Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
There’s a scene in one of my favourite movies, 1971’s American romantic black comedy-drama Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby, in which the glorious Ruth Gordon (in her best ever role) saves a tree from dying in the city by loading into the back of a ute, driving it at full speed through toll gates and out to the country to plant it in the forest, pursued by a motorcycle cop.
The joyful absurdity of her actions is mirrored in the terrific juxtapositions in life that are Gary Krueger’s considered photographs: for example, a “future tree” a circle with words in a lump of concrete surrounded by a constellation of fossil fuel oil stains.
As I said in a previous posting on the artist’s work, “Krueger’s street photography inverts the normal meaning of bathos… in that a silly or very ordinary subject suddenly changes to a beautiful or important one. There is black humour aplenty in these photographs as they picture the happenstance anachronisms of a major American city.”
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Maude saves a Tree from the film Harold and Maude (1971) with Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort, directed by Hal Ashby
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (re)Discoveries presents a new collection of photographs from the artist’s archive. These vintage photographs display a sometimes frenetic and often bizarre and fragmented world. Taken mostly in Los Angeles, California in the mid to late 1970s, Krueger’s curiosity and instincts helped him to create a remarkable body of street photography, one that he describes as “split-second juxtapositions in life.”
After graduating High School in 1963, Gary Krueger (1945 – ) drove his 1954 Ford west from Cleveland, Ohio, to study graphic design and photography at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1964 to 1967. Later Cal Arts, Chouinard was a professional art school founded in 1921 by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard. In 1961, Walt and Roy Disney guided the merger of Chouinard and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts. Notable alumni include Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Joe Goode, and Allen Ruppersberg, with whom Krueger collaborated on Ruppersberg’s narrative photo works, including 23 Pieces (1969) and 24 Pieces (1970). Upon graduation from Chouinard, Krueger was hired by WED, Disney’s “Imagineering” Division. to photograph the Park and its events. He eventually left WED to pursue a successful career as a commercial and editorial photographer.
“Gary Krueger’s plain ol’ photographs (unless I’m missing a point) – small, tough, and sharp – are good, granite reportage. Baldessari’s “Fables” and Krueger’s no-nonsense photos cut like a hot ripsaw through the cool, marshmallow quality of both exhibitions.” – Peter Plagens, from a 1973 ARTFORUM review of the exhibition, Southern California: Attitudes 1972, at the Pasadena Art Museum.
Gary Krueger’s work is represented in The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His work has recently been feature in The Guardian, Creative Review, Huck and The Eye of Photography.
Press release from Joseph Bellows Gallery
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Gary Krueger (American, b. 1945) Los Angeles c. 1970s Vintage gelatin silver print 5 x 7 inches, 8 x 10 inch sheet
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
This is a magnificent exhibition of the 103 photographs that form American photographer Richard Avedon’s series and subsequent book of the same name, In The American West 1984.
“Avedon spent the next six years, from 1979 to 1984, traveling to 189 towns in 17 states – Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming – and even up into Canada. He conducted 752 sittings, exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his large-format view camera.”1
“For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions. He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West.”2
Using relatively small reference prints (40 x 50cm) not originally intended for exhibition made by the photographer at the time to produce the prints for his book, the hanging of this exhibition “on the line”, “follows the book, from the first to the last image… The blank pages are represented on the wall by a gap equivalent to the width of a frame, like a half-space. We have thus reproduced the rhythm of someone leafing through the book. We can see through this that Richard Avedon and Marvin Israel (1924-1984), artistic director, have constructed the rhythm of these images in a very precise manner”3, one which follows “the dynamics of the photograph on the page, and the inter-relationships, scaling and sequencing of groups of photographs.”
Breaking with the code of social documentary photography, Avedon brings to this project all his undoubted skill as a New York fashion photographer, reassigned to the artistic sphere: clarity of purpose, simplicity of representation, aesthetic beauty, clinical detail and contextless backgrounds.
While there is a long history of the use of plain backgrounds in portrait photography dating back to the infancy of the medium, Avedon was one of the first to employ such a technique in contemporary (I’d like to say postmodern) photo-portraits, where the subject is disassociated from their location, job, culture and is posed by the director of the theatrical show.
During the photographic sessions Avedon shot not from behind his camera but to the side, like the director of a play in rehearsal, front of stage. “He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”5
“A conductor of his own composition, Richard Avedon was able to weave an unparalleled fusional relationship with his models, while implacably directing them through his gaze, gestures or voice.”6
Thus, through his imagination, his direction and his creative experience Avedon conjured a subjective view of the American West every bit as much as myth as those cowboys in John Wayne movies, a kind of counter-mythology undercutting the eulogising of the American West, but a staged, fabricated, youthful, desolate, mysterious mythology none the less – a series which captures the ethos of the era (global recession, disease, dis/ease) counter to the one hoped for, “representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of.”7
Think that damned foreigner Robert Frank and his book The Americans, pointing the bone at the belly of the United States of America, holding a mirror up to their reflection8 and they certainly not liking what they saw. Indeed Avedon, while American and respectful of his subjects, could be seen as an interloper from New York exposing through his photographs the underbelly of this vast country colonised through divine providence and Manifest Destiny.
Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”
“Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”9
Neither the series nor the exhibition are without fault, however.
While I believe that Avedon’s exceptional magnum opus In The American West has become one of the truly iconic photographic portrait series of the 20th century it can also be seen as problematic, not in the photographic sense, but in the sense that the photographs did not reflect the diverse reality of the West’s population. While the series may be Avedon’s subjective mythologising of the American West some people, myself included, find the lack of representation of Black Americans, Asian Americans and other ethnicities that have been integral to the development of the American West a point of contention. Are they not those that also do the work, those who also make America work, as much as those Avedon chose to photograph? Indeed there is a “significant demographic blind spot” in the whole series…
Finally, in the juxtaposition of Polaroid and finished portrait we can begin to perceive the magical transformation and artistry and humanism of the man, Avedon, as he visualises his ode to the American West, composing his subjects so that they engage with the viewer directly from the photographic frame – the dynamics of the photographs creating iconic images of memorable characters, collectively constructing the rhythm of these images (from dark to light, from sublime to industrial) into an unforgettable sequence of photographs.
8/ Holding a mirror up to their reflection, i.e. to hold something up to scrutiny, to reveal an unpleasant truth, or to show something for what it truly is, often with the intent of providing insight or understanding.
9/ Nathalie Dassa, op.cit.,
Many thankx to the Fondation 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.
“I don’t think the West in these portraits is any more accurate than John Wayne’s West.”
Richard Avedon at the exhibition opening in 1985
“Avedon’s most compelling photographs are about performance – his performance as well as his subjects’ – and depend on the engagement of their personalities. For this reason it is difficult to separate the photographer from the man. Indeed it is partly owing to the ineluctable presence of Avedon’s own psychology that his portraits transcend the mainstream of cultural history.”
Anonymous. “Body of Evidence,” on the Frieze website, 06 March 1994 [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
“Listen carefully to the stories of others and they may tell us something of ourselves. The story of any person exists first in the mind of its teller, perpetually renewing itself as, like smoke in wind, it is constantly shaped and reshaped in the flux of daily life. Narratives constructed from various facts, memories and rumours are added to, subtracted from, come together and fall apart in a continuous reassembling of experience and imagination. The human mind is a place where fact meets fiction, where reality and fantasy mingle easily and endlessly with fabrication, half-truths and invention. As they say, looking at something is no guarantee you will actually see it.”
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work, In The American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents, from April 30 to October 12, 2025, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, an exceptional exhibition entirely dedicated to this iconic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, at the request of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled the American West and photographed more than 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, drovers, showmen, vendors, and vagabonds, alone or in small groups, in front of his view camera against a white background that enhanced their features, postures, and expressions.
He thus created a striking portrait of this region and its residents, a departure from traditional representations and glorifications of the myth of the American West. The sheer power of the 103 works that make up the final series and the book of the same name make In The American West a pivotal moment in Avedon’s work and a major milestone in the history of photographic portraiture.
The exhibition presented at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson from April 30 to October 12, 2025, displays for the very first time in Europe all the images that appear in the original work, accompanied by previously unpublished documents.
Text from the YouTube website translated from the French by Google Translate [Online] Cited 23/09/2025
Richard Avedon photographing for In The American West
“We have some testimonies about the way that Avedon was working, and we know that he was not behind his camera, he was standing next to it. He had a strong connection with his subjects, mimicking their position, and asking them to respond to a very small gesture by showing himself moving in one direction or another, and I think a lot of the work is in this relationship that he was establishing with the subject. Photographic literature usually focuses on the framing, the composition, but for me, this kind of interaction he was able to develop with the subject is where the work is, where he’s transforming the people that he met into a Richard Avedon photograph.”
Installation views of the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West‘ at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
To mark the 40th anniversary of Richard Avedon’s iconic work In the American West, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, in collaboration with the Richard Avedon Foundation, presents an exclusive exhibition focused on this emblematic series.
Between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Richard Avedon traveled across the American West to photograph over 1,000 of its inhabitants. For five years, Avedon photographed miners, herdsmen, showmen, salesmen and transient people, amongst others with rich histories, alone or in small groups, before his camera, against a white background that enhanced their features, postures and expressions, for a striking portrait of the territory and its residents, in stark contrast to traditional depictions and glorifications of the legend of the American West. The force of the 103 works that compose the book makes In the American West a pivotal event in Avedon’s career, and a milestone in the history of photographic portraits.
For the first time in Europe, the exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the whole series of images included in the original publication, while also showcasing the stages of its production and reception. The exhibition includes a full selection of engravers prints, which served as reference materials for both the exhibition and the 1985 book, as well as previously unpublished documents, such as preparatory Polaroids, test prints annotated by the photographer, and correspondence between the artist and his models.
To mark this anniversary, Abrams, the book’s original publisher, is reissuing the long out-of-print book.
Richard Avedon short biography
Richard Avedon was born to parents of Russian Jewish heritage in New York City. As a boy, he learned photography, joining the YMHA Camera Club at the age of twelve. Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the Merchant Marine. Making identification portraits of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex twin lens camera – a gift from his father – Avedon advanced his technical knowledge of the medium and began to develop a dynamic style. After two years of service he left the Merchant Marine to work as a photographer, making fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
In 1945, Avedon set up his own studio and worked as a freelance photographer for various magazines. He quickly became the preeminent photographer used by Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning, Avedon made portraits for editorial publication as well: in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, in Theater Arts, and in Life and Look magazines. From the outset, he was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. Only rarely did he idealize people; instead, he presented the face as a kind of landscape, with total clarity.
Avedon continued to make portraiture and fashion photography for magazine publications throughout his career. After parting ways with Harper’s Bazaar in 1965, he began a long-term relationship with Vogue that continued through 1988. In later years, he established formidable creative partnerships with the French publication Egoiste, and with The New Yorker. In the pages of these periodicals, Avedon reinvigorated his formalist style, investing his imagery with dynamism and theatricality. In addition, he supported his studio by making innovative advertising work for print and broadcast – defining the look of brands like Calvin Klein, Versace, and Revlon.
As his reputation grew and his signature aesthetic evolved, Avedon remained dedicated to extended portraiture projects as a means for exploring cultural, political, and personal concerns. In 1963-1964, he examined the civil rights movement in the American South. During the Vietnam War, he photographed students, countercultural artists and activists, and victims of the war, both in the United States and in Vietnam. In 1976, on a commission for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced The Family, a composite portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s Bicentennial election.
In 1985, Avedon created his magnum opus – In the American West. He portrayed members of the working class: butchers, coal miners, convicts, and waitresses, all photographed with precisionist detail, using the large format camera and plain white backdrop characteristic of his mature style. Despite their apparent minimalism and objectivism, however, Avedon emphasised that these portraits were not to be regarded as simple records of people; rather, he said, “the moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.”
Publication
Richard Avedon’s acclaimed work In the American West was first published in 1985 by American publishing house Abrams. For its 40th anniversary, Abrams is republishing the work in its original format.
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
“The subjective part of the project is clear. And most of the photographs were from encounters where he photographed people he met as they were. He also stated very clearly that a few photographs were set up, and the photograph of the Bee Man is a good example of that. He first published an advertisement in the American Bee Journal to find the type of person he was interested in – we have the advertisement in the exhibition, we found the original magazine where it was published. So, he looked for that person and made some drawings in preparation for the shoot. He clearly had a dream of a specific image that he wanted to realize. And he made clear that he wanted to have this photograph to show the subjective part of the project, that it was not exclusively a documentary project. I think the Bee Man shows us that there isn’t truth on one side and fiction on the other. It’s much more complex.” …
“Just before the Bee Man, we have the coal miners, these very strong dark images and then suddenly you have the white body of Ronald Fisher with all these little bees. We wanted to respect this in the exhibition, the sense that it was not just a collection of twentieth-century photographs of Americans, but it was a group of images, a full sentence.”
“The year after [Glenn Busch’s] Working Menwas published came fashion photographer Richard Avedon‘s In the American West (New York: Abrams, 1985), the consistent theme of which, as Richard Bolton in Afterimage argues, sees “human experience as manifested in [no]thing but style,” a quality, less sombre, but equally arch, exoticising and stereotyping that is found also in the Small Trades studio series of 1950-51 by Irving Penn.”
James McArdle. “October 8: Prosopography,” on the On This Date In Photography website 08/10/2025 [Online] Cited 08/10/2025
“Avedon was aware of the subjectivity of what he presents. He was also very familiar with art history and pictorial references, such as those of Rembrandt. He made carcasses of sheep and cattle appear like hallucinations among the workers. His photography is therefore no more objective than that of John Wayne’s westerns. And that is what he had been criticised for: representing a sad, unsmiling America, which does not correspond to the one dreamed of. These are the people that Walker Evans and the traveling photographers sought out during the conquest of the West. He demonstrated this paradox. And this is the term Roland Barthes uses for him: the paradox of all great art. Richard Avedon showed his own America, those we do not see, those we pass by without pausing, those who do the work, those who make America work.”
Nathalie Dassa. “Richard Avedon: The Living Forces of the American West,” on the Blind Magazine website, May 12, 2025 [Online] Cited 22/09/2025
I know and greatly admire the presence and directness of legendary American photographer Lee Friedlander’s photographs containing fractured planes within the image construction.
I know and appreciate (if not admire) the immediacy and in your face obstinacy (shoot at all costs!) of American photographer Garry Winogrand’s photographs.
What I didn’t know was the excellent 1980s social documentary and humanist work of the American photographer Joseph RodrÃguez – for me, the unexpected hero of this exhibition.
RodrÃguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval.
“The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, RodrÃguez does not depict despair, but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.” (Text from Museum Ludwig)
Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
(*1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, lives and works in New York City, New York)
Lee Friedlander began photographing at the age of fourteen and studied under Edward Kaminski at the Art Center School in Los Angeles until 1955. In 1956, he moved to New York, where he met Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Garry Winogrand. As early as the end of the 1950s, he made his first photographic forays into the streets of New York. His often humorous photographs reveal the complexity of American society, which he documented in thoughtful compositions.
Friedlander does not create complete series. Each shot stands on its own as a “sharp and crudely amusing, bitterly comic observation” (Walker Evans). He initially used a Leica 35mm, whose wide angle he valued. In the early 1990s, he discovered the depth of field of the Hasselblad camera, which he also used to photograph the suburban towns of San Angelo, Texas. His subjects remained the same, only he continually reinvented them. In the 1990s, Friedlander created his photographs of flower stems trapped in glass containers and surrounded by a veil of condensation, transforming a sober detail of everyday life into a contemporary memento mori – a reminder of transience. The self-portraits, which unvarnishedly depict his ageing body, date from the same period.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
The street life of cities has always been a fascinating subject for photographers, who have approached it in a variety of ways, from candid images documenting urban unrest to portraits that shine a spotlight on individuals. Since the nineteenth century, cities and photography have been directly linked through the idea of modernity. With the introduction of compact cameras such as the Leica, street photography developed into its own genre in the mid-twentieth century. Small-format cameras gave photographers greater flexibility and enabled them to respond quickly while remaining discrete. They explored public space without obtruding and, in contrast to staged photography, captured candid and spontaneous moments that had previously been considered unworthy photographic subjects. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s concept of the “decisive moment,” these photographers sought to capture the fleeting instant when light, composition, and subject aligned to convey the significance of an event.
This exhibition in the Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig is dedicated to three protagonists from two generations of street photography: Garry Winogrand (b. 1928 in New York, d. 1984), Lee Friedlander (b. 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, based in New York), and Joseph RodrÃguez (b. 1951 in Brooklyn, based in New York). Despite all three photographers sharing the same subject matter, each one pursues a singular approach that produces distinct results. Iconic photographs from the 1960s to the 1980s are displayed alongside lesser-known examples from each photographer’s oeuvre. All of the works on display were included in donations made by the Bartenbach Family in 2015 and Volker Heinen in 2018, or have been acquired by the Museum Ludwig since 2001.
The landmark exhibition New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 helped launch the careers of Winogrand and Friedlander. Their striking photographs broke with visual conventions, such as a level horizon line or a centred main subject. Winogrand frequently tilted his viewfinder, producing skewed horizon lines that offer a new view of reality and make his images appear spontaneous, as does his purposeful use of blurriness, overexposure, underexposure, and backlighting. Friedlander, in turn, created compositions in which the viewer’s gaze is hindered by obstructions, such as shadows, signs, architectural elements, and streetlights, or is disoriented by reflections.
Winogrand and Friedlander, who are represented in the exhibition with twenty images each, both use photography in a self-reflective way that brings the formal aspects of photography to the fore. This encourages an analytical gaze, producing an emotional distance between the viewer and the subject, which often results in ambivalent images where the intention of the photographer remains unclear. Winogrand and Friedlander each developed their own distinct style, embracing originality and authorship by merging documentary photography and personal expression. While they attempted to distance themselves from photojournalism and social documentary photography, eschewing event-based, narrative-focused, and emotionally charged imagery, Rodriguez’s work deliberately engages with these genres. He aspires to give visibility to marginalised people by communicating with his subjects and attempting to tell their stories. Many of his photographs are accompanied by short commentaries that provide information about the context in which each image was created. RodrÃguez’s pictures employ unusual perspectives and surprising compositions, and his use of reflections emphasises the subjectivity of the photographer’s empathic gaze beyond the momentariness of the shot. The exhibition features around twenty photographs from his Taxi series.
This is the first exhibition in the new Photography Rooms at the Museum Ludwig, centrally located on the second floor.
Text / press release from the Museum Ludwig website
Installation views of the exhibition Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph RodrÃguez, Garry Winogrand at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, May – October, 2025 Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/Vincent Quack
For many years, Garry Winogrand found his subjects right on his doorstep, on the streets of his birthplace and longtime home, New York. Whether they depict individuals or groups of people, his photographs are characterised by a special dynamism, which is also the result of the unusual perspectives of his shots. Often chaotic, sometimes surreal, the images tell stories from everyday life in the big city, but also from mass events such as sporting events or political demonstrations.
Winogrand distanced himself from both the social documentary photography popular in the 1930s and 1940s and from photojournalism, with which he himself earned his living for a long time. He was concerned with shifting the perspective from the object of the photograph to the camera: “I photograph to find out what things look like when photographed.” In his photographs, Winogrand found a formal equivalent for the diverging social forces of the 1960s. He captured passersby on the streets and public squares with a wide-angle lens in such a way that the horizons tilted and a clear center of gravity was missing. His photographs of women in public often deviated from this principle. He dedicated the book Women are Beautiful to this motif, which he returned to repeatedly throughout his career, in 1975. In another project, beginning in 1969, he focused on the media world in order to – as he put it – “study the events produced in the news.” With a distanced perspective, Winogrand captured press conferences, demonstrations, open-air festivals, and the hustle and bustle of the art world – the spectacles and pseudo-events of a society in transition.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
“When I drove a cab, my taxi cab was a rolling psychology office. Everybody had something to say. Sometimes it’s just light conversation like the weather or kids. Baseball. But then you get all kinds of incredible stories. I was learning the foundations of humanism in my cab.”
Joseph RodrÃguez
“To drive a cab back then, you either had to have a death wish or come to the job with a biography that inured you to the danger or graced you with such intuitive empathy/curiosity that to see and hear and sometimes engage with the cavalcade of humanity sliding in and out of your backseat trumped the nightly game of Russian roulette.”
Richard Price penned these poignant words that open photographer Joseph RodrÃguez’s book, Taxi: Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987
Joseph RodrÃguez
(*1951 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, lives and works there)
Joseph RodrÃguez was a teenager when street photography was celebrated in New York with exhibitions such as New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art, which also brought Friedlander and Winogrand to the fore. RodrÃguez studied graphic design and photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the New York City Technical College. In 1985, he graduated with a degree in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center for Photography in New York. During his studies, he worked as a taxi driver, photographing his passengers and street scenes from behind the wheel. The exhibited works are from the Taxi series. They document, on the one hand, RodrÃguez’s work as a taxi driver, who has to try to secure well-paid long-distance rides to earn a living and cover the costs of his hired taxi. During his twelve-hour shifts, RodrÃguez captures city life in the various neighborhoods at different times of day, from nightlife to the busy hours of the day. His shots of passersby in the rearview mirror, of a sunrise, or of someone urinating in public who believes they are unobserved, testify to the fleeting nature of the moment. RodrÃguez also engages directly with his passengers. His portraits convey the openness and respect with which he treats them. RodrÃguez sees himself in the tradition of social documentary photography. He advocates the goal of giving visibility to those who are overlooked. He often adds short comments to his images that shed light on what is being photographed. He also uses unusual perspectives, surprising crops, and reflections. However, these emphasize the subjectivity of his empathetic gaze beyond the momentary nature of the moment.
The photographs in the Taxi series are a significant document of the 1980s in New York, a period marked by economic and social upheaval and the AIDS crisis. On his journeys crisscrossing the city, RodrÃguez does not depict despair, but rather shows people maintaining their dignity in the face of difficult and uncertain times.
Text from Museum Ludwig translated by Google Translate
“14th Street & West Side Highway. That’s the back of the Anvil. These guys would come outside to take a leak. And of course they’re having a conversation, so who knows what happened after that.” ~ Joseph RodrÃguez
The Anvil was a gay BDSM after-hours sex club located at 500 West 14th Street, Manhattan, New York City, that operated from 1974 to 1985.
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
I love these photographs!
What’s not to like… generously sympathetic photographs that exhibit no pretension, containing interesting backgrounds and wonderful characters. The incongruity of a muscle man in leopard skin bathers in a snowy landscape at Coney Island … no worries!
“In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits.”
I particularly like the wonderful photograph of the large gentleman with tattoos in a white singlet sitting at a table surrounded by a halo of light bulbs. I also like how Salmieri gives some of his portraits context by including background information in his photographs.
The artist joins a rite of passage for many American photographers in taking photographs at Coney Island – that is, to capture the magic and mystique of this theatrical, carnivalesque place – one full of history, ceremony, community, tradition, fun, drama, people, sun and sand.1
Luminaries to have photographed there include Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Weegee, Garry Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Leon Levinstein, Arlene Gottfried, Harold Feinstein and Edward J. Kelty to name just a few.
Stephen Salmieri’s charismatic photographs are strong enough to join this pantheon of stars and the “vaunted tradition” of picturing Coney Island.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm accords to certain patterns of play where “the social hierarchies of everyday life… are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies.”
“The carnival offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realise the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”
Many thankx to the Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”
Stephen Salmieri
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1968 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1969 Vintage gelatin silver print
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of Stephen Salmieri’s photographs of Coney Island. Made between 1967 and 1972 with an array of cameras and black and white film, these images portray a cast of beachgoers and amusement park locals within the surrounding environment of one of America’s earliest and most illustrious seashore amusement parks.
The exhibition showcases Salmieri’s finely crafted vintage black and white prints. In the images, storefront booths, midway games, carnival architecture, and the shoreline provide the backdrop to Salmieri’s descriptive and engaging portraits. In a published statement on the photographs, the artist explains his process and motivation:
“The world of Coney Island has changed dramatically since I made these photographs. It was my first self-assigned project at twenty years of age, having just graduated from the School of Visual Arts. In choosing my subject I gravitated naturally to the familiar destination of my adolescent bike adventures.
I made the hour ride to Coney Island with all my cameras in tow all year round. I carried a 4 x 5 field camera, a 6 x 6 cm and a 35 mm format, and lots of Tri-X film.
In 1969, CAMERA magazine approached me at my first exhibition at the Underground Gallery. In my naivety, I did not realise that Coney Island was also the choice territory for such luminaries as Robert Frank, Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, and Weegee. It wasn’t until the magazine published these photographs as part of their seminal Coney Island issue in 1971 that I realised I had become part of a vaunted tradition.
These spare and emotional first images of a forgotten community, now lost in time, allowed me to forge a vision at a pivotal moment in my young life.”
Salmieri’s photographs from this body of work were also featured in the exhibition Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection.
Salmieri’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Flint Institute, Michigan, the Museum of the City of New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Publications include “American Grilles” (1978, Hartcourt-Brace) and “Cadillac: An American Icon” (1985, Rizzoli).
Text from the Joseph Bellows Gallery website
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1970 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1971 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1972 Vintage gelatin silver print
Stephen Salmieri (American, b. 1945) Coney Island 1967-1972 Vintage gelatin silver print
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Coney Island 4th of July, 1958 Gelatin silver print
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) Harlem Black Birds, Coney Island 1930
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Couple at Coney Island, New York 1928 Gelatin silver print
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island July 21st 1940
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) Coney Island, New York City, N.Y. 1952 Gelatin silver print
Leon Levinstein (American, 1910-1988) Coney Island 1955 Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960 1960 Gelatin silver print
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Two Youths, Coney Island 1958 From the series Brooklyn Gang
Joseph Bellows Gallery 7661 Girrard Avenue La Jolla, California Phone: 858 456 5620
Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment
My apologies that I haven’t been writing that much in recent postings, but I am still recovering from my hip replacement operation and the pain is still ongoing over 6 weeks after the operation. I’m a little exhausted to put it mildly…
With this sumptuous exhibition of photographs by Elliott Erwitt – in a beautiful palazzo with painted ceilings and classical sculptures with the walls painted a glorious colour of green – you get what is says on the tin: Erwitt’s iconic and humanist photographs of dogs, children and celebrities, “visual double-takes and finely tuned one-liners.”
That is all the media images consisted of, his famous photographs.
I know that the exhibition, and the artist’s reputation, rests on his “icons” but I just wish we could see past these to his other photographs, photographs of everyday people, captured in the midst of their ordinary lives; photographs that contain a little more gravitas, a little more depth of poignancy / spirit / energy, revealing small intimacies not readily seen and acknowledged.
That Erwitt is capable of such images can be see in photographs such as Italy, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1965 (below), USA, New York City, 1969 (below) and that most gut wrenching, heart breaking of images, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963 (below) – where Erwitt reveals the grief of loss and finally touches the marrow of what it is to be human.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx of the Palazzo Bonaparte for allowing me to publish the photographs and video in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy
Installation walk through of the exhibition “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” dedicated to the late master of visual irony and empathy, Elliott Erwitt. This major show offers an intimate look into the universe of one of contemporary photography’s most significant figures, whose work transformed everyday life into profound visual poetry.
Installation views of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing in the bottom image, the Erwitt’s photograph France, Paris, 1989
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1953
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Santa Monica, California, 1956 (below); at second left, USA, New York City, 1955 (below); at third left, USA, Louisiana, Shreveport, 1962; and at right, USSR, Bratsk, Siberia, 1967 (below)
Starting June 28th, 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte will open its doors to an extraordinary exhibition, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” dedicated to the late master of visual irony and empathy, Elliott Erwitt. This major show offers an intimate look into the universe of one of contemporary photography’s most significant figures, whose work transformed everyday life into profound visual poetry.
With over 80 celebrated photographs, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons” invites visitors to experience Erwitt’s distinctive style – irreverent, poetic, and deeply human. He possessed a remarkable ability to capture the lightness of the joy of living, becoming the most insightful and moving chronicler of the human comedy. His lens made us smile, reflect, and feel, turning fleeting moments into unforgettable images.
A Glimpse into Erwitt’s Vision
Erwitt, who passed away in November 2023 at the age of 95, was a master at transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. His “Icons” are not just photographs; they are symbols of his unique perspective and our shared collective memory. As he once put it, “In the saddest and most wintry moments of life… suddenly the sight of something wonderful can change the aspect of things, your state of mind. The type of photography I like, the one where the instant is caught, is very similar to this break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful photo seems to come out of nowhere.”
This exhibition, curated by Biba Giacchetti, a leading international Erwitt expert, along with technical assistance from Gabriele Accornero, offers a comprehensive yet concise overview of his genius. From his anthropomorphic dogs to powerful world leaders, from iconic movie stars like Marilyn Monroe to intimate family moments, Erwitt’s gaze was both incisive and empathetic. He captured not only the irony of daily life but also its underlying complexity.
Beyond the Famous Faces
While the exhibition features renowned portraits of figures such as Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac, Marlene Dietrich, Fidel Castro, and Sophia Loren, it also highlights historical moments like the Nixon-Khrushchev dispute, Kennedy’s funeral, and the Frazier-Ali fight. Yet, Erwitt’s democratic approach to his medium shines through in his focus on everyday people, captured in the midst of their ordinary lives.
A significant portion of Erwitt’s work showcased his love for dogs, whose free-spirited nature he admired. Many photographs are taken from a dog’s-eye view, often revealing only the feet or legs of their owners. Erwitt ingeniously employed playful tactics, like sounding a horn or mimicking a bark, to elicit natural reactions from the animals, resulting in humorous and endearing compositions.
An Unmissable Summer Event
The “Elliott Erwitt. Icons” exhibition, running until September 21st, 2025, marks the opening of Palazzo Bonaparte’s summer exhibition season. Following the success of the recent Edvard Munch retrospective, this show pays homage to a globally beloved master of photography. Visitors will have the unique opportunity to journey through Erwitt’s surreal, romantic, and playful vision of the world, always capable of grasping the essence of things.
Press release from Palazzo Bonaparte
Installation views of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing in the bottom image from left to right, Italy, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia, 1965; France, Versailles, 1975; and Spain, Madrid, 1995 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1969 (below)
“A 1969 scene in Amagansett, New York – a sober, soot-stained Victorian office block with a single storefront whose sign (“Tony’s of Worth Street”) is written in cheerful white paint – somehow combines the austerity of Atget with the irreverent glee of Weegee.”
From June 28 to September 21, 2025, Palazzo Bonaparte welcomes the most ironic and disarming gaze in twentieth-century photography: Elliott Erwitt. An exhibition that is much more than an exhibition: it is an invitation to observe the world with lightness, empathy, and wonder.
An unmissable event, which recounts – through over 80 iconic shots – the long and brilliant career of an artist capable of capturing the soul of the twentieth century and transforming ordinary moments into unforgettable images, with a profoundly human yet always surprising gaze.
On display in Rome are icons of an era, of a way of looking at the world with lightness and intelligence. “Icons” because each of Erwitt’s shots has become a symbol of his poetics and of our collective memory.
Erwitt is more than just a photographer: he is the poet of human comedy, the unerring witness to life’s small and large absurdities, which he recounts with disarming irony, subtle poetry, and timeless grace. His images – famous, unforgettable, often dazzling – manage to be simultaneously light and profound, intimate and universal. They are shots that make you smile, reflect, and move you.
Elliott Erwitt was – and is – a key figure in the visual culture of our time. His images, books, reportages, illustrations, and advertising campaigns have spanned the decades, appearing in international publications and influencing generations of photographers and artists. This exhibition is a journey through his work and an invitation to look at the world with new eyes: with lightness, empathy, and wonder.
A member since 1953 of the historic Magnum agency – founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, among others – Erwitt has chronicled the last sixty years of history and contemporary civilisation with journalistic flair, capturing the most dramatic yet humorous aspects of the life that has passed before his lens.
“In life’s saddest, wintry moments, when a cloud has enveloped you for weeks, suddenly the sight of something wonderful can change the face of things, your state of mind. The kind of photography I like, the one that captures the moment, is very similar to this break in the clouds. In a flash, a wonderful photo seems to come out of nowhere.”
With these words, Erwitt sums up the spirit and poetics with which he filters reality, representing it with his mastery, capturing its sometimes playful, sometimes irreverent, or almost surreal aspects, which make him an undisputed master of the human comedy.
Curated by Biba Giacchetti, one of Erwitt’s leading international experts, with technical assistance from Gabriele Accornero, Elliott Erwitt. Icons is a snapshot of history and customs, a concise and comprehensive journey through his genius and his perspective on the world, from his anthropomorphic dogs to the world’s powerful figures, from the great movie stars – Marilyn Monroe above all – to his children. But it is also a tribute to the man who, with a gentle and disenchanted gaze, was able to portray the world for what it is: tragicomic, tender, absurd, unique.
The exhibition features famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Kerouac, Marlene Dietrich, Fidel Castro, Sophia Loren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and photographs that have made history, such as the Nixon-Khrushchev quarrel, Kennedy’s funeral, and the great fight between Frazier and Ali. Other iconic photographs, beloved by the public for their romantic power, such as the California Kiss, include more intimate and private ones, such as the snapshot of his newborn firstborn, observed by her mother on the bed.
Above all, Erwitt casts an incisive yet empathetic gaze, revealing not only the irony of everyday life, but also its complexity.
With the same attitude, Erwitt reserves his attention for any other subject, pushing the democratic quality that is typical of his medium to the extreme. His imagery is populated predominantly by ordinary people, men and women, captured in the midst of the normality of their lives.
From portraits of famous people to more ironic and sometimes irreverent images, we move on to some self-portraits where Erwitt no longer leaves anything to chance or intuition, but constructs a self-other, where eccentricity for its own sake is metaphor and pure surreal fun.
Special attention is paid to dogs, whose irreverent, free-spirited attitude Erwitt appreciated, unfettered by the common rules that condition humans, is what Erwitt appreciated.
Many of his shots are “from the dog’s point of view,” allowing only the shoes or parts of their owners’ legs to appear in his compositions. Erwitt wanted these photographs to be comical, and for this reason he employed ingenious strategies, such as blowing a trumpet or emitting a kind of bark, to elicit the most natural reaction from the animals.
The exhibition – on view until September 21st – marks the opening of Palazzo Bonaparte’s summer exhibition season, following the recent resounding success of the Edvard Munch retrospective and paying tribute to one of the world’s most beloved masters of photography. Visitors will have the opportunity to retrace his vision of the world: surreal, romantic, playful, always capable of capturing the essence of things.
The exhibition, “Elliott Erwitt. Icons,” is produced and organised by Arthemisia, in collaboration with Orion57 and Bridgeconsultingpro. The exhibition’s main partner is the Fondazione Terzo Pilastro – Internazionale with Fondazione Cultura e Arte and Poema.
The exhibition’s special partner is Ricola, mobility partner Frecciarossa Treno Ufficiale, and technical sponsor Ferrari Trento.
Text translated from the Italian by Google Translate from the Palazzo Bonaparte website
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right, Erwitt’s photograph USA, Pittsburgh, 1950 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at right, Erwitt’s photograph France, Honfleur, 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing from left to right, France, Honfleur, 1968; USA, New York City, 1977; and USA, New York City, 1955
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph Ireland, Ballycotton, 1991
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, Marilyn Monroe (with hand), 1956
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, New York City, 1953; and at right, USA, NewYork, 1956 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Los Angeles, 1960; and at right, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963 (below)
Note: wrong title and date underneath the photograph on the right-hand side
Elliott Erwitt was not just a photographer, but an unparalleled visual storyteller, capable of transforming the moment into history, the everyday into art, irony into poetry. His images evoke in the viewer emotions that move on different registers, from emotion to laughter, to the most spontaneous amusing. Having passed away in November 2023 at the age of 95, he left us an immense legacy: an archive of photographs that span eras, cultures, and feelings with a universal language, inviting us to look at the world with greater indulgence and wonder, always standing by our side in that profound lightness that he himself defined as “The Art of Observation.”
His lens captured iconic moments in history: the tense confrontation between Nixon and Khrushchev, Kennedy’s funeral, the legendary fight between Frazier and Ali. He portrayed legends of our imagination – Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, Marlene Dietrich – but he also captured moments of extraordinary intimacy and summarised universal feelings in a single shot: a stolen kiss in the rearview mirror, the gaze of a mother on her newborn baby, a dog lost in thought. Images that transcend time to become iconic.
What makes Erwitt unique is his ability to intertwine emotion and intelligence, making us laugh and moved, surprising us with his irony and his ability to grasp the profound meaning of existence. He has captured the absurd and the surreal with a sharp and light-hearted gaze, always finding in every scene a spark capable of making it memorable.
His anthropomorphic dogs, the protagonists of entire photographic series, are not just amusing images: they are mirrors of the human condition, ironic and melancholic at the same time, sometimes proud and surprising. His children, portrayed with the most authentic spontaneity, convey the wonder of discovery and freedom, still intact, expressing already defined personalities, still unconstrained. His self-portraits, where he pokes fun at himself, remind us that art – like life – should never take itself too seriously.
Elliott Erwitt was all of this: a master of photography, an interpreter of the human comedy, an artist who left an indelible mark on the history of the image. This exhibition is our homage to his vision of the world: a journey through irony, tenderness, depth, and lightness, just as his art has always been able to convey.
Welcome to the world of this great artist. My master.
Biba Giacchetti Exhibition curator
Text translated from the Italian by Google Translate
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1971 (Muhammad Ali vs Joe Frazier)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, USA, Los Angeles, 1960; and at second left, USA, Arlington, Virginia, Jacqueline Kennedy at John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 25, 1963; at third right, USSR, Moscow, 1959 (below); and at second right, Cuba, Havana, 1964 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USSR, Moscow, 1959 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph Cuba, Havana, 1964 (Che Guevara)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing at left, England, Birmingham, 1991 (top); at third right, USA, New York City, 1946 (below); at second right, France, Paris, 1989 (below); and at right, USA, New York City, 2000 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1974 (below)
Installation view of the exhibition Elliott Erwitt. Icons at Palazzo Bonaparte, Rome, Italy showing Erwitt’s photograph USA, New York City, 1955 (below)
I love artist’s that challenge your point of view, knowledge of the world, prejudices and biases – which we all have.
I love artist’s who make you think about the stories they tell, and how you relate to their intimate, constructed and memorable worlds.
Carrie Mae Weems is one such generational artist.
Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Gallerie d’Italia, Turin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I discovered that I was the reference point, and the point of view, pointing the viewer toward the likes of me in history. Later, I understood this photographic self to be a muse and a guide into the unknown.”
Carrie Mae Weems
“My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.”
“Weems was trained as both a dancer and a photographer before enrolling in the folklore studies program at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1980s, where she became interested in the observation methods used in the social sciences. In the early 1990s, she began placing herself in her photographic compositions in an “attempt to create in the work the simultaneous feeling of being in it and of it.”2 She has since called this recurring figure an “alter-ego,” “muse,” and “witness to history” who can stand in for both the artist and audience. “I think it’s very important that as a Black woman she’s engaged with the world around her,” Weems has said, “she’s engaged with history, she’s engaged with looking, with being. She’s a guide into circumstances seldom seen.”3
Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Installation walk through of the exhibition 17th April – 7th September, 2025
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Roaming, 2006
Transcending medium, chronology, and geography, Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter puts the artist – as well as her spiritual and philosophical journeys – at the center of the discourse. Weems is a touchstone artist, renowned for her work investigating history, identity, and power. A comprehensive survey, The Heart of the Matter features generous presentations of landmark bodies of work, from Family Pictures and Stories (1978-1984) to her most recent series on the Black church. Throughout the exhibition and accompanying book, the artist’s spiritual musings provide critical insight into the iconic artist’s mind and eye. Newly commissioned essays and additional contributions from esteemed thinkers and scholars across generations underscore the singular value of Weems’s vision in grappling with the complexities and injustices of the world around us.
Text from the Aperture website
Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953) The Edge of Time – Ancient Rome 2006 From the series Roaming
Carrie Mae Weems’s “Rome Series,” titled ” Roaming” (2006), features photographs taken during her residency at the American Academy in Rome where she performed “photographic actions” contrasting her presence with grand architecture and monumental surroundings. In these works, Weems, often in her signature long black dress with her back to the camera, challenges viewers to confront power structures and historical contexts associated with the sites of Rome. The series explores themes of history, power, and the individual’s relationship to imposing edifices of authority.
AI generated text from Google
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the series Museums, 2006-ongoing
Installation views of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
Gallerie d’Italia – Torino presents the exhibition by American artist Carrie Mae Weems, open to the public from April 17 to September 7, 2025. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Aperture and curated by Sarah Meister, former curator of the photography department at MoMA in New York. It is part of the main program of the second edition of EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, titled Beneath The Surface, curated by Menno Liauw and Salvatore Vitale.
A major new exhibition dedicated to the internationally renowned artist Carrie Mae Weems, known for her photographic explorations of cultural identity, sexism, and class belonging.
The exhibition will feature a world premiere of a project commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo specifically for this occasion, integrated into a powerful retrospective showcasing works from Weems’ most famous photographic series. Visitors will be guided through the artist’s entire career, following a deeply personal and spiritual journey.
The selected works highlight Carrie Mae Weems’ unique ability to address the complexities and injustices of the world around us. Her photography is rooted in spaces often excluded from mainstream narratives: artists’ studios, Southern U.S. plantations, domestic interiors, and the “invisible institutions” that emerged as places of worship for Black communities during times of oppression, juxtaposed with images of monuments and museums that have historically been sites of exclusion.
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach, a new project created specifically for this event as an original commission. This ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history. In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism. Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
The retrospective also includes many of Weems’ early works, such as the historic Kitchen Table Series (1990) and Museums (2006-ongoing); a selection of more recent projects, such as Scenes and Takes (2016) and Painting the Town (2021); as well as significant video installations, including The Shape of Things (2021) and Leave Now! (2022). Together, these works take visitors on a journey spanning Weems’ entire career, showcasing the depth and diversity of her artistic language.
The exhibition also benefits from the collaboration of Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, which has developed activities inspired by the values of inclusion and the appreciation of diversity as a source of enrichment, themes that resonate with the exhibition’s content and align with the foundation’s strategic challenges. Photography serves as a tool for storytelling, documentation, and identity-building, contributing to inclusion and community formation. Through widespread urban communication campaigns and collaboration with the public program #Inside, the foundation’s initiatives aim to promote participation and extend the exhibition’s themes to increasingly diverse audiences, particularly in light of the simultaneous presence of the EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival 2025 in the city.
The exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter will be accompanied by a catalogue co-published by Società Editrice Allemandi / Aperture. In addition to numerous images of the American artist’s works, the catalog will feature contributions from scholars of different generations, underscoring the unique value of Weems’ vision in addressing these themes.
Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through the acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs,” Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.
Carrie Mae Weems. Biography
Carrie Mae Weems, a conceptual artist, examines and challenges perceptions of race and femininity in search of new models of life. Rooted in the specificity of her experience as a Black woman yet universal in its exploration of family relationships, cultural identity, power structures, and social hierarchy, her artistic practice is primarily photographic but also incorporates text, textiles, audio, installations, and video.
Informed by storytelling, folklore traditions, and the observational methodologies of social sciences, her approach to image-making ranges from staged and serialised narratives to the appropriation and adaptation of archival and ethnographic imagery. Weems critically addresses photography’s complicity in perpetuating dehumanising representations and the historical omission of Black women from institutions and art canons.
Weems lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband, Jeffrey Hoone. She is currently an Artist in Residence at Syracuse University.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the work North Star, 2022
In 1936 Carrie Mae Weems’s grandfather Frank Weems traveled 550 miles to Chicago on foot from Earle, Arkansas, partly with the aid of the North Star, which appears in these seven oval photographs as a cold and abstract promise. Frank Weems had been beaten after organising a labour strike to protest abysmal wages and working conditions in the cotton fields. For the artist, the abstracted world holds a tremendous yet distant possibility that her grandfather seized step by step.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing at left, work from the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing the installation Preach, 2025
At the heart of the exhibition is Preach… this ambitious and intense installation explores religion and spirituality among African American communities across generations. The series celebrates the profound, passionate, and joyful forms of worship that define Weems’ Black Church experience while simultaneously confronting the violence and oppression that are inseparable from this history.
In the new poetic text accompanying the installation, Weems writes: “Through flames and bombs, pray wherever and whenever you can, in ports and cabins, in palaces and basements, in theaters and clubs. From your secret hiding place, you have discovered new forms of worship…”. Using herself as both muse and guide, Weems invites us to join in this spiritual awakening and to condemn the persecution that has turned these sacred spaces into sites of refuge and activism.
Preach intertwines early images from Harlem, San Diego, and Sea Island, Georgia, with a vast collection of new works that evoke the transcendental and secular realities of Black religious expression today.
Text from the Gallerie d’Italia Instagram web page
Installation view of the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin showing work from the Kitchen Table Series, 1990
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Surf, Bodega 1937 19 x 24cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
Three week’s to the day since my hip replacement operation and I’m still in pain. I know, slowly slowly but it’s very frustrating…
Thus, I just have two words for you about this exhibition –
GREAT WESTERN!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.
It is not far, It is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know, Perhaps it is every where on water and land.”
Walt Whitman. Part of Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass. 1855
I never try to limit myself by theories, I do not question right or wrong approach when I am interested or amazed – impelled to work. I do not fear logic, I dare to be irrational, or really never consider whether I am or not. This keeps me fluid, open to fresh impulse, free from formulae; and precisely because I have no formulae – the public who know my work is often surprised, the critics, who all, or most of them, have their pet formulae are disturbed. And my friends distressed.
I would say to any artist – don’t be repressed in your work – dare to experiment – Consider any urge – if in a new direction all the better – as a gift from the Gods not to be lightly denied by convention or a priori concept. Our time is becoming more and more bound by logic, absolute rationalism; this is a straitjacket I – it is the boredom and narrowness which rises directly from mediocre mass thinking.
The great scientist dares to differ from accepted ‘facts’ -think irrationally – let the artist do likewise.
Edward Weston 28 January, 1932 from The Daybooks of Edward Weston. Vol. ll Horizon Press, New York 1966
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Guadalupe MarÃn de Rivera 1924 20.8 x 17.9cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Gift of Ansel and Virginia Adams
Strongly linked to the landscape and to North American cultural history, Edward Weston’s work, in its extreme simplicity and originality, allows us to appreciate a unique perspective on the process of consolidation of photography as an artistic medium and its relevant role in the context of modernity in the visual arts. The exhibition Edward Weston. La matèria de les formes (Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms) is conceived as an anthology that covers the different phases of the artist’s photographic production.
A pioneer in the use of a modern photographic style, his use of the large-format camera gives rise to richly detailed black and white images of extraordinary clarity. His technical expertise and his affection for nature and form led to the development of a body of work in which iconic images of still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits stand out. His images are essential for understanding the new aesthetic and new American lifestyle that emerged in the United States between the wars.
The exhibition, curated by Sergio Mah, consists of around two hundred photographs grouped into seven sections. The exhibition tour is completed with numerous documentary material and is conceived from a European perspective on the legacy of modern American photography. An aesthetic and conceptual counterpoint to the photographic modernism in Europe that emerged with the first avant-garde of the 20th century.
The emancipation of photography
Edward Weston was one of the pioneers, along with Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in defending the emancipation of photography from other artistic disciplines. In this sense, his work contributed decisively to demonstrating, in this early period of photography, the aesthetic and perceptual dimension of the medium, the capacity to express aesthetic qualities in the same way as painting or sculpture.
Figuration and abstraction
The technical mastery of the photographic medium leads Weston to a formalism in which framing becomes one of the most relevant elements of his work. Weston eliminates any anecdotal aspect and focuses on the motif that interests him, and does so with such realism and exaltation of the two-dimensional nature of photography, which often results in an abstract image. In this way, the artist shows that figuration and abstraction do not exempt one from the other, but are perfectly compatible.
Exhibition organised with the support of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Two Shells 1927, print about 1933 24.1 x 18.4cm Gelatin silver print The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper No. 30 1930 22.8 x 17.7cm Gelatin silver print Courtesy by Trockmorton Fine Art
Highlights
Fundación MAPFRE presents the exhibition Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms, dedicated to the five decades of the career of this North American artist, one of the most important figures in modern photography. In addition, through the work of the artist himself, the exhibition aims to offer a pedagogical reflection on the history of the medium and its relevance as an aesthetic and perceptive discipline, apart from the more traditional plastic arts; specifically, painting.
Key points
The emancipation of photography
Edward Weston was one of the pioneers, along with Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, in defending the emancipation of photography from other artistic disciplines. In this sense, his work is essential to understanding the aesthetic and perceptive capacity of the medium in its beginnings. This capacity allows photography to express aesthetic qualities such as beauty, pain or ugliness at the same level as painting or sculpture.
Figuration and abstraction
The technical mastery of the photographic medium leads Weston to a formalism where framing becomes one of the most relevant elements of his work. In this sense, he eliminates any anecdotal aspect and focuses on the motif that interests him, and he does so with such realism and with such exaltation of the two-dimensional character of photography that he ends up obtaining an abstract image as a result. In this way, the artist shows that figuration and abstraction do not exclude each other, but are perfectly compatible.
Pepper No. 30
Edward Weston took this photograph, one of the most representative of his entire career, at the beginning of August 1930. It was not the first time he had photographed a vegetable, nor a pepper. The artist himself spoke about this image: “It is a fully satisfactory classic: a pepper, but more than a pepper. It is abstract, in the sense that it exists completely outside the subject. It has no psychological attributes, it does not awaken human emotions: this new pepper takes us beyond the world we know in the conscious mind.” In the light of this photograph and the artist’s words, the innovative character of his work can be distinguished, which transcended not only modern American photography, but also European photography.
The exhibition
Weston’s work, strongly linked to the landscape and to North American cultural history, in its extreme simplicity and originality, reveals a unique perspective on the process of consolidation of photography as an artistic medium and its relevant role in the context of modernity in the visual arts. The exhibition Edward Weston. The Matter of Forms is conceived as an anthology that covers the different phases of the artist’s photographic production. From his initial interest in Pictorialist approaches to his consolidation as one of the central figures in the affirmation of the poetic and speculative value of direct photography. A pioneer in the use of a modern photographic style, his work is characterised by the use of a large-format camera, which allows him to offer richly detailed black and white images of extraordinary clarity. His mastery of technique, together with his love of nature and form, led him to develop a photographic production in which iconic images of still lifes, nudes, landscapes and portraits stand out. As a co-founder of the photography collective Group f/64, his images are key to understanding the new North American aesthetic and lifestyle that emerged in the United States between the wars.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Prologue to a Sad Spring 1920 23.8 x 18.7cm Platinum print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Johan Hagemeyer Collection/Purchase
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Edward Weston began photography very early, thanks to a Kodak Bulls-Eye No. 2 camera that his father gave him when he was just sixteen. Although he was practically self-taught, in 1911 he opened his first photographic establishment in a suburb of Los Angeles. His early works reveal the influence of the Pictorialist atmosphere of the time: impressionistic views and pastoral subjects with soft or slightly blurred focus, scenography and expressive poses.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Janitzio, Mexico 1926 20.4 x 25.2cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive/Gift of the Heirs of Edward Weston
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Weston’s dissatisfaction with this artistic approach to photography, which sought to assimilate itself to painting, coincided with the appearance of other photographers with similar ideas, such as Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, whom he met in New York in 1922. In 1923 he set sail for Mexico accompanied by one of his sons and the photographer Tina Modotti. There he found a true renaissance of the arts and culture, and he came into contact with artists such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Rafael Sala. He expanded his visual horizon and tackled new themes, photographing objects, figures and motifs far from their original context, turning them into suggestive and extraordinary elements. It was then that he realised that true photographic art is intuitive and immediate, that the elimination of everything that is accessory constitutes the essence of his creative talent.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Excusado, Mexico October 1925 24.1 x 19.1cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Floating Nude 1939 19.3 x 24.2cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
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From 1926, after leaving Mexico, Weston photographed several sets of nudes. In these nudes, the photographer’s gaze varies depending on the model. In some cases, the frame is wide and even shows the face, while in others the gaze is more segmented and focuses on parts of the body as a way of cutting out and accentuating the shapes within the frame. It must be recognized that eroticism is a quality present in some of these photographs. However, it is incorrect to conclude that this type of gaze prevails in most of the nudes he photographed. Above all, Weston observes the body as a formal reality. The beauty and sensuality that these bodies suggest is reflected in the play of lines, shadows and contours they offer.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Clouds, Death Valley 1939 20.4 x 25.2cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
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From the late 1920s and into the following decades, landscape became a central element in Weston’s work. The artist photographed in the desert near Palm Springs, California, as well as in New Mexico, Arizona, and other Californian areas near his home in Carmel. In these works, the horizon and the depth of the background become a structural part of his works: the panoramic shots highlight the sublime character of the landscape. It was also during this period that Weston began to be interested in meteorological phenomena such as rain, the configuration of clouds, and the aridity of the territory.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Crescent Beach, North Coast 1939 24.3 x 19.2cm Silver print mounted on board The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
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Over the years, Weston’s work increasingly acquired a “dense and melancholic” patina, an aspect that is accentuated by the tones that the images acquire. This characteristic is particularly evident in the photographs he took in 1941 to illustrate Leaves of Grass, a project for which he traveled throughout much of the United States for nearly two years. The images he captured in cemeteries in Louisiana and Georgia stand out, as well as those of abandoned, destroyed and burned buildings where the interest in formal aspects predominates and in which a critical and disillusioned commentary on reality and American society can already be seen.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Drift Stump, Crescent Beach 1937 20.3 x 25.2cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
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In the vicinity of Point Lobos, California, was the log cabin built by his son Neil on Wildcat Hill, where Weston moved in 1938. In this area of ​​California, the artist found the wild nature that he had sought in distant places. His images from this period denote less compositional and formal rigidity and show the cycles of nature in the territory, the wild beauty, the trees, stones and rocky landscapes that seem to arise and remain in a time that is stopped. These images express a certain melancholy and solitude, while allowing the viewer to rediscover nature in all its splendour.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dunes, Death Valley 1938 20.4 x 25.1cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Edward Weston Archive
The publication of the catalogue, published in Spanish and Catalan by Fundación MAPFRE, also has a co-edition in Italian published by Dario Cimorelli Editore.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude 1936 23.4 x 19.1cm Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. Gift of the Estate of A.Richard Diebold, Jr.
Author of a vast and diverse body of work spanning five and a half decades, Edward Weston (1886-1958) is one of the great figures in the history of modern photography, partly because his work allows us to reflect on the distinctive qualities of photography as a technical, aesthetic and perceptual category.
His first creative experiments reveal a momentary adherence to the pictorialist tendencies of the time, but he would later stand out as one of the protagonists of a new generation of American photographers who sought to refocus the artistic axis of photography based on its exceptional capacity to represent the most diverse subjects in the world with rigor, clarity and sobriety.
With their extreme simplicity and originality, the exceptional quality of Weston’s images also lies in the way in which he was able to rethink and articulate the extraordinary realistic and objective capacity of photography with its aesthetic, poetic and phenomenological potential, contributing to expanding the horizon of the subjective experience of the image. In this way, Weston enunciated the unique role of photography in the panorama of the visual arts of his time.
Weston was an immensely prolific photographer and his work brings together a whole series of photographic themes, types and genres: portraits, nudes, still lifes, natural and urban landscapes, object photography, architecture… This anthological exhibition aims to cover the entirety of Weston’s photographic career, which began at the beginning of the 20th century and was uninterrupted until the end of the 1940s. The selection of works aims to go well beyond the period in which Weston took most of the images that gave him wide critical and institutional recognition. The truth is that a more complete and heterogeneous approach to his work allows us to summon other layers of aesthetic appreciation, broadening the understanding of the depth and articulations that Weston developed in the various fields he explored. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity to point out the aspects and affinities (in the gaze, in the construction of the image or in its peculiar relationship with certain themes) present throughout his career, emphasizing the coherence of his imagery, as well as the nuances and moments of transition that occurred in it.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dunes, Oceano 1936 24.1 x 18.9cm Silver print mounted on board The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
From an early age, Edward Weston showed an interest in developing a creative side of photography apart from his commercial work. His early experiments show the influence of painting and reveal his attention and attachment to the pictorialist atmosphere of the time. These photographs include impressionistic views, pastoral subjects with soft or slightly blurred focus, numerous staged portraits that explore expressive poses and combinations with shadows and graphic elements of the environment.
The two periods he spent in Mexico, between 1923 and 1924 and then between 1925 and 1926, were decisive in Edward Weston’s creative career. There he began to explore new themes and genres and his visual horizon expanded significantly. He covered a wide variety of subjects, types of places, figures and things, parts of things, appropriate objects, motifs taken from their original context and repositioned in another interpretative framework. At the same time, his visual style completely sheds any reminiscence of the Pictorialist phase. A photography of great technical, formal and compositional rigour was consolidated. Weston realised that he had the capacity to transform trivial things into suggestive and extraordinary. He was clear that the art of photography lies fundamentally in the moment of making the image, in the way in which the photographer contemplates the subject and makes decisions according to the variables inherent in the photographic device. For him, the process is instinctive. This way of seeing – intuitive, intense and immediate – which seeks to isolate the subject, eliminating the accessory, the unnecessary, anything that could divert or attenuate the intensity of the photographic vision, constitutes the essence of Weston’s creative talent.
From 1927, Weston began a series of still life photographs. In these images he fully reveals the principles and characteristics of his work: the desire to represent the timeless essence of a natural object and, correlatively, to emphasise the duplicative and perceptive capacities of the photographic medium.
The compositions are carefully conceived. In the space of the image, there is a calculated conformity between the dimension of the forms and the format of the image. Here it is important to reiterate the focus on detail as a defining aspect of Weston’s imagery, evident in these still lifes and also in other aspects of his work. Weston understands the vision of detail as a way of fragmenting, isolating and bringing our gaze closer to certain things, accentuating the two-dimensional character of the image, its closed and opaque nature, without depth or horizon, evident above all in still lifes with dark backgrounds, such as photographs of peppers, but also in the various images of plants, trees, rocks and stones that he has been making since the early 1930s.
Weston left Mexico in 1926. In the following years, he made several series of nudes. This is not a new subject. He had already made some important ones before, including one of Anita Brenner’s back and another of her son Neil, whose torso is cut out in an image that evokes ancient Greek statues. In the nudes, the photographer’s gaze varies depending on the model. In some cases, the framing is wide and even shows the face, while in others the gaze is more segmented and focuses on parts of the body as a way of cutting out and accentuating the shapes within the frame. We can recognise that eroticism is a quality present in some of these photographs. It is incorrect, however, to conclude that this gaze prevails in most of his nudes. Weston observes the body mainly as a formal reality. The beauty and sensuality that these bodies suggest are based above all on the play of lines, shadows and contours that they provide.
From the late 1920s, and with greater intensity in the following decades, the landscape genre occupies a central place in Weston’s photographic production. In 1927, the artist takes photos in the Californian desert near Palm Springs. In the following years, he travels through New Mexico, Arizona and other areas of California, such as Oceano, Death Valley, Yosemite, the Mojave Desert and Point Lobos, near his home in Carmel. In these various places, he captures wide views of inhospitable territories in which there are no signs of human presence or intervention. The horizon line and the breadth of the territory become structuring motifs in his work. The impetus for these images is a feeling of admiration for the epic and immeasurable nature of these natural landscapes. Beyond his choice of panoramic shots, the images reveal other aspects and elements of nature, such as meteorological phenomena, rain, cloud formations and variations in sunlight, often in conjunction with their visual effect on the arid land or the vegetation and unique morphology of these territories. It is a vision sensitive to the transformative nature of the landscape, subject to environmental and geological changes.
Gradually, and with greater intensity from the 1940s onwards, Edward Weston’s imagery became denser and more melancholic, not only in terms of the selection of subjects, but also in the tonalities of the images. This tendency is particularly evident in the photographs he takes for an edition of Leaves of Grass, the masterpiece of the poet Walt Whitman. He travels throughout the United States for two years. He revisits many of the recurring themes in his work, but the large number of images he takes of cemeteries in Louisiana and Georgia stand out. These are photographs in which his interest in formal aspects, texture and light predominates. All the subjects are seen as an integral part of a geography that is at once physical, social and mental. On the other hand, there are a lot of images of abandoned, destroyed and burnt buildings, of rubbish and things destined to disappear. We can identify that the themes of finitude and death contribute to an imagery increasingly characterised by loneliness, melancholy, and decadence. For the first time in his work, the images suggest a disillusioned and critical commentary on American reality, on the relationship between nature and culture, continuity and change, alienation and social tension.
In 1938, Weston moved with Charis Wilson to the wooden house built by his son Neil on Wildcat Hill, near Point Lobos, California. The artist spent long periods taking photos in this coastal region. He wandered through areas that he knew well. The images show a nature permeated with cycles, rhythms and forces, a macrocosm where Weston found the material to continue his work. At Point Lobos, Weston encountered a wild, dazzling and ineffable beauty that he had always sought in distant places. In the trees, forests, stones and rocky landscapes, the photographer found a vital energy that led perception towards a diffuse time, contrary to the linearity of history, alien to modernity. Nature then emerged as a theme and setting that allowed him to think and experience a renewed gaze (spontaneous, intuitive, aesthetic), a gaze that was both concrete and metaphysical that allowed him to rediscover nature.
Text from Fundación MAPFRE translated from the Spanish by Google Translate
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Charis, Lake Ediza 1937 19.1 x 24.1cm Silver print mounted on board The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
KBr Fundación MAPFRE Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona Phone: +34 932 723 180
Curators: Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. Virginia McBride, Research Associate in the Department of Photographs, provided assistance.
Unknown Maker Woman Wearing a Tignon c. 1850 Daguerreotype with applied colour Case (open): 3 1/8 × 7 1/4 in. (8 × 18.4cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
It’s just nice to be able to post on this eclectic exhibition – to see the installation photographs with vitrines full of the wonders of the age, outdoors, indoors, objects, people, landscapes, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, salted paper prints, albumen silver prints, cyanotypes, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints, cartes de visite, stereographs, and cabinet cards.
Can you imagine having your photograph taken for the first time?
Entering the photographers studio, com(posing) yourself in front of the camera and the process and performance of doing that, even as the photographer composed you on the glass plate in the camera. A double composition, the constituent parts making the whole, a dance between the sitter, the camera and the photographer.
And there you are, exposed in camera, the latent image revealed by vapour, a talismanic object radiating your spirit.
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.
Installation views of the exhibition The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April – July, 2025
This exhibition presents a bold new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from The Met’s William L. Schaeffer Collection, major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton Watkins, and Alice Austen are shown in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. Featuring a range of formats, from daguerreotypes and cartes de visite to stereographs and cyanotypes, the show explores the dramatic change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. In 1835, even before the nearly simultaneous announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted with remarkable vision: “Our Age is Ocular.”
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
Installation views of the exhibition The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, April – July, 2025
The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 will feature more than 250 photographs drawn from the Museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection
This spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present an adventurous new history of American photography from the medium’s birth in 1839 to the first decade of the 20th century. Drawn from the Museum’s William L. Schaeffer Collection – a magnificent recent promised gift to The Met by trustee Philip Maritz and his wife Jennifer – major works by lauded artists such as Josiah Johnson Hawes, John Moran, Carleton E. Watkins, and Alice Austen, will be presented in dialogue with extraordinary photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners made in small towns and cities from coast to coast. The exhibition’s many photographs by little-studied makers, early practitioners, and intrepid amateurs have been selected to reveal the artists’ ingenuity, aesthetic ambition, and lasting achievement. In some 275 photographs – most never before seen – The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910 explores the nation’s shifting sense of self, driven by the immediate success of photography as a cultural, commercial, artistic, and psychological preoccupation. The presentation will be on view from April 11 through July 20, 2025.
“Through an impressive array of 19th- and early 20th-century images that capture the complexities of a nation in the midst of profound transformation, this exhibition offers something new even for those well-versed in the history of photography,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Thanks to the generosity of Jenny and Flip Maritz, we can study and celebrate these formerly hidden treasures by hundreds of both known and unknown makers finally ready for their close-ups. Our hope is to give these works their rightful place in the ever-expanding history of the medium.”
Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “The camera and its myriad democratic products – rivals to the greatest literature of the era – are clearly the origin of modern communication and global image-sharing today. If we want to forge a deeper appreciation of contemporary art and the role of the camera in the lives of today’s picture makers, we must recognise and respect the stunning visual power and authenticity of early American photography.”
Carefully assembled over the last 50 years by the Connecticut collector and private dealer William L. Schaeffer, the collection includes splendid photographs in superb condition from every stage of the medium’s early technical development: daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, salted paper prints, albumen silver prints, cyanotypes, platinum prints, and gelatin silver prints. The exhibition also features an extensive display of three types of card-mounted photographs – cartes de visite, stereographs, and cabinet cards – each wildly popular in the mid- to late 19th century. When seen through binocular viewers, all the stereographs in the show will be visible in three dimensions.
This is not the first exhibition at The Met to feature photographs drawn from the famous collection of 19th-century photographs amassed by Schaeffer. In 2013, the Museum included more than a dozen Civil War views in Photography and the American Civil War. These are now part of the Museum’s collection through the direct support of another Museum trustee, Joyce Frank Menschel. The gifts by the Maritzes to The Met, as well as those by Joyce Menschel, mark a pinnacle in the institution’s ongoing effort to build the finest holdings of 19th-century American photography in the nation.
Exhibition Overview
In 1839, the invention of photography transformed the world. In December of that year, when the first daguerreotypes were exhibited in New York, former mayor Philip Hone marvelled in his diary at what he described as “one of the wonders of modern times,” adding that “like other miracles, one may almost be excused for disbelieving it without seeing the very process by which it is created.”
The daguerreotype’s remarkable ability to hold permanently an unimaginably detailed likeness on its surface – an image heretofore only seen fleetingly in a mirror – seemed in equal measure unbelievable and perfectly real, darkly mysterious yet scientifically verifiable, a shadowy fiction and yet a beautiful truth. The supernatural quality of the new art was noted by many around the world. As one reviewer, writing for a Baltimore weekly in January 1840, admitted, “We can find no language to express the charm of these pictures painted by no mortal hand.”
Photography arrived almost simultaneously with the steam locomotive, the steam ship, and the electric telegraph – all inventions that dramatically shortened the distances between people and places and forever changed the way civilisations communicate. The medium developed during the age of the type-crazy broadside, the morning and the evening newspaper, and the illustrated weekly. It was also the time of the birth of mercantile libraries (previously only the wealthy had access to books and libraries), and, not surprisingly, of eye strain. The era saw the medical specialisation in the study of eye maladies and the development of optometry and ophthalmology. In 1835, just before the concurrent announcement of the invention of the new art in Paris and London, the American philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his private journal: “Our age is ocular.”
Organised primarily by picture format across three galleries, The New Art illustrates what photography looked like for the average working citizen as well as those at the top of the economic scale. Exhibition visitors can see the clothes individuals wore at work and home, their attitudes to the camera singly and in groups, their ways of sitting or standing or touching, and how they honoured their children and respected their ailing and recently deceased family members. They can look at newly constructed storefronts, see how farmers worked their fields, and measure where new towns met the wilderness. They can observe the near total devastation of Native American communities, especially those living in the Plains, and confront the vicious cruelty of slavery and the influential role of the camera in the Civil War, still the crucible of American history.
In daguerreotypes, tintypes, and paper prints, viewers can also begin to see and comprehend how African Americans during the Civil War, throughout the Reconstruction era, and leading into the 20th century slowly began to replace negative stereotypes with positive self-images. This effort was explicitly nurtured by Frederick Douglass, who had long advocated visits to photography studios. In his nearly constant lecturing circuit across the country, he argued persuasively that no one could be truly free until each individual could sit for and possess their own photographic likeness. In The New Art, men and women of color definitively hold the camera’s attention and the viewer’s as well.
Seen together in The New Art, the subjects in these photographs are not just sitters molded by a camera operator, but the cocreators of their own portraits. One can see this clearly in their eyes and in their many small, seductive gestures. Confronting a photograph that left an artist’s studio more than 150 years ago can be a humbling experience. The magic of photography brings one face to face with the past, and the present is never more vital than it is in these early pictures. That is the medium’s essence, its beauty, and its pathos.
Cameras
The exhibition will also showcase a small selection of 19th-century American cameras to further immerse visitors in the photography process. These have been kindly lent to The Met by Eric Taubman and the Penumbra Foundation.
Press release from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown Maker (American) Young Man with Rooster 1850s Daguerreotype with applied color Case (open): 3 5/8 × 6 1/4 in. (9.2 × 15.9cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Josiah Johnson Hawes (American, 1808-1901) Winter on the Common, Boston early 1850s Salted paper print from glass negative 7 5/16 × 9 5/16 in. (18.5 × 23.7cm) 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 Maker Studio Photographer at Work c. 1855 Salted paper print from glass negative 5 1/8 × 3 13/16 in. (13 × 9.7cm) 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 Maker (American) Laundress with Washtub 1860s Ambrotype with applied colour Case: 4 1/8 x 3 1/4 in. (4.2 x 3.2cm) 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 Maker (American) Actor Playing Hamlet, Holding a Skull 1860s Tintype with applied colour Case: 6 1/4 × 4 15/16 in. (15.8 × 12.6cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
John Moran (American born England, 1821-1903) Showing Weather Among the Alleghenies 1861-1862 Albumen silver print from glass negative 4 3/4 × 3 5/8 in. (12.1 × 9.2cm) 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 Maker Roller Skate and Boot 1860s Albumen silver print from glass negative Mount: 4 1/8 × 2 7/16 in. (10.5 × 6.2cm) 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 Maker (American) Published by E. & H. T. Anthony (American, 1862-1880s) Specimens of New York Bill Posting, No. 897 from the series “Anthony’s Stereoscopic Views” 1863 Albumen silver print from glass negative Mount: 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in. (8.3 × 17.1 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
Carleton E. Watkins (American, 1829-1916) View on the Columbia River, from the O.R.R., Cascades, No. 1286 from the series “Pacific Coast” 1867 Albumen silver prints from glass negatives Mount: 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in. (8.2 × 17.1cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Albert Cone Townsend (American, 1827-1914) A Politician 1865-1867 Albumen silver print from glass negative Mount: 4 × 2 7/16 in. (10.1 × 6.2cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The New Art: American Photography, 1839-1910
Introductory panel
The world changed dramatically in September 1839 when photography was introduced to the public and quickly emerged as one of the wonders of modern times. Its invention marks the dawn of our own media-obsessed age in ways that become clear when we explore in depth the special language of daguerreotypes, tintypes, cartes de visite, stereographs, and other early photographic processes and formats.
This exhibition presents an adventurous new history of American photography from the medium’s beginnings to the first decade of the twentieth century. Major works by established artists are shown in dialogue with superb, never-before-seen photographs by obscure or unknown practitioners working in large urban centres and small towns across the expanding country. Tracing technological advancements and the development of picture formats, The New Art charts the remarkable change in the nation’s sense of itself that was driven by the phenomenal success of photography as a cultural, commercial, and artistic preoccupation.
All the works of art on view are drawn from an extraordinary promised gift to The Met of more than seven hundred rare photographs offered by Jennifer and Philip Maritz in celebration of the Museum’s 150th anniversary in 2020. The donors acquired the collection from William L. Schaeffer, a renowned Connecticut private photography dealer who had quietly built it over the last half century.
The ambrotype is similar in its process to the daguerreotype, but it uses a sheet of glass rather than copper as the image support. Popular in the U.S. from 1854 to 1870, the technique – invented in England but named by an American – was the predictable next development of photography. Although less visually alluring, it had marked advantages over the daguerreotype: it was cheaper to produce, it was easier to see (without glare) in most lighting conditions, and it eliminated the lateral reversal of the image characteristic of the earlier process. This was especially helpful with certain patrons who were annoyed, for example, by a jacket buttoning backward or a wedding ring appearing on the incorrect hand.
Tintypes
The tintype is a distinctively American style of photograph. Patented in February 1856 by Hamilton Lamphere Smith, the technique was inexpensive and relatively easy to master. It appealed as much to enterprising itinerant picture makers, who traveled to rural communities and made outdoor portraits and views, as it did to artists operating brick-and-mortar galleries. Rather than a coating of silver emulsion on copper (the daguerreotype) or glass (the ambrotype), the tintype’s support is a common sheet of blackened iron. Despite its misleading name, which was not in use until 1863, there is no tin present in a tintype. The process was wildly popular in the U.S. until the end of the nineteenth century.
Paper-print Photographs
From 1839 until the start of the Civil War in 1861, most photographs were made on metal (daguerreotypes and tintypes) or glass (ambrotypes). Beginning in the late 1850s, however, paper was widely adopted as the physical support for photographs. This gallery primarily features paper-print photographs and albums that date from 1850 to 1910. They are known by a variety of names that reflect changes in materiality and date of production: salted paper prints, generally made from paper negatives; albumen silver prints, made from glass negatives; and gelatin silver and platinum prints, made from glass or flexible film negatives. In this era, two formats of card-mounted paper-print photographs enjoyed remarkable success: the small carte-de-visite portrait and the stereographic view.
Cartes de Visite
The carte de visite – commonly known as a “cdv” – is a small photograph, usually an albumen silver print made from a glass negative, affixed to a 4-by-2½-inch stiff paper card. Invented in France in the mid-1850s as a portrait medium, it was the world’s first mass-produced and mass-consumed type of photographic collectible. Most photographers marked the mounts with their gallery names as a means of self-promotion and what today we would call brand-building. Ubiquitous in the U.S. from just before 1860 to 1880, the democratic, Victorian-age novelty was wildly popular with the public. “Cartomania,” as the phenomenon was known, is worthy of attention today as a resonant precursor to our own obsession with sharing images of celebrities and ourselves via social media.
Cabinet Cards
A cabinet card is essentially an oversize carte de visite. In vogue for three decades in the U.S. beginning around 1870, the 6 1/2-by-4 1/2-inch card-mounted photograph offered picture makers significantly more space and freedom to compose their visual narratives. After the deadly seriousness of the Civil War, cabinet cards frequently fulfilled a growing appetite for light-hearted diversion. They often feature elaborate props and accessories, exotic backdrops, and, as the century progressed, increasingly playful indoor and outdoor scenes.
Stereographs
Introduced in the late 1850s and prevalent into the twentieth century, the stereograph was not only a culturally significant invention but also a commercial boon to American photographers. When viewed through a device known as a stereoscope (or stereopticon), a pair of photographs of the same subject – made from two slightly different points of view – are perceived in the brain as a single, seemingly three-dimensional image. The dazzling binocular effect created an immersive experience, offering inexpensive armchair travel and a window on the world to millions of Americans.
Cyanotypes
Invented in 1842 by the British scientist John Herschel, a cyanotype is a naturally blue photograph made with iron salts. Early on, most cyanotypes took the form of nature studies made without a camera by placing botanical specimens (or other objects) directly in contact with sensitised paper and then exposing the composition in the sun. In the 1870s architects and engineers began using the process to duplicate their drawings, resulting in what are generally known as “blueprints.” Both economical and easily developed, the cyanotype reemerged in the late 1880s as a favourite choice of professional photographers and amateurs alike. It was often selected for large municipal documentary projects such as those seen here.
Intro and Section Wall Texts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Unknown Maker (American) Railroad Worker (?) with Wye Level c. 1870 Tintype with applied color Case (open): 6 5/16 × 10 3/8 in. (16 × 26.4cm) 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 Maker (American) Musician 1870s Tintype, with lock of hair and cut paper Case (open): 2 × 3 1/2 in. (5.1 × 8.9cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Golder & Robinson (American, active 1870s) Comic Novelty Portrait 1870s Tintype with applied colour 4 × 2 7/16 in. (10.1 × 6.2cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Wenderoth, Taylor & Brown (American, active 1864-1871) The Gallery of Arts & Manufacturers of Philadelphia 1871 Albumen silver prints from glass negative Open: 13 3/4 x 19 in. (34.9 x 48.3cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Anna K. Weaver (American, 1847/48-1913) Welcome 1874 Albumen silver print from glass negative 10 7/8 x 17 1/2 in. (27.8 x 44.5cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Chauncey L. Moore (American, died 1895) Young Man Laying on Roof 1880s-1890s Albumen silver print Mount: 4 1/4 × 6 1/2 in. (10.8 × 16.5cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Alice Austen (American, 1866-1952) Group on Petria, Lake Mahopac August 9, 1888 Albumen silver print from glass negative 6 × 8 1/8 in. (15.2 × 20.7cm) 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 Maker (American) Schoolmaster Hill Tobogganing, Franklin Park, Roxbury, Massachusetts 1905 Cyanotype 7 × 9 1/4 in. (17.8 × 23.5cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, William L. Schaeffer Collection Promised Gift of Jennifer and Philip Maritz, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
‘Remember Me. Postmortems from the M. G. Jacob Collection’ and ‘Through Light. The First 20 Years of Photography in the Photo Library Collections’
Postmortem curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini and Michael G. Jacob
Attraverso la luce curators: Monica Leoni, Elisabeth Sciarretta with Laura Gasparini
Sleeping beauty
“When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten.
When this you see remember me
Lest I should be forgotten.”
This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.
Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)
All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)
As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)
Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…
But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 – in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.
Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.
Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2
In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980
2/ Marcus Bunyan. “This is not my favourite photograph,” part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025
Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Unknown photographer (American) A sleeping man c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A sleeping man (detail) c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
Ricordati di me
Una esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem”: la realizzazione di immagini commemorative di familiari defunti per genitori, amici e parenti era un aspetto significativo del lavoro quotidiano di molti studi fotografici vittoriani.
An exhibition dedicated to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, to the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography: the creation of commemorative images of deceased family members for parents, friends and relatives was a significant aspect of the daily work of many Victorian photographic studios.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American) A sleeping girl c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A woman with long fingernails, bured teeth & cut flowers (detail) c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) Young girl holding a daguerrotype c. 1846 Daguerreotype Title given by the collector
L’esposizione dedicata alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob alla riscoperta della fotografia “post mortem” nell’epoca vittoriana, ha l’intento di illustrare il legame di affezione e rispetto di quella cultura che indusse i vivi a ricordare i propri defunti, analizzando come, dopo gli anni Quaranta del XIX secolo, la fotografia sia diventata centrale anche nel modo di sentire e vivere il lutto.
La pratica di raffigurare il volto del defunto è antichissima e la fotografia si innesta in questa tradizione, modificando il modo di vivere e comunicare il lutto. Come tutte le tradizioni più o meno radicate, anche nella colta ed evoluta Europa le esequie e il lutto seguono consuetudini e usanze che si sono perdute o modificate nel tempo. Il galateo del lutto, in epoca vittoriana, è uno degli aspetti per noi meno comprensibili ma più affascinanti, i cui codici, nel tempo, sono andati perduti o si sono radicalmente trasformati.
I rituali funebri, così come venivano concepiti dai vittoriani, si manifestavano in comportamenti, abbigliamento e usanze che spesso appaiono eccessivi per la sensibilità moderna e hanno oggi bisogno di essere decodificati per comprenderne la vasta iconografia. L’antropologia e la sociologia ci hanno spiegato quali reazioni emotive e formali l’essere umano ha avuto nel corso del tempo di fronte alla morte e al corpo dei defunti, indotte dalla cultura a cui apparteniamo, mentre la fotografia contribuisce sostanzialmente a documentare questa cultura del lutto.
The exhibition dedicated to the Michael G. Jacob collection and the rediscovery of “post mortem” photography in the Victorian era, aims to illustrate the bond of affection and respect of that culture that induced the living to remember their dead, analysing how, after the 1840s, photography also became central to the way of feeling and experiencing mourning.
The practice of depicting the face of the deceased is very ancient and photography is grafted onto this tradition, modifying the way of experiencing and communicating mourning. Like all more or less rooted traditions, even in cultured and evolved Europe, funerals and mourning follow customs and habits that have been lost or modified over time. The etiquette of mourning, in the Victorian era, is one of the aspects that is least comprehensible to us but most fascinating, whose codes, over time, have been lost or have radically transformed.
Funeral rituals, as conceived by the Victorians, manifested themselves in behaviors, clothing and customs that often seem excessive for modern sensibilities and today need to be decoded to understand their vast iconography. Anthropology and sociology have explained to us what emotional and formal reactions human beings have had over time in front of death and the body of the deceased, induced by the culture to which we belong, while photography contributes substantially to documenting this culture of mourning.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American) A mother, daughter and dead infant c. 1848 Daguerreotype retouched in colour Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A family group 1853 Daguerreotype Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853” Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A family group (detail) 1853 Daguerreotype Date in handwritten characters on the lower edge of the daguerreotype: “July 15 1853” Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) Sleeping baby c. 1860 Ambrotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) Sleeping baby (detail) c. 1860 Ambrotype Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American) A Sleeping child c. 1860 Ferrotype Title given by the collector
Attraverso la luce
In occasione di Fotografia Europea, la Biblioteca Panizzi propone una mostra dedicata ai primi 20 anni della fotografia nelle collezioni della Fototeca attraverso l’esposizione di fotografie su carta salata, albumine, e dagherrotipi, tra cui la prestigiosa collezione di Michael G. Jacob.
On the occasion of Fotografia Europea, the Panizzi Library presents an exhibition dedicated to the first 20 years of photography in the collections of the Photo Library through the display of photographs on salted paper, albumen, and daguerreotypes, including the prestigious collection of Michael G. Jacob.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
John Brown Portrait of a Young Man c. 1848 3 Daguerreotypes
John Brown Portrait of a Young Man c. 1848 Daguerreotype
John Brown Portrait of a Young Man c. 1848 Daguerreotype
John Brown Portrait of a Young Man c. 1848 Daguerreotype
La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Bibliotecca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci portera indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione sceintifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare ali’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quel’oggetto di culto che e stata la fotografia delle origini.
The exhibition presents a journey through rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was the photography of the origins.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American) Dead child in his mother’s arms c. 1850 Daguerreotype
Unknown photographer (American) Girl holding a flower c. 1850 Daguerreotype
Unknown photographer (American) Freckled girl with daguerreotype c. 1850 Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Unknown photographer (American) Tinted woman c. 1850 Daguerreotype retouched in colour
Unknown photographer (American) Portrait of mother with child c. 1850 Daguerreotype
La magia della luce è stata per secoli oggetto di importanti studi scientifici, ma ha affascinato anche e soprattutto il mondo dell’arte, oltre che la cultura popolare. La fotografia, attraverso i vari procedimenti storici, si inserisce in questo capitolo della storia visuale, intrecciandosi con arte, scienza e tecnologia, unite alla passione comune per la nascita di un nuovo e accattivante linguaggio. La mostra presenta un percorso attraverso gli esemplari che appartengono alla collezione di Michael G. Jacob, ultima acquisita grazie alla generosa donazione di questo importante collezionista e studioso, insieme a rari esempi di fotografie su carta salata e numerosi dagherrotipi, ambrotipi, ferrotipi e album delle collezioni della Fototeca della Biblioteca Panizzi. Una narrazione, quindi, che ci porterà indietro nel tempo, agli anni pionieristici della sperimentazione scientifica attraverso la luce, la chimica e la trasformazione di materiali quali l’argento, per arrivare all’arte del ritratto e del paesaggio e giungere a quell’oggetto di culto che è stata la fotografia delle origini.
The magic of light has been the subject of important scientific studies for centuries, but it has also fascinated the world of art, as well as popular culture. Photography, through its various historical processes, fits into this chapter of visual history, intertwining with art, science and technology, combined with a shared passion for the birth of a new and captivating language. The exhibition presents a journey through the specimens that belong to the collection of Michael G. Jacob, the last acquired thanks to the generous donation of this important collector and scholar, together with rare examples of photographs on salted paper and numerous daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, ferrotypes and albums from the collections of the Photo Library of the Panizzi Library. A narrative, therefore, that will take us back in time, to the pioneering years of scientific experimentation through light, chemistry and the transformation of materials such as silver, to arrive at the art of portraiture and landscape and reach that cult object that was early photography.
Text translated by Google Translate from the Biblioteca Panizzi website
Unknown photographer (American) Coach in park c. 1860 Ambrotype
Unknown photographer (American) Portrait of women c. 1860 Ferrotype
Unknown photographer (American) Double vignette friends c. 1860 Ferrotype
Unknown photographer (American) Well dressed lady c. 1880 Ambrotype
Biblioteca Panizzi Via Luigi Carlo Farini, 3, 42121 Reggio Emilia RE, Italy
Curators: Dennis Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation, and De Kwok, Head of Public Programming
*PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014) Untitled Nd Vintage silver gelatin print
Celebrations of the Human Spirit
~ Honesty
~ ~ Integrity
~ ~ ~ Dignity
~ ~ ~ ~ Vulnerability
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Respect
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Love
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Friendship
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Sexuality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Strength
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Beauty
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Form
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Humanism
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Identity
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Personality
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Presence
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Intimacy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Nude
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Empathy
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Revelation
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Spirit
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Truth
I’ve been wanting to do a posting on the magnificent New Orleans photographer George Dureau’s work for a long while but because there are so few exhibitions of his photographs I have never had the opportunity – until now.
It’s a great pity that his work is not as recognised as that of his contemporaries, Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed, you can still pick up an original Dureau in the secondhand art market for around $500 whereas Mapplethorpe’s photographs run into the many thousands.
His photographs are not romantic, certainly not sentimental. He was fascinated by the people he photographed, their truth. These are the stories he conceptualised, posed, lit and photographed, stories that emerged from his imagination, that revealed surprising things about his subjects.
Unlike the clinical formalism of Mapplethorpe, Dureau worked with a poetry that was always present. Indeed, there is something so eloquent and sincere about his photographs for in them the artist draws (Dureau was also a painter) the mysteries of the soul of his subjects.
Dureau’s response to the world and the photographs that emanate from that engagement are humanist in the best sense of the word, revealing his subjects in a direct way that emphasises an individual’s dignity, worth and capacity for self-realisation.
Thus, I feel his photographs are a celebration not just of the human form but more importantly, of the human spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Dennis Bell, Corbin Crable and the Bob Mizer Foundation for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I live a warm, involved humanist sort of life. There are lots of people passing through it. I have exciting experiences and learn things about people. They always go into my art. I cannot have an experience and it not go into my art.”
 George Dureau
John H. Lawrence, HNOC emeritus director of museum programs and himself a fine-art photographer, said Dureau’s portraits reveal a tangible intimacy between photographer and subject.
“George respected the people he asked to sit for him,” said Lawrence. “I don’t say that from a knowledge, just from what the photographs show. The direct stare into the camera, it may have been at George’s direction. Even with the gaze directed in that fashion, you don’t get the kind of quality you see in these portraits unless there is a mutual respect between the photographer and the subject. There is a vibe there that is based on these two people having respect for each other as the photograph is made.”
John H. Lawrence quoted in Dave Walker. “The Intimate Eye of George Dureau,” on The Historic New Orleans Collection website, December 31, 2021 [Online] Cited 20/06/2025
This exhibition presents 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by George Dureau, capturing the resilience and vulnerability of his subjects – from athletes to marginalised individuals – against the vibrant cultural backdrop of New Orleans, where beauty and humanity converge in transformative ways.
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph Craig Blanchette, 1992
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco showing Dureau’s photograph John Slate, Nd
Installation view of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
Installation views of the exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco
The Bob Mizer Foundation proudly presents Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, an exhibition showcasing 25 evocative black-and-white portraits by the acclaimed New Orleans artist George Dureau. This compelling collection captures the resilience, vulnerability, and individuality of Dureau’s subjects, spanning athletes, performers, and marginalised individuals.
Dureau’s photography transcends traditional portraiture, blending classical composition with the rich cultural spirit of New Orleans. His intimate works explore themes of identity and dignity, transforming vulnerabilities into powerful symbols of humanity’s resilience. The photographs invite viewers to reimagine beauty as inclusive, diverse, and multifaceted.
“George Dureau’s work is a testament to his unique ability to celebrate the human form while challenging societal norms,” says Den Bell, founder of the Bob Mizer Foundation. “His portraits honour the individuality of his subjects while weaving in the vibrancy of New Orleans, making his work timeless and deeply impactful.”
“Dureau photographed people with kindness and sympathy,” added Mizer Foundation’s Head of Programming, De Kwok, “It has been said that his subject matter became a member of his extended family and you can clearly see that in the way his camera lovingly captured them.”
The exhibition will be on view from March 6 to June 28, 2025, at the Bob Mizer Foundation’s Main Gallery. An opening reception will be held on March 6 from 6.00 pm – 8.30 pm, providing an opportunity to explore the works and celebrate Dureau’s extraordinary legacy.
About George Dureau
A celebrated figure in the art world, George Dureau (1930-2014) was renowned for his black-and-white photography and classical paintings. Rooted in the rich cultural heritage of New Orleans, Dureau’s art challenges conventions and highlights the resilience of the human spirit. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inspire audiences with its profound emotional depth and technical mastery.
Text from the Bob Mizer Foundation website
George Dureau (American, 1930-2014) Wilbert with Hook Nd Vintage silver gelatin print 20 x 16 inches
This exhibition highlights the remarkable artistry of George Dureau through 25 compelling black-and-white portraits that showcase his unique vision. Created during the 1970s and 1980s, these photographs transcend traditional boundaries, blending classical composition with an unflinching exploration of the human experience. Dureau’s subjects – athletes, performers, friends, and individuals often marginalised by society – are elevated to iconic status through his lens.
The images reveal a profound empathy and an unshakable belief in the inherent dignity of every individual. With a studio rooted in the vibrant cultural milieu of New Orleans, Dureau captured not only the physical form but also the spirit of his subjects, transforming their vulnerabilities into striking symbols of resilience and humanity. His work redefines beauty as inclusive and multifaceted, challenging societal norms and inviting reflection on identity, strength, and community.
This exhibition Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form presents 25 photographs by one of New Orleans’ most celebrated artists. Dureau’s black-and-white portraits, taken primarily during the 1970s and 1980s, capture the raw beauty, strength, and vulnerability of his subjects. Known for his classical approach and profound empathy, Dureau’s work invites us to confront traditional notions of beauty, body, and identity while celebrating the richness of the human experience.
George Dureau’s intimate portraits are both timeless and grounded in the rich cultural tapestry of New Orleans. His subjects include athletes, performers, friends, and marginalised individuals – including amputees and people with disabilities – rendered with dignity and compassion. Through his lens, Dureau elevates these figures to monumental status, echoing the grandeur of classical sculpture and Renaissance painting. His compositions emphasize the interplay of light and shadow, underscoring the sculptural quality of the human form.
One cannot discuss Dureau’s photography without acknowledging his connection to the city of New Orleans. His studio in the French Quarter became a space of artistic exploration, where he cultivated a dynamic and diverse community. This exhibition captures the spirit of that time and place, highlighting the distinct cultural influences that informed his work. The city’s unique blend of European, African, and Creole traditions provided a fertile ground for Dureau’s creativity, inspiring him to blend the classical and contemporary, the local and the universal.
Dureau’s photographs are celebrated not only for their technical mastery but also for their emotional depth. His subjects often meet the camera’s gaze directly, creating a sense of intimacy and trust. This rapport between artist and subject is palpable, revealing layers of vulnerability and strength. By choosing subjects who were often overlooked or marginalised, Dureau challenges societal norms and compels viewers to reconsider preconceived notions of worth and beauty.
This exhibition also explores the parallels between Dureau’s work and that of his contemporary, Robert Mapplethorpe. While the two artists shared a fascination with the human form and the dramatic use of black-and-white photography, their approaches diverged in significant ways. Dureau’s images are imbued with warmth and humanity that reflect his deep connection to his subjects. Unlike Mapplethorpe, who often sought a polished and idealised aesthetic, Dureau embraced imperfection and individuality, resulting in portraits that are as soulful as they are striking.
Among the works on display are several of Dureau’s most iconic images. Craig Blanchette, 1992 (above) captures a young man with a disarming gaze, his body framed in chiaroscuro that highlights his muscular form and absence of legs. The image challenges the viewer to see beyond the physical difference, emphasising Craig’s confidence and vitality. Similarly, Roosevelt Singleton features a subject with dwarfism, his ethereal presence heightened by the soft, diffused light. These works exemplify Dureau’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, presenting his subjects as both individuals and archetypes.
Dureau’s artistry extends beyond the purely visual. His photographs resonate with themes of resilience, identity, and community. They ask us to confront the complexities of human existence and to celebrate the diversity of the human condition. By placing marginalised individuals at the forefront of his work, Dureau not only elevates their stories but also reflects the universal truths of vulnerability and strength that connect us all.
This exhibition offers viewers the opportunity to engage with Dureau’s legacy in a deeply personal way. Each photograph serves as a testament to the power of art to reveal the unseen, to challenge the status quo, and to inspire empathy. Through his lens, Dureau reminds us that every individual – regardless of their physical appearance or societal status – possesses inherent dignity and beauty.
The 31 photographs selected for this show represent the breadth and depth of Dureau’s oeuvre. From tender portraits of friends to bold explorations of the male nude, the images on display capture the full spectrum of his artistic vision. Each piece is a study in contrasts: light and shadow, strength and vulnerability, individuality and universality. Together, they form a cohesive narrative that celebrates the complexity of the human experience.
George Dureau’s work has left an indelible mark on the world of photography and beyond. His ability to see and celebrate the humanity in every subject has cemented his place as a true visionary. This exhibition, Beyond Symmetry: George Dureau’s Celebrations of the Human Form, invites you to step into his world – a world where beauty is redefined, where differences are celebrated, and where the human spirit shines through in every frame.
As you explore these images, consider the stories they tell and the questions they pose. How do we define beauty? What does it mean to see and be seen? And how can art challenge us to look beyond the surface and connect with the essence of another human being? In celebrating the life and work of George Dureau, we celebrate the power of art to transform, to inspire, and to unite us all.
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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