In mid-December Foam will present the first major retrospective exhibition in the Netherlands of the work of Joel Sternfeld (1944, New York), one of the pioneers of colour photography. Foam will be showing more than one hundred photos from ten different series in an exhibition spanning two floors. A highlight is Sternfeld’s early work from the 1970s, which has never been previously exhibited. A large selection from famed series such as AmericanProspects, the result of his legendary journey through the United States, and Stranger Passing will also be on show. A constant factor in his work is his native land America, its inhabitants and the traces left by people on the landscape. With a subtle feeling for irony and an exceptional feeling for colour, Sternfeld offers us an image of daily life in America over the last three decades.
New Color Photography
Along with William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld saw to it that colour photography became a respected artistic medium in the 1970s. Until that time, colour was used widely in advertising and amateur photography, but was rarely seen in museums and galleries. Sternfeld was influenced by the colour theory of the Bauhaus and by the work of William Eggleston, whose exhibition in MoMA in 1976 marked the official acceptance of colour photography in the art world.
Early Work
A typical ‘street photographer’ style can be recognised in Sternfeld’s early and as yet unknown work, using a 35mm camera, to record everyday life in America. This work already contained the characteristics that made his later work so successful. In 1978, Joel Sternfeld began a long journey through the United States. For eight years he crisscrossed his homeland and recorded everything he encountered with his large-format camera. His investigation into the landscape and people moving within it resulted in the American Prospects series (1979-1983). In Stranger Passing (1987-2000) Sternfeld concentrated on people. He photographed them in an unambiguous way: from the same distance and looking directly into the camera. This series is a portrait of a society, comparable to the magnum opus of August Sander in the early twentieth century. Just as in American Prospect, there is evidence of a light absurdism as well as sympathy for those being portrayed.
The American Landscape
For the On This Site series (1993-1996), Sternfeld photographed urban and rural locations which were at first glance unremarkable. In the accompanying text, however, it becomes clear that these were the locations of ‘crime passionnels’, racial violence and stabbings. The photos thus acquire an entirely different connotation. In Sweet Earth (1993-2005) Sternfeld shows alternative lifestyles and communities which have arisen in America over the past two centuries. He travelled to the homes and communities of people that do not fit into conventional lifestyles and instead pursue another way of life. In Oxbow Archive (2005-2007) Sternfeld depicts the effects of the changing seasons on the landscape and how human behaviour influences nature.”
“I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.”
“Seeing is a neglected enterprise.”
Saul Leiter
“Leiter’s sensibility… placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.”
Martin Harrison. ‘Saul Leiter Early Color’
The first of two postings on the underrated, underexposed American photographer Saul Leiter.* These photographs are a delightful surprise!
Some, like Through Boards (1957, below) are as illuminating as any Rothko going around. His art is not of the documentary gaze but of a brief glimpse, glanz, refulgence of desire ∞ snatched from the nonlinearity of time ∞ cleft in(to) its fabric. What wonderfully composed reflections they are. I absolutely adore them.
The media release states, “… but where his color photography is concerned, he cannot be compared with any other photographer. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer working in color.”
Galleries and museums must beware such bombastic claims.
The second posting will be from a major retrospective of his work at The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen.
Perhaps this photographer is finally getting the accolades he so rightly deserves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
* Since this posting in 2012, the work of Saul Leiter has come to prominence and the artist is now (in 2026) rightly appreciated as one of the early masters of colour photography.
Many thankx to the Jewish Historical Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
From 24 October 2011 to 4 March 2012 the JHM is presenting a retrospective exhibition of the work of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Following a long period of obscurity, Leiter’s work has recently been rediscovered in the United States and Europe. This is the first exhibition of his work in the Netherlands.
Saul Leiter is celebrated particularly for his painterly colour photographs of the street life in New York, which he produced between 1948 and 1960. Amid the hectic life of the city he captured tranquil moments of everyday beauty. He was able to transform mundane objects – a red umbrella in a snowstorm, a foot resting on a bench in the metro, or a human figure seen through the condensation on a pane of glass – into what has been described as ‘urban visual poetry’. His photographs are frequently layered, near-abstract compositions of reflections and shadows, which recall paintings by abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, with whom Leiter felt a strong affinity.
Saul Leiter is seen as belonging to the New York School of Photographers, a group of innovative artists, most of them Jewish, who achieved fame in New York in the period 1936-1963, primarily with their images of the street and their documentary photography. His black-and-white work displays a lyricism, dreaminess and surrealism that might prompt comparison with photographers such as Ted Croner, Leon Levinstein and Louis Faurer, but where his colour photography is concerned, he cannot be compared with any other photographer. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer working in colour.
Born in Pittsburgh, Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father. But his growing interest in art led him to abandon his religious studies. Instead, he went to New York and dedicated himself to painting. His friendship there with the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography, and the work of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, inspired Leiter to take up photography. His friendship with the photographer W. Eugene Smith was another inspiring influence.
The exhibition Saul Leiter: New York Reflections was prepared by the JHM in collaboration with the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. Besides over 60 colour and 40 black-and-white examples of his street photography, a small selection of fashion photographs, paintings, and painted photographs will be shown. Visitors will also be able to watch a recent documentary about Leiter by the British film maker Tomas Leach. This autumn, the publisher Steidl will be publishing the third edition of Early Color, the first book of Leiter’s photographs, compiled in 2006 by Martin Harrison of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Press release from the Jewish Historical Museum website
Personally, the early photographs of his wife Eleanor and Eleanor with their child Barbara and the most poignant, intimate and beautiful of Callahan’s work while the later modernist Cape Cod photographs presage the spirit and aesthetics of the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape of 1975.
Mario Cutajar observes of these photographs:
“These pictures of strangely vacant, light haunted intersections of sky, land, and ocean are confrontations with the limits of both the ego and photography itself as the ego’s instrument. They are oriented toward death rather than life, intimating in a cold, unsentimental way passage to another world or, perhaps, the engulfing oblivion at the horizon.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The year 2012 marks the centenary of the birth of Harry Callahan (1912-1999), whose highly experimental, visually daring, and elegant photographs made him one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century.
On view in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art from October 2, 2011, through March 4, 2012, Harry Callahan at 100 explores all facets of his work in some 100 photographs, from its genesis in the early 1940s Detroit to its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s, and finally to its maturation in Providence and Atlanta from the 1960s through the 1990s. In 1996, the Gallery organised the exhibition Harry Callahan, which traveled to Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Chicago, and included numerous works on loan from the artist.
“Using the rich holdings of the Gallery’s own collection of Callahan’s work, as well as a large collection of photographs on long-term loan from the artist’s widow, the exhibition will reveal the remarkable consistency of his vision and will demonstrate how his strong, inventive formal language repeatedly enriched his art,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art.
The Exhibition
Organised thematically and chronologically, Harry Callahan at 100 examines Callahan’s work in relation to the places where he lived and to his family, unveiling his unparalleled devotion to both his subjects and the medium of photography.
In his earliest photographs made in and around Detroit, Callahan explored the limits of the camera, constructing photographs of multiple exposures in both black-and-white and colour. In works such as Twig in Snow (c. 1942) and Store Front and Reflections (c. 1943), he sought to capture simultaneously the simplicity and complexity of nature and the theatre of urban life.
Callahan continued his aesthetic and technical experiments through photographs of his wife, Eleanor. His nudes play with dramatic contrasts of light and dark: his layered multiple exposures reveal Eleanor’s body against landscapes and frosted glass windows (Eleanor, Chicago, 1948). His photographs of his wife and their daughter, Barbara, in the lake, the city, and the woods (Eleanor and Barbara, Lake Michigan, c. 1953) exploit the spontaneity and intimacy of snapshots – yet, paradoxically, were made with a large, cumbersome 8- x 10-inch view camera.
Callahan’s twin interests in the city and the land expanded during his years in Chicago and Providence, where he created both spare and evocative photographs of the natural landscape and complex compositions of urban architecture and pedestrians. He began to document anonymous women on the streets of Chicago, first in close shots of squinting eyes, open mouths, and downcast faces seen in Chicago (1950), then in full-figure shots from a low angle that feature the women against backgrounds of skyscrapers and flagpoles, as in Chicago (1961).
In the 1970s Callahan returned to colour photography, continuing to push the boundaries of the medium, seen in the well-known Providence (1977). Taken in Atlanta and during travels abroad, his late photographs emphasised vibrant colours, long shadows, and the complex humanity of urban life, seen in Morocco (1981) and Atlanta (1985).
Harry Callahan (1912-1999)
Born in Detroit in 1912, Callahan began to photograph in 1938. Although he received no formal training in the medium, his exceptional talent was immediately recognised. In 1946 László Moholy-Nagy hired him to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago. There and at the Rhode Island School of Design (he moved to Providence in 1961) he taught generations of younger photographers, inspiring them both with the creativity of his vision and his steadfast commitment to the medium. In a career that spanned nearly six decades, he repeatedly explored a few select themes – his wife Eleanor and daughter Barbara, nature, and the urban environment. Yet each time he returned to a familiar subject, he reinvented it, endowing each photograph with both a personal and symbolic significance.
Press release from the National Gallery of Art website
During the 1940s and ’50s, Callahan’s work was deeply affected by the resolutely humanizing presence of his wife, Eleanor, and daughter, Barbara. Frequent subjects, though consistently inscrutable, Eleanor and Barbara are the shadow puppets of his career, a direct testament to his family life, but always seen as if behind some kind of veil or scrim. They are markers of an intimacy that Callahan never violates by direct exposure.
Eleanor, in particular, is photographed down to the very last details of anatomy. She remembers that during these years, she might be cooking or cleaning, and suddenly Harry would announce: “‘Take off your clothes.’ And that would be that.”
The results are sometimes staggering. A 1947 image of what appears to be the lines created by Eleanor’s legs and buttocks looks like a Cycladic statue, relentlessly rectilinear but soft around the edges, freakishly modern and ancient at the same time. An 1953 image of Eleanor and Barbara bathing in Lake Michigan dissolves the horizon, fusing lake and sky into a field of shimmering gray. The two figures seem suspended in space, dematerialized, like characters in a dream.
It’s a small miracle that no matter how much Callahan’s camera dissects the world, the photographs never seem clinical. He divorces things from context, pulls out small vignettes from the larger city, but without violence, and without the gamesmanship of a photographer inclined to the cheap surreal.
Curator: Clifford Chanin, National September 11 Memorial Museum curator and director for the project
Many thankx to the Imperial War Museum, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Having watched the graphic destruction from my apartment, only two blocks from the Twin Towers, when I entered Hangar 17 at JFK International Airport for the first time in 2006, I was immediately hit by the deep sense that the objects I was confronted with, from large shards of rusted and burnt steel to bikes left forever by their owners, were the symbolic substitutes of the victims. Their overwhelming presence stood for all the people that lost their lives that late summer day a decade ago.”
The empty shell of Hangar 17 at JFK Airport became a storehouse of memories when it was filled with the material cleared from the World Trade Center site following the September 11 attacks on New York City.
Marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Francesc Torres’s work features over 150 projected images which explore inside the hangar and reflect on the emotional power of what remained, from personal belongings to steel girders distorted by the force of the attacks. Alongside the photographs is a section of raw rusted steel over two metres in length from the ruins of the World Trade Center. As well as larger piece (over 1 tonne) that is due to go on display at IWM North in October, these objects are the first pieces of steel from Ground Zero to go on display in the UK. The exhibition will also be on display at the International Centre for Photography in New York and at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.
Throughout his career, Spanish-American artist Francesc Torres has reflected on the diverse manifestations of culture, politics, memory and power. His latest exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Memory Remains, is a bold and haunting amalgam of all four.
In 2009, Torres was granted rare access to Hangar 17 at John F Kennedy International Airport, a gaping space of over 80,000-square-feet. Within the hangar lie the remnants deemed worth preserving from the September 11 attacks, taken from the 1.8 million tonnes of debris from Ground Zero. For five weeks Torres daily confronted the legacy of terror and the ghosts of that fateful late-summer day, capturing images of objects that stand as symbolic substitutes to the victims.
“Look at it this way”, says Torres, relaying his experience, “it’s a hanger constructed to house a plane, which was transformed into a weapon used for the attack on the towers and now the sediment of that attack is here. With the sound of planes constantly flying overhead it was absolutely surreal.”
According to the photographer, the experience of walking around the hanger after the first day was so emotionally draining that he slept from four o’clock in the afternoon through to ten o’clock the next morning.
“I was absolutely exhausted; physically and emotionally… every single iota of energy I had was gone.”
His efforts have produced some exceptional results, however, displayed on a rolling slideshow in a small room near the entrance of the museum. Among the objects photographed are large shards of rusted, burnt steel, crumpled filing cabinets and a plethora of flattened Port Authority vehicles. Some unexpected pieces of detritus were also found, including a nine-foot, three-dimensional Bugs Bunny, made completely bizarre when juxtaposed by a sign whose letters read chillingly: “That’s All Folks!”
Prior to the Hangar 17 project, Torres documented the excavation of a mass Spanish Civil War grave that he said drew certain comparisons with the material at JFK.
“The clothing is something that just grabs you,” he says, “it’s very uncanny that nothing changes with the victims as historical subjects. The clothing [in Hangar 17] was exactly the same as the clothing I’ve seen in Spain or in the former Yugoslavia; it all has the same patina. The victim becomes universal… the remains have that quality.”
Along with the photographs, the museum has also acquired a section of steel from the structure of the World Trade Center, displayed outside the projection room. It is the first section of raw rusted steel from the ruins at Ground Zero – thought to be the box section from one of windows – to be displayed in the UK.
For the past year, pieces from the hangar have made their way to be placed in memorials in each of the 50 American states, as well as seven other countries across the globe. Some, but not all, of the remaining pieces will be housed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum near the site of the attack, which is something that concerns Torres.
“We have to preserve the hanger as a container. It’s an unbelievable narrative apparatus that had been created almost on the run,” he says.
With a lifelong interest in questions of human memory and meaning, Torres’ work is based on the concept that it is through the remains of history that memory remains. His latest show is an unforgettable testament to those horrendous attacks that capped the 20th century almost a decade ago.”
Exhibition dates: 20th January – 25th February, 2012
Curator: William Ewing
Many thankx to Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York 1980 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
“No photographer has worked more successfully to express the sheer physical joy of seeing.”
John Szarkowski
“Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself – less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive; less prose, more poetry.”
Ernst Haas from “About Color Photography,” in DU, 1961
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Rush Hour, New York City Nd C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA Nd C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA Nd Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA Nd Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Feed Line, New York City, USA Nd Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA Nd Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City 1951 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Food Day, New York City, USA 1953 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) 3rd Avenue, Reflection, New York City 1952 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1953 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Paris, France 1954 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Frigidaire, Paris 1954 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City 1955 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New Orleans 1957 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Park Avenue Taxis 1958 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New Orleans, USA 1960 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1962 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1962 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Traffic, Mexico City 1963 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1963 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Lights of New York City, New York City 1966 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Torn Poster I, Wave, NYC 1968 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1968 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Greenwich Village, New York City, USA 1970 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) California, USA 1970 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1972 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1973 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1974 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
“Making his first color photographs in 1949, Haas was a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. Known mainly for his commissioned work, whereby he created influential imagery such as iconic Marlboro Man advertisements long before other artists were commissioned to do so, Haas’ work would come to have great influence on later artists, such as Richard Prince, Marc Quinn or Robert Longo. Using color also for his personal work, with a pictorial language recalling at times the works by painter Edward Hopper, Haas has been described as a poet photographer. Haas cropped and abstracted, photographed against the light and out of focus, and used reflections and close-ups to mystify the visible. Interested in the everyday,as well, some of his personal photographs remind of the likes of Lee Friedlander or Stephan Shore.”
Anonymous. “Ernst Haas: Color Correction,” on the Lens Culture website Nd [Online] Cited 15/11/2024. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New Mexico, USA 1975 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Western Skies Motel 1978 C-Print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1981 C-Print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) St Louis, Missouri, USA 1986 C-Print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Christophe Guye Galerie is proud to present Color Correction by one of the most important and influential artists in the development of colour photography and the history of the medium on a whole, this exhibition spotlights a body of work that poignantly describes the complex ways in which an artist’s ‘career’ took form. Ernst Haas belonged to the best known, most productive and widely published photographers of the twentieth century. Most commonly associated with vibrant colour photography, Haas was famed for his commercial work. It is undoubtedly however his other, private work that really illuminates the power of his sensibility and his true mastery. Unfortunately this side of his creative output has been kept private and thus escaped posthumous appreciation. It is only now, with the efforts and belief in Haas’ ability of a few, such as William Ewing, former Director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, that this body of work is finally revealed and justly let’s this artist’s aptitude shine. The exhibition Color Correction, and Ewing’s corresponding book published by Steidl, uncovers, with an exciting and novel view, the “other” side of Ernst Haas’ visionary.
Color Correction is the first exhibition in Switzerland to present the to-date little known, non-commission work by the late Austrian-born photographer. Uncovering a new side to a much celebrated body of work, the show will include fifteen new and mostly never before seen large format works, alongside a handpicked selection of rare, vintage dye-transfer prints from the 1950s and ’60s. These astoundingly complex and ultimately enveloping pieces form a group exhibited under the title Colour Correction to coincide with the recent Steidl publication Color Correction, by William Ewing.”These images are of great sophistication, and rival (and sometimes surpass) the best of his colleagues”, says Ewing, revealing works “far more edgy, loose, enigmatic, and ambiguous than his celebrated work.”
“Color correction” is a term used in printing, through which the inked proofs are brought into as close equivalence as possible with the original photograph. Ewing has chosen to use the term metaphorically, to suggest “we owe it to Ernst Haas and our understanding of the history of colour photography, to reevaluate his importance in light of this marvellous imagery, kept under wraps for so many years.” It was in 1962 that the first ever colour photography exhibition, Ernst Haas Color Photography, was held at the prestigious MoMA in New York, and not until fourteen years later would colour photography be given another show at the museum with Color Photography by William Eggleston. Though introducing Haas’ work to a large audience and a major milestone in the history of the medium it would not come to have the same effect on the development of the artist’s career. On the contrary: an exhibition planned by Edward Steichen, renowned photographer and curator of MoMA at the time, it was in the end his predecessor John Szakowski who would actually see it realised. With this shift in curatorial visionary, Szakowski would enforce a different taste. Having the duty to complete Steichen’s idea, but keen to champion his own and dissimilar ideas, Szakowski’s enthusiasm regarding the artist and the exhibition Ernst Haas Color Photography was meek, the praise in his accompanying texts all but faint. Steichen, once in favour of Pictorialism, thus a subjective photography, valued Haas’ profound use of the camera, while Szakowski on the other hand chose to favour a less embellished sentiment; a more hardedge modernist inspired American approach. It was this disregard and clashing of personal agendas that would ultimately and erroneously see Haas excluded from the canon of colour photography; his indisputable talent became the victim of the cyclical debate of what art photography should be.
Making his first colour photographs in 1949, Haas was a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. Known mainly for his commissioned work, whereby he created influential imagery such as iconic Marlboro Man advertisements long before other artists were commissioned to do so, Haas’ work would come to have great influence on later artists, such as Richard Prince, Marc Quinn or Robert Longo. Using colour also for his personal work, with a pictorial language recalling at times the works by painter Edward Hopper, Haas has been described as a poet photographer. By no means the first to use the medium in colour, he was said to be “the first to do it masterfully.” Visionary, Haas early on cropped and abstracted, photographing against the light and out of focus, using reflections, close-up to mystify the visible, abstraction of colour and texture. Interested in the everyday, his photographs remind of the likes of Lee Friedlander or Stephan Shore, but rather than documents his works are “vignettes of personal experience.” The works on display in Color Correction reveal this more abstract side of the artist’s oeuvre.
Haas’ work never received the recognition it deserved. The works presented at Christophe Guye Galerie are based upon this dispute, attempting to reveal the true ability of Haas’ work and restore his rightful place in the medium’s canon.
Haas’ formal language echoes decades past while being extremely contemporary at once. Often shooting inches away from the subject at acute and unexpected angles, Haas work was visionary. Lyrical, evocative, and expressive, while at the same time exact, the artist moved away from obvious reality, finding fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. The works on view are to be understood not as informative but as creative; description gives way to suggestion. Color Correction – the exhibition as well as the book – show works that are rich, vibrant, and intelligent alike. With this new view on the body of work of one of the medium’s most important advocates, Color Correction hopes to evoke the excitement Steichen expressed when he first came across Haas imaginarium of seeing: “In my estimation we have experienced an epoch in photography. Here is a free spirit, untrammelled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography.”
Press release from the Christophe Guye Galerie website
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City 1952 C-print, later print 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Brooklyn, New York 1952 C-print, later print 101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1952 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1955 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Bronco Rider, California 1957 C-print, later print 101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) New York City, USA 1963 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Los Angeles, California, USA 1963 C-print, later print 101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in) Edition of 15 Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) Cafe Boi Charbon, Caen, France 1976 C-print, later print Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
Ernst Haas (American born Austria, 1921-1986) California, USA 1976 C-print, later print 101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in) Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie
One of the great pleasures of presenting this archive is introducing myself and my readers to forgotten artists. Here we have a dazzling Australian artist who died largely forgotten especially, it seems, in his native country. He does not deserve this fate!
How many works does the National Gallery of Australia hold in its collection?
6
Count them … 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
(and none displayed online)
AGNSW 5, NGV 0
(and none displayed online)
Tell me, is there something wrong with this picture?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Bruce Museum for allowing me to publish the images in the posting. Please click on the images for a larger version.
Martin Lewis (1881-1962) was born in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia on June 7, 1881. He was the second of eight children and had a passion for drawing. At the age of 15, he left home and traveled in New South Wales, Australia, and in New Zealand, working as a pothole digger and a merchant seaman. He returned to Sydney and settled into a Bohemian community outside Sydney. Two of his drawings were published in the radical Sydney newspaper, The Bulletin. He studied with Julian Ashton at the Art Society’s School in Sydney. Ashton, a famous painter, was also one of the first Australian artists to take up printmaking.
In 1900, Lewis left Australia for the United States. His first job was in San Francisco, painting stage decorations for William McKinley’s presidential campaign of 1900. By 1909, Lewis was living in New York, where he found work in commercial illustration. His earliest known etching is dated 1915. However, the level of skill in this piece suggests he had been working in the medium for some time previously. It was during this period that he helped Edward Hopper learn the basics of etching. In 1920, after the break up of a romance, Lewis traveled to Japan, where for two years he drew and painted and studied Japanese art. The influence of Japanese prints is very evident in Lewis’s prints after that period. In 1925, he returned to etching and produced most of his well-known works between 1925 and 1935 Lewis’s first solo exhibition in 1929 was successful enough for him to give up commercial work and concentrate entirely on printmaking. Lewis is most famous for his black and white prints, mostly of night scenes of non tourist, real life street scenes of New York City. During the Depression, however, he was forced to leave the city for four years between 1932 and 1936 and move to Connecticut. When Lewis was able to return to the New York City in 1936, there was no longer a market interested in his work. He died largely forgotten.
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, presents the new exhibition The Prints of Martin Lewis: From the Collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly from October 2, 2011, through February 19, 2012. Recognised as one of the premier American printmakers of the first half of the 20th-century, Martin Lewis (1881-1962) left an indelible mark on the landscape of the art world. Although not as publicly well known as some of his contemporaries such as Edward Hopper, Lewis was a highly skilled printer who was greatly involved in the artistic scene of New York City during the 1920s and ’30s. This exhibition features more than thirty etchings and several canceled plates by the artist from the private collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly of West Redding, Connecticut.
The exhibition The Prints of Martin Lewis: From the Collection of Dr. Dorrance Kelly provides a brief biographical account of Lewis and showcases some of the artist’s best technical prints. Lewis was an acknowledged master of the intaglio techniques of printmaking, experimenting with multiple processes including etching, aquatint, engraving, mezzotint, and dry point.
In 1915 he produced his first documented etching, Smoke Pillar, Weehawken. Images like this one documented the scenes of everyday life as they played out in the thriving metropolis around New York City. Lewis portrayed all aspects of city life including dockworkers, skyscrapers, tugboats, and pedestrians – mostly the ladies. He produced magnificent prints that captured the energy, bustle, and occasional solitude of New York. With his move to Connecticut in 1932, Lewis investigated another topic through his printmaking: country life. This firmly entrenched Lewis as a prominent American scene artist, as his prints captured the intersection between the urban and rural environments and shed light on the slowly emerging suburban culture.
Curators: originally co-curated by Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward and organised by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, its later presentation at the Brooklyn Museum was coordinated locally by Tricia Laughlin Bloom as project curator.
“The possibility of using our bodies as a possible source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. For instance, if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating and fucking. And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our bodies, our pleasures ….
It is very interesting to note, for instance, that for centuries people generally, as well as doctors, psychiatrists, and even liberation movements, have always spoken about desire, and never about pleasure. “We have to liberate our desire,” they say. No! We have to create new pleasure. And then maybe desire will follow.” (My bold)
Michel Foucault 1
George Platt Lynes, Minor White and The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors
I had the great privilege of visiting The Minor White Archive at Princeton University while I was researching for my PhD. While there I studied the work cards and classic prints of the great photographer, paying particular attention to his photography of the male. What was a great surprise and delight to me were the presence of photographs of explicit sexual acts, men photographed with erections – images that have, to my knowledge, never been published. I don’t think that many people would even know that Minor White took such photographs. Although these images would have never been for public consumption it is still very unusual to find a classical photographer with such a public profile taking photographs of erect penises, especially in the 1940s!
Disturbed by having been in battle in the Second World War and seeing some of his best male friends killed, White’s early photographs of men (in their uniforms) depict the suffering and anguish that the mental and physical stress of war can cause. He was even more upset than most because he was battling his own inner sexual demons at the same time, his shame and disgust at being a homosexual and attracted to men, a difficulty compounded by his religious upbringing. In his photographs White both denied his attraction to men and expressed it. His photographs of the male body are suffused with both sexual mystery and a celebration of his sexuality despite his bouts of guilt. After the war he started to use the normal everyday bodies of his friends to form sequences of photographs, sometimes using the body as a metaphor for the landscape and vice versa. In the above photograph (Tom Murphy, left), based on a religious theme, we see a dismembered hairy body front on, the hands clutching and caressing the body, the lower hand hovering near the exposed genitalia, the upper hand cupping the breast. We see the agony and ecstasy of a homoerotic desire cloaked in a religious theme.
The image comes from the The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors (1948), four pages of which can be seen below. While at The Minor White Archive I looked at the only complete, undamaged book in existence. What an experience!
The book has a powerful and intense presence. It was beautifully sequenced as you would expect from Minor White and features photographs of Tom Murphy. There is a series of his hands over the back of a chair in different positions: hanging, curled, splayed, held slightly upwards, and these are paired with photographs of bare feet and turned up jeans, bare feet and rocks, and three other photographs of Tom Murphy. In an excellent paper Cruising and Transcendence in the Photographs of Minor White (Nd. Later published as an online-only feature accompanying Aperture magazine’s Spring 2015 issue, “Queer”), author Kevin Moore observes that the hand-bound volume with images paired on facing pages – “mirrors” to both one another and the artist – is a personal account as well as a meditation on the sins of the flesh.
“Temptation (which was never published or exhibited) begins with a sort of prologue, comprising a single full-length nude of Tom Murphy, White’s student and the model most commonly associated with his work. The pose is similar to those found in the beefcake pictures White was producing at this time: Murphy adopts a classical contrapposto stance and is entirely nude, his pale, wiry body positioned against a dark backdrop. A piece of driftwood at the model’s feet proposes a theme of innocence – man in his natural state. The sequence then moves to pairings of images describing man in his civilised state, featuring several loving close-ups of Murphy’s gesturing hands, a shot of his bare feet, and a single shoulder-length portrait, in which he wears a buttoned shirt and looks intently off to the side. Next, there is an interlude suggesting growing dissolution: an image of Murphy’s feet and a petrified stone is paired with a shot of Murphy in full dress slouched on a mass of rocks and staring vacantly off into the distance. The next pairing (images 9 and 10 below) accelerates the descent into temptation. Here, the pose in a second picture of Murphy’s feet suggests agitation, while a three-quarter length portrait of Murphy, crouched in the bushes and looking back over his shoulder, is as emblematic an image of cruising as White ever produced. The photographs that follow descend further into lust and self-recrimination, conveyed through photographs in which Murphy’s naked body alternates between expressions of pain and pleasure. The sequence ends with a series of beatific nudes (images 27 and 28 below), which express redemption through nonsexual treatments of the body and in the body’s juxtaposition with natural forms – a return to nature.
White may have thought at first that the sequence format would help him transcend the limits of personal biography, that he could use the breadth and fluidity of the sequence to emphasize a universal narrative while exercising control over the potentially explosive and revealing content of individual images. This proved to be overly optimistic, at least in his earliest uses of the form. White’s colleagues, for example, immediately understood Temptation for what it really was: an agonized portrayal of White’s love for his male student.”
Moore goes on to conclude that White obsfucated his sexuality, displacing gay ‘cruising’ “by a universalised mystical searching – sexual longing setting in motion a heroic search” using photography as his medium, and that his photographs became a dreamscape, perhaps even a dream(e)scape: “in which meanings are obscured, not clarified; signs are effaced, not illuminated; beauty is closeted, not set out for all to see. White was attracted to the ambiguity of the dream because it offered cover and protection but also freedom to maneuver. The dream supported the irrational, maintained a sense of mystery, and beautified frustration.”
I have to disagree with Kevin Moore.
Anyone who has seen The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors in the flesh (so to speak) can feel the absolute presence of these images, their reality, the connection between image and viewer.
Maybe White was a Romantic but he was realistically romantic; his images are not dreamscapes, they offer multiple readings and contexts, insights into the human condition. Even though there was anguish and guilt present about his sexuality, channelled through his photography, anyone bold enough to take photographs of erections in 1940 has some ticker. It takes a clear eye and a courageous heart to do this, knowing what was at stake in this era of sexual repression. Beauty is not closeted here, unless I am looking at different images from Kevin Moore. In fact the magic of the photography of Minor White is his ability to modulate space, to modulate bodies so that they are beautiful, ambiguous and mystical whatever their context. Not everything in this world has to be in your face. Like a Glen Gould playing the Goldberg Variations revelation of beauty takes time, concentration and meditation.
Also, an overriding feeling when viewing the images was one of loneliness, sadness and anguish, for the bodies seemed to be observed and not partaken of, to be unavailable both physically and in a strange way, photographically.
For a photographer who prided himself on revealing the spirit within, through photography, these are paradoxical photographs, visually accessible and mysteriously (un)revealing, photographs of a strange and wonderful ambivalence. Two great words: obsfucation, ambivalence. Clouded with mixed feelings and emotions, not necessarily anything to do with sexuality. Not everything has to be about sexuality. It is the difference between imbibing Freud or Jung – personally I prefer the more holistic, more inclusive, more spiritual Jung.
And so to the image of George Platt Lynes that I have paired with the nude of Tom Murphy (below).
Platt Lynes was another artist who struggled with is sexuality, but seemingly not to such an extent as Minor White did. GPL worked as a fashion photographer and had his own studio in New York where he photographed dancers, artists and celebrities among others. He undertook a series of mythological photographs on classical themes (which are amazing in composition and feature Surrealist motifs). Privately he photographed male nudes but was reluctant to show them in public for fear of the harm that they could do to his reputation and business with the fashion magazines. Generally his earlier male nude photographs concentrate on the idealised youthful body or ephebe.
As Lynes became more despondent with his career as a fashion photographer his private photographs of male nudes tended to take on a darker and sharper edge. After a period of residence in Hollywood he returned to New York nearly penniless. His style of photographing the male nude underwent a revision. While the photographs of his European colleagues still relied on the sun drenched bodies of young adolescent males evoking memories of classical beauty and the mythology of Ancient Greece the later nudes of Platt Lynes feature a mixture of youthful ephebes and heavier set bodies which appear to be more sexually knowing. The compositional style of dramatically lit photographs of muscular torsos of older men shot in close up (see photograph below for example) were possibly influenced by a number of things – his time in Hollywood with its images of handsome, swash-buckling movie stars with broad chests and magnificent physiques; the images of bodybuilders by physique photographers that George Platt Lynes visited; the fact that his lover George Tichenor had been killed during WWII; and the knowledge that he was penniless and had cancer. There is, I believe, a certain sadness but much inner strength in his later photographs of the male nude that harnesses the inherent sexual power embedded within their subject matter.
When undertaking research into GPL’s photographs at The Kinsey Institute as part of my PhD I noted that most of the photographs had annotations in code on the back of them giving details of age, sexual proclivities of models and what they are prepared to do and where they were found. This information gives a vital social context to GPL’s nude photographs of men and positions them within the moral and ethical framework of the era in which they were made. The strong image (below) is always quoted as an example of GPL’s more direct way of photographing the male nude in the last years of his life. The male is solid, imposing, lit from above, heavy set, powerful, massive. The eyes are almost totally in shadow. Later photos have more chiaroscuro than earlier work, more use of contrasting light (especially down lit or uplit figures) but are they more direct? Yes. The men look straight into camera.
This monumentality of body and form was matched by a new openness in the representation of sexuality. There are intimate photographs of men in what seem to be post-coital revere, in unmade beds, genitalia showing or face down showing their butts off. Some of the faces in these later photographs remain hidden, as though disclosure of identity would be detrimental for fear of persecution. The photograph above is very ‘in your face’ for the conservative time from which it emerges, remembering it was the era of witch hunts against communists and subversives (including homosexuals). Conversely, this photograph is quite restrained compared to the most striking series of GPL’s photographs that I saw at The Kinsey Institute which involves an exploration the male anal area (a photograph from the 1951 series can be found in the book titled George Platt Lynes: Photographs from The Kinsey Institute). This explicit series features other photographs of the same model – in particular one that depicts the male with his buttocks in the air pulling his arse cheeks apart. After Lynes found out he had cancer he started to send his photographs to the German homoerotic magazine Der Kries under the pseudonym Roberto Rolf, and in the last years of his life he experimented with paper negatives, which made his images of the male body even more grainy and mysterious.
I believe that Lynes understood, intimately, the different physical body types that gay men find desirable and used them in his photographs. He visited Lon of New York (a photographer of beefcake men) in his studio and purchased photographs of bodybuilders for himself, as did the German photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. It is likely that these images of bodybuilders did influence his later compositional style of images of men; it is also possible that he detected the emergence of this iconic male body type as a potent sexual symbol, one that that was becoming more visible and sexually available to gay men.
The differences between the White and GPL nudes is instructive.
White: introspective, haunted, religious with an unrequited sense of longing – hands clutching self, inward pointing; GPL: more closely cropped, more open, one hand firmly grasping but the other hand open, receptive, presented to the viewer above the available phallic organ. It reminds me for some unknown reason, some quirk of my brain association, of the shell of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1486) inverted.
There is difference between the two artists – one struggling with his sexuality, being realistically romantic, the other physically doing something about it – posting his photographs to one of the first gay magazines in the world. But both were taking photographs of intimate sexual acts that could never have been published in their lifetimes – that are still are hidden from view today.
When, oh when, will someone have the courage to publish this work?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
My notes on Minor White’s photographs and notes on George Platt Lynes photographs from my Phd thesis Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (2001) can be found below.
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
1/ Gallagher, Bob and Wilson, Alexander. “Sex and the Politics of Identity: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Thompson, Mark. Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p.31.
Research notes on photographs from the Minor White Archive, Princeton University, New Jersey 06/08/1999
Research at The Kinsey Institute , Bloomington, Indiana 16/08/1999 – 19/08/1999. George Platt Lynes photographs from the Collection at The Kinsey Institute
(top) Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Images 9 and 10 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors 1948 9.3 x 11.8cm; 11.2 x 9.1cm
(bottom) Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Images 27 and 28 in the bound sequence The Temptation of Saint Anthony Is Mirrors 1948. 5.3 x 11.6cm; 10.6 x 8.9cm
(left) Minor White (American, 1908-1976) Tom Murphy (San Francisco) 1948 From The Temptation of St Anthony is Mirrors 1948 Gelatin silver print 4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in. (11.7 x 9.2 cm)
George Platt Lynes (American, 1907-1955) Untitled (Frontal Male Nude) 1949-1950 Gelatin silver print
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916) Walt Whitman (American, 1818-1892) 1891 10.3 x 12.2cm National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute
Charles Demuth (American, 1883-1935) Dancing Sailors 1917 Watercolour and pencil on paper 20.3 x 25.4cm Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Mr and Mrs William H Marlatt Fund
George Wesley Bellows (American, 1882-1925) Riverfront No.1 1915 Oil on canvas 115.3 x 160.3cm Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Howald Fund Purchase
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943) Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane 1933 Oil on canvas Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
Harold Hart Crane (American, 1899-1932)
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylised, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot’s poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation…
Crane visited Mexico in 1931-32 on a Guggenheim Fellowship and his drinking continued as he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation … While on board the steamship SS Orizaba enroute to New York, he was beaten after making sexual advances to a male crew member, seeming to confirm his own idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual. Just before noon on April 27, 1932, Hart Crane jumped overboard into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed his intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed “Goodbye, everybody!” before throwing himself overboard. (The legend among poets is: He walked to the fantail, took off his coat quietly, and jumped.) His body was never recovered.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) A Fire In My Belly (Film In Progress) (film still) 1986-1987 Super 8mm film Black and white & color (transferred to video) Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collection
One day before World AIDS Day, the renown painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37 from AIDS-related complications, has had one of his most important works, A Fire In My Belly, pulled from The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery’s HIDE/SEEK exhibit because of pressure from conservative politicians and the Catholic League.”
HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the first major museum exhibition to explore how gender and sexual identity have shaped the creation of American portraiture, organised by and presented at the National Portrait Gallery last fall, will be on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 18, 2011, through February 12, 2012. With the cooperation of the National Portrait Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum has reconstituted the exhibition in concert with the Tacoma Art Museum, where it will be on view from March 17 through June 10, 2012.
HIDE/SEEK includes approximately a hundred works in a wide range of media created over the course of one hundred years that reflect a variety of sexual identities and the stories of several generations. Highlighting the influence of gay and lesbian artists, many of whom developed new visual strategies to code and disguise their subjects’ sexual identities as well as their own, HIDE/ SEEK considers such themes as the role of sexual difference in depicting modern Americans, how artists have explored the definition of sexuality and gender, how major themes in modern art – especially abstraction – have been influenced by marginalisation, and how art has reflected society’s changing attitudes.
Announcing the Brooklyn presentation, Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman states, “From the moment I first learned about this extraordinary exhibition in its planning stages, presenting it in Brooklyn has been a priority. It is an important chronicle of a neglected dimension of American art and a brilliant complement and counterpoint to ‘Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties’, a touring exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum, also on view this fall.”
In addition to its commentary on a marginalised cultural history, HIDE/ SEEK offers an unprecedented survey of more than a century of American art. Beginning with late nineteenth-century portraits by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent, it includes works from the first half of the 1900s by such masters as Romaine Brooks, George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe; the exhibition continues through the postwar period with works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Andy Warhol, and concludes with major works by late twentieth-century artists such as Keith Haring, Glenn Ligon, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Catherine Opie.
The Brooklyn presentation will feature nearly all of the works included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Among them are rarely seen paintings by Charles Demuth, whose better-known industrialised landscapes are on view in the Brooklyn Museum exhibition Youth and Beauty; a poignant portrait of New Yorker writer Janet Flanner wearing two masks, taken by photographer Bernice Abbott; Andrew Wyeth’s painting of a young neighbour standing nude in a wheat field, much like Botticelli’s Venus emerging from her shell; Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph riffing on the classic family portrait, in which a leather-clad Brian Ridley is seated on a wingback chair shackled to his whip-wielding partner, Lyle Heeter; and Cass Bird’s photographic portrait of a friend staring out from under a cap emblazoned with the words “I look Just Like My Daddy.” The exhibition will also include David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, an unfinished film the artist created between 1986 and 1987.
Press release from the Brooklyn Museum website
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner (American, 1892-1978) 1927 Photographic print 23 x 17.3cm Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C C Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd., Inc.
Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916) Salutat 1898 Oil on canvas 127.0 x 101.6cm Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Gift of anonymous donor
Lincoln Edward Kirstein (May 4, 1907 – January 5, 1996) was an American writer, impresario, art connoisseur, philanthropist, and cultural figure in New York City, noted especially as co-founder of the New York City Ballet. He developed and sustained the company with his organising ability and fundraising for more than four decades, serving as the company’s general director from 1946 to 1989. According to the New York Times, he was “an expert in many fields,” organising art exhibits and lecture tours in the same years.
Photographer Walker Evans and writer-patron Lincoln Kirstein shared a pivotal creative partnership that shaped early American modern photography. Kirstein – co-founder of the New York City Ballet – was Evans’s early patron, funding his 1930–1931 New England architecture project, organising his first MoMA show in 1933, and writing the text for his landmark 1938 book, American Photographs.
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943) Painting No. 47, Berlin 1915 Oil on canvas 39 7/16 x 32 in (100.1 x 81.3cm) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972
Many thankx to the Art Gallery of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Glaister studio (Australian, 1855-1870) Untitled (portrait of a man and three girls) 1855-1870 Ambrotype, colour dyes 6.5 x 9cm sight; 9.3 x 11.9cm case Purchased 1989
This charming ambrotype was thought to have been produced by one of Australia’s most important early photographers, Thomas Glaister, owning to the presence of the Glaister stamp on the case. However, superb varnish was one of Glaister’s hallmarks and this ambrotype is not varnished. In addition, the hand-colouring is not considered to be to Glaister’s standard. As such, it is possible that the ambrotype was inserted into this case at a later date, not least because there is no form of blackening behind the image. This was standard practice to prevent the viewer seeing through to the inside of the case. The Eichmeyer ‘book’ case, patented in 1855 by Henry A Eichmeyer of Philadelphia, were made of fine leather and beautifully put together. Glaister certainly used these but the ambrotype is probably not his specifically and could have been made by one of his sons in the 1860s when they worked as travelling photographers. Regardless of who took the image, it is a charming colonial portrait which in size is typical of the period – it can easily be held in the hand.
Ambrotypes were developed in the 1850s. They were faster and cheaper to make than daguerreotypes, yet were still unique objects.
1/ 1989, ‘Masterpieces of Australian photography’, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney p. 25
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind c. 1939 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 33.2 x 30.0cm Purchased with funds provided by John Armati 2006 Art Gallery of NSW Collection
Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind appears to have been the only print Cotton made of this image. It was found in the late 1990s and has been shown only once, in an exhibition at the AGNSW in 2000 where it was also used on the catalogue cover. It was unusual for Cotton to print so large, yet it is entirely fitting that this monumental head and shoulder shot of a beautiful young woman should be presented in this way. The subject was a model on a fashion shoot at which Cotton was probably assisting. Cotton often took her own photographs while on such shoots and used them for her private portfolio. The photograph transcends portraiture, fashion and time to become a remarkable image of harmony with the elements.
Cotton took the title for this photograph from an 1895 poem by English poet Laurence Binyon, ‘O summer sun’:
O summer sun, O moving trees! O cheerful human noise, O busy glittering street! What hour shall Fate in all the future find, Or what delights, ever to equal these: Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind, Only to be alive, and feel that life is sweet?1
A photographer whose work straddles pictorialism, modernism and documentary, Cotton maintained an independent vision throughout her working life, based on the close observation of nature. Her understanding of the medium of photography was not to do with capture, but rather ‘drawing with light’.
1/ 1915, ‘Poems of today’, English Association, London p. 96.
Deacon is widely recognised for her staged photographs which employ various props, including souvenirs and kitsch, in satirical tableaus that critique notions of Aboriginality. Initially, in 1991, she employed dolls and since then they have become a signature motif. This use of non-living models informed her practice when she began to photograph people. As Deacon states, ‘I’ve never been one for “live action” shots… I’ve got to rule the roost. It’s no different dealing with inanimate objects or people, except with people I’m more terrified.’1
This method can be seen in Deacon’s Portrait: Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, artists 1998. Burchill and McCamley, Melbourne and Mildura based collaborative artists, have been arranged in a re-enactment of Henri Matisse’s Conversation 1908-1912. The photograph echoes the deep blue background of the original painting. The two artists hold the stiff positions of Matisse and his seated wife gazing across at each other. This is one of a number of Deacon’s works that feature Australian writers, artists and other notable figures re-enacting iconic paintings. Other examples include artist Fiona Hall in a 2004 retake of Grace Cossington-Smith’s The sock knitter 1915 and a portrait of Gary Foley inspired by William Dobell’s The boy at the basin 1932.
1/ Destiny Deacon, ‘Interview with Virginia Fraser’ in Destiny Deacon: walk & don’t look blak, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2004, p. 109.
Self portrait with Leica is a complex image in which the artist has photographed herself and her trademark Leica in one mirror, while the profile of both is reflected in another. The large button on her cuff disturbs the play between full face and profile, while the objects at the bottom of the frame lend a certain informality to an otherwise highly contrived set-up. The soft velvety curtain behind introduces a further element of rich tactility. The play between black, white and shades of grey softens and enriches the overall image.
Although Bing avoided becoming part of any specific movement of the 1920s or 1930s – for example, constructivism, the Bauhaus or surrealism, describing herself as being ‘on the edge of the periphery of the Bauhaus’ only – she was fully cognisant of the range of experimentation which was taking place across Europe. She forged her own path, combining an abiding belief in the importance of intuition and poetry with rigorous composition and superb technical skills.
Inspired by the work of Florence Henri, and with increasing confidence in her ability to marry naturalism with geometric formalism, Bing worked extensively as a press, fashion, portrait and documentary photographer in Paris until she was interned as an enemy alien in 1940. Late in her life Bing wrote:
‘I didn’t choose photography; it chose me. I didn’t know it at the time. An artist doesn’t think first and then do it, he [sic] is driven. Now over fifty years later, I can look back and explain it. In a way, it was the trend of the time; it was the time when you started to see differently … And the camera, that was, in a way, the beginning of the mechanical device penetrating into the field of art.’1
1/ Barrett N C 1985, Ilse Bing: three decades of photography, New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans pp. 13-14.
The four portraits in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection reflect a particular period in Australian art, when the now established artists were beginning their careers. They depict members of the contemporary art scene of the late 1970s to mid 1980s associated with Art + Text, an Australian art magazine published from 1981-2000.
Philip Brophy formed the experimental group Tsk Tsk Tsk in 1977. The group produced experimental music, films, videos, and live theatrical performances. Brophy involved his friends in the group, including partner Maria Kozic on synthesiser. Kozic was also producing her own multimedia work. In this photograph, Kozic and Brophy are standing in a suburban backyard complete with Hills Hoist. This is reflective of Tsk Tsk Tsk’s suburban beginnings, based as it was at Clifton Hill’s Community Music Centre. After the group’s dissolution in the early 1980s, Brophy made several experimental films and curated numerous programs for the Melbourne international film festival as well as exhibitions such as Tezuka: the marvel of manga for the National Gallery of Victoria. Kozic moved to New York where she continued her artistic career. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout Australia and overseas and been collected by many museums including the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Lux’s portraits are by no means traditional, ‘I call them imaginary portraits. They are not really about the children that I photographed’, commented the artist in interview with Wim van Sinderen (Loretta Lux: new work 2004). In relation to The waiting girl, Lux has said: ‘It’s a picture about time, and timelessness. For me they are sitting on the sofa as if they are waiting for eternity.’ (The Guardian 23 November 06)
Through subtle digital manipulation of the body and facial features of her subjects, Lux creates eerie doll-like creatures with glazed eyes, porcelain smooth skin and subtly ill-proportioned forms. The resulting portraits contain an uncanny blend of mute childish innocence and the self-contained stoicism of adulthood.
Lux’s images of children recall those of the old masters, such as Veláquez, Runge and Bronzino whom she cites as main inspirations alongside German photographer August Sander. Lux has stated in an interview with Louise Baring for the Telegraph (UK) that she uses children ‘as a metaphor for a lost paradise’. Dressing her young models in past fashions (often of the era of her own childhood) suggests the child’s game of ‘dress ups’ in order to be an adult yet somehow played out in reverse. That is, Lux’s children do not seem like children at all, but rather like serious world-weary adults manifested in childish forms.
Spanning over a century, What’s in a face? aspects of portrait photography is an exhibition of 45 photographs from the Art Gallery of NSW collection. The exhibition focuses on crucial points in the history of photographic depictions of the human face ranging from studio portraiture in the late 19th century to contemporary practices today.
Works by Australian photographers, such as Paul Foelsche, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Carol Jerrems, Destiny Deacon, Patrina Hicks, Darren Sylvester and others, are placed in an international context, represented by Man Ray, Edward Weston, Iwao Yamawaki, Nan Goldin, Ben Cauchi and Loretta Lux, amongst others.
All portraits reveal something of the sitter, the photographer and also of us as viewers, but none reveal a whole and complete being. This is part of the enduring fascination with the photographic portrait which purports to be an exact likeness but operates more accurately as a metaphor for the self and how that self might exist in the world at a particular point in time.
Judy Annear, senior curator photographs, Art Gallery of NSW
Using photography to depict the face and figure was initially a time-consuming and expensive business. However, the drive to document all things in the world, and rapid technological advances, meant that by the 1880s most people, willing or not and regardless of the photographer’s or their own desires, were documented in some way.
Spurious 19th century ideas to do with what a face could represent exploded in the early 20th century when identity came to be seen as a psychological rather than social phenomenon. Theatricality and performing for the camera, which had existed in photography since its inception, also became much more evident in this period.
In the post-WWII era representations of the face and the body quickly acquired a political and socially aware edge. More recently the face has tended to stand less as an expression of personal experience and more a statement that may signify a set of ideas, whether about the individual, the group or the society at large. Many of these highly constructed images acknowledge and play upon the problematics of the photographic portrait.”
Text from the AGNSW website
Petrina Hicks (Australian, b. 1972) Shenae and Jade 2005 From the series Untitled 2005 Lightjet print 85.5 x 80cm Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery
Shenae and Jade is typical of Hicks’ unconventional portraits. The young model holds the budgie’s head in her mouth. It’s the kind of slightly dangerous behaviour which can be unnerving to observe. The freckled nose of the model is in tension with her smooth pale temples, heavily lashed closed eyes and soft white top. The luminescent background and generally pale colouration throw the headless body of the brightly coloured budgie into high relief.
Informed by the slick stylistic conventions of high-end consumer images, Darren Sylvester’s body of work suggests the existential dilemma of living in an overtly consumerist society – one that promises fulfilment but fails to truly satisfy even the most ardent consumer. Perpetually tantalised with glossy images of affluence, ‘must-have’ products and brochure living, our ‘real’ lives can at times seem unfulfilling by comparison, sometimes painful and often a little pathetic. Sylvester’s work seems to suggest that even in our most personal heartfelt moments, our lives are just like everybody else’s, not so special or unique. Our lives could equally be a series of advertising moments.
Yet the nature of this work is resolutely ambiguous, alternately offering intimacy and emotion with cool detachment. Photo-shopped clean of incidental detail and anomaly, and featuring youthful agency models, Sylvester’s evenly lit, tightly focused images still tap a nerve despite their polished finish. Perhaps this is because they are precisely ‘generic’ (and emotive) experiences to which we can all relate. The same principles underpin a good pop song and in Sylvester’s work this is no coincidence – he strives to produce images that carry the same directness and lasting impact. Commenting on the music of the Carpenters, ‘their lyrics were always sad and about emotional relationships but sealed beneath glossy west coast melodies’, Sylvester reveals the pop-music strategies he employs in his work.1
Based on short stories written by the artist prior to composing the scene, his images carry their own inherent narrative. Yet we don’t need to read Sylvester’s story to understand the drama, nor do we need to hear the tune to recognise the song – it’s an old one, and a shared one, that each of us remembers well.
1/ Colless, E 2006, ‘Darren Sylvester: the right stuff’, Australian Art Collector, no 36, Apr-Jun p. 102.
Hans Hasenpflug (Australia/Germany 1907-1977) Untitled (head of a woman) 1940-1941 Gelatin silver photograph Image: 28.8 x 24.3cm Gift of Mr Christopher Hamilton, the artist’s son 1984
Hans Hasenpflug arrived in Australia in 1927 aged 20. He had been born into an educated Stuttgart family but it does not appear that he became involved in photography until 1932 when he was employed by Leica Photo Service, Sydney. Hasenpflug went on to work for prominent photographer Russell Roberts from 1935 to 1937 before moving to Melbourne and working with Athol Shmith and other Melbourne studios from 1937 to 1942. As an enemy alien Hasenpflug was not allowed to work on industrial assignments during World War Two but he was not interned and was naturalised in 1945. Hasenpflug exhibited in photography salons in the 1930s and his work appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Woman’s Weekly and the Sunday Telegraph.
Hasenpflug was a versatile advertising photographer. He specialised in fashion and product advertising and some portraiture. Despite his apparent lack of photographic training until the 1930s, he seems to be have been strongly influenced by the European avant-garde. Many of his photographs, regardless of genre or subject matter, depend on diagonals through the picture plane and on raking light.
This is true of Untitled. Strong light has created deep shadows across the subject, a closely cropped image of a woman’s face. This, combined with the oblique camera angle, creates a vivid and disconcerting image. The woman is staring directly into the camera, yet a band of strong shadow across the centre of the image creates a blank eyed effect. The pupil free eyes seem inhuman; mask-like or alien. This is in stark contrast to the woman’s open smile that dominates the bottom of the work. The strong, full light on this area highlights her lips, gums and teeth to an almost hyper real extent. These contradictions create an image that on the surface seems friendly and intimate, yet contains an undertone of threat. The inherent strangeness of the image makes it unlikely that this was a commissioned photograph, but rather the artist’s experiment with his medium, and indeed is probably a portrait of his fiancee, Elizabeth Hamilton Crouch.
Edward Weston’s Mexican years were of great importance to him and allowed for the maturing of his vision in relation to photography. Accompanied by Tina Modotti, whose own work developed at this time, Weston experimented with pure form through monumental portraits (of which Guadalupe de Rivera, Mexico is a classic example), images of landscapes and buildings, still-lifes and nudes.
Weston’s portraits of those he encountered in Mexico are uniformly compelling. Often taken with a hand-held camera against a plain background and with strong lighting, these images emphasise individuality, modernity and dynamism.
Guadalupe de Rivera was Diego Rivera’s wife at the time and both were among the group of people Weston and Modotti associated with. Weston described Guadalupe in his ‘Daybooks’ as ‘tall, proud of bearing, almost haughty; her walk like a panther’s, her complexion almost green, with eyes to match’.1 As he worked on the portrait, Weston wrote: ‘I am finishing the portrait of Lupe. It is a heroic head, the best I have done in Mexico; with the Graflex, in direct sunlight I caught her, mouth open, talking, and what could be more characteristic of Lupe! Singing or talking I must always remember her’.2
This later print by Weston emphasises, through the dramatic effect of light and shade, the strong lines of the face. The shape of the open mouth is echoed by the shadowed eye above and the jawline below. The diagonal of jaw to ear which runs in parallel to the nose also adds to the dynamism of this image. Outdoors, with the sun shining on her hair, this is a portrait of a remarkable woman.
1/ Newhall, N (ed) 1981, ‘The daybooks of Edward Weston 1 Mexico’, Aperture, New York p. 26. 2/ Ibid p. 42.
A quintessential image of the 1970s, Vale Street has lost none of its capacity to enchant and disturb in the intervening years. In one sense it can be read as a sociological document; in another as a wholly subjective work of art. Like the mediumistic spirit-photographs of the nineteenth century, Jerrems’s photo seems to disclose the very souls of its subjects. As they respond, each in their individual fashion, to the regarding presence of the camera lens, the figures compose themselves, without theatrics, into telling attitudes. The prominence and bodily confidence of the open-faced young woman is set against the reticence of her boyish companions. As a portrait of relationships as well as individuals, Vale Street speaks of gender relations, adolescent sexuality, suburban mores and the photographer’s own subtly partisan demeanour in regard to these themes.
Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992) Untitled (self portrait) 1930s Gelatin silver photograph 19.3 x 14cm Art Gallery of NSW Collection
This engaging self-portrait by Max Dupain was kept by the artist in an album of photographs from the 1930s. The album was possibly a workbook which would enable Dupain and his clients to review his career as a young modernist photographer. Dupain had opened his own studio in 1934 at the age of 23 having previously been apprenticed to Cecil Bostock and studying painting and drawing at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. In his teens, through the Photographic Society of New South Wales, Dupain had also had contact with Harold Cazneaux whom he later described as ‘the father of modern Australian photography’.1 Both Cazneaux and Bostock provided Dupain with a solid technical and aesthetic base from which to work.
The young working photographer has chosen to depict himself in Untitled (self portrait) with rolled-up sleeves and a furrowed brow. The image is bisected into light in the upper half and dark below with the photographer’s right hand pressing the cable release. Looking away, in three-quarter profile, Dupain is engaged with something out of the frame. The dynamism of the image is further enhanced by the bent arms and the strong shadow of Dupain’s profile.
The 1930s was a period of intense experimentation for Dupain as he applied the lessons learned from Bostock and Cazneaux and absorbed the material in international publications. He mastered solarisation, montage, portraiture, interiors and advertising photography. His interest in form and composition matured. His dedication to his work is manifested in this image.
1/ Dupain M 1978, Cazneaux: photographs by Harold Cazneaux 1878-1953, National Library of Australia, Canberra p. xi.
Foam presents Black Passport, a project by and about the American conflict photographer Stanley Greene (New York, 1949-2017). Black Passport shows photos of conflicts and disasters combined with photos of Greene’s private life. The result is a revealing portrait of a photographer who is addicted to the adrenaline rush of being on the move, but at the same time realises the sacrifices he makes in his personal life. Stanley Greene has photographed in regions such as Chechnya, Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan and is one of the founders of the international photo agency NOOR.
Every day, newspapers and magazines are filled with photos of war, oppression and violence. The photographer that enables us to watch what is happening in the rest of the world from the safety of our own homes, however, usually remains invisible. This is not the case in Black Passport, the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, which appeared in book form in 2009 and will be exhibited in Foam starting on 16 December. Photos of conflict and disaster regions such as Rwanda, Sudan, Chechnya and Iraq are alternated with photos from the private life of Stanley Greene: photos of Paris and many women. Slide shows will also be presented, interspersed with texts from the book. Greene’s voice resounds through the exhibition space – he is disconcertingly frank: ‘I think you can only keep positive for eight years. If you stay at it longer than that, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly.’
Just as Stanley Greene, visitors to the exhibition are poised between the safety of Western life and the horrors of foreign wars. And it is precisely this juxtaposition that causes these photos to stir us more than the stream of bad-news images that inundate us daily. In addition, Black Passport is a fascinating story about what it is like to be a war photographer. Why does someone choose to be continually confronted with death and misery? Is it an escape from everyday reality and a craving for adventure?
Short Biography
Stanley Greene has photographed in the former Soviet Union, Central America, Asia and the Middle East. His work has appeared in publications including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Stern and Paris Match. He has won various World Press Awards and in 2004 the W. Eugene Smith Award. Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 was published in 2004 and his book Black Passport in 2009. Greene is one of the founders of the Amsterdam-based international photo agency NOOR.
“I think you can only do this for eight years. For eight years you can still keep the positive. If you stay at it longer than eight years, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly. You really turn. I see it in myself, I see it in all my friends and colleagues. I mean they are all victims of post trauma. We’re not the beautiful butterflies anymore. We become moths. We’re like moths flying to the flame.You know, sometimes your wings get singed or you just burn up. Get killed. Or you burn up inside.The drugs and the alcohol and the party and all of this is to push it away, push it away.”
“I’m an observer, I’m not an objective observer though, but I’m an observer. I feel it’s very important for journalists to go to these hell holes and photograph or write or do radio or whatever because I still believe that the public wants to know.”
Stanley Greene
Stanley Greene(American, 1949-2017)
Stanley Greene (February 14, 1949 – May 19, 2017) was an American photojournalist.
Greene was born to middle class parents in Brooklyn. Both his parents were actors. His father, who was born in Harlem, was a union organiser, one of the first African Americans elected as an officer in the Screen Actors Guild,and belonged to the Harlem Renaissance movement. Greene’s father was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and forced to take uncredited parts in movies. Greene’s parents gave him his first camera when he was eleven years old.
Greene began his art career as a painter, but started taking photos as a means of cataloging material for his paintings. In 1971, when Greene was a member of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the Black Panther Party, his friend photographer W. Eugene Smith offered him space in his studio and encouraged him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Greene held various jobs as a photographer, including taking pictures of rock bands and working at Newsday. In 1986, he shot fashion photographs in Paris. He called himself a “dilettante, sitting in cafes, taking pictures of girls and doing heroin”. After a friend died of AIDS, Greene kicked his drug habit and began to seriously pursue a photography career.
He began photojournalism in 1989, when his image (“Kisses to All, Berlin Wall”) of a tutu-clad girl with a champagne bottle became a symbol of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, Greene was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a stand-off between President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament. He covered the war-torn countries Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, and Lebanon. He took pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
After 1994, Greene was best known for his documentation of the conflict in Chechnya, between rebels and the Russian Armed Forces, which was compiled in his 2004 book, Open Wound. These photos drew attention to the “suffering that has marked the latest surge in Chechnya’s centuries-long struggle for independence from Russia”.
In 2008, Greene revealed that he had hepatitis C, which he believed he had contracted from a contaminated razor while working in Chad in 2007. After controlling the disease with medication, he traveled to Afghanistan and photographed a story about “the crisis of drug abuse and infectious disease”.
Stanley Greene co-founded NOOR Agency with Kadir van Lohuizen in 2007. They launched their agency with their colleagues on the 7th of September 2007 at Visa Pour L’Image. Greene died in Paris, at the age of 68. He had been undergoing treatment for liver cancer.
Black Passport is the biography of war photographer Stanley Greene, compiled out of hours of interviews by Teun van der Heijden. It shows Stanley’s war images alternated with private images.
Teun van der Heijden: “Black Passport started as any other photo book project. At the beginning Stanley did let me know that he was up for ‘something completely different’. While working on the project we had a lot of conversations in which I discovered that there were a lot of similarities between Stanley and me. What is it then that one person becomes a designer, living happily with the same woman for 25 years, being a father of two daughters and the other person becomes a war photographer. This question was the beginning of a series of interviews. Out of the interviews came Black Passport. Black Passport is nominated several times. Some people believe it is the most important photo book of 2010.
A fabulous posting, with memorable thoughts and photographs!
These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate.
As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx 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.
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth. Individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life… I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Diane Arbus. Paper on Plato, senior English seminar, Fieldston School, November 28, 1939
“I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
There are the Ceremonies of Celebration (the Pageants, the Festivals, the Feasts, the Conventions) and the Ceremonies of Competition (Contests, Games, Sports), the Ceremonies of Buying and Selling, of Gambling, of the Law and the Show; the Ceremonies of Fame in which the Winners Win and the Lucky are Chosen or Family Ceremonies or Gatherings (the Schools, the Clubs, the Meetings). Then they are Ceremonial Places (The Beauty Parlor, The Funeral Parlor or, simply The Parlor) and Ceremonial Costumes (what waitresses wear, or Wrestlers), Ceremonies of the Rich, like the Dog Show, and of the Middle Class, like the Bridge Game. Or, for example: the Dancing Lesson, the Graduation, the Testimonial Dinner, the Séance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic, and perhaps the Waiting Room, the Factory, the Masquerade, the Rehearsal, the Initiation, the Hotel Lobby and the Birthday Party. The etcetera.
I will write whatever is necessary for the further description and elucidation of these Rites and I will go wherever I can to find them.
These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
Diane Arbus. “American Rites, Manners and Customs,” Plan for a Photographic Project, Guggenheim proposal
“They are the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”
Diane Arbus in response to request for a brief statement about photographs, March 15, 1971
Diane Arbus (New York, 1923-1971) revolutionised the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves.
Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology – portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities – stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theatre and reality.
In this first major retrospective in France, Jeu de Paume presents a selection of two hundred photographs that affords an opportunity to explore the origins, scope, and aspirations of a wholly original force in photography. It includes all of the artist’s iconic photographs as well as many that have never been publicly exhibited. Even the earliest examples of her work demonstrate Arbus’s distinctive sensibility through the expression on a face, someone’s posture, the character of the light, and the personal implications of objects in a room or landscape. These elements, animated by the singular relationship between the photographer and her subject, conspire to implicate the viewer with the force of a personal encounter.
Biography
Diane Arbus was born in New York City on March 14, 1923, and attended the Ethical Culture and Fieldston Schools. At the age of eighteen she married Allan Arbus. Although she first started taking pictures in the early 1940s and studied photography with Alexey Brodovitch in 1954, it was not until 1955-1957, while enrolled in courses taught by Lisette Model, that she began to seriously pursue the work for which she has come to be known.
Her first published photographs appeared in Esquire in 1960 under the title The Vertical Journey. From that point on she continued to work intermittently as a free-lance photographer for Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Show, The London Sunday Times, and a number of other magazines, doing portraits on assignment as well as photographic essays, for several of which she wrote accompanying articles.
During the 1950s, like most of her contemporaries, she had been using a 35mm camera, but in 1962 she began working with a 6×6 Rolleiflex. She once said, in accounting for the shift, that she had grown impatient with the grain and wanted to be able to decipher in her pictures the actual texture of things. The 6×6 format contributed to the refinement of a deceptively simple, formal, classical style that has since been recognised as one of the distinctive features of her work.
She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1963 and 1966 for projects on “American Rites, Manners and Customs” and spent several summers during that period traveling across the United States, photographing contests, festivals, public and private gatherings, people in the costumes of their professions or avocations, the hotel lobbies, dressing rooms and living rooms she had described as part of “the considerable ceremonies of our present.” “These are our symptoms and our monuments,” she wrote in her original application. “I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.”
The photographs she produced in those years attracted a great deal of attention when a selected group of them were exhibited, along with the work of two other photographers, in the 1967 “New Documents” show at the Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless, although several institutions subsequently purchased examples of her work for their permanent collections, her photographs appeared in only two other major exhibitions during her lifetime, both of them group shows.
In the late 1960s she taught photography courses at Parsons School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design and Cooper Union and in 1971 gave a master class at Westbeth, the artists cooperative in New York City where she then lived. During the same period she initiated the concept and did the basic research for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1973 exhibition on news photography, “From the Picture Press.”
She made a portfolio of ten photographs in 1970, printed, signed and annotated by her, which was to be the first of a series of limited editions of her work. She committed suicide on July 26, 1971 at the age of forty-eight. The following year the ten photographs in her portfolio became the first work of an American photographer to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
In the course of a career that may be said to have lasted little more than fifteen years, she produced a body of work whose style and content have secured her a place as one of the most significant and influential photographers of our time. The major retrospective mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was attended by more than a quarter of a million people in New York before it began its tour of the United States and Canada. The Aperture monograph Diane Arbus, published in conjunction with the show has sold over 300,000 copies. Beginning in 2003, Diane Arbus Revelations, an international retrospective organised by The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art travelled to museums throughout the United States and Europe between 2003 and 2006. Major exhibitions devoted exclusively to her work have toured much of the world including, Australia, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
“There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll go through a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
“If you’ve ever talked to somebody with two heads you know they know something you don’t.”
The Gap between Attention and Affect
“You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw. It’s just extraordinary that we should have been given these peculiarities. And, not content with what we were given, we create a whole other set. Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I’ve always called the gap between intention and effect. I mean if you scrutinise reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.”
Other Thoughts
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.”
“Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognise.”
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print but I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think what it is, is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it’s of it always more remarkable than what it is.”
“I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”
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