PLEASE NOTE: THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Stained glass, cracked 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) White door 1 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien, 1994 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Night repair 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry holding a brush, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry behind safety screen, Punt Road, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Presence 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nautilus shell in cup 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Jerry with shaved head 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Undergrowth 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) White door 2 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien sitting outside his flat, South Yarra, 1994 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Trees, capstone, shadows 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Damien with snake 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Glass bird, Punt Road, South Yarra 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Easter Sunday 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Capstone, night, Windsor train station 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Paul, cock on anvil 1994 Silver gelatin photograph
“Johsel photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
June 2013
Published by Cosgrove Editions, Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective is a collection of one hundred exquisite images selected from a remarkable career in photography spanning six decades.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Big Meadow, Washington Pass, Washington September, 2000 2000
“I like to give my viewers questions, not answers. Let them find beauty in the most mundane things, like roadside wildflowers and tumbled weeds.”
Johsel Namkung
“When we can find the abstract in nature we find the deepest art.”
Mark Tobey
“Photographs give us information; it seems that they give us information that is very packaged and they give us the information that we are already prepared to recognise obviously. It’s as if the words don’t have the weight they should have, so that one of the statements being made by any photograph is: “This really exists.” The photograph is a kind of job for the imagination to do something that we should have been able to do if we were not so disturbed by so many different kinds of information that are not really absorbed. Photographs have this authority of being testimony, but almost as if you have some direct contact with the thing, or as if the photograph is a piece of the thing; even though it’s an image, it really is the thing.”
Susan Sontag. Excerpt from a speech, Wellesley College photographic symposium, April 21, 1975
This is a superlative book by Cosgrove Editions that celebrates the sixty-year life in photography of the now 94-year-old Johsel Namkung. Rather than a retrospective I see this book as testimony to Johsel Namkung’s vision as an artist and the photographs, as Susan Sontag observes above, as testaments that allow the viewer to have some direct contact with the things that Johsel photographed, to see and feel with him the places that he visited and the things that he saw.
Some of the photographs in this book take your breath away. Taken with a large format camera Johsel’s compositions are heavily influenced by music and are almost fugue-like in their structure. They vibrate and sing like few other landscape photographs that I have ever seen. There is the absence of a horizon, so that his photographs seem to agree with the picture-plane rather than with the world at large.1 Rather, Johsel lets his images flow and in that flow he creates patterning that distinctly creates layers of landscape. The juxtaposing of lines on the landscape is reinforced in the sequencing of the book, where binary opposites are paired on facing pages: feminine / masculine, yang / ying, macro / micro. For example Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989 is printed opposite Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 (feminine / masculine); Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989 is printed opposite Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991 (yang / ying); and the vast Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987 is printed opposite the almost Japanese-like delicacy of Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980 (macro / micro). Although there are links to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Toby and photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Eliot Porter this work is wholly Johsel’s in its compositional structure – the position that the photographer puts himself in, both physically and mentally, to obtain these most beautiful of images.
Johsel has a love of small triangular shapes within the pictorial frame. They act like small punctum or pizzicato in musical terms and these given details are intended as such by the photographer. The little punctum in Johsel’s individual works become an accumulation of small punctum that resonate throughout the whole testimony of his work – through the placement of rocks and twigs, the use of triangles and layers whose presence Johsel so loves within the photograph. In this sense (that the photograph is written by the photographer), these are photographs of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. Working in the manner of Minor White (photographing in meditation, creating a pathway from the self to the object, from the object through the camera and back to the self, forming a circle), harmonising all elements (visual, physical, elemental, spiritual), Johsel exposes himself as much as the landscape he is photographing. This is his spirit in relation to the land, to the cosmos, even. Like Monet’s paintings of water lilies these photographs are a “small dreaming” of his spirit with a section of the land not necessarily, as in Aboriginal art, a dreaming and connection to the whole land.
As Minor White observes of the “recognition” of such dreaming when working with the view camera,
“First, there is a store of images, experience, ego problems, ideals, fears, which the man brings to his seeing at the start. Second, during the activity of seeing they are matched against the images in the visual world, like matching colours. This is done with some conscious effort and a great deal of unconscious participation. At the moment of matching or “recognition” there is a feeling of important at least, and sometimes a merciless impact. This in turn is secured by exposure – like a sudden gust of wind drops a ripe apple. So we can say “recognition” is the trigger of exposure. In view camera work the lapse between recognition and exposure may be relatively long. There is time for analysis and criticism of image and idea, and exposure sums up the entire experience.”2
Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple.
Oh the joy Johsel must have found when he recognised such invocations, by being aware of his surroundings and his relationship to the earth. I know from my own experience that when you find such a place and recognise it for what it is, it is then an entirely different matter to capture it on film for the camera imparts its own perspective. It is almost as if Johsel and the camera are one, and that the camera itself has disappeared into the landscape (I like the way that you can nearly see his camera but it is actually hidden in the photograph at the bottom of the posting). I get the feeling that Johsel is quite consciously working within an adopted aesthetic – sort of like a tea ceremony – and just making things purposefully and having faith that it is some sort “of way” of doing things. At no point is there any sense of difficulty here – it has all been removed. Yet there was so much physical effort: climbing, walking, waiting, patience, no trace of it. What a heroic act this is!
Johsel approaches a metaphysics of the Real, creating authentic visualisations of the world – an idealised, abstracted Real tending towards a (mental) s(t)imulation. In other words, he photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind. Is the link to indexicality broken? No, but there is no ultimate truth or origin here, for his is an art of transformation (theatricality) through structure (modernism) which is the essence of aesthetic arts.
“This strategy rejects the search for an origin or ultimate Truth and instead interprets reality as composed, contingent and intersubjective; reality is, therefore, theatrical… Theatricality is made of this endless play and of these continuous displacements of the position of desire, in other words, of the position of the subject in process with an imaginary constructive space.”3
In Johsel’s photographs desire is displaced, ego is removed and his photographs become images of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. This is Johsel at play recognising, becoming these imaginary, constructive spaces. He is in the zone, he becomes the zone, even. Finally we can say: his photographs and his life are transformational; his imagination is the representation of possibility; his work is testimony to that representation.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Adapted from Robert Nelson commenting on the painting of Monet. “Impressionist’s ode to beauty trips into light fantastic,” The Age newspaper, Wednesday May 22nd 2013, p. 42
2/ White, Minor. “Exploratory Camera,” 1949 in Bunnell, Peter C. (ed.,). Aperture Magazine Anthology – The Minor White Years 1952-1976. Aperture, 2013, p. 64
3/ Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified,” in Modern Drama 25 (March) 1982, p. 177
Many thankx to Johsel Namkung, Dick Busher and Cosgrove Editions for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Dick Busher allowed me to pick the photographs that I wanted to illustrate this posting and for that I am most grateful. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The book has recently taken top honours in two different award competitions among independent publishers for photography books: The Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benny Awards, and the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Cougar Lake, Oregon June 1991 1991
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 1979
In his photography Johsel brings attention and importance to elements of nature that most people pass by on their way to the grand vistas. One of my favourite locations in Washington is the Palouse as seen from Steptoe Butte; Johsel’s interpretations of the undulating wheat fields just greening with new growth are sensuous and impressionistic. One feels the slope of the earth, the texture of the tilled fields rather than seeing it. The sophisticated simplicity of his vision is highlighted in a simple composition of a dark pond surface, afloat with delicate grasses; the fine lines flowing this way and that give a sense of constant movement, yet it is a still photograph. In a twig reaching out of the snow, the subtle reflection on a pond in late afternoon light, delicate frozen ripples of ice clinging to river rock, the geometric chaos of tree branches covered in snow, the rich patina of weather-beaten stone, Johsel celebrates the minute in a grand way; it becomes the symbol for the greater whole. Textures, rhythm of line and movement become the foremost elements in his work. Some of Johsel’s images are quiet and abstract, singing a single note, while others are full-out symphonies in a celebration of the rhythms. In particular I find his Korean landscapes extraordinary. In winter the alpine hillsides bare their architecture; ridge after ridge, speckled with leafless birch and pyramidal conifers, they overlap in a crescendo of natural beauty.
Art Wolfe, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective
Photography as a medium is still relatively young. Introduced publicly in 1839, its definition has remained complicated in discourse and practice, oscillating between practical application – whether scientific illustration, family record, or aid to commerce – and aesthetic or expressive concerns. Debates that arose shortly after its invention, contesting whether photography could be an artistic medium, remained heated a century later and beyond, resolving only after Photoshop and other types of photographic manipulation became commonplace. Questions about the role of the photographer, the relative merits of colour versus black-and-white, truth to the original shot versus darkroom manipulation, investigations about canon, hierarchy, and genre have continued to multiply, as have the social organisations – art schools, technical assistance and supplies, professional and amateur societies, regular shows and publications – that foster photographic work. Becoming a photographer in the middle of the twentieth century, Johsel Namkung emerged at the intersection of all these social and conceptual shifts. Taking advantage of this opening, he made several unconventional choices: deciding to work in colour although it was black and white that signified art photography until the 1970s or later; working abstractly, but hewing to the dictates of straight photography: available light, no darkroom manipulation, print the full negative.
From the acquisition of his first camera, Namkung developed high standards for his photographic practice, recalling to interviewer Alan Lau, “I always had a confidence in myself… I had a sort of a vision toward my photographic future. I knew I was going to be something.”1 Trained first as a musician, from the beginning Namkung defined photography in abstract terms, approaching his motifs in terms of rhythms, tonal relationships, pattern, and texture. Individual works reveal specific affinities. The calligraphic grasses in Lizzard Lake, Stampede Pass, WA, August 1976 suggests Harry Callahan’s images of reeds, which are associated with Abstract Expressionist photography. The lichen-covered stone in Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, WA, September 1976 resembles Jackson Pollock or the famed White Paintings of Namkung’s friend Mark Tobey. The screen of regular tree trunks in Sherman Pass, WA, August 1993, recalls the hatched lines representing driving rain in modern Japanese printmaking. Like limpid watercolor strokes, the rolling hills of the Palouse – distinct in each version of Steptoe Butte, of 1976, 1977, and 1983 – allude to Morris Louis’s colour field paintings.
Namkung’s preface here recounts how successive unusual jobs supplied him with professional training as a photographer. Seattle in the postwar boom years also provided a rich and supportive context for his art. Skilled artists from the ranks of first- and second-generation immigrants, from Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines, gathered in the International District but worked and showed farther afield. Art photography had a popular following and many innovative practitioners; Pictorialism – promoted by annual exhibitions like those organised by the Seattle Camera Club – encouraged aesthetic and technical exploration with cameras. The so-called Northwest Mystics represented only one of several artistic communities exploring abstraction, some emphasising its expressive potential, others seeking formal invention. Creativity was equally celebrated beyond fine art. Rarefied technical challenges were tackled and mastered at The Boeing Company as well as the scientific laboratories of the University of Washington. The richness of this cultural ecology fostered the unique development of Namkung’s career. In return, his thoughtful production has nourished local and international audiences for over four decades.
Elizabeth Brown, Former Chief Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective
1/ Alan Chong Lau interview of Johsel Namkung conducted in Seattle, Washington, on October 5, 1989, for the Archives of American Art Northwest Asian American Project.
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Shi Shi Beach Buoy, Olympic National Park, Washington August, 1981 1981
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Bissell, Washington December, 1981 1981
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Alaska Lichens, Date Unknown Nd
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, Washington September, 1976 1976
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Weston Beach, Point Lobos, California May, 1988 1988
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Frenchman Coulee, Washington May, 2002 2002
Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013) Kalaloch Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington October, 1984 1984
Joshel Namkung on Hurricane Ridge, photographed by his friend Ken Levine
Cosgrove Editions is an independent publisher of books on photography. We also provide production and printing assistance for artists who self publish their work. Many of our projects have won some of the highest international awards for printing quality.
“Kill or be killed, boredom, nightmares, as if fighting and sleeping in a dream. Hetherington lays it all on the line for the viewer.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 22nd May to 22nd June, 2013
In association with Yossi Milo Gallery and Head On Photo Festival
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Alcantara, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
2008
from Sleeping Soldiers, 2008
Digital C-prints
76.2 x 114.3cm
Editions of 18 + 4AP
“Our generation is not attached to this myth of photography as objective reporting because we know it’s not. And so he and I had been kind of playing with the idea of, so where is that line? What does that mean? Are we, by definition, objective? Is there something else that can be reported about war that can be more about the experience? That touches on what it’s like to be there, on the individual conflict of what it means to be there? That’s what that particular work is about.”
Chris Anderson
The intimacy of war
Both of these series depict human bodies under surveillance. In one (Tim Hetherington) the subject is un/aware. Having given the photographer prior consent to be photographed while they were sleeping the American servicemen remain blissfully unaware of the result of the camera “snapping” them. Just as they seem to be on the very verge of snapping in the video Sleeping Soldiers_single screen (2009, below). The psychological scars of war don’t differentiate between awake and asleep, aware and unaware:
“The photographer wanted to reveal the soldiers how they must seem to their mothers: innocent, vulnerable. Still it is a portrait of the scars of war because, as Hetherington said, their sleep was often helped along by drugs… That a soldier allowed Hetherington to capture him while asleep illustrates the photographer’s dedication and connection to the platoon.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator on the Washington Post website [Online] Cited 12/06/2013)
Hetherington spent 15 months in Afghanistan between 2007-2008 following the members of a 15-strong platoon of US paratroopers at one of the most remote and dangerous outposts in the war zone. He went on to make the award winning film Restrepo (2010) with the footage that he shot during his year-long engagement with the spaces of war. In repose, the US soldiers seem angelic, contemplative, or vulnerable: in the photographs posted here I see Adonis (Alcantara), foetal (Kelso), corpse (Lizama) and death mask (Richardson). As Michael Fried comments on the 1930s Walker Evans subway photographs were he took pictures of commuters with a hidden camera, “the notion that persons who are unaware of being photographed who at the limit are unaware of being beheld manifest the inner truth of their meaning on their faces.” This way of capturing an inner truth is rare in the history of art. While there are plenty of individual paintings that depict sleeping men in art I could find no body of work that depicts men sleeping in photography.
Although the exhibition is of the still photographs, what I find most chilling however is how Hetherington melds the sleeping bodies with action footage in the video. The overlaying of the sound of helicopters onto images of the sleeping soldiers, the blending of bodies and machines, the reverberation of voices with the rat tat tat of heavy weapons fire is particularly disturbing. The look in the soldier’s eyes as he freaks out when one of his compatriots is shot at 3.24 – 3.38 of the video is frightening. The grief, the fear, palpable – and then to end the video with the corpse-like body of Lizama… THIS is the horror of war. Kill or be killed, boredom, nightmares, as if fighting and sleeping in a dream. Hetherington lays it all on the line for the viewer.
“For me, it’s kind of the closest thing I’ve seen, in any form, that actually shows what it must feel like to be in combat. You’re right there with the soldiers, and they’re not heroic; they’re really just struggling to come to terms with what is going on around them. That’s really what this is. So instead of showing them just being honourable, he’s showing this stuff, the scenes of them being in combat, as a kind of dream.” (Philip Brookman, Corcoran chief curator)
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Stills Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Donoho, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
“The book and film are about the intimacy of war,” explains Hetherington. “And that’s what I see when I see the photographs of these guys sleeping. We are used to seeing soldiers as cardboard cut-outs. We dehumanise them, but war is a very intimate act. All of those soldiers would die for each other. We’re not talking about friendship. We’re talking about brotherhood.”
“You can get bored of taking pictures of fighting,” he says. “I got more interested in the relationship between the soldiers. That’s where the shots of them sleeping came from. If you go to these places you can sometimes get all your media oxygen sucked up by the fighting; we were lucky to have time to explore other things.”
“In America, soldiers are used by the right wing as a symbol of patriotic duty, but the truth is they are all individuals,” he concludes. “And the Left want a moral condemnation of the war. What I say is that if we have a full understanding of what the soldiers can and can’t do out there, it is a good starting point for peace-building. The heart of the war machine is in fact taking a group of young men and putting them on the side of a mountain. We need to understand that experience. Certainly if we have any hope of properly reintegrating them into society.”
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Kelso, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Kim, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Lizama, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Nevalla, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
Tim Hetherington (British, 1970-2011) Richardson, Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan 2008 From Sleeping Soldiers, 2008 Digital C-prints 76.2 x 114.3cm Editions of 18 + 4AP
In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills Gallery is delighted to host compelling works by two internationally acclaimed artists, Tim Hetherington and Doug Rickard, brought to Australian audiences from Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
Without the guns and artillery of war, or the armor of bravado and aggression, Tim Hetherington’s images of sleeping American soldiers are disarmingly peaceful and childlike in their vulnerability. Hetherington observed this active-duty battalion while they were stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley during 2007-08, capturing beneath the camouflage the most intimate of moments, which are seemingly at odds with common reportage images of adrenaline-fuelled and stony-faced soldiers. Through his photographs, writing and films, Tim Hetherington gave us new ways to look at and think about human suffering. Tim was tragically killed on April 20, 2011, while photographing and filming the conflict in Libya.
Doug Rickard’s A New American Picture depicts American street scenes, located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard virtually explored the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen, freeing the image from its technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane. Rickard’s work evokes a connection to the tradition of American street photography. He both follows and advances that tradition, with a documentary strategy that acknowledges an increasingly technological world. Collectively, these images present a photographic portrait of the socially disenfranchised and economically powerless, those living an inversion of the American Dream.
Both artists are highly regarded for their contributions to contemporary photographic and film practices. Before his untimely death Hetherington received numerous accolades for his documentation of conflict zones, including the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year, the Rory Peck Award for Features (2008), an Alfred I. duPont Award (2009), and an Academy Award nomination for Restrepo (2011). His work has posthumously become part of the Magnum Photo Archive. Doug Rickard is founder of American Suburb X and These Americans, and his work has been widely exhibited including in New Photography 2011 at MOMA, New York, Le Bal, Paris, and the 42nd edition of Les Rencontres d’Arles. A monograph of A New American Picture was first published in 2010 and was rereleased in 2012.This is the first opportunity for Australian audiences to see many of these works, and it is also a new collaboration with the prestigious Yossi Milo Gallery, established in 2000, and focused on the representation of artists specialising in photo-based art, video and works on paper.
Text from the Stills Gallery website
Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #32.700542, Dallas, TX (2009) 2011 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 66.04 x 105.41cm Editions of 5 + 3AP
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Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #34.546147, Helena-West Helena, AR (2008) 2010 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 66.04 x 105.41cm Editions of 5 + 3AP
Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #40.700776, Jersey City, NJ (2007) 2011 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 66.04 x 105.41cm Editions of 5 + 3AP
Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #40.805716, Bronx, NY (2007) 2011 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 66.04 x 105.41cm Editions of 5 + 3AP
Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #82.948842, Detroit, MI (2009) 2010 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 101.6 x 162.56cm Edition of 5 + 3AP
Doug Rickard (American, b. 1968) #114.196622, Lennox, CA (2007) 2012 From A New American Picture Archival pigment prints 66.04 x 105.41cm Editions of 5 + 3AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Belco Pride
2008
Archival pigment print
60 x 60cm
Edition of 8 + 2 AP
In Belco Pride, the photographer Lee Grant comes as close as you are ever likely to come to an Australian version of the American photographer Alec Soth (Sleeping by the Mississippi, Niagara). That is a great compliment indeed.
This is an intelligent, cohesive exhibition which features 5 large colour photographs and a grid of 3 x 9 smaller colour photographs that form a topographical map of a suburb in Canberra called Belconnen. The body of work investigates how humans inhabit a specific place and how that place in turn influences the formation of identity and a sense of belonging and community. These themes are set in the context of a shifting, migratory, multicultural Australian suburb. The photographs are beautifully shot and individually well resolved; these square photographs then go on to form a holistic body that give the viewer a wonderful sense of the people and place being photographed.
Grant likes to shoot formally and frontally, but that does not mean that there is not subtly and humour present in these photographs. Technically she likes to vary depth of field to emphasise the context of place: in some images, for example Ashleigh in her Formal Dress (2008, below), depth of field is minimal in order to bring focus onto Ashleigh and the texture of her formal dress. The artist also likes to change light conditions from bright sunlight (Alisha and baby Saul, 2009 below), to overcast (Belco Pride, 2008 above) to gathering gloom (George with his model aeroplane, 2008 below); she also likes to push and pull figures and objects within the pictorial frame, from close up to mid-distance to infinity (the rendering of houses for example). This shading of space and tonality adds a beautiful luminosity to the series.
The humour and detail present is also fun: the suits of the sons two sizes too big in The Duot Family (2009, below); the barbed wire looming ominously above the white graffiti ‘Belco Pride’; the off kilter lamp post in Suburban Hedge (2008, below) being swallowed by the hedge; and the delicious way that the lead from Kiki travels down and trails along the ground to Chucky the dog. There is a real affection and affinity for this place and these people that is expressed in these photographs. They are unusually contemplative for this type of photography and that is perhaps a reflection on Grant’s Korean-Australian heritage.
Other work on her website is a mixed bag: the Sudanese Portraits are very successful, reminding me of the work of Mali photographer Malick Sidibé, while Window on the Orient is interesting but the photographs are a little ‘flat’ due to their subject matter. The Road to Kuvera and Welcome to Vietnam lack the same connection and insight into the human condition that Belco Pride possesses, and this body of work seems to be her strongest so far in terms of an enunciation of her inner vision. I await new work with interest.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Edmund Pearce for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) The Duot Family 2009 Archival pigment print 110 x 110cm Edition of 4 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Cactus Garden 2012 Archival pigment print 110 x 110cm Edition of 4 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Ashleigh in her Formal Dress 2008 Archival pigment print 110 x 110cm Edition of 4 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Suburban Hedge 2008 Archival pigment print 110 x 110cm Edition of 4 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Graffheads 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Roxy and Jess 2008 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Belco’s a hole… but it’s our hole.
I’ve been told that you never truly leave behind the place you grew up. That it remains deep within your experience of the world. Feeling conflicted about one’s place of origin is certainly not unique, but for me, the process of returning ‘home’ and reconciling my perception of place with its banal and vernacular reality was a surprising yet cathartic experience. The photographs in this series express the idea that belonging, connection and identity is deeply rooted in the specifics of one’s inhabited landscape. The landscape depicted here being the 25 northernmost suburbs of Canberra known as Belconnen, or to us locals, as ‘Belco’.
As a photographer, I am interested in the way migrant communities adapt to new environments, particularly in western cultures and much of my work explores themes of identity, belonging and community set often in the context of the Australian suburbs.
Lee Grant
“I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighbourhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those. I lived on this block my whole life; most of these people have.”
Dennis Lehane
Lee Grant’s latest exhibition at Edmund Pearce, Belco Pride, explores how belonging, connection and identity is deeply rooted in the specifics of one’s inhabited landscape. The landscape depicted here being the 25 northernmost suburbs of Canberra known as Belconnen, or to the locals, as ‘Belco’.
Lee is a documentary photographer who lives and works in Canberra. She holds a degree in Anthropology and in 2010 completed a Master of Philosophy at the ANU School of Art. Lee has exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography, the Monash Gallery of Art and the National Portrait Gallery amongst others. She has been a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize, the Head On Alternative Portrait Prize, the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Prize and the Olive Cotton Award. Lee was also the winner of the prestigious Bowness Photography Prize in 2010. Her work is held in the National Library, the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery as well as numerous private collections.
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Kiki and Chucky 2008 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Nathan & Mac, BMX bros 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) A View of Suburbia 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Alisha and baby Saul 2009 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) George with his model aeroplane 2008 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Ginninderra Creek on a Winter’s morning 2008 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) The Beehive 2008 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Lee Grant (Australian, b. 1973) Lee 2010 Archival pigment print 60 x 60cm Edition of 8 + 2 AP
Gregor Arax (Krikor Djololian) (European born Turkey, 1897-1975) Pierre Laurent 1948 Nice, France
A photograph that I have been scanning for Nick Henderson, the negative of which he bought at auction. A great negative, well exposed, with an unusual background for a physique photograph. American? English?
French would you believe. And the only way I know that is by enlarging the discarded newspaper at bottom left. It is fascinating to me the information that can be found in old photographs by enlarging details.
More information
Nick says the information on the auction was this:
“Original vintage photographic negative by the renowned French physique photographer Gregor Arax of Pierre Laurent taken in Nice 1948.”
Gregor Arax was France’s greatest physique photographer.
“Gregor Arax of Arax Studio… was a Greek national [this is incorrect, he was born in Turkey], who photographed male nudes in Paris from the 1930’s to 1960’s. He photographed many of the elite bodybuilders of his time, including Steve Reeves.” (text from Vintage Male Physique blog)
Finally some more information below on Gregor Arax published in 2021. He is not Greek as stated above but was born in Turkey.
I wish I knew who the author was, I would like to thank them for the information.
Greatest of all bodybuilding photographers
“Krikor Djololian, as Gregor Arax was officially called, was born on 27 February 1897 in Adapazar (Turkey) in the bosom of a very humble and poor family…
In 1922, Krikor and his mother, Mariam, emigrated to Paris, where he resumed his activities as a photographer. He opens a studio at 9 Rue Papillon which he calls Studio Arax. At the beginning of the 1930s it moved to number 31 Boulevard Raspail. During this stage he devoted himself to studio portraits, ballroom dance championships and working as a photojournalist, collaborating with numerous Armenian and Parisian publications portraying the social life of the Parisian Armenian community. At this stage of his working life, an interest in photographing the French capital during the war, the liberation of Paris and the postwar period will also resurface.
From 1934 to 1975, with a short hiatus caused by the Second World War, he began to collaborate with the British magazine Health and Strength. During this time, he traveled the roads of France in his curious and unique car (a Fiat 500 that was better known by the alias of baby mouse), to photograph and immortalize the winners of the bodybuilding competitions of the federations of ‘physical culture’ in France, and occasionally in Belgium, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. …
A few years after the end of the Second World War, photography related to the cult of the body grew steadily, thus emerging the true Golden Age for physical culture magazines. Obviously, the editors realized the commercial vein of this new photographic product, acquired mostly by an elite public, with great purchasing power, who did not skimp on expenses and who, always or almost always, received them clandestinely under the title of artistic magazines. This product led magazines to publish increasingly sensual and erotic images, but always without showing genitalia, however, those who wanted to get full nude photos (which included erections and rarely explicit sexual acts) could get them by asking for them custom made.
Curiously, in a country as puritanical as the United States was then, it is where the greatest demand arises, which causes photographic studios to proliferate. Arax is quickly claimed by North American publications attracted by his talent and his already consolidated reputation, and without thinking much he joins the bandwagon by expanding his business with a new portfolio of more artistic than sporty physical models, and with a style of posing that he produced. images that used to show frontal nudes with total naturalness, dedicating a large part of their production to these images. In order to carry out the sale by mail of this type of images but to expose the genitals, Arax devised the system of covering with a thin layer of gouache in the shape of a false fig leaf the virile attributes of the model, which disappeared easily with a little water once in the hands of the buyer. …
But if all these years were very prosperous for Arax, they were also quite tumultuous when a group of photographers like him brought to life that phenomenon called photo. beefcake. This word immediately conjures up the image of a young man flaunting his physique, but has actually been used as a blanket term for a genre of photography that is as American as jazz music and yet was actively repressed by the Bureau itself. United States Post Office and censored by law enforcement officials, who believed that the nude male form was inherently pornographic. In the early 1970s, ARAX was so fed up with these persecutions that he went so far as to say: “Comparing my photography to pornography is like comparing classical music to rock and roll.”
Anonymous. “Greatest of all bodybuilding photographers,” on the World Today News website, May 30, 2021 [Online] Cited 21/09/2022. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Another fascinating exhibition and a bumper posting to boot (pardon the pun!)
A panoply of famous photographers along with a few I had never heard of before (such as Georges Hugnet) are represented in this posting. As the press blurb states, through “key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices.”
The large exhibition seems to have a finger in every pie, wandering from the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis, through “New Vision” photography in the 1920s, experimental film, Surrealism, Constructivism and New Objectivity, Dada, Rayographs, photographic avant-gardism, photocollages, photomontages, street photography of the 1960s, colour slide projection performance, through New Topographics, self-published books, and conceptual photography, featuring works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. “The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history.”
Without actually going to New York to see the exhibition (I wish!!) – from a distance it does seem a lot of ground to cover within 5 galleries even if there are 250 works. You could say this is a “meta” exhibition, drawing together themes and experiments from different areas of photography with rather a long bow. Have a look at the The Shaping of New Visions exhibition checklist to see the full listing of what’s on show and you be the judge. There are some rare and beautiful images that’s for sure. From the photographs in this posting I would have to say the distorted “eyes” have it…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to MoMA for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In 1920 Paul Strand and artist Charles Sheeler collaborated on Manhatta, a short silent film that presents a day in the life of lower Manhattan. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass, the film includes multiple segments that express the character of New York. The sequences display a similar approach to the still photography of both artists. Attracted by the cityscape and its visual design, Strand and Sheeler favoured extreme camera angles to capture New York’s dynamic qualities. Although influenced by Romanticism in its view of the urban environment, Manhatta is considered the first American avant-garde film.
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) No. 10 October 1927 Letterpress 10 3/8 x 7 1/4″ (26.3 x 18.4cm) Publisher: Ogonek, Moscow The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Judith Rothschild Foundation
Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954) Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (still) 1929 35mm film 65 min ( black and white, silent) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Department of Film
Dziga Vertov (Russian, 1896-1954) Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) 1929 Film 1 hr 6 mins 49 secs
Excerpt from a camera operators diary ATTENTION VIEWERS: This film is an experiment in cinematic communication of real events Without the help of Intertitles Without the help of a story Without the help of theatre This experimental work aims at creating a truly international language of cinema based on its absolute separation from the language of theatre and literature
Man with a Movie Camera (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors by Soviet-Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.
Vertov’s feature film, produced by the film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in the Soviet cities of Kiev, Kharkov, Moscow and Odessa. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have “characters,” they are the cameramen of the title, the film editor, and the modern Soviet Union they discover and present in the film.
This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and self-reflexive visuals (at one point it features a split-screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles).
In the British Film Institute’s 2012 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted Man with a Movie Camera the 8th best film ever made. In 2014 Sight & Sound also named it the best documentary of all time.
Text from the YouTube website
László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895-1946) Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray) (excerpt) 1930
This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a carefully choreographed cycle of movements. Created in 1930, the film was originally planned as the sixth and final part of a much longer work depicting the new space-time.
Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) Untitled [Surrealist beach collage] c. 1935 Collage of photogravure, lithograph, chromolithograph and gelatin silver prints on gelatin silver print 11 7/8 x 9 7/16″ (30.2 x 24cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Timothy Baum in memory of Harry H. Lunn, Jr.
William Klein (American, 1928-2022) Gun, Gun, Gun, New York 1955 Gelatin silver print 10 1/4 x 13 5/8″ (26 x 34.6cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Gift of Arthur and Marilyn Penn
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Red Stripe Kitchen 1967-1972 From the series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful Pigmented inkjet print, printed 2011 23 3/4 x 18 1/8″ (60.3 x 46cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York Purchase and The Modern Women’s Fund
The Museum of Modern Art draws from its collection to present the exhibition The Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook on view from April 18, 2012, to April 29, 2013. Filling the third-floor Edward Steichen Photography Galleries, this installation presents more than 250 works by approximately 90 artists, with a focus on new acquisitions and groundbreaking projects by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Germaine Krull, Dziga Vertov, Gerhard Rühm, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, Robert Heinecken, Edward Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Paul Graham, and The Atlas Group / Walid Raad. The exhibition is organised by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
Punctuated by key photographic projects, experimental films, and photobooks, The Shaping of New Visions offers a critical reassessment of photography’s role in the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde movements, and in the development of contemporary artistic practices. The shaping of what came to be known as “new vision” photography in the 1920s bore the obvious influence of “lens-based” and “time-based” works. The first gallery begins with photographs capturing the birth of the 20th-century modern metropolis by Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz, presented next to the avant-garde film Manhatta (1921), a collaboration between Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler.
The 1920s were a period of landmark constructions and scientific discoveries all related to light – from Thomas Edison’s development of incandescent light to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and light speed. Man Ray began experimenting with photograms (pictures made by exposing objects placed on photosensitive paper to light) – which he renamed “rayographs” after himself – in which light was both the subject and medium of his work. This exhibition presents Man Ray’s most exquisite rayographs, alongside his first short experimental film, Le Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923), in which he extended the technique to moving images.
In 1925, two years after he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus school in Weimar Germany, László Moholy-Nagy published his influential book Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film) – part of a series that he coedited with Bauhaus director Walter Gropius – in which he asserted that photography and cinema are heralding a “culture of light” that has overtaken the most innovative aspects of painting. Moholy-Nagy extolled photography and, by extension, film as the quintessential medium of the future. Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the movement of objects and light through space led him to construct Light-Space Modulator, the subject of his only abstract film, Ein Lichtspiel: schwarz weiss grau (A Lightplay: Black White Gray, 1930), which is presented in the exhibition next to his own photographs and those of Florence Henri.
The rise of photographic avant-gardism from the 1920s to the 1940s is traced in the second gallery primarily through the work of European artists. A section on Constructivism and New Objectivity features works by Paul Citroën, Raoul Hausmann, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, El Lissitzky, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and August Sander. A special focus on Aleksandr Rodchenko underscores his engagement with the illustrated press through collaborations with Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Tretyakov on the covers and layouts of Novyi LEF, the Soviet avant-garde journal of the “Left Front of the Arts,” which popularised the idea of “factography,” or the manufacture of innovative aesthetic facts through photomechanical processes. Alongside Rodchenko, film director Dziga Vertov redefined the medium of still and motion-picture photography with the concept of kino-glaz (cine-eye), according to which the perfectible lens of the camera led to the creation of a novel perception of the world. The exhibition features the final clip of Vertov’s 1929 experimental film Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera), in which the eye is superimposed on the camera lens to form an indivisible apparatus fit to view, process, and convey reality, all at once. This gallery also features a selection of Dada and Surrealist works, including rarely seen photographs, photocollages, and photomontages by Hans Bellmer, Claude Cahun, George Hugnet, André Kertész, Jan Lukas, and Grete Stern, alongside such avant-garde publications as Documents and Littérature.
The third gallery features artists exploring the social world of the postwar period. On view for the first time is a group of erotic and political typo-collages by Gerhard Rühm, a founder of the Wiener Gruppe (1959-1960), an informal group of Vienna-based writers and artists who engaged in radical visual dialogues between pictures and texts. The rebels of street photography – Robert Frank, William Klein, Daido Moriyama, and Garry Winogrand – are represented with a selection of works that refute the then prevailing rules of photography, offering instead elliptical, off-kilter styles that are as personal and controversial as are their unsparing views of postwar society. A highlight of this section is the pioneering slide show Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (1971-1974). Capturing the lively beat, humour, and drama of New York’s street theatre, Levitt’s slide projection is shown for the first time at MoMA since its original presentation at the Museum in 1974.
Photography’s tradition in the postwar period continues in the fourth gallery, which is divided into two sections. One section features “new topographic” works by Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Stephen Shore, and Joel Sternfeld, along with a selection of Edward Ruscha’s self-published books, in which the use of photography as mapmaking signals a conceptual thrust. This section introduces notable works from the 1970s by artists who embraced photography not just as a way of describing experience, but as a conceptual tool. Examples include Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971-1973), Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings (A theory of photography) (1970), VALIE EXPORT’s Einkreisung (Encirclement) (1976), On Kawara’s I Got Up… (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), all works that reevaluate the material and contextual definitions of photography. The other section features two major and highly experimental recent acquisitions: Martha Rosler’s political magnum opus Bringing the War Home (1967-1972), developed in the context of her anti-war and feminist activism, for which the artist spliced together images of domestic bliss clipped from the pages of House Beautiful with grim pictures of the war in Vietnam taken from Life magazine; and Sigmar Polke’s early 1970s experiments with multiple exposures, reversed tonal values, and under-and-over exposures, which underscore the artist’s idea that “a negative is never finished.” The unmistakably cinematic turn that photography takes in the 1980s and early 1990s is represented with a selection of innovative works ranging from Robert Heinecken’s Recto/Verso (1988) to Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s breakthrough Hustler series (1990-1992).
The final gallery showcases major installations by a younger generation of artists whose works address photography’s role in the construction of contemporary history. Tapping into forms of archival reconstitution, The Atlas Group / Walid Raad is represented with My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (1996-2004), an installation of 100 pictures of car-bomb blasts in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) that provokes questions about the factual nature of existing records, the traces of war, and the symptoms of trauma. A selection from Harrell Fletcher’s The American War (2005) brings together bootlegged photojournalistic pictures of the U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia, throwing into sharp focus photography’s role as a documentary and propagandistic medium in the shaping of historical memory. Jules Spinatsch’s Panorama: World Economic Forum, Davos (2003), made of thousands of still images and three surveillance video works, chronicles the preparations for the 2003 World Economic Forum, when the entire Davos valley was temporarily transformed into a high security zone. A selection of Paul Graham’s photographs from his major photobook project a shimmer of possibility (2007), consisting of filmic haikus about everyday life in today’s America, concludes the exhibition.
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) Projects: Helen Levitt in Color (detail) 1971-1974 40 colour slides shown in continuous projection Originally presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, September 26-October 20, 1974
On Kawara (Japanese, 1932-2014) I Got Up At… 1974-1975 (Ninety postcards with printed rubber stamps)
The semi autobiographical I Got Up At… by On Kawara is a series of postcards sent to John Baldessari. Each card was sent from his location that morning detailing the time he got up. The time marked on each card varies drastically from day to day, the time stamped on each card is the time he left his bed as opposed to actually waking up. Kawara’s work often acts to document his existence in time, giving a material form to which is formally immaterial. The series has been repeated frequently sending the cards to a variety of friends and colleagues.
Atlas Group, Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (detail) 1996-2004 100 pigmented inkjet prints 9 7/16 x 13 3/8″ (24 x 34cm) each The Museum of Modern Art, New York Fund for the Twenty-First Century
The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019 Phone: (212) 708-9400
Opening hours: 10.30am – 5.30pm Open seven days a week
InsideArt TV Marcus Bunyan – Confounding: Contemporary Photography
2013
This week on InsideArt TV, Michel Lawrence talks with Dr Marcus Bunyan about the National Gallery of Victoria’s intriguing photographic exhibition, Confounding: Contemporary Photography, where the photographs exhibited are not always what they seem (Series 3, Episode 1, Part 2).
Many thankx to Michel and Inside Art for inviting me to speak about the exhibition, and the NGV for allowing us to film in the gallery.
Marcus Bunyan, artist and curator of Art Blart, examines one of his favourite photographs – Alexander Gardner’s photograph of one of the plotters to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, Lewis Paine, who was captured by the camera months before his execution in April 1865 – and asks what makes this a great photograph.
The video is a little underwhelming but it was done for free for the CCP.
It doesn’t show the 12 images that I used to illustrate the talk and you can see me pressing the buttons on the computer to present them. Unfortunately, this ruins the structure of the speech.
However, you can see the photographs that I used by Alexander Gardner below.
Click on the picture to view the video or go to the Vimeo website.
Many thankx to the Director of the CCP, Naomi Cass, for asking me to speak at the event. Other presenters: Serena Bentley, Helen Frajman, Natalie King, Tin & Ed, Tom Mosby and John Warwicker.
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Alexander Gardner (American, 1821-1882) Three photographs of Lewis Paine
26th April, 1865
Albumen silver prints from a Collodion glass plate negative
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Noel Cordle Hot Dead Guys: Lewis Powell
Posted on September 5th, 2010 Mere Musings blog [Online] Cited 01/12/2012. No longer available online
Descriptions of Lewis from “The Life, Crime and Capture”
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Roland Barthes (French, 1915-1980) Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire)
1980
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Alexander Gardner (American born Scotland, 1821-1882) Lewis Paine (detail)
26th April 1865
Albumen silver print from a Collodion glass plate negative
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Negro Returno, Long Gully
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm
“What does it mean, to rediscover an unknown continent through the medium of photography in the 21st century? The seven artists that appear in this “Unfound in Australia” issue are well versed in the photographic technique and language familiar to modern art, yet show cultural distinctness that is nothing short of extraordinary. Our readers might experience a sense of shock or alienation from their work, which combines the new with the old. This kind of unsettling feeling may very well be an unconscious reaction to what we consider to be the ‘other.’ It is my hope that our readers will rediscover the power of photography as a chronological and visual language through these works of long under appreciated modern Australian photography.
IANN magazine Vol.8, “Unfound in Australia,” October 2012 ‘IANN Magazine’ website [Online] Cited 06/01/2013
My text that appears in IANN magazine Vol.8, “Unfound in Australia” (October 2012) on the art of Jacqui Stockdale is a reworking of the review of her exhibition Jacqui Stockdale: The Quiet Wild at Helen Gorie Galerie in April – May 2012. It is a good piece of writing but it is the “lite” version of the text that I wrote. Instead of the “heavy” version fragmenting away on some long forgotten backup hard drive, and for those of you that like a little more conceptual meat on the bone, it is published below.
Other artists featured in the Volume 8 edition of IANN magazine include Marian Drew, Henri Van Noordenburg, Justine Khamara, Magdalena Bors and Christian Thompson.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Orality, (n)framing and enactment in the art of Jacqui Stockdale
The concept of Orality is important in the art of Australian Jacqui Stockdale for her works are visual tone poems. Portraying identities in flux, her mythological creatures rise above the threshold of visibility to engage our relationship with time and space, to challenge the trace of experience.
Stockdale uses the body not as passive object but as descriptive and rhapsodic theme, the body as pliable flesh acting as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph, longing and desire. Drawing on personal places and stories, assemblage and performance (the process of painting the models and the outcome of this interaction), Stockdale creates a wonderful melange of archetypal characters that subvert traditional identities and narratives. Her creatures “shape-shift” and frustrate attempts at categorisation and assimilation.
The artist inverts cultural stereotypes (which embody elements of fixity, repetition, and ambivalence) located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary in order to dis/place the collective memory of viewers that have been inscribed with a stereotypical collective vernacular. In this process the work elides “fantasy” which Bhabha suggests plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power.1 In Stockdale’s upside-down world (quite appropriate for the “land down under”), “Each new identity is one of inversion; man becomes woman, child becomes adult, animals transform into humans and vice-versa.”2
An example of this inversion can be seen in her latest series of photographs, The Quiet Wild (2012). HereStockdale unsettles traditional textual readings, the titles of her photographic portraits indecipherable to the uninitiated, a coded language of identity and place. Lagunta, Leeawuleena and Jaara for example, are three Aboriginal names meaning, respectively, Tasmanian Tiger, the name for the land around Cradle Mountain on that island and the name for the Long Gully region around Bendigo, Victoria (Stockdale’s native area); El Gato is the cat and Gondwanan the name for the southernmost of two supercontinents (the other being Laurasia) before the world split apart into the structure that we known today.
Stockdale’s performative tactics and multiple modes of address, her polyvocal subject if you like, may be said to be an effect of intertextuality3: “a conscious recognition and pursuit of an altogether different set of values and historical and cultural trajectories.”4 Undeniably her re-iterations and re-writings of cultural trajectories as ritual performative acts have links to Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque and the carnival paradigm, which accords to certain patterns of play where “the social hierarchies of everyday life… are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies.”5
It is through this “play” that the context of the photographs and their relationship to each other and the viewer are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic rather than information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the body, the world of which it is part and the dream-reason of time.6
This intertextual (n)framing (n meaning unspecified number in mathematics) encourages the viewer to explore the inbetween spaces in the meta-narrative, “and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith)”7 encourage escapism. Through the (n)framing of the body and the enactment of multiple selves Stockdale narrativises her mythological creatures, her charged bodies initiating new conditions of Otherness in the mise-en-scène of being. This is why her images are so powerful for her art approaches Otherness using a visual Orality and a theatrical openness that encourages disparate meanings to emerge into consciousness. It is up to us as viewers to seek the multiple, disparate significances of what is concealed in each photograph – in the myth of origin; in something that can’t be explained by man; in the expression of meaning of the things that are beyond us.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
August 2012
Footnotes
1/ “According to Bhabha, stereotypes are located within the realms of the fetish, the scopic, and the Imaginary. He suggests that fantasy plays a formative role in colonial exercises of power. Bhabha describes the mechanism of cultural stereotypes as embodying elements of fixity, repetition, fantasy, and ambivalence, and suggests that if certain types of images are constantly presented in a range of different contexts, they will become imprinted onto the collective memory of viewers and inscribed within a collective vernacular.” Vercoe, Caroline. “Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, p. 240.
2/ Stockdale, Jacqui. Artist statement 2012
3/ Intertextuality “is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.” Intertexuality is how a text is constituted. It fragments singular readings. “The reader’s own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural formation” also influences these re-inscriptions.” Keep, Christopher, McLaughlin, Tim and Parmar, Robin. “Intertextuality,” on The Electronic Labyrinth website [Online] Cited 13/11/2011
4/ Fisher, Jean. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Fusco, Coco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 227-228.
5/ Anon. “Carnivalesque,” on the Wikipedia website. [Online] Cited 13/05/2012
6/ Bacon, Julie Louise. “Liquid Archive: On Ambivalence,” in Liquid Archive. Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), 2012, p. 119
7/ Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “The Museum – A Refuge for Utopian Thought,” in Rüsen, Jörn; Fehr Michael, and Ramsbrock, Annelie (eds.). Die Unruhe der Kultur: Potentiale des Utopischen. Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2004. In German.
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) The Wing Walker
2011
Mixed media
Robyn Hosking (Australian, b. 1948) The Wing Walker (detail)
2011
Mixed media
… My favourite has to be The Wing Walker (2011) as an irate Julia Gillard tries to get rid of Kevin Rudd once and for all, even poking him with a stick to push him off the edge of the biplane. Balanced on a slowly revolving turntable with the world at its centre, this political merry-go round is panacea for the soul for people sick of politicians. This is brilliant political satire. The planes are all ends up and even when Julia thinks she has got rid of Kevin there he is, hanging on for dear life from the undercarriage of one of the planes…
Reminding me of the fantasy creatures of Tom Moore, these whimsical manifestations deal with serious, life changing and challenging issues with purpose, feeling and a wicked sense of humour. I really enjoyed this art (and joy is the correct word) because it takes real world issues, melds fantasy and pointed observation and reflects it back, as the artist observes, in a funfair’s distorted mirror. Magic!
This is a fine exhibition of the work of celebrated English photographer Martin Parr at Niagara Galleries, Richmond, albeit with one proviso. The mainly large colour prints are handsomely displayed in plain white frames within the gallery space and are taken from his well known series: Last Resort, Luxury, New British and British Food. Parr’s work is at its best when he concentrates on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.
And so it goes. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic… They are joyous paeans to the quirky, incongruous worlds in which we live and circulate. They evidence life itself in all its orthogonal absurdity.
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) England. New Brighton 1983-1985 From the series Last Resort
1983-1985
Pigment print
Edition of 5
102 x 127cm
Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Martin Parr (British, b. 1952) England. New Brighton 1983-1985 From the series Last Resort
Pigment print
Edition of 5
102 x 127 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
I have always loved the work of Nicola Loder ever since I saw her solo exhibition Child 1-175: A Nostalgia for the Present at Stop 22 Gallery in St Kilda in 1996. This exhibition is no exception. Loder is the consummate professional, her work is as imaginative and intriguing as ever and there has been a consistent thematic development of ideas within her work over a long period of time. These ideas relate to the nature of seeing and being seen, the mapping of identity and the process of its (dis)appearance…
Loder’s exquisitely sensuous description of disappearance allows us to see the phenomenal word afresh. I look forward with a sense of anticipation to the next voyage of discovery the artist will take me on.
Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 by Nicola Loder, installation photograph at Helen Gorie Galerie
Nicola Loder (Australian, b. 1964) Tourist #5: Disappearing Project 1-41 (no 11)
2012
Polyester thread, muslin
86 x 69cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Big Trout, New South Wales 2010
Museo silver rag print
59 x 46cm
Jane Brown (Kuwait, Australia, b. 1967) Adelong, New South Wales 2011
Fibre based, silver gelatin print
16.5 x 20.5cm
This is a good exhibition of small, darkly hewn, traditionally printed silver gelatin photographs, beautifully hung in the small gallery at Edmund Pearce and lit in the requisite, ambient manner. There are some outstanding photographs in the exhibition. The strongest works are the surrealist tinged, film noir-ish mise-en-scènes, the ones that emphasise the metaphorical darkness of the elements gathered upon the stage. Photographs such as Big Trout, The Female Factory, Adelong, New South Wales and Captain’s Flat Hotel, New South Wales really invoke a feeling of unhomely (or unheimlich), where nature is out of kilter. These images unsettle our idea of Oztraliana, our perceived sense of Self and our place in the world. They disrupt normal transmission; they transmutate the seen environment, transforming appearance, nature and form.
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Rama-Jaara the Royal Shepherdess
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm
Jacqui Stockdale (Australian, b. 1968) Lagunta Man, Leeawuleena
2012
Type C Print
100 x 78cm
These are incredibly humorous, magical and symbolic photographs. A thought came into my mind when I was in the gallery surrounded by the work: for me they represented a vision of the Major Arcana of the Tarot (for example Jaguar Hombre could be seen as an inverted version of the Hanged Man with his foot in a figure four, the Hanged Man symbolising the need to just be in the world, yielding his mind and body to the Universal flow). The Major Arcana deal with the human condition, each card representing the joys and sorrows every man and woman can experience in a lifetime. In a way Stockdale offers us her own set of subversive Major Arcana, images that transgress the boundaries of the colonial vernacular, offering the viewer a chance to explore the heart of the quiet wild.
6/ Review: Littoral by Kristian Laemmle-Ruff at Colour Factory Gallery, Fitzroy
Exhibition dates: 4th May – 26th May 2012
It was such a joy then to walk around the corner from the CCP to the Colour Factory Gallery and view the exhibition Littoral by emerging artist Kristian Laemmle-Ruff. This is one of the best, if not the best, “photography” exhibition I have seen so far this year. As soon as you walk into the simple, elegant gallery you are surrounded by fourteen large scale horizontal photographs that are suffused with colour variations bouncing across the gallery – here a blue, there a green, now a lush orange palette. The effect is much like Monet’s waterlilies at the Musée de l’Orangeriein Paris; seated in the middle of the four curved paintings you are surrounded by large daubs of paint of various hues that have an elemental effect – resonances of earth, air, water, fire – on the viewer. The same affection of colour and space can be found in Laemmle-Ruff’s photographs.
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Olympic Stadium 2012 Type C print
100cm x 67cm
Kristian Laemmle-Ruff (Australian) Truck in Safi
2010
Type C print
100cm x 67cm
What we are left with in these images are vestiges of presence, remnants or traces of people that have passed on. In a kind of divine intervention, these photographs ask the viewer questions about the one fact that we cannot avoid in our lives, our own mortality, and what remains after we pass on. We can never know these people and places, just as we can never know the place and time of our death – when our “time” is up – but these photographs awaken in us a subconscious remembering: that we may be found (in life), then lost (through death), then found again in the gaze of the viewer looking at the photographs in the future present. We are (dis)continuous beings.
There is no one single reading of these photographs for “there are only competing narratives and interpretations of a world that cannot be wholly, accurately described.” These indescribable photographs impinge on our consciousness calling on us to remember even as the speed of contemporary life asks us to forget. This ethical act of looking, of mourning and remembering, of paying homage to presence acknowledges that we choose not to let pass into the dark night of the soul these traces of our forebears, for each emanation is deeply embedded within individual and cultural memory.
These photographs are a contemporary form of Western ‘dreaming’ in which we feel a link to the collective human experience. In this reification, we bear witness to the (re)assemblance of life, the abstract made (subconsciously) concrete, as material thing. These images of absent presence certainly reached out and touched my soul. Vividly, I choose to remember rather than to forget.
Anonymous photographer Untitled
2011
From Lost and Found 2011
The main work We Are All Flesh (2012) reminded me of a version of the game The Hanged Man (you know, the one where you have to guess the letters of a word and if you don’t get the letter, the scaffold and the hanged man are drawn). The larger of the two hanging pieces featured two horse skins of different colours intertwined like a ying yang paux de deux. Psychologically the energy was very heavy. The use of straps to suspend the horses was inspired. Memories of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and The Godfather rose to the surface. My favourite piece was 019 (2007). Elegant in its simplicity this beautiful display case from a museum was dismantled and shipped over to Australia in parts and then reassembled here. The figurative pieces of wood, made of wax, seemed like bodies drained of blood displayed as specimens. The blankets underneath added an element of comfort. The whole piece was restrained and beautifully balanced. Joseph Beuys would have been very proud.
The “visceral gothic” contained in the exhibition was very evident. I liked the artist’s trembling and shuddering. Her narratives aroused a frisson, a moment of intense danger and excitement, the sudden terror of the risen animal
Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgian, b. 1964) We Are All Flesh
2012
Treated horse skin, epoxy, iron armature
280 x 160 x 100cm
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Galleria Continua
Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgian, b. 1964) 019
2007
Wax, epoxy, metal, glass, wood, blankets
293.5 x 517 x 77.5cm
Private Collection, Paris
9/ Review: Light Works at NGV International, Melbourne
Exhibition dates: 23rd March – 16th September 2012
This is an intimate and stimulating photographic exhibition at the NGV International featuring the work of artists Mike and Doug Starn, David Stephenson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bill Henson, Adam Fuss, Simone Douglas, Park Hong-Chun, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Sam Shmith, Christoph Dahlhausen and Patrick Bailly-Maitre-Grand. It is fantastic to see an exhibition of solely contemporary photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria taken from their collection (with nary a vintage silver gelatin photograph in sight!), one which examines the orchestration of lightfrom which all photography emanates – used by different photographers in the creation, and there is the key word, of their work. Collectively, the works seem to ooze a mysterious inner light, a facing towards the transcendent divine – both comforting, astonishing and terrifying in part measure.
Exhibition dates: 28th September – 11th November 2012
In his visual mosaics Crewdson engages our relationship with time and space to challenge the trace of experience. His tableaux act as a kind of threshold or hinge of experience – between interior and exterior, viewer and photograph. His photographs are a form of monism in which two forces (interior / exterior) try to absorb each other but ultimately lead to a state of equilibrium. It is through this “play” that the context of the photographs and their relationship to each other and the viewer are “framed.” This device emphasises the aesthetic as much as information and encourages the viewer to think about the relationship between the body, the world of which it is part and the dream-reason of time. This intertextual (n)framing (n meaning unspecified number in mathematics) encourages the viewer to explore the inbetween spaces in the non-narrative / meta-narrative, “and by leaps (intuitive leaps, poetic leaps, leaps of faith)”encourage escapism in the imagination of the viewer. It is up to us as viewers to seek the multiple, disparate significances of what is concealed in each photograph as “felt knowledge” (Walter Benjamin), recalling to mind the sensory data placed before our eyes, something that can be experienced but cannot be explained by man: “the single moment of the present amidst the transience of life and searching for some kind of eternal truth.”
Installation photograph of the series Beneath the Roses from the exhibition Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne
Exhibition dates: 28th November 28 – 15th December 2012
Installation photograph of Ikea by Janina Green at Edmund Pearce Gallery, Melbourne
Janina Green (Australian born Germany, b. 1944) Orange vase
1990 reprinted 2012
Silver gelatin print on fibre based paper, hand-tinted with orange photo dye
85 x 70 cm
Fable = invent (an incident, person, or story)
Simulacrum = pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original
Performativity = power of discourse, politicization of abjection, ritual of being
Intimate, conceptually robust and aesthetically sensitive.
The association of the images was emotionally overwhelming.
An absolute gem. One of the highlights of the year.
![Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) 'Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]' c. 1935](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/georges-hugnet-untitled-surrealist-beach-collage.jpg "Georges Hugnet (French, 1906-1974) 'Untitled [Surrealist beach collage]' c. 1935")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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