I wonder whether you have seen those tv crime shows where the cops are grilling a suspect, and for fear of incriminating themselves they give a “no comment” interview…
What do you think of the composition of these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the lighting in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the use of colour in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the people depicted in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the allegedly subtle critique of these patrician families, these far from “ordinary people”?
No comment
My mother said to me, if you can’t say anything constructive don’t say anything at all.
No comment
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanks to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jeu de Paume showcases the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection.
Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, the exhibition marks the artist’s first European retrospective. Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.
Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.
In “Family Ties,” Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common.
In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday, but often hidden, life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast.
These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie – a landscape of hidden tension found in micro-expressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.
Newly released, “Family Ties” brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career, alongside an interview between the artist and Aperture’s executive director Sarah Meister, and texts by Quentin Bajac and James Welling.
This volume coincides with Barney’s first retrospective exhibition in Europe, on view at Jeu de Paume through January 2025.
In September 2024, Jeu de Paume, Paris, will showcase the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection. Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, Tina Barney. Family Ties marks the artist’s first European retrospective.
Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.
Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.
Tina Barney’s experimental approach to photography emerged in the late 1970s. In 1981, she transitioned from working with a hand-held Pentax 35mm camera to a tripod-mounted Toyo 4 x 5 view camera. Through the 1980s, Barney’s early images revealed a world rarely seen in photography, offering the public an intimate look at the inner lives of the East Coast American upper class. At various vacation spots, birthday parties (The Children’s Party, 1986), weddings (Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995), backyard barbecues (Tim, Phil, and I, 1989) and family lunches in and around her house in Rhode Island, Barney probed the social habits of her subjects, exposing a fine line between intense concentration and idle restlessness. Her models pose like actors in a theater or film scene as the artist quickly replays micro-gestures and gives informal instructions. With the spontaneity of a snapshot, The Reception (1985), for example, sees Barney carefully direct the guests of her sister’s wedding.
Between 1996 and 2004, Barney traveled to Italy, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Spain and Germany, turning her attention to social types and customs instead of individuals. In these works, traditional motifs are often combined with more contemporary features, as figures of the European aristocracy pose in a pictorial manner, reminiscent of British “conversation pieces” of the eighteenth century. Working in large format allows Barney to magnify the exquisite details found in the textures and colours of her subjects’ clothes, furniture, fabrics and decor, drawing particular focus to the visual and material cultures that inform their mannerisms.
The exhibition will explore the theatrical dimension of Barney’s mise-en-scènes, with special attention to her work with her subjects and the construction of space. Barney’s work underscores a certain narrative dimension or tendency. In the early 1990s, Barney began working for several magazines and newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, W, Arena Homme Plus, Hommes Vogue International and Vogue US, fuelling her attention to the formal and compositional possibilities of photographs where the costumes, setting, and circumstances are already defined.
Departing from a strictly chronological approach, Tina Barney. Family Ties will present specific themes that have traversed Barney’s various bodies of work over four decades. For example, family – a key theme from the very beginning of Barney’s photographic practice in 1976 – may be found in Jill and Mom (1983), an intimate scene where the artist’s sister and mother address the camera in relaxed postures. Nearly twenty years later, The Daughters (2002) revisits the dynamic of a mother and daughter in a portrait of a French family whom Barney had not previously met.
Tina Barney was born in New York in 1945. Her mother, Lillian Fox, was a model turned interior designer. Her father, Philip Henry Isles, came from a long line of investment bankers and art collectors. Throughout her childhood, she was exposed to the practice of photography by her maternal grandfather. She began experimenting with photography when she and her family moved to Sun Valley, Idaho in 1973, where she lived until returning to New York City in 1983. Barney has exhibited her work at major venues across the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1987. Today, her work is included in many prominent collections around the world. She lives and works between New York and Rhode Island.
Victor Plumier (Belgian, 1820-1878) Lady in Costume About 1850 Daguerreotype, half plate 5 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Past present
Magnificent photographs that bring past presence into present consciousness.
Costume. variedly, the term “costume,” indicating clothing exclusively from the eighteenth century onward, can be traced back to the Latin consuetudo, meaning “custom” or “usage.”
Gesture. late Middle English: from medieval Latin gestura, from Latin gerere ‘bear, wield, perform’. The original sense was ‘bearing, deportment’, hence ‘the use of posture and bodily movements for effect in oratory’.
Expression. the action of making known one’s thoughts or feelings. a look on someone’s face that conveys a particular emotion. late Middle English: from Latin expressio(n- ), from exprimere ‘press out, express’.
The emotions and the sentiments, the gestures and the expressions.
The actor and the stage, the photographer and the sitter.
The staged photograph and the tableaux vivant.
The Self and the Other.
Today, something happens when we look at these photographs. Today, the social spaces, gestures and expressions in these photographs are not fixed, monological re-presentations or presences. Our experience of the photographs enables them to be seen as nodes within a network caught up in a system of social and cultural references, whose unity is variable and relative.1
Thus,
” …in my reading (of the photograph), I relied upon a number of semiological systems, each one being a social / cultural construct: the sign language of clothes, of facial expressions, of bodily gestures, of social manner, etc. Such semiological systems do indeed exist and are continually being used in the making and reading of images. Nevertheless the sum total of these systems cannot exhaust, does not begin to cover, all that can be read in appearances.”2
The intertextuality of images.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Roland Barthes. “From Work to Text” and Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences in Kurt Thumlert. Intervisuality, Visual Culture, and Education. [Online] Cited 10/08/2006. No longer available online
2/ John Berger and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, p. 112
Many thankx to the Nelson-Atkins Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“There is no perfection, no infinite completeness. But always, there is a way to move toward being whole. The capital letter, the Self is a wholeness that does not and will never exist. It is a direction that I move toward no matter the meanders of my feet.”
Kendrick VanZant
Camille Dolard (French, 1810-1884) Self-portrait as ailing man c. 1843-1845 Daguerreotype Plate (whole): 8 1/2 × 6 1/2 inches (21.59 × 16.51cm) Mat: 10 3/8 × 8 3/8 inches (26.37 × 21.29cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
French painter Camille Dolard briefly embraced photography in the 1840s as an innovative creative tool. This daguerreotype, and the one in the next case, are from a group of three theatrical self-portraits created by Dolard in his studio. Here, the artist performs for the camera, posing with props and costumes as a patient in the care of his attentive wife. In the other plate, he uses a similarly theatrical approach, depicting himself smoking a hookah (a water pipe used to smoke tobacco) while lounging on a patterned rug.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Jean-Pierre Thierry (French, 1810-1870) Two ladies reading a letter c. 1845 Daguerreotype Plate (quarter): 4 1/4 × 3 1/4 inches (10.8 × 8.26 cm) Mat: 6 1/16 × 5 1/8 inches (15.39 × 13.03 cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Philibert Perraud (French, 1815 – after 1863) Deux femmes se recueillent sur la tombe d’une etre cher … (Two women at the grave of a loved one) c. 1845 Daguerreotype Plate (quarter): 4 1/4 × 3 1/4 inches (10.8 × 8.26cm) Mount: 5 1/8 × 4 1/8 inches (13.02 × 10.48cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Unknown photographer Actor in Costume c. 1850 Daguerreotype Plate (three-quarter): 6 × 4 1/2 inches (15.24 × 11.43 cm) Case (open): 8 1/8 × 13 1/4 × 3/8 inches (20.64 × 33.66 × 0.95 cm) Case (closed): 8 1/8 × 6 5/8 × 5/8 inches (20.64 × 16.83 × 1.59 cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Though the pose and expression in this photograph are stiff, the extensive hand-colouring enlivens the portrait, drawing attention to the fine details in the actor’s costume. Sitting for a daguerreotype portrait in the 1850s required patience and a certain degree of stamina. Photographic exposure times – which varied according to plate sensitivity and studio lighting – typically ranged from three to 30 seconds. Studio props, such as chairs and head braces, were used to help sitters remain as motionless as possible for the duration of the exposure.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1813-1865) Two Pifferari c. 1850s Salt print Image: 8 3/8 × 5 11/16 inches (21.27 × 14.45cm) Sheet: 11 3/16 × 5 11/16 inches (28.42 × 14.45cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Nothing summed up picturesque modern Italy as well as the Pifferari; described by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) in 1832: ‘These are strolling musicians who, towards Christmas, come down from the mountains in groups of four or five, armed with bagpipes and ‘pifferi’ (a sort of oboe), to play in homage before statues of the Madonna. They are generally dressed in large brown woollen coats and the pointed hats that brigands sport, and their whole appearance is instinct with a kind of mystic savagery that is most striking’. He admits that close to the music is ‘overpoweringly loud, but at a certain distance the effect of this strange ensemble of instruments is haunting and few are unmoved by it’.
José Maria Blanco (Spanish, active c. 1850) Man with mandolin 1851 Daguerreotype Plate (quarter): 4 × 3 1/4 inches (10.16 × 8.26cm) Mat: 5 5/8 × 4 7/8 inches (14.29 × 12.38cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) Portrait of Edouard Brindeau 1853 Salt print 6 1/4 × 4 5/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (French, 1795-1866) Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Provost, in the role of the emperor Claude in the play Valeria 1853 Portraits of Actors from the Comédie Française Salt print Image and sheet: 6 7/16 × 4 1/8 inches (16.35 × 10.48cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Two Small Savoyards c. 1853 Albumen print Image and sheet: 7 × 5 3/16 inches (17.78 × 13.12cm) Mount: 17 × 15 inches (43.18 × 38.1cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Charles Nègre refers to the threadbare young men in this photograph as “Savoyards” (originating from the Savoy region of France). Impoverished, migrant Savoyards have appeared in European art since the 1700s, and Nègre’s title could be shorthand for a certain type of person seen in the streets of Paris, regardless of the two boys’ actual place of origin. A painter and a photographer, Nègre practiced the two mediums side-by-side. Like other artists of his time, he ascribed nobility to the poor, seeking to convey their “truth, warmth, and life.”
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Alban-Adrien Tournachon (French , 1825-1903) and Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) Pierrot Yawning 1854 Salt print 11 1/4 × 8 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Auguste Belloc (French, 1805 -1873) Une étude de nu de deux femmes c. 1855 Salt print Image and sheet: 8 5/16 × 6 1/8 inches (21.11 × 15.56cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
A masterful printer, Auguste Belloc created nudes that surpassed the typical erotic fare found in Parisian markets. In this scene, Belloc strategically positions the models and surrounding drapery to make the photograph appear more artistic than pornographic. Though nude paintings, drawings, and sculptures were immensely common, at this time photography was treated far more harshly by censors. In October 1860, the French government seized some 5,000 of Belloc’s photographs, declaring them obscene, and by 1868 he had abandoned his photographic studio.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne (French, 1806-1875) and Alban-Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825-1903) The Muscles of Weeping and Whimpering About 1855-1857 Albumen print 9 1/16 × 6 15/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Facial expressions and their corresponding emotions have been studied by artists for centuries. In the 1850s, Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne used photography to document the facial expressions produced by localised electric shock. Working in partnership with photographer Adrien Alban Tournachon, Duchenne felt these photographs truthfully recorded his experiments and that “none shall doubt the facts presented here.” Praising photography for its accurate rendering of the subject’s deep wrinkles, he wrote, “the distribution of light is in perfect harmony with the passions represented by these expressive lines. Thus, the face depicting the dark, concentric passions – aggression, wickedness, suffering, pain, dread, torture mixed with fear – gain an uncommon amount of energy.”
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne (French, 1806-1875) and Alban-Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825-1903) The Muscle of Pain c. 1854-1857 Figure 27, plate 63 from The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression Albumen print Image and sheet: 9 1/16 × 6 5/8 inches (23.01 × 16.84cm) Mount: 16 1/16 × 10 13/16 inches (40.79 × 27.51cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
In this uncanny double portrait, the physiologist Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne holds a mechanical device to the face of a 52-year-old, Italian-born woman believed to have been institutionalised in a Parisian asylum. Duchenne asserted that localised electric shock could force facial muscles to “contract to speak the language of the emotions and the sentiments.” “Armed with electrodes,” he wrote, “one would be able, like nature herself, to paint the expressive lines of the emotions of the soul on the face of man.”
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Roger Fenton (English, 1819-1869) Self-portrait as a Zouave 1855 Salt print: Image and sheet: 7 13/16 × 6 7/16 inches (19.84 × 16.35cm) Mount: 22 1/8 × 16 1/8 inches (56.2 × 40.96cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Cocking a rifle and smoking a pipe, with alcohol by his side, Roger Fenton poses for his camera with bravado. Wearing the distinctive baggy uniform of a Zouave (skilled infantry soldiers from the French army in Algeria), Fenton fashions himself as a hardened, glowering soldier, though he never fought in any war. Fenton did, however, photograph the Crimean War (1853-1856) from a great distance. The war brought together an alliance of soldiers from England, Croatia, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, and France whom Fenton encountered while photographing the conflict.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Marcel Gustave Laverdet (French, 1816-1886) Masks from the album Selection of Ancient Terra Cotta from the Collection of M. Le Vicomte H. de Janzé 1857 Photolithograph 8 15/16 × 14 9/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Charles Nègre (French, 1820-1880) Self-portrait About 1855-1860 Salt print 7 5/8 × 5 7/16 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Early photography is ripe with creative fictions. Actors, children, aristocrats, models, artists, psychiatric patients, maids, and all manner of the working class posed in front of cameras and were transformed into figures from history, literature, the Bible, or into an idealised version of themselves. Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography, which opens at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City Aug. 24, celebrates the unique and compelling ways 19th century European photographers used the medium to explore and document performance, transforming the photographer’s studio into a theatrical stage. The exhibition runs through Jan. 12, 2025.
“The subjects in this exhibition were highly influenced by popular entertainment – live theatre, tableaux vivant, and dioramas – as well as tastes and trends in painting, drawing, and sculpture,” said Julián Zugazagoitia, Director & CEO of the Nelson-Atkins. “These works were made in a time of anxiety about photography’s relationships to the fine arts and reflect a close intermingling between the worlds of the ‘high’ and the ‘low’.”
Visiting a photographer’s studio in Europe in the mid to late 1800s was like going behind the scenes of a theatrical production. Props, backdrops, costumes, curtains, and controlled lighting converted otherwise ordinary portrait sessions into staged productions. Whether working in their homes or commercial studios, photographers cast themselves, friends, actors, models, and strangers in their photographs, transforming them into all types of characters, from young pickpockets to ancient Greek gods.
“These portraits are so fascinating, and I think our guests are going to be amazed at the rich creative complexity found in European photography’s first 50 years,” said Marijana Rayl, Assistant Curator, Photography.
Deliberately made, not casually taken, these staged photographs are often the result of collaborative efforts between photographer and sitter, such as with a series of portraits of Virginia Oldoini, the Countess of Castiglione. A prodigious narcissist, or perhaps just ahead of her time, the countess collaborated with the photographer Pierre-Louis Pierson to produce hundreds of portraits, directing every aspect of the picture-making process. Included in Still Performing is a very rare, hand-coloured portrait of the countess.
The resulting photographs are an outstanding array of complex and compelling fictions showcasing the medium’s early creative potential.
Press release from the Nelson-Atkins Museum
Oscar Gustav Rejlander (English born Sweden, 1813-1875) Drawing Water from a Well (O.G. Rejlander and model) c. 1858 Salt print Image and sheet: 7 15/16 × 6 1/2 inches (20.16 × 16.51cm) Mount: 14 1/16 × 11 5/16 inches (35.72 × 28.73cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Oscar Rejlander occasionally cast himself in staged photographs like this one, which was made to appear like a candid image of ordinary people going about their daily lives. Here he poses, turned away from the camera, as though he is helping a peasant woman retrieve water from a well. These kinds of genre scenes were immensely popular in the 1800s across painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Rejlander passionately advocated for photography to be treated as a fine art, believing that it must emulate painting.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
Camille Silvy (French, 1834-1910) Actress Rosa Csillag in the Role of Orpheus 1860 Albumen print 9 3/16 × 7 5/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913) The Countess de Castiglione 1860s Gelatin silver print (printed about 1930) 10 15/16 x 14 1/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913) The Countess de Castiglione 1860s Gelatin silver print (printed about 1930) Image: 14 3/16 x 11 inches (36.04 x 27.94cm) Sheet: 14 3/16 x 11 inches (36.04 x 27.94cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913) Bal en Costume, Royaume de Belgique c. 1860 Salt print Image and sheet: 11 1/2 × 8 3/4 inches (29.21 × 22.23cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Lady Clementina Hawarden (English, born Scotland, 1822-1865) Clementina Maude and Isabella Grace c. 1863 Albumen print Image and sheet: 9 13/16 × 9 11/16 inches (24.97 × 24.61cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Julia Margaret Cameron (English, born India, 1815-1879) Sappho (Mary Hillier) 1865 Albumen print Image and sheet: 12 15/16 × 10 1/8 inches (32.86 × 25.72cm) Mount: 20 13/16 × 16 13/16 inches (52.86 × 42.7cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Giorgio Sommer (Italian born Germany, 1834-1914) The Pickpocket About 1865 Albumen print 9 3/8 × 7 5/8 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Gaudenzio Marconi (French born Switzerland, 1842-1885) Male nude for artist c. 1870 Albumen print Image and sheet: 8 5/8 × 6 3/8 inches (21.91 × 16.19cm) Mount: 12 9/16 × 9 3/4 inches (31.91 × 24.77cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Julia Margaret Cameron (English born India, 1815-1879) Sir Galahad and the Pale Nun 1874 Albumen print 13 7/16 × 10 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Giraudon’s Artist (French, active c. 1875) Woman with bundle of twigs c. 1875-1880 Albumen print Image and sheet: 6 5/8 × 4 11/16 inches (16.83 × 11.91cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
Pierre-Louis Pierson (French, 1822-1913) Portrait of the Countess of Castiglione from Série des Roses 1895 Albumen cabinet card Image and sheet: 5 15/16 × 3 15/16 inches (15.06 × 9.98cm) Mount: 6 3/8 × 4 1/4 inches (16.21 × 10.8cm) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
The Countess of Castiglione became reclusive with age, rumored to only leave her home at night, hidden behind veils. Social chroniclers of the time claimed that she removed all mirrors from her home to avoid her appearance; however, this portrait seems to contradict her alleged displeasure. Taken toward the end of her life, the countess admires her reflection in the mirror, donning a youthful blond wig elaborately decorated with roses.
Text from the Nelson-Atkins Museum website
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 4525 Oak Street Kansas City, MO 64111
While the photographs from his groundbreaking photobook The Americans (1958) have defined the artistic reputation and legacy of Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank and his influence on a later generation of documentary photographers, I am so grateful to the man for not retreating into his shell as so many artists do, finding a style which makes them famous and makes them money and then repeating the formula over and over again ad nauseam.
Frank was ever creative, always exploring new ways of filmic and photographic expression. I admire that. While “his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums” did not produce another seminal body of work – indeed Arthur Lubow has argued that if the aim of this exhibition is to reposition Frank’s reputation through showcasing six decades of later work the problem being that his genius as a photographer did not carry over into filmmaking1 – no matter!
Frank was not afraid to put himself out there as an artist, challenging himself to see differently, to develop further as an artist and as a human being. As he said, “I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still … I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.”
Critical to his new way of seeing after The Americans was Frank’s move beyond a single, static image into combining multiple negatives, images, text together. Recently I again delved through my copy of Frank’s 1972 photobook The Lines of My Hand, which “demonstrates Frank’s particular interest in the visual effects and meaning produced from combinations of images, either within a single photograph or formed by printing multiple negatives together to create a dense montage.” (Text from MoMA)
What’s so striking about the photobook is its tightly packed nature, its pages filled with ideas and images. Frank was using his intuition to construct a new language of photography: multiple, diverse and overlaid perspectives complicit with narratives not external to the self but an internal vision of a felt reality, visions that exist somewhere between documentary and fiction.
Here is abstraction and isolation, loneliness in the dream… the white line eternally disappearing into the distance in 34th Street (1949); tickertape floating in the air in Wall Street (1951); stiff men in bowler hats in City of London (1951) and the lines of the hand in Untitled [The Lines of the Hand] (Paris, 1949-1951, below) with the declaration ‘Sciences and Mysteries’. Sciences and mysteries, realities and abstractions, the known and unknown. The Lines of My Hand are the song lines of Frank’s life, the photographs breathing into existence his innermost thoughts and truths. Who am I? What do I believe in?
“Outside it is snowing, no waves at all. The beach is white, the fence posts are grey. I am looking back into a world gone forever. Thinking of a time that will never return. A book of photographs is looking at me. Twenty-five years of looking for the right road. Post cards from everywhere. If there are any answers I have lost them.” (Opening words from The Lines of My Hand)
“Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35 mm camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said.”2 This turning inwards was facilitated by his move in 1970 with his wife June Leaf to the rural town of Mabou on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada: “what I wanted to photograph was not really what was in front of my eyes but what was inside.”
Personally I don’t think it matters that the later photographs are not as memorable as those in The Americans. What matters is that Frank believed in what he was doing: it was his truth telling. “I am no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter,” Frank declared. “Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know!”
Finally, in the film Life Dances On (1980), his wife looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”
The Museum of Modern Art announces Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that will provide new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career. The exhibition will delve into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth and taking its name from the artist’s 1980 film, Life Dances On will explore Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition will feature more than 200 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans.
Text from the MoMA website
Unknown photographer Robert Frank, shown from behind, making “Pull My Daisy” 1959 John Cohen/John Cohen Irrevocable Trust, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Pull My Daisy 1959 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via the Museum of Modern Art
Pull My Daisy incorporated improvisation by actors, artists and poets.
“I think of myself, standing in a world that is never standing still,” the artist Robert Frank once wrote. “I’m still in there fighting, alive because I believe in what I’m trying to do now.” Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue – the artist’s first solo exhibition at MoMA – provides a new perspective on his expansive body of work by exploring the six vibrant decades of Frank’s career following the 1958 publication of his landmark photobook, The Americans.
Coinciding with the centennial of Frank’s birth, the exhibition will explore his restless experimentation across mediums including photography, film, and books, as well as his dialogues with other artists and his communities. It will include some 200 works made over 60 years until the artist’s death in 2019, many drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection, as well as materials that have never before been exhibited.
The exhibition borrows its title from Frank’s poignant 1980 film, in which the artist reflects on the individuals who have shaped his outlook. Like much of his work, the film is set in New York City and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. In the film, Leaf looks at the camera and asks Frank, “Why do you make these pictures?” In an introduction to the film’s screening, he answered: “Because I am alive.”
The Museum of Modern Art presents Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue, an exhibition that provides new insights into the interdisciplinary and lesser-known aspects of photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank’s expansive career. On view from September 15, 2024, to January 11, 2025, the exhibition delves into the six decades that followed Frank’s landmark photobook The Americans (1958) until his death in 2019, highlighting his perpetual experimentation and collaborations across various mediums. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, and taking its name from his 1980 film, Life Dances On explores Frank’s artistic and personal dialogues with other artists and with his communities. The exhibition features more than 250 objects, including photographs, films, books, and archival materials, drawn from MoMA’s extensive collection alongside significant loans. Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is organised by Lucy Gallun, Curator, with Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Fellow, and Casey Li, 12 Month Intern, Department of Photography.
“This exhibition offers visitors a fresh perspective on this beloved and influential artist,” said Gallun. “The enormous impact of Frank’s book The Americans meant that he is often remembered as a solo photographer on a road trip, a Swiss artist making pictures of an America that he traversed as an outsider. And yet, in the six decades that followed, Frank continually forged new paths in his work, often in direct artistic conversation with others, and these contributions warrant closer attention. The pictures, films, and books he made in these years are evidence of Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life, at once searing and tender.”
Organised loosely chronologically, Life Dances On focuses on the theme of dialogue in Frank’s work and reflects on the significance of individuals who shaped his outlook. Frank’s own words are present throughout the exhibition – in the texts he scrawled directly onto his photographic negatives, in the spoken narrative accompanying his films, and in quotes woven into the exhibition catalogue published by MoMA in conjunction with the exhibition. Also revealed throughout the exhibition is Frank’s innovation across multiple mediums, from his first forays into filmmaking alongside other Beat Generation artists, with films such as Pull My Daisy (1959), to the artist’s books he called “visual diaries,” which he produced almost yearly over the last decade of his life.
By focusing on dialogue and experimentation, the exhibition explores such enduring subjects as artistic inspiration, family, partnership, loss, and memory through the lens of Frank’s own personal traumas and life experiences. Among the works presented in the exhibition is a selection of photographs drawn from Frank’s footage for his 1980 film Life Dances On. These works reflect on the significance of individuals who shaped Frank’s own outlook – in this case, his daughter Andrea and his friend and film collaborator Danny Seymour. Like much of his work, the film finds its setting in Frank’s own communities in New York City and in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where he and his wife, the artist June Leaf, moved in 1970. An abundance of material was loaned to the exhibition by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, including works from the artist’s archives that are shown publicly for the first time, as well as personal artefacts, correspondence, and book maquettes. …
MoMA has been exhibiting Frank’s work since 1950, early in his career. In 1962, the Museum featured Frank’s work in a two-person exhibition alongside photographer Harry Callahan. Since then, the Museum has regularly collected and exhibited his work, and today the Museum’s collection includes over 200 of Frank’s photographs. That collection has been built through important gifts from Robert and Gayle Greenhill in 2013, and more recently, a promised gift to the Museum from Michael Jesselson, comprising a remarkable group of works, many of which are presented at MoMA for the first time in this exhibition. In 2015, the artist made an extraordinary gift of his complete film and video works, spanning the entirety of his career in filmmaking. MoMA’s Department of Film has since been engaged in a multiyear restoration project of these materials. Building upon this significant history with the Museum, Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue is the first solo exhibition of Robert Frank’s work at MoMA.
Publication
The accompanying publication, edited by Gallun, features photographs, films, books, and archival materials, layered with quotes from Frank on his influences and process. Three scholarly essays, excerpts from previously unpublished video footage, and a rich visual chronology together explore Frank’s ceaseless creative exploration and observation of life. 192 pages, 150 illustrations. Hardcover, $60. ISBN: 978-1-63345-164-3. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Press release from MoMA
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Beauty Contest, Chinatown c. 1968 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Frank collaged multiple prints of news photographers to convey a sense of the frenzy.
When Frank was moving to Nova Scotia, Frank photographed a bulletin board in his East Village loft, making one picture out of many.
The Beginning of Something New
The summer of 1958 marked a shift in Frank’s work. He had already finalised the selection of pictures that would appear in his photobook The Americans. For a new series, Frank photographed passersby from the window of a New York bus as it traversed Fifth Avenue. The pictures – a sequence of frames that appear linked by his own movement – indicated a notable moment of change beyond a single, static image. In 1972 he reflected on their significance: “When I selected the pictures and put them together I knew and I felt that I had come to the end of a chapter. And in it was the beginning of something new.”
Frank was also on the lookout for cinematic scenes. On the night of Independence Day, he photographed revelers sleeping on the beach among the holiday detritus. The stillness of the nighttime images contrasts with the daylit beach scenes he captured of his family on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where Frank also shot his first film that same summer. Although it would remain unfinished, the film anticipated the collaborative and experimental spirit of his work to come.
The Way These Painters Lived
From his window across a courtyard, Frank could watch the painter Willem de Kooning as he paced in his studio and contemplated his canvas. “I think that the people that influenced me most were the abstractionist painters I met; and what influenced me strongly was the way these painters lived,” Frank said of his time embedded in New York City’s vibrant arts community. “They were people who really believed in what they did. So it reinforced my belief that you could really follow your intuition. … You could photograph what you felt like.”
During these years, Frank continued to earn a living by photographing artists and writers for magazine print commissions, while also embracing the creative challenges of filmmaking alongside photography. His proximity to a diverse group of painters, sculptors, writers, and poets in the late 1950s would lead to boundary-pushing explorations like his first finished film, Pull My Daisy (1959), co-directed with artist Alfred Leslie, and filmed in Leslie’s own loft.
The Truth is Somewhere Between the Documentary and the Fictional
In 1968 Frank premiered his first feature-length film, Me and My Brother, at the Venice Film Festival. Built as a film within a film, the story prompts questions about participation in traditional society and culture, and about what experiences of life are understood as valid. “The truth is somewhere between the documentary and the fictional, and that is what I try to show,” Frank explained. “What is real one moment has become imaginary the next.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Frank turned his camera toward friends and neighbours, he also captured events of the time – manifested in political protests, music, poetry, and other aspects of social change and counterculture. During this period, Frank contributed cinematography to films directed by others and also spearheaded his own projects, which featured both recognisable figures and everyday folks on the street. In Me and My Brother, one character advises another: “Don’t make a movie about making a movie. MAKE IT. … Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you didn’t even have to have a piece of celluloid between you and what you saw?”
The Lines of My Hand
Frank’s photobook The Lines of My Hand offers a retrospective view of his career up until the date of its publication, in 1972. Pairing text and image, the book begins with early photographs made in Switzerland in the 1940s and ends with montages of film strips from Frank’s films of the 1950s and ’60s. Its title, perhaps a rumination on one’s past and one’s fate, is drawn from a sign pictured in a 1949 photograph of a Paris fortuneteller’s booth, on view here. This section of the exhibition also brings together a selection of older photographs that appear in the first Lustrum edition of the book.
The Lines of My Hand demonstrates Frank’s particular interest in the visual effects and meaning produced from combinations of images, either within a single photograph or formed by printing multiple negatives together to create a dense montage. In later editions, in keeping with his practice of revisiting and rearranging his images, Frank made changes to the photographs and graphic design and updated the book with his most recent works, using photocopies and notebooks to sequence the book’s new iterations.
In Front of Me I Have the Sea
In 1970 Frank and Leaf relocated from New York City to the rural town of Mabou on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. The photographer Walker Evans, Frank’s friend and mentor, came to visit them soon after at their old fisherman’s cabin overlooking the sea. Evans’s photographs capture the house’s hulking wood stove and the clothesline strung outside it, elements of the couple’s daily routine that also became material for artistic work. Living there, they “learned a completely different rhythm of life.”
In Mabou, Frank’s work shifted its focus, becoming a means of processing his feelings, including profound grief. His change of environment, he acknowledged, had been significant: “All of a sudden you are in the company of something very powerful. … [But] what I wanted to photograph was not really what was in front of my eyes but what was inside.” For Frank, the sea was a dynamic ground against which to measure his life. He reflected, “I have a lot in back of me and that’s a tremendous pull, of what has happened in my life, backward. And in front of me I have the sea.”
There Are Ways of Strengthening the Feeling
In the 1970s, Frank began regularly incorporating an instant print process, commonly known by the brand name Polaroid, into his work. He valued the immediacy of Polaroids, which enabled him to create an image instantly but then consider a work’s full composition over time. “I am no longer the solitary observer turning away after the click of the shutter,” Frank declared. “Instead I’m trying to recapture what I saw, what I heard and what I feel. What I know!”
Throughout the rest of his career, Frank experimented with images by scratching words directly into the negatives and collaborating with printers to enlarge them into bigger prints and combinations. This process became especially significant for him after the sudden death of his daughter, Andrea, late in 1974. Frank began constructing monuments out of wood and materials around him in the landscape, which then figured into photographic memorials. “The Polaroid negative allows me to add that on it if it isn’t in the picture – I can put a word in it, I can combine two pictures – there are ways of strengthening the feeling I have,” Frank described.
The Video Camera Is Like A Pencil
In the early 1980s, Frank started using a Sony Portapak, a portable video camera that allowed him to instantly play back recordings. He could then erase, edit, and add new content on the tape. On video, Frank brought together fragments that at first seem unrelated, but through the choices he made while assembling them, offer a window into his personal preoccupations. Video, he noted, is “like a pencil. You can say things that you could never say with film.”
Home Improvements (1985), Frank’s first work in video, was made between New York City and Mabou. From it, the artist made a new work in which he captured still images of the footage using a large-format Polaroid camera. The resulting photographs feature snippets of found text; portraits of family members; and – in the last image – Frank himself, captured in a reflection behind his camera. “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside,” Frank narrates in the video. “Trying to say something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always different.”
Memory Helps You – Like Stones In A River Help You To Reach The Shore
In his last decades, Frank’s work centered ever more upon his own life. Instead of travelling and looking outward, he found stories and compositions by panning his camera around his homes. His camera lingered on collected objects: figurines on the windowsill, postcards pinned to the wall, the typewriter on the table, and – always – photographs from years earlier. “I want to use these souvenirs of the past as strange objects from another age,” he once wrote. “They are partly hidden and curiously resonant, bringing information, messages which may or may not be welcome, may or may not be real.”
Frank also collected memories in his “visual diaries,” small, softcover books in which he, with his assistant, the photographer A-chan, arranged new and old pictures in sequences with personal resonance. Toward the end of his life, these photobooks became his main artistic output. Looking back at the souvenirs of his life – the settings in which it had taken place and the people who populated it – was incredibly generative: “Memory helps you,” he mused. “Like stones in a river help you to reach the shore.”
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bonjour – Maestro, Mabou 1974 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
Frank hung an earlier landscape collage from a clothesline in a see-through frame, with the same landscape visible behind it.
After the death of Andrea Frank, his young daughter, in a plane crash, Frank memorialised her in a collage that he embellished with paint and a heartfelt, handwritten message.
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles – February 4th – I Wake Up – Turn On TV 1979 Robert Frank/The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via The Museum of Modern Art, NY
In words and pictures he expressed a forlorn mood in a hotel room.
Robert Frank never recovered from the success of “The Americans.” On its publication in the United States in 1959, the book was initially excoriated as un-American, particularly in the photography magazines, for its sour, disillusioned take on life in this country. The rich looked bored, the poor desperate, the city fathers fatuous, and the flags threadbare or soiled. What’s more, specialists in photography faulted his technique for muddiness, grain and blur.
But in a slow burn, Frank’s willful violation of the conventional rules of photography was understood to serve the purpose of personal expression, and his dissection of national alienation and social divides was deemed prophetic. The smoke blew away, and “The Americans” stood clearly as a towering monument, one of the most important and influential books in the history of photography.
Frank hated that. In the early ’60s, he renounced still photography in favor of filmmaking. When he went back in the ’70s to making photographs – “in the time left over between films or film projects,” as he put it – he eschewed the street photography that had established his reputation. Instead, he mostly made studio or landscape pictures, which he liked to splice together into montages or embellish with scratched and stenciled words.
It’s this late work – if such a rubric can be applied to the six decades of movie, video and photo production that preceded his death at 94 in 2019 – that is the focus of “Life Dances On: Robert Frank in Dialogue,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Lucy Gallun, the exhibition marks the centenary of Frank’s birth and is his first solo show at MoMA. Although there are some omissions (his return to documentary photography in Beirut in 1991, for example), it presents as eloquent a case as can be made for this later art, often left in the shade by what came before.
Frank felt trapped by the expectations and pigeonholing that the lionization of “The Americans” induced, and he recoiled in horror at the prospect of repeating himself. Beyond that, he gave various explanations over the years for why he abandoned the 35 mm camera that he brandished like a sorcerer’s wand. He explained that he had lost faith in the capacity of a single photograph to convey the truth. And his search had turned inward. “The truth is the way to reveal something about your life, your thoughts, where you stand,” he said. He believed film was a better way to do that.
Film (joined by video in the ’80s) allowed Frank to record his feelings directly. In addition to clips from his movies and videos, the museum is showing “Robert Frank’s Scrapbook Footage,” an assemblage of previously unseen diaristic moving images, stitched together by Frank’s longtime editor, Laura Israel, and art director Alex Bingham – most ambitiously, in a five-screen installation that jumps between shots taken in the house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, and the apartment on Bleecker Street in the East Village in New York that Frank shared with his wife, artist June Leaf, as well as visits he made to his parents in Switzerland (where he was born) and to Russia. Topping it off, MoMA, which received Frank’s entire film and video archive as a gift from the artist, will present a complete motion-picture retrospective, from Nov. 20 to Dec. 11.
The aim is to reposition Frank’s reputation by showcasing the art that occupied most of his life. The trouble is: His genius as a photographer did not carry over to filmmaking. That was evident from the outset. His first completed movie, “Pull My Daisy,” a collaboration with artist Alfred Leslie, incorporated improvisation by the actors within the framework of a rehearsed script. With a voice-over by Jack Kerouac and appearances by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and Larry Rivers, the film resonates as a historical document of the Beat movement. As a movie, though, its madcap bohemianism is a clunky, leaden bore. First screened publicly in 1959 on a double bill with John Cassavetes’ similarly improvised “Shadows,” it wilts, woefully dated, when viewed today alongside that other milestone of independent American cinema.
A self-portrait of the artist, in September 1993. Frank caught himself studying a strip of filmed images.
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) The Suffering, the Silence of Pablo 1995 Robert Frank/June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, via Museum of Modern Art, NY
After the suicide of his son, Pablo Frank, the photographer composed this testament to his young, painful life.
Last exhibition posting until the New Year. I need a break!
On the edge of oblivion
Joel Sternfeld – along with artists like William Eggleston, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Stephen Shore and Saul Leiter among others – was a pioneer of colour photography, his large format photographs picturing American contemporary life and identity.
His elegant, luxurious, and slightly twisted if not surreal look at the American landscape and life can be seen as “a darkly funny, bleak, but not unromantic vision of America.” Sternfeld, “peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience.”
Both utopian and dystopian at one and the same time, Sternfeld’s photographs have both a quiet eloquence and an unsettling kick in the pants within the same image, for example updating the historical lineage of Walker Evans (documentary) and Robert Frank (outsider) in colour photographs framing the uneasy nature of American life.
Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980, below) reformulates in colour the tract housing photographs of Bill Owens, William A. Garnett or Robert Adams. His Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia (April 1983, below) comments sublimely, subliminally, to the ongoing racism in the genteel South. “There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied… The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems.”1
Sternfeld’s photographs are full of felt insecurities and idiosyncrasies.
The crumpled car indicative of the alienated landscape the barefoot youth is growing up in that is Kansas City, Kansas (May 1983, below); the family with their myriad possessions in a battered Ford pickup truck heading who knows where (riffing on the FSA photographs of the 1930s) in Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); the migrant family “existing” in their wooden shack in South Texas (January 1983, below); and the baby protected, isolated, left to its own devices in Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below) as the family peers over the precipice into the existential depths.
On and on and on we go… from exhausted renegade elephants to realtors in the desert to abandoned uranium mines to limousines and glaciers. The real and the absurd, ludicrous even, living cheek by jowl, on the edge of oblivion.
There is one particular image of Sternfeld’s that is my favourite and that I think sums up the art of this wonderful artist: After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below). To me it perfectly pictures the dichotomy of American life. The have and have nots. The large expensive car and the beautiful, probably gated, community homes – and the desire for money that provides that lifestyle – dashed away by a force of nature, sweeping both the lifestyle, homes and car into the ravine, like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510), the ‘garden of lusts’ (and desires for money, home, possessions) descending into the hell of the chthonic earth. Be careful what you wish for.
Sternfeld’s work is worthy of our kind, calm meditation for in the stillness and cinematic quality of his photographs lies everlasting revelation into the human condition as we live and die on this, our one Earth.
Many thanks to the Bruce Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Joel Sternfeld doesn’t just capture America; he exposes it. With each photograph, he peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience. A pioneer in colour photography, Sternfeld’s lens turns everyday scenes into striking narratives where beauty meets decay, and hope intersects with abandonment. His images, timeless, yet hauntingly relevant – a cross-country journey that invites us to look deeper and question what lies beneath the surface.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects offers a rare encounter with Joel Sternfeld’s profound exploration of the American Dream – its triumphs, fractures, and quiet absurdities. Since its first release in 1987, this series has stood as a seminal work in colour photography, redefining the medium and reshaping our perception of American landscapes. Like his contemporaries William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld used colour to move beyond documentation, crafting layered narratives that invite both reflection and critique. On view through January 5, 2025, Sternfeld’s lens frames America as it is – flawed, resilient, and enduringly hopeful.
In Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Sternfeld confronts us with a haunting testament to industrial intrusion on sacred land. The muted pinks and warm ochres spread across the landscape, evoking the natural beauty of the Navajo Nation’s desert. Yet, at its heart, the photograph holds a darker, fractured reality – the scars of industry etched deeply into the land, an intrusion upon both the environment and the community’s heritage. Sternfeld’s light is gentle yet harsh, and his careful composition balances the serenity of nature against the unease of contamination. It’s a scene that commands attention, evoking reverence while quietly asking us to grapple with the unsettling impact of human intervention.
Coeburn, Virginia brings Sternfeld’s eye for subtle irony to life within the seemingly serene environment of a small town. Here, the frame captures the tension between the landscape’s lushness and signs of quiet disrepair houses sitting precariously against a verdant backdrop, hinting at lives lived in the margins. Through muted earthy tones and a sparing splash of green, Sternfeld avoids romanticising rural life, instead highlighting the fragile balance between nature’s persistence and the impermanence of human structures. The result is a scene that feels both intimate and detached, inviting us to see Coeburn not as a forgotten place but as a testament to resilience and transience.
In Canyon Country, California, Sternfeld turns his lens to the sublime – a canyon that feels at once vast and void, a sprawling testament to the untouched beauty of the American West. Here, the land stretches endlessly, exuding a calm that contrasts sharply with the bustling, culturally charged image of California we often imagine. Sternfeld’s framing, balanced with a quiet geometry, amplifies the canyon’s emptiness while subtly pointing to the tension between this natural expanse and the human inclination to intrude, consume, and commercialise. It’s a scene that invites introspection, leaving viewers to consider California as both escape and spectacle, a space layered with expectation yet stripped bare.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects invites us to traverse Sternfeld’s America – a land as haunting as it is beautiful. With a careful eye for color, geometry, and narrative tension, Sternfeld transforms these landscapes into timeless scenes, at once grounded and surreal. Each photograph holds a sense of melancholic grandeur, inviting viewers not just to observe but to confront the quiet dramas embedded in America’s vast, varied, and vulnerable terrain. In Sternfeld’s vision, America is an open road of paradoxes – where beauty meets desolation, and where each mile reveals a new truth we can’t ignore.
Giuliana Brida. “Oct 30 Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects | The Bruce Museum,” in Musee: Vanguard of Photography Culture on the Bruce Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 28/11/2024
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Kansas City, Kansas, May 1983 (below); at centre, Putney, Vermont, October 1978; and at right, Canyon Country, California June 1983 (above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at centre, Sternfeld’s A Bus Stop in Tucson, Arizona (July 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Bikini Contest, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (March 1983, below); and at right, The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); and at right, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s South Texas (January 1983, below); at second left, Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, above); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, above); at second right, Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); and at right, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left centre, Sternfeld’s Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); at centre, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below); and at right, Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington (June 1979, below)
Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects has come to be regarded as one of the important early monuments of colour photography. Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was one of a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore, who in the 1960s and 1970s began exploring the potential of colour photography as a fine art.
Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of colour and a distinctive personal vision. Inspired by the photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he embarked on an ambitious quest to document America, traversing the continent from 1978 to 1983 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. American Prospects is the result.
Although Sternfeld saw deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he also went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery. His goal was not to document the failure of the American Dream, but to record what was great, vital, and regenerative about this nation. On one hand, Sternfeld’s imagery includes damaged landscapes and industry in decline. He delights in the curious, bizarre, and accidental in the everyday. Scenes of an elephant collapsed on the road or a firefighter buying a pumpkin while a fire rages in the background convey a sense of absurdity. And yet underlying the series is a vision of a beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of the variety and resiliency of the American people. Even today, Sternfeld is optimistic about the American prospect: “America has a tremendous capacity to right itself,” he noted recently. Sternfeld’s vision is as complicated as the nation. His images are deep, rich, and powerful specifically because they are complex and conflicted, at once both critical and affectionate.
Guest curated by Robert Wolterstorff, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects will mount more than forty large scale colour prints, among them many of the most iconic images from the series, along with others that have never before been exhibited. It coincides with a new edition of American Prospects published by Steidl Press.
Text from the Bruce Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Earl Garvey Realtor, The Mojave Desert, California (July 1979, below); and at right, Wyoming (1994)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Abandoned Freighter, Homer Alaska (July 1984, below); and at second right, Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984); and at right, Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Navajo Nation (1982)
Beauty, sadness and humor are woven through complex portraits of America in “Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects.” On view at the Bruce Museum Oct. 3, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, the exhibition is an ode to the artist’s 1987 landmark photography book, “American Prospects,” and coincides with a new edition published by Steidl Press. The Bruce mounted more than 40 large-scale color prints, ranging from Sternfeld’s most iconic images to never-before-exhibited photographs.
Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was an early adopter of color photography as fine art. He explored the medium’s potential in the 1960s and 70s with a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt and Stephen Shore. Sternfeld initially focused on New York street photography and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. Longing to explore beyond the confines of the urban grid, the award supported his purchase of a Volkswagen camper and a wooden 8 x 10 view camera, his tools as he embarked on a multi-year quest to capture scenes across the country.
The work of documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank inspired Sternfeld to observe people and places across the United States and record what was great, vital and regenerative about the nation. Despite sensing deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery, delighting in the curious, bizarre and accidental moments in everyday life.
Sternfeld traversed the nation from 1978 to 1987, taking thousands of photographs. His large-format view camera accommodated 8 x 10-inch sheets of color negative film, with a small shutter opening that achieved great depth of field. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston used the same methods in their famous black-and-white photographs, producing razor-sharp detail and an infinite range of tones. Sternfeld’s pictures were composed carefully around color harmonies, often focusing on pastel hues of two or three dominant colors and were guided by a strong sense of geometry and order despite the visual chaos of life they portrayed.
The resulting images revealed beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, damaged landscapes and industry in decline and the variety and resiliency of the American people. The artist has referred to the underlying theme of his work as the utopian vision of America contrasted with the dystopian one. The first edition of “American Prospects” featured 55 images created from four-colour plates that capture both America’s beauty and its flaws. The book was published to wide acclaim and is regarded as an important early monument of color photography.
“Joel Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of color and a distinctive personal vision,” said guest curator Robert Wolterstorff, the former Susan E. Lynch executive director of the Bruce Museum. “His powerful images are imbued with a sense of irony and depict a vision of Americans that is as complicated as the nation, inviting contemplation on ideas of paradise versus reality through modern conceptions of landscape.”
“American Prospects” includes a 1978 photograph of a farm market in McLean, Virginia that depicts a uniformed fireman shopping for pumpkins as a house fire rages in the background, the autumnal colours coordinating with the flames. Published in Life magazine, the absurd image is one of the most recognised scenes of Sternfeld’s career. Other subjects include an elephant collapsed on a road in Washington state, clouds approaching a busy waterpark in Florida and the landing of the space shuttle Columbia at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
Sternfeld’s work captures details of specific moments in time, serving as an archive for the future as well as a caution toward photography’s manipulative power. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Sternfeld said, “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say.”
Sternfeld is based in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rome Prize. His work has been exhibited in institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), the Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco).
Press release from the Bruce Museum
Joel Sternfeld short biography
Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.
Ever since the publication of his landmark study, American Prospects in 1987 his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).
On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.
Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site… It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).
All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.
His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation – they are an archive for the future.
Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Brattleboro, Vermont (October 1978)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Roadside Rest Area, White Sands, New Mexico (September 1980); and at right, The Eagles of Kayenta, Junior High School at Football Practice, Kayenta, Arizona, Navajo Nation (August 1986)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Portage Glacier, Alaska (August 1984, below); and at right, Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s After a Tornado, Grand Isle, Nebraska (June 1980, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Grafton, West Virginia (February 1983); and at right, Prince Manufacturing, Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania (November 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Buckingham, Pennsylvania (August 1978); and at right, Pendleton, Oregon (1980)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980); and at right, Lake Oswego, Oregon (June 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at right, Sternfeld’s Near Interlochen, Michigan (February 1981)
Short biography: Aline Meyer Liebman (1879-1966). Born in Los Angeles, Aline Meyer Liebman studied at the Art Students League in New York and received the support of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. By the 1930s she had already become a consolidated artist and was the subject of a solo show at Walker Galleries in 1936. Meyer Liebman was also known for her work as a collector of art and photography. She acquired works by O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Max Ernst, among others. Liebman kept a broad circle of relationships with key people in the New York art world, such as Peggy Guggenheim, who included her work Painted Dream (1935) in Exhibition by 31 Women. Other notable facets include her political and philanthropic work: aside from supporting President Roosevelt, she became a member of the New York League of Women Voters and designed a poster for the organization in 1944.
While it is fantastic to see this “recreation” (many of the original art works are unknown or missing and others have been substituted by the same artist in their place) of Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 Exhibition by 31 Women “organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women,” I am conflicted by this exhibition. Conflicted, conflicted, conflicted.
Wealthy white women uses influence and money to promote women artists when no one else would, a patron reinforcing female participation introducing “well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.” But I have a feeling that this group of female artists was part of an elite cohort – a privileged, internalist, internationalist, undoubtedly incestuous (in terms of knowing each other) clique of humans that knew the right people, especially through their connections with male artists.
As ever with the art world, it’s not what you know it’s who you know. Which artist has the ear of which curator; which artist is “fashionable” at the moment; and which artist is supported by which patron and gallery. It’s all about connections, and these women, whether emerging or established, had those connections. They were part of an educated elite that was at one and the same time, both exclusive and excluding (no Black American or Asian artists here… think of the times!)
And while the relationship between art and bourgeois life central to an earlier ideal of culture (the artist and their patron) has changed since the Second World War and the playing field has become much more egalitarian, my cynicism and socialism still rails at those with power and how they withhold their largesse. You only have to look at the photograph of Peggy Guggenheim in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace or the naming of so many galleries in art museums after wealthy patrons to understand what I mean.
What did it mean for these women artists, at what level was it a recognition of their undoubted skill as artists, when so many largely vanished without trace?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The idea of the artist as central member of a spiritual elite embodying an alternative to Philistine commercialism, or even pointing the way to humankind’s salvation, has powered a variety of movements as different as Aestheticism, Realism, Dada, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism. This was the conception of culture that crystallized in the notion of the avant-garde, whose “function” – in Clement Greenberg’s classic formulation of 1939 – was “to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.”[1]
Greenberg’s text touchingly reveals the double sense of the idea of culture, as both redeeming force of the existing system and as a sort of critique by enactment of an alternative set of values. In this conception, the essence of art, incarnated in the avant-garde, is its alienation from the norms of bourgeois society (hence, in the case of modernist abstraction, its abandonment of going systems of representation). On the other hand, Greenberg acknowledged that “No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income” and even that “in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.”[2]
This paradox is nothing but the place of culture in capitalist society, in its most concentrated form. Given the distinctive social character of art objects, as handmade luxury goods in a world dominated by mechanized mass production, they offer both their producers and their consumers an experience outside the “everyday life” of the market. Expressive, in its very freedom from monetary considerations, of the power of money and of the access to free time made possible by money, art is a token and a perk of social distinction for those who own and even for those who merely appreciate it. The artist, as producer of this token, shares in the distinction, though (for the most part) not in the wealth that supports the social practice of art as a whole. It was the very separation of the world of cultural production from the norm of capitalist investment and production that made it potentially so valuable. By means of critique, culture cleanses modern society of the sin of commercialism, allowing its dominating classes to see themselves as worthy inheritors of the position of the aristocracy they displaced.
The picture I have sketched here, hardly a novel one, evidently owes a great deal to Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of what he calls “the field of cultural production.” That analysis reveals in particular the close relation between, on the one hand, the social antagonism between the producers of culture and the upper-class consumers from whom they are separated by style of life and self-conception as well as degree of social power, and, on the other, the fact that “the cult of art and the artist… is one of the necessary components of the bourgeois ‘art of living,’ to which it brings a ‘supplément d’âme,’ its spiritualistic point of honor.”[3] This cultural system, evolved during the nineteenth century, survived until well into the twentieth. But the last twenty years have seen the acceleration of a process of change, whose origin is traceable to the end of the Second World War.[4] What changed was not the centrality of the “cult of art” to the bourgeois “art of living” but the felt antipathy between art and bourgeois life central to the earlier ideal of culture.
Paul Mattick. “After the Gold Rush,” on the American Society for Aesthetics website 2010 [Online] Cited 12/12/2024
1/ C. Greenberg, “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” in idem, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 5. 2/ Ibid., p. 8 3/ P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 44. 4/ For an in-depth discussion, see Katy Siegel, Since ’45: American Art in the Age of Extremes (London: Reaktion, 2016)
Installation view of the exhibition 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim at Fundación MAPFRE showing at left, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli’s Juno and Vulcan (1936, below); at second left, Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, below); and at right, Buffie Johnson’s The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) (1949-1959, below)
In 1943, the renowned art collector Peggy Guggenheim organised in her New York gallery ‘Art of This Century’, one of the first exhibitions in the United States to showcase works exclusively by European and American women, titled Exhibition by 31 Women. The show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp, and the artists were selected by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst and Duchamp himself. Guggenheim, as the sole woman on the jury, was in a privileged position to provide a female perspective in the selection process.
These women, many of whom were associated with Surrealism or abstraction, maintained an ambiguous position within both trends. Often, they employed these styles to reformulate and challenge them, preserving their independence and shedding light on the patriarchal assumptions underlying these artistic movements.
31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a curated selection and reinterpretation of that initiative, including all the artists featured in the original show. With this exhibition, the Foundation aims not only to honor Peggy Guggenheim’s significant role as one of the foremost patrons and collectors of the 20th century, but also shift the narrative away from viewing these women primarily through their connections with male artists. Instead, it highlights the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship they established among themselves.
Short biography: Sonja Sekula (1918-1963). Born in Lucerne from a Hungarian father and a Swiss mother, Sonja Sekula emigrated to New York in 1936, where her father had moved their family business. In 1938 she attempted suicide for the first time and from that point onward began suffering from mental health issues. Through her well-connected family, Sekula was able to meet André Breton and other European Surrealists in the early 1940s. In mid-decade, she travelled to Mexico and came into contact with Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. Later, she traversed the northeastern United States, discovering the imagery of Native American people. The primitivist symbols in her canvases are interwoven with decorative patterns, intense colours, and a juxtaposition of viewpoints. At the time, Sekula’s work was well received by critics, some suggesting that there was a hidden symbolism related to her homosexuality. Aside from including her painting Composition at Exhibition by 31 Women, Peggy Guggenheim dedicated a solo exhibition to Sekula’s work in 1946. Two years later Sonja Sekula joined the Betty Parsons Gallery, which would host five solo exhibitions between 1948 and 1957. In 1951, a day after the opening of her third exhibition, she suffered a nervous breakdown. The artist spent the following years coming in and out of mental health clinics in the United States and Switzerland. In 1963 she committed suicide in her Zurich studio.
Short biography: Louise Nevelson (1899-1988). Born in Ukraine, Louise Nevelson emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of six. After studying in Germany under Hans Hofmann, she settled in New York, where she met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Nevelson collaborated on one of Rivera’s murals while receiving lessons from George Grosz and Chaim Gross. Her first terracotta works – painted in black and often subject to the application of a form of engraving – reveal the influence of Central American art that she had come to know through Kahlo and Rivera. Furthermore, Louise Nevelson participated in the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) and was often in the company of Frederick Kiesler and Peggy Guggenheim, who selected her work Column for Exhibition by 31 Women. In the 1950s she began to accumulate a large collection of wooden fragments, which would give rise to her most characteristic working method. First, she painted each piece black, white, or gold. Later, she piled and stored the fragments. Finally, she assembled the pieces in large abstract constructions. In 1956 she began to use milk cartons and wood to produce small embedded reliefs, combining them to create increasingly large ensembles. Her work received much critical acclaim after her participation in the Moon Garden Plus exhibition in New York, in 1958.
Highlight
Fundación MAPFRE presents 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, featuring works by thirty-one artists who participated in Exhibition by 31 Women, a show organised in 1943 by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery in New York. Most of these creators, who came from Europe and the United States, were linked to the Surrealist movement or to abstraction, and included both well-established figures within the artistic landscape as well as emerging talent.
The exhibition highlights Peggy Guggenheim’s important role as a patron, addressing the context in which the artists she became associated with at her New York gallery developed their work, as well as the networks of collaboration that were established between them.
KEYS
Art Also Belongs to Women
In her famous article of 1971, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists”, Linda Nochlin stated: “In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, has been unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian.” This text finally advocated the role played by many women who had been dismissed on the basis of their gender throughout the history of art and have only recently begun to occupy the place they deserve – along with writers, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. The artists featured in 31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim, such as Frida Kahlo, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Valentine Hugo, and Dorothea Taning, could easily figure in Nochlin’s list, which included figures such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffmann, Safo, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson.
Surrealism
Surrealism, a term coined by Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, refers to the movement led by André Breton, who defined it as “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.” Rooted in Dadaism and Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, Surrealists expressed themselves through writing, photography, performance, painting, collage, and music. Although Surrealism in principle advocated gender equality and supported the work of women artists, in practice women were considered almost as objects, rather than creative subjects.
Peggy Guggenheim
Patron and art lover, Peggy Guggenheim (New York, 1898 – Padova, 1979) was one of the most important collectors and promoters of avant-garde art of the 20th century. The daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, and niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, founder of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, she decided to move to Europe in 1921. In Paris she established relationships with Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and Djuna Barnes, among others. Later, she settled in London, where she opened her first gallery in 1938. Under the name Guggenheim Jeune, the gallery featured works by Vasili Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy. Prior to the Nazi occupation of France, Guggenheim returned to Paris and acquired some of the most important works in her collection, which she managed to take with her when she fled to the United States.
In 1942, once she had settled in New York, Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century Gallery on West 57th street. Aside from displaying her own collection, the space became a platform for young artists, among which were the women who took part in Exhibition by 31 Women.
THE EXHIBITION
In 1943 the renowned collector Peggy Guggenheim organised one of the first exhibitions dedicated exclusively to the work of European and North American women artists at her New York gallery Art of This Century. Titled Exhibition by 31 Women, the show was conceived by Guggenheim in collaboration with Marcel Duchamp. The selection of artists was carried out by a jury whose members included André Breton, Max Ernst, and Duchamp himself. As the only woman in the jury, Guggenheim was able to contribute a female perspective to the process. In the press release, the gallerist herself presented the exhibition as a “testimony to the fact that the creative ability of women is by no means restricted to the decorative vein, as could be deduced from the history of art by women throughout the ages.” Her objective was to present the work of these creators as independent artists, distancing them from the traditional roles they had been given as muses or models.
The list of works published for the exhibition did not contain photographs, only titles, which were often quite unspecific, such as “still life” or “composition”. With the exception of a few cases, it is difficult to ascertain which works were on display at 31 Women.
31 Women. An Exhibition by Peggy Guggenheim presents a selection and a reinterpretation of The 31 Women Collection repository; a collection created by the North American producer and collector Jenna Segal in 2020, featuring works by the same artists who participated in the historic exhibition of 1943.
Through this exhibition, Fundación MAPFRE aims to disseminate the work and vision conceived by Peggy Guggenheim at her New York Gallery, further breaking with the narrative that has often valued the contributions of women artists in terms of their relationships with male artists, while focusing more specifically on the networks of collaboration, solidarity, and friendship that were established between them. Associated mostly with Surrealism or abstraction, these women used said languages in an effort to reformulate and question them, maintaining their independence and highlighting the patriarchal precepts such movements were based on.
All of the works on display – close to forty – belong to The 31 Women Collection. Likewise, the exhibition also features photographs, publications, and other pieces; contextualising and complementing the show’s approximation to the scene of North American women artists of the time. Along with the exceptional loan from The 31 Women Collection, the exhibition is also supported by the Vitra Design Museum, the Lafuente Archive, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Documentation Center.
The exhibition discourse is articulated in different sections, the first of which introduces the viewer to the work carried out by Peggy Guggenheim at her Art of This Century gallery, and in particular her support of women artists of the time. The following sections pose an approximation to some of the main thematic axes and strategies explored by the creators featured in Exhibition by 31 Women, who sought to assert their independence and avoid clichés associated with the label “female artist” that were commonplace in the world of art at the time.
Art of This Century
In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened the Art of This Century gallery on the top floor of a building on West 57th Street in New York. Determined to create a space that would generate expectation, she hired the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler, who designed custom furniture – one piece being featured in this exhibition – and projected a groundbreaking exhibition device to stimulate interactions between viewers and artworks.
The space had a profound impact on the artistic scene through a program of solo exhibitions that Guggenheim dedicated to numerous artists who would later become some of the most renowned creators of their time. The gallery also became an essential meeting point for European and North American avant-gardes. Among the most important initiatives developed by Guggenheim at her gallery were her support and promotion of the work of women artists, not only through group exhibitions, such as Exhibition by 31 Women and later The Women (1945), but also through the solo shows dedicated to some of the participants in said exhibitions, such as Sonja Sekula or Irene Rice Pereira.
The “Self” as Art
The role played by self-representation in the work of these artists was fundamental in their claim for independence and in their efforts to assert their identity versus traditional art historiography, in which women – when mentioned – appeared as secondary figures relegated to the roles of muses, wives, or companions of their male counterparts. Furthermore, in order to construct identities that were different to those assigned to them and escape from the gender roles imposed by the patriarchal society of the time, they adopted a number of languages that included autobiographical components, costumes, performances, and self-portraiture. This can be observed in works such as Woman in Armor I, by Leonor Fini, or Untitled (Self-Portrait), by Dorothea Tanning, for example.
In their quest to escape from social expectations and gender roles, self-representation became one of the creative strategies most widely adopted by women artists in the first half of the 20th century. Through elaborate costumes and extravagant make-up, which they wore in their daily lives or during improvised performances, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Leonor Fini constructed alternate identities that allowed them to elude the rigid female behavioral models determined by bourgeois ideology. Likewise, Hedda Sterne, Dorothea Tanning, and Meret Oppenheim spoke of their interest in blurring the boundaries of conventionally constructed identities through doubling, masquerades, and the confusion of reality against its reflection, which can be observed in their self-portraits. Similarly, Gypsy Rose Lee reinvented the genre of striptease – traditionally linked to popular culture – by challenging the contemporary understanding of the pose and of female nudes.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Leonora Carrington completed their self-creation work with the writing of their autobiographies, which seamlessly combined reality and invention. Writing novels about themselves allowed these artists to reflect on aspects of their past that might have been considered lurid – for instance, becoming the victim of rape by a group of men in Madrid as Carrington recounted in Down Below – or imagining alternative narratives of their lives. In similar fashion, Leonor Fini frequently took photographs of herself posing in black feather wigs and other props through which she fabricated imaginary personalities. Both Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Gypsy Rose Lee, who had worked as dancers and strippers in burlesque shows and as professional models in art schools, were very aware of the need to take control of their own image, subverting the passive role that muses and female models still played within the avant-garde.
Gypsy Rose Lee (American, 1911-1970) Gypsy Rose Lee images for Tru-Vue stereoscope film: Striptease Stereoview #1306 Burlesque (detail) 1933 Vintage Tru-Vue 16 pictures in film (13 of Gypsy Rose Lee) The 31 Women Collection
Gypsy Rose Lee began performing as a stripper in burlesque shows and went on to appear in Broadway theaters. Her stripteases were greatly successful, allowing her to transform the genre. The fact that she talked while striping was truly groundbreaking and enabled her to draw attention away from the mere act of stripping, while presenting herself as a modern and entertaining woman. Likewise, her enunciation was unlike street slang: she recited with an outlandish high-class accent and incorporated phrases in French.
Short biography: Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970). Born under the name Rose Luise Hovick into a working-class family that performed in vaudeville theaters in Seattle, Washington, Gypsy Rose Lee began to work as a stripper in burlesque shows at the age of sixteen and went on to perform at important Broadway theaters. Her acts were enormously popular at the time, granting the genre respect and transforming it into something beyond the act of stripping. She began to collect works of art in the 1940s. Among such purchases were works by Max Ernst. This opened the doors to meetings with Peggy Guggenheim, who at that time was married to the German painter and would host the encounters at her house. In Exhibition by 31 Women, she exhibited a collage titled Self-Portrait. In 1957 Gypsy Rose Lee published her autobiography, culminating the life-long self-promotion and self-invention work that drove her entire career.
In this self-portrait from the early 1940s, Dorothea Tanning experimented with the limits of reality and representation. In a style akin to fashion figurines that often appeared in women’s magazines of the time, the artist portrayed herself in a room full of empty canvases. Her naked legs are reflected onto a framed glass that is pointed at the viewer, creating an impossible interplay of mirrors and altering the relationship between reality and reflection; inside and out.
Short biography: Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). Born in a small town in Illinois, where she lived a solitary childhood, Dorothea Tanning developed an interest in dreams and fantasy since she was a child. After visiting Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) at MoMA, she felt attracted to Surrealism and travelled to Paris three years later with the objective of coming into contact with said group. Although she was forced to cut her stay short due to the outbreak of the war, the paintings she created upon her return to New York are proof of her strong Surrealist bias. In 1942, following the advice of gallerist Julien Levy, Max Ernst visited her studio and selected the works Birthday and Children’s Game for Exhibition by 31 Women. The visit also signified the beginning of a relationship between Tanning and Ernst, who separated from Peggy Guggenheim and married the artist in 1946. From the 1930s to the late 90s Tanning developed a prolific career. Her paintings, ballet designs, soft sculptures, and literary works reflect some of her recurring obsessions: the subversion of the bourgeoise domestic space, metamorphosis, the power of imagination, the gothic novel, and non-conventional images of girls and feminine figures.
The autobiographical component of this work has been linked to the closed umbrella, which lies uselessly at the center of the image and represents the loneliness felt by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at a point when she had been abandoned by those who supported her both emotionally and financially. The treading foot that appears on the left of the composition symbolizes the passing of the years. The title of the work also expands on this notion, which is a direct interpellation to her friend and patron Berenice Abbott. On the other hand, the silhouette of the urinal alludes to the famous readymade by Marcel Duchamp, a work that a number of recent studies have attributed to Freytag-Loringhoven.
Short biography: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927). Born in Germany under the name Else Plötz, she became known as Else Endell, Else Greve, and finally Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven through her numerous marriages over the course of several decades; evidence of her early interest in constructing herself as a character. At the age of eighteen she settled in Berlin, where she began to study art and worked as a variety artist and model. In 1913 she emigrated to New York and joined the Dadaist circle that gathered around the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg. Elsa von Freytag’s work spanned several genres: poetry, autobiography, art, and artistic self-representation. Aside from producing sculptures with found elements, she used materials rescued from the streets and objects stolen from department stores to create costumes that she wore at Greenwich Village balls and during her walks through New York, combining them with striking make-up, extravagant hairdos, and other decorations. One of the objects she created with fragments from plumbing materials was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1923 she returned to Berlin and shortly after settled in Paris, where she scraped a living with the help of friends like Berenice Abbott and Djuna Barnes. She died under uncertain circumstances in 1927. Very few of her performances where documented and her work remained invisible to a great extent until the early 21st century. Some research suggests that she was the author of the famous readymade Fountain, considered one of Marcel Duchamp’s key works.
Strangely Familiar
In 1919 Freud coined the term unheimlich – which roughly translates into English as “ominous” or “uncanny”, and into French as “unsettling strangeness”. This aesthetic category, which is verging on beautiful, was adopted by the Surrealist movement and generally alludes to things that are familiar and attractive, but simultaneously produce a sense of unease and rejection. This is the underlying feeling in Gray Day (Sand Dunes), by Aline Meyer Liebman, or in the still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara and Meret Oppenheim, which portray decontextualised familiar objects, provoking a sense of unease that is hard to explain. This sensation is accentuated in Spanish Customs by Dorothea Tanning and in Kay Sage’s The Fourteen Daggers, in which two mysterious figures covered in fabric seem to ascend a staircase to the sky.
Hence, Aline Meyer Liebman’s yellowish dunes are striking for their anthropomorphic forms, the Connecticut night sky appears as a fantastic explosion of flowers and stars in Jacqueline Lamba’s painting, and the viewer is unsettled by the incongruent characters and scenes that disrupt the peacefulness in Hazel McKinley and Pegeen Vail’s colourful landscapes. Furthermore, familiar objects seem to have lost their usual meaning in the puzzling dreamlike still lives by Meraud Guinness Guevara, Anne Harvey, Meret Oppenheim, and Gypsy Rose Lee, while Eyre de Lanux and Evelyn Wild’s rug designs combine primitivist and avant-garde elements that question the ideals of purity associated with modern domestic interiors. Kay Sage and Dorothea Tanning’s paintings are particularly unnerving as they transform the bourgeois house into a strange territory inhabited by ghostly figures and elongated shadows.
Produced in 1972, this piece is a reinterpretation of one of Meret Oppenheim’s most renowned works, Déjeuner en Fourrure, which was on display for the first time in 1936 – the year it was produced – at an exhibition dedicated to Surrealist objects. The work garnered much recognition and was selected by Peggy Guggenheim for Exhibition by 31 Women. Dipleased by always seeing her name associated with this work, the artist wanted to make an ironic version of her infamous mug, recreating it with cheap materials: a perfect kitsch souvenir of the iconic work.
Short biography: Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985). Born in Berlin into a family of the liberal bourgeoisie, Meret Oppenheim studied at Rudolf Steiner’s school in Basel. Between 1932 and 1937 she spent much of her time in Paris, where she became close to the Surrealist movement. The photographs in which she posed for Man Ray and the enormous success of her objects – in particular Déjeuner en Fourrure [Breakfast with Furs] from 1936, acquired by MoMA and also on display at Exhibition by 31 Women – make her a Surrealist muse of sorts. Later, she expressed her irritation at seeing her name associated solely to that work and to Surrealism. In 1937 Oppenheim returned to Basel, where she battled depression and produced very little until 1954, when she resumed her artistic work with great impetus. Myths, dreams, literary sources, Jung’s psychoanalysis, gender roles, and social stereotyping were interwoven within her work, which also incorporated magical objects, poems, photographs, theatre costumes, and textile designs.
In the mid-1940s, Jacqueline Lamba and the North American Surrealist artist David Hare took a trip together through the western United States, where they came into contact with the cosmology and art of the indigenous peoples of North America. The typical brown colours of Amerindian fabrics dominate the palette of this canvas, in which Lamba portrayed the surroundings of her house in Roxbury and captured the unexpected reality that lies hidden behind a seemingly mundane landscape.
Short biography: Jacqueline Lamba (1910-1993). Born in France, Jacqueline Lamba spent her early years in Egypt, where her father – an engineer – passed away in a car accident in 1914. She returned to Paris with her mother and attended the École de l’Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs. After the passing of her mother in 1927 Lamba survived with the meager wages she earned from her design work. Fascinated by André Breton’s Communicating Vessels, she began an intense and difficult romantic relationship with him. The couple married shortly after and had a daughter named Aube. Jacqueline Lamba always lamented being more recognised as Breton’s muse than for her collages, cadavre exquis, objects, and paintings, which would soon be on display at Surrealist exhibitions. In 1938 she travelled to Mexico with her husband. The couple was hosted by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whom she established a profound relationship with. Thanks to the patronage of Peggy Guggenheim, Lamba and Breton settled in New York in 1941 as they fled from the Nazis. Lamba exhibited her work at the inaugural show of the Art of This Century Gallery and participated in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1944 she divorced Breton and began a relationship with David Hare. They settled in Connecticut in 1948 and had a son. Lamba lost interest in Surrealism and veered toward abstraction, focusing on the mythologies of indigenous populations from Mexico and the United Sates. In 1954, after separating from Hare, she returned to Paris and destroyed much of her prior work. She later confessed that she had first tried to please Breton and then Hare with her paintings, ensuring that she would only paint to please herself from that point onward. In 1967 the most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to her work in her lifetime was hosted at the Musée Picasso in Antibes.
The conversion of domestic space into unusual territory reached its pinnacle in works such as this one. Sage imagined a bizarre interior space that opens up to a door behind which lies a staircase leading to the sky. The scene is inhabited by two ghostly figures covered in fabric that cast elongated shadows on the ground and accentuate the air of mystery. The motif of the open door reappears in Dorothea Tanning’s oil painting Spanish Customs, also on display in this room.
Short biography: Kay Sage (1898-1963). Born under the name Katherine Linn Sage into a wealth family from Albany, Kay Sage spent most of her childhood travelling through Europe with her mother, who had divorced her father in 1908. Although she never received a formal education, she went on to study at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D. C. and at the British Academy in Rome, where she settled in 1920. Aside from coming into contact with the local artistic scene, Sage met Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, whom she married in 1925. During their ten years as a married couple, Sage dedicated little time to art. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she came into contact with the members of the Surrealist group and began a romantic relationship with the painter Yves Tanguy, whom she married in 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, the couple migrated to Connecticut, where they would reside for the following years. During that period Sage developed her own style: uninhabited landscapes intersected by austere architectural forms, shadows, and floating fabrics that are simultaneously recognisable and enigmatic. Peggy Guggenheim selected her painting from 1942 At the Appointed Time – today preserved at the Newark Museum of Art – for Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1955 Tanguy died suddenly. This event led Sage into depression. Coupled with eyesight problems, she drifted away from painting. In the late 1950s she began to produce collages and write poetry. However, in January of 1963 Sage took her own life.
Bestiaries
Many of the artists featured in this exhibition – particularly those whose works are more closely linked with Surrealism – experimented with multiple personalities, which led them to identify themselves with animals that became their alter egos. As noted by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show, “the animals embodied the search for other mythical or imaginary worlds where they could finally be free”. Hence, the female body is transformed into an eagle, a crow, or a deer in the works of Barbara Poe-Levee Reis, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, Julia Thecla, and Frida Kahlo, while in Leonora Carrington’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick, the horse simultaneously embodies the dreaded paternal figure and the artist herself.
Women artists close to Surrealism granted particular importance to the representation of animals. Such is the case with works by Barbara Poe-Levee Reis and Milena Pavlovic-Barilli, in which animals often inhabited fictional landscapes or mythical worlds where women could imagine themselves freed from patriarchal norms. Likewise, in works by Julia Thecla, Frida Kahlo, and Leonor Fini, the depiction of women’s bodies being transformed into crows, deer, and cats refers to an alternate reality in which humans and animals are hybridized. Djuna Barnes imagined a collection of grotesque women with animal-like traits that challenged normative understandings of the feminine in an illustrated book of poems published in 1915. Valentine Hugo was inspired by the animals of the zodiac when designing costumes for a theatrical performance that took place at the Théâtre Champs-Elysées in Paris. Lastly, in Leonora Carrington’s painting, the horse appears as a more ambivalent figure that simultaneously embodies patriarchal authority and the liberation of women.
Since the 1930s, women had a growing presence in Surrealist initiatives. For example, in 1936 Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp participated in the exhibition Art, Dada, Surrealism hosted at MoMA. Six years later, Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage exhibited their work at First Papers of Surrealism, organised by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp in New York . Women also collaborated on the movement’s publications, either as authors or as illustrators; an example of which includes the series of eighteen drawings that Hugo produced in 1951 for Paul Éluard’s book of poems Le Phénix. Peggy Guggenheim’s work as a patron undoubtedly helped to reinforce female participation. Many of the artists included in the exhibition of 1943 had attended the meetings between North Americans and exiled Europeans organised by the collector at her house in New York. Some of the works on display at 31 Women were reproduced in the double issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV in 1943; an acknowledgement that most likely contributed to the show’s repercussion.
Short biography: Valentine Hugo (1887-1968). Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer under the name Valentine Gross, Valentine Hugo possessed a natural talent for drawing since her childhood. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, produced illustrations for fashion magazines, and frequently attended Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Inspired by the subject of dance, her drawings and paintings were on display at the Thèatre des Champs-Elysées in 1913. A friend of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau, she also collaborated she also collaborated on thaeatrical sets and designs with Jean Hugo, her husband at the time. In 1926 she met André Breton – whom she would establish a short-lived romantic relationship with – and joined the circle of Surrealists. She participated in the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (MoMA, 1936), in the development of numerous cadavre exquis, and the illustration of Surrealist books. The influence of Surrealism can be perceived in her constructions, which are based on the unexpected encounter with objects and materials, as well as in the importance she grants to motifs such as dreams, night-time atmospheres, the marvelous, and ghostly apparitions. The drawing that was featured at Exhibition by 31 Women – which has since been lost – was poignantly titled Dream of 17/1/34. Hugo remained in France during the war, after which she focused on illustration, writing books of poems, and the production of theater costumes and sets.
Short biography: Leonor Fini (1907-1996). Born in Argentina into a family marked by a dominant father, Leonor Fini fled with her mother to Trieste, Italy, when she was still a young girl. Fini taught herself art. At the age of seventeen she left the family home and moved to Milan and later to Paris, where her interest in the world of dreams and the unconscious led her to come into contact with the Surrealists. Although she was not officially part of the group, she participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA in 1936. Hybrid figures such as the sphynx dominate her paintings, a motif she also explored through costumes and self-representation. The painting that was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women was in fact titled The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes. During the war she remained in Europe. Between 1944 and 1972, aside from continuing to paint, she focused intensely on the design of theatrical costumes and sets.
The painting by Pavlovic draws from various sources: Mannerist art from the 16th century, Magical Realism, and Surrealism. It also incorporates motifs and mythical figures from classical antiquity, such as the Roman goddess Juno and her son Vulcan, protagonists of this canvas. The use of diluted colours, the impression that the characters are floating in space, and the apparently incongruent combination of a wide range of elements (the eagle, the piano, the wheel, the drapery, the bouquet of flowers, and the mirror) grant this painting a dreamlike and mysterious atmosphere.
Short biography: Milena Pavlovic-Barilli (1909-1945). Born in Serbia into a family with artistic inclinations, Milena Pavlovic-Barilli studied art in Munich between 1926 and 1928. There she was introduced to painting, fashion illustration, and drawing, creating an iconography based on stylised figures and wavy lines in which the influence of Art Nouveau is combined with echoes of orient. In 1931 she settled in Paris, where she came into contact with figures of Surrealism, such as André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Valéry. Regardless, her work drifted into a style that critics considered closer to Magical Realism. Everyday life was fused with fantasy in her paintings, while space was filled with enigmatic symbols: ancient columns that levitate, veiled faces of women, winged youths painted in pale hues, all of which grants her work a supernatural feel. She lived in New York between 1939 and 1945, where she focused on fashion illustration and costume and set designs for the theater. Her paintings, populated with elongated figures in architectural environments that seem rooted in the Renaissance, reflect her admiration for Mannerism. In 1940 she exhibited her work at the Julien Levy Gallery and established ties with the group of Surrealist immigrants. Her work Insomnia (1942) – which has since been lost – was on display at Exhibition by 31 Women. Her premature death in an accident in 1945 cut her career shot. In 1962 the Milena Pavlovic-Barilli Museum opened its doors at the house where she was born. The museum includes a broad selection of her paintings, drawings, letters, and personal objects.
Short biography: Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Born into a wealthy English family, Leonora Carrington was fascinated by fairy tales and fantasy literature since she was a young girl. She studied art in Florence, Paris, and London under the guidance of Amédée Ozenfant. Her first works recreate legendary worlds populated by hybrid animal species and powerful female figures. In 1936 she discovered Surrealism during a visit to the International Surrealist Exhibition. Two years later she settled in the south of France with Max Ernst – whom she had established a relationship with – in an old house that the couple transformed into a work of total art. Carrington began to publish her first books containing short stories. In 1940, after the outbreak of the war and the arrest of Max Ernst, she fled to Madrid, where she became the victim of rape and was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Santander; she would recount this experience in her book Down Below. After managing to migrate to New York in 1941 she participated in a number of initiatives promoted by exiled Surrealists, such as the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism and the magazine VVV. Peggy Guggenheim included two of her works The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938, above) and the Joy of Skating (1941, below) in Exhibition by 31 Women. In 1943 Carrington settled in Mexico, where she would live until her death. She integrated into the community of exiled artists along with Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Benjamin Péret. Her paintings re-elaborated old themes and she delved into new ones: fantasy literature, female divinities, alchemy, magic, and Mexican mythologies.
Djuna Barnes (American, 1892-1982) The Book of Repulsive Women, 4th image in the 1st edition 1915 The 31 Women Collection
In the modern age of Taylorism and Fordism, women played a vital role in the functioning of the American system by efficiently arranging domestic life with a precision similar to that of the nation’s industry. In contrast with this mechanical monotony, Barnes imagined the “repulsive women” that appear in her poems and drawings as the antithesis of the model housewife. Some of these figures, such as the woman with donkey ears and animal-like features that can be observed in one of her illustrations, manage to question the very the boundaries of humanity.
Short biography: Djuna Barnes (1892-1982). Born in a colony of artists north of New York, Djuna Barnes studied art at the Pratt Institute and at the Art Students League. In 1915 she settled in the bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where she began her career as an artist and a writer. That same year she published The Book of Repulsive Women, a collection of poems that included her own illustrations, and began to work as a journalist. Best known for her experimental novel from 1936, Nightwood, Barnes cultivated all genres: narrative, poetry, theater, and journalism. In 1921 she moved to Paris, where she began a romantic relationship with the sculptor Thelma Wood and began to frequent the avant-garde circles of the Rive Gauche, establishing friendships with Gertrude Stein, Berenice Abbott, Natalie Clifford Barney, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Peggy Guggenheim herself. With the outbreak of World War II, she moved back to New York, where her work Portrait of Alice was put on display at Exhibition by 31 Women.
The Middle Way: Languages of Abstraction
Although many of the artists who participated in 31 Women fell within the sphere of influence of Surrealism, some of them were more inclined toward abstract languages. In the 1930s the North American art scene was dominated by social realism and regionalism. In an effort to promote abstraction, the association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded, an association which included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. Abstraction began to progressively dominate the artistic landscape of North America and was configured in a way that highlighted the ideal of masculinity, whose epitome was Jackson Pollock. In the face of a discourse that hailed the language of expressionism as a reflection of the North American male, many of these artists opted to explore a “middle way” that could account for all of the possibilities afforded by abstraction. A great example of this can be found in The Middle Way / The Great Mother Rules the Sky (Astor Mural) by Buffie Johnson.
The association American Abstract Artists (AAA) was founded in 1936 with the objective of fostering the development of abstraction in the United States. It included members such as Suzy Frelinghuysen, Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. It is no coincidence that Slobodkina was one of the artists included by Ad Reinhardt in his vignette “How to Look at Modern Art in America” (1946), in which he traced the family tree of North American modern art. Other creators participated in key initiatives for the renovation of abstract practice in the United States, such as Gretchen Schoeninger, who attended the experimental art school New Bauhaus, founded by László Moholy-Nagy – a former professor at the historic German Bauhaus – in Chicago in 1947. Regardless, few artists who took part in 31 Women occupy an important place in the dominant narratives of North American abstract art. As Xenia Cage jokingly suggested in a collage produced from one of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings, perhaps the value of these artist’s works is compromised by the strong exaltation of masculinity, which at the time was characteristic of discourse. Buffie Johnson became aware of the marginalisation suffered by women in Abstract Expressionist circles early on. In the 1940s, determined to give value to female legacies, she undertook a research project on the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, culminating in a book published in 1988.
The exhibition concludes with a relationship map detailing the connections established between the thirty-one artists who participated in the exhibition and Peggy Guggenheim. By highlighting the network of professional and personal links they constructed, the chart depicts the important role these artists played as agents in the art scene of the time beyond traditional conceptions of women artists as supporting characters.
Suzy Frelinghuysen (American, 1911-1988) Untitled (Brahms Abstract) 1945 Oil and collage on Masonite
Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists known as The Park Avenue Cubists, who proposed a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In her works, Frelinghuysen combined the influence of Synthetic Cubism, which she expanded on through the use of blue, lavender, and rusty hues, with constant references to the world of music; a field in which the artist also excelled as an opera singer.
Short biography: Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911-1988). Born into a wealthy family from Newark, New Jersey, Suzy Frelinghuysen was part of the group of artists knowns as The Park Avenue Cubists, along with Albert Eugene Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, and George L. K. Morris – whom she married in 1935 – who advocated for a reinterpretation of European Cubist heritage from a North American perspective. In 1937 Frelinghuysen joined the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), founded in an effort to promote the development of abstract art in the United States, whose members included Louise Nevelson, Irene Rice Pereira, and Esphyr Slobodkina. After the war she temporarily quit art to focus on music, becoming a renowned opera singer. In her work, which was included in important group shows such as Exhibition by 31 Women, the influence of Synthetic Cubism was combined with constant references to the world of music.
Esphyr Slobodkina (American born Russia, 1908-2002) Peacock Garden 1938 Oil on board
From the late 1930s, Slobodkina developed a style of her own based on the poetic combination of curved forms painted in lyrical hues. Along with the influence of Cubism and the technique of collage, the artist also demonstrated her interest in sewing and working with scraps, which she learned from her mother, a professional seamstress. One of the defining traits of her work was its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina created assemblages, produced murals, illustrated children’s books, and designed costumes and jewellery.
Short biography: Esphyr Slobodkina (1908-2002). Originally from Siberia, Esphyr Slobodkina moved to Manchuria with her family in order to escape from the Soviet Revolution. Since she was a child, she studied in the fields of art and music. In 1928 she moved to New York on her own, where she continued her studies at the National Academy of Design. From the late 1930s she developed her own style based on a combination of wavy forms in lyrical tones that, along with the influence of Cubism and collage, reflect her interest in the tradition of decorative arts from her native country. Her work stands out for its interdisciplinary nature: aside from painting, Slobodkina focused on assemblage, murals, the illustration of children’s books, and on jewelry and costume design. As one of the founders of the association American Abstract Artists (AAA), which she presided – also acting as treasurer and secretary – Slobodkina played an important role in the promotion of abstraction in the United States. Alfred H. Barr, director of MoMA, recommended her work to Peggy Guggenheim, who decided to include Memories (1942) – which has since been lost – in Exhibition by 31 Women.
Between 1949 and 1959, Buffie Johnson produced what is considered one of her most important works: a great mural intended to decorate the Astor Theater in New York. This project was a true challenge for all those who negated women’s ability to create large format paintings. Thanks to the recovery of the mural by part of the Women’s Caucus prior to the theater’s demolition in 1982, some fragments, such as the one on display in this exhibition, are today part of public and private collections.
Short biography: Buffie Johnson (1912-2006). Born in New York, Buffie Johnson studied art at the University of Los Angeles. She later spent two years in Paris, where she established a friendship with Sonia Delaunay and other painters of the Parisian avant-garde. After completing her studies at the Académie Julian, she settled in New York in 1939. Johnson began to frequent several artistic circles, such as Peggy Guggenheim’s, who invited her to participate in Exhibition by 31 Women with the painting Déjeuner sur mer (1942). Outraged by the response of a Time Magazine critic who refused to review the exhibition arguing that he had never heard of outstanding women creators, Johnson attempted to publish an article on women artists that was rejected by several art magazines. This experience entailed the first awakening of her feminist consciousness. During the 1950s her work pivoted toward Abstract Expressionism. In parallel to her artistic career, she received a grant to study the imagery of the goddess mothers of antiquity, a work she would publish in 1988. Johnson’s early interest in the matriarchal tradition, which would also be reflected in many of her paintings, was embraced by second wave feminism in the late 1960s; a movement the artist would be actively involved in.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp produced works that were marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies and were very much her own. She experimented with painting, dance, sculpture, tapestry design, and puppet making. Vertical-Horizontal Composition might be related to the designs that the artist produced for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg. Taeuber-Arp’s protagonism in this work of total art, conceived on the basis of a dialogue between different artistic disciplines, has nevertheless been overshadowed by Jean Arp and Theo Van Doesburg’s participation in the project.
Short biography: Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943). Born in the Alpine city of Davos, Sophie Taeuber-Arp studied in Munich and Hamburg, where she absorbed the ideals of artistic fusion from the Arts and Crafts movement. She moved to Zurich during the outbreak of World War I and became involved in the Dada movement along with her future husband Hans Arp. She taught arts and crafts at the Zurich School of Commerce – a job that would support the couple for the following years – while attending expressive dance classes under Rudolf von Laban. She developed a style of work very much of her own, marked by the dissolution of artistic hierarchies. Taeuber-Arp experimented with painting, dance, furniture design, tapestries, interior design, and the construction of puppets and assemblages. In 1929 she quit teaching and moved to a house on the outskirts of Paris with her husband. Like other creators linked to non-objective art, she reacted to the push of Surrealism by becoming involved in associations such as Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. In 1941 the couple left Paris fleeing from the arrival of the Nazis. They stayed at Peggy Guggenheim’s house in Veyrier for a few days before heading to the south of France. They decided not to leave Europe and sought refuge in Zurich. In 1943 Taeuber-Arp died in Zurich due to accidental poisoning from a heater.
Catalogue
Along with the reproduction of works on display and other materials within the exhibition, the catalogue includes an essay by Patricia Mayayo, curator of the show and professor of Art History at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and a text by Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The publication also includes a succinct biography of each artist and a relationship map depicting the connections between Peggy Guggenheim and the artists featured in Exhibition by 31 Women.
Meret Oppenheim (Swiss born Germany, 1913-1985) Untitled (Helene Mayer) 1936 The 31 Women Collection
Helene Julie Mayer (1910-1953) was a German-born fencer who won the gold medal at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and the silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She competed for Nazi Germany in Berlin, despite having been forced to leave Germany in 1935 and resettle in the United States because she was of Jewish descent.
Hedda Sterne (American born Romania, 1910-2011) Self Portrait 1936-1939 The 31 Women Collection
Short biography: Hedda Sterne (1910-2011). Born in Bucharest, Romania, under the name Hedwig Lindenberg, Hedda Sterne came into contact with her city’s Dada and Constructivist scenes from a young age. In 1928 she moved to Vienna and later to Paris, where she continued her studies attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhote. The following year she began to study philosophy and art history at the University of Bucharest. In 1932 she married her classmate Frederick Stern, whom she separated from a few years later. She came into contact with Parisian Surrealism through Romanian Surrealist Victor Brauner, which would greatly influence her early work. Thanks to recommendations by Brauner and Jean Arp, Peggy Guggenheim included several of Sterne’s collages in a group exhibition at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London. In 1941 she settled in New York, in an apartment close to Guggenheim’s mansion, who invited her to participate in her meetings of “exiled Surrealists” and included her work in Exhibition by 31 Women and The Women. Sterne also participated in important Surrealist exhibitions such as First Papers of Surrealism (1942). After the war she joined the Betty Parsons gallery, taking part in the circles of Abstract Expressionism. She was the only woman present in the famous image of the North American abstraction group “The Irascibles”, published in Life Magazine in 1951. Sterne would later express her discomfort in being more famous for her presence in said photograph than for her extensive career.
Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) in the entrance hall of her eighteenth century Venetian palace. Hanging from the ceiling is a 1941 Alexander Calder mobile and behind her is a 1937 painting by Picasso titled On The Beach. The 31 Women Collection Photo: Keystone Features/Getty Images
I’ve posted on this exhibition once before when it was shown at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. While there some photographs that are the same in both postings there are new photographs to admire here. So, let’s have some fun with the text!
I started playing around with ideas in my head… and instead of the “autopsy of the spectacle” – an examination to discover the cause of the spectacle – I inverted that statement to make it the “spectacle of the autopsy”.
What immediately came to mind when I did this was the spectacle, the spectacular, painting that is Rembrandt’s early masterpiece The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632, below), that tableau – French, late 17th century (in the sense ‘picture’, figuratively ‘picturesque description’) – of figures, spectators, gathered around the corpse of the “criminal Aris Kindt (alias of Adriaan Adriaanszoon), who was convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death by hanging.”1
Fast forward a few centuries to the “Murder is my business” photographs of Arthur Fellig (alias Weegee) and I again observe spectators gathered around the body of a corpse, either physically examining it or wilfully ignoring it (Drowning victim, Coney Island c. 1940, below), where the men “examine” the drowning victim surrounded by men that stare and the women who smiles for the camera. With the crowd behind, all are physically and metaphorically drawn in to the spectacle of the autopsy and the presence of the camera. “”Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well.”
In other photographs such as Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below) and Body of Dominic Didato (1936, below) Weegee’s camera becomes the spectator, standing in for us as we crane our necks to get a better view of the action. Together, the camera and the viewer, perform what could be seen as a form of “necropsy” – from the Greek words nekros (meaning “corpse”) and opsis (meaning “to view”), and together they mean “to look at the dead body with naked eyes” – that is, a macroscopic examination of a dead body.
Witness, and we do stand witness in Weegee’s photographs looking at dead bodies with naked eyes, the perspectival viewpoint of the bodies of both Andrew Izzo and Dominic Didato similar to the elongated perspective in the painting by Rembrandt, the shading of the face in that painting – the umbra mortis (shadow of death) – now supplanted by the reversed body, head shaded / covered in blood, surmounted with out flung gun and boater.
While these photographs fail “to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief, horror (as if the pictorial repetition of events were a way of understanding these events, being able to live with them)”2 finally, in the derivation of the word “autopsy” – and in the spectacular images of Weegee – we may begin to understand that these photographs are as much about us, the spectator and viewer, and our discontinuous nature (we die) as they are about the pictured bodies. For the meaning of the word autopsy – early 17th century (in the sense ‘personal observation’): from modern Latin autopsia, from Greek, from autoptos ‘self-revealed’, from autos ‘self’ + optos ‘seen’ – reveals as much about ourselves as it does the object of our attention.
Looking at mortality with naked eyes, our self-revealed, our self seen, reflected back to us in the photographs of Weegee.
Many thankx to Fundación MAPFRE for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Weegee knew the power of imagery to speak to larger truths about human nature and society. He captured New York as it truly was: gritty, raw, and filled with contrasts. His work turned the everyday violence and chaos of the city into art, making the mundane extraordinary. In Weegee’s own words, “I picked a story that meant something.” He had an instinct for identifying moments that held deeper significance, even if they were just snapshots of daily life in a chaotic metropolis.”
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp 1632 Oil on canvas 216.5cm × 169.5cm (85.2 in × 66.7 in) Mauritshuis, The Hague
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid showing at right Weegee’s Self-portrait, Distortion (1955, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle at Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid showing at left Weegee’s Body of Andrew Izzo, killed by off-duty policeman Elegio Sarro (1942, below); at second left, [Outline of a Murder Victim] (1942); and at right, Body of Dominic Didato, (1936, below)
Dominick Didato, aka Terry Burns, who you see above in a photo made by Arthur Fellig, aka Weegee, lies dead on a New York City street where he was gunned down today in 1936. He was killed for interfering with rackets run by Lucky Luciano. It was a low percentage play. Luciano was literally the most powerful mobster in the U.S. at the time, and as the saying goes, you come at the king, you best not miss.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
The work of Arthur H. Fellig, known as Weegee (Zolochiv, Ukraine, 1899 – New York, 1968), is, in a sense, an enigma that this exhibition seeks to unravel. His photographs of the underworld and the fringe circles of New York nightlife in the 1930s and 1940s quickly gained wide international recognition. However, the same cannot be said for the photographs he took after settling in Hollywood in 1948: images of Californian high society and the social life of major film celebrities, whom he often portrayed in a markedly ironic or satirical manner, sometimes (as in the case of the “photocaricatures”) as a result of his later work in the laboratory. At the time, critics emphasised the radical opposition between the two periods, openly praising the former and dismissing the latter. In these photographs of his Californian experience (1948-1951), Weegee expressed his critical vision of society and culture from a perspective that anticipated the well-known cultural and social analyses of ‘the society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord).
Weegee. Autopsy of the Spectacle aims to show the profound coherence that, beyond their stylistic and thematic differences, links these two stages, as well as to highlight the relevance of the critical perspective from which Weegee’s images expose the features and mechanisms of our time as a ‘society of the spectacle’.
Exhibition organised by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE.
The above photo shows the murder scene of a mid-level gangster named Joseph “Little Joe” La Cava, and occurred in New York City on Mulberry Street at the Feast of San Gennaro today in 1939. We’ll go out on a limb and say the festive atmosphere took a fatal hit too. Luckily, the celebration usually went for a week, so we suppose it was salvaged. La Cava was gunned down along with Rocco “Chickee” Fagio… Also interesting, cops being cops, the flatfoot closest to La Cava looks incongruously jocular as he chats with a higher-up. If this wasn’t the most unforgettable Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy’s history it had to be close.
Anonymous. “Urban Decay,” on the Pulp International website August 22, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/11/2024
“Distraught and pale with grief, Irma Twiss Epstein, 32-year-old nurse, whose own baby died 18 months ago, is booked on a homicide charge in the death of a baby whose crying, she said, ‘drove me crazy.’ Miss Epstein, Bronx Maternity Hospital nurse, is accused of giving a powerful drug to the 20 hour-old daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Castro Vallee, whose only other child died after birth 11 years ago. Another infant, 4 days old, was revived by nurses and doctors after Miss Epstein was found in a hallway hysterically sobbing: ‘eyedropper, baby.’ Hospital records showed she entered service there in 1940 and after nine months took a leave of absence to have a baby. Police said she had been in Bellevue’s psychopathic ward two years ago for observation after tasking an overdose of sleeping tablets. She told police at Morrisania Station she expected to be married soon.”
PM Daily, December 23, 1940 quoted on the International Center of Photography website
A pivotal figure of American photography in the first half of the twentieth century, Arthur H. Fellig, known by his pseudonym Weegee (Zolochiv, 1899 – New York, 1968) was an immensely popular artist thanks to the news photographs he took in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. This new exhibition aims to reveal a lesser-known facet of his career: the work he did between 1948 and 1951 in Hollywood, where he focused on the “society of the spectacle”.
Key themes
High-impact photographs
Some of Weegee’s photographs were veritable “visual punches”. This is true of the pictures he took of murders, corpses, fires and prisoners during the years spent covering crimes and accidents in New York, as well as of his later work, like the series showing circus artist Egle Zacchini being fired from a cannon at a speed of 100 metres per second, or his photo-caricatures of Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy and other prominent personalities. His images almost always had a powerful impact on viewers, making them think not only about the scene they were contemplating but also about how they were looking at it.
The society of the spectacle
First published in 1967, Society of the Spectacle is one of the most important books by the philosopher Guy Debord, founding member of the Situationist International. It paints an incisive portrait of contemporary society, presumably replaced by its represented image. Throughout the work, Debord critically exposes the theory and practice of the spectacle, explaining how it governs our experience of time, history, goods, territory and happiness. In the twenty-first century, when immediacy reigns supreme, Debord’s ideas resound as the severest, most lucid assessment of the meanness and bondage of a society – the society of the spectacle – in which we all live.
Critique of the society of the spectacle
Class consciousness and empathy for the disadvantaged permeate Weegee’s work, as he never forgot his humble beginnings. Yet his most famous images are snapshots of accidents, fires and murders, in which he underscores the idea that bystanders are also spectators of the tragedies they contemplate, watching a scene in much the same way as cinema-goers watch Hollywood films (which are not all that different to the events captured by Weegee’s camera). He also used trick photography to critique the image of actors, singers, broadcasters, politicians and other public figures.
Weegee’s “satires”, as he called them, were visionary, appearing several years before the Situationist International first posited its theories. As Clement Che roux, curator of the exhibition, has pointed out, during his first period in New York, Weegee proved that the tabloids were selling news as a spectacle, and after 1945 he exposed how the media system radically spectacularised celebrities.
Biography
Weegee was born Usher Felig on 12 June 1899 to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, now in western Ukraine. At the age of ten he travelled to the United States to be reunited with his father, and immigration officers on Ellis Island registered him as Arthur Fellig. At 14, having settled into New York’s Lower East Side, a poor neighbourhood at the time, he left school and started working to help support his family. After trying several jobs, he became an itinerant photographer. He subsequently worked for the photographers Duckett & Adler and later in the ACME Newspictures agency laboratories. In 1935, he went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. He began using the pseudonym Weegee around 1937, and in 1941, the year he joined the Photo League (a group of freelance photographers who firmly believed in the emancipating power of images and fought for social justice), he started signing his prints as “Weegee the Famous”. In 1943, his work was included in a group exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 1945 he compiled his best photos in a book titled Naked City, which was a huge critical and commercial success. In the spring of 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood, where he worked in cinema as a technical consultant and occasionally as an actor. In addition to photographing parties, he devised several trick photography techniques and used them to caricature celebrities. After four years on the West Coast, in December 1951 he returned to New York, although he did not resume his former practice. From that moment until his death on 26 December 1968, Weegee mainly capitalised on his fame to publish more books, do lecture tours, and widely circulate his photo-caricatures in the press.
The exhibition
There is a mystery in Weegee’s work which the exhibition now on view at Fundacio n MAPFRE aims to unravel. From very early on, the artist was internationally renowned for his photographs taken in the 1930s and 1940s and printed in the New York tabloids: corpses, fires, detainees in police wagons, etc. But Weegee had another group of works which, at first glance, might seem diametrically opposed to his reportage: the photo-caricatures of public figures created in Hollywood between 1948 and 1951. Critics highlighted the opposition between these two periods, praising the former and rejecting the latter. Weegee: Autopsy of the Spectacle attempts to reconcile both bodies of work by showing that, stylistic differences aside, they are fundamentally consistent in their portrayal of the “society of the spectacle” which was taking shape in the United States at that time.
In his early years, the artist photographed lurid, violent subjects, but those shots were often deeply ironic and exposed the “spectacular” nature of the depicted events. His images were printed in newspapers, and Weegee often included spectators or fellow photographers – individuals gawking at a traffic accident or murder scene – in the fore or background of his compositions. In a consistent manner, during the second part of his career the artist mocked the Hollywood spectacle: the short-lived fame, the adoring crowds who flocked to see “celebrities”, and the banal society scene. Weegee personally edited and altered these ironic, satirical images in the lab, anticipating the theories of the Situationist International and the critique of the society of the spectacle and its commodification, and always acted in consonance with his own political convictions.
The exhibition curated by Clement Che roux, director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, features over one hundred photographs and a variety of documentary material. With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, the itinerary is divided into three sections and offers a sweeping overview of his work.
The spectacle of news reportage
In 1935, Weegee went into business for himself as a freelance photojournalist. Thanks to a radio tuned to the police frequency which he installed in his car – basically a mobile office where he kept everything he needed to take photos – Weegee was always one of the first to arrive at the scene of a crime, fire or traffic accident. It was the Prohibition era, and gang violence was rampant in New York. Every night for ten years, Weegee covered the city’s accidents and crimes with flash photographs and, starting in 1940, did the same for the NP Daily, a newspaper with Marxist leanings. As the artist himself confessed, “Murder is my business.”
In addition to fires and crimes, during this period Weegee also took highly expressive portraits of the individuals who emerged from police wagons after a raid. At a time when it was considered criminal for a man to wear women’s clothes, some of those detainees tried to hide their faces while others basked in the attention, exiting the vehicle as if making a stage entrance. With these images, the artist emphasised the idea that social relations and the world in general were becoming pure spectacle.
At the same time, Weegee never forgot his roots as the son of poor Jewish immigrants and was keenly aware of the living conditions of the most destitute. For this reason, he also captured homeless people and acts of racial and everyday discrimination against the underprivileged, making his photographs “genuine social documents”.
The society of spectators
“The Curious Ones” is the title of a chapter in Naked City, the compilation of Weegee’s best photographs that he published in 1945. Thanks to that book, which was a huge critical and commercial success, he began to attend New York’s important society events much more frequently, photographing them exactly as he would a crime or accident scene. This is illustrated by two images taken in New York on 22 November 1943, The Critic and In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night. The artist was particularly interested in representing human emotions and tried to prevent his subjects from altering their expressions to pose for the camera. Little by little, he began to portray the witnesses to events that happened after dark in New York City, attempting to reflect the entire range of possible human reactions to a tragedy, from astonishment to nervous laughter or tears. Other photographers who came to the same scenes also caught his interest, prompting him to reflect on the very act of taking photos.
With all this repertoire, Weegee showed how ordinary individuals became voyeurs by treating the scene of the crime as a theatrical stage. Recalling the moment in 1939 when he took the photograph Balcony Seats at a Murder, he explained, “The detectives are all over […]. To me this was drama. This was like a backdrop. I stepped back about a hundred feet. I used flash powder and I got this whole scene. The people on the fire escapes, the body, everything!”
The comedy of the spectacular
In 1967, Guy Debord wrote that “the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image” in his book Society of the Spectacle. Weegee, who understood this very well, photographed every sight that struck him as out of the ordinary. Fascinated by the makeup of crowds, he portrayed them enjoying a peaceable Sunday afternoon at the beach on Coney Island or celebrating the end of World War II in Chinatown; but he was also drawn to carnival and circus attractions and to cinemas, where he photographed movie-goers in the dark, engrossed in the film on screen.
Tired of murders and crime scenes, in 1948 Weegee moved to Hollywood and traded the direct, documentary-style photography he had practised in New York for manipulated images that required hours in the lab. During his stint in California, he turned his lens upon actors, singers, broadcasters and society figures. His vision of these individuals was not usually very flattering, photographing them from behind or in awkward situations. In some cases he would later distort the images using a kaleidoscope, photomontage or multiple exposure. Weegee created what he called “photo-caricatures”, a tradition that started among amateur photographers in the late nineteenth century and was originally known as “photographic amusements”, although he stated in his autobiography that his photo-caricatures had never been done before. Though a celebrity himself, the artist used photography to criticise the star system.
Catalogue
The exhibition, organised by Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in partnership with Fundacion MAPFRE, is accompanied by a publication titled Weegee. Autopsia del espectáculo, in which the majority of the images on display are reproduced. The catalogue contains a text by Clement Che roux, the show’s curator and director of Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and two more essays by Cynthia Young, a curator specialised in photojournalism, and Isabelle Bonnet, a lecturer at the Sorbonne and photography expert. The writer, curator and photography lecturer David Campany has also made an important contribution to the volume, in which he compares Weegee and Stanley Kubrick based on their collaboration on Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
The original edition in French was published by Éditions Textuel with Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the Spanish-language edition has been co-published with Fundación MAPFRE.
There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948 and 1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his career. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.
The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
The News Spectacle
“News photography is my meat.” After many years as a printer for press agencies, Weegee started his own business as a photojournalist in 1935. In order to be the first to arrive at the site of a murder, fire, or traffic accident, he set up a radio in his car, tuned to the police frequency. For a decade, using a flash, he took photographs of news in New York every night.
Weegee Himself
“I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.
Murder Is My Business
“I used to be an expert on murder.” From 1935 to 1945, Weegee spent his nights roaming the city looking for shocking images. Even after Prohibition, New Yorkers’ dreams were punctuated by explosion sounds caused by rival gangs settling scores. The photographer learned to create expressive images which the booming tabloids were particularly fond of.
Off Road
“Sudden death for one…, sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents, introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.
The Tragedy of Fire
“Murders and fires (my two best sellers, my bread and butter).” In the darkness of the city, like a moth to a flame, Weegee took photographs of fires. The urban landscape of New York, with its many substandard buildings, provided him with many such opportunities. The combination of fire, smoke and gushing water offered a particularly photogenic spectacle that the press adored.
On The Spot
“The Parade never ceases as the ‘pie’ Wagons unload.” When he wasn’t in the field, Weegee waited at the entrance of the police station for the prison wagon to return with its load of offenders arrested in the night. At a time when it was a criminal act for a man to dress as a woman, some tried to hide their faces, while others took the opportunity to step out of the wagon as if onto a stage.
In Flagrante Delicto
“When criminals tried to cover their faces, it was a challenge to me. I literally uncovered not only their faces, but their black souls as well.” Faced with Weegee’s scrutinising lens, defendants often tried to conceal their identities. In his autobiography, the photographer recounts the many stratagems he developed to oblige them to reveal themselves. Clearly, they didn’t always work.
Social Documents
“The people in these photographs are real.” Coming from a Jewish family who emigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century, experiencing extreme poverty upon their arrival, Weegee was quite aware of standards of living among the underprivileged. He took photographs of ordinary forms of discrimination, people with small trades, and the homeless. His photographs can be seen, in his own words, as “veritable social documents.”
Society of the Spectators
“The Curious ones” is a chapter title from Weegee’s best-seller: Naked City. The photographer takes an interest in people who, like himself, indulge unreservedly in the act of looking. He often includes them in the scenes he photographs, framing them in close-up to create veritable portraits of on-lookers. His work is a particularly striking testimony to the society of spectators developing in the United States at the time.
Meta Photo Co.
“I have no time for messages in my pictures.” Yet Weegee often included other photographers in his compositions as if, through this mise en abyme, he was inciting people to reflect on what it meant to take a photograph. An image from 1942, published in PM’s Weekly, is a good example. Three reporters and the words “Meta Photo Co.” on a window in the background of the photograph indicate there is something to be learned here about photography itself.
The Critic
“‘What is the best picture you ever took?’ Without hesitation I answer, ‘A picture I took at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. I consider this to be my masterpiece.'” The circumstances were contrived. Weegee went to a working-class neighbourhood to pick the woman up, then brought her to the entrance of this gala. The image illustrates the widening gap between the rich and the poor under American capitalism. It also reflects the critical power of a simple look.
Looking at Death
“I stepped back far enough to take in the whole scene: the puzzled detectives examining the body, the people on the fire escape, watching… it was like a stage setting.” Balcony seat at a murder: by including spectators in many of his images, Weegee imagines crime scenes as theatrical scenes, underscoring how American society transforms news into spectacle.
Spectators
“When I take a picture of a fire, I forget all about the burning building and I go out to the human element.” After years of tirelessly documenting events of the New York night, Weegee began taking photographs of the individuals who witnessed them. He was thus able to take portraits of groups expressing the full range of human reactions to tragedy, from surprise and tears to nervous laughter.
Out of Frame
“The curious […] ones always rushing by […] but always finding time to stop and look at.” On July 28, 1945, at 9:40 a.m., as a thick fog enveloped New York, a small plane crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. Weegee photographed spectators trying to catch a glimpse of it. People discovering his photographs in newspapers found themselves in the same position as these observers, a voyeuristic one.
Seeing in the Dark
“It’s hard to photograph people and get natural expressions. The minute they see the camera, they ‘freeze’ up on you.” Weegee was especially interested in depicting emotions on the faces of observers. Concerned that his presence would change their reaction, he had the ingenious idea of taking their photographs in the darkness of a theatre using infrared film. The result is a series of stunning portraits of wide-eyed spectators.
She Gestures of Art
“I used the same technique […] whether it was a murder, a pickpocket, or a society ball.” Following the success of his book Naked City, Weegee was routinely invited to high society events in New York, which he took pleasure in photographing as news items. In October 1945, at the opening of an exhibition by painter Stuart Davis at the MoMA, he captured the strange gestures of the art world.
The Theatre of the Spectacular
“Spectacle is Capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image,” explained Guy Debord in 1967. Weegee understood this well. He took photographs of all that was visually uncommon: crowds at Coney Island, fairground attractions, stars, acrobats, clowns… and finally, himself. A few years before the Situationist International, he pioneered a visual form of critique of the Society of the Spectacle.
In the Company of Crowds
“And this is Coney Island on a quiet Sunday afternoon […]. A crowd of over a MILLION is usual and attracts no attention.” On a Brooklyn beach, in Times Square or in Chinatown celebrating victory over Nazi power, Weegee never missed the opportunity to photograph crowds. Beyond “mass ornament,” theorised a few years earlier by Siegfried Kracauer, he was fascinated by the ways in which the people constitute themselves as images.
The Cannonball Woman
“Punch in Pictures.” That’s how one magazine described an article on Weegee. The scoop-hunter knows better than anyone else how to produce hard-hitting images. In 1943, Weegee photographed circus performer Egle Zacchini, nicknamed Miss Victory, or The Cannonball Woman, shot out of a cannon at 360 feet per second. As war was raging in Europe, it was a strange metaphor for the role of women in the conflict.
A Circus Community
“Someday they, too, will be stars.” Weegee especially enjoyed hanging around behind the scenes of fairgrounds in the suburbs. He photographed the way a performer at Sammy’s Bar placed her money in her stocking. Elsewhere, a dwarf with a forced smile, a melancholy clown slumped in his dressing room, what remains of the parade after the crowd passes by. Many of his photographs display the ambiance of a sad party.
Photo-caricatures
“I was tired of gangsters lying dead with their guts spewed in the gutter, of women crying at tenement-house fires, of automobile accidents […]. I was off to Hollywood.” In the City of Angels, Weegee not only photographs the celebrities he meets, he delights in making caricatures of them with what he calls his “elastic lens,” now mocking the star system.
The Spyglass
“I have used the camera to provoke good old-fashioned belly laughs.” In 1963, Weegee was invited to the set of Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove. The director was a great fan of Weegee, and had begun his own career as a press photographer. On set, Weegee applied a new technique for the tubular distortion of faces, as if one were looking through the small end of a spyglass.
Trick Inventory
“Their originality was such that they sold like hot cakes.” This is how Weegee described his photo-caricatures, the first of which appeared in papers in 1947. For 20 years and up until his death in 1968, he would regularly publish these works. Around fifty of the publications are known today. There are most likely many more. In his daily work, the photo-caricature came to definitively replace the news item.
Weegee, Ouija
“I’m called Weegee which comes from Ouija.” The pseudonym Weegee refers to the name of a board used in seances to decipher messages from the beyond. Weegee liked to describe himself as a “psychic photographer”, able to predict in advance where a story will take place. On the scene, he said he photographed using his “third eye.” Whether clairvoyant or voyeur, Weegee was able to see, better than anyone else, transformations in American society.
I wrote this philosophical text as a flow of consciousness, a layered exposition of my thoughts on space, photography, identity and belonging. I hope I have done the subject justice… in freedom.
within, bridge and fissure
The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space. So observes Wendy Garden.1
The spaces that bodies move in, through and over are fluid spaces, permeable spaces, fragmentary and transitory spaces. They are also spaces of displacement and distance which form a kind of ‘alienation’ which derives from the Latin alienare: to render foreign, other.2
Thus the “border” between one and the other – that fluid penumbra (a peripheral or indeterminate area or group), that oscillation of energy across the line – must be constructed to be legible and fixed by those that seek to control such spaces, through the imposition of a coded representation of space itself.3 The border wall between Mexico and America is one such imposition of a coded representation of space which, seeks to control an/other. It is a “direct translation of ideology and temporality into material and spatial culture”3 which masks as much as it represents, through a selective representation of history and memory.
Through systems of surveillance (e.g. CCTV, aerial surveillance, phone taps) and control (e.g. police, government, the judiciary), in which one reinforces the other in a never ending circle, and in the of naming of the ‘other’ (Foucault) – those with privilege embedded and thus emboldened within colonial and imperial systems seek to confirm hegemonic structures of power: for example, who can travel where, who has access adequate to health care, who is seen as an ill/legal alien. “Although Foucault rarely alludes to it in a clear-cut manner, what he describes in Discipline and Punish is the formation of the discursive regime of surveillance which is a central element in the expression of the modern state.”4
But we can counter this narrative.
In his influential book Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996), the American postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja (1940-2015) proposes the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. Firstspace “is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality.”5 Much early photographic practice is rooted in Firstspace, in the passive representation of an undeniable truth, the veracity of the image and its representation of the referent: this existed because it was captured by the camera.
Thirdspace on the other hand, “contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism.”6
Thus photographic Thirdspace as an amorphous space of both the real and imagined is the vibration of energy – doubled – the real and imagined spaces of everyday life, and the real and imagined spaces of photography through which we can contest the contexts of becoming, belonging.
These Thirdspaces of the real and imagined are not spaces of universalising totality which then would be constitutive of history or memory, but in-between spaces in which differences, memories and histories are not denied or negated, hidden, forgotten or repressed. It is not the segregation of black and white, either/or, but the grey areas in-between that interest me: those fluid zones of difference – think Tarkovsky’s film Stalker 1979, in which a guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone.
“The Thirdspace – in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history”a – allows that none of these couples, such as the phenomenal and the noumenal, can be divided by an either/or attitude. “This… does not mean differences are denied, instead, it most of all means the inevitable reciprocity of any pair of definitions. In such a case both leave a mark on the other. It is a question of both-and – how each of the pair influences the other”b.”7
Both leave a mark on each other. And it is in this marking that social and political relations can be reconfigured, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”8 Thus, the physical aspects as well as the attitudes and habitual practices of ‘space’, the arrangements of space and the socialisation of space, “is an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all ‘space’ is social space ….”9
Following, we can say that social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent (Soja).
“Social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. Cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. While elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. Behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, cultural resistance by Maori.
Indeed, dominant ideologies such as those which are religious, political, economic, ethnic or racial, continually define or redefine ‘deviance’ or ‘otherness’ to maintain their power and landscapes of dominance. Space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and of order and propriety.”10
But as Wael Salah Fahmi insightfully observes, we must not fall into the idea that juxtapositions of social space are just alternating choices of “either/or” or acts of simple resistance: “But “juxtaposition” might imply alternating choices, an “either/or.” Perhaps instead we might think of Lefebvre’s image of interpenetrating spaces, one violating another, yet rising up from within the very “fundament” of the space that wishes to ignore its existence. Here, perhaps, is a spatial dialectic that does not fall into a binary opposition of simple resistance.”11
Spaces that rise up from within each other!
Change that emanates from within through the actions and innovations of social agents… human beings, artists!
Here, the thoughts of that glorious Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco (b. 1960) – quoted by Jean Fisher – whose work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing are particularly cogent.
“Two imperatives are set in motion: to alter the perceptions of those with privileged access to hegemonic structures of power, and to change the sense of disempowerment of those deprived of political agency. “What is more fundamentally at stake than freedom,” Fusco argues, “is power – the power to choose, the power to determine value, and the right of the more powerful to consume without guilt”: entitlements that Eurocentric cultures have assumed for themselves at the expense of others. These aims are advanced through an exploration of the relationship between the politics and practices of cultural difference and social inequity, in which intellectual, experiential, and artistic alliances are built across nationalistic and geographical boundaries …””12
As Wael Salah Fahmi notes, “spaces constantly juxtapose themselves one against the other” – in real life, in art, in photography. The media saturated world of the “total flow” of images is resistant to interpretation, yet in real life – and in this exhibition – the juxta/position (mapping of space), juxta/posing (posing for the camera) of one space against another, “of image to image calls to attention a line of conflict, either fissure or bridge.”13
The images in this posting draw our attention to fissures (George Rodriguez, Susan Meiselas, Ada Trillo) and bridges (Graciela Iturbide, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke). They also possess a multivalent narrative, allowing the work to be accessible to different interpretations, meanings, and values: a new door or path opens up on the basis of very diverse needs and objectives. These images, untraceable gifts from photography itself, are marks of candour and authenticity, both descriptions of a stable object and the fleeting glance (Firstspace and Thirdspace) interacting upon each other. They are an investigation into our fluid identity and shifting place in our worlds.14
In spatial dialectics and in the nuances of contradictions we proceed onwards, paying no heed to the dangers which lie ahead, journeying on to fulfil our desires: to be seen, to be heard, in our difference and uniqueness, enacting change from within.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,435
PS. My friend and Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gertsakis insightfully observes, “The philosophical arguments resonate with the vacillation of the photograph meanings/non-meanings. Spaces that implode from within to further generate the unknown which even in definition become dispersed. The photography around the border/wall is beautiful as well as tortuous as well as unspoken.”
Well said Liz 🙂
Footnotes
1/ Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007
2/ Rob Shields. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 40-41.
3/ Ibid., pp. 79-80.
4/ Jon Stratton. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19
5/ Garden, Op cit.,
6/ Garden, Op cit.,
7/ A: Edward W. Soja. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57; B: Mika Hannula. “Third space – a merry-go-round of opportunity,” on the Kiasma Magazine website No. 12, Vol. 4, 2001 [Online] Cited 01/05/2016. No longer available online quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
8/ Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 24
9/ Shields, Op cit., pp. 154-155
10/Alexander Trapeznik. “Introduction,” from Public History Review, Vol. 13, 2006, p. 2
11/ Wael Salah Fahmi. “Reading of Post Modern Public Spaces As Layers Of Virtual Images and Real Events,” from The 37th International Planning Congress “HONEY, I SHRUNK THE SPACE” Planning in the Information Age. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 16-20 September, 2001
12/ Jean Fisher. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 226-227
13/ Wael Salah Fahmi, op cit.,
14/ Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
Many thankx to the Cleveland Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there […]”
Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power
“Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality.
For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. …
Photographic space can create a spatial reality which allows those who access it to contest, enlarge or in someway recreate their experiences of Firstspace. It never attempts to close off subjectivity or pin identity down, but rather allows fluid and transitory experiments with other ways of being that can then be carried over and inform experiences of Firstspace.”
Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007
Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counter-narratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.
Capitalising on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website
George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937) Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights 1970 Gelatin silver print
Photojournalism from the US-Mexico border currently emphasises stark, divisive images: walls, fences, surveillance devices, border patrols, “coyotes,” and crossing migrants. Yet some of the most compelling artwork dealing with this region attests to several generations of cross-border familial relationships, personal identities that carry markers of both countries, and hybrid cultures that meld influences from the United States, Mexico, and farther south in Latin America. This more complex work demonstrates how border residents have resisted being defined by the border and its conflicts, concentrating instead on a deterritorialised notion of home, along with a sense of self that often transcends both nationalism and gender politics.
The photographs and video works included in Picturing the Border offer a more nuanced portrayal of life in the borderlands. The exhibition positions the US-Mexico border as a cultural framework and highlights how Latinx photographers – many of whom are border residents themselves – have instead formulated alternative photographic vocabularies with regard to place, identity, and race. Photographs range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, extended family gatherings, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US border patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s.
The exhibition is accompanied by an important scholarly publication that brings new insights to the subject of Latinx photography and the history of the US-Mexico border. Picturing the Border has also brought about the opportunity to grow our permanent collection in this area, precipitating recent acquisitions by Laura Aguilar and the donation of an important work by Ada Trillo, who has witnessed firsthand the perils of the unbelievably extensive journey migrants have taken from Central America to the United States.
Although Cleveland is far from the southern border, stories of global migration are woven throughout the CMA’s encyclopeadic collection as well as throughout the community in Northeast Ohio. Picturing the Border puts faces on stories and brings to life the various threads that stitch together an ever-growing understanding of, and empathy for, the migrant experience.
Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. “Picturing the Border,” on the Cleveland Museum of Art website June 1, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/07/2024
Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Opening on July 21, 2024, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, this free exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2025. From intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol, this one-of-a-kind exhibition presents photographs taken by both border residents and outsiders, many of whom are Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican, and tells the story of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present.
“Borders have long been spaces of contention,” says Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art. “The mainstream media in the United States tends to present nationalistic narratives about imminent threats at the border. This reductive and divisive narrative does not often portray the identities, languages, cultures, and social ties among communities. The photographs featured in this exhibition tell a different story that can serve as a counter-narrative and timely new perspective on life in this region.”
The earliest images in Picturing the Border form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. In addition, they showcase artists who were ahead of their time in presenting ideas about spaces and exclusion as they relate to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identities in the United States.
Exhibition catalogue
A beautifully illustrated 134-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Picturing the Border by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, with contributions from Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
The US-Mexico border has undergone dramatic changes over the past six decades, becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised, and militarised, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mainstream and conservative news coverage has often reinforced or exacerbated such developments, characterising the border as out of control and describing migrants in derogatory terms, in the process fuelling xenophobic sentiment.
A foil to this reductive and dehumanising narrative, this presentation of Latinx photography offers more nuanced portrayals of life in the borderlands. Ranging from the 1970s to the 2020s, images by Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, and Laura Aguilar, as well as emerging artists such as Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro display alternative photographic vocabularies regarding place, identity, and race. With subject matter spanning from intimate domestic portraits and youth counterculture to border crossings and clashes involving the US Border Patrol, this richly illustrated volume also features scholarly essays and new work by fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, providing new insights on this fraught and misunderstood region.
Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as series from 1986 Los Angeles is perhaps the best encapsulation of the show’s thesis. The women in Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles told Iturbide that they wanted to be photographed under a mural of some mariachis. In fact, these were images of Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Pancho Villa. We might as well admire their freedom from context. After all, isn’t America all about freedom?
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Rosario y Boo Boo en su casa, Los Angeles (Rosario and Boo Boo in their home, Los Angeles) 1986 Gelatin silver print
“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesising who you are… So you make your own image, interpreting.”
As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.
This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico – risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of gruelling travel. …
Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”
Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo Hardcover/Sewn bound 192 pages/30.5 x 24.8cm Language: English ISBN: 978-94-91525-93-3 November 2021
Every day, thousands of people leave in processions from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador via Mexico for America because of flaring violence, murder (on women) and poor economic conditions in their own country. A journey covering hundreds of kilometres, often on foot, full of fear of being arrested and sent back. Some people even ‘disappear’. Under the Trump administration, despite fierce opposition, ‘The Wall’ was built to keep these immigrants out of ‘The Northern Triangle’, making their passage into America even more perilous.
Photographer Ada Trillo considers it her mission to portray this distressing situation. In ‘La Caravana del Diablo’ she doesn’t look away but confronts us. Ada shows that each of these thousands of migrants is a human being. A human being with a family, with fear, hope and dreams.
More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.
This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed – or tried to cross – the border.
Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.
In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].
But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking – the primary approach from the media – but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.
[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994. [4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57. [5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.
Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.
Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it – the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.
Exhibition dates: 24th August – 29th December 2024
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Poling the Marsh Hay c. 1885 Platinum print on paper
Id est / that is
Voluptuous = relating to or characterised by luxury or sensual pleasure
Sensual = late Middle English (in the sense ‘sensory’): from late Latin sensualis, from sensus (see sense)
Sense = various; including:
~ a reasonable or comprehensible rationale i.e. the latent and emerging Modernism inherent in Photo-Secession photographs
~ the way in which a situation [in this case the “reading” of a photograph] can be interpreted i.e. the interpretation of Photo-Secession photographs as either Pictorialist, Modernist or a combination of both
~ a keen intuitive awareness of or sensitivity to the presence or importance of something i.e. the feeling of the photographer towards the object of their attention, revealed in the print, whether that be a nude, a building, pears and an apple or the side of a white barn
~ to be aware of (something) without being able to define exactly how one knows i.e. to be able to detect, recognise, and feel that ineffable “something” that emanates from the object of (y)our attention… in the act of creativity, in the act of seeing
Bringing something to our senses
Thus, the older I get the more I appreciate the faculty of feeling, thought and meaning that is revealed in these revolutionary photographs.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Quotes on Walls
“Why, Mr. Stieglitz, you won’t insist that a photograph can possibly be a work of art – you are a fanatic!”
Luigi Palma de Cesnola, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reportedly said to Alfred Stieglitz, 1902
“The painter need not always paint with brushes, he can paint with light itself. Modern photography has brought light under control and made it as truly art-material as pigment or clay. … The photographer has demonstrated that his work need not be mechanical imitation. He can control the quality of his lines, the spacing of his masses, the depth of his tones and the harmony of his gradations. He can eliminate detail, keeping only the significant. More than this, he can reveal the secrets of personality. What is this but Art?”
Arthur Wesley Dow, 1921
“The photographer’s problem therefore, is to see clearly the limitations and at the same time the potential qualities of his medium… without tricks of process or manipulation, through the use of straight photographic methods. … Photography is only a new road from a different direction but moving toward the common goal, which is Life.”
Paul Strand, 1917
“Pictorial photography owes its birth to the universal dissatisfaction of artist photographers in front of the photographic errors of the straight print. Its false values, its lack of accents, its equal delineation of things important and useless, were universally recognised and deplored by a host of malcontents… I consider that, from an art point of view, the straight print of today is not a whit better than the straight print of fifteen years ago. If it was faulty then it is still faulty now.”
Robert Demachy, 1907
“Gum, diffused lenses, (ultra) glycerining, were of experimental interest once. … Most of these are of more value historically than artistically. The prints are neither painting (or its equivalents) nor photographs. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph. It will be straight and beautiful – a true photograph.”
Alfred Stieglitz, 1919
Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography celebrates an intrepid group of photographers, led by preeminent photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who fought to establish photography as fine art, coequal with painting and sculpture at the turn of the 20th century. The Photo-Secession movement took cues from European modernists – who seceded from centuries-old academic traditions – to demonstrate photographic pictures’ aesthetic, creative, and skilful value as art. An homage to Stieglitz, Photo-Secession includes some of the very images that established the appreciation of photography’s artistic merits.
The UMFA will present this exhibition concurrently with Blue Grass, Green Skies: American Impressionism and Realism from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to draw attention to the cyclical dialogue between painting and photography in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this period, photographers manipulated their images at various stages of production to imitate painterly effects, while painters worked and reworked their oils to imitate the immediacy of photography, demonstrating a remarkable reciprocity between these two art forms.
Text from the Utah Museum of Fine Arts website
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing the work of Heinrich Kühn Image courtesy of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing at centre from left to right, Bernard Shea Horne Doorway Abstraction; Drahomir Josef Ruzicka The Arch, Pennysylvannia Station c. 1920; Arnold Genthe Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico c. 1920; William E. Dassonville The Great Highway, San Francisco c. 1905
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing from top left to right, Edward Steichen Lotus, Mount Kisco 1915; Edward Steichen Calla Lily c. 1921; Edward Steichen Three pears and an apple c. 1921; Edward Steichen Blossom of White Fingers c. 1923
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Installation view of the exhibition Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts showing in the display cabinet issues of the magazine Camera Work, 1903-1917. Edited by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen
The Role of Camera Work
One of the key platforms for the Photo-Secession movement was the influential journal Camera Work, edited by Stieglitz and Steichen. Published from 1903 to 1917, Camera Work featured the work of Photo-Secessionists alongside essays and critiques that championed the artistic potential of photography. The journal played a crucial role in shaping public and critical perceptions of photography, providing a space for photographers to showcase their work and engage in intellectual discourse.
This exhibition celebrates 26 intrepid artists at the turn of the 20th century who sought to establish photography as a fine art equal to long-established media like painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. This movement in the United States centred on the group dubbed the Photo-Secession. While each of the Photo-Secessionists had their distinctive approaches, their works are hand-crafted photographic prints of traditional artistic subjects, such as landscape, portraiture, figure study, and still life. This combination of painterly imagery and printmaking is also known as Pictorialism.
The passionate leader and tenacious advocate of the Photo-Secession was Alfred Stieglitz, who advanced the visions of the most ambitious photographers of the time, including Heinrich Kühn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White. Stieglitz tirelessly promoted art photography through his exhibition space in New York City – the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession and later called simply 291 – as well as through the journals he edited – Camera Notes (1897-1903) and Camera Work (1903-1917).
This exhibition also covers the breakup of the Photo-Secession, as some photographers rejected Pictorialism while others remained staunchly committed to it. The Photo-Secession itself irrevocably split apart around 1917. Artists led by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand switched to Straight Photography, an approach involving sharp focus and direct printing of the original shot. Artists led by Käsebier and White continued to innovate through painterly approaches using soft focus and manipulated prints.
The works in this exhibition represent some of the most influential artists and iconic images of the period as well as superb examples of a variety of photographic printing techniques, including platinum, gum-bichromate, carbon, cyanotype, and bromoil.
All works of art this exhibition are from the private collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. This exhibition is organised by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.
The Rebirth of Art Photography in Europe
In the first few decades after the invention of photography in 1839, painters played an instrumental role in the development of this new medium. Artist-photographers like D.O. Hill in Edinburgh and Gustave Le Gray in Paris exhibited their photographs alongside paintings, drawings, and prints. The novelty of the photograph led to the proliferation of portrait studios and mass-produced views of famous monuments or exotic locales for the tourist trade. By the 1860s photography was considered a bourgeois technical profession. The Kodak camera, first issued in 1888, further popularised photography with its roll film, simple controls, and reasonable cost of one dollar (about $33 today).
Even as more and more individuals could access the means to make photos, artist-photographers advocated for the status of their medium and demanded a differentiation between their work and the products of point-and-shoot cameras. In 1889 Peter Henry Emerson published the book Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, which proposed a role for landscape photographers equal to esteemed painters like Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet. Emerson’s publication was a clarion call for a new generation of artistic photographers, and Pictorialism was born.
Pictorialist photographers enthusiastically pursued their new movement, pioneering soft-focus lenses and manipulatable printing methods. Soon they were forming regional clubs across Europe and resumed exhibiting their prints as art. The photographers that formed the t in London were particularly active and influential, and Pictorialism spread to other cultural centres like Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
Alfred Stieglitz and the American Pictorialist Movement
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, but educated largely in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) watched the flowering of European Pictorialism with a mixture of aesthetic appreciation and fierce competitiveness, writing in 1892:
“Every unbiased critic will grant that we [American photographers] are still many lengths in the rear, apparently content to remain there, inasmuch as we seem to lack the energy to strive forward – to push ahead with that American will-power which is so greatly admired by the whole civilised world.”
Energised by European Pictorialism, Stieglitz championed juried photographic salons in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He also edited a series of increasingly ambitious journals about Pictorialist photography, starting with The American Amateur Photographer in 1893, then Camera Notes in 1897, and finally Camera Work starting in 1903. He inaugurated and named the Photo-Secession movement through the landmark exhibition he curated in 1903 at the National Arts Club in New York, which comprised 162 works by 32 artists. The name “Photo-Secession” referred to European avant-garde artistic movements, and in his own words, “Photo-Secession actually means a seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph.” Eventually European artists would also be invited to join the Photo-Secession.
In 1905 Stieglitz opened a space at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later simply called 291. It was the first retail gallery devoted to photography. He supported the venture with his own resources and generous assistance from others, and Edward Steichen was his steadfast associate. By 1915 Stieglitz was also showing avant-garde painting and sculpture at 291, including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Constantin Brâncuși. Thus, he sought to demonstrate the idea that all art forms were on par with and informed one another.
Close Collaborations and the Sudden End of the Photo-Secession
From 1907 to 1910 Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence White closely collaborated on photographs and a landmark photography exhibition. In 1907 they made a series of 60 nudes, Stieglitz posing the models and White focusing the camera and making most of the prints. The following year, Stieglitz devoted an entire issue of Camera Work to White. In 1910 Stieglitz and White co-curated the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at Buffalo’s Albright Gallery (now Albright Knox Gallery). This historic project that included over 600 prints is now regarded as the apex of the Photo-Secession. It was also the final monument of the movement, as each of the major Pictorialists, White included, broke away from Stieglitz in the years that followed.
Significant reasons for the end of the Photo-Secession were Stieglitz’s authoritarian personality and disdain for photographers who needed to earn a living rather than exclusively pursue art for art’s sake. Philosophical differences also explain the rupture. Stieglitz had come to believe that Pictorialism had run its course. The irony was that the Photo-Secession had established photography as fine art through images that imitated other art forms by manipulation at every stage of the process – from lens to negative to print. Their pictures to varying degrees used methods that denied the very essence of photography. Stieglitz asserted that it was time to abandon the “painterly photograph” and to champion photography as fine art with compelling pictures that were truly photographic.
Late Pictorialism and the Clarence White School
As the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz’s partner for 30 years, acknowledged, “He was either loved or hated – there wasn’t much in between.” For reasons both personal and professional, most of the leading Photo-Secessionists chose not to follow Stieglitz and Paul Strand into Straight Photography. Many clustered instead around Clarence White, who in his gentle and encouraging manner was the antithesis of Stieglitz. In 1914 White founded the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City. In 1916 White along with Gertrude Käsebier and Alvin Langdon Coburn co-founded Pictorial Photographers of America; this new society welcomed members of all backgrounds and published the new journal Photo-Graphic Art.
The Clarence White School continued to be a locus for the training of new photographers until 1940, under the guidance of White’s widow Jane White after his death in 1925. Among the most prominent students of Clarence White are Karl Struss, Anne Brigman, Laura Gilpin, and Doris Ulmann, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. Other notable pupils of White include Margaret Bourke-White, Anton Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge, and Dorothea Lange.
Straight Photography, Edward Steichen, and Paul Strand
The final section of this exhibition focuses on Straight Photography and two of Alfred Stieglitz’s most notable protégés, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand. Between them, they pioneered leading branches of 20th-century American photography.
With the entry of the United States into World War I, both Steichen and Strand were drafted into the U.S. Army. Steichen was a photographer for the Army Air Service Signal Corps in Europe, and Strand was an X-ray technician in the Army Medical Corps. In the years immediately after WWI, they each turned their attention to photographing the natural world: flowers and fruit in Steichen’s case, and toadstools, grasses, and ferns in Strand’s. Both would return to photographing their gardens in the final years of their lives.
Outside the naturalist realm, Steichen and Strand’s paths diverged.
Steichen, an extrovert, pioneered modern fashion and advertising photography for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. Later he was named Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he organised the landmark exhibition, Family of Man, which traveled to 37 countries on six continents and was seen by an estimated nine million people.
Strand, an introvert, traveled to remote places around the world, documenting the landscape, architecture, and people, his work exuding a respect for the dignity of the labouring class, which he absorbed from his mentor, Lewis Hine. Overall, Strand’s profoundly humanist scenes of everyday life influenced a generation of socially conscious photographers who documented the 20th-century crises of the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, World War II, and more.
Heinrich Kühn
In the late 19th century, European Pictorialism was divided into two camps. On the one side were the purist photographers who, aside from a softening of the lens, opposed extensive manipulation of the negative or the print for artistic effect. On the other side were those who derided “button-pushers” and viewed the “straight” photograph as merely the raw material from which to create an artistic print through elaborate handiwork.
The leader of this latter camp was Heinrich Kühn (1866-1944). Eschewing Modernist tendencies, he chose traditional subject matter of painting from the 17th through 19th centuries: still life, figural studies, and genre scenes. His preference for gum-bichromate and bromoil printmaking techniques, which allowed for extensive manipulation, were intended to provoke the reaction in the viewer: is that really a photograph?
Born in Dresden, Kühn moved to Innsbruck, Austria, after youthful studies in science and medicine. Thanks to a sizeable inheritance, he could devote himself to artistic photography, joining both the Linked Ring in London and Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession in the United States. A trans-Atlantic correspondence with Stieglitz began in 1899 and lasted three decades. They congratulated one another on their latest triumphs and encouraged each other through professional and personal disappointments. In 1909, with Stieglitz’s assistance, Kühn organised the International Photographic Exhibition in Dresden, one of the high points of Pictorialism.
Later in life, Kühn filed multiple patents in photochemistry and camera technology related to Pictorialist photography, but none earned him any money. Tastes had changed, and the painterly photograph had become a quaint curiosity.
Gertrude Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier (1852-1934) was 37 years old, married, and had three children by the time she began studying art at the Pratt Institute. She had originally purchased a camera to make portraits of her children, but Pratt encouraged its women students to earn a living in the arts. By 1897 she opened a one-room commercial portrait studio in New York City. Her ambition was to make “not maps of faces, but likenesses that are biographies, to bring out in each photograph the essential personality that is variously called temperament, soul, humanity.”
Recognition for Käsebier’s talent and ability came swiftly. In 1898 the painter William Merritt Chase, judging the Philadelphia Photographic Salon, called her work “as fine as anything that [Anthony] Van Dyck has ever done.” For Stieglitz, who organised her first solo show in 1899 at the Camera Club of New York, Käsebier was “beyond dispute the leading portrait photographer in this country.” That year, she sold one of her photographs for the unheard-of sum of $100 (almost $3,800 today).
However, by the time that the Brooklyn Museum honoured Käsebier with a career retrospective in 1929, Pictorialist photography had fallen so far out of fashion that the exhibition was not even reviewed in major journals.
Clarence Hudson White
Clarence Hudson White (1871-1925) was a modest, soft-spoken, entirely self-taught genius from America’s heartland. Raised in the small town of Newark, Ohio, he eked out a living as a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocer; each week he saved enough to purchase two glass plates for his camera. He specialised in gorgeously back-lit domestic interior scenes featuring his friends and members of his close-knit extended family.
White’s contributions to the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon were so highly praised that, like Gertrude Käsebier, he was appointed a judge for the following year. The annual salons of the Newark Camera Club that he organised featured the nation’s preeminent Pictorialists and were the direct precursor to Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession. Indeed, the 1900 salon featured his friend and latest discovery, Edward Steichen of Milwaukee.
From 1907 onwards, both in New York City and during summers in rural Maine, White was also America’s foremost teacher of photography. Many of the leading American photographers of the 20th century studied at the Clarence White School.
Paul Strand
In 1915 Alfred Stieglitz found in the young Paul Strand (1890-1976) the leader of a remarkable new direction in photography. Strand had been a senior at the Ethical Culture High School in 1907 when he first visited Gallery 291 on a class trip with his photography teacher, Lewis Hine, whose poignant documents of immigrants and child labor were staples of the Progressive Movement. Eight years later, after thousands of hours in the darkroom at the New York Camera Club, Strand returned to 291 with a portfolio of platinum prints that pointed the way to a new era. Stieglitz deemed them “brutally direct, devoid of all flim-flam, devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism’. These photographs are the direct expression of today.” Stieglitz not only offered Strand an exhibition at 291, but also devoted the final two issues of Camera Work exclusively to him.
What was so compelling and inspiring to Stieglitz in Strand’s photography? His portfolio contained pictures of urban street life and architecture, as well as powerful close-ups of weathered New York faces (influenced by Lewis Hine), boldly composed still lifes, and shadow abstractions taken on a porch in Twin Lakes, Connecticut.
As for photography’s future, Strand and Stieglitz saw eye to eye. In his essay in Camera Work, Strand called for the universal adoption of Straight Photography “without tricks of process or manipulation.” In a provocative lecture at the Clarence White School, Strand condemned “this so-called pictorial photography, which is nothing but an evasion of everything photographic.”
Works by Emerson, Post, Evans, and Sutcliffe
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe (British, 1853-1941) The Water Rats 1886 Platinum print on paper
Sutcliffe was a member of the British photographic society the Linked Ring, which sought to make their work recognised as fine art. He operated a portrait studio in the seaside town of Whitby in North Yorkshire but is remembered for his charming, naturalistic depictions of local life. This photograph resulted in his excommunication by local clergy for its “corrupting” effects. Today this is his best-known photograph, regarded as a study of pure childhood joy.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Poplars on a French River c. 1900 Platinum print on paper
Peter Henry Emerson (British born Cuba, 1856-1936) Gathering Water Lilies c. 1885 Platinum print on paper
In addition to his photographic work, Emerson wrote persuasively that photography could match – and even surpass – painting as an emotive art form. His writings were influential to the young Alfred Stieglitz, with whom he corresponded over four decades.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Thiollier
Félix Thiollier (French, 1842-1914) Landscape in Bugey c. 1885 Carbon print on paper
From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Kühn
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Nude in Morning Sun c. 1920 Multiple bromoil transfer print on Japanese tissue paper
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Female torso in sunlight c. 1920
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Walter at Easel c. 1909 Gum-bichromate print on paper
Heinrich Kühn (Austrian born Germany, 1866-1944) Still Life with Fruit and Pottery c. 1896 Gum-bichromate print on paper with an applied watercolour wash
Kühn’s still lifes deliberately recall paintings from earlier centuries. This scene – his first published image – contains similar elements to 17th-century still-life compositions. He even included insects, which are traditional references to mortality called memento mori (reminders of death). Can you spot the housefly?
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Portraits by Steichen
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) George Frederic Watts, London 1901 Varnished platinum print on paper
This dramatic profile portrait of the English Pre-Raphaelite painter was the first in what Steichen termed his “Great Men” series. Steichen wrote about his approach to portraiture, “I aim for the expression of something psychological. I am not satisfied with the mere reproduction of features and expression.”
Published in Camera Work, 14, 1906
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) The Photographer’s Best Model: George Bernard Shaw, London 1907 Platinum print on paper
Steichen was elated after his photographic sitting with Shaw, writing to Stieglitz: “Well I’ve seen and done Shaw (photographically of course). He’s the nicest kind of fellow imaginable – genial and boyish – there is a little of the sardonic about him as you see him but when you get the camera at him you are tempted with possibilities in that way. He seems to know a lot about photography and certainly skilfully bluffs you into believing he knows it all.”
Published in Camera Work, 42/43, 1913
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Glossary of Photographic Printing Methods and Terms from the History of Photography
Gelatin Silver Print
For over a century, from the 1880s until the digital era, the gelatin silver print was the most common technique for producing black-and-white photographs. The paper is coated with a binder layer of gelatin incorporating light-sensitive silver chloride or silver bromide. The paper is exposed under a negative, either by contact-printing or through an enlarger, then chemically developed, stopped, fixed, and dried. In the process, the silver salts are reduced to metallic silver, which carries the image. The overall color of the print can be altered through toning.
Cyanotype
A sheet of paper is sensitised in a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate. After contact-printing under a negative, the iron compounds form an insoluble blue (“cyan”) dye known as Prussian blue. Apart from its occasional artistic use, the only regular use of the cyanotype was in copying architectural plans, thus called “blueprints.”
Platinum or Palladium Print
A platinum print is produced by sensitising a sheet of paper with platinum and iron salts. The sheet is then contact-printed under a negative until a faint image is visible. The print is developed in a potassium oxalate solution that dissolves unexposed iron salts and transforms the platinum salts into metallic platinum, which intensifies the image. Mercury chloride can be added to the solution to give a warmer tone. Unlike a silver print, where the image lives in a gelatin binder layer on top of the paper (akin to a watercolour), the image in a platinum print is embedded in the paper fibres (akin to an oil painting). The rich mid-tone range and matte surface made the platinum print the favoured medium for the Pictorialist photographers, from P.H. Emerson onward. When the price of platinum spiked during World War I, palladium was introduced as a more affordable (and generally warmer-toned) substitute.
Pigment Prints
The following processes are known as pigment prints, because the photographic image is carried by inks or pigments, rather than by metallic particles like silver, iron, or platinum.
Gum Bichromate Print
A sheet of paper is coated with diluted gum-arabic mixed with coloured pigment and light-sensitive potassium bichromate. During exposure under a negative, the bichromate causes the coloured gum-arabic to harden in proportion to the amount of light received. The areas not exposed to light remain soluble in water, and the print is developed by washing away the soluble areas, leaving a positive image on the paper. The prints can be exposed and reprinted numerous times with different coloured pigments, as well as manipulated by brushing away more pigmented gum during the washing stage.
Bromoil (Transfer) Print
This process does not begin with a negative, but rather with a gelatin silver print that is bleached in a solution of potassium bromide. The bleaching removes the silver-based image and selectively hardens the underlying gelatin in proportion to the image density. The sheet is then hand-coloured with an oil-based ink, which is selectively absorbed depending on the hardness of the gelatin: the softer areas contain more water, which repels the oil-based ink. An inked print is sometimes used as a kind of printing plate for transferring the image to another sheet of paper (a bromoil transfer print).
Photogravure
This is a sophisticated photomechanical process used for reproducing photographs in ink in a large edition. It is a form of intaglio printing, in which a photographic image is acid-etched into a copper plate. The relief image is then inked and printed. Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work was largely printed in photogravure.
The Photo-Secession
This was the brief but influential artistic movement led by American Alfred Stieglitz during the years 1902–1915 that championed photography as an art form that was as aesthetic, creative, and skilful as traditional media like painting, drawing, watercolour, and printmaking. The European artistic movement Secessionism inspired the name Photo-Secession, and both movements were committed to Modernism by seceding from centuries-old academic traditions.
Pictorialism / Pictorialist
The approach to photography in which artists sought to make images that imitated the tradition of paintings through photographic prints. Pictorialist photographers used soft focus lenses and manipulated both their negatives and printing media to create their prints.
The Linked Ring
Also known as the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, this photographic society founded in 1892 in London promoted photography as a form of art and was influential for the American society of the Photo-Secession.
Straight Photography
The approach to photography in which artists use sharp focus and print directly from their negatives with minimal or no manipulation.
Camera Notes
Camera Notes was the journal of the Camera Club of New York, edited by Alfred Stieglitz from 1897 to 1902. Under Stieglitz’s editorship, the purposes of Camera Notes were “to take cognisance also of what is going on in the photographic world at large, to review new processes and consider new instruments and agents as they come into notice; in short to keep our members in touch with everything connected with the progress and elevation of photography.”
Camera Work
Camera Work was the journal about contemporary photography that Alfred Stieglitz edited and published with the assistance of Edward Steichen from 1903 to 1917. The goal of this journal “devoted largely to the interests of pictorial photography” was “to issue quarterly an illustrated publication which will appeal to the ever-increasing ranks of those who have faith in photography as a medium of individual expression, and, in addition, to make converts of many at present ignorant of its possibilities.”
This glossary has been edited from primary sources and text by Ina Schmidt-Runke, Meike Harder, and Andreas Gruber.
The Photo-Secession Movement: Pioneering Artistry in Early Photography
By Adelaide Ryder, head photographer and digital assets manager at the UMFA
The Birth of the Photo-Secession Movement
This fall the Utah Museum of Fine Arts will exhibit Photo-Secession: Painterly Masterworks of Turn-of-the-Century Photography. This exhibition of art photography from the early 20th century will be on view from August 24 to December 29, 2024. Who were the Photo-Secessionists and why was their work so pivotal to the advancement of photography as an art form?
In the mid-19th century photography was regarded as a complex technical field that only a trained professional could do. By the 1880s, however, the hand-held camera had become affordable and easy to use, and the “snapshot” became commonplace. Smaller, easier-to-use cameras and the ability to send the film off to a lab for development gave the public accessibility to the medium in a new way. This technological advancement greatly affected the professional photography business, as people began to question the skills needed to make a photograph when “anyone could push a button.”
How did photographers respond to this shift in aesthetics and business? Many searched for ways to use photography to express abstract ideas or subjective points of view, shifting from using photography to document objective likeness to illustrating subjective conditions or the subject’s inner state. This helped elevate the photographer’s status, as the expressive ability of the person behind the camera became as important as the subject. Photographers embraced symbolism and started printing with complex techniques like gum bichromate to elevate their craft above the basic snapshot. Two significant movements were born from this struggle to gain recognition as a legitimate form of artistic expression rather than simply a means of mechanical documentation: Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession.
The camera was seen as a tool, and many felt that photographs visually lacked the “artist’s hand,” an essential factor in calling something “art.” The Photo-Secession movement, founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902, aimed to change this perception. Stieglitz and his contemporaries believed photography deserved the same artistic consideration as painting and sculpture. They aimed to elevate photography to fine art, emphasizing the photographer’s vision and creativity over mere technical skill. Stieglitz said the Photo-Secession was founded “loosely to hold together those Americans devoted to pictorial photography in their endeavour to compel its recognition, not as a handmaiden of art, but as a distinctive medium of individual expression.” (Camera Work, no. 6, April 1904.)
The Photo-Secession movement emerged from the broader Pictorialist movement, which dominated photographic art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While both movements sought to establish photography as an art form, the Photo-Secessionists emerged with their own philosophy.
Similarities
Artistic Expression: The Photo-Secession and Pictorialism emphasized the photographer’s role as an artist rather than a mere technician. They believed that photography should convey the photographer’s vision and emotional intent.
Aesthetic Quality: Both movements valued the aesthetic quality of photographs. They often employed techniques like soft focus, manipulation of light, and careful composition to create visually striking images.
Influence of Painting: Both were heavily influenced by the aesthetics of painting, particularly Impressionism and Symbolism. They sought to create images that were painterly in style, blurring the lines between photography and traditional fine arts.
Differences
Philosophical Focus: Pictorialism focused on creating images that looked like paintings, often using elaborate darkroom techniques to achieve a painterly effect. Photo-Secession, while also influenced by painting, emphasised the photographer’s personal expression and the inherent qualities of the photographic medium, sometimes even embracing the “snapshot” aesthetic if it helped to illustrate more hidden ideas and thoughts.
Technical Innovation: The Photo-Secessionists were more open to embracing the amateur artist and experimentation in techniques and technologies, whereas the Pictorialists held on to the traditional hierarchy of the European artistic schools of the time. Photo-Secessionists saw innovation as a means to expand photography’s artistic potential.
Subject Matter: Pictorialists focused on romanticized and idealized subjects, such as landscapes, portraits, and allegorical scenes. The Photo-Secessionists, on the other hand, explored a wider range of subjects, including urban scenes, modern life, and abstract forms. They embraced art movements like Cubism and Futurism, reflecting a broader and more progressive vision of art.
Exhibition and Display: The Photo-Secessionists were disenchanted with the outdated salons and gate-keeping ways of many photo schools commonly practiced in Europe. They began publications like The American Amateur Photographer, Camera Notes, and Camera Work to help give a platform to young photographers and people practicing these new ways of image making.
Alfred Stieglitz was a driving force behind the Photo-Secession movement. His passion for photography galvanized his dedication to promoting it as an art form. He saw photography as a means of personal expression. He helped catapult the idea that image-making can happen in the darkroom, during the printing process, as much as in the camera.
Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage (1907, below) is one of the most iconic images in the history of photography. This powerful image captures the crowded lower deck of a transatlantic steamer, where people traveled in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. The Steerage is celebrated for its striking composition, which combines geometric shapes and human forms to create a dynamic and balanced visual narrative. Stieglitz considered this photograph one of his most outstanding achievements, as it encapsulated his transition to straight photography, which embraced photographs looking like photographs rather than the painterly qualities of Pictorialism. This photograph shows his ability to convey the complexity and depth of human experience through a single image. The photograph is a masterpiece of visual artistry and a compelling social document, reflecting the conditions and aspirations of early 20th century immigrants.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Steerage 1907 Hand-pulled photogravure on paper
This photograph has become the iconic image of the Photo-Secession and has legendary status. In June 1907 he sailed to Europe to visit family and booked a first-class cabin. On a stroll around the ship, he encountered a bustling scene of labourers and their families traveling in steerage class, the part of the ship with accommodations for those with the cheapest tickets. With a single four-by-five-inch glass plate left in his camera, Stieglitz shot what would be regarded as a definitive masterpiece of both photography and Modernism.
About making this picture Stieglitz recalled: “There were men and women and children on the lower deck of the steerage. There was a narrow stairway leading to the upper deck of the steerage, a small deck right on the bow of the steamer. To the left was an inclining funnel and from the upper steerage deck there was fastened a gangway bridge that was glistening in its freshly painted state. It was rather long, white, and during the trip remained untouched by anyone. On the upper deck, looking over the railing, there was a young man with a straw hat. The shape of the hat was round. He was watching the men and women and children on the lower steerage deck. A round straw hat, the funnel leaning left, the stairway leaning right, the white drawbridge with its railing made of circular chains – white suspenders crossing on the back of a man in the steerage below, round shapes of iron machinery, a mast cutting into the sky, making a triangular shape. I saw shapes related to each other. I saw a picture of shapes and underlying that the feeling I had about life.”
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) The Hand of Man 1902 Hand-pulled photogravure on paper
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Käsebier
Gertrude Käsebier: The Master of Portraiture
Gertrude Käsebier was known for her compelling portraits and allegorical imagery. Käsebier’s work transcended traditional portrait photography by infusing her images with a deep sense of intimacy and character. She believed that a photograph should reveal the inner essence of its subject, and her portraits are renowned for capturing the personality and spirit of the people she photographed.
Käsebier’s approach to portraiture was both innovative and empathetic. This image from the UMFA’s permanent collection is a perfect example of how she photographed women and children, presenting them with dignity and respect at a time when they were not the usual subjects of portraiture. Her work challenged conventional representations and highlighted her subjects’ emotional depth and individuality.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Untitled (Billiard Game) c. 1909 Platinum print on paper
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mother and Two Children 1899 Platinum print on paper
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Serbonne (A Day in France) 1901 Platinum print on paper
Both Pumpkin Pie, Voulangis and Serbonne (A Day in France) were set in France in 1901, when the artist was chaperoning art students. The young man in both scenes is Edward Steichen at age 22, whose interest in photography was then budding.
Serbonne is Käsebier’s chaste reference to Édouard Manet’s famous painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) of 1863. An example of ultra-soft focus, this photo was reproduced in the inaugural issue of Camera Work, which was devoted to Käsebier.
Published in Camera Work, 1, 1903
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Heritage of Motherhood 1904 Gum-bichromate print on paper
This portrays the children’s book author Agnes Rand Lee in mourning after the sudden death of her daughter from illness. A contemporary photographer and critic deemed this image “one of the strongest things that Käsebier has ever done, and one of the saddest and most touching that I have ever seen.” Käsebier extensively manipulated the gum-bichromate process to make this print appear like a charcoal drawing.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) Mother and Child c. 1900 Multiple gum-bichromate print on paper
The subject of mother and child was a frequent one for Pictorialists, especially Käsebier and Clarence White. The contrast between the tiny infant and the mighty tree gives this image additional symbolic meaning.
Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852-1934) The Picture Book 1903 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz had a print of this photograph in his personal collection, which he bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Published in Camera Work, 10, 1905
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Evans
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Aubrey Beardsley 1893 Platinum print on paper
Evans, a member of the British art photography group the Linked Ring, was close friends with prominent authors and artists, such as George Bernard Shaw and Aubrey Beardsley. Portrayed here around age 20, Beardsley was a talented artist, designer, and illustrator, whose promising career was cut short by tuberculosis just five years after this photo was made.
Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) Alvin Langdon Coburn in Eastern Clothing 1901 Platinum print on paper
Coburn was a precocious young American artist. An eighth birthday gift of a Kodak camera sparked his interest in photography. By age 16 Coburn had moved to London to work with his cousin the photographer F. Holland Day, whose portrait by Gertrude Käsebier is in this exhibition. After being included in a landmark exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society, Coburn returned to New York and apprenticed with Käsebier. By the tender age of 20, he became a founding member of the Photo-Secession and launched an international career dividing his time between New York, London, and Paris.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Dow
Arthur Wesley Dow (American, 1857-1922) Silhouetted Trees c. 1910 Cyanotype print on paper
A painter, printmaker, and photographer, Dow is mainly remembered today as a pioneering educator who taught in New York at the Pratt Institute, Art Students League, and Teacher’s College of Columbia University. Among Dow’s students were Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Dow also hired Clarence White to teach photography at Columbia, thereby launching White’s important teaching career.
From the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Haviland
Paul Burty Haviland (American, 1880-1950) Ship Deck 1910 Platinum print on paper
Haviland was an amateur photographer from a young age and grew up immersed in the arts. His grandfather was an early photography critic in Paris, and his father owned Haviland porcelain factory in Limoges, France. As the New York representative of the family business, Haviland happened to meet Alfred Stieglitz in 1908. Just two years later he became associate editor of Camera Work and helped financially support Stieglitz’s gallery 291.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Struss
Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) Cables 1912 Gelatin silver print on paper
Struss was a star pupil of Clarence White and became a favourite of Alfred Stieglitz and the youngest member of the Photo-Secession. He is best known for his compelling cityscapes of New York, including the view of the Singer Building through the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and the dramatic Flatiron Building, Twilight.
Karl Struss (American, 1886-1981) Flatiron Building, Twilight c. 1915 Gelatin silver print on paper
Struss eventually broke away from Stieglitz and cofounded the society of the Pictorial Photographers of America along with Clarence White and Gertrude Käsebier in 1916. He … accepted a job as a cameraman for filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille. Struss would become one of the most prolific Hollywood cinematographers with 150 films, an Academy Award, and three Academy nominations to his credit.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Nudes by Stieglitz and White
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) Reflected Nude 1909 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) Nude Posed in Doorway (Miss Thompson) 1907 Platinum print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) and Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Torso 1907 Palladium print on paper
This is likely the most widely reproduced nude by Photo-Secession artists.
After their personal and professional rupture, Stieglitz wrote White a letter that specifically referred to their collaboration in 1907. Stieglitz insisted “that my name be not mentioned by you in connection with either the prints or the negatives” and further instructed White to erase his name from any prints they had jointly signed. Despite this vitriol, Stieglitz retained in his personal collection two prints of The Torso, one of them jointly signed in pencil.
Published in Camera Work, 27, 1909
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Images of O’Keeffe by Stieglitz
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe 1918 Palladium print on paper
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe (Fixing Hair) 1919-1921 Palladium print on paper
Over two decades, Stieglitz made over 300 photos of O’Keeffe, producing an extraordinary and candid portrait of the artist. She recalled, “I was photographed with a kind of heat and excitement and in a way wondered what it was all about.” The directness and intimacy of this series of photos differ from the idealised nudes that Stieglitz and White made together during the heyday of the Photo-Secession.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by White
Clarence Hudson White: The Romantic
Clarence Hudson White was celebrated for his romanticised and intimate approach to photography. His 1904 image The Kiss perfectly illustrates his unique style. This platinum print on paper captures a tender moment with a soft focus and gentle lighting. The Kiss portrays an intimate scene imbued with a sense of emotional depth. White’s use of the platinum printing process, which provides a broad tonal range and exquisite detail, enhances the image’s delicate and dreamlike quality. His work reflects the movement’s early emphasis on creating photographs that evoke the emotional and aesthetic qualities of fine art while also paving the way for future explorations in photographic expression.
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Bubble 1898 Platinum print on paper
This image was exhibited at the 1898 Philadelphia Photographic Salon to great acclaim. Fellow photographer and critic Joseph Keiley commented, “Like most of Mr. White’s pictures, it is a well nigh perfect piece of composition whose subject with subtle poetry stimulates and leaves much to the imagination.”
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Mirror 1912 Platinum print on paper
Clarence Hudson White (American, 1871-1925) The Kiss 1904 Platinum print on paper
This is one of White’s best known photographs. Despite his separation from White, Stieglitz kept prints of both The Kiss and The Bubble in his personal collection throughout his life.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by followers of White
Anne Brigman: The Feminine Mystic of Photo-Secession
Anne Brigman was known for her evocative and mystical imagery. She often placed herself within her compositions, challenging traditional gender roles and expectations. Her connection to the Photo-Secession movement was cemented through her association with Alfred Stieglitz, who published her work in Camera Work and admired her innovative spirit.
Brigman’s 1911 photograph The Pine Sprite exemplifies her distinctive style. The image features a nude female figure intertwined with the natural landscape, blending the human form seamlessly with the rugged environment. This work reflects Brigman’s themes of femininity, nature, and freedom, aligning with the Photo-Secessionist emphasis on personal expression and artistic experimentation. Brigman’s contributions highlighted the movement’s inclusive spirit, showcasing how female photographers could assert their voices and artistic visions in a male-dominated field.
Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Shadow on My Door (Self Portrait) 1921 Gelatin silver print on paper
Anne Brigman (American, 1869-1950) The Pine Sprite 1911 Gelatin silver print on paper
Brigman was for a long time the only Californian member of the Photo-Secession. She was a free spirit and pagan whose woodsy nudes inspired by fantasy and folklore were frequently reproduced in Camera Work.
Laura Gilpin (American, 1891-1979) Ghost Rock, Garden of the Gods, Colorado 1919 Palladium print on paper
An amateur photographer from Colorado Springs, Gilpin moved to New York to study with Clarence White in 1916. This photograph was one of Gilpin’s first successes after returning home in 1919, the beginning of her decades-long career as one of the most notable photographers of the West and Southwest.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
In 1916 Gilpin enrolled at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Two years later, she returned to her native Colorado Springs and became one of the few women to pursue landscape photography.
This is her depiction of the Garden of the Gods, a scenic rock formation in Colorado Springs. It captures the stillness and otherworldly quality of the area. The photograph also reflects an emphasis on the evocation of mood rather than on descriptive detail.
Text from the National Gallery of Art Facebook page
Edward Steichen
Edward J. Steichen: The Innovator
Edward J. Steichen, a close associate of Stieglitz, brought a unique perspective to the Photo-Secession movement. Steichen was not only a photographer but also a painter, which influenced his photographic style. He experimented with various techniques, including soft focus and manipulation of light, to create both ethereal and visually striking images.
An avid gardener, Steichen propagated and grew a bountiful garden at his French country house. This image of a calla lily is rendered with exquisite detail and tonal richness. Steichen’s botanical images showcase his ability to find harmony between nature and art. His meticulous composition and sensitivity to light transform a simple flower into a work of art, reflecting his painterly approach to photography. His botanical works contributed to the Photo-Secession movement by highlighting the artistic potential of natural forms.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Lotus, Mount Kisco 1915 Gelatin silver print on paper
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Calla Lily c. 1921 Platinum print on paper
Steichen had previously photographed flowers in compositions that placed delicate floral arrangements next to women figured as ideals of feminine beauty. In contrast, here he presents the lotus and calla lily in sharp focus and as singular subjects without overt metaphorical meaning.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Three Pears and an Apple 1921 Gelatin silver print on paper
On making this picture Steichen wrote: “I was particularly interested in a method of representing volume, scale, and a sense of weight. In my small greenhouse I constructed a tent of opaque blankets. From a tiny opening, I directed light against one side of the covering blanket, and this light, reflected from the blanket, was all. I made a series of exposures that lasted more than two days and one night. As the nights were cool, everything, including the camera, contracted and the next day expanded. Instead of producing one meticulously sharp picture, the infinitesimal movement produced a succession of slightly different sharp images, which optically fused as one. Here for the first time in a photograph, I was able to sense volume as well as form.”
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Blossom of White Fingers c. 1923 Gold-toned gelatin silver print on paper
This study of the graceful hands of Steichen’s wife with ultra-soft focus and high-key lighting and printed on gold-toned gelatin paper is one of the rare instances of Steichen using Pictorialist methods after the end of the Photo-Secession.
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Backbone and Ribs of a Sunflower c. 1920 Gelatin silver print on paper
Steichen was a knowledgeable botanist and spent five decades photographing the life cycle of sunflowers. This is one of his earliest studies of the plant. He became fascinated with spirals in nature, writing, “I found some form of the spiral in most succulent plants and in certain flowers, particularly in the seed pods of the sunflower.”
Edward Steichen (American born Luxembourg, 1879-1973) Advertising Study for Coty Lipstick 1929 Gelatin silver print on paper
Steichen is credited as a founding figure of modern advertising and fashion photography. From 1923 to 1938, he served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. He had extensive experience in graphic design and advertising from his youth and earlier career. He had designed posters as a young man for a lithographic printer in Milwaukee. As Alfred Stieglitz’s associate on Camera Work from 1903 to 1917, Steichen produced the logo, typeface, and page layouts.
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works by Strand
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Central Park 1915-1916 Platinum print on paper
Urban life preoccupied Strand and in the 1920s would become a central subject of Modernist photographers around the world. From a Central Park overpass Strand identified this interesting composition with the bright, sinuous path dividing the picture plane. The decisive moment to snap the shutter occurred with the appearance of the two advancing figures and their angular shadows.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Speckled Toadstool, Georgetown, Maine 1927 Waxed platinum print on paper
Strand continued to use platinum printing long after most other photographers adopted gelatin silver papers, which were more efficient and versatile and had a glossier surface. His prints in platinum are highly regarded for capturing minute detail and a wide range of tonal values.
Paul Strand (American, 1890-1976) Cobweb in the Rain, Georgetown, Maine 1928 Gelatin silver print on paper
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Works of Straight photography
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883-1965) Side of White Barn, Bucks County 1917 Gelatin silver print on paper
A painter and photographer, Sheeler became a close friend of Alfred Stieglitz as the Photo-Secession dissolved. This photographic study of line, shape, and tone recalls the hard-edged style of Sheeler’s paintings. Only the chickens appearing at the bottom edge give a sense of scale to the barn.
Alvin Langdon Coburn: The Avant-Garde Creator
Alvin Langdon Coburn pushed the boundaries of photography with his innovative Vortographs, created in 1916-1917. These images are considered some of the first abstract photographs, born from Coburn’s desire to create art that combined the physical with the spiritual. By placing a vortoscope, a triangular arrangement of mirrors and prisms, over a camera’s lens, Coburn created complex images of kaleidoscopic and geometric patterns that simplify the photograph to the essential elements of light and form. This technique broke away from traditional photographic representation, emphasising form, structure, and abstraction. The Vortographs were influenced by the Vorticist movement, which celebrated dynamic and abstract art. Coburn’s pioneering work with these images marked a significant departure from Pictorialism, embracing modernist principles and demonstrating the artistic potential of photography beyond mere depiction. The Vortographs stand as a testament to Coburn’s visionary approach and contributions to the evolution of photographic art.
Alvin Langdon Coburn (British American, 1882-1966) Vortograph 1917 Gelatin silver print on paper
Coburn was one of the Photo-Secessionists who rejected Pictorialism. In his 1916 essay “The Future of Pictorial Photography,” he called for abstraction in photography, concluding, “it is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts, and with her infinite possibilities, do things stranger and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.” Coburn created vortographs like this by placing a devise with three mirrors between his camera and subject. When he exhibited them to great fanfare in London in 1917, Ezra Pound proclaimed: “The Camera is freed from Reality!”
All from the Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Utah Museum of Fine Arts University of Utah campus Marcia and John Price Museum Building 410 Campus Center Drive
Curators: Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist
There are some stunning photographs in this exhibition but their “formula” is well known – aerial photographs of the blighted landscape etched by both geological and human forces (a la Edward Burtynsky, Richard Woldendorp et al) paired with objective, frontal “dead pan” portrait photographs (a la Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra et al), both forms of topographical mapping (of the land and of the face… as is the regulated presentation) – images which attempt to interrogate “the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants.”
This is strong work but it begs the question: what fresh insight are these photographs giving us into the object of the photographers attention, other than the specifics of “American Southwest” and “Indigenous inhabitants” which turn out to be conceptually and visually generic? Is it necessary for everything to be new again or can work such as this stand in its own right and not just be an echo of what has come before. For the general public the work might seem fresh and new but for the informed observer this is well trodden, indeed trampled ground.
The press release states that “The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.” I don’t feel that with these photographs. Where is the art that expresses through a partnership with the photographer the eloquent, unique voice of the Indigenous inhabitants of this ancestral landscape, its spirit and its fire?
As with any art please make up your own mind.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Denver Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing the opening wall text (below)
Thirst | Exposure | In Place presents photographs from three projects Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to 2023. The portraits, landscapes, and testimonies make visible the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Exposure examines the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Dine Bikeyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists form Princeton University to address the region’s hazardous waste and pollution left by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.
In place evokes the enduring landscape of the Bears Ears region in Utah, while Thirst presents a selection from a new series about the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking due to dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds may carry clouds of toxic sediment from the lake bed – by-products from mining, agriculture, and urban development – across the valley and beyond.
Opening wall text from the exhibition
Denver Art Museum Talk with Fazal Sheikh March 9, 2024
Photographer Fazal Sheikh speaks about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place. His photographs address the consequences of industrial land use, engage questions about water use and climate change, and reflect on the ongoing relationship between people and nature. Sheikh discusses the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed, and his collaborations with writers, scientists, and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work.
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake 2022
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Text from the Denver Art Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Exposure 2019
“The medicine men told our men not to work in the mines, that it was dangerous, but the men needed to support their families and had no choice … My husband, John Guy, worked in the mines like my father. He would arrive home during his lunch break with his clothes caked in uranium dust, and I cleaned those clothes in our home every day. The children played on the tailings pile, but no one from the company ever told us the dangers they were being exposed to.”
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region), 2017-2020
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change. Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place will open March 10, 2024, and will be on view through October 20, 2024, in the museum’s Photography galleries, located on level 6 of the Martin Building, and will be included with general admission.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
“Through expansive aerial shots and intimate portraits, Fazal Sheikh documents these regions and their people with solidarity and honesty,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “The Colorado Plateau is a region deeply impacted by climate change and economic development. This exhibition offers a nuanced view into the past, present and future lives of its inhabitants.”
Sheikh is best known for his deeply humane photographs of refugees and migrants displaced by war and famine. Focusing on the United States for the first time, Sheikh explores how Indigenous people and the lands they call home have been affected by industrial growth and government policy.
“The aerial photographs in this exhibition remind us of the great age and natural beauty of the Colorado Plateau,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the DAM and curator of this exhibition for Denver. “They create an awareness of deep human and geological time and raise questions about the future of the region. In that context, Sheikh’s portraits and accompanying text affirm local communities’ need to protect their sacred spaces and encourage wider recognition of that need.”
The DAM exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections:
Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds carry clouds of toxic sediment – by-products from mining, agriculture and urban development – from the lakebed, across the valley and beyond.
Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Diné Bikéyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists from Princeton University – to address hazardous waste and pollution left across the region by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to their culture, spirituality and health.
In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. Visitors are surrounded by images made at a close distance and from high in the air. Sixty-three large colour photographs show the tremendous geological variety and the long cultural continuities of the Four Corners region.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Jonah Yellowman, spiritual advisor for the Utah Diné Bikéyah intertribal coalition and one of its founding members, will present an offering that represents his Navajo (Diné) spirituality and a deep connection to the land. This offering will be present in the gallery during the run of the exhibition.
Sound recordings taken from seismometer readings by University of Utah geologist Jeffrey Ralston Moore will resonate throughout the gallery space. They represent the otherwise inaudible vibrations of rock formations on the Colorado Plateau.
Taken together, the photographs and collaborations in Thirst | Exposure | In Place lay bare the indelible marks etched on the landscape by geological and human forces. Sheikh asks us to witness the consequences of what has passed and imagine what is yet to come.
Sheikh will speak about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition in a lecture event at the DAM on March 9, 11am – 12pm. The lecture will take place in the Sharp Auditorium, in the lower level of the museum’s Hamilton Building. Sheikh will discuss the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed and his collaborations with writers, scientists and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work. This exhibition follows the Denver Art Museum’s 2017 presentation of Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is organised by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition is presented by Jane Watkins, with additional support from the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.
The exhibition was curated in Denver by Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist.
![Alban-Adrien Tournachon (French , 1825-1903) and Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Pierrot Yawning' 1854 from the exhibition 'Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography' at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/tournachon-and-nadar-pierrot-yawning.jpg "Alban-Adrien Tournachon (French , 1825-1903) and Nadar [Gaspard Félix Tournachon] (French, 1820-1910) 'Pierrot Yawning' 1854 from the exhibition 'Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography' at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City")
![Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 'Untitled [The Lines of the Hand]' Paris, 1949-1951](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/frank-untitled-the-lines-of-the-hand.jpg "Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 'Untitled [The Lines of the Hand]' Paris, 1949-1951")
![Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) 'Vertical-Horizontal Composition [Conceived by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and executed in relief by Jean Arp]' 1927-1928 / 1943-1956](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/13.jpg "Sophie Taeuber-Arp (Swiss, 1889-1943) and Jean (Hans) Arp (German-French, 1886-1966) 'Vertical-Horizontal Composition [Conceived by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and executed in relief by Jean Arp]' 1927-1928 / 1943-1956")
![Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [attributed to] 'Peggy Guggenheim poses at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York, October 22, 1942'](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/16.jpg "Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) [attributed to] 'Peggy Guggenheim poses at her Art of This Century Gallery in New York, October 22, 1942'")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/weegee-fire-in-loft-building.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) 'Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]' 1947")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-black-buick.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[Black Buick with dead passenger pulled out of the Harlem River, New York]' February 23, 1942")
![Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/weegee-after-the-opera.jpg "Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine, 1899-1968) '[After the opera, Sammy's on the Bowery, New York]' 1943-1945")
![Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ask-58_ccp_bernal_ag182-20230302-110020.jpg "Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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