My favourites: the weight of Weston’s Shipyard detail, Wilmington (1935, above); and the romanticism (Jean-François Millet-esque), sublime beauty of Boubat’s Lella, Bretagne, France (1947, below).
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008) Pres. John F. Kennedy’s Lincoln Continental 1963 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Stoughton (American, 1920-2008)
Cecil William Stoughton (January 18, 1920 – November 3, 2008) was an American photographer. Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Stoughton is best known for being President John F. Kennedy’s photographer during his White House years.
Stoughton took the only photograph ever published showing John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe together. Stoughton was present at the motorcade at which Kennedy was assassinated, and was subsequently the only photographer on board Air Force One when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as the next President. Stoughton’s famous photograph of this event depicts Johnson raising his hand in oath as he stood between his wife Lady Bird Johnson and a still blood-spattered Jacqueline Kennedy.
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985) Garage Doors, San Francisco 1947 Silver gelatin print
Max Yavno (American, 1911-1985)
Max Yavno (1911-1985) was a photographer who specialised in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specialising in urban-landscape photography. Photographer Edward Steichen selected twenty of Yavno’s prints for the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and the next year Yavno won a Guggenheim fellowship.
History professor Constance B. Schulz said of him:
For financial reasons he worked as a commercial advertising photographer for the next twenty years (1954-75), creating finely crafted still lifes that appeared in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He returned to artistic landscape photography in the 1970s, when his introspective approach found a more appreciative audience.
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986) American Rural Baroque 1929 Silver gelatin print
Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986)
Ralph Steiner (February 8, 1899 – July 13, 1986) was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.
Born in Cleveland, Steiner studied chemistry at Dartmouth, but in 1921 entered the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. White helped Steiner in finding a job at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, and Steiner worked on making photogravure plates of scenes from Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Not long after, Steiner’s work as a freelance photographer in New York began, working mostly in advertising and for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal. Through the encouragement of fellow photographer Paul Strand, Steiner joined the left-of-centre Film and Photo League around 1927. He was also to influence the photography of Walker Evans, giving him guidance, technical assistance, and one of his view cameras.
In 1929, Steiner made his first film, H2O, a poetic evocation of water that captured the abstract patterns generated by waves. Although it was not the only film of its kind at the time – Joris Ivens made Regen (Rain) that same year, and Henwar Rodekiewicz worked on his similar film Portrait of a Young Man (1931) through this whole period – it made a significant impression in its day and since has become recognised as a classic: H2O was added to theNational Film Registry in December 2005. Among Steiner’s other early films, Surf and Seaweed (1931) expands on the concept of H2O as Steiner turns his camera to the shoreline; Mechanical Principles (1933) was an abstraction based on gears and machinery.
Wilson A. Bentley (American, 1865-1931) Snowflake c. 1920 Gold-chloride toned microphotographs from glass plate negatives
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985) Erotic Nude 1950s Silver gelatin print
Andre de Dienes (Hungarian, 1913-1985)
Andre de Dienes (born Andor György Ikafalvi-Dienes) (December 18, 1913 – April 11, 1985) was a Hungarian-American photographer, noted for his work with Marilyn Monroe and his nude photography.
Dienes was born in Transylvania, Austria-Hungary, on December 18, 1913, and left home at 15 after the suicide of his mother. Dienes travelled across Europe mostly on foot, until his arrival in Tunisia. In Tunisia he purchased his first camera, a 35mm Retina. Returning to Europe he arrived in Paris in 1933 to study art, and bought a Rolleiflex shortly after.
Dienes began work as a professional photographer for the Communist newspaper L’Humanité, and was employed by the Associated Press until 1936, when the Parisian couturier Captain Molyneux noted his work and urged him to become a fashion photographer. In 1938 the editor of Esquire, Arnold Gingrich offered him work in New York City, and helped fund Dienes’ passage to the United States. Once in the United States Dienes worked for Vogue and Life magazines as well as Esquire.
When not working as a fashion photographer Dienes travelled the USA photographing Native American culture, including the Apache, Hopi, and Navajo reservations and their inhabitants. Dissatisfied with his life as a fashion photographer in New York, Dienes moved to California in 1944, where he began to specialise in nudes and landscapes.
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025) Porch, Monhegan Island, Maine 1971 Selenium-toned silver print
George A. Tice (American, 1938-2025)
George Tice (b. 1938) is an American photographer best known for his large-format black-and-white photographs of New Jersey, New York, and the Amish. Tice was born in Newark, New Jersey, and self-trained as a photographer. His work is included in major museum collections around the world and he has published many books of photographs, including Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), Paterson, New Jersey (1972), Seacoast Maine: People and Places (1973), Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait (1975), “Lincoln” (1984), Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage (1988), Urban Landscapes (2002), Paterson II (2006), Urban Romantic (1982), and George Tice: Selected Photographs 1953-1999 (2001).
Auguste Salzmann (French, 1824-1872) Jerusalem, Sainte Sepulchre, Colonne du Parvis 1854 Blanquart-Evrard salted paper print from a paper negative
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) Billie Dauscha and Mabel Sidney, Bowery Entertainers December 4, 1944 Silver gelatin print
Winston O. Link (American, 1914-2001) Luray Crossing, Luray, Virginia 1956 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf (American, 1899-1985) Looking down on Grand Central Station 1935 Silver gelatin print
Paul J. Woolf began his photographic career in London, taking pictures as a child. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and the Clarence White School of Photography. By 1942 he was established as a professional photographer who specialised in design and night-time photography. Woolf also maintained a practice as a clinical social worker while continuing his work as a photographer.
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) Alicante 1933 Silver gelatin print
Joel-Peter Witkin (American, b. 1939) Leda 1986 Silver gelatin print
Roman Vishniac (Russian-American, 1897-1990) Father taking his son to the first day of cheder 1937-1938 Silver gelatin print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) James Rogers 1867 Albumen print
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) The Dream 1869 Albumen print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) An Albanian Woman from Italy at Ellis Island 1905 Silver gelatin print
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian laborer, Ellis Island 1905-1912 Silver gelatin print
Laure Albin-Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Opale c. 1930 Silver gelatin print
Cecil Beaton (British, 1904-1980) Virginia Cherrill 1930s Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999) Lella, Bretagne, France 1947 Silver gelatin print
Édouard Boubat (French, 1923-1999)
Édouard Boubat (1923-1999) was a French photojournalist and art photographer.
Boubat was born in Montmartre, Paris. He studied typography and graphic arts at the École Estienne and worked for a printing company before becoming a photographer. In 1943 he was subjected to service du travail obligatoire, forced labour of French people in Nazi Germany, and witnessed the horrors of World War II. He took his first photograph after the war in 1946 and was awarded the Kodak Prize the following year. He travelled the world for the French magazine Réalités and later worked as a freelance photographer. French poet Jacques Prévert called him a “peace correspondent” as he was apolitical and photographed uplifting subjects.
Exhibition dates: 13th December, 2014 – 19th April, 2015
Exhibition coincides with the culmination of the Thomas Walther Collection Project, a four-year research collaboration between MoMA’s curatorial and conservation staff
Co-curators: Quentin Bajac, Chief Curator of Photography, MoMA, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography, MoMA
Unknown photographer British ‘Chute Jumpers 1937 Gelatin silver print 5 15/16 x 6 15/16″ (15.1 x 17.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
OMG, OMG, OMG if we had tele-transportation to travel around the world, I would be at this exhibition in an instant. Please MoMA, fly me to New York so that I can do a proper review of the exhibition!
Not only are there photographs from well known artists that I have never seen before – for example, the brooding mass of Boat, San Francisco (1925) by Edward Weston with the name of the boat… wait for it… ‘DAYLIGHT’ – there are also outstanding photographs from artists that I have never heard of before.
There is so much to like in this monster posting, from the glorious choreography of British ‘Chute Jumpers (1937) to the muscular symmetry and abstraction of Rodchenko’s Dive (1934); from the absolutely stunning light and movement of Riefenstahl’s Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (August 1936) to the ecstatic, ghost-like swimming in mud apparitions of Kate Steinitz’s Backstroke (1930) – an artist who I knew nothing about (Kate Steinitz was a German-American artist and art historian affiliated with the European Bauhaus and Dadaist movements in the early 20th century. She is best known for her collaborative work with the artist Kurt Schwitters, and, in later life, her scholarship on Leonardo da Vinci). Another artist to flee Germany in the mid-1930s to evade the persecution of the Nazis.
In fact, when I looked through the checklist for this exhibition I observed the country of origin of the artist, and the date of their death. There are a lot of artists from Germany and France. Either they lived through the maelstrom of the Second World War and survived, escaped to America or England, or died during the war and their archive was lost (such as the artist Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945). For some artists surviving the war was not enough either… trapped behind the Iron Curtain after repatriation, artists such as Edmund Kesting went unacknowledged in their lifetime. What a tough time it must have been. To have created this wonderful avant-garde art and then to have seen it dashed against the rocks of violence, prejudice and bigotry – firstly degenerate, then non-conforming to Communist ideals.
Out of the six sections of the exhibition (The Modern World, Purisms, Reinventing Photography, The Artist’s Life, Between Surrealism and Magic Realism, and Dynamics of the City) it would seem that the section ‘Reinventing Photography’ is the weakest – going from the checklist – with a lack of really memorable images for this section, hence only illustrated in this posting by one image. But this is a minor quibble. When you have images such as Anne W. Brigman’s A Study in Radiation (1924) or Edmund Kesting’s magnificent Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) (1928) who cares!
I just want to see them all and soak up their atmosphere.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. There is an excellent website titled Object: Photo to accompany the exhibition. It contains sections that map and compare photographs, connect and map artists’ lives along with many more images from the collection, conservation analysis and essays about the works. Well worth a look.
Note: Images below correspond to their sections in the exhibition.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938)
Latvian painter, sculptor, graphic artist, designer and teacher, active in Russia. He was an important exponent of Russian Constructivism. He studied in Riga and Petrograd (now St Petersburg), but in the 1917 October Revolution joined the Latvian Rifle Regiment to defend the Bolshevik government; his sketches of Lenin and his fellow soldiers show Cubist influence. In 1918 he designed posters and decorations for the May Day celebrations and he entered the Free Art Studios (Svomas) in Moscow, where he studied with Malevich and Antoine Pevsner. Dynamic City (1919; Athens, George Costakis priv. col., see Rudenstine, no. 339) illustrates his adoption of the Suprematist style. In 1920 Klucis exhibited with Pevsner and Naum Gabo on Tver’skoy Boulevard in Moscow; in the same year Klucis joined the Communist Party. In 1920-21 he started experimenting with materials, making constructions from wood and paper that combined the geometry of Suprematism with a more Constructivist concern with actual volumes in space. In 1922 Klucis applied these experiments to utilitarian ends when he designed a series of agitprop stands based on various combinations of loudspeakers, speakers’ platforms, display units, film projectors and screens. He taught a course on colour in the Woodwork and Metalwork Faculty of the Vkhutemas (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops) from 1924 to 1930, and in 1925 helped to organise the Soviet section at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. During the 1920s he became increasingly interested in photomontage, using it in such agitprop posters as ‘We will repay the coal debt to the country’ (1928; e.g. New York, MoMA). During the 1930s he worked on graphic and typographical design for periodicals and official publications. He was arrested and died during the purges in World War II.
Gustav Klutsis (Latvian, 1895-1938) Postcard for the All Union Spartakiada Sporting Event 1928 Offset lithograph 5 3/4 x 4 1/8″ (14.1 x 10.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, on view from December 13, 2014, to April 19, 2015, explores photography between the First and Second World Wars, when creative possibilities were never richer or more varied, and when photographers approached figuration, abstraction, and architecture with unmatched imaginative fervour. This vital moment is dramatically captured in the photographs that constitute the Thomas Walther Collection, a remarkable group of works presented together for the first time through nearly 300 photographs. Made on the street and in the studio, intended for avant-garde exhibitions or the printed page, these objects provide unique insight into the radical intentions of their creators. Iconic works by such towering figures as Berenice Abbott, Karl Blossfeldt, Alvin Langdon Coburn, El Lissitzky, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Paul Strand are featured alongside lesser-known treasures by more than 100 other practitioners. The exhibition is organised by Quentin Bajac, the Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography, and Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA.
The exhibition coincides with Object: Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909-1949, the result of a four-year collaborative project between the Museum’s departments of Photography and Conservation, with the participation of over two dozen leading international photography scholars and conservators, making it the most extensive effort to integrate conservation, curatorial, and scholarly research efforts on photography to date. That project is composed of multiple parts including a website that features a suite of digital-visualisation research tools that allow visitors to explore the collection, a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther collection, and an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949, is organised thematically into six sections, suggesting networks between artists, regions, and objects, and highlighting the figures whose work Walther collected in depth, including André Kertész, Germaine Krull, Franz Roh, Willi Ruge, Maurice Tabard, Umbo, and Edward Weston. Enriched by key works in other mediums from MoMA’s collection, this exhibition presents the exhilarating story of a landmark chapter in photography’s history.”
Press release from the MoMA website
The Collection
In the 1920s and ’30s photography underwent a period of exploration, experimentation, technical innovation, and graphic discovery so dramatic that it generated repeated claims that the true age of discovery was not when photography was invented but when it came of age, in this era, as a dynamic, infinitely flexible, and easily transmissible medium. The Thomas Walther Collection concentrates on that second moment of growth. The Walther Collection’s 341 photographs by almost 150 artists, most of them European, together convey a period of collective innovation that is now celebrated as one of the major episodes of modern art.
The Project
Our research is based on the premise that photographs of this period were not born as disembodied images; they are physical things – discrete objects made by certain individuals at particular moments using specific techniques and materials. Shaped by its origin and creation, the photographic print harbours clues to its maker and making, to the causes it may have served, and to the treatment it has received, and these bits of information, gathered through close examination of the print, offer fresh perspectives on the history of the era. “Object: Photo” – the title of this study – reflects this approach.
In 2010, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gave the Museum a grant to encourage deep scholarly study of the Walther Collection and to support publication of the results. Led by the Museum’s Departments of Photography and Conservation, the project elicited productive collaborations among scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists, who investigated all of the factors involved in the making, appearance, condition, and history of each of the 341 photographs in the collection. The broadening of narrow specialisations and the cross-fertilisation between fields heightened appreciation of the singularity of each object and of its position within the history of its moment. Creating new standards for the consideration of photographs as original objects and of photography as an art form of unusually rich historical dimensions, the project affords both experts and those less familiar with its history new avenues for the appreciation of the medium. The results of the project are presented in multiple parts: on the website, in a hard-bound paper catalogue of the entire Thomas Walther Collection (also titled Object: Photo), and through an interdisciplinary symposium focusing on the ways in which the digital age is changing our engagement with historic photographs.
Historical Context
The Walther Collection is particularly suited to such a study because its photographs are so various in technique, geography, genre, and materials as to make it a mine of diverse data. The revolutions in technology that made the photography of this period so flexible and responsive to the impulse of the operator threw open the field to all comers. The introduction of the handheld Leica in 1925 (a small camera using strips of 35mm motion-picture film), of enlargers to make positive prints from the Leica’s little negatives, and of easy-to-use photographic papers – each of these was respectively a watershed event. Immediately sensing the potential of these tools, artists began to explore the medium; without any specialised training, painters such as László Moholy-Nagy and Aleksandr Rodchenko could become photographers and teachers almost overnight. Excitedly and with an open sense of possibility, they freely experimented in the darkroom and in the studio, producing negative prints, collages and photomontages, photograms, solarisations, and combinations of these. Legions of serious amateurs also began to photograph, and manufacturers produced more types of cameras with different dimensions and capacities: besides the Leica, there was the Ermanox, which could function in low light, motion-picture cameras that could follow and stop action, and many varieties of medium- and larger-format cameras that could be adapted for easy transport. The industry responded to the expanding range of users and equipment with a bonanza of photographic papers in an assortment of textures, colours, and sizes. Multiple purposes also generated many kinds of prints: best for reproduction in books or newspapers were slick, ferrotyped glossies, unmounted and small enough to mail, while photographs for exhibition were generally larger and mounted to stiff boards. Made by practitioners ranging from amateurs to professional portraitists, journalists, illustrators, designers, critics, and artists of all stripes, the pictures in the Walther Collection are a true representation of the kaleidoscopic multiplicity of photography in this period of diversification.
Text from the MoMA website
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Photo of Myself at the Moment of My Jump (Selbstfoto im Moment des Abspringens) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 9/16 × 8 1/16″ (14.2 × 20.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) With My Head Hanging Down before the Parachute Opened . . . (Mit dem Kopf nach unten hängend, bei ungeöffnetem Fallschirm . . .) 1931 Gelatin silver print 5 1/2 × 8″ (14 × 20.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961) Seconds before Landing (Sekunden vor der Landung) (detail) From the series I Photograph Myself during a Parachute Jump (Ich fotografiere mich beim Absturz mit dem Fallschirm) 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 1/16 × 5 9/16″ (20.4 × 14.1cm) (irreg.) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) Lines of Modern Industry: Cooling Tower (Linien der modernen Industrie: Kühlturmanlage) 1920-29 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945) The Course of the Mulde with Sand Deposits in the Curves (Der Lauf der Mulde mit Versandungen in den Windungen) 1920-33 Gelatin silver print 3 3/8 × 4 1/2″ (8.5 × 11.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Albert Renger-Patzsch, by exchange
Robert Petschow (German, 1888-1945)
Robert Petschow was studying in Danzig as a free balloon pilot in the West Prussian air force. During the First World War Petschow was a balloon observer with the rank of lieutenant in Poland, France and Belgium. Maybe it was the work of a balloon observer which led him to photography, in which he was worked freelance from 1920. His images appeared in the prestigious photographic yearbook The German photograph in which he was presented with photographers such as Karl Blossfeldt, Albert Renger-Patzsch Chargesheimer and Erich Salomon. The book Land of the Germans, which was published in 1931 by Robert Diesel and includes many photographs of Petschow went on to be published in four editions. In 1931 he journeyed with the airship LZ 127, the “Graf Zeppelin” to Egypt. He participated as an unofficial member of the crew to document the trip photographically. In 1936, at the age of 48 years, Petschow joined the rank of captain in the Air Force and ended his work as a senior editor at the daily newspaper The West, a position he held from 1930. For the following years, there is no information to Petschow.
Robert Petschow died at the age of 57 years on 17 October 1945 in Haldensleben after he had to leave his apartment in Berlin-Steglitz due to the war. He left there a picture archive with about 30,000 aerial photographs, which fell victim of the war. His contemporaries describe Petschow as a humorous person and a great raconteur.
Translated from the German Wikipedia website by Google Translate
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 11/16 x 9 3/8″ (29.7 x 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Dive (Pryzhok v vodu) 1934 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 5/16″ (29.9 × 23.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Nocturnal Start of Decathlon 1,500m Race (Nächtlicher Start zum 1500-m-Lauf des Zehnkampfes) August 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 11 3/4″ (23.7 x 29.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003) Untitled 1936 Gelatin silver print 9 3/16 x 11 5/8″ (23.4 x 29.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Kate Steinitz (American born Germany, 1889-1975) Backstroke (Rückenschwimmerinnen) 1930 Gelatin silver print 10 1/2 × 13 7/16″ (26.6 × 34.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
The Modern World
Even before the introduction of the handheld Leica camera in 1925, photographers were avidly exploring fresh perspectives, shaped by the unique experience of capturing the world through a lens and ideally suited to express the tenor of modern life in the wake of World War I. Looking up and down, these photographers found unfamiliar points of view that suggested a new, dynamic visual language freed from convention. Improvements in the light sensitivity of photographic films and papers meant that photographers could capture motion as never before. At the same time, technological advances in printing resulted in an explosion of opportunities for photographers to present their work to ever-widening audiences. From inexpensive weekly magazines to extravagantly produced journals, periodicals exploited the potential of photographs and imaginative layouts, not text, to tell stories. Among the photographers on view in this section are Martin Munkácsi (American, born Hungary, 1896-1963), Leni Riefenstahl (German, 1902-2003), Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956), and Willi Ruge (German, 1882-1961).
Anne W. Brigman (American born Hawaii, 1869-1950) A Study in Radiation 1924 Gelatin silver print 7 11/16 × 9 3/4″ (19.6 × 24.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. B. S. Sexton and Mina Turner, by exchange
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Untitled 1916-17 Platinum print 8 1/16 × 6 1/8″ (20.5 × 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933) Design 1916-1917 Platinum print 7 15/16 x 6 1/8″ (20.2 x 15.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933)
Bernard Shea Horne was the son of Joseph Horne, who built a legendary department store in Pittsburgh. The younger Horne retired from the family business when he was in his thirties and moved to northern Virginia to pursue his interests in golf and photography. In 1916 he enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, in New York, and became friends with one of its teachers, the avant-garde painter Max Weber. Horne produced numerous Weber-inspired design exercises, which he compiled into albums of twenty Platinum prints each. The four prints in the Thomas Walther Collection belonged to an album that he gave to Weber.
In 1917 Horne was elected president of the White School’s alumni association, a post he retained until 1925. In 1918 instructor Paul L. Anderson left the school, and Horne took his place as teacher of the technique class, a job he held until 1926. That a middle-aged man of independent means commuted to the school several days a week from Princeton, New Jersey, where he then lived with his two sons, suggests Horne’s devotion to White and his Pictorialist aims. During these years, Horne played a major role in the White School’s activities. In 1920 he was given a one-person show in the exhibition room of the school’s new building, a show that the alumni bulletin described as “interesting and varied in subject and technique, rich in bromoils, strong in design.” Supportive of the practical applications of artistic photography, in 1920 White joined his school to other institutions, including the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the Art Directors Club, to form The Art Center in New York. In 1926 Horne was given a one-person show at The Art Center, which marked the end of his active association with the school.
Abbaspour, Mitra, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990) Untitled 1924 Pigment print 9 1/16 × 9 1/16″ (23 × 23 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Horace W. Goldsmith Fund through Robert B. Menschel
Jarislav Rössler (Czech, 1902-1990)
Jaroslav Rössler (1902-1990) was one of the Czech avant-garde photographers of the first half of the twentieth century whose work has only recently become known outside Eastern Europe. Czech photography in the twenties and thirties produced radical modernist works that incorporated principles of abstract art and constructivism; Jaroslav Rossler was one of the most important and distinctive artists of the period. He became known for his fusing of different styles, bringing together elements of Symbolism, Pictorialism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, New Objectivity, and abstract art. His photographs often reduced images to elementary lines and shapes that seemed to form a new reality; he would photograph simple objects against a stark background of black and white, or use long exposures to picture hazy cones and spheres of light. From 1927 to 1935 he lived and worked in Paris, producing work influenced by constructivism and new objectivity. He used the photographic techniques and compositional approaches of the avant-garde, including photograms, large details, diagonal composition, photomontage, and double exposures, and experimented with colour advertising photographs and still lifes produced with the carbro print process. After his return to Prague, he was relatively inactive until the late 1950s, when he reconnected with Czech artistic and photographic trends of that period, including informalism. This book documents each stage of Rossler’s career with a generous selection of duotone images, some of which have never been published before. The photographs are accompanied by texts by Vladimir Birgus, Jan Mlcoch, Robert Silverio, Karel Srp, and Matthew Witkovsky.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) A Fish Called Sierra (Un pez que llaman sierra) 1944 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 x 7 1/4″ (24.1 x 18.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Somewhat Gay and Graceful (Un poco alegre y graciosa) 1942 Gelatin silver print 6 5/8 × 9 1/2″ (16.9 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002) Day of Glory (Día de gloria) 1940s Gelatin silver print 6 3/4 × 9 1/2″ (17.2 × 24.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Steel: Armco, Middletown, Ohio October 1922 Palladium print 9 1/16 × 6 7/8″ (23 × 17.4cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
In Edward Weston’s journals, which he began on his trip to Ohio and New York in fall 1922, the artist wrote of the exhilaration he felt while photographing the “great plant and giant stacks of the American Rolling Mill Company” in Middletown, Ohio. He then went to see the great photographer and tastemaker Alfred Stieglitz. Were he still publishing the magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz told him, he would have reproduced some of Weston’s recent images in it, including, in particular, one of his smokestacks. The photograph’s clarity and the photographer’s frank awe at the beauty of the brute industrial subject seemed clear signs of advanced modernist tendencies.
In moving away from the soft focus and geometric stylisation of his recent images, such as Attic of 1921 (MoMA 1902.2001), Weston was discovering a more straightforward approach, one of considered confrontation with the facts of the larger world much like that of his close friend Johan Hagemeyer, who was photographing such modern subjects as smokestacks, telephone wires, and advertisements. Shortly before his trip east, Weston had met R. M. Schindler, the Austrian architect, and had been excited by his unapologetically spare, modern house and its implications for art and design. Weston was also reading avant-garde European art magazines full of images and essays extolling machines and construction. Stimulated by these currents, Weston saw that by the time he got to Ohio he was “ripe to change, was changing, yes changed.”
The visit to Armco was the critical pivot, the hinge between Weston’s Pictorialist past and his modernist future. It marked a clear leave-taking from his bohemian circle in Los Angeles and the first step toward the cosmopolitan connections he made in New York and in Mexico City, where he moved a few months later to live with the Italian actress and artist Tina Modotti. The Armco photographs went with him and became talismans of the sea change, emblematic works that decorated his studio in Mexico, along with a Japanese print and a print by Picasso. When he sent a representation of his best work to the Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929, one of the smokestacks was included.
In the midst of such transformation, Weston maintained tried-and-true darkroom procedures. He had used an enlarger in earlier years but had abandoned the technique because he felt that too much information was lost in the projection. Instead he increasingly favoured contact printing. To make the smokestack print, Weston enlarged his 3 ¼ by 4 ¼ inch (8.3 by 10.8 centimetre) original negative onto an 8 by 10 inch (20.3 by 25.4 centimetre) interpositive transparency, which he contact printed to a second sheet of film in the usual way, creating the final 8 by 10 inch negative. Weston was frugal; he was known to economise by purchasing platinum and palladium paper by the roll from Willis and Clements in England and trimming it to size. He exposed a sheet of palladium paper to the sun through the negative and, after processing the print, finished it by applying aqueous retouching media to any flaws. The fragile balance of the photograph’s chemistry, however, is evinced in a bubble-shaped area of cooler tonality hovering over the central stacks. The print was in Modotti’s possession at the time of her death in Mexico City, in 1942.
Lee Ann Daffner, Maria Morris Hambourg
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Boat, San Francisco 1925 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 x 7 9/16″ (23.7 x 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Tina January 30, 1924 Gelatin silver print 9 1/16 x 6 7/8″ (23 x 17.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund and The Fellows of Photography Fund, by exchange
Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) Acanthus mollis (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928 Gelatin silver print 11 3/4 × 9 3/8″ (29.8 × 23.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Purisms
The question of whether photography ought to be considered a fine art was hotly contested from its invention in 1839 into the 20th century. Beginning in the 1890s, in an attempt to distinguish their efforts from hoards of Kodak-wielding amateurs and masses of professionals, “artistic” photographers referred to themselves as Pictorialists. They embraced soft focus and painstakingly wrought prints so as to emulate contemporary prints and drawings, and chose subjects that underscored the ethereal effects of their methods. Before long, however, most avant-garde photographers had come to celebrate precise and distinctly photographic qualities as virtues. On both sides of the Atlantic, photographers were making this transition from Pictorialism to modernism, while occasionally blurring the distinction. Exhibition prints could be made with precious platinum or palladium, or matte surfaces that mimicked those materials. Perhaps nowhere is this variety more clearly evidenced than in the work of Edward Weston, whose suite of prints in this section suggests the range of appearances achievable with unadulterated contact prints from his large-format negatives. Other photographers on view include Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932), Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1902-2002), Jaromír Funke (Czech, 1896-1945), Bernard Shea Horne (American, 1867-1933), and Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946).
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) Vortograph 1916-17 Gelatin silver print 11 1/8 x 8 3/8″ (28.2 x 21.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Vortograph
The intricate patterns of light and line in this photograph, and the cascading tiers of crystalline shapes, were generated through the use of a kaleidoscopic contraption invented by the American / British photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, a member of London’s Vorticist group. To refute the idea that photography, in its helplessly accurate capture of scenes in the real world, was antithetical to abstraction, Coburn devised for his camera lens an attachment made up of three mirrors, clamped together in a triangle, through which he photographed a variety of surfaces to produce the results in these images. The poet and Vorticist Ezra Pound coined the term “vortographs” to describe Coburn’s experiments. Although Pound went on to criticise these images as lesser expressions than Vorticist paintings, Coburn’s work would remain influential.
Reinventing Photography – Here Comes New Photographer
In 1925, László Moholy-Nagy articulated an idea that became central to the New Vision movement: although photography had been invented 100 years earlier, it was only now being discovered by the avant-garde circles for all its aesthetic possibilities. As products of technological culture, with short histories and no connection to the old fine-art disciplines – which many contemporary artists considered discredited – photography and cinema were seen as truly modern instruments that offered the greatest potential for transforming visual habits. From the photogram to solarisation, from negative prints to double exposures, the New Vision photographers explored the medium in countless ways, rediscovering known techniques and inventing new ones. Echoing the cinematic experiments of the same period, this emerging photographic vocabulary was rapidly adopted by the advertising industry, which appreciated the visual efficiency of its bold simplicity. Florence Henri (Swiss, born America, 1893-1982), Edward Quigley (American, 1898-1977), Franz Roh (German, 1890-1965), Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson (British, born Poland, 1907-1988 and 1910-1988), and František Vobecký (Czech, 1902-1991) are among the numerous photographers represented here.
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Magda, Mme Beöthy, M. Beöthy, and Unknown Guest, Paris 1926-1929 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 7/8″ (7.9 × 9.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 1/8 × 3 11/16″ (7.9 × 9.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Grace M. Mayer Fund
Unknown Photographer White Party, Dessau (Weißes Fest, Dessau) March 20, 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 x 1 15/16″ (7.6 x 5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Howard Stein
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Lunch (12-2 p.m.) (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931 Gelatin silver print 6 7/16 × 4 5/8″ (16.3 × 11.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) At the Masters’ Houses (An den Meisterhäusern) 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 7/8 x 6 1/4″ (22.6 x 15.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000)
Gertrud Arndt (née Hantschk; 20 September 1903 – 10 July 2000) was a photographer associated with the Bauhaus movement.She is remembered for her pioneering series of self-portraits from around 1930.
Arndt’s photography, forgotten until the 1980s, has been compared to that of her contemporaries Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun.Over the five years when she took an active interest in photography, she captured herself and her friends in various styles, costumes and settings in the series known as Masked Portraits. Writing for Berlin Art Link, Angela Connor describes the images as “ranging from severe to absurd to playful.”Today Arndt is considered to be a pioneer of female self-portraiture, long predating Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) Untitled 1931 Gelatin silver print 8 11/16 x 6 1/2″ (22 x 16.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989) Untitled (Self-Portrait) 1931 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 1/16″ (23.9 × 17.9cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Hajo Rose (German, 1910-1989)
‘Finally – a house made of steel and glass!’ This was the enthusiastic reaction of Hajo Rose (1910-1989) to the Bauhaus building in Dessau when he began his studies there in 1930. Rose promoted the methods of the Bauhaus throughout his lifetime: as a lecturer at universities in Amsterdam, Dresden and Leipzig, and also as an artist and photographer.
Hajo Rose experimented with a wide variety of materials and techniques. The photomontage of his self-portrait combined with the Dessau Bauhaus building (c. 1930), the surrealism of his photograph Seemannsbraut (Sailor’s Bride, 1934), and the textile print designs that he created with a typewriter (1932) are examples of the extraordinary creativity of this artist. He also contributed to an advertising campaign for the Jena Glass Company: the first heat-resistant household glassware stood for modern product design and is still regarded as a kitchen classic today.
Shortly before the Bauhaus was closed, Hajo Rose was one of the last students to receive his diploma. Subsequent periods in various cities shaped his biography, which is a special example of the migratory experience shared by many Bauhaus members after 1933. After one year as an assistant in the Berlin office of László Moholy-Nagy, Hajo Rose immigrated to The Netherlands together with Paul Guermonprez, a Bauhaus colleague, in 1934. He worked there as a commercial artist and taught at the Nieuwe Kunstschool in Amsterdam. At the 1937 World Exposition in Paris, he won an award for his poster ‘Amsterdam’. After the Second World War, Rose worked as a graphic designer, photographer and teacher in Dresden and Leipzig. He continued to advocate Bauhaus ideas in the GDR, even though the Bauhaus was regarded in East Germany as bourgeois and formalistic well into the 1960s. Rose resigned from the Socialist Unity Party (SED) – in spite of the loss of his teaching position as a consequence. From that time, he worked as one of the few freelance graphic designers in the GDR. Hajo Rose died at the age of 79 – shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Gertrude Lawrence 1928 Gelatin silver print 9 7/16 × 7 9/16″ (24 × 19.2cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Edward Steichen Estate and gift of Mrs. Flora S. Straus, by exchange
The Artist’s Life
Photography is particularly well suited to capturing the distinctive nuances of the human face, and photographers delighted in and pushed the boundaries of portraiture throughout the 20th century. The Thomas Walther Collection features a great number of portraits of artists and self-portraits as varied as the individuals portrayed. Additionally, the collection conveys a free-spirited sense of community and daily life, highlighted here with photographs made by André Kertész and by students and faculty at the Bauhaus. When the Hungarian-born Kertész moved to Paris in 1925, he couldn’t afford to purchase photographic paper, so he would print on less expensive postcard stock. These prints, whose small scale requires that the viewer engage with them intimately, function as miniature windows into the lives of Kertész’s bohemian circle of friends. The group of photographs made at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s, before the medium was formally integrated into the school’s curriculum, similarly expresses friendships and everyday life captured and printed in an informal manner. Portraits by Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954), Lotte Jacobi (American, born Germany, 1896-1990), Lucia Moholy (British, born Czechoslovakia, 1894-1989), Man Ray (American, 1890-1976), August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) are among the highlights of this gallery.
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933) Summer Swimming (Sommerbad) 1925-1930 Gelatin silver print 7 x 7 7/8″ (17.8 x 20cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Bequest of Ilse Bing, by exchange
Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933)
Aenne Biermann (March 8, 1898 – January 14, 1933), born Anna Sibilla Sternfeld, was a German photographer of Ashkenazi origin. She was one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, a significant art movement that developed in Germany in the 1920s.
Biermann was a self-taught photographer. Her first subjects were her two children, Helga and Gershon.The majority of Biermann’s photographs were shot between 1925 and 1933. Gradually she became one of the major proponents of New Objectivity, an important art movement in the Weimar Republic. Her work became internationally known in the late 1920s, when it was part of every major exhibition of German photography.
Major exhibitions of her work include the Munich Kunstkabinett, the Deutscher Werkbund and the exhibition of Folkwang Museum in 1929. Other important exhibitions include the exhibition entitled Das Lichtbild held in Munich in 1930 and the 1931 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts (French: Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels.Since 1992 the Museum of Gera has held an annual contest for the Aenne Biermann Prize for Contemporary German Photography, which is one of the most important events of its kind in Germany.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Helmar Lerski (Swiss born Germany, 1871-1956) Metamorphosis 601 (Metamorphose 601) 1936 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 × 9 1/16″ (29 × 23cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. The Family of Man Fund
Helmar Lerski (Swiss, born Germany 1871-1956)
There can hardly be another name in the international history of photography whose work has been so frequently misunderstood and so controversially evaluated as that of Helmar Lerski (1871-1956). “In every human being there is everything; the question is only what the light falls on”. Guided by this conviction, Lerski took portraits that did not primarily strive for likeness but which left scope for the viewer’s imagination, thus laying himself open to the criticism of betraying the veracity of the photographic image.
… Lerski’s pictures were only partly in line with the maxims of the New Photography, and they questioned the validity of pure objectivity. The distinguishing characteristics of his portraits included a theatrical-expressionistic, sometimes dramatic use of lighting inspired by the silent film. Although his close-up photographs captured the essential features of a face – eyes, nose and mouth –, his primary concern was not individual appearance or superficial likeness but the deeper inner potential: he emphasised the changeability, the different faces of an individual. Lerski, who sympathised with the political left wing, thereby infiltrated the photography of types that was practised (and not infrequently misused for racist purposes) by many of Lerski’s contemporaries.
… Helmar Lerski’s attitude was at its most radical in his work entitled Metamorphosis. This was completed within a few months at the beginning of 1936 in Palestine, to where Lerski and his second wife Anneliese had immigrated in 1932. In Verwandlungen durch Licht (this is the second title for this work), Lerski carried his theatrical talent to extremes. With the help of up to 16 mirrors and filters, he directed the natural light of the sun in constant new variations and refractions onto his model, the Bernese-born, at the time out-of-work structural draughtsman and light athlete Leo Uschatz. Thus he achieved, in a series of over 140 close-ups “hundreds of different faces, including that of a hero, a prophet, a peasant, a dying soldier, an old woman and a monk from one single original face” (Siegfried Kracauer). According to Lerski, these pictures were intended to provide proof “that the lens does not have to be objective, that the photographer can, with the help of light, work freely, characterise freely, according to his inner face.” Contrary to the conventional idea of the portrait as an expression of human identity, Lerski used the human face as a projection surface for the figures of his imagination. We are only just becoming aware of the modernity of this provocative series of photographs.
Peter Pfrunder Fotostiftung Schweiz
Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) Lotte (Eye) (Lotte [Auge]) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/8 x 15 3/4″ (30.2 x 40cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Peter Norton
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) Anna Oderfeld, Zakopane 1911-1912 Gelatin silver print 6 11/16 × 4 3/4″ (17 × 12.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Mrs. Willard Helburn, by exchange
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970) Glance to the Sun (Blick zur Sonne) 1928 Gelatin silver print 13 1/16 x 14 1/2″ (33.2 x 36.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Edmund Kesting (German, 1892-1970)
Edmund Kesting (27 July 1892, Dresden – 21 October 1970, Birkenwerder) was a German photographer, painter and art professor. He studied until 1916 at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before participating as a soldier in the First World War, upon returning his painting teachers were Richard Müller and Otto Gussmann and in 1919 he began to teach as a professor at the private school Der Weg. In 1923 he had his first exposition in the gallery Der Sturm in which he showed photograms. When Der Weg opened a new academy in Berlin in 1927, he moved to the capital.
He formed relations with other vanguardists in Berlin and practiced various experimental techniques such as solarisation, multiple images and photograms, for which reason twelve of his works were considered degenerate art by the Nazi regime and were prohibited. Among the artists with whom he interacted are Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Alexander Archipenko. At the end of World War II he formed part of a Dresden artistic group known as Künstlergruppe der ruf – befreite Kunst (Call to an art in freedom) along with Karl von Appen, Helmut Schmidt-Kirstein and Christoph Hans, among others. In this city he made an experimental report named Dresdner Totentanz (Dance of death in Dresden) as a condemnation of the bombing of the city. In 1946 he was named a member of the Academy of Art in the city.
He participated in the controversy between socialist realism and formalism that took place in the German Democratic Republic, therefore his work was not realist and could not be shown in the country between 1949 and 1959. In 1955 he began to experiment with chemical painting, making photographs without the use of a camera and only with the use of chemical products such as the developer and the fixer and photographic paper, for which he made exposures to light using masks and templates. Between 1956 and 1967 he was a professor at the Academy of Cinema and Television of Potsdam.
His artistic work was not recognised by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic until 1980, ten years after his death.
Maurice Tabard (French, 1897-1984) Am I Beautiful? (Suis-je belle?) 1929 Gelatin silver print 9 5/16 × 6 15/16″ (23.6 × 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Between Surrealism and Magic Realism
In the mid-1920s, European artistic movements ranging from Surrealism to New Objectivity moved away from a realist approach by highlighting the strange in the familiar or trying to reconcile dreams and reality. Echoes of these concerns, centred on the human figure, can be found in this gallery. Some photographers used anti-naturalistic methods – capturing hyperreal, close-up details; playing with scale; and rendering the body as landscape – to challenge the viewer’s perception. Others, in line with Sigmund Freud’s definition of “the uncanny” as an effect that results from the blurring of distinctions between the real and the fantastic, offered visual plays on life and the lifeless, the animate and the inanimate, confronting the human body with surrogates in the form of dolls, mannequins, and masks. Photographers influenced by Surrealism, such as Maurice Tabard, subjected the human figure to distortions and transformations by experimenting with photographic techniques either while capturing the image or while developing it in the darkroom. Additional photographers on view include Aenne Biermann (German, 1898-1933), Jacques-André Boiffard (French, 1902-1961), Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961), Helmar Lerski (Swiss, 1871-1956), and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939)
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan November 21, 1935 Gelatin silver print 9 5/8 × 7 1/2″ (24.4 × 19.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984) Steamship Pipes, Paris Winter 1931 Gelatin silver print 3 13/16 × 2 11/16″ (9.7 × 6.8cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Andreas Feininger, by exchange
Marjorie Content (American, 1895-1984)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was an American photographer active in modernist social and artistic circles. Her photographs were rarely published and never exhibited in her lifetime, but have become of interest to collectors and art historians. Her work has been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chrysler Museum of Art; it has been the subject of several solo exhibitions. (Wikipedia)
Marjorie Content (1895-1984) was a modest and unpretentious photographer who kept her work largely to herself, never published or exhibited. Overshadowed by such close friends as Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz, she was more comfortable as a muse and source of encouragement for others, including her fourth husband, poet Jean Toomer. This text presents her beautiful, varied photographs and provides a glimpse into her life. Her pictures portray a variety of images including: New York’s frenetic cityscape distilled to essential patterns and rhythms; the Southwestern light and heat along with the strength and dignity of the Taos pueblo culture; and cigarettes and other everyday items arranged in jewel-like compositions. The discovery of the quality and extent of her work is proof that an artist’s determination can surmount a lack of recognition in her lifetime.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Votive Candles, New York City 1929-1930 Gelatin silver print 8 1/2 x 6 15/16″ (21.6 x 17.7cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Willard Van Dyke and Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., by exchange
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985) Untitled 1926 Gelatin silver print 3 11/16 x 3 1/4″ (9.4 x 8.3cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Georgii Zimin (Russian, 1900-1985)
Georgii Zimin was born in Moscow in 1900, where he lived and worked for his entire life. Before the Russian Revolution he enrolled as a student at the Artistic-Industrial Stroganov Institute, known after 1918 as SVOMAS (Free state art studios). Zimin continued his studies at VKhUTEMAS (Higher state artistic and technical studios), which replaced SVOMAS in 1920. It was during his time at the school that he published the portfolio Skrjabin in Lukins Tanz (Scriabin in Lukin’s dance), in an edition of one hundred. This set of Cubo-Futurist lithographs from 1922 features costumed dancers in erotic poses, complementing a ballet choreographed by Lev Lukin. This work garnered Zimin acknowledgment by the Academy of Arts and Sciences and marked his affiliation with the Russian Art of Movement group. Throughout the 1920s he showed regularly at Art of Movement exhibitions at GAKhN (State academy for artistic sciences), in Moscow. Zimin also experimented with photography in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing photograms akin to those made by László Moholy-Nagy and others at the time. Later in life, he served as Art Director of Exhibitions at the Department of Trade and held a post at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition.
~ Ksenia Nouril
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Mystery of the Street (Mysterium der Strasse) 1928 Gelatin silver print 11 7/16 x 9 1/4″ (29 x 23.5cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980)
Trained at the Bauhaus under Johannes Itten, a master of expressivity, Berlin-based photographer Umbo (born Otto Umbehr) believed that intuition was the source of creativity. To this belief, he added Constructivist structural strategies absorbed from Theo Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and others in Berlin in the early twenties. Their influence is evident in this picture’s diagonal, abstract construction and its spatial disorientation. It is also classic Umbo, encapsulating his intuitive vision of the world as a resource of poetic, often funny, ironic, or dark bulletins from the social unconscious.
After he left the Bauhaus, Umbo worked as assistant to Walther Ruttmann on his film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City 1926. In 1928, photographing from his window either very early or very late in the day and either waiting for his “actors” to achieve a balanced composition or, perhaps, positioning them as a movie director would, Umbo exposed three negatives. He had an old 5 by 7 inch (12.7 by 17.8 centimetre) stand camera and a 9 by 12 centimetre (3 9/16 by 4 3/4 inch) Deckrullo Contessa-Nettle camera, but which he used for these overhead views is not known, as he lost all his prints and most negatives in the 1943 bombing of Berlin. The resulting images present a world in which the shadows take the active role. Umbo made the insubstantial rule the corporeal and the dark dominate the light through a simple but inspired inversion: he mounted the pictures upside down (note the signature in ink in the lower right) .
In 1928-29, Umbo was a founding photographer at Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst), a seminal photography agency in Berlin dedicated to creating socially relevant and visually fascinating photoessays, an idea originated by Erich Solomon. Simon Guttmann, who directed the business, hired creative nonconformists, foremost among them the bohemian Umbo, who slept in the darkroom; Umbo in turn drew the brothers Lore Feininger and Lyonel Feininger to the agency, which soon also boasted Robert Capa and Felix H. Man. Dephot hired Dott, the best printer in Berlin, and it was he who made the large exhibition prints, such as this one, ordered by New York gallerist Julien Levy when he visited the agency in 1931. Umbo showed thirty-nine works, perhaps also printed by Dott, in the 1929 exhibition Film und Foto, and he put Guttmann in touch with the Berlin organizer of the show; accordingly, Dephot was the source for some images in the accompanying book, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Here comes the new photographer!). Levy introduced Umbo’s photographs to New York in Surréalisme (January 1932) and showcased them again at the Julien Levy Gallery, together with images by Herbert Bayer, Jacques-André Boiffard, Roger Parry, and Maurice Tabard, in his 1932 exhibition Modern European Photography.
Maria Morris Hambourg, Hanako Murata
Umbo (Otto Umbehr) (German, 1902-1980) Six at the Beach (Sechs am Strand) 1930 Gelatin silver print 9 3/8 × 7 1/8″ (23.8 × 18.1cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Shirley C. Burden, by exchange
Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966) The Octopus 1909 Gelatin silver print 22 1/8 × 16 3/4″ (56.2 × 42.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther
Dynamics of the City – Symphony of a Great City
In his 1928 manifesto “The Paths of Contemporary Photography,” Aleksandr Rodchenko advocated for a new photographic vocabulary that would be more in step with the pace of modern urban life and the changes in perception it implied. Rodchenko was not alone in this quest: most of the avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and 1930s were city dwellers, striving to translate the novel and shocking experience of everyday life into photographic images. Equipped with newly invented handheld cameras, they used unusual vantage points and took photos as they moved, struggling to re-create the constant flux of images that confronted the pedestrian. Reflections in windows and vitrines, blurry images of quick motions, double exposures, and fragmentary views portray the visual cacophony of the metropolis. The work of Berenice Abbott (American, 1898- 1991), Alvin Langdon Coburn (American, 1882-1966), Germanie Krull (Dutch, born Germany, 1897-1985), Alexander Hackenschmied (Czech, 1907-2004), Umbo (German, 1902-1980), and Imre Kinszki (Hungarian, 1901-1945) is featured in this final gallery.
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30 am – 5.30 pm Open seven days a week
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Fifth Avenue Houses (5th Avenue and 8th Street) 1936, printed later Silver gelatin print
A selection of interesting images.
The Vanishing Race by Edward S. Curtis is simple, yet one of the best. Their shadows seem more substantial than their owners.
Any photographer worth their salt would recognise the light on the foliage in a certain location that they know, but the chance of it being as perfect as this are about a billion to one. Notice how the original frame extends the synthesis of man and landscape as well. Such a great amalgam of image and frame, such a perfect marriage where one complements the other without the frame being overpowering, as though the frame were an extension of the image (and organic nature of the landscape).
The line of the riders in the image … they would have virtually ridden over the photographer and the tripod if they had kept that line! And the outrider – magnificent!!
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Vanishing Race – Navaho 1904 Orotone (in original frame)
“The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other… consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.”
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Redding Stream, Redding, Connecticut 1968, printed later Gelatin silver print
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Nautilus Shell, Ipswich, Mass 1960 Silver gelatin print
Paul Caponigro (American, 1932-2024) Two Leaves, Brewster, New York 1963 Silver gelatin print
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Eleanor, Port Huron c. 1954 Silver gelatin print
With her raven hair and ripe figure, Eleanor Callahan is one of the most recognisable models in the history of 20th-century photography, an inseparable part of both the life and work of one of its most renowned artists. Clothed and standing among trees in a public park, or nude and turned to the wall while clutching a radiator in an empty room, she served as a formal element within Mr. Callahan’s austere compositions as well as a symbol of womanhood. From 1941 to his death in 1999, she allowed herself to be photographed by him, without complaint, hundreds of times…
“He just liked to take the pictures of me,” she told an interviewer in 2008. “In every pose. Rain or shine. And whatever I was doing. If I was doing the dishes or if I was half asleep. And he knew that I never, never said no. I was always there for him. Because I knew that Harry would only do the right thing.”
Text from Richard B. Woodward. “Eleanor Callahan, Photographic Muse, Dies at 95,” on the New York Times website 28th February 2012. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Potato truck in the field near Shafter, California 1937 Ferrotyped silver print
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Fish Market near Birmingham, Alabama 1936 Silver gelatin print
Robert Doisneau (French, 1912-1994) Le gardien des géants du Nord Nd Silver gelatin print
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Christopher Street Shop late 1940s Silver gelatin print
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) But Lately I Find a Sliver of a Mirror is Simply to Slice an Eyelid 1979-1980 Silver gelatin print
André Kertész (Hungarian, 1894-1985) Fan, December 1937 1937 Silver gelatin print
“I am an amateur and I intend to stay that way for the rest of my life.”
~ André Kertész
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana 1936 Silver gelatin print
This photograph became an icon of the machine age, not only because it was printed as the cover of the first issue of Life magazine (November 23, 1936), but also because it showed the power of modern technology to dwarf humankind. The giant buttresses and what seem to be crenellated battlements (actually the supports for an elevated highway) are meant to be as raw and impressive as the towering walls of ancient monuments. The engineers on the spillway provide the necessary indication of scale.
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Terminal Tower [Cleveland] c. 1928 Silver gelatin print
“I stood on the deck to watch the city [Cleveland] come into view. As the skyline took form in the morning mist, I felt I was coming to my promised land … columns of machinery gaining height as we drew toward the pier, derricks swinging like living creatures. Deep inside I knew these were my subjects.”
~ Margaret Bourke-White 1927
François Kollar (Hungarian, 1904-1979) Double-impression of the Eiffel Tower 1931 Solarised silver gelatin print
In this unique and widely-reproduced photograph, the French modernist photographer has overlaid positive and negative images of the magnificent Eiffel Tower. The iconic structure is depicted from an unusual perspective, thrusting upward, with Kollar’s special solarised effect.
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) X-ray of Ajax, the sword swallower 1928 Silver print 18 × 11 inches (45.7 × 27.9cm) With a New York X-ray lab credit in the negative
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) Marcellus Golden Models 1933 Silver print 11 1/4 × 8 7/8 inches (28.6 × 22.5cm) With Kelty’s credit and title in the negative
This stunning suite of large format photographs emanates from an esteemed lineage: the early morning light of Atget’s photographs of Old Paris during that cities urban renewal; the frontality of Walker Evans and his photographs of Southern churches (with both artist’s attention to the storefront facade); and the formal qualities of the New Topographic movement and the gridded topos of Bernd and Hilla Becher.
While Eugène Atget photographed the vanishing environs of Old Paris, Davies captures the urban decay of New York City, a city that was undergoing serious urban renewal in the 1970s.
“The redevelopment of large sections of New York City and New York State by Robert Moses between the 1930s and the 1970s was a notable and prominent example of urban redevelopment. Moses directed the construction of new bridges, highways, housing projects, and public parks. Moses was a controversial figure, both for his single-minded zeal and for its impact on New York City… The Rondout neighbourhood in Kingston, New York (on the Hudson River) was essentially destroyed by a federally funded urban renewal program in the 1960s, with more than 400 old buildings demolished, most of them historic brick structures built in the 19th century. Similarly ill-conceived urban renewal programs gutted the historic centres of other towns and cities across America in the 1950s and 1960s.” (Anon. “Urban Renewal,” on the Wikipedia website)
In Davies’ project (and essential to his task), is the revealing of detail in these undervalued buildings. An ethereal light radiates, almost pulsates from these night time buildings – all rendered in beautifully ferrotyped prints that display a surplus of detail.
The previsualisation in these photographs is excellent. Notice how Davies pushes and pulls the viewer forward and backward in the image plane by using the device of the footpath to frame his compositions. In an image such as 94 Greene Street, New York (1975, above) – one of my favourite in this posting – the artist frames the image to stop at the edge of the pavement, allowing enough room so that the eye is led into the image. In other images, such as Broadway, New York (1976, below) or 425 Broome Street, New York (1976, below), Davies crops right up to the base of the building, forcing the viewer to acknowledge the geometric, cellular structure of the facade and nothing else. In yet other images, such as Column, Mercer Street, New York (1975, below) or 155 West Broadway, New York (1975, below) the artist pulls back from the building, allowing the pavement to anchor the building’s displacement while emphasising the columns grounding within the scene.
These really are magnificent photographs that bring the silence of the city to the fore front of our consciousness. Without the presence of human beings, the buildings take on a majesty that is usually usurped, overlooked or just plain passed by during the humdrum nature of everyday life.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming solo exhibition, Bevan Davies New York. The exhibition opens on March 14th and will continue through May 9, 2015. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 14th, from 6-8 pm. New York will present Davies’ luminous and highly detailed large-format black and white architectural views from the mid 1970’s, along with a selection of his earlier street portraiture from the preceding decade, in the atrium gallery.
Bevan Davies studied photography with Bruce Davidson, at the University of Chicago in early 1960’s and benefitted greatly through mentoring from Diane Arbus later in that decade. After working the street in both daylight and evening hours, photographing people at odds with society, with a hand camera, Davies changed his working methodology to describing the physical environs of the street: the building facades, alleys and streets with a tripod mounted view camera.
This change in subject and approach resulted in Davies most celebrated work. Created in 1975/76 Bevan Davies’ architectural photographs situated themselves wholly within the dictum laid forth by William Jenkins, as “New Topographics”. In fact, Davies writes of his approach as, “an effort being made to let the camera almost see by itself.” This notion was carried further by the late photographer, Lewis Baltz, who in 1976, referred to Davies’ photographs as, “rigorously contemporary, while acknowledging a use of the camera which dates from the inception of the medium.” The New York facades, taken in the early morning hours and devoid of people, describe spaces defined by light and shadow. They depict a specific time and place, as seen by the window dressings and signage, as well as portray a formal grace among the building’s details that are included within Davies’ camera frame. New York is the first comprehensive exhibition of Davies’ photographs in over two decades.
Davies photographs can be found in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Center for Creative Photography, Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, George Eastman House, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Harry Ransom Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography.
In 2014, Nazraeli Press released Los Angeles, 1976, a monograph on Davies’ photographs from that region and era. The photographs depict the residential architecture and neighbourhoods through nuanced arrangement and clarity. A forthcoming volume on Davies’ New York photographs is in prepublication.
Although I have ten tattoos by different artists – including a full back job by Alex Binnie of London – and scarification done in 1992, you always remember your first tattoo. I was in my early twenties when I decided to get inked. And the person recommended for the job was the legendary Alan Oversby (aka Mr. Sebastian), an S/M tattooist and one of the primary figures in the development of contemporary body piercing.
I remember travelling down to the East End of London and rocking up to this nondescript office block, climbing to the third floor I think it was, and entering a tiny square room, Alan’s studio. What an experience it was to be tattooed by him. Not so much the tattoo itself, which was a tiger on my upper left arm – first part of my earth, air, water, fire, void elemental sequence – but his presence and being surrounded by these fantastic, outrageous photographs on all four walls, floor to ceiling. Here was men’s tackle of all different shapes and sizes, the cocks and pubic area heavily tattooed and some of them heavily pierced, lying on pristine white dinner plates. Welcome to lunch.
For a young man this was an amazing, wondrous display. I totally loved him, the photographs, and his work. Unfortunately I don’t have any photographs of that studio and there are none that I could find online. Suffice it to say that the experience only confirmed me on my path of delicious deviancy that will not stop until the day I die.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs and text in the posting. The videos were all sourced from YouTube. Many thankx also to Becky Nunes who I contacted directly and who provided the wonderful photographs of Tã moko facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand.
Alan Oversby (Mr Sebastian)
Alan Oversby (Mr. Sebastian)
Alan Oversby (20 February 1933 – 8 May 1996) was one of the primary figures in the development of contemporary body piercing in Europe. He was better known by his professional name Mr. Sebastian.
Originally an art teacher, Alan Oversby left his initial profession to pursue his interests in tattooing and piercing instead. From his studio in London, he promoted both tattooing and body piercing, especially within the gay leather community. He was a correspondent of both Doug Malloy and Jim Ward. Sponsored by Malloy, he visited Los Angeles. Malloy also sponsored trips to London to visit him, bringing along Ward and Sailor Sid Diller. These exchanges were critical to the global spread of the techniques and technology used in contemporary body piercing.
Oversby was also responsible for the adoption of the use of topical and local anaesthetics as part piercing procedure in Europe. Although they are used less now, it used to be standard practice to use anaesthetics when performing piercings in England, where in North America this practice is almost unknown. He was interviewed in the fourth issue of PFIQ. He performed much of the tattooing and piercing on Psychic TV musicians Genesis P-Orridge and Paula P-Orridge. His vocals were used in the Psychic TV track “Message from The Temple” which appeared on their first album Force the Hand of Chance.
In 1987, Alan Oversby was one of 16 men charged as a part of Operation Spanner, a series of raids that resulted in the arrest of men who were all engaged in consensual homosexual BDSM activities. Alan, like the other men, was charged with assault occasioning actual bodily harm for performing a genital piercing on a client. He was also charged with using anaesthetic without a licence and for sending obscene material through the post (photographs of piercings). As the judge was not willing to take the consensuality of the participants into account, Alan pleaded guilty along with the other 15 men. He received a sentence of 15 months, which was suspended for two years.
The Tattoo exhibition is dedicated to old traditions and new stories. It takes a look at the vibrant, innovative and multifaceted tattoo culture, with a focus on artistic, artisanal and culture-specific issues. International exhibits from diverse perspectives are displayed and current debates considered. This is the first time that an exhibition has brought together such a broad range of references, presenting the phenomenon of the tattoo with a particular focus on art and design, since these enduring pictures, words and symbols inspire artists and designers. The theme of the exhibition is therefore the reciprocal influence of art, traditional and lived tattoo art and visual design. The exhibition Tattoo throws light on the ambivalence of the tattoo between a mark of distinction, a sign allocating its bearer to a social class, a badge of identity and a stigma in various cultures, social classes and epochs. Tattoo shows over 250 pieces of work, including photographs, coloured woodcuts, paintings and sculptures, as well as video clips and audio installations, stencils and historical specimens of tattooed skin. From tattooing instruments made of simple tools available in nature to intricate precision machines, colours and pigments convey an impression of the craft in practice. In this show the MKG also looks back on the long tradition of the Hamburg tattoo scene, which had its cradle in the port milieu of the late 19th century. Historical photos which have never before been on public show document the typical tattoos of the working class in Hamburg around 1890. Legendary tattooists such as Christian Warlich (“The Tattoo King”) and Herbert Hoffmann exemplify a many-facetted and highly expressive art form which generates ever new experimental designs. A glimpse into this is given by work from local tattoo artists who let themselves be inspired by the museum’s collection. A picture loop shows many pieces of work by celebrated tattooists, men and women, from the current international scene, which is marked by a huge diversity of stylistic approaches and new aesthetic movements.
The traditional cultural technique
All over the world, many cultures use the human skin as a surface to carry images. The tradition of tattooing is among the earliest art forms and the most ancient crafts. The exhibition shows selected examples. The facial tattoos of Chin women in Burma are part of a rite of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood. With the help of thorns or needles, female tattooists incise patterns into the skin which vary from one family clan to another. Tā Moko, the facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand, indicate a person’s family affiliation and social status. Each part of the face is reserved for a particular type of information. A tattoo on the centre of the forehead, for instance, testifies to high status. In Thailand, sacred tattoos – known as Sak Yant – are widespread. They are intended to protect their bearer from bad luck and to help them lead a morally impeccable life. Tattoos have a long tradition in Japan too, dating back to the 3rd century. Their design follows a particular harmony and elegance and is characterised by clearly demarcated areas of colour. The tattoos often cover wide expanses of the body surface and connect to a cohesive image. The motifs often reference subjects of traditional woodcuts or represent mythological beings which are supposed to exemplify particular qualities of their bearer’s character. For instance, the dragon stands for virility, power or heaven. Since tattoos were banned from 1870 to 1948 in Japan, they were for a long time associated with the criminal milieu of the Yakuza, a Japanese mafia organisation.
The spread of tattooing in the Western world
In the 18th and 19th centuries, illustrated travel reports were a major influence on the way people viewed other cultures in far-off lands and fired curiosity about the practice of tattooing, which seemed exotic in those days. The word tattow in the Polynesian language is first mentioned in James Cook’s reports of his expeditions to the South Seas in the 18th century. Modern tattooing became widespread in the West through the very popular early ethnographic drawings and prints as well as later through photographs. At the beginning, the art of tattooing often stood for the erotically titillating flair of the exotic and magic-mystical in a world attended by strange cults and rituals. Tattoos flourished in Europe and America during the years leading up to the World War I. For this reason, the members of the American upper class and of almost all European royal families – including the German imperial family – were tattooed. In this period, this form of body decoration was regarded as an expression of good taste. In the 19th century a more ambivalent attitude towards tattooing develops, however, above all among the bourgeoisie. In consequence, very little lies between fascination and rejection in the Western historical view of tattooing: this is what underlies the dual character of tattooing as stigma and mark of distinction.
Codes and their reinterpretation
The functions and meanings attributed to tattooing proliferate due to its diffusion throughout different social classes and groups over the last century. First and foremost, its ambiguity, signalling both stigma and distinction, is symptomatically revealed in the different tattooing practices followed in different milieus. While sailors and soldiers flaunt the record of their travels with exotic images, tattoos develop into veritable badges of recognition in the criminal underworld. In the context of photographic “mugshots”, first used in the hunt for criminals at the beginning of the 20th century, tattoos already take on great significance as a means of identifying suspects. In Russian prison camps of the late 19th century tattoos and branding are systematically employed by the state to mark out people as convicts. In response professional criminals in Russia, however, get around this form of stigmatisation by adopting their own informal tattoos. They modify traditional motifs and develop a system of secret signs, which reveals the group they belong to, their convictions or their rank in the criminal hierarchy. The French photographer and filmmaker Christian Poveda has documented the heavily tattooed members of the Latin American gangs of the Mara Salvatrucha and M-18, the lettering and symbols displayed on their skin have an important function in recognition and promotion of group affinity. The work of the Austrian Klaus Pichler traces the current significance of tattoos in prisons and offers a photographic glimpse into what are actually forms of coping with imprisonment within the penal system.
Women and tattoos
Another aspect of the exhibition are objects dealing with the relationship between women and tattoos. Historical photos highlight the vicissitude, ranging from the exhibition of the heavily tattooed female body as a fairground attraction in the 1920s up to the glamour girls in the vaudeville shows of the 1960s and the first female tattooists, who independently and with great determination carved out a place for themselves in a male-dominated profession. Tattoo culture is meanwhile unthinkable without women and they play an important role as artists in the contemporary scene.
Tattoos in contemporary art
The complex spectrum of meanings conveyed also plays a major role in contemporary art. The Japanese woman artist Fumie Sasabuche, for instance, takes as the theme of her sculptural and photographic works the interplay between the traditional Japanese tattoo motifs of the Yakuza and the aesthetic impulses of Western mass culture. Enrique Marty’s sculptures from his series Art is Dangerous, too, fall back on the Yakuza iconography in order to raise ironic questions about the role of art and the meaning conveyed by tattoos in combination with the grotesque effect created by the figures. The Spanish concept artist Santiago Sierra discusses the subject from the perspective of social and capitalistic criticism in his films. He pays members of socially marginalised groups to have a continuous line tattooed on their backs as part of a performance. With the deliberately unsteadily drawn line he is alluding to the precarious existence they lead and the social stigmatisation that goes with it. The Polish artist Artur Żmijewski addresses relentlessly and provocatively the practice of tattooing prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps. His video 80064, which sparked fierce and controversial debate among its viewers, shows Josef Tarnawa, a 92-year old survivor of Auschwitz, whom the artists persuaded to have his fading camp number freshly tattooed. On the one side, Tarnawa is being stigmatized all over again by this procedure, on the other side the number on his left forearm takes on the function of a shocking admonition not to forget. Active remembrance, Artur Żmijewski seems to be saying here, is channeled today into much too orderly forms. The burn mark and the involuntary tattoo have faded out of view today in the Western history of tattooing, but what was practiced during the Second World War remains deeply engraved on the artist’s memory.
The tension between the tattoo as a work of art and its existence on the “living canvas” is the subject of an exemplary treatment by the Belgian concept artist Wim Delvoye. The exhibition shows the tattooed pig Donata, which the artist decorated under anesthetic in 2005, with the help of several professional tattooists, on his Chinese “Art Farm”. Delvoye subsequently exhibited the animal as a living work of art, and had it stuffed after it died. The second work by Delvoye shown in the exhibition picks up on this idea and articulates critical questions about moral principles in the art market, power and the right to make use of the human body as an artistic object. The Swiss Tim Steiner had a work by the Belgian artist tattooed on his back between 2006 and 2008; in 2008 it was purchased by a Hamburg art collector, together with the right to pass Tim Steiner on as an item on loan, to sell him, to bequeath him and to have his skin conserved after his death. Since then the work Tim has been the subject of great international controversy. He will be on show in the Hamburg exhibition on 11 and 12 April and on 27 and 28 June 2015.
Pricking the skin with a needle demands the same aesthetic imagination and care, the same controlled craftsmanship and knowledge of materials and color sense as any other design technique. The contemporary tattooing scene is highly innovative, transcending the traditional language of tattooing and renewing the medium. A picture loop in the exhibition shows international work in a great variety of styles and in outstanding quality.
With contributors including: Masahiko Adachi (JP) / Diane Arbus (USA) / Imogen Cunningham (USA) / Wim Delvoye (BEL) / Chris Eckert (USA) / Goran Galić & Gian-Reto Gredig (CH) / Herbert Hoffmann (DE/CH) / Mario Marchisella (CH) / Enrique Marty (ESP) / The Rich Mingins Collection (GB) / Ralf Mitsch (NL) / Becky Nunes (NZ) / Jens Uwe Par¬kitny (DE) / Klaus Pichler (AUT) / Christian Poveda (FR) / Rodolphe Archibald Reiss (DE/CH) / Fumie Sasabuchi (JP) / Santiago Sierra (ESP) / Aroon Thaewchatturat (THA) / Timm Ulrichs (DE) / Christian Warlich (D) / Artur Żmijewski (POL). Work in the picture loop by: Luke Atkinson (DE) / Curly (GB) / Mike DeVries (USA) / Thea Duskin (USA) / Lionel Fahy (FR) / Sabine Gaffron (DE) / Valentin Hirsch (DE) / Saira Hunjan (GB) / Inma (GB) / Bastien Jean (FR) / Jon John (GB) / Guy LeTatooer, (FR) / Filip Leu, (CH) / Karl Marc, (FR) / Volko Merschky & Simone Pfaff, (DE) / Lea Nahon, (FR) / Roxx (USA) / Minka Sicklinger (USA) / Liam Sparkes (GB) / Jacqueline Spoerle (CH) / Kostek Stekkos (BE) / Amanda Wachob (USA) / Seth Wood (USA).
Tattoo is a production of the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, Schweiz, curator Susanna Kumschick, and is being shown for the first time in Germany.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg website
Installation views of the exhibition Tattoo at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg showing in the bottom two images, photographs by Ralf Mitsch
Kept under wraps in winter and proudly displayed in summer: tattoos are now ubiquitous. However, they are much more than just a current mass phenomenon and trendy fashion accessory: many cultures throughout the world are familiar with the tradition of tattooing, and human skin has always been used as a canvas. Tattooing is one of the earliest art forms and oldest handicrafts.
Tattoos last for a lifetime. Pigments are inserted under the skin forever, yet they are as transient as the life of the person who bears them. They tell personal stories, create identity and affiliation, embellish, heal, protect – and they can both fascinate and repulse. For a long while they were most commonly known as a mark of social distinction or as a means of identifying social outcasts, and as a method of self stigmatisation used by sailors, criminals, prostitutes and gang members to distinguish themselves from “the other”. It is easy to forget that the craze for inking one’s body spread even to aristocratic circles in the later nineteenth century, in a trend that is now echoed by the current fashion for tattoos.
The Tattoo exhibition is dedicated to old traditions and new stories. It takes a look at the vibrant, innovative and multifaceted tattoo culture, with a focus on artistic, artisanal and culture specific issues. International exhibits from diverse perspectives are displayed and current debates considered. This is the first time that an exhibition has brought together such a broad range of references, presenting the phenomenon of the tattoo with a particular focus on art and design, since these enduring pictures, words and symbols inspire artists and designers. The theme of the exhibition is therefore the reciprocal influence of art, traditional and lived tattoo art and visual design.
Johann Baptist von Spix (German, 1781-1826) Journey to Brazil on command Maximilian Joseph I, King of Bavaria, in the years 1817-1820 / made and described by Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich von Martius – Munich: [sn], 1823-1831 Loan: Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg
Expedition to Brazil
Johann Baptist von Spix, 1817-1820
Between 1817 and 1820, the zoologist Johann Baptist von Spix and the botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius undertook an expedition to Brazil at the behest of Maximilian Joseph I, King of Bavaria. They were also interested in the culture of the Brazilian indigenous tribes on the Rio Yapurà, and they published their findings in a three-volume travel report. The illustration is a portrait of Juri, “The son of a cacique of the Juri nation”.
Illustrated travel books were very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. They shaped western ideas about foreign cultures and also indicate the early interest in exotic tattooing practices. James Cook’s reports on his expeditions to the South Seas in the 18th century contain the mention of the word “tattow” derived from the Polynesian. The term quickly spread and tattooing became popular in the Western world soon afterwards.
Early ethnographic drawings and engravings such as those made by Georg Forster and Karl von den Steinen attracted widespread interest, as did photographs at a later date such as the studio portraits taken by Felice Beato in Japan. They helped to make the art of tattooing into a symbol of the eroticised alien, and a magico-mythical world of cults and rites. Tattoos elicited a mixture of fascination and revulsion right from the start, particularly in middle-class circles during the 19th century: tattooing thus developed a dual character as both stigma and mark of distinction.
Enrique Marty (Spanish, b. 1969) Pablo & Ruth 2010 From the series Art is Dangerous Oil paint on latex on polyurethane, human hair, textiles, metal 155 x 90 x 53.5 cm/143 x 60 x 35cm Loan: Deweer Gallery, Otegem, Belgium
Real portraits are always the starting point for Enrique Marty’s tragicomic sculptures. The tattoos of Pablo & Ruth in the Art is Dangerous series reflect the iconography of the tattoo motifs in Japanese yakuza which the artist has explored in detail and incorporated into his work. His grotesque figures also make reference to early sculptural traditions such as those used in the quaint waxworks exhibitions of the 19th century. He builds on these themes and develops an original sculptural world. Ironic inversions and humour are essential strategies which he uses as an effective weapon. “Art is dangerous”: protest or parody? An allegory of the market system? Can art be dangerous? Or should it be? What role does the art of tattooing play?
Tattoo equipment
Throughout the world tattooing is performed by introducing pigments to the dermis, or second layer of skin. Pieces of wood, thorns, bones, horns, tortoiseshells, metals and shards can be worked into tools. Depending on the shape of the tattooing implement, the patterns produced may be smooth or dotted, narrow or broad. The individual instruments have not changed greatly over the years. However, one notable step forward was the use of electricity which resulted in new techniques and styles at the beginning of the 20th century after Samuel O’Reilly had patented his rotary tattoo machine in 1891. The electric motor moves the needles up and down regularly, enabling the operator to work smoothly and steadily. It is also a less painful process for the client. These electric machines are in widespread use today. Nevertheless, traditional tools, which have hardly changed, are also still employed.
Tattoo inks
It was not until the 20th century that tattoo inks began to be manufactured as industrial products. Previously, they had been mixed in small quantities according to individual recipes using pigments, oils and plant juices. Synthetic pigments not only altered the colour spectrum and production techniques of tattoo inks, but also led to new requirements and constraints as is clear from developments over the last forty years. Today, challenges in the manufacturing process for tattoo inks primarily concern the purity of the ink production process and the quality of the pigments procured. Other requirements tend to be connected with new problems which are no longer to do with the actual pigment that is inserted into the skin. Nowadays the main focus is on the risks posed by laser treatment for tattoo removal.
The Rich Mingins Collection: 1288 Pictures of Early Western Tattooing from the Henk Schiffmacher Collection 2011
The Rich Mingins Collection
Rich Mingins (1916-1968) ran a tattoo studio with his father and his brother Alf Mingins in Cumbria, which is in the north-west of England, and later in London. Tattooing was his passion and he was a master of his craft. He also collected photographs and newspaper cuttings about tattoos. Today all that remains is his photo album which documents the history of tattooing from 1922 to 1949. Unfortunately, it lacks a chronology or any precise dates, and no accompanying commentary has been found. The digital version with extracts from the photo album shows his clients, other well-known tattoo artists of his era, copies of pictures that were in circulation at the time and the artist himself: Rich Mingins poses for the camera with clenched fists, displaying the picture of Jesus Christ with crown, that was tattooed on his chest by his brother Alf Mingins (no. 424).
Painting The Lily! (1936, 1.12 mins.)
In this documentary, George Burchett (1872-1953) tattoos two women with permanent makeup at his studio in the West End of London. His clientele included members of the English upper classes and European royalty such as King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King Frederick IX of Denmark and King George V of England. George Burchett also tattooed Horace Ridler, the legendary Zebra Man also known as “The Great Omi”.
Tattoo Soldiers (1942, 1.15 mins.)
Three Australian soldiers talk about their tattoos from all over the world.
Woman Tattooist (1952, 1 min.)
The first British female tattooist, Jessie Knight (1904-1994), tattoos young women soldiers in Aldershot, Hampshire. She ran a number of studios from the 1920s up to the 1980s.
Tattoo Club (1954, 1.51 mins.)
The well-known British tattooist Les Skuse (1912-1973) founded the Bristol Tattoo Club in 1953 and in 1955 he organised the world’s first tattoo competition, the precursor of the tattoo conventions of today. In the 1950s the Bristol Tattoo Club was the focal point of the tattoo scene, counting famous people such as Bob Maddison, Al Schiefley, Albert Cornelissen and Tattoo Peter among its members.
Photograph from the Christian Warlich estate, 1961 Loan: Hamburg Museum, Sammlung Fotografie
Christian Warlich: the “King of the tattoo artists”
During his lifetime, Christian Warlich (1890-1964) was held to be the greatest tattoo artist in Germany and gained an international reputation as “King of the tattoo artists”. He had taught the craft to the Hamburg tattoo legend Herbert Hoffmann and later made him to be his “Crown Prince”. Warlich himself is believed to have come into this profession by chance. After an apprenticeship as a boilermaker he had gone to sea and become acquainted with tattoo artists in the United States. From there, he brought back one of the first electric tattoo machines. In 1919, Warlich opened an inn in today’s Clemens-Schultz-Straße in St. Pauli, Hamburg, where one of the corners served as a “Modern Tattoo Studio”. Warlich took on tattooing as a serious business: he promoted the store, traded with tattoo machines and tools and in addition to his tattooing, he offered a residue-free and painless removal of tattoos by using a special tincture. Warlich was not only noticed because of his business sense, his work was characterized by craftsmanship and artistic standards, too. Unlike other tattoo artists of his time, he strove for a continuous improvement of the shapes and for the modernisation of the image repertoire. For these purposes, he developed new designs and collected all kinds of templates, for instance from Chinese sample books, movie posters or advertising images. In addition, Warlich kept in contact with tattooists all over Europe, North America and Asia. They exchanged sketches photographs and celluloid stencils with which the outlines of the motifs were transferred to the skin of the customers.
The tattooist Herbert Hoffmann: a legend
The world famous tattooist Herbert Hoffmann (1919-2010) lived through and helped shape various stages of the history of western tattooing. Throughout his life he was very keen to help tattoos gain acceptance and social approval. Having been trained by Christian Warlich, he later became the proprietor of Germany’s oldest tattoo studio in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, where he worked until 1980. He then moved to Switzerland, where he lived with his partner Jakob Acker in Schwendi bei Heiden in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. Hoffmann was active in the tattoo scene right up to his death in 2010, attending conventions throughout Europe and acting as an important role model for younger tattoo artists. He himself bore tattoos by Christian Warlich, Tattoo Peter, Tatover Ole, Horst Streckenbach and others. Throughout his life he was also a keen photographer and collector. Many of his photographs were published in the photo book Living Picture Books, Portrait of a Tattooing Passion 1878-1952, which is now out of print. The images displayed in the exhibition are from his private archive and have rarely been shown before. These are photographs from his personal albums with portraits of his friends and clients. They depict Herbert Hoffmann himself at different stages of his life, as well as his environment. At the same time, they narrate an important chapter in the history of tattooing from the 1920s to the 1970s. Unfortunately his written comments can no longer be traced.
Women and tattoos from the private collection of Herbert Hoffmann
The picture archive of the tattooist and collector Herbert Hoffmann (1919-2010) also includes photographs of tattooed women from the 1920s up to the 1970s. Some of them are photographs he took himself but others are copies and images that were circulated in various forms by like-minded people. They are not systematically arranged, most of them are undated and there is no commentary. The collection also includes iconic photographs which had a decisive impact on how tattooed women were viewed at that period. This selection of Herbert Hoffmann’s pictures is a chronicle of women with tattoos, from circus attractions of the 1920s and glamour girls of the 1960s to the predecessors of the famous “new burlesque” artists like Dita Von Teese. However, there are also photos of “ordinary women” with tattoos in the prim-and-proper 1950s and – more rarely – of female tattooists. Herbert Hoffmann’s collection ends with the “renaissance” of tattooing in the 1970s. At that time, women in particular were discovering tattoos as a sign of self-empowerment and the number of female creative tattoo artists making their way in this male-dominated profession began to increase. Today there is a huge variety of (self-)expression by tattooed women, and female tattoo artists play an essential and influential role in the rich contemporary tattoo culture.
Maud Stevens Wagner, Tattoo Artist, USA (1877-1961, photo from 1907)
Maud Stevens Wagner (American, 1877-1961)
The American tightrope walker and contortionist Maud Wagner was the first well-known female tattooist in the Western world. Like others of the small number of female tattooists in the 1920s, she learned her craft from her husband, Gus Wagner, whom she met at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.
Lady Viola (American, 1898-1977) Nd
Lady Viola (Ethel Martin) (American, 1898-1977)
Ethel Martin Vangi, who became famous as “Lady Viola”, was a circus performer and later tattooist; she had portraits of presidents Woodrow Wilson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln tattooed on her chest. Her left thigh was tattooed with pictures of popular figures of the day, such as Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin.
Artoria Gibbons (American, 1893-1985) Nd
Artoria Gibbons (American, 1893-1985)
Like many tattooed circus attractions, Anna Mae Burlington Gibbons was a working-class woman who had herself tattooed when she fell on hard times, and then earned good money as a result (especially as a woman). She and her husband, the tattooist Charles Gibbons, travelled all over America in the 1920s and worked as a team in the circus business. She had one tattoo showing a section of Botticelli’s Annunciation, another depicting a part of Michelangelo’s Holy Family, and her chest featured a portrait of George Washington.
Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025) Untitled [Self-portrait] Nd
Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025)
The last great circus lady, Cindy Ray – also known as “Miss Technicolor” or “The Classy Lassie with the Tattooed Chassis” – toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1960s. She learned how to do tattooing and is still working today under her real name, Bev Nicholas, at the Moving Pictures Tattoo Studio near Melbourne.
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Irene “Bobbie” Libarry 1976 Silver gelatin estate print 19.3 x 17.8cm Loan: The Imogen Cunningham Trust, Lopez Island, USA
Irene “Bobbie” Libarry (American, 1893-1978)
Irene “Bobbie” Libarry (1893-1978) worked as a circus performer, magician and market vendor. She was tattooed by her husband in 1918, ran her own sideshow “The World’s Strangest People” in the 1930s and later worked as a tattoo artist in San Francisco.
Numerous historical portraits of tattooed men have been preserved in the inheritance of the tattoo artist Christian Warlich (1890-1964). The pictures probably originate in the 1880s to 1890s [see both images above]. Especially typical contemporary garments, the beard and hair fashion of the time, relevant tattoo motifs from the German Empire under William I or the symbol of the tenth World Expo in 1889, the Eiffel Tower, give information about this type. All images are carefully rear numbered and labeled with the names of the people portrayed. On display are mainly dock workers and seafarers; members of underprivileged workers who were not used to posing in front of a camera. In the late 19th century, the loading work in the ports was extremely cumbersome and labour intensive, roosts such as the Hamburg Gängeviertel hosted thousands of working families. In this milieu relevant subjects such as anchors, sailboats or professional characters show the belonging to a social group. The tattoos document but beyond the story of people’s lives. There are references to the military service or the crossing of the equator, as well as prison stays or religious motives.
Preserved tattoo specimens
The specimens date from around 1900. At the time they were used to identify unknown corpses. Photography was not yet in routine use at that period and preserved specimens offered almost the only opportunity to document a tattoo in detail and keep it for later identification. The oldest known report of successful identification thanks to a tattoo dates back to the 11th century: King Harold II of England fell in battle and is said to have been identified by the inscription “Edith and England” tattooed above his heart, thanks to which he was buried in a manner befitting his rank.
Emile Lavril, Romeo und Julia Tattoo 14 November 1913, front
Rudolf Archibald Reiss (German-Swiss, 1875-1929)
The criminologist, lecturer and photographer founded the “Institut de police scientifique” at the University of Lausanne in 1909. He also helped to set up courses in photography for investigative purposes at the same institution. Forensic photography, which was being carried out according to standard criteria for the first time was an essential component in his teaching. Since tattoos are important identification features, Reiss paid particular attention to them [see photograph above]. However, the technology available at the time made it difficult to obtain a sharp and accurate image. Reiss used photographs purely for forensic purposes. He refused to accept the then common opinion that offenders could be recognised simply because they had tattoos.
Eyes on the stomach denote homosexuality (the penis makes the ‘nose’ of the face). Stars on the shoulders show that an inmate is a criminal ‘authority’. The medals are awards that existed before the revolution and as such are signs of defiance towards the Soviet regime.
The devils on the shoulders of this inmate show a hatred of authority. This type of tattoo is known as an oskal (grin), a baring of teeth towards the system. They are sometimes accompanied by anti-Soviet texts.
The double-headed eagle is a Russian state symbol that dates back to the 15th century. After the fall of Communism, it replaced the hammer and sickle as the Russian Federation’s coat of arms. This Soviet-era photo is a bold symbol of rage against the USSR; the Statue of Liberty implies a longing for freedom.
Photographs of Russian convicts
Up until the end of the 19th century, it was usual for the government to burn the initials “B.O.R.” (Russian for thief) into thieves’ skin as a punishment. Subsequently, tattoos developed as a distinctive feature of professional criminals; serving as demarcation, identification, as well as a secret means of communication: they transmit information such as affiliation, profession, number of convictions or position in criminal hierarchies. This informal practice transliterated the original stigmatisation inflicted through the government, using a pictorial repertoire borrowed from traditional tattoo imagery while assigning a new meaning. Most of the prison tattoos were done with primitive instruments, such as modified electric shavers with attached needles. Oftentimes, a self-made mixture of rubber and urine was used as substitute ink, bearing great health risks. Arkady Bronnikov (b. 1926) was a leading forensic doctor at the interior ministry of the USSR. From the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s he interviewed and photographed numerous inmates of labour camps in the Urals and Siberia. Today, Bronnikov is a leading expert on tattoo iconography and owns what is considered to be one of the biggest photographic collections of Russian prison tattoos.
The Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler (b. 1977) spent eight years looking for ex-prisoners, photographing their tattoos and writing down the stories behind them. The result was an impressive documentary account of the still poorly researched history of prison tattoos. The pictures and interviews were published in the book Inked for Life. The World of Prison Tattoos.
The acceptance of tattoos in Japanese society is subject to constant change. In the 19th century, large tattoos were considered decorative and were carried openly by rickshaw drivers, for example. For the scantily clad men an ornate body was helpful for their business because it attracted the attention of customers. The image of bullies and petty criminals adhered to rickshaw drivers, as well as to other professions from the simple population which led to a long-term negative perception of the skin images. As an identifying feature of “outlaws” they also function in the criminal milieu of the yakuza. In the Japanese mafia organisation, tattoos still illustrate the milieu name of the bearer (“serpent”, “dragon”, etc.) and document his gang membership. The result was a social aversion to tattoos which continues to this day and also unjustly criminalises innocent citizens. Unlike their historical predecessors, taxi drivers today would only flaunt their tattoos for a photographer; because they are not good for business. Tattoos in Japan were rarely shown openly; in public bath houses they are even forbidden to this day. It was only through the appreciation of the Japanese tattoo tradition by the American tattoo scene of the 1960s and 1970s that the taboo was partially revised.
Masahiko Adachi (Japanese, b. 1983) Flesh Color 2010 Japan Animation / 4 Min.
Japanese colour woodcuts: The 108 heroes of the “Suikoden”
The Japanese name “Suikoden” stands for a famous Chinese adventure story that became very popular in both countries. In this story, a group of rebels fights against corruption and injustice, campaigning for the poor and the disadvantaged. The story originates in the 14th century and is set in the 12th century. For the first time, Kuniyoshi displays these rebels with naked, tattooed bodies which lead to a great success of the book. Until today, the Suikoden is a well-known theme of Japanese culture such as computer games and TV series.
Fumie Sasabuchi draws irezumi tattoos on the skin of pictures of young girls taken from the children’s fashion magazine Vogue Angels. The motifs of the tattoos are part of the traditional repertoire of the Japanese yakuza mafia, and symbolise mortal danger, superhuman strength and special protection, among other things. Sasabuchi unites two media from Western and Eastern popular culture: photography from modern fashion magazines and the traditional woodcut. She combines Japanese myths with Western picture subjects and plays with the ensuing ambivalent images.
Twelve years of civil war in El Salvador came to an end in 1992. Today, gang warfare is an everyday reality in San Salvador, mainly because of two gangs: the Mara Salvatrucha (MS) and the Mara 18 (18). Every year 2,000 people die as a result. Some 14,000 abandoned youths dedicate their lives to the gangs which replace their families. They are the successors of the US gangs that were founded in the 1980s by refugees from the Salvadoran civil war. The Mara gangs today, which originated in the ghettos of Los Angeles, have over 70,000 members in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Members generally have a tattoo containing the letters M or MS, as well as the number 13 which refers to the position of M in the alphabet. Tattoos in the shape of teardrops represent the number of murders committed, or commemorate the death of a fellow Mara member and friend. The words “La vida loca” stand for “the crazy life” in the Mara, and a downward-pointing M formed with the fingers is used as a sign of recognition.
The Spanish-French photographer and documentary filmmaker Christian Poveda spent over a year with members of the Mara. He followed the lives of these “lost youths”, documenting them through interviews, impressive photographs and the film La vida loca (El Salvador / France / 2008 / 90 mins.). Poveda was killed by several shots to the head in San Salvador in 2009 while working on another film.
The face tattoos of the Chin women in Burma form part of a ritual to mark the transition from childhood to the adult world. Female tattoo artists use thorns 17 or needles to prick patterns into the skin. The symbolic meaning of the lines and dots cannot be ascertained, since no records exist. All that is known is that the patterns differentiate one clan from another. Although the tradition of facial tattooing has died out in many parts of Burma, it is now experiencing a partial revival.
The Tã moko facial tattoos of the Maori in New Zealand give information about family membership, ancestors and social position, as well as the specific abilities of the tattooed person. Each part of the face is dedicated to a particular type of information. Few people have a tattoo in the centre of the forehead, for example, since this indicates high status. Men can usually wear tattoos over the entire face, whereas women have them only on the chin area. This tattoo tradition has been suppressed for a long period, as also happened in other cultures, but the Tã moko have recently been experiencing a renaissance.
Mau Moko: photographic images of the world of Maori tattoo by Becky Nunes
“These are impressive and moving images, which deserve exhibition simply in their own right. More than that, they place moko in a contemporary context, expressing the art as a living, relevant force in our culture and not some struggling remnant of a distant past. They strongly counter the negative connotations of moko.”
Hamish Keith, Art Historian 2009
Mau Moko: the World of Maori Tattoo began as a research project at the University of Waikato, and evolved into a major publication, a scholarly yet entertaining journey from the art’s Pacific chisel origins to the marae workshops and sophisticated urban studios of Aotearoa today. It has been essentially a visual experience – the exacting portraiture of Parkinson and Jenner-Merrett, the iconic canvasses of Goldie and Lindauer, the pretty, ubiquitous postcard albums, and most recently, the brooding, elemental image-making of Westra and Friedlander, have all marked their own place, in their own time. With Mau Moko, and the consummate artistry of this collection, we reach the twenty first century. Becky Nunes’ eloquent lens engages the viewer, and the viewed, and one wonders who is saying “Tirohia, he moko!” It is about us. And yes, it is forever.
Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. May 2008
In December 2007 Penguin Books published Mau Moko, The World Of Maori Tattoo. The result of several years’ research, the book explores the cultural and spiritual issues around ta moko, and relates the stories of its wearers and practitioners. Mau Moko was authored by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku and Linda Waimarie Nikora with contemporary portraits photographed by Becky Nunes. Becky Nunes is a photographic artist and educator, making images for a range of commercial and editorial clients, as well as her own personal work. She heads the Photo Media department at Whitecliffe College of Arts & Design. For the Mau Moko project Nunes travelled through both the North and South Islands of Aotearoa / New Zealand meeting and photographing wearers and practitioners of ta moko.
Sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant are commonly found in Thailand. They protect the bearers from accidents, misfortune and crime. At the same time they help them to lead a morally upright life. However, the rules set by the tattooist must be obeyed or the tattoos lose their power. Sak Yants are not intended for public view and therefore often kept hidden. The motifs used are derived from ancient Khmer script writings and animal symbols such as tigers, dragons, birds, snakes and lizards. The tiger, or Yant Sua, is a popular subject and is associated with strength, fearlessness and power.
Tattoo Master
There are several hundred tattooists in Thailand. Monks tattoo in their temples, and tattoo masters in studios. They are authority figures and their followers also seek advice from them. The sacred tattoos link tattooist and tattooed for a lifetime. 38-year-old Achan Neng Onnut is a tattoo master in On Nut, a district of Bangkok. The pricked motif is called Pho Kae. It depicts a recluse, or hermit, and bestows wisdom, goodness and a peaceful mind to the bearer. The tattoo master recites a mantra in order to activate the tattoo.
Santiago Sierra (Spanish, b. 1966) 250 cm line tattooed on six paid people 1999 Espacio Aglutinador, Havanna / Cuba / doc. / 28.17 mins. / no sound Loan: Galerie Kow, Berlin
In 1999 Santiago Sierra recruited six young unemployed men in Havana to stand in a row and have a horizontal line tattooed on them, running continuously from one man’s back to the next, in exchange for 30 dollars each. Further versions of this performance were carried out and documented as simply as possible. It alludes to the unequal values of capitalist society and to the relative and haphazard nature of remuneration. The imprecise line drawn of the tattoos suggests scarring, so the participants in the performance – members of socially marginalised groups – were subjected to further stigmatisation.
Artur Żmijewski (Polish, b. 1966) 80064 2004 11 mins. Polish with English subtitles Loaned by the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich
The Polish artist Artur Żmijewski takes an unsparing and provocative look at the tattooing that took place in the Nazi concentration camps. His video shows 92-year-old Auschwitz survivor Josef Tarnawa whom the artist persuaded to have his fading camp number re-inked. While the tattooist is renewing the numbers, Josef Tarnawa recalls the most traumatic time of his life. Artur Żmijewski’s video work polarises opinions. On the one hand, Josef Tarnawa is stigmatised for a second time, but on the other, the number on his left forearm acts as a shocking memorial. According to Artur Żmijewski, nowadays active remembrance is often far too conventional.
In the history of western tattooing, brands and involuntary tattoos have receded into the background, although the practices used during the Second World War remain deep in people’s memories. Whereas the prisoners in Auschwitz were numbered, members of the SS had their blood group tattooed on their upper arms. This meant that after the war, what had started out as a useful medical information turned out to be an irreversible identification mark. The social connotations of a tattoo change over time, with proud insider symbols becoming the stigmata of an outsider group.
Wim Delvoye (Belgium, b. 1965) Tim 2006-08 Tattoo, loan: Sammlung Reinking, Hamburg
Tim Steiner, a Swiss citizen, has had a work by the Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye tattooed on his back. In 2008 the tattoo was sold to a Hamburg-based art collector who acquired the right to lend, sell and bequeath Tim Steiner as a loan object and to preserve his skin after his death. Since then, the work, called Tim, has given rise to international controversy. It raises important questions about ethics in the art market, and about power and the right to dispose of the human body (and its organs, such as the skin).
Chris Eckert (American, b. 1968) Auto Ink 2010 Metal, paint, microelectronics 137 x 56 x 50cm Loaned by the artist
Auto Ink
The strongest indication of a person’s religion is geography. You are born into your religion. That doesn’t make it irrelevant or incorrect – religion provides a framework for basic morality that’s very powerful and it gives people a cultural identity that spans borders. I’ve attended mass in Dutch, German, French, and Spanish and I’ve always felt like I belonged. While my personal experience with religion is one of inclusion, a system that unites people from different regions and cultures, the public face of religion is often one of exclusion. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish zealots who know what God wants. More specifically they know what God doesn’t want and apparently God does not want me… or you. This public face of religion is always so certain, self-confident, even arrogant. That anyone could possibly know the “truth” when that truth is randomly assigned at birth is just funny.
Auto Ink is a three axis numerically controlled sculpture. Once the main switch is triggered, the operator is assigned a religion and its corresponding symbol is tattooed onto the persons arm. The operator does not have control over the assigned symbol. It is assigned either randomly or through divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs.
The kinetic sculpture of American artist Chris Eckert draws a random religious symbol on the arm of a volunteer subject. Membership of a religion integrates, connects and offers an ethical and moral framework for living with others. Yet many faiths compete with each other and regard the others with resentment and politically motivated enmity. Chris Eckert’s tattooing machine explores how having a particular faith can affect peaceful coexistence in a globalised world.
In European history, the now defunct tradition of religious pilgrim tattoos is an example of the practice of tattooing as a mark of identity and segregation. Examples include the crusader tattoos and tattooed guild symbols in the Middle Ages.
Inking the skin requires the same aesthetic imagination and care, the same manual dexterity, and the same knowledge of materials and colour as other artistic processes. The innovative contemporary tattoo scene is transcend¬ing the language of classical tattooing and regenerating the medium. The image loop shows a diverse range of top quality works by international tattoo artists in a huge variety of styles.
Frank Taki Über(leben) 2014
Tradition and modernity
The rich and cross-cultural collection of the MKG has served as an inspiration for creative work to artists and craftspeople for over 130 years. The classic ornaments of historism, the floral patterns of art nouveau or the spirited characters of Japanese wood cuts: the continuous examination with this kind of historic artwork and its adaption into one’s own visual language are just as much a part of the art of tattooing as the creation of new images. In the autumn of 2014, the MKG has invited a selection of Hamburg tattoo artists to use the museum’s collection as a starting point for new tattoo designs.
Timm Ulrichs (German, b. 1940) The End Eyelid tattoo, 1970/1981/1997 Inkjet print on canvas on stretcher bars, 150 x 150cm Loaned by the artist
In 1981, Timm Ulrichs had THE END tattooed on his right eyelid by “Tattoo Samy” (Horst Heinrich Streckenbach). The tattoo, which can only be read when the eye is closed, recalls the final credits of a film, the last performance and the final moment. This tattoo event was also documented on film, created in the context of the video of the same name which juxtaposes 60 final images.
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Steintorplatz, 20099 Hamburg
Co-curators: Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, and Sarah Kelly Oehler, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art at the Art institute of Chicago
Again, I am drawn to these impressive avant-garde works of art. I’d have any of them residing in my flat, thank you very much. The Dalí, Delaunay and Léger in painting and drawing for me, and in photography, the muscular Ilse Bing, the divine Umbo and the mesmeric, disturbing can’t take your eyes off it, Witkiewicz self-portrait.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of the fragments.”
Luis Buñuel (Spanish, 1900-1983) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) Un Chien Andalou 1929
Director – Luis Buñuel Writers – Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel Cast – Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff
Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) is a 1929 Franco-Spanish silent surrealist short film by Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Buñuel’s first film, it was initially released in a limited capacity at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.
Un Chien Andalou has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. With disjointed chronology, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without events or characters changing, it uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of the then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
Ballet Mécanique (1923-1924) is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film conceived, written, and co-directed by the artist Fernand Léger in collaboration with the filmmaker Dudley Murphy (with cinematographic input from Man Ray). It has a musical score by the American composer George Antheil. However, the film premiered in silent version on 24 September 1924 at the Internationale Ausstellung neuer Theatertechnik (International Exposition for New Theater Technique) in Vienna presented by Frederick Kiesler. It is considered one of the masterpieces of early experimental filmmaking.
Ballet mécanique (1924) | MoMA
Ballet mécanique, conceived by painter Fernand Léger and photographed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy (possibly with some involvement from Man Ray), is a rhythmic interplay between human and object. Affected by his experience of fighting in World War I, and in particular by the mustard gas attack that left him hospitalised for a year, Léger became fascinated with mechanical technology, which would feature heavily in his post-1917 art. Ballet mécanique, his only film, is an example of this juxtaposition of man and machine: gears and pendulums vs. eyes and mouths, pistons pumping vs. a woman’s endless climb up the stairs, clocks vs. legs. A kaleidoscopic combination of faces and kitchen utensils, Ballet mécanique was completely unlike contemporary commercial movies, and would pave the way for other revolutionary films like Metropolis and Limite.
If you were to see Ballet mécanique installed in one of our galleries or projected in one of our theaters, it would look a little different than it does here – the frameline would be stabilised and the edges of the picture would either be cropped or camouflaged with masking around the screen. However, we are presenting this version the way a scholar visiting the Film Study Center would see it on a flatbed viewing machine, with a slight bounce to the image and the sprocket holes visible, and without live musical accompaniment. (The score, composed by George Antheil and usually performed as a separate concert piece, was finished several years after Ballet mécanique premiered and is significantly longer than the film.)
MoMA text from the YouTube website
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) Object 1936 The Art Institute of Chciago Through prior gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman
A century ago, society and life were changing as rapidly and radically as they are in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists in the early years of the 20th century responded to these issues with both exhilaration and anxiety. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflect this new shift in perception.
Shatter Rupture Break, the first exhibition in The Modern Series, explores the manifold ways that ideas of fragmentation and rupture, which permeated both the United States and Europe, became central conceptual and visual themes in art of the modern age. Responding to the new forms and pace of the metropolis, artists such as Robert Delaunay and Gino Severini disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz explored collage, using trash and bits and pieces of printed material in compositions to reflect social and political upheaval and produce something whole out of fragments. In the wake of new theories of the mind as well as the literal tearing apart of bodies in war, artists such as Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Stanisław Witkiewicz produced photographs and objects revealing the fractured self or erotic dismemberment. The theme of fragmentation was ubiquitous as inspiration for both the formal and conceptual revolutions in art making in the modern age.
Shatter Rupture Break unites diverse objects from across the entire holdings of the Art Institute – paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films – to present a rich cacophony that exemplifies the radical and generative ruptures of modern art.
The Modern Series
A quintessentially modern city, Chicago has been known as a place for modern art for over a century, and the Art Institute of Chicago has been central to this history. The Modern Series exhibitions are designed to bring together the museum’s acclaimed holdings of modern art across all media, display them in fresh and innovative ways within new intellectual contexts, and demonstrate the continued vitality and relevance of modern art for today.
Text from the Art Institute of Chicago website
Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) Champs de Mars: The Red Tower 1911/1923 The Art Institute of Chicago Joseph Winterbotham Collection
Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964) Ready-to-Wear 1955 The Art Institute of Chicago Restricted gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sigmund W. Kunstadter; Goodman Endowment
Designed by Ruben Haley Made by Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company “Ruba Rombic” Vase 1928/1932 Art Institute of Chicago Raymond W. Garbe Fund in honor of Carl A. Erikson; Shirley and Anthony Sallas Fund
The Art Institute of Chicago is introducing an innovative new series of exhibitions that presents works from the museum’s acclaimed collection of modern art in reimagined ways that demonstrate the continued vitality and significance these works have today.
The Modern Series debuts with Shatter Rupture Break, opening Sunday, February 15, in Galleries 182 and 184 of the museum’s Modern Wing. The exhibition unites such diverse objects as paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and designed objects, textiles, books, and films.
“We wanted to explore how the idea of rupture permeated modern life in Europe and the Americas,” said Elizabeth Siegel, Associate Curator of Photography, who, with Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Associate Curator of American Art, took the lead in organising the first exhibition. “It served as an inspiration for revolutionary formal and conceptual developments in art making that remain relevant today.”
A century ago, society was changing as rapidly and radically as it is in today’s digital age. Quicker communication, faster production, and wider circulation of people, goods, and ideas – in addition to the outbreak of World War I – produced a profoundly new understanding of the world, and artists responded with both anxiety and exhilaration. Freeing themselves from the restraints of tradition, modern artists developed groundbreaking pictorial strategies that reflected this new shift in perception.
Responding to the new forms and pace of cities, artists such as Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941) and Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) disrupted traditional conventions of depth and illusionism, presenting vision as something fractured. Delaunay’s Champs de Mars: The Red Tower fragments the iconic form of the Eiffel Tower, exemplifying how modern life – particularly in an accelerated urban environment – encouraged new and often fractured ways of seeing. Picturesque vistas no longer adequately conveyed the fast pace of the modern metropolis.
The human body as well could no longer be seen as intact and whole. A devastating and mechanised world war had returned men from the front with unimaginable wounds, and the fragmented body became emblematic of a new way of understanding a fractured world. Surrealists such as Hans Bellmer (German, 1902-1975), Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1989) fetishised body parts in images, separating out eyes, hands, and legs in suggestive renderings. A more literal representation of the shattered body comes from Chicago’s own Ivan Albright, who was a medical draftsman in World War I. In his rarely shown Medical Sketchbook, he created fascinatingly gruesome watercolours that documented injured soldiers and the x-rays of their wounds.
Just as with the body, the mind in the modern era also came to be seen as fragmented. Stanislaw Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) produced a series of self-portraits as an act of psychological exploration. His work culminated in one stunning photograph made by shattering a glass negative, which he then reassembled and printed, thus conveying an evocative sense of a shattered psyche. The artistic expression of dreams and mental imagery perhaps reached a pinnacle not in a painting or a sculpture, but in a film. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s film Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) mystified viewers with its dreamlike narrative, dissolves from human to animal forms, dismembered body parts, and shockingly violent acts in an attempt to translate the unconscious mind onto a celluloid strip.
Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) and George Grosz (German, 1893-1959) explored collage, which took on new importance for avant-garde artists thanks to the aesthetic appeal and widespread availability of mass-produced media. Schwitters used the ephemera of German society to create what he called Merz, an invented term signifying an artistic practice that included collage, assemblage, painting, poems, and performance. The Art Institute owns a significant group of these collages by Schwitters, and six will appear in the exhibition. The use of thrown-away, ripped up, and scissored-out pieces of paper, divorced from their original meaning and reassembled with nails and glue into new objects, was an act that exposed the social and political disruptions of a German society that seemed broken and on the edge of collapse in the aftermath of World War I.
Shatter Rupture Break is unusual in that it unites objects from across the entire museum – from seven curatorial departments as well as the library. This multiplicity is significant because modern artists did not confine themselves to one medium, but explored different visual effects across a variety of media. As well, the show prominently features the voices of artists, writers, scientists, and other intellectuals of the period. The goal is to create a dynamic space that evokes the electrifying, disruptive, and cacophonous nature of modern art at the time.
“We hope to excite interest in the modern period as a crucial precursor to the changes of our own time, to show how what might seem old now was shockingly fresh then,” said Oehler.
Considered one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world, the Art Institute’s collection of modern art includes nearly 1,000 works by artists from Europe and the Americas. The museum was an early champion of modern artists, from its presentation of the Armory Show in 1913 to its early history of acquiring major masterpieces. This show highlights some recent acquisitions of modern art, but also includes some long-held works that have formed the core of the modern collection for decades. Shatter Rupture Break celebrates this history by bringing together works that visitors may know well, but have never seen in this context or with this diverse array of objects.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purpose of art criticism.
I freely admit that I knew little about this artist’s work before starting to assemble this posting.
Strong, focused, conceptually driven bodies of work that have real guts and presence. Tough, no compromise realist photographs with Gossage not afraid to challenge convention… through dark, almost totally black, chthonic images; through over exposure, sprocket holes of the film, out of focus foregrounds, and an elemental consciousness pushing at reality.
While there are only 12 images in the posting (I wish there were more!), there are 600 more on the Art Institute of Chicago website in the collection and I have spent a lot of time immersing myself in his worlds, his heterotopic spaces (Foucault), spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental. The series Berlin in the Time of the Wall is a particular favourite. Just look at the image Stallschreiberstr., (1989, below) and grasp the atmosphere and allusion of the image – the light that emanates from the yin/yang puddle and the symbolic quality of that division with the looming presence of the towering wall, being reflected into the water and next to the only specular highlight of the image.
I am deeply impressed by the profundity of his artistic enquiry, his visioning of a reality that takes the viewer places that they have never been before. And holds them there. Gossage does more than just gather, record, and sequence memories from our contemporary world… he creates those memories afresh, anew. Some photographs in his series work better than others but that is bound to happen when you are really trying to engage with the world that you are imag(in)ing. The force is strong in this one. He got me hook, line and sinker.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Art Institute of Chicago for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For ‘There and Gone’, [Gossage] is photographing on the beach of Tijuana in Mexico; ‘Berlin in the Time of The Wall’ is taking place in Berlin; ‘The Romance Industry’ in Marghera, a desolated industrial area located across the lagoon from Venice in Italy. With these series John Gossage is established as an anthropologist of the ordinary.
In his work, objects, places, situations are also clues, traces to build a photographic memory of past and contemporary history… The choice of the title “Routine” for both of these exhibitions shouldn’t surprise us. John Gossage is using photography as a mastered routine. He gathers, records, and sequences memories from our contemporary world.”
Agathe Cancellieri. “Chicago: Three Routines by John Gossage,” on The Eye of Photography website 2nd March 2015 [Online] Cited 10/03/2015. No longer available online
The first museum survey of American photographer John Gossage’s career ever mounted, this “retrospective in a room” brings together several decades’ worth of work to show three distinct ways, or routines, in which the artist has approached photography.
One routine concentrates on his intensely productive time in Berlin in the 1980s; on display are two dozen images from the nearly 600 that make up his Berlin series, which the Art Institute is fortunate to own in its entirety. The second routine comes from Gossage’s recent year spent traveling the United States on a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, making portraits of art students and capturing views in smaller towns and cities, from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Rochester, Minnesota. The third offers a “medley” of images from across his career, which he began in his teenage years as a student of Lisette Model, Alexey Brodovich, and Bruce Davidson. In addition to highlighting the various photographic methods Gossage has used throughout his career, the exhibition includes a reading table with a selection of the artist’s publications, showcasing his talents as a consummate printer and an ingenious book artist.
Jim Iska Untitled [Installation views of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago] 2015
The Art Institute of Chicago is presenting the first museum survey ever mounted of American photographer John Gossage’s career. John Gossage: Three Routines opened Jan. 22, 2015, and continues through May 3, 2015, in Galleries 188 and 189 in the museum’s Modern Wing.
Gossage, who was born in New York City in 1946, began his photographic career at age 14, taking pictures for the local newspaper in Staten Island, New York. Within a year he advanced to intensive studies with photographers Lisette Model and Bruce Davidson, as well as with art director Alexey Brodovitch.
His only formal education came in 1964, at the experimental Walden School in Washington, D.C. Gossage continued to live in Washington after he graduated, even though New York remained central to his development. He showed his own work there – most frequently with the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan – and organised shows of work by others, including a three-part exhibition on the New York School at the Corcoran Gallery in 1992.
The Art Institute’s “retrospective in a room” brings together several decades’ worth of work to show three distinct ways, or routines, in which the artist has approached photography. One routine concentrates on his intensely productive time in Berlin in the 1980s; on display are two dozen images from the nearly 600 that make up his Berlin series, which the Art Institute is fortunate to own in its entirety. The second routine comes from Gossage’s recent year spent traveling the United States on a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, making portraits of art students and capturing views in small towns, particularly in Colorado. The third offers a “medley” (a fitting approach, as Gossage once played blues guitar professionally) of images from across his career. In addition to highlighting the various photographic methods Gossage has used throughout his career, the exhibition includes a reading table with a selection of the artist’s publications, showcasing his talents as a consummate printer and an ingenious book artist.
While Gossage plays with narrative in his works, he only partly accepts the general expectation that photographs will explain and replicate the world. Extending from Berlin in 1982 to Albuquerque, N.M., in 2014, Three Routines displays a permutating approach to creativity that suggests a reflection on individual continuity in the face of massive historical change. The grouping of so many projects illuminates how Gossage works to maintain authorial consistency while regularly challenging his habits and even questioning the value of a personal style.
John Gossage: Three Routines was organised by Matthew Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography, at the Art Institute. Major funding for the exhibition has been provided by the Trellis Fund. Additional support has been generously contributed by Stephen G. Stein and Edward Lenkin. The exhibition is part of Photography Is ____________ , a nine-month celebration of photography at the Art Institute that includes pop-up gallery talks, online events, and the presentation of the museum’s most treasured photographs.”
“There and Gone is a book in three chapters … the first chapter being the bathing beach in the city of Tijuana. My wife, Terri Weifenbach, took me to this beach. It’s one of those funny places in the world where everything comes together. It’s like a stage set almost. The landscape, what’s going on there and what it means is all concentrated in a relatively small area; it’s exceedingly intense. There’s a lot of illegal border crossing and at the same time it’s the beach of the people of Tijuana.
Robert Adams made a comment in his book Beauty in Photography that always stuck with me. [He wrote] that no photographer of major ambition had ever sustained important work taken with long telephoto lenses. It seemed on obvious loophole. There’s got to be something out there worth taking, something like the periphery of your vision at a great distance. What are things at a great distance?
What seemed interesting to me was the photographing of strangers. Here was a culture whose language I did not speak, which I didn’t really know anything about … I could go on the beach and do the standard photojournalist pantomime where you spend a couple of days blending in, getting to know the people, but it’s a lie, an illusion. Given this I decided to stay at a distance and photograph people who didn’t know that they were being photographed. All of the pictures taken of Mexico are done from America, about a quarter mile down the beach. I could just stand there and shoot all day, anything that went on, taking another culture on its own terms.”
Exhibition dates: 23rd December, 2014 – 10th May, 2015
Curator: organised by assistant curator Arpad Kovacs in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum
Herman F. Nielson (American, active Niagara Falls, New York 1883 – early 1900s) View of Niagara Falls in Winter c. 1885 Gelatin silver print 19.1 x 24.3cm (7 1/2 x 9 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum always puts on the most interesting photography exhibitions. This looks to be no exception.
Marcus
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Platt D. Babbitt (American, 1823-1879, active Niagara Falls, New York 1853-1870) [Scene at Niagara Falls] c. 1855 Whole plate daguerreotype The J. Paul Getty Museum CC This work is in the public domain
In the 1800s Prospect Point at Niagara Falls was a popular destination for travellers in search of a transcendent encounter with nature. The falls were revered as a sacred place that was recognised by the Catholic Church in 1861 as a “pilgrim shrine,” where the faithful could contemplate the landscape as an example of divine majesty. Two well-dressed couples are seen from behind as they stand on the shore downstream from the falls, gazing at its majestic splendour. The silhouetted forms – women wearing full skirts and bonnets and carrying umbrellas and men in stovepipe hats – are sharply outlined against the patch of shore and expansive, white foam. Platt D. Babbitt would customarily set up his camera in an open-sided pavilion and photograph groups of tourists admiring the falls without their knowledge, as he appears to have done here. Later he would sell the unsuspecting subjects their daguerreotype likenesses alongside the natural wonder.
Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) The Billiard Room, Mentmore c. 1858 Albumen silver print Height: 303mm (11.93 in) Width: 306mm (12.05 in). The J. Paul Getty Museum CC This work is in the public domain
A group of fashionable men and women enjoy a game of billiards in a richly furnished salon. The recently completed billiards room, which was designed as a conservatory, is flooded with sunlight, illuminating the lavish interior and creating a dramatic pattern of light and shadows. Indoor photography was rare in the mid-1800s, but the abundance of light and Fenton’s skill with the wet-collodion process created a remarkably detailed portrait of the space and its inhabitants. Behind the woman standing in the doorway at the very far end of the salon, a marble bust, mantelpiece, and mirror can be seen in an adjacent room.
Mentmore House was a country residence of the wealthy Rothschild family, but little is known as to how Fenton came to photograph its interior or who the depicted individuals might be. Fenton accepted commissions to document several other country homes, and his surviving photographs of Mentmore House – both interior and exterior views – may have formed part of a commissioned album. Like Fenton’s Orientalist scenes, this image reveals a high degree of staging. Only one figure actually holds a cue stick, and several of the women wear hats that seem unusual for the indoor setting.
Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d’Aumale, the Count d’Eu, the Duke d’Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England] 1864 Albumen silver print 10.2 x 17cm (4 x 6 11/16 in.)
Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d’Aumale, the Count d’Eu, the Duke d’Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England] (detail) 1864 Albumen silver print 10.2 x 17cm (4 x 6 11/16 in.)
In Focus: Play, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from December 23, 2014 through May 10, 2015, presents photographs that explore how notions of leisure and play have been represented over the course of the medium’s history. The nearly thirty works from the Museum’s permanent collection highlight a wide range of amusing activities, from quiet games like chess to more boisterous forms of recreation like skateboarding and visits to amusement parks and circuses. All of the photographs included in the exhibition illustrate the many ways people have chosen to spend their free time. The images also demonstrate inventive and improvised approaches, like unusual vantage points and jarring juxtapositions that photographers have employed to help capture the spontaneity of playfulness.
Organised by assistant curator Arpad Kovacs in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, this exhibition spans almost 175 years of the medium’s history and features the work of a variety of well-known and lesser-known photographers, including Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogene Cunningham, Larry Fink, T. Lux Feininger, Roger Fenton, Andre Kertész, Man Ray, Alexander Rodchenko, Masato Seto, Camille Silvy, and Weegee, among others.
“Capturing our everyday lives has been one of photography’s central themes ever since its invention in the mid-nineteenth century,” says Timothy Potts, Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “So it is no surprise that images of people playing games and having fun is a rich seam within the history of photography that this exhibition and accompanying book bring to life brilliantly. This is photography at its entertaining and uplifting best.”
The introduction of photography in 1839 coincided with a bourgeoning culture of leisure. Changes in working and living conditions brought on by the Industrial Revolution created an unprecedented amount of free time for large numbers of people in Europe and the United States. In the 1850s, photographic studios began to capitalize on the development and growth of the tourism industry, promoting recreation as a photographic subject. Technological advancements in film and camera equipment during the early twentieth century facilitated the recording of dynamic activities such as sports and visits to amusement parks. Domestic and public spaces alike became sites where people performed for the camera and documented a break from daily routines.
During the nineteenth century, the eminent photographer Roger Fenton, who was widely recognised for visually documenting the Crimean War (1853-1856), also photographed intimate scenes that reflected casual pastimes. Included in the exhibition is his photograph from 1858 entitled, The Billiard Room, Mentmore House, in which a group of six people act out a scene of domestic amusement in a billiard room lined with a row of large windows.
The desire for pictures of everyday life flourished during the early twentieth-century. The illustrated press, which had grown in popularity in the United States and Europe since the 1920s, was especially interested in photographs of recreation and leisure. Photojournalists often searched for high-impact images that could tell compelling or amusing stories. Weegee (Arthur Fellig), a well-known tabloid photographer, kept his camera focused on New York City’s neighbourhoods. In the photograph Summer, Lower East Side, New York City, 1937, he recorded the ecstatic faces of boys and girls cooling off in the water from an open fire hydrant as they briefly co-opted a street for their own delight.
Tourist destinations with sweeping vistas, like Niagara Falls and Yosemite Valley, had been attracting photographers continuously since the 1850s. In a 1980 photograph from his Sightseer series, Roger Minick comments on the phenomenon of taking in the sights through visual juxtaposition. A tourist, seen from behind, obstructs the famous view of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point, a spot that is practically synonymous with photography. The woman wears a souvenir headscarf illustrated with views of the valley, underscoring the commodification of nature that pervades modern life.
In the 1990s, the photographer Lauren Greenfield began an ambitious project documenting various subcultures in Los Angeles. These works examine the social pecking order and rites of passage associated with youth culture. In her photograph “Free Sex” Party Crew Party, East Los Angeles, 1993, one gets a glimpse into the potential dangers associated with these wild demonstrations of unrestricted freedom and machismo.
“The photographs chosen for this exhibition demonstrate the wide range of approaches photographers have employed to capture people at play, along with a variety of sites that have traditionally signalled leisure and entertainment,” said Kovacs. “Visiting a museum would be included on that list of leisure-time activities. I can’t think of a better way to spend an afternoon.”
In Focus: Play is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center beginning December 23, 2014, through May 10, 2015.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum
Unknown photographer [Barnum and Bailey Circus Tent in Paris, France] 1901-1902 Gelatin silver print 22.2 x 58.1cm (8 3/4 x 22 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Photographer Masato Seto’s series picnic, produced between 1996 and 2005, takes a particularly intimate approach. Seto’s photographs get inside Tokyo’s private pockets of outdoor space, a highly coveted respite from the busy thrum of the Japanese urban lifestyle. They give us a glimpse of the hard-won leisure of local couples escaping the cramped quarters of high-rise living for the scarce green space of public parks.
The couples’ reactions to the camera’s intrusion range from shielding their faces to outright defiance, to simple staring curiosity. We feel like we’ve caught them in the act of doing something that we shouldn’t see. Representing one family, couple, or individual at a time, Seto situates his subjects in a detached reality of their own. He creates what critic Hiro Koike referred to as “invisible rooms” – plots of grass often defined by the customary plastic sheet – in which intimate moments have been openly displayed and captured.
Melissa Abraham, “An Intimate View of Tokyo,” on The Getty Iris blog, August 5, 2014 [Online] Cited 03/03/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
You can tell a lot about a person from their self-portrait. In the case of Richard Avedon’s self-portrait (1969, below), we see a man in high key, white shirt positioned off centre against a slightly off-white background, the face possessing an almost innocuous, vapid affectation as though the person being captured by the lens has no presence, no being at all. The same could be said of much of Avedon’s photography. You can also tell a lot about an artist by looking at their early work. In the exhibition there is a photograph of James Baldwin, writer, Harlem, New York 1945, celebrated writer and close friend of the artist, which evidences Avedon’s mature portrait style: the frontal positioning of Afro-American Baldwin against a white background will be repeated by Avedon from the start to the end of his career. This trope, this hook has become the artist’s defining signature.
Spread across two floors of the exhibition spaces at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, the exhibition hangs well. The tonal black and white photographs in their white frames, hung above and below the line against the white gallery walls, promote a sense of serenity and minimalism to the work when viewed from afar. Up close, the photographs are clinical, clean, pin sharp and decidedly cold in attitude. Overall the selection of work in the exhibition is weak and the show does not promote the artist to best advantage. There are the usual fashion and portrait photographs, supplemented by street photographs, photographs at the beach and of mental asylums, and distorted photographs. While it is good to see a more diverse range of work from the artist to fill in his back story none of these alternate visions really work. Avedon was definitely not a street photographer (see Helen Levitt for comparison); he couldn’t photograph the mentally ill (see Diane Arbus’ last body of work in the book Diane Arbus: Untitled, 1995) and his distorted faces fail miserably in comparison to Weegee’s (Athur Fellig) fabulous distortions. These are poor images by any stretch of the imagination.
That being said there are some arresting individual images. There is a magical photograph of Truman Capote, writer, 1955 which works because of the attitude of the sitter; an outdoors image of Bob Dylan, musician, Central Park, New York, February 20, 1965 (below) in which the musician has this glorious presence when you stand in front of the image – emanating an almost metaphysical aura – due to the light, low depth of field and stance of the proponent. Also top notch is a portrait of the dancer Rudolf Nureyev, Paris, France, July 25, 1961, in which (for once), the slightly off-white background and the pallid colour of the dancer’s lithe body play off of each other, his placement allowing him to float in the contextless space of the image, his striking pose and the enormousness of his member drawing the eyes of the viewer. All combine to make a memorable, iconic image. Another stunning image is a portrait of the artist Pablo Picasso, artist, Beaulieu, France, April 16, 1958, where the artist’s large, round face fills the picture plane, his craggy features lit by strong side lighting, illuminating the whites of his eyes and just a couple of his eyebrow hairs. Magnificent. And then there are just two images (see below) from the artist’s seminal book In the American West. More on those later.
Other portraits and fashion photographs are less successful. A photograph of Twiggy, dress by Roberto Rojas, New York, April 1967 (below), high contrast, cropped close top and bottom, is a vapid portrait of the fashion/model. The image of Elizabeth Taylor, cock feathers by Anello of Emme, New York, July 1964 (below) is, as a good friend of mine said, a cruel photograph of the actress. I tend to agree, although another word, ‘bizarre’, also springs to mind. In some ways, his best known fashion photograph, Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955 (below) is a ripper of an image… until you observe the punctum, to which my eyes were drawn like a moth to a flame, the horrible shackles around the legs of the elephants.
Generally, the portraiture and fashion photographs are a disappointment. If, as Robert Nelson in The Age newspaper states, “Avedon’s portraiture is a search for authenticity in the age of the fake,”1 then Avedon fails on many levels. His deadpan portraits do not revive or refresh the life of the sitter. In my eyes their inflection, the subtle expression of the sitter, is not enough to sustain the line of inquiry. I asked the curator and a representative from the Avedon Foundation what they thought Avedon’s photographs were about and both immediately said, together, it was all about surfaces. “Bullshit” rejoined I, thinking of the portrait of Marilyn Monroe, actress, New York, May 6, 1957 (below), in which the photographer pressed the shutter again and again and again as the actress gallivanted around his studio being the vivacious Marilyn, only hours later, when the mask had dropped, to get the photograph that he and everyone else wanted, the vulnerable women. This, and only this image, was then selected to be printed for public consumption, the rest “archived, protected by the Avedon Foundation, never allowed off the negative or the contact sheet.”2 You don’t do that kind of thing, and take that much time, if you are only interested in surfaces.
On reflection perhaps both of us were right, because there is a paradox that lies at the heart of Avedon’s work. There is the surface vacuousness and plasticity of the celebrity / fashion portrait; then the desire of Avedon to be taken seriously as an artist, to transcend the fakeness of the world in which he lived and operated; and also his desire to always be in control of the process – evidenced by how people had to offer themselves up to the great man in order to have their portrait taken, with no control over the results. While Avedon sought to be in touch with the fragility of humanity – the man, woman and child inside – it was also something he was afraid of. Photography gave him control of the situation. In his constructed images, Avedon is both the creator and the observer and as an artist he is always in control. This control continues today, extending to the dictions of The Richard Avedon Foundation, which was set up by Avedon during his lifetime and under his tenants to solely promote his art after he passed away.
When you look into the eyes of the sitters in Avedon’s portraits, there always seems to be a dead, cold look in the eyes. Very rarely does he attempt to reveal the ambiguity of a face that resists artistic production (see Blake Stimson’s text below). And when he does it is only when he has pushed himself to do it (MM, BD). Was he afraid, was he scared that he might have been revealing too much of himself, that he would have “lost control”? If, as he said, there is finally nothing but the face – an autograph, the signature of the face – then getting their autograph was a way to escape his mundane family life through PERFORMANCE. Unfortunately, the performance that he usually evinces from the rich and famous, this “figuring” out of himself through others through control of that performance – is sometimes bland to the point of indifference. Hence my comment on his self-portrait that I mentioned at the start of this review. It would seem to me that Avedon could not face the complex truth, that he could bring himself, through his portraits, to be both inside and outside of a character at one and the same time… to be vulnerable, to be frightened, to loose control!
If he shines himself as a self-portrait onto others, in a quest or search for the human predicament, then his search is for his own frightened face. Only in the Western Project which formed the basis for his seminal book In the American West – only two of which are in the exhibition – does Avedon achieve a degree of insight, humanity and serenity that his other photographs lack and, perhaps, a degree of quietude within himself. Created after serious heart inflammations hindered Avedon’s health in 1974, he was commissioned in 1979 “by Mitchell A. Wilder (1913-1979), the director of the Amon Carter Museum to complete the “Western Project.” Wilder envisioned the project to portray Avedon’s take on the American West. It became a turning point in Avedon’s career when he focused on everyday working class subjects such as miners soiled in their work clothes, housewives, farmers and drifters on larger-than-life prints instead of a more traditional options with famous public figures… The project itself lasted five years concluding with an exhibition and a catalogue. It allowed Avedon and his crew to photograph 762 people and expose approximately 17,000 sheets of 8 x 10 Tri-X Pan film.”3
In his photographs of drifters, miners, beekeepers, oil rig workers, truckers, slaughterhouse workers, carneys and alike the figure is more frontally placed within the image space, pulled more towards the viewer. The images are about the body and the picture plane, about the minutiae of dress and existence and the presence and dignity of his subjects, more than any of his other work. In this work the control of the sitter works to the artist’s advantage (none of these people had ever had their portrait taken before and therefore had to be coached) and, for once, Avedon is not relying on the ego of celebrity of the transience of fashion but on the everyday attitudes of human beings. Through his portrayal of their ordinariness and individuality, he finally reveals his open, exposed self. The project was embedded with Avedon’s goal to discover new dimensions within himself… “from a Jewish photographer from out East who celebrated the lives of famous public figures to an ageing man at one of the last chapters of his life to discovering the inner-worlds, and untold stories of his Western rural subjects… The collection identified a story within his subjects of their innermost self, a connection Avedon admits would not have happened if his new sense of mortality through severe heart conditions and ageing hadn’t occurred.”4 Definitively, this is his best body of work. Finally he got there.
Printed on Agfa’s luscious Portriga Rapid, a double-weight, fibre-based gelatin silver paper which has a warm (brown) colouration for the shadow areas and lovely soft cream highlights, the prints in the exhibition are over six-feet high. The presence of Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980 – freckles highlighted by the light, folds of skin under the armpit – and Boyd Fortin, thirteen-year-old, Sweetwater, Texas, March 10, 1979 – visceral innards of the rattlesnake and the look in his eyes – are simply stunning. Both are beautiful prints. In the American West has often been criticised for its voyeuristic themes, for exploiting its subjects and for evoking condescending emotions from the audience such as pity while studying the portraits, but these magnificent photographs are not about that: they are about the exchange of trust between the photographer and a human being, about the dignity of that portrayal, and about the revelation of a “true-self” as much as possible through a photograph – the face of the sitter mirroring the face of the photographer.
While it is fantastic to see these images in Victoria, the first time any Avedon photographs have been seen in this state (well done The Ian Potter Museum of Art!), the exhibition could have been so much more if it had only been more focused on a particular outcome, instead of a patchy, broad brush approach in which everything has been included. I would have been SO happy to see the whole exhibition devoted to Avendon’s most notable and influential work (think Thomas Ruff portraits) – In the American West. The exhibition climaxes (if you like) with three huge, mural-scale portraits of Merce Cunningham (1993, printed 2002), Doon Arbus, writer, New York, 2002 and Harold Bloom, literary critic, New York City, October 28, 2001 (printed 2002), big-statement art that enlarges Avedon’s work to sit alongside other sizeable contemporary art works. Spanning floor to ceiling in the gallery space these overblown edifices, Avedon’s reaction to the ever expanding size of postmodern ‘gigantic’ photography, fall as flat as a tack. At this scale the images simply do not work. As Robert Nelson insightfully observes, “To turn Avedon’s portraiture into contemporary art is technically and commercially understandable, but from an artistic point of view, the conflation of familiarity to bombast seems to be faking it one time to many.”5
Finally we have to ask what do artists Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Avedon have in common? Well, they were all based in New York; they are all white, middle class, and reasonably affluent; they were either gay, Jewish or Catholic or a mixture of each; they all liked mixing with celebrities and fashion gurus; and they all have foundations set up in their honour. Only in New York. It seems a strange state of affairs to set up a foundation as an artist, purely to promote, sustain, expand, and protect the legacy and control of your art after you are gone. This is the ultimate in control, about controlling the image of the artist from the afterlife.
Foundations such as the Keith Haring Foundation do good work, undertaking outreach and philanthropic programs, making “grants to not-for-profit groups that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: The support of organisations which provide educational opportunities to underprivileged children and the support of organisations which engage in education, prevention and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.”6 I asked the representative of The Richard Avedon Foundation what charitable or philanthropic work they did. They offer an internship program. That’s it. For an artist so obsessed with image and surfaces, for an artist that eventually found his way to a deeper level of understanding, it’s about time The Richard Avedon Foundation offered more back to the community than just an internship. Promotion and narcissism are one thing, engagement and openness entirely another.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 2,335
Footnotes
1/ Robert Nelson. “Pin sharp portraits show us real life,” in The Age newspaper, Friday January 2, 2014, p. 22.
2/ Andrew Stephens. “Fame and falsehoods,” in Spectrum, The Age newspaper, Saturday November 29, 2014, p. 12.
3/ Anon. “Richard Avedon,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/03/2015
4/ Whitney, Helen. “Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light.” American Masters, Season 10, Episode 3, 1996 quoted in Anon. “Richard Avedon,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/03/2015.
5/ Robert Nelson op cit.,
6/ Anon. “About” on The Keith Haring Foundation website [Online] Cited 01/03/2015
American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) produced portrait photographs that defined the twentieth century. Richard Avedon People explores his iconic portrait making practice, which was distinctive for its honesty, candour and frankness.
One of the world’s great photographers, Avedon is best known for transforming fashion photography from the late 1940s onwards. The full breadth of Avedon’s renowned work is revealed in this stunning exhibition of 80 black and white photographs dating from 1949 to 2002. Avedon’s instantly recognisable iconic portraits of artists, celebrities, and countercultural leaders feature alongside his less familiar portraiture works that capture ordinary New Yorkers going about their daily lives, and the people of America’s West. With uncompromising rawness and tenderness, Avedon’s photographs capture the character of individuals extraordinary in their uniqueness and united in their shared experience of humanity.
Richard Avedon People pays close attention to the dynamic relationship between the photographer and his sitters and focuses on Avedon’s portraits across social strata, particularly his interest in counter-culture. At the core of his artistic work was a profound concern with the emotional and social freedom of the individual in society. The exhibition reveals Avedon’s sensitivity of observation, empathy of identification and clear vision that characterise these portraits.
Text from The Ian Potter Museum of Art website
“There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person.”
“There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is truth.”
“Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”
Richard Avedon
Installation photographs of the exhibition Richard Avedon People at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, February 2015 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
“Photography has had its place in the pas de deux between humanism and anti-humanism, of course, and with two complementary qualities of its own. In the main, we have thought for a long time now, it is photography’s capacity for technological reproduction that defines its greater meaning, both by indexing the world and through its expanded and accelerated means of semiosis. This emphasis on the proliferation of signs and indices has been part of our posthumanism, and it has turned us away consistently from readings that emphasise photography’s second, humanist quality, its capacity to produce recognition through the power of judgment and thus realise the experience of solidarity or common cause.
In keeping with the framing for this collection of writings, we might call the first of these two qualities photography’s ‘either / and’ impulse and the second its ‘either / or’. Where the first impulse draws its structuring ideal from deferring the moment of judgment as it moves laterally from one iteration to the next, one photograph to the next, the second develops its philosophical ground by seeing more than meets the eye in any given photograph or image as the basis of judgment. For example, this is how Kierkegaard described the experience of a ‘shadowgraph’ (or ‘an inward picture which does not become perceptible until I see it through the external’) in his Either/Or:
Sometimes when you have scrutinised a face long and persistently, you seem to discover a second face hidden behind the one you see. This is generally an unmistakable sign that this soul harbours an emigrant who has withdrawn from the world in order to watch over secret treasure, and the path for the investigator is indicated by the fact that one face lies beneath the other, as it were, from which he understands that he must attempt to penetrate within if he wishes to discover anything. The face, which ordinarily is the mirror of the soul, here takes on, though it be but for an instant, an ambiguity that resists artistic production. An exceptional eye is needed to see it, and trained powers of observation to follow this infallible index of a secret grief. … The present is forgotten, the external is broken through, the past is resurrected, grief breathes easily. The sorrowing soul finds relief, and sorrow’s sympathetic knight errant rejoices that he has found the object of his search; for we seek not the present, but sorrow whose nature is to pass by. In the present it manifests itself only for a fleeting instant, like the glimpse one may have of a man turning a corner and vanishing from sight. (Either/Or, Volume 1, 171, 173)
Roland Barthes was trying to describe a similar experience with his account of the punctum just as Walter Benjamin did with his figure of the angel of history: ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events [in the same way we experience photography’s ‘either / and’ iteration of images], he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’. As Kierkegaard, Barthes, and Benjamin suggest, the old humanist experience of struggle with the singular experience of on-going failure to realise its hallowed ideals only ever arose in photography or anywhere else fleetingly, but it is all but invisible to us now.”
Søren Kierkegaard.Either/Or, volume I, 1843, 171, 173 quoted in Blake Stimson. “What was Humanism?” on the Either/And website [Online] Cited 01/03/2015. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Richard Avedon People celebrates the work of American photographer Richard Avedon (1923 to 2004), renowned for his achievements in the art of black and white portraiture. Avedon’s masterful work in this medium will be revealed in an in-depth overview of 80 photographs from 1949 to 2002, to be displayed at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne from 6 December 2014 to 15 March 2015.
Known for his exquisitely simple compositions, Avedon’s images express the essence of his subjects in charming and disarming ways. His work is also a catalogue of the who’s who of twentieth-century American culture. In the show, instantly recognisable and influential artists, celebrities, and countercultural leaders including Bob Dylan, Truman Capote, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Malcolm X, are presented alongside portraits of the unknown. Always accessible, they convey his profound concern with the emotional and social freedom of the individual.
Ian Potter Museum of Art Director, Kelly Gellatly said, “Richard Avedon was one of the world’s great photographers. He is known for transforming fashion photography from the late 1940s onwards, and his revealing portraits of celebrities, artists and political identities.
“People may be less familiar, however, with his portraiture works that capture ordinary New Yorkers going about their daily lives, and the people of America’s West,” Gellatly continued. “Richard Avedon People brings these lesser-known yet compelling portraits together with his always captivating iconic images. In doing so, the exhibition provides a rounded and truly inspiring insight into Avedon’s extraordinary practice.”
Avedon changed the face of fashion photography through his exploration of motion and emotion. From the outset, he was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. This is evidenced across the works in the exhibition, which span Avedon’s career from his influential fashion photography and minimalist portraiture of well-known identities, to his depictions of America’s working class.
Avedon’s practice entered the public imagination through his long association with seminal American publications. He commenced his career photographing for Harper’s Bazaar, followed by a 20-year partnership with Vogue. Later, he established strong collaborations with Egoiste and The New Yorker, becoming staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992.
Richard Avedon People is the first solo exhibition of Avedon’s work to be displayed in Victoria following showings in Perth and Canberra. The exhibition was curated by the National Portrait Gallery’s Senior Curator, Dr Christopher Chapman, in partnership with the Richard Avedon Foundation over the course of two years. The Foundation was established by Avedon in his lifetime and encourages the study and appreciation of the artist’s photography through exhibitions, publications and outreach programs.
Dr Christopher Chapman
Dr Christopher Chapman is Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery where he has produced major exhibitions exploring diverse experiences of selfhood and identity. He joined the Gallery in 2008 and was promoted to Senior Curator in 2011. He works closely with the Gallery’s management team to drive collection and exhibition strategy. Working in the visual arts field since the late 1980s, Christopher has held curatorial roles at the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia. He has lectured in visual arts and culture for the Australian National University and his PhD thesis examined youth masculinity and themes of self-sacrifice in photography and film.
A National Portrait Gallery of Australia exhibition presented in partnership with the Richard Avedon Foundation, New York.
“Insights into the crossover of genres and the convergence of modern media gave Avedon’s work its extra combustive push. He got fame as someone who projected accents of notoriety and even scandal within a decorous field. By not going too far in exceeding known limits, he attained the highest rank at Vogue. In American popular culture, this was where Avedon mattered, and mattered a lot. But it was not enough.
In fact, Avedon’s increasingly parodistic magazine work often left – or maybe fed – an impression that its author was living beneath his creative means. In the more permanent form of his books, of which there have been five so far, he has visualised another career that would rise above fashion. Here Avedon demonstrates a link between what he hopes is social insight and artistic depth, choosing as a vehicle the straight portrait. Supremacy as a fashion photographer did not grant him status in his enterprise – quite the contrary – but it did provide him access to notable sitters. Their presence before his camera confirmed the mutual attraction of the well-connected.”
Exhibition dates: 31st October, 2014 – 19th April, 2015
Curator: Sarah Montross, Senior Curator at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998) Three men and three women, seated as couples in banquette in bar or restaurant advertising “Fried Shrimp Plate $.85” and “1/4 Fried Chicken $.70” c. 1959; printed 2001 Silver gelatin print Gift of Arlette and Gus Kayafas
Another fun posting to add to the archive!
Marcus
Many thankx to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998) Photographer taking picture of Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) possibly in Carlton House Hotel, Downtown 1963; printed 2001 Silver gelatin print Gift of Arlette and Gus Kayafas
Charles “Teenie” Harris photographed the African-American community of his hometown of Pittsburgh, primarily for the Pittsburgh Courier, the preeminent national African-American newspaper (c. 1930-1960). Photographing community members, visiting political figures, athletes, and entertainers, Harris set out to balance negative views of African-Americans and their communities. Nicknamed “One-Shot,” Harris photographed confidently and with ease, rarely asking his subjects to pose more than once. The resulting 80,000 negatives make up one of the largest collections of photographs of a black urban community in the United States. Harris’ artistic output helps define photography as a tool for preserving the past, his photographs serving as invaluable documentation of the spirit of a particular time, place, and people.
Prefiguring the paparazzi images of celebrities that pervade contemporary media, Harris’ photographs of singer / actress Lena Horne and boxer Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) capture his famous subjects in relaxed settings that humanise them. Furthermore, Harris’ photograph of Clay shows the boxer having his portrait taken by another photographer, giving Harris’ image of a photograph-in-process an even greater behind-the-scenes feel.
Jules Aarons (American, 1921-2008) Untitled (Bronx), from the portfolio In The Jewish Neighborhoods 1946-76 c. 1970; printed 2003 Silver gelatin print, printer’s proof II Gift of Arlette and Gus Kayafas
Jules Aarons was one of the most respected and prolific American social documentary photographers in the twentieth century. His street photography captured personal moments in the public eye within the urban neighbourhoods in which he lived: the Bronx, where he was born and raised, and Boston, where he spent the majority of his adult life. Shot with his twin lens Rolleiflex camera held at waist-level, Aarons’ images are casual, intimate, and lively. Although the artist did not personally know his subjects, his work does not exhibit the detachment found in earlier forms of social documentary photography. His deep associations with the places and people he photographed imbue his images with a warmth and familiarity.
Greg Schmigel (American, b. 1969) Subway Triptych 2011 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist
Greg Schmigel (American, b. 1969) An Afternoon in the Sun 2012 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist
Greg Schmigel (American, b. 1969) Ideal Hosiery 2013 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist
Greg Schmigel (American, b. 1969) Late Day On Broadway 2012 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist
Greg Schmigel (American, b. 1969) This Isn’t Fucking Paris 2012 Digital photographic prints Courtesy of the artist
Greg Schmigel works in the vernacular of mid-twentieth century black and white street photography, capturing candid glimpses of everyday moments. While inspired by pioneering artists such as Jules Aarons, whose work is also on view in this gallery, Schmigel creates photographs with a decidedly twenty-first century quality. A mobile photographer since 2007, his device of choice is the most itinerant and convenient camera available: his iPhone. In his work, Schmigel emphasises that the production of a good photograph is due mainly to the eye of the photographer, and not necessarily dependent on the equipment he uses.
By producing black and white prints from his digital images, the artist casts a timeless aura over contemporary scenes. In photographs such as Ideal Hosiery, the faded signs of a New York City street corner provide an uncanny setting that could easily be found in a photograph taken many decades ago. In other images, however, the omnipresence of smartphones in the hands of pedestrians instantly signals the twenty-first century. In these photographs, Schmigel aptly captures the ironic isolation caused by the very technology created to increase interpersonal communication.
Presented at a time when the compulsion to digitally document and share human activity has increased exponentially, this exhibition features works from deCordova’s permanent collection that prefigure and inform current trends in social photography, as well as recent work by contemporary artists who utilise smartphones and social media to record the world around them. The Social Medium features work spanning from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and includes multiple photographic genres such as social documentary, street, society/celebrity, and portrait photography.
The Social Medium was largely inspired by a recent gift of one of Andy Warhol’s Little Red Books, which contains a set of colour Polaroids. With his camera, Warhol documented the events of his life – from glamorous celebrity parties to mundane occurrences. The arrival of these photographs, which record Warhol’s artistic and social milieu (or environment), created an opportunity to examine the work of other artists who also photograph social experience. Together, the images in this exhibition speak to the continued relevance of the photographic medium’s singular power to capture and preserve personal and societal histories, and provide a selective history of the camera’s role as an extension of memory and a tool that is at once a witness to and participant in human social activity.
Text from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum
Eugene Richards (American, b. 1944) First Communion, Dorchester 1976 Silver gelatin print Gift of the artist
Eugene Richards captures a specific, local community in which he was embedded, to offer us uncanny views of small-town America. In the 1970s, Richards returned to his native Boston neighbourhood and produced photographs such as First Communion, which would later comprise his seminal book, Dorchester Days (1978). Richards documented a small section of urban Boston at a time when racial tensions and economic decline were defining Dorchester along with swaths of American cities and towns in similar states of transition and decline. First Communion captures a moment that nods towards social frictions at large, where religious traditions and street life converge in ambiguously innocent tension.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) N.Y.C. Club Cornich, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1977; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print, 28/30 Gift of Diane and Eric Pearlman
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) N.Y.C. Club Cornich, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1977; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print, 28/30 Gift of Diane and Eric Pearlman
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, from the portfolio 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 1982; printed 1983 Silver gelatin print, 28/30 Gift of Diane and Eric Pearlman
Larry Fink is a prominent American photographer who is best known for capturing images of high-profile social events. Fink’s images from the 1970s and 1980s capture individual vignettes within social gatherings, and nod to the development of documentary photography within the image-driven culture of the second half of the twentieth century. These photographs from Fink’s series 82 Photographs 1974 to 1982 and Making Out 1957-1980 depict scenes from clubs and parties in and around New York City. Fink’s subjects are caught off-guard by his camera, and their expressions provide windows into their weariness or giddy party euphoria. Capturing groups and individuals at surprisingly intimate and vulnerable moments, his photographs subtly reveal the disconnect often found between a subject’s public image and his or her inner self. For example, in Peter Beard’s, East Hampton, Fink captures a dynamic group of people in various levels of engagement with one another. While some are intertwined, others glance outward to the party beyond, having seemingly lost interest in the gathering at hand.
Tod Papageorge (American, b. 1940) Studio 54 1977 Silver gelatin print Gift of Pete and Constance Kayafas
In this photograph, Tod Papageorge captures revellers in gritty black and white, employing straightforward photography to show significant, poetic moments from everyday life. Highlighted by the timeless quality of a silver gelatin print, his photograph of partygoers at the infamous New York City nightclub, Studio 54, captures such a scene. Dramatic without arranging its subjects, Papageorge’s photograph freezes the precise moment just before the woman’s upstretched hand makes contact with balloon floating wistfully above her head.
Phillip Maisel (American, b. 1981) Wall Photos, from the series A More Open Place 2010 Archival inkjet print Courtesy of the artist
Phillip Maisel (American, b. 1981) Profile Pictures (4702), from the series A More Open Face 2011 Archival inkjet print Courtesy of the artist
Phillip Maisel’s photographs are layered, ethereal images that evoke the fleeting nature of memories. Though nostalgic in tone, these images derive from a very contemporary source. Setting long exposures on his camera, the artist captures the images appearing on his computer screen as he clicked through his friends’ Facebook albums. The resulting picture-of-pictures is twice removed from its source, emphasising the swollen state of image culture and the manner in which digital images are created, uploaded, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.
The title of these series derives from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who noted that, through the social media platform, he was trying “to make the world a more open place.” Facebook and other sites have certainly achieved that; however, this extreme openness, the compulsion to over-share personal images and information, creates a paradox given the subsequent lack of privacy inherent in these activities. Maisel’s work comments on this contemporary phenomenon in which individuals willingly share images of their private memories in public venues. Furthermore, by reducing a collection of images to a single photograph, the artist manifests the compression of time and space in the internet age. This layering of images is also a form of erasure; each new image obscures the last, consistently degrading the significance of each individual picture and memory.
Neal Slavin (American, b. 1941) Capitol Wrestling Corporation, Washington, D.C ., from the portfolio Groups in America 1979 Color coupler print, 60/75 Gift of Stephen L. Singer and Linda G. Singer
Neal Slavin is acclaimed for his group portraits, which range from corporate associates to recreational cohorts to families. The photographs on display offer astute yet humorous studies of groups with specific shared interests that lay at the edges of societal norms. In Slavin’s images, no single member of the group pulls focus from the others and the ultimate personality of the portrait hinges upon the collective aura.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) The Little Red Book 128 1972 Twenty Polacolor Type 108 Polaroid prints Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. 2014
Examples of Polaroids in book. 20 total.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Andy Warhol used the Polaroid colour film camera. A then-novel technology which developed photographs in a matter of seconds, he employed it to document the events of his life – from the most glamorous celebrity parties to the most mundane and inconsequential occurrences. Warhol catalogued many of these photographs into small red Holston Polaroid albums, consequently known as Little Red Books. DeCordova’s Little Red Book 128, recently donated to the museum by The Warhol Foundation, features twenty photographs from a day in 1972 that Warhol shared with acclaimed writer Truman Capote, socialite Lee Radziwill and her family, and his business associates Vincent Fremont, Fred Hughes, and Jed Johnson. Consisting of both staged portraits and casual snapshots, the book is part paparazzi portfolio and part quaint family album.
Throughout the height of his fame, Andy Warhol was rarely without a camera in hand. The enigmatic artist often preferred social situations to be passively mitigated by his camera lens, rather than experienced physically and emotionally. In many ways, Warhol’s detachment mirrors a contemporary reliance on electronic forms of communication that limit human contact. Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be world – famous for 15 minutes.” Unsurprisingly, in all his work and in this collection of Polaroids, the artist blurs the lines between public / private and commoner / celebrity in a manner which is eerily prophetic of current social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, among others, which allow anyone and everyone to have their Warholian 15 minutes of fame, or perhaps even just 15 seconds of infamy.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Anthony Radziwill 1972 Polacolor Type 108 Polaroid print
Prince Anthony Stanislaw Albert Radziwill (American, 1959-1999)
Prince Anthony Stanislaw Albert Radziwill (4 August 1959 – 10 August 1999) was an American television executive and filmmaker.
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Radziwill was the son of socialite / actress Caroline Lee Bouvier (younger sister of First Lady Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) and Polish Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwiłł. He married a former ABC colleague, Emmy Award-winning journalist Carole Ann DiFalco, on 27 August 1994 on Long Island, New York.
As a member of the Radziwills, one of Central Europe’s noble families, Anthony Radziwill was customarily accorded the title of Prince and styled His Serene Highness, although he never used it. He descended from King Frederick William I of Prussia, King George I of Great Britain, and King John III Sobieski of Poland. The family’s vast hereditary fortune was lost during World War II, and Anthony’s branch of the family emigrated to England, where they became British subjects.
Radziwill’s career began at NBC Sports, as an associate producer. During the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, he contributed Emmy Award-winning work. In 1989, he joined ABC News as a television producer for Prime Time Live. In 1990, he won the Peabody Award for an investigation on the resurgence of Nazism in the United States.Posthumously, Cancer: Evolution to Revolution was awarded a Peabody.His work was nominated for two Emmys.
Around 1989 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, undergoing treatment which left him sterile, but in apparent remission. However, shortly before his wedding, new tumours emerged. Radziwill battled metastasising cancer throughout his five years of marriage, his wife serving as his primary caretaker through a succession of oncologists, hospitals, operations and experimental treatments. The couple lived in New York, and both Radziwill and his wife tried to maintain their careers as journalists between his bouts of hospitalisation. During this period, Radziwill became especially close to his aunt Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was also terminally ill with cancer. He died on 10 August 1999, and was survived by his sister, Anna Christina Radziwill.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Lee Radziwill 1972 Polacolor Type 108 Polaroid print
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Jed Johnson 1972 Polacolor Type 108 Polaroid print
Jed Johnson (December 30, 1948 – July 17, 1996) was an American interior designer and film director. Initially hired by Andy Warhol to sweep floors at Warhol’s Factory, he subsequently moved in with Warhol and became his lover.As a passenger in the First Class cabin, he was killed when TWA Flight 800 exploded shortly after takeoff in 1996.
Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) Truman Capote 1972 Polacolor Type 108 Polaroid print
deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum 51 Sandy Pond Rd, Lincoln, MA 01773, United States Phone: +1 781-259-8355
![Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/karl-blossfeldt-german-1865e280931932-acanthus-mollis-web.jpg "Karl Blossfeldt (German, 1865-1932) 'Acanthus mollis' (Acanthus mollis [Akanthus, Bärenklau. Deckblätter, die Blüten sind entfernt, in 4facher Vergrößerung]) 1898-1928")
![Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/iwao-yamawaki-japanese-1898e280931987-lunch-12e280932-p-m-web.jpg "Iwao Yamawaki (Japanese, 1898-1987) 'Lunch (12-2 p.m.)' (Mittagessen [12-2 Uhr]) 1931")
![Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/max-burchartz-lotte-eye-1928-web.jpg "Max Burchartz (German, 1887-1961) 'Lotte (Eye)' (Lotte [Auge]) 1928")
![Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Terminal Tower [Cleveland]' c. 1928](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/margaret-bourke-white-terminal-tower-cleveland-web.jpg "Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) 'Terminal Tower [Cleveland]' c. 1928")
![Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025) 'Untitled [Self-portrait]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cindy-ray-web.jpg "Cindy Ray (Bev Robinson) (Australian, 1942-2025) 'Untitled [Self-portrait]' Nd")
![Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) 'Self-Portrait, Zakopane [Broken Glass]' 1910](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/witkiewicz_self-portrait-zakopane-web.jpg "Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939) 'Self-Portrait, Zakopane [Broken Glass]' 1910")
![Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/installation-b-web.jpg "Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015")
![Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/installation-a-web.jpg "Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015")
![Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/installation-c-web.jpg "Jim Iska. 'Untitled [Installation view of the exhibition John Gossage: Three Routines at The Art Institute of Chicago]' 2015")
![Platt D. Babbitt (American, 1823-1879, active Niagara Falls, New York 1853-1870) '[Scene at Niagara Falls]' c. 1855 from the exhibition 'In Focus: Play' at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, December 2014 - May 2015](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/platt_d_babbitt_scene_at_niagara_falls-web.jpg "Platt D. Babbitt (American, 1823-1879, active Niagara Falls, New York 1853-1870) '[Scene at Niagara Falls]' c. 1855 from the exhibition 'In Focus: Play' at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, December 2014 - May 2015")
![Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) 'Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d'Aumale, the Count d'Eu, the Duke d'Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England]' 1864](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/camille-silvy-group-of-their-royal-web.jpg "Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) 'Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d'Aumale, the Count d'Eu, the Duke d'Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England]' 1864")
![Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) 'Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d'Aumale, the Count d'Eu, the Duke d'Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England]' 1864 (detail)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/camille-silvy-group-of-their-royal-detail.jpg "Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910, active in London) 'Group of their Royal Highnesses the Princess Clementine de Saxe Cobourg Gotha, her Sons and Daughter, the Duke d'Aumale, the Count d'Eu, the Duke d'Alencon, and the Duke de Penthievre [in England]' 1864 (detail)")
![Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) '[Marcel Duchamp and Raoul de Roussy de Sales Playing Chess]' 1925](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gm_05332701-web.jpg "Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) '[Marcel Duchamp and Raoul de Roussy de Sales Playing Chess]' 1925")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Summer, The Lower East Side, New York City]' Summer 1937](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gm_04304601-web.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Austria, 1899-1968) '[Summer, The Lower East Side, New York City]' Summer 1937")
![André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) '[Underwater Swimmer]' Negative 1917; print 1970s](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gm_06225401-web.jpg "André Kertész (American born Hungary, 1894-1985) '[Underwater Swimmer]' Negative 1917; print 1970s")
![Unknown photographer. '[Barnum and Bailey Circus Tent in Paris, France]' 1901-1902](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gm_05045201-web.jpg "Unknown photographer. '[Barnum and Bailey Circus Tent in Paris, France]' 1901-1902")
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