pewter
16.7 x 20.3 x .15cm

The invention of photography was announced simultaneously in France and England in 1839, dazzling the public and sending waves of excitement around the world. These astonishing breakthroughs depended upon centuries of developments in chemistry, optics, and the visual arts, accelerating in the decades after 1790. The Niépce Heliograph was made in 1827, during this period of fervent experimentation. It is the earliest photograph produced with the aid of the camera obscura known to survive today.

Text from the Harry Ransom Center website

At left, André Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (French, 1819-1889) Uncut Sheet of Cartes-de-Visite Portraits, 1860s; and at right, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, b. 1982) Daylight Studio with Garden Cuttings (_DSF0340) 2022

William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877)
[A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer]
Probably 1843-1846
Photogenic drawing negative
Image: 18.1 x 22.1cm (7 1/8 x 8 11/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The exceptional boldness of this image conveys a visual impression that at first may seem quite unlike other of William Henry Fox Talbot’s pictures. He made it with the same photogenic drawing process he used for much of his work by placing the stem of leaves directly on top of the prepared paper and then exposing to sunlight without the aid of a camera. Although the original plant was delicate, its sharply delineated white shadow on the rich dark brown background creates a graphic, two-tone effect. The same specimen was used in a slightly different orientation to make a negative that is preserved in one of the family albums formerly at the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock and now at the British Library, London.

Other visually similar works in Talbot’s oeuvre help us to understand what we are seeing here. Some of them show the interior structure of the plant specimens he photographed, proving that the negatives at first had fuller details. Because the most vulnerable sections of the silver-based images are those that are light in tone, these areas will fade disproportionately faster than the darker parts. In this case, the lightest tones would have been in the interior spaces of the plant, and these at some point faded. It is unlikely that Talbot saw the same picture we see today, at least not when he first made it, but the boldness of the present state reminds us that changes over time can create as well as destroy.

Adapted from Larry Schaaf. William Henry Fox Talbot, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2002), 68. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer, circa 1843-1846
2009
Toned gelatin silver print
Image: 93.7 × 74.9cm (36 7/8 × 29 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of the artist
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

“To look at Fox Talbot’s earliest experiments, the blurred and hazy images suffuse the excited anticipation of discovering how light could transfer the shape of things onto paper. … I decided to collect Fox Talbot’s earliest negatives, from a time in photographic history very likely before positive images existed, and print the photographs that not even he saw.”

~ Hiroshi Sugimoto (p. 349, in Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2005)

Hiroshi Sugimoto visited the Getty Museum in 2007 to study the earliest photographs in the collection. After photographing some of William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing negatives, he produced large-scale prints and coloured them with toning agents to replicate the hues of the paper negatives. The scale of the enlarged prints reveals the fibers of the original paper, which create delicate patterns embedded in the images.

At left, Herbert Bell et al, [Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread); and at right, Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) Herbaria 2021 (detail)

Herbert Bell (English, 1856-1946)
Frederick Nutt Broderick (English, about 1854-1913)
Gustave Hermans (Belgian, 1856-1934)
Anthony Horner (English, 1853-1923)
Michael Horner (English, 1843-1869)
C. W. J. Johnson (American, 1833-1903)
Léon & Lévy (French, active 1864-1913 or 1920)
Léopold Louis Mercier (French, b. 1866)
Neurdein Frères (French, founded 1860s, dissolved 1918)
Louis Parnard (French, 1840-1893)
Alfred Pettitt (English, 1820-1880)
Francis Godolphin Osborne Stuart (British born Scotland, 1843-1923)
Unknown maker
Valentine & Sons (Scottish, founded 1851, dissolved 1910)
L. P. Vallée (Canadian, 1837-1905)
York and Son
J. Kühn (French, active Paris, France 1885 – early 20th century)
[Amateur World Tour Album, taken with early Kodak cameras, plus purchased travel photographs by various photographers] (2 page spread)
Albumen silver print
Closed: 35.4 x 28 x 3.5cm (13 15/16 x 11 x 1 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Google Arts & Culture website

Includes amateur photographs taken with early Kodak cameras, including the original Kodak or Kodak no. 1, and Kodak no. 2 cameras, as well as commercially produced images.

Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974) 'Herbaria' 2021 (detail)

Stephanie Syjuco (American born Philippines, b. 1974)
Herbaria (detail)
2021
From the series Pileups
Hand-assembled pigmented inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Baryta
Framed [Outer Dim]: 121.9 x 91.4cm (48 x 36 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Stephanie Syjuco

A collage composed of diverse naturalist archival sources, including photographs of bones, foliage, and crystal formations.

At left, Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927) Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression 1878; and at right, Laura Larson (American, b. 1965) The Mind Is a Muscle 2019

Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927)
Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression
1878
Part of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot)
Photogravure
Image: 10.3 x 7.1cm (4 1/16 x 2 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Laura Larson (American, b. 1965)
The Mind Is a Muscle
2019
From the series City of Incurable Women
Inkjet print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Courtesy of and © Laura Larson

At first glance, photographs made in the 19th century may seem like faded relics of an increasingly distant and forgotten age, yet they persist in inspiring, challenging, and resonating with artists today.

Nineteenth-Century Photography Now, on view April 9 through July 7, 2024 at the Getty Center, offers new perspectives on early photography by looking through the lens of contemporary artists who respond directly to their historical themes and subject matter.

“This exhibition provides an opportunity to connect visitors with some of the earliest photographs in the Museum’s collection, now almost two centuries old, via the responses of contemporary makers,” says Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “The revelatory ability of early photography to capture images of the world around us still resonates with practitioners today, and bridges between past and present photography are as active and relevant as they have ever been.”

Organised around five themes, dating back to the medium’s beginnings, Identity, Time, Spirit, Landscape, and Circulation, this exhibition explores 19th-century photographs through the work of 21 contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine 19th century photography while exploring its complexities.

In their work, artists Daido Moriyama, Hanako Murakami, and Carrie Mae Weems look back to the invention of photography to convey a sense of how this revolutionary discovery changed people’s perceptions.

As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the 19th century were people. In the galleries focused on Identity, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture while Laura Larson, Stephanie Solinas, and Fiona Tan investigate the pseudosciences of the 19th century and how they reinforced stereotypes and identification systems that impact us today.

Photography and Time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. This section includes work by Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes exploring 19th-century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time.

The genre of Spirit photography emerged from the Victorian obsession with death in Europe and North America. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. In this section, Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.

19th-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote Landscapes. Government-sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.

By the middle of the 19th century, thousands of photographs were in Circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. In this section, early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the 19th-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.

“Through the works of these visionary contemporary artists, 19th-century photography is not faded and dead but very much alive, an active material that enables us to rethink the medium and our relationship to it,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition.

Nineteenth-Century Photography Now is curated by Karen Hellman, former associate curator in the Department of Photographs. Carolyn Peter, assistant curator in the Department of Photographs, Getty Museum, served as organising curator with assistance from Claire L’Heureux, former Department of Photographs graduate intern and Antares Wells, curatorial assistant.

Related programming includes Who or What is Missing in Nineteenth-Century Photography?, a discussion featuring artists Laura Larson, Wendy Red Star, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya in a conversation about their artistic practices and how they are engaging with, and critiquing photography from the 19th century, and Art Break: The Precarious Nature of Photography, Society, and Life, June 6, 12pm. Artist Phil Chang talks with curator Carolyn Peter about his series “Unfixed” on view in Nineteenth-Century Photography Now and how an economic crisis and a pandemic inspired him to create photographs that will intentionally fade away to express the fragility of societal systems and life.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Introduction

At left, Maker unknown Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old January 6, 1882; and at right, Myra Greene (American, b. 1975) Undertone #10 2017-2018

Introduction

The earliest photographs – often associated with small, faded, sepia-toned images – may seem to belong to a bygone era, but many of the conventions established during photography’s earliest years persist today. Organised around five themes dating back to the medium’s beginnings, this exhibition explores nineteenth-century photographs through the work of twenty-one contemporary artists. Reflecting the inventiveness of early practitioners as well as the more disturbing historical aspects of their era, these interchanges between the first decades of the medium and the most recent invite us to reimagine nineteenth-century photography while exploring its complexities.

Maker unknown
Kuroda Yasaburo, 50 Years Old
January 6, 1882
Ambrotype
Closed: 11.5 x 9 x 1cm (4 1/2 x 3 9/16 x 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Virginia Heckert in memory of Gordon Baldwin

Myra Greene (American, b. 1975)
Undertone #10
2017-2018
Ambrotype
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Myra Greene

__________________________________________

Identity

At left, Various makers Pickpockets at the Universal Exposition of 1889 1889; and at right, Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966) Marie Thiriot 2021

Fiona Tan (Indonesia, b. 1966)
Marie Thiriot
2021
From the series Pickpockets
HD video installation, stereo, flat-screen monitor
Courtesy of the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
© Fiona Tan
Photo: Frith Street Gallery CC

‘As an artist working almost entirely with time-based and lens-based media, time is one of my major tools … time is both tool with which to shape and chisel and material to fold, distort and configure.’

Fiona Tan (b. 1966, Pekanbaru) explores history and time and our place within them, working within the contested territory of representation. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s works is her fascination with the mutability of identity, the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space in a world increasingly shaped by global culture. She investigates how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. …

A testament to Tan’s passion for archives, her video installation Pickpockets (2020) stems from an album of photographs she came across when in residence at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. It contained early examples of mugshots taken of pickpockets apprehended at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1889. Fascinated by the subjects of these portraits, their names and countries of origin, and their unknown stories, she invited a group of writers to devise monologues from the point of view of these individuals, which were then performed and recorded by actors.

Anonymous. “Fiona Tan,” on the Frith Street Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 29/04/2024

[The identity section] has “Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin” (Nov. 2, 1902), a print by Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mug shot, showing the mustached villain full-face and in profile; it is accompanied by over 20 pictures of sites that played a significant role in Bertillon’s life taken in 2012 by Stéphanie Solinas employing a “crime scene” approach.

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

At left, Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914) Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin November 2, 1902; and at right, Stéphanie Solinas (French, b. 1978) Untitled (M. Bertillon) – Two Faces 2012

Identity

As is still the case today, the most popular subjects for the camera in the nineteenth century were people. Early commercial portrait photographers set up studios and established standards for posing and props, serving clients who eagerly shared these prized images with family and friends. Other portraits of the time, however, such as the mug shot and studies of female “hysterics,” reinforced questionable forms of objectification. Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Myra Greene respond to the complex history of photographic portraiture. Fiona Tan, Laura Larson, and Stéphanie Solinas investigate the nineteenth century pseudosciences that relied on the perceived accuracy of the new medium.

Attributed to Alphonse Bertillon (French, 1853-1914)
Affaire Alaux, Faubourg St. Honoré – L’Assassin
November 2, 1902
Gelatin silver print
Image: 7.9 x 12.7cm (3 1/8 x 5 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The mugshot of Henri-Léon Scheffer, the man who murdered Joseph Reibel.

CAUGHT BY A FINGER PRINT

A unique piece of detective work has been accomplished in Paris by a retiring scientist. A mysterious murder had been committed. The detectives arrested one wrong man dis charged him, and were preparing .to arrest another when to their chief came the quiet scientist, saying,

“The assassin’s name is Henri Léon Scheffor. Here is his photograph, his description and past record.” M. Cochefert, chief of the police hesitated. “My men know nothing of this person.” he said. “How shall we accuse him ?”

“Arrest him,” insisted the other, “and should he prove to innocent I will pay him 1,000 francs as an indemnity.”

“But what basis have you for your certainty of his guilt ?” asked M. Cochefert.

“Some finger prints he left on a piece of broken glass,” replied the man of science.

It was not necessary to pay the indemnity. He who was thus strangely accused was arrested and confessed his crime. The quiet man of science was M. Alphonse Bertillon, already celebrated as the founder and present chief of tho anthropometric service of tho Paris prefecture of police. Alphonse Bertillon has the gentle, weary smile of the over-worked and nervous student. He speaks mildly, moves softly, like one on his guard against strain and haste, until now and again, his thoughtful face will light up with enthusiasm as he lets himself go. Then his conversation becomes rapid and eloquent ; he runs through books and documents with ardour, pulls down boxes from high shelves, spreads out charts, explains them, performs experiments to illustrate his statements and darts back by a short cut to tho point where he had left off; tho whole man is transformed. Thus we heard the tale of the Accusing Finger Prints.

“A man named Joseph Reibel, porter to tho dentist Allaux, in his apartment and offices in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, was found choked to death and clumsily tied, lying in his master’s office,” began M. Bertillon. “The place had been looted hastily, closets and drawers being open and their contents tossed about. In particular a handsome cabinet holding a collection of coins was found with its glass door broken and its gold coins absent. There were- practically no clues to the identity of the assassin, the janitress at the street door, having a confused memory as to visitors, which set the detectives on more than one wrong scent. They arrested one man and the papers published his portrait. Then the newspapers at least began to suspect the innocent dentist himself.

“They had taken a flashlight photograph of the office,” continued M. Bertillon. “Looking at that photograph one day, I noticed two glittering little white marks on the edge of the broken glass of the coin cabinet. I asked my self what they could be. They might be defects in the printing ; but, on the other hand their situation suggested that they might be finger prints – and finger-prints are very much in my line ! The thought wore upon me until at last I jumped into a cab and drove to tho place. Examining the edge of the glass I found tho marks to be really finger-marks, and in spite of the thousand chances still in good condition.

“Being composed of tiny quantities of grease and dirt they made the glass slightly opaque, so that they came out bright by contrast in the photograph. Except when looked at in a favourable light they were practically invisible to the naked eye. There were marks of a right-hand thumb in one place and of the same thumb and four fingers in another. I had the two pieces of glass cut out with a diamond. I gave one to a policeman, instructing him to hold it just so, and saw him start off to my office with it in a cab. Then I gave tho other piece to a second policeman, with the same instructions, and started him off in a second cab, so that if an accident should happen to one of the pieces the other might be spared.

“In the workrooms of the anthropometric service I had the finger-marks immediately photographed. At first I admit I did not attach overmuch importance to them. They might be the prints of one of the detectives, or of the dentist Allaux – naturally solicitous of his broken cabinet – or even the finger-prints of M. Cochefert ! One by one I took their finger-prints for comparison. One by one I found that they did not at all correspond with those on the glass. This started me in earnest,” admitted M. Bertillon. “I began to ask myself, if among the thousands of criminals, swindlers and violent and suspicious characters photo-graphed, measured, and, finger-printed yearly by the anthropometric service the author of these finger-prints might not, at some time or other, himself have passed.” Here M. Bertillon called our attention to the thumb mark (“pouce”) of Scheffer, the assassin, Just below his full-face and profile photographs. Though small it was very distinct.

“Look at the central point of that thumb-print,” he exclaimed. “Look where the innermost loop moves up and over a single diagonal. Now jumping two loops from that interior diagonal, towards tho direct left you see a plain little fork in tho third loop. It is the exact reproduction of just such another in the thumb-mark on the broken glass ! Tho next thing was to arrest Scheffer though it took a little time to find him. Here, again, the information obtainable from his ‘fiche’ in the anthropometric service rendered service. It was seen that he had been a native of Aubervilliers (the Paris suburb and had worked in the government match factory. When arrested he confessed, at the same time trying to make out a case of extenuating circumstances. According to his story, Reibel planned that they should simulate a burglary of his master’s premises. They quarrelled over the division of the spoils and Scheffer says he thought he had merely choked his friend into un-consciousness and left him tied – according to original agreement. And all discovered through an accidental finger-print which the assassin had left as an index to the crime. “Science Siftings.”

Anonymous. “Caught by a Finger Print,” in the Balmain Observer and Western Suburbs Advertiser (NSW: 1884-1907), Sat 4 Mar 1905, Page 2 on the Trove website [Online] Cited 29/04/2024

__________________________________________

Time

Gustave Le Gray (French, 1820-1884)
An Effect of Sunlight – Ocean No. 23
1857-1858
Albumen silver print from glass negatives
12 5/8 x 16 7/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
An Effect of Sunlight – Ocean No. 23 (1857/2019)
2019
Gelatin silver print, exposed to sunlight and toned with silver
Framed [Outer Dim]: 35.6 x 47.7 x 3.7cm (14 x 18 3/4 x 1 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Lisa Oppenheim

Time

Photography and time have been inextricably linked ever since early inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot struggled to permanently fix a fleeting moment on a sheet of paper. The development of the camera coincided with new discoveries about how we perceive an instant in time or an object in motion, and people praised photography for its ability to “stop time” and record what the unaided eye could not see. Lisa Oppenheim and Liz Deschenes respond to nineteenth century photographers’ technical innovations and the ways in which the medium affects our perception of time. Phil Chang and Hiroshi Sugimoto address the fate of photographs across minutes or even centuries.

At left, Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s) Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide) about 1890, published 1893; and at right, Liz Deschenes (American, b. 1966) FPS (120) 2018-2021

Étienne-Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) and Michel Berthaud (French, active 1860s-1880s)
Walking/Running (La Marche/La Course Rapide)
About 1890, published 1893
Collotype
Image: 11.3 x 17.6cm (4 7/16 x 6 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

__________________________________________

Spirit

At left, William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884) Mrs. Swan 1869-1878; and at right, Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992) Nak Bejjen [Cow’s Horn] 2017-2018

Spirit

The genre of spirit photography – which used photographic tricks to insert ghostly figures among the living – emerged during the nineteenth century from the Victorian obsession with death, séances, and mediums in Europe and North America and from the losses of the Civil War in the United States. Photographers exploited the ability to manipulate photographic images, employing multiple exposures and staged photography to create otherworldly scenes or to summon loved ones back from the dead. Khadija Saye and Lieko Shiga respond to the possibilities that spirit photography offers in rendering the unseen.

William H. Mumler (American, 1832-1884)
Mrs. Swan
1869-1878
Albumen silver print
Image: 8.9 x 5.7cm (3 1/2 x 2 1/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Khadija Saye (Gambian-British, b. 1992)
Nak Bejjen [Cow’s Horn]
2017-2018
From the series in this space we breathe
Silkscreen print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Estate of Khadija Saye

At left, Unknown maker (American) [Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man] about 1865-1875; and at right, Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980) Talking with Me 2005 From the series Lilly

Unknown maker (American)
[Seated Woman with “Spirit” of a Young Man]
About 1865-1875
Tintype
Image: 8.7 x 6.4cm (3 7/16 x 2 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Lieko Shiga (Japanese, b. 1980)
Talking with Me
2005
From the series Lilly

‘Lilly’ is a photographic essay that was initiated in 2005 when Lieko Shiga was living in London. During that period she produced a series of images of her neighbours that lived alongside her in a block of East London council flats, drawing techniques and inspiration from paranormal photographs that were popular in the early days of photography. Haunting, mysterious, playful and captured in an array of muted colours, the photographs [are] grouped around different subjects…

Publisher’s Description

__________________________________________

Landscape

At left, Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Plateau of Sebastopol II 1855; and at right, An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b. 1960) Security and Stabilization Operations, Iraqi Police 2003-2004

Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869)
Plateau of Sebastopol II
1855
Albumen silver print
Image: 22.2 x 34.4cm (8 3/4 x 13 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

An-My Lê (Vietnamese American, b. 1960)
Security and Stabilization Operations, Iraqi Police
2003-2004
From the series 29 Palms
Gelatin silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
© An-My Lê

Landscape

Nineteenth-century photographers went to great lengths to make images of remote landscapes, which required traveling with large format cameras, glass plates, and chemicals. Ideological forces drove many of these journeys, with the ultimate goal of imperial expansion through industrial development and war. Government sponsored surveys and expeditionary programs employed the camera to justify the expansion and to record the resulting military conflicts. Mark Ruwedel, Michelle Stuart, and An-My Lê re-envision some of these same historical landscapes and offer up new ones that bring the past closer to our present.

At left, Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882) Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada 1867; and at right, Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933) Timeless Land 2021

Timothy O’Sullivan (American, about 1840-1882)
Desert Sand Hills Near Sink of Carson, Nevada
1867
Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Timothy O’Sullivan’s darkroom wagon, pulled by four mules, entered the frame at the right side of the photograph, reached the center of the image, and abruptly U-turned, heading back out of the frame. Footprints leading from the wagon toward the camera reveal the photographer’s path. Made at the Carson Sink in Nevada, this image of shifting sand dunes reveals the patterns of tracks recently reconfigured by the wind. The wagon’s striking presence in this otherwise barren scene dramatises the pioneering experience of exploration and discovery in the wide, uncharted landscapes of the American West.

O’Sullivan’s photographs from the 1867 Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel expedition were intended to provide information for the purpose of expanding railroads and industry, yet they demonstrate his eye for poetic beauty.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Michelle Stuart (American, b. 1933)
Timeless Land
2021
Ambrotypes
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Michelle Stuart

A.J. Russell (American, 1830-1902)
Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon [Wyoming]
April 1868
Albumen silver print
Image: 21.9 x 29.4 cm (8 5/8 x 11 9/16 in.)
Mount: 34.1 x 43.1 cm (13 7/16 x 16 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Mark Ruwedel (American/Canadian, b. 1954)
Union Pacific #67 (after A.J. Russell)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Image: 18.9 x 23.9cm (7 7/16 x 9 7/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Mark Ruwedel

Mark Ruwedel’s statement in a wall text notes that “The legacy of nineteenth-century expeditionary photography was most important to me when working on my Westward series.” He cites Timothy O’Sullivan, Alexander Gardner and A.J. Russell. The Landscape section has a print by A.J. Russell, “Embankment No. 3 West of Granite Cannon. [Wyoming]” (April 1868), and seven pictures by Mr. Ruwedel: “Union Pacific #39 (After A.J. Russell)” and “Union Pacific #67 (After A.J. Russell)” (1994 and 1996, respectively) and five others with no specific acknowledgments but clearly influenced by his 19th-century mentors.

William Meyers. “Photography’s Past and Present at the Getty Center,” on The Wall Street Journal website May 29, 2024 [Online] Cited 16/06/2024

At left, Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916) Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite 1861; and at right, Ken Gonzales-Day (American, b. 1964) At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak… Negative 2002; print 2021

Carleton Watkins (American, 1829-1916)
Cathedral Spires – Yo Semite
1861
Albumen silver print
Image (Dome-Topped): 52.2 x 40.3cm (20 9/16 x 15 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

When Carleton Watkins photographed the remote Yosemite wilderness, America was not yet a century old. Conscious of their country’s lack of a national cultural identity, Americans adopted particularly dramatic geologic formations such as Cathedral Spires as their version of ancient ruins and soaring Gothic churches. The great pine tree in the foreground here became another form of this uniquely American history. Watkins’s images helped define America’s preference for landscape views depicting rugged wilderness and celebrating spectacular landforms on the grandest of scales.

Ken Gonzales-Day (American, b. 1964)
At daylight the miserable man was carried to an oak…
Negative 2002; print 2021
From the series Searching for California’s Hang Trees
Pigment print
Image: 92.7 × 117.5cm (36 1/2 × 46 1/4 in.)
© Ken Gonzales-Day

This print: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment

Through meticulous research, Gonzales-Day documented approximately 350 lynching incidents that occurred in California between 1850 and 1935, most of which involved victims of Mexican descent. To create the series Searching for California Hang Trees, the artist visited many of these sites and captured the likeness of trees that may have borne witness to these events. Gonzales-Day’s landscapes unearth traces of this little-known history.

Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013

__________________________________________

Circulation

Charles M. Bell (American, 1848-1893)
Manulitó, Chief of the Navajos
1874
Albumen silver print
Image (Arched): 18.4 x 14.9cm (7 1/4 x 5 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Wendy Red Star (American/Apsáalooke, b. 1981)
Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven)
2014
From the series Crow Peace Delegation
Inkjet print
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Museum purchase with funds provided by Jennifer McCracken New and Jason G. New
© Wendy Red Star
Image courtesy of the Nasher Museum of Art

Artist-manipulated digitally reproduced photograph by C.M. (Charles Milton) Bell, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 24 x 16 9/20 inches

Circulation

By the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of photographs were in circulation worldwide, the result of photographers’ ability to reproduce the same image multiple times. Pictures of historical events, tourist destinations, and anthropological expeditions made the world seem more accessible, but with time and distance, they became disconnected from their original contexts. Many eventually ended up in archives (including at Getty). Early photographs appear next to projects that make these historical absences present. Wendy Red Star, Stephanie Syjuco, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Andrea Chung recover what has been lost, calling out the residual effects of the nineteenth-century photograph on our present knowledge of global cultures and histories.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum

At left, Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877) Ceylon/Fern about 1854; and at right, Andrea Chung (American, b. 1978) Untitled 2016

Anna Atkins (British, 1799-1871) possibly with Anne Dixon (British, 1799-1877)
Ceylon/Fern
About 1854
Cyanotype
Image: 34.8 x 24.7cm (13 11/16 x 9 3/4 in.)
Sheet: 48.3 x 37.5cm (19 x 14 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants

After completing the highly ambitious, decade-long project Photographs of Blue Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in the summer of 1853, Anna Atkins turned to new botanical subjects. She would eventually produce several unique presentation albums with cyanotypes of ferns and flowering plants. Atkins most likely collaborated on these albums with her dear friend, Anne Dixon. Dixon came to Halstead Place for an extended stay in the summer of 1852 to comfort Atkins who was deeply shaken by the death of her father and frequent scientific partner John George Children earlier that year. Photo historian Larry Schaaf suggests that it was during this stay or perhaps one the next summer that Dixon began assisting Atkins and creating her own cyanotypes. Thus, it becomes difficult to know whether surviving works from this time period were created by Atkins, Dixon, or both.1

These seven pieces in the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection (figs. 1-7) were extracted from an 1854 presentation album Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Flowering Plants given by Anna Atkins to Anne Dixon in 1854. The album remained intact until sometime around 1981, when it was broken up after being sold at auction.

Atkins and Dixon shared a deep interest in botany, a science that was considered well suited to women since it could be studied locally, even in one’s own garden. Serious “lady botanists” could join the Botanical Society in London, one of the first scientific organisations to admit women. Atkins joined in 1839. The two friends’ interest in botany is documented in a letter of 1851 from Children to Sir William Hooker in which he discussed the two women’s longtime plant collecting. Later, in a letter that Atkins wrote to Hooker in 1864, she extended an offer from Dixon to send him samples of any of the plants from her own collection.2

Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs
2019
© J. Paul Getty Trust
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

1/ Larry Schaaf, Sun Gardens: Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (New York: The New York Public Library, 2018), 77

2/ Ibid, 80

Andrea Chung (American, b. 1978)
Untitled
2016
From the series Anthropocene
Cyanotypes
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Andrea Chung

Anna Atkins was a 19th-century botanist who documented plant specimens to make the world’s first photo book.

Today, artist Andrea Chung makes images of lionfish. Invasive to the Caribbean, they stand as a metaphor for the impact of colonisation in the region.

Text and photograph from the Getty Museum X web page

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

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National Portrait Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London

“In both artist’s work the notion of materialisation (the process of coming into being) and transformation is a powerful creative tool.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition dates: 21st March – 16th June, 2024

Curator: Magdalene Keaney

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879) 'The Dream (Mary Hillier)' 1869 from the exhibition 'Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In' at the National Portrait Gallery, London, March - June, 2024

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)

The Dream (Mary Hillier)

1869

Albumen silver print

Wilson Centre for Photography

Mary Ann Hilliar was born on the Isle of Wight, and as well as being Julia Margaret Cameron’s favourite model was employed by her as a house maid. She often poised in religious themed photos looking noble and melancholy. As well as modelling for Mrs Cameron she was painted by G F Watts.

She married Thomas Gilbert and had 8 children, descendants of whom still live on the Isle of Wight. Mary Ann lived to the age of 88, although in her later years she suffered badly from rheumatism and was almost blind due to cataracts. She is buried just a few feet away from the Tennyson grave.

Text from the National Portrait Gallery website

Otherworldy beings: the materialisations and transformations of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron

To pair these two artists together is curatorial inspiration from the gods!

In both artist’s work the notion of materialisation (the process of coming into being) and transformation is a powerful creative tool.

Cameron‘s photographs are exterior to the artist, outward facing creations which capture in the sitter an emanation of spirit. These ethereal creatures mainly based on biblical, mythological, or literary figures … these beautiful apparitions who seem to hover before us were, at the time, seen as radical photographs. Their striking presences and emotive sensibility create a psychological connection with the viewer, photographs imaged / imagined as if they were seen in a dream.

“Cameron’s portraits are famously a pictorialist stagecraft: a pantomime of Christian archetypes, Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, and the influence of contemporary poets such as Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. What would be considered as potential subject matter for this nascent thirty-year-old medium was formative and cautious, and the conventions of beauty and gender, static” opines Stephen Frailey in an article commenting on the exhibition on the Aperture website (see below). Nothing could be further from the truth.

The artist envisions CHIMERICAL CREATURES. At the time of their production, Cameron’s shimmering portraits were seen as anything but cautious, they were seen as radical and ephemeral: a unique vision, different from everyone else: “directed light, soft focus, and long exposures that allowed the sitters’ slight movement to register in her pictures, instilling them with a sense of breath and life.”1 And, despite their soft focus, I believe that they are never “Pictorialist” photographs – they are “modern” photographs of a radical nature which may have later influenced the Pictorialist aesthetic. As I have commented before,

“She has, of course, been seen as a precursor to Pictorialism, but personally I do not get that feeling from her photographs, even though the artists are using many of the same techniques. Her work is based on the reality of seeing beauty, whereas the Pictorialists were trying to make photography into art by emulating the techniques of etching and painting. While the form of her images owes a lot to the history of classical sculpture and painting, to Romanticism and the Pre-Raphaelites, she thought her’s was already art of the highest order. She did not have to mask its content in order to imitate another medium. Others, such as the curator of the exhibition Marta Weiss, see her as a proto-modernist, precursor to the photographs of Stieglitz and Sander and I would agree. There is certainly a fundamental presence to JMC’s photographs, so that when you are looking at them, they tend to touch your soul, the eyes of some of the portraits burning right through you; while others, others have this ambiguity of meaning, of feeling, as if removed from the everyday life.”2

Contemporary commentators condemned Cameron’s photographs for sloppy craftsmanship (they were out of focus, the plates contained fingerprints, dust, debris, streak marks and swirls of collodion on her negatives). Others mocked her for claiming to have photographed a historical figure ‘from the life’. The kinds of images being made at the time did not interest Cameron. The artist would focus her lens until she thought the subject was beautiful “instead of screwing on the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist upon.” (JMC) “Her photographic vision was a rejection of ‘mere conventional topographic photography – map-making and skeleton rendering of feature and form’ in favour of a less precise but more emotionally penetrating form of portraiture.”3

Woodman‘s photographs are interior to the artist, inward facing creations which capture her/self and the female form in space as a flux or metamorphosis of spirit.

“Francesca Woodman’s photographs explore issues of gender and self, looking at the representation of the body in relation to its surroundings. She puts herself in the frame most often, although these are not conventional self-portraits as she is either partially hidden, or concealed by slow exposures that blur her moving figure into a ghostly presence.”4

They promote in the attentive viewer a ghostly insistence that you could be her – in vulnerability, in presence, in fear of suffering, for our death. Who are we that is represented, what is our place in this lonely world, how do we interact with our shadow? They offer glimpses of another, dream-like world, the microcosm of a life focusing a lens on (her) infinite spirit.

“The artist is a CHIMERICAL CREATURE. Imaginary, visionary. Woodman’s transformations, her interior elements, become part of the wall or the house. She vanishes “from the room, out of the picture, at any given second.”5 A preoccupation with the body / her own body, and the dichotomy of subject-object, also adds multiple meanings and complexity to Woodman’s work. Her many angel images (and also images of umbrellas – Mary Poppins was released in 1964 when Woodman was growing up) suggest movement and the ability to fly, a fascination that found its ultimate expression when she jumped off a building in lower Manhattan at the age of 22.”6

Both Cameron, a woman taking photographs for just fifteen years within the first twenty five years of the birth of commercial photography, using rudimentary technology and chemicals – and Woodman, a woman taking photographs for just eight years, whose practice of staging her body and her face in interior spaces so influenced a later generation of female artists – have left an indelible mark on the history of photography and identity formation.

Working “at times when women were marginal in the history of art and photography” both women are now regarded as important artists, in the upper echelons of photographers who have ever lived. The unique quality of their work shines through, each materialising a distinctive handwriting which could only ever be a Cameron or a Woodman (the atmospheric radiance of the one and a sense of vulnerability in the other). In their photographs I feel the transformative potential of that vision (it rumbles through my body, it impinges on my consciousness). Their ability to see things not as others see them, away from the too-rough fingers of the world.

Oh how I would like to see this exhibition in the flesh, to observe the synergies and differences between both artist’s works, to listen to the conversations across time and space through centuries of art practice. I will just have to buy the catalogue instead, but that is no substitute for physically standing in front of their “beautiful, subtle, intricate, and beguiling” prints.

To feel the vibrations of energy from these otherworldy beings…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Press release from the exhibition Julia Margaret Cameron at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, August 2013 – January 2014

2/ Marcus Bunyan. “The road less travelled,” on the exhibition ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney on the Art Blart website 24th October 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2024

3/ Anonymous. “A Study of the Cenci,” on the V&A website Nd [Online] Cited 11/06/2024

4/ Text from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art website [Online] Cited 25/06/2009. No longer available online

5/ Anna Tellgren. Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel (50kb pdf). 2015, p. 11

6/ Marcus Bunyan. “The artist as chimerical creature,” on the exhibition ‘Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm on the Art Blart website 4th December 2015 [Online] Cited 11/06/2024

Other exhibitions on Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman on Art Blart

~ Exhibition: ‘Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London Part 1, March – May 2018
~ Exhibition: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, November 2015 – February 2016
~ Exhibition: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney Part 2, August – October 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron: from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Sydney Part 1, August – October 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Julia Margaret Cameron’ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, August 2013 – January 2014
~ Exhibition: ‘Francesca Woodman. On Being an Angel’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, September – December 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Francesca Woodman’ at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, March – June 2012
~ Exhibition: ‘ARTIST ROOMS: Celmins, Gallagher, Hirst, Katz, Warhol, Woodman’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, March – November 2009

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

The Dream Keeper

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all of your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world

Langston Hughes

Major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to showcase rare vintage prints by two of art history’s most influential photographers – Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron

More than 160 rare vintage prints will be exhibited as part of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, as the two photographers – who worked 100 years apart – are presented in parallel for the first time.

The exhibition will present a thematic exploration of the photographic work produced throughout both artists’ entire careers, including their best known and less familiar work. Artist’s books by Francesca Woodman, which have never been exhibited in the UK, will be on display.

Julia Margaret Cameron. 'The Dream' 1869

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
The Dream
1869
Albumen print from wet collodion glass negative
Given by Alan S. Cole, 19 April 1913
© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

John Milton’s poem On his deceased Wife (about 1658) tells of a fleeting vision of his beloved returning to life in a dream.

L-R: 'The Dream (Mary Hillier)' by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869; 'Untitled', 1979 by Francesca Woodman; 'Annie (My very first success in Photography)', by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864; 'Self Portrait' at Thirteen by Francesca Woodman, 1972

L-R: The Dream (Mary Hillier) by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869. Wilson Centre for Photography; Untitled, 1979 by Francesca Woodman. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London; Annie (My very first success in Photography), by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Self Portrait at Thirteen by Francesca Woodman, 1972. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

This spring, the National Portrait Gallery in London has staged an unexpected pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron, whose bodies of photographic work were made a hundred years apart. The lushly titled Portraits to Dream In, the result of a thoughtful and imaginative curatorial inquiry, provides a compelling guide to their posthumous resemblances and describes a cultural arc of Romanticism from the mid-nineteenth-century to the turn of the twentieth, from luminous and pastoral to haunted and opaque. Both artists were engaged with the past, and the exhibition places them in a shared classicism of figuration and myth – a revelatory insight for Woodman. Both practiced photography for less than fifteen years. Both of their biographies often eclipse their critical reception. At times their congruence feels magnetic; at times their differences are as illuminating as their similarities.

The exhibition is organised by curator Magda Keaney in tidy themes that support affinities between the two women, among them “Angels and Otherworldly Beings,” “Mythology,” “Doubling,” and “Nature and Femininity.” Much of this is informative and, indeed, suggests a universal lexicon beyond this survey of dual sensibilities. Some of the rhymes are less plausible: a section entitled “Men” fails to persuade that Cameron’s depictions of eminent male political and cultural figures mirror Woodman’s male portraits. Unclothed men make rare appearances in Woodman’s photographs, where they do little to diminish the images as self-portraits. Festooned with a seashell, egg, pomegranate, or dead bird, the men serve as playful surrogates for the photographer herself.

Portraits to Dream In is an occasion to revel in the sumptuous texture of the photographic print, born from technologies decades apart. For both photographers, darkroom manipulation and tactility contribute to the pictures’ emotional mood, however diametric. For Cameron, the shallow depth of field and long shutter speed of the glass plate negative and wet collodion process renders a picture that flutters as if provisional, a vision subject to light glinting off an immaterial surface. They are as ethereal and transparent as Woodman’s are submersed in shadow; a moth bounding away from flame. One body of work, despite its soft patina, feels rooted in a sense of presence, the other by absence: fraught and confessional without evident disclosure.

Extract from Stephen Frailey. “An Unexpected Pairing of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron,” on the Aperture website May 16, 2024 [Online] Cited 03/06/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

L-R: 'The Dream (Mary Hillier)' by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1869; 'Untitled', 1979 by Francesca Woodman

L-R: 'Annie (My very first success in Photography)', by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864; 'Self Portrait at Thirteen' by Francesca Woodman, 1972

L-R: Annie (My very first success in Photography), by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1864. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Self Portrait at Thirteen by Francesca Woodman, 1972. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled
1979
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation/DACS London

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Annie (My very first success in Photography)
1864
Albumen silver print
A photographic portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot (1857-1936)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

A photographic portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot (1857-1936), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1864. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871). Annie was the daughter of Rev. William Benamin Philpot, a poet and friend of Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892).

Julia Margaret Cameron is one of the most significant figures in nineteenth century photography. Born in Calcutta, she moved to Britain where she lived at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. In 1863, aged forty-eight, she was given a camera by her daughter as a gift. From then on she took portraits of her family, friends and servants, as well as many eminent Victorians. Cameron was strongly influenced by classical art and many of her portraits are pictorial allegories based on religious or literary themes. In 1875 Cameron moved to Sri Lanka (Ceylon), where she died.

Text from the V&A website

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Self Portrait at Thirteen
1972
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

L-R: 'Untitled', from the 'Caryatid' series by Francesca Woodman, 1980; 'House #3' by Francesca Woodman, 1976; 'Untitled' by Francesca Woodman, 1977-1978

L-R: Untitled, from the Caryatid series by Francesca Woodman, 1980. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London; House #3 by Francesca Woodman, 1976. Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London; Untitled by Francesca Woodman, 1977-1978 Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation © Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled
1980
From the Caryatid series
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
House #3
1976
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled
1977-1978
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

From 21 March to 16 June 2024, the National Portrait Gallery will display a major retrospective exhibition of work by two of the most significant photographers in the history of the medium – Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). Bringing their work together for the first time in an exhibition of this scale, it will showcase more than 160 rare vintage prints from galleries, museums and private collections, including 96 works by Woodman and 71 by Cameron, spanning the entire careers of both photographers – who worked 100 years apart.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In will offer a new way to consider these two artists, by moving away from the biographical emphasis that has often been the focus of how their work is understood. The exhibition challenges this approach in its insistence on experiencing the physical print, taking the picture making of Woodman and Cameron as a starting point for consideration of their work. While neither artist aimed for technical perfection in their printing, for each it was a dynamic and essential aspect of their creative process used to explore and extend the possibilities of photographic image making.

After an extensive curatorial research period, works by Julia Margaret Cameron have been selected for loan from major museums internationally including the Getty, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum, New York City; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Science and Media Museum, Bradford; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and the National Portrait Gallery’s own Collection. Prints made by Francesca Woodman in her lifetime, nearly 20 of which have not been previously published or exhibited, have been loaned primarily from the Woodman Family Foundation in New York, who have collaborated closely on the making of the exhibition and accompanying publication, with further loans from Tate and the Rhode Island School of Design

The exhibition’s title, Portraits to Dream In, suggests that when seen side by side, both artists conjure a dream state within their work as part of their shared exploration of appearance, identity, the muse, gender and archetypes. The title of the exhibition comes from an observation made by Woodman that photographs could be ‘places for the viewer to dream in’. Both Woodman and Cameron produced work that was deeply rooted in mythology and storytelling and each made portraits of those close to them to represent these narratives. Further, both women explored portraiture beyond its ability to record appearance.

Following a thematic approach, visitors will experience the work of Woodman and Cameron moving forward and back in time between the nineteenth and twentieth century; and also within the relatively short span of years that each artist was active – neither worked for more than fifteen years. Themes on display will comprise: Declaring intentions & claiming space; Angels & Otherworldly Beings; Mythology; Doubling; Nature & femininity; Caryatids & the classical form; Men and Models & Muses.

Key works on display will include the first forays both artists made into the medium of photography, as they began to portray their unique perspectives and carve out distinctive styles. These include Cameron’s self-declared ‘first success’, a portrait of Annie Wilhemina Philpot in 1864, accompanied by Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at thirteen’, taken during a summer holiday in Antella, Italy in 1972. Photographs depicting angelic and otherworldly figures will be presented in a dense constellation with pieces from Woodman’s evocative and often abstracted Angels series contrasted against Cameron’s more direct representations of cherubic beings and winged cupids. Not to be missed images by Francesca Woodman will include Polka Dots #5 and House #3 both made in 1976, seen alongside ethereal portraits of the British actress Ellen Terry made by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1864.

Other defining works by Woodman include Caryatid pieces from a major photographic project developed in the last year of her life in which she experimented with large scale diazotype prints, including depictions of herself and other models as caryatids – carved female figures which take the place of columns in ancient Greek temples. The exhibition will be the first to draw significant attention to Woodman’s portraits of men as well as exploring the importance of her ongoing photographs of friends. Providing additional insight into her practice, contact sheets and examples of Woodman’s artist’s books will be on display, exhibited in the UK for the first time.

The exhibition will include many of Julia Margaret Cameron’s most famous and much loved portraits, including those of her niece and favourite model, Julia Jackson, who would later be the mother to Bloomsbury artists Virginia Wolf and Vanessa Bell; her striking depiction of Alice Liddell as the goddess Pomona; her portraits of prominent Victorian men including John Frederick William Herschel who she captured as he posed dramatically in The Astronomer (1867); and her frequent muses, May Prinsep and Mary Ann Hillier.

“It is a great pleasure to bring together the work of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron for the first time in this innovative and imaginative exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Though, of course, Cameron could not have known Woodman, and Woodman did not explicitly reference Cameron, they shared thematic and formal interests uncovered through the exhibition. Paired in this way, we see their work – individually and together – in a new light; one that feels contemporary and timeless. We are immensely grateful to our lead curator Magdalene Keaney for conceptualising this exhibition with great expertise and for the team at the Woodman Family Foundation in New York who have been wonderfully collaborative partners.”

Dr. Nicholas Cullinan OBE
Director, National Portrait Gallery

“Both Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron were utterly committed to the practice of photography and to their practice as artists without reservation. They both worked incredibly hard at times when women were marginal in the history of art and photography. I hope that visitors relish the physical experience of seeing such a large collection of prints that each artist made. They are beautiful, subtle, intricate, and beguiling. Then of course to come away knowing more about these two women artists who have defined the history of photography. I hope it poses questions about how we might think in new ways about relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practice and what a portrait is and can be.”

Magdalene Keaney
Curator, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In

The exhibition will be accompanied by the publication, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In by curator Magdalene Keaney, which will include essays and contributions from the collections curator of the Woodman Family Foundation, Katarina Jerinic, and leading photography historian, Helen Ennis.

Press release from the National Portrait Gallery

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
I Wait (Rachel Gurney)
1872
Albumen silver print
32.7 x 25.4cm (12 7/8 x 10 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Untitled
1977
From the Angels series
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Throughout her career, the young American photographer Francesca

Woodman revisited the theme of angels. In On Being an Angel (1976), she is

seen bending backward as light falls on her white body. A black umbrella is

in the distance. The following year she made a new version – an image with

a darker mood in which she shows her face. Woodman developed the angel

motif during a visit to Rome, where she photographed herself in a large,

abandoned building. In these images, she is wearing a white petticoat, but

her chest is bare. White pieces of cloth in the background are like wings. She

called these photographs From Angel series (1977) and From a series on

Angels (1977). There are also a number of pictures simply called Angels

(1977-1978), and among them is one where again she is bending backward, but this time in front of a graffitied wall. These angels are but a few examples of Francesca Woodman’s practice of staging her body and her face.

Anna Tellgren. Francesca Woodman: On Being an Angel (50kb pdf). 2015, p. 9

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Cherub and Seraph
1866
Albumen silver print
A photographic study of William Frederick ‘Freddy’ Gould (born 1861) and Elizabeth ‘Topsy’ Keown (born 1859)
National Science and Media Museum

A photographic study of William Frederick ‘Freddy’ Gould (born 1861) and Elizabeth ‘Topsy’ Keown (born 1859), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1866. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Sadness (Ellen Terry)
1864
Albumen silver print
22.2 x 17.6cm (8 3/4 x 6 15/16 in.)
Albumen silver print
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Dame Ellen Terry (English, 1847-1928)

Dame Alice Ellen Terry GBE (27 February 1847 – 21 July 1928) was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born into a family of actors, Terry began performing as a child, acting in Shakespeare plays in London, and toured throughout the British provinces in her teens. At 16, she married the 46-year-old artist George Frederic Watts, but they separated within a year. She soon returned to the stage but began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She resumed acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and other classics.

In 1878 she joined Henry Irving’s company as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain. Two of her most famous roles were Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She and Irving also toured with great success in America and Britain.

In 1903 Terry took over management of London’s Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. The venture was a financial failure, and Terry turned to touring and lecturing. She continued to find success on stage until 1920, while also appearing in films from 1916 to 1922. Her career lasted nearly seven decades.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)
Polka Dots #5
1976
Courtesy Woodman Family Foundation
© Woodman Family Foundation / DACS, London

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, formerly Mrs Duckworth)
1867
Albumen silver print
National Portrait Gallery, London

Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; formerly Duckworth; 7 February 1846 – 5 May 1895) was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Julia Prinsep Jackson was born in Calcutta to an Anglo-Indian family, and when she was two her mother and her two sisters moved back to England. She became the favourite model of her aunt, the celebrated photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who made more than 50 portraits of her. Through another maternal aunt, she became a frequent visitor at Little Holland House, then home to an important literary and artistic circle, and came to the attention of a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters who portrayed her in their work.

Married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, in 1867 she was soon widowed with three infant children. Devastated, she turned to nursing, philanthropy and agnosticism, and found herself attracted to the writing and life of Leslie Stephen, with whom she shared a friend in Anny Thackeray, his sister-in-law.

After Leslie Stephen’s wife died in 1875 he became close friends with Julia and they married in 1878. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four further children, living at 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, together with his seven-year-old mentally disabled daughter, Laura Makepeace Stephen. Many of her seven children and their descendants became notable. In addition to her family duties and modelling, she wrote a book based on her nursing experiences, Notes from Sick Rooms, in 1883.

She also wrote children’s stories for her family, eventually published posthumously as Stories for Children and became involved in social justice advocacy. Julia Stephen had firm views on the role of women, namely that their work was of equal value to that of men, but in different spheres, and she opposed the suffrage movement for votes for women. The Stephens entertained many visitors at their London home and their summer residence at St Ives, Cornwall. Eventually the demands on her both at home and outside the home started to take their toll. Julia Stephen died at her home following an episode of rheumatic fever in 1895, at the age of 49, when her youngest child was only 11. The writer Virginia Woolf provides a number of insights into the domestic life of the Stephens in both her autobiographical and fictional work.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
The Astronomer (Sir John Frederick William Herschel)
1867
Albumen silver print
Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, RI

Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH FRS (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, and experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work.

Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus – the seventh planet, discovered by his father Sir William Herschel. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays. His Preliminary Discourse (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory-building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science. …

Photography

Herschel made numerous important contributions to photography. He made improvements in photographic processes, particularly in inventing the cyanotype process, which became known as blueprints, and variations, such as the chrysotype. In 1839, he made a photograph on glass, which still exists, and experimented with some colour reproduction, noting that rays of different parts of the spectrum tended to impart their own colour to a photographic paper. Herschel made experiments using photosensitive emulsions of vegetable juices, called phytotypes, also known as anthotypes, and published his discoveries in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1842. He collaborated in the early 1840s with Henry Collen, portrait painter to Queen Victoria. Herschel originally discovered the platinum process on the basis of the light sensitivity of platinum salts, later developed by William Willis.

Herschel coined the term photography in 1839. Herschel was also the first to apply the terms negative and positive to photography.

Herschel discovered sodium thiosulfate to be a solvent of silver halides in 1819, and informed Talbot and Daguerre of his discovery that this “hyposulphite of soda” (“hypo”) could be used as a photographic fixer, to “fix” pictures and make them permanent, after experimentally applying it thus in early 1839.

Herschel’s ground-breaking research on the subject was read at the Royal Society in London in March 1839 and January 1840.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Pomona (Alice Liddell)
1872
Albumen silver print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art., New York
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1963

Pomona was the goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards. Unlike many other Roman goddesses and gods, she does not have a Greek counterpart, though she is commonly associated with Demeter. She watches over and protects fruit trees and cares for their cultivation.

Symbolically, Pomona and her fruit garden represent abundance, nurture and the simple pleasure derived from nature. She is often depicted in a garden full of life, colour and opulence, with her milky soft flesh on display and a cornucopia of fruit and flowers on her lap.

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
The Gardener’s Daughter
1867
Albumen silver print
A photographic study of Mary Ryan (1848-1914)
National Science and Media Museum

A photographic study of Mary Ryan (1848-1914), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1867. This albumen print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).

‘The Gardener’s Daughter’ was the title of a poem by Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). Cameron’s photograph was inspired by the lines: ‘Gown’d in pure white, that fitted to the shape, Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.’

Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879)
Iago – study from an Italian
1867
Albumen silver print
A photographic portrait of the artist’s model, Angelo Colarossi (born about 1839)
National Science and Media Museum

A photographic portrait of the artist’s model, Angelo Colarossi (born about 1839), taken by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) in 1867. The print forms part of the Herschel Album, created by Cameron for her friend Sir John Herschel (1792-1871).

This is the only existing print known of ‘Iago’. The negative may have been destroyed intentionally by Cameron, and it is believed that the print was taken for George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) to work from for a painting.

Iago was the villain of Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello’.

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book front cover

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book back cover

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book p. 11

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In book back cover pp. 70-71

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In

Magdalene Keaney (Editor), Katarina Jerinic (Contributor), Helen Ennis (Contributor)

Hardcover – 26 June 2024

Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In draws parallels between two of the most significant practitioners in the history of photography, presenting fresh research, rare vintage prints, and previously unseen archival works.

‘I feel that photographs can either document and record reality or they can offer images as an alternative to everyday life: places for the viewer to dream in.’
~ Francesca Woodman, 1980

Living and working over a century apart, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) and Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) experienced very different ways of making and understanding photographs. Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In accompanies the exhibition of the same name opening at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in March 2024. Spanning the careers of both artists, the beautifully illustrated catalogue includes their best-known photographs as well as less familiar images. The exhibition works are arranged into eight thematic sections with feature essays, offering an accessible, engaging opportunity to consider both artists in a new light.

This publication presents the artists’ exploration of portraiture as a ‘dream space’. It makes new connections between their work, which pushed the boundaries of the photographic medium and experimented with ideas of beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling to produce some of art history’s most compelling and admired photographs.

National Portrait Gallery Publications
208 pages

Text from the Amazon Australia website

National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London, WC2H 0HE

Opening hours:
Open daily: 10.30 – 18.00
Friday and Saturday: 10.30 – 21.00

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation website

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

“Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.” Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera' 1950 from the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, January - May, 2024

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

To see ourselves as others see us

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

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

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

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

Weegee

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

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

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

Clément Chéroux

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

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

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

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

Curator Clément Chéroux

Wall text from the exhibition

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) '"Chevrolet". Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York' c. 1943 from the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, January - May, 2024

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

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

Wall text from the exhibition

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Self-portrait' 1950

Weegee Tells How

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

Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) 'Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide' 1944

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

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

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

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

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

Wall text from the exhibition

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

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

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

Exhibition

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

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

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

Biography

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

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

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

Text from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle' at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre, 'Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn' (1940)

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

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

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

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

Weegee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boo Paterson. “Big guns to big top: Weegee at circus,” on the Boo York City website [Online] Cited 13/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

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

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

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

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

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

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

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

Weegee Looks At Dali

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats

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

Look magazine 1957

"How your TV heroes look to Weegee's magic camera" in Look magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curator Clément Chéroux

Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous. “How New Yorkers survived hot summer nights,” on the Ephemeral New York website Nd [Online] Cited 14/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Simply adding boiling water' 1943

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Lovers at the Palace Theater' c. 1953

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonymous. “National Affairs: SLAUGHTER ON FIFTH AVENUE,” in TIME Monday, Jan. 27, 1941 on the TIME website [Online] Cited 14/04/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Weegee (American, born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 - 1968 New York) '[Outline of a Murder Victim]' 1942

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Harry Maxwell shot in a car' 1941

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

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

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Charlie Chaplin, Distortion' 1950

Weegee (American, 1899-1968) 'Self-Portrait' 1963

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

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

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

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

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

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

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