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Oct

Exhibition: ‘Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933’ at Tate Liverpool

Categories: beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, Diane Arbus, documentary photography, drawing, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, time, Walker Evans and works on paper
Tags: Alfred Döblin, Alfred Döblin Berlin Alexanderplatz, Argentinian Venomous Scorpion, ARTIST ROOMS, ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander, Assault Troops Advance under Gas, August Sander, August Sander Bohemians, August Sander Bohemians [Willi Bongard Gottfried Brockmann], August Sander National Socialist Head of Department of Culture, August Sander Photographer, August Sander Photographer [August Sander], August Sander Secretary at West German radio in Cologne, August Sander The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, August Sander Turkish Mousetrap Salesman, August Sander Victim of Persecution, August Sander Working Students, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bildnis des Fotografen Hugo Erfurth mit Hund, Bohemians, Bohemians [Willi Bongard Gottfried Brockmann], cabaret culture, civilian rebellions, Classes and Professions, collective historical experience, Conceptual Art, conceptual artist, conceptual artists, cultural landscape, Düsseldorf, Degenerate Art, Der Krieg, Entartete Kunst, First World War, German art, German artist, German artists, Giant Snake, Hugo Erfurth with Dog, Liegende auf Leopardenfell, Mask Fish, National Socialist Head of Department of Culture, Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, New Objectivity painters, Otto Dix, Otto Dix Argentinian Venomous Scorpion, Otto Dix Assault Troops Advance under Gas, Otto Dix Bildnis des Fotografen Hugo Erfurth mit Hund, Otto Dix Butterfly, Otto Dix Der Krieg, Otto Dix Giant Snake, Otto Dix Hugo Erfurth with Dog, Otto Dix Liegende auf Leopardenfell, Otto Dix Mask Fish, Otto Dix Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurth, Otto Dix Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin, Otto Dix Selbstbildnis mit Staffelei, Otto Dix Self-Portrait with Easel, Otto Dix Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor, Otto Dix The War, Otto Dix Tibetan Turkey Vulture, Otto Dix Vulture Skull, Otto Dix: The Evil Eye, People of the Twentieth Century, Photographer [August Sander], Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurth with Dog, Portraying a Nation, Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933, Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin, Secretary at West German radio in Cologne, Selbstbildnis mit Staffelei, Self-Portrait with Easel, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor, The Farmer, The Last People, The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha, The Skilled Tradesman, Tibetan Turkey Vulture, Turkish Mousetrap Salesman, twentieth century photography, visual arts, Vulture Skull, Weimar Republic, Working Students

Exhibition dates: 23rd June – 15th October 2017

August Sander (1876-1964)
The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha
1925-6, printed 1991
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
205 x 241 mm
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Hugo Erfurth with Dog (Bildnis des Fotografen Hugo Erfurth mit Hund)
1926
Tempera and oil paint on panel
800 x 1000 mm
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
© DACS 2017. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Writing sociology: picturing an uncertain cultural landscape

There is something completely unexpected in the strange correlation and synergy between the work of these two artists.

While it is inadvisable to compare and contrast (why pick those particular images out of thousands!), I have paired several images from the exhibition together in this posting. Let’s look at the pairing above.

Technically, Sander’s photograph of The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha (1925-6) evidences a slightly flattened perspective especially in the “face on” aspect of the androgynous woman – but the photograph also possesses a surreal air, the silhouette of the woman’s hair contrasting with the swept back slickness of the man and his jutting, three-quarter profile. The unusual space between them adds admirably to the overall frisson of the photograph, it’s non/objectivity and performativity. In Dix’s painting Hugo Erfurth with Dog (1926) a greater distortion of perspective is in evidence. The mythic dog is painted as if photographed using a telephoto lens, while the man’s face is all over the place… the jaw elongated as if by using a wide angle lens, the front of the face flattened in an earnest manner. This is what painting can do, and is allowed to do, that photography can never match. But it doesn’t have to. It does it in a different way.

Here we need to excavate – that’s a good word for this investigation – we need to excavate the ethos in the zeitgeist. We need to understand the attitudes and aspirations of the cultural era in which these artists lived in order to comprehend the defining spirit of the period, as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time. These artists emerge out of the same society, they inhabit the spirit of the age – those interwar years of the avant-garde, speed, and change; of poverty, postwar realities and politics; of The Great Depression, disfiguration and disenfranchisement.

I look at the obscurity of faces in Dix’s Assault Troops Advance under Gas (1924) and then adjust to the pensiveness of hand, pose and gaze in Sander’s Working Students (1926) … and then mentally add in Avedon’s later portraiture. Interesting. I look at Sander’s National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture (c. 1938) and note the “exemplary mastery of illumination”, but just as distinctively the averted gaze, the line on head where the unnamed man (who is he? what was his name?) had just taken his cap off. Just below is Dix’s Self-Portrait with Easel (1926) with three-quarter profile, piercing stare, bent finger. Who is capturing reality here? No body.

In his own way, Sander plays with the reality of time and space just as much as Dix. In my mind, Sander’s “staged performativity and the artifice of construction [which] is paramount to the surreal effects created,” are no less un/real than the paintings of Dix. There are things that just don’t fit. The strangeness of the era, the creation of these non/objective environments, cause an alignment of the stars between both artists. This is inspired curating, to bring these two extra-ordinary talents together.

These artists walked the same streets, they breathed the same air. They excavated the spirit of the age. And in so doing, their art becomes impervious to time.

Marcus

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Many thankx to Tate Liverpool for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“We want to see things completely naked, clear, almost without art. I invented the New Objectivity.”

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Otto Dix, 1965

German artist Otto Dix was a committed painter of portraits. At a time when photography had diminished portraiture’s importance and the genre was seen as a deeply unfashionable pursuit for so-called serious artists, he was making a living – and cementing his reputation – out of exactly that. He commented:

“Painting portraits is regarded by modernist artists as a lower artistic occupation; and yet it is one of the most exciting and difficult tasks for a painter.”

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Reclining Woman on a Leopard Skin (Liegende auf Leopardenfell)
1927
Oil paint on panel
680 x 980 mm
© DACS 2017. Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Gift of Samuel A. Berger

Dix was a key supporter of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, a name coined after an exhibition held in Mannheim, Germany in 1925. Described by art historian G.F. Hartlaub, as ‘new realism bearing a socialist flavour’, the movement sought to depict the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.

August Sander (1876-1964)
Bohemians [Willi Bongard, Gottfried Brockmann]
c. 1922-5, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
189 x 250 mm
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Tate Liverpool presents the faces of Germany between the two World Wars seen through the eyes of painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) and photographer August Sander (1876-1964). Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 brings together two artists whose works document the glamour and misery of the Weimar Republic, a time of radical extremes and political and economic upheaval.

Portraying a Nation, which exhibits Dix and Sander as a pair for the first time, reflects a pivotal point in Germany’s history, as it introduced democratic rule in the aftermath of the First World War. The period was one of experimentation and innovation across the visual arts, during which both artists were concerned with representing the extremes of society, from the flourishing cabaret culture to intense poverty and civilian rebellions.

Featuring more than 300 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, Portraying a Nation unites two complementary exhibitions. Otto Dix: The Evil Eye explores Dix’s harshly realistic depictions of German society and the brutality of war, while ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander presents photographs from Sander’s best known series People of the Twentieth Century, from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art.

The exhibition focusses on the evolution of Dix’s work during his years in Düsseldorf, from 1922 to 1925, when he became one of the foremost New Objectivity painters, a movement exploring a new style of artistic representation following the First World War. Dix’s paintings are vitriolic reflections on German society, commenting on the country’s stark divisions. His work represents the people who made up these contradictions in society with highlights including Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurth with Dog 1923, Self-Portrait with Easel 1926, as well as a large group of lesser known watercolours. Dix’s The War 1924 will also form a key element of the exhibition, a series of 50 etchings made as a reaction to and representation of the profound effect of his personal experiences of fighting in the First World War.

Sander’s photographs also observe a cross-section of society to present a collective portrait of a nation. Sander commenced his major photographic project People of the Twentieth Century in 1910, an ambitious task that occupied him until the 1950s. The project resulted in more than 600 images in which people were categorised into what he described as ‘types’, including artists, musicians, circus workers, farmers and, in the late 1930s, images of Nazi officers. More than 140 photographs from the ARTIST ROOMS collection will be displayed to create a large-scale timeline of Weimar Germany, placing individual subjects against a backdrop of the era’s tumultuous cultural and political history.

Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 is made up of Otto Dix: The Evil Eye, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander, an exhibition of works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art.

The ARTIST ROOMS collection is jointly owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the public, and was established through The d’Offay donation in 2008 with the assistance of the Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund and the Scottish and British governments. It is shared with UK museums and galleries including Tate, National Galleries of Scotland and a network of Associate venues through ARTIST ROOMS On Tour, which is a partnership until 2019 with lead Associate Ferens Art Gallery, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Art Fund and the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

Otto Dix: The Evil Eye is curated by Dr Susanne Meyer-Büser, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Francesco Manacorda, Artistic Director and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool. ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander is curated by Francesco Manacorda, and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, with the cooperation of ARTIST ROOMS and the German Historical Institute.

Press release from Tate Liverpool

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Assault Troops Advance under Gas (Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor)
1924
© DACS 2017
Image: Otto Dix Stiftung

August Sander (1876-1964)
Working Students
1926, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Seen together, Sander’s images form a pictorial mosaic of inter-war Germany. Rapid social change and newfound freedom were accompanied by financial insecurity and social and political unrest. By photographing the citizens of the Weimar Republic – from the artistic, bohemian elite to the Nazis and those they persecuted – Sander’s photographs tell of an uncertain cultural landscape. It is a world characterised by explosions of creativity, hyperinflation and political turmoil. The faces of those he photographed show traces of this collective historical experience. Alfred Döblin, author of the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz said:

“Sander has succeeded in writing sociology not by writing, but by producing photographs – photographs of faces and not mere costumes.”

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Argentinian Venomous Scorpion (Argentinischer Gift-Skorpion)
1922
Graphite on found paper
134 x 217 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

Dix served in the First World War from 1915, fighting on the Western front in the Battle of the Somme. Although an enthusiastic soldier – his service earned him the Iron Cross (Second Class) – Dix’s experiences affected him deeply. He marked the war’s 10th anniversary with a group of etchings entitled Der Krieg (The War), leaving few of the horrors of the front line to the imagination. Commenting later, he said:

“For years, [I] constantly had these dreams in which I was forced to crawl through destroyed buildings, through corridors through which I couldn’t pass. The rubble was always there in my dreams.”

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Butterfly (Schmetterling)
1922
Graphite on found paper
217 x 135 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Giant Snake (Riesenschlange)
1922
Graphite on found paper
135 x 217 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Mask Fish (Maskenfisch)
1922
Graphite on found paper
217 x 135 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Tibetan Turkey Vulture (Tibetanischer Truthahngeier)
1922
Graphite on found paper
135 x 217 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Vulture Skull (Totenkopfgeier)
1922
Graphite on found paper
217 x 135 mm
Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf
© DACS 2017. Galerie Remmert und Barth, Düsseldorf

August Sander (1876-1964)
National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture
c. 1938, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
260 x 192 mm
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Self-Portrait with Easel (Selbstbildnis mit Staffelei)
1926
800 x 550 mm
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum, Düren
© DACS 2017. Leopold-Hoesch-Museum & Papiermuseum Düren. Photo: Peter Hinschläger

From the early 1920s, he devoted himself to the study of old master painting techniques, using a layering effect, produced first with egg tempera and, later, finished with oils. This moved his contemporary George Grosz to jokingly call him ‘Otto Hans Baldung Dix’ (after the German old master Hans Baldung Grien). Later, Grosz would write:

“Dix did all the drawing in a thin tempera, then went over it with thin mastic glazes in various cold and warm tones. He was the only Old Master I ever watched using this technique.”

August Sander (1876-1964)
Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne
1931, printed 1992
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
260 x 149 mm
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Otto Dix (1891-1969)
Portrait of the Jeweller Karl Krall
1923
Kunst- und Museumsverein im Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal
Photo: Antje Zeis-Loi, Medienzentrum Wuppertal
© DACS 2017

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his professorship teaching art at the Dresden Academy, where he had worked since 1927. The reason given was that, through his painting, he had committed a ‘violation of the moral sensibilities and subversion of the militant spirit of the German people’.

In the years following, some 260 of his works were confiscated by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Several of these works, including The Jeweller Karl Krall 1923 (which features in the Tate Liverpool exhibition Portraying a Nation), appeared in the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition of 1937-8. The exhibition was staged by the Nazis to destroy the careers of those artists they considered mentally ill, inappropriate or unpatriotic.

August Sander (1876-1964)
Victim of Persecution
c. 1938, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

In the mid-1920s, Sander began his highly ambitious project People of the 20th Century. In it, Sander aimed to document Germany by taking portraits of people from all segments of society. The project adapted and evolved continuously, falling into seven distinct groups: ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’ and ‘The Last People’. Sander once said ‘The portrait is your mirror. It’s you’. He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person’s story; their profession, politics, social situation and background.

Sander did not use the newly invented Leica camera. Instead he remained devoted to an old-fashioned large-format camera, glass negatives and long exposure times. This allowed him to capture minute details of individual faces. Sander prized the daguerreotype, a photographic process introduced in the previous century, of which he said: ‘it cannot be surpassed in the delicacy of the delineation, it is objectivity in the best sense of the word’. Allied to this, his portraits were anonymous. Shot against neutral backgrounds and titled more often than not by profession alone, he let the images – and the faces in them – speak for themselves.

The ambition and reach of People of the 20th Century (both in terms of the quality of his photography and in his representation of a cross-section of society) made him a monumental figure of twentieth century photography. The likes of American social realist photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange (whose works became iconic symbols of the depression), and later photographers such as Diane Arbus, each owe a debt to the trailblazing Sander. More recently, the work of conceptual artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher (known for their typologies of industrial buildings and structures) and Rineke Dijkstra, whose photography is infused with psychological depth and social awareness, resonates with the influence of August Sander’s career-long project.

Text from the Tate Liverpool website

August Sander (1876-1964)
Turkish Mousetrap Salesman
1924-30, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
260 x 191 mm
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

August Sander (1876-1964)
Photographer [August Sander]
1925, printed 1990
Photograph, gelatin silver print on paper
ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Lent by Anthony d’Offay 2010
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archiv, Cologne; DACS, London, 2017

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront,
Liverpool L3 4BB

Opening hours:
Monday to Sunday 10.00 – 17.50

Tate Liverpool website

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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Acting for the Camera’ at the Albertina, Vienna

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, book, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, Paris, photographic series, photography, pictorialism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: A Lover's Discourse, A Night in London, academies, Accademia Musicale Chigiana, acting, Acting for the Camera, Actionist Art, Actionist Stagings of the Body, Actress and Dancer Lucy Kieselhausen, agrarian romanticism, Aktionen, Albert Londe, Albert Londe and Jean-Martin Charcot, Alexander Sacharoff, androgynous couple, Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in their dance Märtyrer, Anton Josef Trčka, Anton Josef Trčka Egon Schiele, Arthur Benda, Ausdruckstanz, Austrian art, Austrian avant-garde, Austrian performance artist, Austrian photography, Bewegungsstudie, Bill Brandt A Night in London., Bodies as Photographic Material, choreography, Christine Furuya Gössler, Clotilde Margarete Anna Edle von der Planitz, Clotilde von Derp, Clotilde von Derp-Sacharoff, Conrad Veidt, constellations of bodies, Der Künstlerische Tanz unserer Zeit, Dora Kallmus, Dora Kallmus and Arthur Benda Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in their dance Märtyrer, early days of modern dance, Egon Schiele, Elektrischer Schnellseher, erotic pictorial repertoire, Erwin Wurm, Erwin Wurm One Minute Sculpture, expressionistic dance, expressive dance, Ferdinand Hodler, fixing time and space, Franz Xaver Setzer, Franz Xaver Setzer Conrad Veidt, Free dance, Günter Brus, German dance, German Dance Archive Cologne, German expressionist dancer, Gertrud Kraus, Guido Chigi Saracini, gum bichromate, gum bichromate print, gum bichromate process, Gustav Klimt, Hans Gasser, Helmar Lerski, Helmar Lerski Metamorphosis through Light, Hugo Erfurth, Hugo Erfurth Clotilde von Derp-Sacharoff, In the Arms of Nature, Jean-Martin Charcot, Johann Victor Krämer, life reform movement, living pictures, Lucy Kieselhausen, Madame D'Ora, Martin Imboden, Martin Imboden The Dancer Gertrud Kraus, Metamorphosis through Light, Models for Artists, modern dance, Motion Studies, Motion Study, movement vocabularies, Multicolor gum bichromate print, O. Winston Link, objects for photographs, One Minute Sculpture, Ottomar Anschütz, Ottomar Anschütz Elektrischer Schnellseher, performance art, performance artist, performances, performing for the camera, photo reportages, Photo-Secessionist, photography and the body, Picture Stories, Pitié-Salpêtrière, Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, Portraits of Actresses and Actors, posing for the camera, Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes A Lover's Discourse, romy schneider, Romy Schneider in Paris, Rudolf Koppitz, Rudolf Koppitz Bewegungsstudie, Rudolf Koppitz In the Arms of Nature, Rudolf Koppitz Motion Study, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Rudolf Schwarzkogler 2nd Action, Rudolf Schwarzkogler 3rd Action, Rudolf Schwarzkogler 4th Action, Sacharoff and Clotilde, Seiichi Furuya, Seiichi Furuya Christine Furuya Gössler, staged photography, staging the body, Stagings of the Body, symbolist sensuality, tableaux-vivants, The Artistic Dance of Our Time, The Dancer Gertrud Kraus, The Sculptor Hans Gasser and Workshop Assistants at Work, theatrical group photos, transvestite costume, transvestite costumes, Trude Fleischmann, Trude Fleischmann Actress and Dancer Lucy Kieselhausen, Vienna Secession, Viennese Actionism, Viennese Actionist artist, Viennese Actionist stagings of the body, Viennese Modernism, visual works of art, Wiener Werkstätte, will mcbride, Will McBride Romy Schneider in Paris

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 5th June 2017

I made this posting way before my operation, but have been unable to post until now because of my ongoing recuperation.

While the exhibition may have finished, I am so enamoured of the theme of the exhibition, the people and artists, that I think it’s valuable to have the posting, images and the additional research I did online. I especially like the striking work of Helmar Lerski and the “Aktionen” of Rudolf Schwarzkogler which reflect on the hurtfulness of the world, but remind me of the yet to come political art of the first wave of HIV/AIDS. What a beautiful installation as well…

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Albertina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anonymous
The Sculptor Hans Gasser and Workshop Assistants at Work
1855-1857
Daguerreotype
Albertina, permanent loan of the Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna

Ottomar Anschütz
Elektrischer Schnellseher
1886

Anton Josef Trčka
Egon Schiele
1914
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna

Josef Anton Trčka, Antios (7. September 1893 Vienna – 16. March 1940), was a Czech photographer , painter, sculptor, draftsman, designer of tapestries and silver jewellery, collector of folk art Moravian, occasional antiquarian, poet and philosopher . He was a representative of Viennese Modernism, Art Movement, which influenced European culture of the 20th century…

Around 1910 the Trčka decided to study at the professional school of photography Lehr- Graphische und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, one of the best in Europe. Coincidentally, at the school was Professor Karel Novák, in his time one of the most important personalities of the beginnings of art photography. In 1914 he got the opportunity to portray several leading personalities of Viennese Modernism. Among them was Gustav Klimt, Peter Alternberg and the 50 year old Josef Svatopluk Machar. However, the highlight for Trčka prewar contracts were the photographic series of portraits of Egon Schiele, which focused on facial expressions and hand gestures.

Franz Xaver Setzer
Conrad Veidt
1919
Gelatin Silver Print
Albertina, Vienna

Hans Walter Conrad Veidt (22 January 1893 – 3 April 1943) was a German actor best remembered for his roles in films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Man Who Laughs (1928), and, after being forced to migrate to Britain by the rise of Nazism in Germany, his English-speaking roles in The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and, in Hollywood, Casablanca (1942). After a successful career in German silent film, where he was one of the best-paid stars of Ufa, he left Germany in 1933 with his new Jewish wife after the Nazis came to power. They settled in Britain, where he participated in a number of films before emigrating to the United States around 1941…

He starred in a few films, such as George Cukor’s A Woman’s Face (1941) where he received billing just under Joan Crawford’s and Nazi Agent (1942), in which he had a dual role as both an aristocratic German Nazi spy and as the man’s twin brother, an anti-Nazi American. His best-known Hollywood role was as the sinister Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca (1942), a film which was written and began pre-production before the United States entered the war.

In 1943, at the age of fifty, he died of a massive heart attack while playing golf at the Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles. In 1998, his ashes were placed in a niche of the columbarium at the Golders Green Crematorium in north London.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Dora Kallmus, Arthur Benda
Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste in their dance Märtyrer [Martyrs]
1922
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna

Her hair was cut fashionably into a short bob and was frequently bright red, as in 1925 when the German painter Otto Dix painted a portrait of her, titled “The Dancer Anita Berber”. Her dancer friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who performed in the film Algol (1920), was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than low slung loincloths and Anita occasionally a corsage worn well below her small breasts.

Her performances broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged taboos. Berber’s overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public chatter. In addition to her addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber’s favourites was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat.

Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, she was also a heavy alcoholic. In 1928, at the age of 29, she suddenly gave up alcohol completely, but died later the same year. She was said to be surrounded by empty morphine syringes.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Rudolf Koppitz
In the Arms of Nature
1923
Multicolor gum bichromate print
Albertina, permanent loan of the Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna

Rudolf Koppitz
Bewegungsstudie (Motion Study)
1926
Multicolor gum bichromate print
Albertina, permanent loan of the Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna

Rudolf Koppitz (4 January 1884 – 8 July 1936), often credited as Viennese or Austrian, was a Photo-Secessionist whose work includes straight photography and modernist images. He was one of the leading representatives of art photography in Vienna between the world wars. Koppitz is best known for his works of the human figure including his iconic Bewegungsstudie, “Motion Study” and his use of the nude in natural settings….

Koppitz’s work is marked by a pronounced awareness of form, line, and the surface play of light and shadow. Early in his career, Koppitz was known for staging groups of subjects in the style of the Vienna Secession, the most well known example of this being his Bewegungsstudie, “Motion Study”.

Bewegungsstudie (Motion Study) is surely the most widely published and best known image in Austrian photography from the early decades of the last century. This is for good reason, as no photograph better captures the cultural strands that characterized the Austrian avant-garde at that time. Here one can see a graphic strength and compositional clarity that reflects the modernist ambitions initiated in the fine as in the applied arts by the Secession and by the Wiener Werkstätte. But what gives the image its power is the aura of mystery, of symbolist sensuality that resonates through this enigmatic grouping of the three uniformly coiffed and draped figures and the one single naked figure.” ~ Christies

Bewegungsstudie’s languid nude, elaborately robed women and undeniable sensuality, in the context of its rigorous and artistic composition, bring to mind the sexual morbidity of Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha, as well as the Swiss symbolist painter Ferdinand Hodler and has made it as unforgettable then as it is today. It has become the Koppitz’s signature image, and was also his best-seller. Prints of the image were purchased by, among others, the Toledo Museum of Art; the New York Camera Club notable Joseph Bing, head of that club’s print committee; and the Englishman Stephen Tyng, who published it in a small portfolio of works from his collection.

His earliest works show evidence of influence by Gustav Klimt, Japanese art, Art Nouveau and Constructivism. During the First World War, Koppitz’s photographs took on a documentary quality when his photographs became more simple and direct in their subject matter and composition. Koppitz’s work came of age during the inter-war period when most of Austria’s photographers were supporters of art photography. Photographs from that time are full of symbolic meanings often capturing nude and clothed dancers as well as liberal use of both male and female, many of which were of Koppitz himself and female nudes placed in elements of nature and posed to give the impression of a Greek or Roman statue…

Although he did not possess a consistent style, Koppitz was a virtuoso of the dark room, seemingly determined to make the photograph as much of an art object as possible. His beautifully grainy, subtly tinted images align him with American Pictorialists like Edward Steichen and Clarence Smith. Koppitz’s work, much of it using the gum bichromate process, reflected his links with modern artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and their involvement with the ‘life reform’ movement including; nudism, sun culture, and expressive dance popular in Central Europe from the early 1900s as well as agrarian romanticism. Koppitz’s extraordinary mastery of pictorial processes – pigment, carbon, gum, and bromoil process of transfer printing – gained the respect of his colleagues throughout the world and garnered mention in the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1929.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Trude Fleischmann
Actress and Dancer Lucy Kieselhausen
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna

Lucy Kieselhausen was born in 1897 in Vienna, Austria. She was an actress, known for Tausend und eine Frau. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Junggesellen (1918), Erdgeist (1923) and Die siebente Großmacht (1919). She was a student of Grete Wiesenthal and was celebrated as a successful dancer at the beginning of the 20th century who had great successes on German stages. Besides her dancing activity she also wrote the dance drama “Salambo”, which was set to music by Heinz Tiessen. She died in December 1926 in Berlin, Germany.

“Around 1915 another Viennese, Lucy Kieselhausen (1897-1927), began specializing in performing waltzes. She, too, had evolved out of ballet culture, but her embodiment of the waltz was virtually opposite that of Wiesenthal. She favoured luxuriously decorative hothouse costumes and the utmost refinement of movement. For her the waltz was not a lyrical expansion of space into the freedom of nature but an almost perfumed distillation of the stirrings within an opulent boudoir, with its scenography of exquisite privileges and voluptuous secrets. An adroit sense of irony shaded her movements with a abruptly “bizarre and jerky” rhythms; “her joyfully flashing temperament did not hover on a smooth surface but over a shadowy abyss from which issued her fool’s dance with its slumbering, half-animal rapture.” Her curious appropriation of the waltz ended suddenly when she died in a benzine explosion.”

Karl Eric Toepfer. Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935. University of California Press, 1997, pp. 161-162.

Hugo Erfurth
Clotilde von Derp-Sacharoff
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna – permanent loan of the Austrian Ludwig Foundation for Art and Science

Clotilde von Derp, stage name of Clotilde Margarete Anna Edle von der Planitz (5 November 1892 – 11 January 1974), was a German expressionist dancer, an early exponent of modern dance. Her career was spent essentially dancing together with her husband Alexander Sakharoff with whom she enjoyed a long-lasting relationship…

Among her admirers were artists such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Yvan Goll. For his Swiss dance presentations, Alexej von Jawlensky gave her make-up resembling his abstract portraits. From 1913, Clotilde appeared with the Russian dancer Alexander Sacharoff with whom she moved to Switzerland during the First World War. Both Sacharoff and Clotilde were known for their transvestite costumes. Clotilde’s femininity was said to be accentuated by the male attire. Her costumes took on an ancient Greek look which she used in Danseuse de Delphes in 1916. Her style was said to be elegant and more modern than that achieved by Isadora Duncan. Their outrageous costumes included wigs made from silver and gold coloured metal, with hats and outfits decorated with flowers and wax fruit.

They married in 1919 and. with the financial support of Edith Rockefeller, appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York but without any great success. They lived in Paris until the Second World War. Using the name “Les Sakharoff”. Their 1921 poster by George Barbier to advertise their work was seen as showing a “mutually complementary androgynous couple” “united in dance” joined together in an act of “artistic creation.”

They toured widely visiting China and Japan which was so successful that they returned again in 1934. They and their extravagant costumes visited both North and South America. They found themselves in Spain when France was invaded by Germany. They returned to South America making a new base in Buenos Aires until 1949. They toured Italy the following year and they took up an invitation to teach in Rome by Guido Chigi Saracini. They taught at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena for Saracini and they also opened their own dance school in Rome. She and Sakharoff stopped dancing together in 1956. They both continued to live in Rome until their deaths. Clotilde gave and sold many of their writings and costumes, that still remained, to museums and auctions. She eventually sold the iconic 1909 painting of her husband by Alexander Jawlensky. In 1997 the German Dance Archive Cologne purchased many remaining items and they have 65 costumes, hundreds of set and costume designs and 500 photographs.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Martin Imboden
The Dancer Gertrud Kraus
c. 1929
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna

In the 1920s, Gertrud Kraus’s style was known as expressionistic dance, or German dance. In 1929 Gertrud Kraus, together with Gisa Geert, was chief assistant to Rudolf von Laban, director of a trade union parade during the “Vienna Festival” in Vienna.

In 1930, an impresario invited her to perform in Mandate Palestine. Her tour was a great success and she was invited back the following season. In 1933, her company performed her work Die Stadt wartet (“The City Waits”), presenting the modern metropolis as a fascinating but dangerous place. It was based on a short story by Maxim Gorki. On the night that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, Kraus’s company performed this piece on the open-air stage in the Burg-garden next to the Hofburg.

In 1933, while she was in Prague performing for the Zionist Congress, leaders of a Czech communist cell contacted her and tried to recruit her for their purposes. The next day, she went to the Palestine Office in Prague, and applied for immigration. Kraus moved to Tel Aviv in 1935, first living with friends and then renting a basement that became her studio. She formed a modern dance company affiliated with the Tel Aviv Folk Opera, which was probably the only one of its kind in the world. In 1949, she won a scholarship to travel to the United States to learn the newest trends in modern dance.

In 1950-1951, she founded the Israel Ballet Theatre, and became its artistic director. The company folded after a year due to financial difficulties. Until her death in 1977, Kraus devoted herself to teaching dance, as well as painting and sculpture.

Text from the Wikipedia website

The work of Jan Coplans left and centre

Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures at right

Installation views of the exhibition Acting for the Camera at the Albertina, Vienna, March – June 2017

With circa 120 works from the Albertina’s Photographic Collection, the exhibition Acting for the Camera examines the diverse ways in which models are staged or stage themselves before the camera. The featured photographic works, created between the 1850s and the present, represent a cross-section of photographic history as well as the diversity of the Albertina’s own holdings. The present selection is divided between six thematic emphases: motion studies, models for artists, dance, picture stories, portraits of actresses and actors, and Viennese Actionist stagings of the body.

All of these photographs arose from diverse and multi-layered forms of collaboration between the model before and the photographer behind the camera lens. Some of the models are staged according to their photographers’ instructions, while other shots originated via a creative process in which model and photographer collaborated on an equal footing. And in some cases, the pictures were even taken according to highly specific instructions given by the model.

Beginnings

It was photographic studies done in the interest of scientific research that made it possible for the first time to visually analyse the processes of human locomotion in high detail. Anonymous models, such as in the photographs taken by Ottomar Anschütz beginning around 1890, made themselves available in order to render understandable processes such as spear-throwing. The individuals seen in such works act according to the exact instructions of the photographer. Series of this type were used to compare the motion patterns of “healthy” and “unhealthy” bodies as well as undergird medical theories with visual evidence.

While such motion studies occasionally doubled as working studies for artworks by other artists, there was also a category of works created specifically for this purpose such as Johann Victor Krämer’s staged studio photographs as well as Otto Schmidt’s nudes, and some of these were also sold “under the table” as pornography.

Expressive Gestures

A strong and likewise mutually influential relationship arose between photography and dance. At the beginning of the 20th century, modern expressionist dance was an avant-garde art form, and dancers would work together closely with photographers in order to document and disseminate their performances. Such partnerships made possible expressive stagings that helped define the styles of that era. The expressive gestures often seen therein were also taken up by Anton Josef Trčka, who had Egon Schiele pose with a hand position reminiscent of something one might see in dance.

Portraits of well-known actors such as a laughing Romy Schneider, along with role-portraits for film productions, were created in Viennese studios by photographers such as Trude Fleischmann and Madame d’Ora, and these iconic pictures represent yet another emphasis in this presentation.

Bodies as Photographic Material

Much like the way in which classic portraits convey the personalities of those being portrayed, photography can also stage the body in the opposite way, as something purely material. Helmar Lerski, for example, treated the human face as a landscape that could be modelled by light and shadow. John Coplans, on the other hand, explored his own naked body centimetre by centimetre, portraying himself without his head and thus questioning stagings of masculinity and social norms.

In Viennese Actionism, the artists likewise placed themselves front and centre as pictorial subjects. Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who wrapped himself like a mummy in muslin bandages during the late 1960s, as well as his Actionist colleague Günter Brus, staged performances specifically for the photographic camera. And the newest works in Acting for the Camera are as recent as Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures, for which the artist had models assume ridiculous poses with everyday objects.

Following Black & White (2015) and Landscapes & People (2016), this is the third large-scale presentation of the Albertina’s Photographic Collection. The Albertina, as a treasure trove of visual knowledge, began collecting photographs all the way back in the mid-19th century – but it was only upon the establishment of the Photographic Collection in 1999 that these fascinating works were rediscovered.

Press release from the Albertina

Helmar Lerski
Metamorphosis through Light #601 (Metamorphose 601)
1936
Gelatin silver print

Helmar Lerski
Metamorphosis through Light #587
1935-36
Gelatin silver print

Wall texts

Motion Studies

Photographs taken in the context of scientific experimental arrangements visualise the different phases of human and animal locomotion sequences. Several cameras are mounted one after another, their shutters release at short intervals while the model is moving. Shortly after Eadweard Muybridge, who makes a name for himself with motion studies of racehorses in 1877, achieves his first successes, the physician Étienne-Jules Marey and the photographers Ottomar Anschütz and Albert Londe also dedicate themselves to capturing movement sequences photographically. Londe works with Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital in Paris. Anonymous models have to perform certain movements defined by the scientists. The photographs are used to compare the movement patterns of “healthy” and”unhealthy” people and to provide visual evidence for medical theories. Artists interested in the anatomically correct representation of movements use the photographs as models.

Models for Artists

Photographs are used as a workaround in the fine arts quite early on; special collections are compiled. Photographs of models in motion, for example, come to replace preparatory drawings after nature. The expanding demand for photographic material creates a new market for professional studios. The Viennese photographer and publisher Otto Schmidt produces body and facial expression studies as well as nudes (so-called academies). Since these photographs, thanks to their erotic pictorial repertoire, enjoy great popularity not only with artists, Schmidt’s circle of customers keeps growing.

The reduction in price and the easier handling of the photographic material increases the number of artists that take up a camera themselves. The painter Johann Victor Krämer has his models pose in front of half-finished paintings to check or complete their posture and gestures. Grids drawn on the photographs sometimes help to transfer subjects to the canvas.

Dance

Germany’s and Austria’s cultural scenes of the early twentieth century see the triumphant progress of modern expressionist dance. Many dancers develop choreographies and movement vocabularies of their own. They visit photographic studios, commissioning presentation and promotion materials. The artists present themselves in the costumes of the performances they currently star in on the stage.

Photographers resort to various possibilities for their dance studies. Hugo Erfurth relies on sequences to convey the flow of movements. The emphasis is on the dancer’s pose in these photographs from the early days of modern dance. Shadows are eliminated by massive retouches, since the pictures were to be reproduced in the book Der Künstlerische Tanz unserer Zeit (The Artistic Dance of Our Time, 1928), published by Langewiesche. Martin Imboden, on the other hand, focuses on the expression of the artistic performance in his static suggestive photographs.

Picture Stories

Restaging paintings and other works of art is a favourite pastime of the upper middle classes and the aristocracy in the nineteenth century. Costumed amateur actors adopting rigid poses for a few moments present the “living pictures” at certain events. The emergence of photography makes it possible to reenact these fleeting performances in the studio and to preserve them for the long term. The theatrical group photos are sold as editions on the art market or used as models to emulate.

Henry Peach Robinson is one of those who devote themselves to staging photographs in a way that lean on the tradition of tableaux vivants. Brassaï’s and Bill Brandt’s photo reportages, which seem to document nocturnal scenes the photographers chanced upon, are actually staged for the occasion. Brandt, for example, has members of his family embody precisely conceived parts in his mysteriously toned series A Night in London. The American O. Winston Link, who shows a penchant for steam engines, plans his pictures in every detail. Relying on an elaborate flash technique and the use of spotlights, his photographs, taken in the open and by night, exhibit a filmic aesthetic.

Portraits of Actresses and Actors

In Vienna, Madame d’Ora, Franz Xaver Setzer, and Trude Fleischmann specialise in portraits of performing artists from the 1910s to the 1930s. They not only catered to the public’s great demand; focusing on the cultural scene’s clientele also ties in with the personal interest of the studios’ owners. The models collaborate with the photographers to realise the desired notions regarding their appearance and the interpretation of their look. Stars from the theatre world choose the costume, make-up, and pose they prefer for their photographic portraits. Some of the character portraits and scenic representations show sweepingly theatrical gestures. Film actresses and actors are only rarely captured in traditional character portraits in the early days of the medium. Setzer’s portrait of Conrad Veidt, who stars in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1919, is an exception. The lighting and styling as well as his facial expression and the expressive gesture of his hand mirror the film’s Expressionism.

Actionist Stagings of the Body

The Actionist art gaining momentum from the 1960s on shows itself inseparably bound up with photography. Next to film, photography is the only way to provide live documentations of performances. Some actions are specifically staged for the photo camera. From about the mid-1960s on, the Viennese Actionist artists Günter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler realise constellations of bodies and objects for photographs that are intended as visual works of art.

Arnulf Rainer, whose grimaces, like the Vienna Actionists’s works, are aimed at criticising the socially standardised body, also poses for a photographer. The photographer was not supposed to pursue an artistic approach of his own but to neutrally capture the given representations of the body. After the pictures were taken, Rainer defines the final image area and overpaints the photos by relying on gestural techniques that emphasise physical and emotional moments of expression.

John Coplans combines observations on the representation of the body with reflections on the nature of media. Using a straightforward and precise exposure technique and keen on obtaining sharp pictures, he confronts the viewer with defamiliarised views of his body transforming it into sculptural fragments. The humorous and absurd poses in which models present themselves for Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures with the help of everyday objects are often based on drawn studies and are captured in factual photographs lending the ephemeral performances durability.

Will McBride
Romy Schneider in Paris
1964, printed 2001
Gelatin Silver Print
Albertina, Vienna
© Will McBride Estate/Berlin

Rudolf Schwarzkogler
2nd Action
1965
Gelatin Silver Print

Rudolf Schwarzkogler
3rd Action
1965
Gelatin Silver Print

Rudolf Schwarzkogler
4th Action
1965
Gelatin Silver Print

Rudolf Schwarzkogler (13 November 1940, Vienna – 20 June 1969, Vienna) was an Austrian performance artist closely associated with the Viennese Actionism group that included artists Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, and Hermann Nitsch.

He is best known today for photographs depicting his series of closely controlled “Aktionen” featuring such iconography as a dead fish, a dead chicken, bare light bulbs, coloured liquids, bound objects, and a man wrapped in gauze. The enduring themes of Schwarzkogler’s works involved experience of pain and mutilation, often in an incongruous clinical context, such as 3rd Aktion (1965) in which a patient’s head swathed in bandages is being pierced by what appears to be a corkscrew, producing a bloodstain under the bandages. They reflect a message of despair at the disappointments and hurtfulness of the world.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Seiichi Furuya
Christine Furuya Gössler
1983; printed 1988
Gelatin silver print
Albertina, Vienna

“The other person is absent as a point of reference but present as an addressee. This strangely warped situation causes an unbearable presence: You are gone (which I lament); you are here (because I am turning to you).” ~ Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

“If you consider the taking of photographs to be in a sense a matter of fixing time and space, then this work – the documenting of the life of one human being – is exceptionally thrilling… in facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, I also see and discover “myself.”” ~ Seiichi Furuya, 1979

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Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler would soon marry, and they would later have a child, Komyo. Throughout their seven years together, Christine would plunge in and out of depressions and psychiatric institutions. And one Sunday in October of 1985, she would jump to her death from the 9th floor of their apartment building in East Berlin. Furuya photographed her throughout, to the very end. And this faithful and macabre portrait making would become his artistic and philosophical project.

Text by Stacey Platt on the space in between website

Erwin Wurm
One Minute Sculpture
1997
Silver dye bleach print
Albertina, Vienna

Since the late 1980s, he has developed an ongoing series of One Minute Sculptures, in which he poses himself or his models in unexpected relationships with everyday objects close at hand, prompting the viewer to question the very definition of sculpture. He seeks to use the “shortest path” in creating a sculpture – a clear and fast, sometimes humorous, form of expression. As the sculptures are fleeting and meant to be spontaneous and temporary, the images are only captured in photos or on film.

To make a One Minute Sculpture, the viewer has to part with his habits. Wurm’s instructions for his audience are written by hand in a cartoon-like style. Either Wurm himself or a volunteer follow the instructions for the sculpture, which is meant to put the body in an absurd and ridiculous-looking relationship with everyday objects. Whoever chooses to do one of Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures holds the pose for a minute, or the time it takes to capture the scene photographically. These positions are often difficult to hold; although a minute is very short, a minute for a One Minute Sculpture can feel like an eternity.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Erwin Wurm
One Minute Sculpture
1997
Silver dye bleach print
Albertina, Vienna

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Albertinaplatz 1
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Jun

Exhibition: ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Exhibition dates: 12th February – 18th June 2017

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
F in Field
1920
Gouache and collage on paper
8 11/16 × 6 15/16 in.
Private collection, courtesy of Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner, Bremen/Berlin
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

“To meet the manifold requirements of this age with a definite program of human values, there must come a new mentality and a new type of personality. The common denominator is the fundamental acknowledgment of human needs; the task is to recognise the moral obligation in satisfying these needs, and the aim is to produce for human needs, not for profit.”

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László Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947

New vision

One of the most creative human beings of the 20th century, and one of its most persuasive artists … “pioneering painter, photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker as well as graphic, exhibition, and stage designer, who was also an influential teacher at the Bauhaus, a prolific writer, and later the founder of Chicago’s Institute of Design.”

New visual creations, new combinations of technology and art: immersive installations featuring photographic reproductions, films, slides, posters, and examples of architecture, theatre, and industrial design that attempted to achieve a Gesamtwerk (total work) that would unify art and technology with life itself. Moholy’s “belief in the power of images and the various means by which to disseminate them” presages our current technological revolution.

It’s time another of his idioms – the moral obligation to satisfy human values by producing for human needs, not for profit – is acted upon.

The aim is to produce for human needs, not for profit.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The first comprehensive retrospective of the work of László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) in the United States in nearly 50 years, this long overdue presentation reveals a utopian artist who believed that art could work hand-in-hand with technology for the betterment of humanity. Moholy-Nagy: Future Present examines the career of this pioneering painter, photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker as well as graphic, exhibition, and stage designer, who was also an influential teacher at the Bauhaus, a prolific writer, and later the founder of Chicago’s Institute of Design. The exhibition includes more than 250 works in all media from public and private collections across Europe and the United States, some of which have never before been shown publicly in the U.S. Also on display is a large-scale installation, the Room of the Present, a contemporary construction of an exhibition space originally conceived by Moholy-Nagy in 1930. Though never realised during his lifetime, the Room of the Present illustrates Moholy’s belief in the power of images and the various means by which to disseminate them – a highly relevant paradigm in today’s constantly shifting and evolving technological world.

An exhibition walkthrough of Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at LACMA. Mark Lee, Principal of Johnston Marklee and Carol S. Eliel, Curator of Modern Art at LACMA discuss how Johnston Marklee’s design of the exhibition dialogues with the multiple mediums that constitute Moholy-Nagy’s vast body of work.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Title unknown
1920/21
Gouache, collage, and graphite on paper
9 5/8 × 6 3/8 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Kate Steinitz
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photogram
1941
Gelatin silver photogram
28 x 36 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Sally Petrilli, 1985
© 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
19
1921
Oil on canvas
44 × 36 1/2 in.
Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Red Cross and White Balls
1921
Collage, ink, graphite, and watercolor on paper
8 7/16 × 11 7⁄16 in.
Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photo © Museum Kunstpalast – Horst Kolberg – ARTOTHEK

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Construction
1922
Oil and graphite on panel
21 3/8 × 17 15/16 in.
Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lydia Dorner in memory of Dr. Alexander Dorner
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Q
1922/23
Collage, watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper attached to carbon paper
23 3⁄16 × 18 1⁄4 in.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Moholy-Nagy: Future Present, the first comprehensive retrospective of the pioneering artist and educator László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) to be seen in the United States in nearly 50 years. Organized by LACMA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago, this exhibition examines the rich and varied career of the Hungarian-born modernist. One of the most versatile figures of the twentieth century avant-garde, Moholy (as he is often called) believed in the potential of art as a vehicle for social transformation and in the value of new technologies in harnessing that potential. He was a pathbreaking painter, photographer, sculptor, designer, and filmmaker as well as a prolific writer and an influential teacher in both Germany and the United States. Among his innovations were experiments with cameraless photography; the use of industrial materials in painting and sculpture; research with light, transparency, and movement; work at the forefront of abstraction; fluidity in moving between the fine and applied arts; and the conception of creative production as a multimedia endeavour. Radical for the time, these are now all firmly part of contemporary art practice.

The exhibition includes approximately 300 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, photographs, photograms, photomontages, films, and examples of graphic, exhibition, and theatre design. A highlight is the full-scale realisation of the Room of the Present, an immersive installation that is a hybrid of exhibition space and work of art, seen here for the first time in the United States. This work – which includes photographic reproductions, films, images of architectural and theatre design, and examples of industrial design – was conceived by Moholy around 1930 but realised only in 2009. The exhibition is installed chronologically with sections following Moholy’s career from his earliest days in Hungary through his time at the Bauhuas (1923-28), his post-Bauhaus period in Europe, and ending with his final years in Chicago (1937-46).

Moholy-Nagy: Future Present is co-organised by Carol S. Eliel, Curator of Modern Art, LACMA; Karole P. B. Vail, Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Matthew S. Witkovsky, Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Department of Photography, Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition’s tour began at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, continued at the Art Institute of Chicago, and concludes at LACMA.

“Moholy-Nagy is considered one of the earliest modern artists actively to engage with new materials and technologies. This spirit of experimentation connects to LACMA’s longstanding interest in and support of the relationship between art and technology, starting with its 1967-71 Art and Technology Program and continuing with the museum’s current Art + Technology Lab,” according to Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “This exhibition’s integrated view of Moholy’s work in numerous mediums reveals his relevance to contemporary art in our multi- and new media age.”

Moholy’s goal throughout his life was to integrate art, technology, and education for the betterment of humanity; he believed art should serve a public purpose. These goals defined the artist’s utopian vision, a vision that remained as constant as his fascination with light, throughout the many material changes in his oeuvre,” comments Carol S. Eliel, exhibition curator. “Light was Moholy’s ‘dream medium,’ and his experimentation employed both light itself and a range of industrial materials that take advantage of light.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photogram
1925/28, printed 1929
Gelatin silver print (enlargement from photogram) from the Giedion Portfolio
15 3/4 × 11 13/16 in.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Mary Kathryn Lynch Kurtz Charitable Lead Trust, The Manfred Heiting Collection
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Self-Portrait with Hand)
1925/29, printed 1940/49
Gelatin silver print
9 5/16 × 7 in.
Galerie Berinson, Berlin
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photogram
1925/26
Gelatin silver photogram
7 3/16 × 9 1/2 in.
Museum Folkwang, Essen
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © Museum Folkwang Essen – ARTOTHEK

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photogram
1926
Gelatin silver print
9 3/8 x 7 in.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ralph M. Parsons Fund
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Photogram (1926): In the 1920s Moholy was among the first artists to make photograms by placing objects – including coins, lightbulbs, flowers, even his own hand – directly onto the surface of light-sensitive paper. He described the resulting images, simultaneously identifiable and elusive, as “a bridge leading to a new visual creation for which canvas, paintbrush, and pigment cannot serve.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Cover and design for Malerei Photographie Film (Painting Photography Film)
1st ed., Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books) 8 (Albert Langen Verlag, 1925), bound volume
9 1/16 × 7 1/16 in.
Collection of Richard S. Frary
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Once a Chicken, Always a Chicken
1925
Photomontage (halftone reproductions, paper, watercolor, and grapite) on paper
15 × 19 in.
Alice Adam, Chicago
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

About the artist

László Moholy-Nagy was born in Hungary in 1895. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Budapest in 1915, leaving two years later to serve as an artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He began drawing while on the war front; after his discharge in 1918 Moholy convalesced in Budapest, where he focused on painting. He was soon drawn to the cutting-edge art movements of the period, including Cubism and Futurism. Moholy moved to Vienna in 1919 before settling in Berlin in 1920, where he served as a correspondent for the progressive Hungarian magazine MA (Today).

The letters and glyphs of Dada informed Moholy’s visual art around 1920 while the hard edged geometries and utopian goals of Russian Constructivism influenced his initial forays into abstraction shortly thereafter, particularly works that explored the interaction among coloured planes, diagonals, circles, and other geometric forms. By the early 1920s Moholy had gained a reputation as an innovative artist and perceptive theorist through exhibitions at Berlin’s radical Galerie Der Sturm as well as his writings. His lifelong engagement with industrial materials and processes – including the use of metal plating, sandpaper, and various metals and plastics then newly-developed for commercial use – began at this time.

In 1923 Moholy began teaching at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde school that sought to integrate the fine and applied arts, where his colleagues included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and other path breaking modernists. Architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, invited Moholy to expand its progressive curriculum, particularly by incorporating contemporary technology into more traditional methods and materials. He also had a part in Bauhaus graphic design achievements, collaborating with Herbert Bayer on stationery, announcements, and advertising materials.

Photography was of special significance for Moholy, who believed that “a knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterates of the future will be ignorant of the use of the camera and pen alike.” In the 1920s he was among the earliest artists to make photograms by placing objects directly onto the surface of light-sensitive paper. He also made photographs using a traditional camera, often employing exaggerated angles and plunging perspectives to capture contemporary technological marvels as well as the post-Victorian freedom of the human body in the modern world. His photographs are documentary as well as observations of texture, captured in fine gradations of light and shadow. Moholy likewise made photomontages, combining assorted elements, typically newspaper and magazine clippings, resulting in what he called a “compressed interpenetration of visual and verbal wit; weird combinations of the most realistic, imitative means which pass into imaginary spheres.” Moholy-Nagy includes the largest grouping of the artist’s photomontages ever assembled.

After leaving the Bauhaus in 1928, Moholy turned to commercial, theatre, and exhibition design as his primary means of income. This work, which reached a broad audience, was frequently collaborative and interdisciplinary by its very nature and followed from the artist’s dictum “New creative experiments are an enduring necessity.”

Even as his commercial practice was expanding, Moholy’s artistic innovations and prominence in the avant-garde persisted unabated. He continued to bring new industrial materials into his painting practice, while his research into light, transparency, and movement led to his 35 mm films documenting life in the modern city, his early involvement with colour photography for advertising, and his remarkable kinetic Light Prop for an Electric Stage of 1930. An extension of his exhibition design work, Moholy’s Room of the Present was conceived to showcase art that embodied his “new vision” – endlessly reproducible photographs, films, posters, and examples of industrial design.

Forced by the rise of Nazism to leave Germany, in 1934 Moholy moved with his family to Amsterdam, where he continued to work on commercial design and to collaborate on art and architecture projects. Within a year of arriving the family was forced to move again, this time to London. Moholy’s employment there centred around graphic design, including prominent advertising campaigns for the London Underground, Imperial Airways, and Isokon furniture. He also received commissions for a number of short, documentary influenced films while in England. In 1937, the artist accepted the invitation (arranged through his former Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius) of the Association of Arts and Industries to found a design school in Chicago, which he called the New Bauhaus – American School of Design. Financial difficulties led to its closure the following year, but Moholy reopened it in 1939 as the School of Design (subsequently the Institute of Design, today part of the Illinois Institute of Technology). Moholy transmitted his populist ethos to the students, asking that they “see themselves as designers and craftsmen who will make a living by furnishing the community with new ideas and useful products.”

Despite working full-time as an educator and administrator, Moholy continued his artistic practice in Chicago. His interest in light and shadow found a new outlet in Plexiglas hybrids of painting and sculpture, which he often called Space Modulators and intended as “vehicles for choreographed luminosity.” His paintings increasingly involved biomorphic forms and, while still abstract, were given explicitly autobiographical or narrative titles – the Nuclear paintings allude to the horror of the atomic bomb, while the Leuk paintings refer to the cancer that would take his life in 1946. Moholy’s goal throughout his life was to integrate art, technology, and education for the betterment of humanity. “To meet the manifold requirements of this age with a definite program of human values, there must come a new mentality,” he wrote in Vision in Motion, published posthumously in 1947. “The common denominator is the fundamental acknowledgment of human needs; the task is to recognise the moral obligation in satisfying these needs, and the aim is to produce for human needs, not for profit.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
AL 3
1926
Oil, industrial paint, and graphite on aluminium
15 3/4 × 15 3/4 in.
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Berlin Radio Tower)
1928/29
Gelatin silver print
14 3/16 × 10 in.
The Art Institute of Chicago, Julien Levy Collection, Special Photography Acquisition Fund
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Digital image © The Art Institute of Chicago

Photograph (Berlin Radio Tower) (1928/29): Moholy used a traditional camera to take photos that often employ exaggerated angles and plunging perspectives to capture contemporary technological marvels such as the Berlin Radio Tower, which was completed in 1926. This photograph epitomises Moholy’s concept of art working hand-in-hand with technology to create new ways of seeing the world – his “new vision.”

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Light Prop for an Electric Stage)
1930
Gelatin silver print
9 7/16 × 7 1/8 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

A short documentation from the replica of Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator in Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Holland

Làslò Moholy Nagy film
1930

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Light Prop for an Electric Stage)
c. 1930
Gelatin silver print
14 3/4 × 10 3/4 in.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of the artist
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Installation view of Room 2, designed by László Moholy-Nagy, of the German section of the annual salon of the Society of Decorative Artists, Paris, May 14-July 13, 1930
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Room of the Present
Constructed 2009 from plans and other documentation, dated 1930
Mixed media, inner dimensions: 137 3/4 x 218 7/8 x 318 3/4 in.
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2953
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photography by Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The Room of the Present is an immersive installation featuring photographic reproductions, films, slides, posters, and examples of architecture, theatre, and industrial design, including an exhibition copy of Moholy’s kinetic Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1930). The Room exemplifies Moholy’s desire to achieve a Gesamtwerk (total work) that would unify art and technology with life itself. A hybrid between exhibition space and work of art, it was originally conceived around 1930 but realised only in 2009, based on the few existing plans, drawings, and related correspondence Moholy left behind.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Construction AL6 (Konstruktion AL6)
1933-34
Oil and incised lines on aluminum
60 × 50 cm
IVAM, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Generalitat
© 2016 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
CH BEATA I
1939
Oil and graphite on canvas
46 7/8 × 47 1/8 in.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, photography by Kristopher McKay

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Light Modulator in Motion)
1943
Gelatin silver print
6 9/16 x 4 7/16 in.
George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, purchase with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Photograph (Light Modulator in Repose)
1943
Gelatin silver print
6 7/16 x 4 1/2 in.
George Eastman Museum, Purchased with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Vertical Black, Red, Blue
1945
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Alice and Nahum Lainer, the Ducommun and Gross Acquisition Fund, the Fannie and Alan Leslie Bequest, and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council, as installed in Moholy-Nagy: Future Present at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photo
© 2017 Museum Associates/LACMA

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
Space Modulator CH for R1
1942
Oil and incised lines on Formica
62 3/16 × 25 9/16 in.
Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Ann Arbor, Michigan
© 2017 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photography by Peter Schälchli

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May

Exhibition: ‘The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection’ at Tate Modern, London

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, Australian photography, beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, documentary photography, Edward Steichen, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, Man Ray, memory, New York, Paris, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time, Walker Evans and works on paper
Tags: "Katz" - Cat, A Bee on a Sunflower, A Forgotten Model, A young girl living in a shack town near Oklahoma City, Actress Gloria Swanson, Adolph de Meyer, Adolph de Meyer For Elizabeth Arden (The Wax Head), Alexander Rodchenko, Alexander Rodchenko Shukov Tower, Alfred Stieglitz, Alfred Stieglitz Georgia O'Keeffe 1922, American social documentary photography, André Kertész Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe, André Kertész Underwater Swimmer, Andre Kertesz, Bandelier Corn and Sickle, Christ or Chaos?, Dora Maar, Dora Maar 1936, dorothea lange, Dorothea Lange A young girl living in a shack town near Oklahoma City, Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother, Edward Steichen, Edward Steichen A Bee on a Sunflower, Edward Steichen Actress Gloria Swanson, edward weston, Edward Weston Igor Stravinsky, Edward Weston Nude 1936, Edward Weston White Door, Floyde Burroughs, Floyde Burroughs a cotton sharecropper, For Elizabeth Arden (The Wax Head), George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes A Forgotten Model, George Washington Bridge, Georgia O'Keeffe, Georgia O'Keeffe 1922, Glass Tears (Les Larmes), gloria swanson, Herbert Bayer, Herbert Bayer Self-Portrait, Ice Cube Tray with Marbles and Rice, Igor Stravinsky, Il Tuffatore, Irving Penn, Irving Penn Salvador Dali in New York, Josef Breitenbach, Josef Breitenbach Patricia New York, Juliet and Margaret Nieman, Juliet and Margaret Nieman in Papier-Mâché Masks, László Moholy-Nagy, László Moholy-Nagy View from the Berlin tower, Man Ray, Man Ray Dora Maar 1936, Man Ray Glass Tears (Les Larmes), Man Ray Juliet and Margaret Nieman in Papier-Mâché Masks, Man Ray Noire et blanche, Man Ray Nusch Éluard, Man Ray portraits, Man Ray Rayograph 1923, Margaret Bourke-White, Margaret Bourke-White George Washington Bridge, Margaret de Patta, Margaret de Patta Ice Cube Tray with Marbles and Rice, Max Dupain, Max Dupain Sunbaker, Migrant Mother, Modernist Photography, Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, Modernist portraiture, Mondrian's Glasses and Pipe, Movement Study, New Vision, New Vision movement, Nino Migliori, Nino Migliori 'Il Tuffatore', Nino Migliori The Diver, Noire et blanche, Nusch Éluard, Otto Umbehr, Otto Umbehr "Katz" - Cat, Patricia New York, paul strand, Paul Strand Wall Street New York, photographic archive, photography collection, Rayograph 1923, rayographs, Rudolph Koppitz, Rudolph Koppitz Movement Study, Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali in New York, Shukov Tower, social documentary photography, Staircase Ursuliner Lyzeum Cologne, Sunbaker, The Diver, The Radical Eye, The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, The Sir Elton John Photography Collection, The Wax Head, tina modotti, Tina Modotti Bandelier Corn and Sickle, Underwater Swimmer, Underwater Swimmer Esztergom Hungary, View from the Berlin tower, vintage prints, Walker Evans, Walker Evans Christ or Chaos?, Walker Evans Floyde Burroughs, Werner Mantz, Werner Mantz Staircase Ursuliner Lyzeum Cologne, White Door Hornitos California

Exhibition dates: 10th November 2016 – 7th May 2017

Many thankx to Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography, drawn from the classic modernist period of the 1920s-50s. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, including portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Breton. With over 70 artists and nearly 150 rare vintage prints on show from seminal figures including Brassai, Imogen Cunningham, André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, Tina Modotti, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, this is a chance to take a peek inside Elton John’s home and delight in seeing such masterpieces of photography.”

Text from the Tate Modern website

Paul Strand
Wall Street, New York
1915
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

Tate Modern presents a major new exhibition, The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection, drawn from one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography. This unrivalled selection of classic modernist images from the 1920s to the 1950s features almost 200 works from more than 60 artists, including seminal figures such as Berenice Abbott, André Kertész, Man Ray, Alexandr Rodchenko and Edward Steichen among many others. The exhibition consists entirely of rare vintage prints, all created by the artists themselves, offering a unique opportunity to see remarkable works up close. The quality and depth of the collection allows the exhibition to tell the story of modernist photography in this way for the first time in the UK. It also marks the beginning of a long term relationship between Tate and The Sir Elton John Collection, as part of which Sir Elton and David Furnish have agreed to give important works to the nation.

The Radical Eye introduces a crucial moment in the history of photography – an exciting rupture often referred to as the ‘coming of age’ of the medium, when artists used photography as a tool through which they could redefine and transform visions of the modern world. Technological advancements gave artists the freedom to experiment and test the limits of the medium and present the world through a new, distinctly modern visual language. This exhibition reveals how the timeless genres of the portrait, nude and still life were reimagined through the camera during this period, also exploring photography’s unique ability to capture street life and architecture from a new perspective.

Featuring portraits of great cultural figures of the 20th century, including Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston by Tina Modotti, Jean Cocteau by Berenice Abbott and Igor Stravinsky by Edward Weston, the exhibition gives insight into the relationships and inner circles of the avant-garde. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, depicting key surrealist figures such as Andre Breton and Max Ernst alongside artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar. Ground-breaking experimentation both in the darkroom and on the surface of the print, such as Herbert Bayer’s photomontage and Maurice Tabard’s solarisation, examine how artists pushed the accepted conventions of portraiture.

As life underwent rapid changes in the 20th century, photography offered a new means to communicate and represent the world. Alexandr Rodchenko, László Moholy-Nagy and Margaret Bourke-White employed the ‘worm’s eye’ and ‘bird’s eye’ views to create new perspectives of the modern metropolis – techniques associated with constructivism and the Bauhaus. The move towards abstraction is also explored, from isolated architectural elements to camera-less photography such as Man Ray’s rayographs and Harry Callahan’s light abstractions.

A dedicated section of the exhibition looks at the new approaches that emerged in capturing the human form, highlighted in rare masterpieces such as André Kertész’s Underwater Swimmer, Hungary 1917, while Imogen Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom, Tower of Jewels 1925 and Tina Modotti’s Bandelier, Corn and Sickle 1927 feature in a large presentation dedicated to the Still Life. The important role of documentary photography as a tool of mass communication is demonstrated in Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother 1936 and Walker Evans’ Floyde Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama 1936, from the Farm Security Administration project.

The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection is at Tate Modern from 10 November 2016 until 7 May 2017. It is curated by Shoair Mavlian with Simon Baker and Newell Harbin, Director of The Sir Elton John Photography Collection. The exhibition is accompanied by an exclusive audio tour of the exhibition featuring commentary from Sir Elton John, and a major new catalogue from Tate Publishing including an interview with Sir Elton John by Jane Jackson.

Press release from Tate Modern

Edward Weston
White Door, Hornitos, California
1940
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

“We possess an extraordinary instrument for reproduction. But photography is much more than that. Today it is … bringing something entirely new into the world.”

.
László Moholy-Nagy, 1932

Artists in the modernist period explored what the camera could do that the human eye alone could not, and how this could be harnessed to present a new modern perspective on the world. Artist and theorist László Moholy-Nagy proclaimed that photography could radically change not just what, but how we see. He called this the ‘new vision’. Rather than emulating other art forms, photography began to embrace qualities unique to itself, from its ability to reproduce the world in sharp detail to its capacity to create new realities through the manipulation of light, chemicals and paper.

This re-evaluation of photography coincided with a period of upheaval. War, revolution and economic depression led to mass movements of people and great social change. The idea of the avant-garde took hold and dada and surrealism emerged, challenging both the art and social norms that had come before. At the same time, new art schools such as the Bauhaus in Germany and Vkhutemas in Russia fostered the role of the professional artist and challenged divisions between art and design.

The Radical Eye is arranged thematically and charts a changing emphasis from the subject of an image to the visual qualities of the photograph itself, irrespective of what it represents. The many vintage prints in this exhibition – made soon after the photographs were taken – give a rare insight into the artists’ processes and creative decisions, and foreground the photograph as a physical object. All works are shown in the frames in which they are displayed in the home of Sir Elton John and David Furnish.

Together, the works in this exhibition show how photography pushed the boundaries of the possible, changing the world through the ways in which it was seen and understood. ‘Knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterates of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike,’ wrote Moholy-Nagy in 1927, foreseeing the cultural dominance of the photographic image. This extraordinary period still impacts how we, the photo-literate future, read and create images today.

Max Dupain
Sunbaker
1937
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

“They collect themselves. Carefully, as if tying a cravat, they compose their features. Insolent, serious and conscious of their looks they turn around to face the world.”

.
From ‘Men before the Mirror’, published alongside portraits by Man Ray, 1934

Portraits

Modernist portraiture harnessed photography’s capacity to render an accurate likeness in clear, sharp focus and detail. But at the same time, artists and sitters pushed the conventions of portraiture with innovations in pose, composition and cropping.

Many of the portraits in this room are of artists, writers and musicians, giving a cross section of key cultural players of the time. Issues of control and collaboration arise particularly when the subject is an artist, raising the question of who is responsible for conveying the sitter’s persona. The modernist period also saw a boom of the illustrated press. Magazines reproduced photographic portraits of well-known figures which were instrumental in shaping their public images.

Alfred Stieglitz
Georgia O’Keeffe
1922
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

Man Ray
Nusch Éluard
1928
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Nusch Éluard (born Maria Benz; June 21, 1906 – November 28, 1946) was a French performer, model and surrealist artist…

Nusch arrived in France as a stage performer, variously described as a small-time actress, a traveling acrobat, and a “hypnotist’s stooge”. She met Paul Éluard in 1930 working as a model, married him in 1934, produced surrealist photomontage and other work, and is the subject of “Facile,” a collection of Éluard’s poetry published as a photogravure book, illustrated with Man Ray’s nude photographs of her.

She was also the subject of several cubist portraits and sketches by Pablo Picasso in the late 1930s, and is said to have had an affair with him. Nusch worked for the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. She died in 1946 in Paris, collapsing in the street due to a massive stroke.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Edward Steichen (American 1879-1973, emigrated to United States 1881, worked in France 1906-23)
Actress Gloria Swanson
1924
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
© 1924 Condé Nast Publications

Adolph de Meyer
For Elizabeth Arden (The Wax Head)
1931
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Edward Weston
Igor Stravinsky
1935
Silver gelatin print
© 1981 Center for Creative Photography

George Platt Lynes
A Forgotten Model
c. 1937
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Man Ray
Juliet and Margaret Nieman in Papier-Mâché Masks
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Irving Penn
Salvador Dali in New York
1947
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: The Irving Penn Foundation

“The enemy of photography is convention, the fixed rules ‘how to do’. The salvation of photography comes from the experiment.”

.
László Moholy-Nagy, c. 1940

Experiments

This was not a period of discovery but of rediscovery. Artists were rewriting the preceding century’s rules of photographic technique, harnessing ‘mistakes’ such as distortions and double exposures, or physically manipulating the printed image, cutting, marking and recombining photographs. These interventions could occur at any point in the process, from taking the image to the final print.

Used in portraiture, such experiments allowed for more psychologically charged representations. However, the transformative power of a particular technique often becomes much more important than the particular subject of the image. Above all, the rich creative possibilities of the photographic process come to the fore. While artists were seriously investigating the medium, the results are often surprising and playful.

Herbert Bayer
Self-Portrait
1932
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
© DACS 2016

Otto Umbehr
“Katz” – Cat
1927
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
© Phyllis Umbehr/Galerie Kicken Berlin/DACS 2016

Josef Breitenbach
Patricia, New York
c. 1942
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Josef and Yaye Breitenbach Charitable Foundation, Courtesy Gitterman Gallery

“The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh.”

.
Edward Weston, 1924

Bodies

Experimental approaches to shooting, cropping and framing could transform the human body into something unfamiliar. Photographers started to focus on individual parts of the body, their unconventional crops drawing attention to shape and form, accentuating curves and angles. Fragmented limbs and flesh were depersonalised and could be treated like a landscape or still life, dissolving distinctions between different genres. Thanks to faster shutter speeds and new celluloid roll film, photographers could also freeze the body in motion outside of the studio for the first time, capturing dancers and swimmers with a clarity impossible for the naked eye.

André Kertész
Underwater Swimmer, Esztergom, Hungary, 30 June 1917
1917
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
© Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures

Rudolph Koppitz
Movement Study
1925
Gelatin silver print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS London 2016

Man Ray
Noire et Blanche
1926
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Man Ray (1890-1976)
Glass Tears (Les Larmes)
1932
Gelatin silver print on paper
229 x 298 mm
Collection Elton John
© Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Edward Weston
Nude
1936
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Man Ray
Dora Maar
1936
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Nino Migliori
‘Il Tuffatore’ (The Diver)
1951
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

“The documentary photographer is trying to speak to you in terms of everyone’s experience.”

.
Dorothea Lange, 1934

Documents

During the 1930s, photographers refined the formula for what we now know as social documentary. To compel the public to look at less palatable aspects of contemporary society they married creative manipulation with an appeal to viewers’ trust in the photograph as an objective visual record. This combination proved itself uniquely capable of eliciting empathy but is fraught with artistic and ethical complexity. These works highlight the vexed position of documentary photographs: historical evidence, instruments of propaganda and, latterly, works of art.

The development of new technology – particularly the portable camera and roll film – allowed photographers to capture spontaneous moments unfolding in the everyday world. Taking viewers into neighbourhoods where they might never set foot, street photography and documentary opened up new perspectives socially as much as visually.

Dorothea Lange
Migrant Mother
1936
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

Walker Evans
Floyde Burroughs, a cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama
1936
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Dorothea Lange
A young girl living in a shack town near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
1936
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Walker Evans
Christ or Chaos?
1946
Gelatin silver print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Walker Evans Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Contradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting.”

.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, 1920s

Objects, Perspectives, Abstractions

The subjects and approaches of modernist photography vary widely, but are united by a fascination with the medium itself. Every image asks what photography is capable of and how it can be pushed further. This final room brings together three interlinked approaches. It shows the still life genre reimagined by photographers who used the technical capabilities of the camera to reveal the beauty of everyday things. Objects captured at unconventional angles or extreme close-up become strange, even unrecognisable.

A similar effect of defamiliarisation was accomplished by taking photographs from radically new perspectives, positioning a camera at the point of view of the ‘worm’s eye’ or ‘bird’s eye’. This created extreme foreshortening that transformed photographs from descriptive images of things into energetic compositions hovering between abstraction and representation.

Abstraction pushes against photography’s innate ability to record objectively. Radical techniques such as cameraless image-making simplified the medium to the point of capturing the play of light on photosensitive paper. By stripping it back to its most basic components, artists celebrated photography, not as a tool for reproduction, but as a creative medium capable of producing new imagery.

Alexander Rodchenko
Shukov Tower
1920
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
© A. Rodchenko & V. Stepanova Archive, DACS, RAO 2016

Edward Steichen
A Bee on a Sunflower
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Man Ray
“Rayograph”
1923
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
Photograph: Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

André Kertész
Mondrian’s Glasses and Pipe
1926
Gelatin silver print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection
© Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures

Tina Modotti
Bandelier, Corn and Sickle
1927
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

Werner Mantz
Staircase Ursuliner Lyzeum Cologne 1928
1928
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

Margaret Bourke-White
George Washington Bridge
1933
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photography Collection

László Moholy-Nagy
View from the Berlin tower
1928
Silver gelatin print
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection

Margaret de Patta
Ice Cube Tray with Marbles and Rice
1939
The Sir Elton John Photographic Collection
© Estate of Margaret de Patta

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

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Friday – Saturday 10.00 – 22.00

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Feb

Exhibition: ‘Film Stills: Photography between Advertising, Art and the Cinema’ at Albertina, Vienna

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, colour photography, designer, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, film, gallery website, intimacy, light, memory, Paris, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, pictorialism, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, space, surrealism, Susan Sontag, time, video and works on paper
Tags: 8½ film, a Symphony of Horror, Alain Resnais, Alain Resnais Last Year in Marienbad, Albertina, Albertina Vienna, Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo, American film, American film noir, Angelo Novi, Anita Ekberg, Anna Karina, Art Nouveau, atmospheric landscape, auteur cinema, Auteur pictures, avant-garde, Berlin - Symphony of a Great City, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, between film and photography, Bibi Andersson, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman in Persona, Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder The Seven Year Itch, Breathless, Brigitte Helm, Brigitte Helm in Metropolis, Bud Fraker Psycho, Caspar David Friedrich, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, decisive moment, Don English, Don English Marlene Dietrich, Don English Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, doubling, Edra Gale, Edra Gale in 8½, Edra Gale in Otto e mezzo, European auteur cinema, European avant-garde film, European avant-garde photography, Expressionism, Federico Fellini 8½, Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini Otto e mezzo, film and photography, film noir, film stills, Film Stills at the Interface to Fine Art, Film Stills: Photography between Advertising Art and the Cinema, For the Media and the Press, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Faust, Fritz Lang Metropolis, Georg John, Georges, Georges Pierre, Georges Pierre Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou, Georges Pierre Delphine Seyrig, Georges Pierre Delphine Seyrig in Last Year in Marienbad, German film, gloria swanson, Gloria Swanson in Male and Female, Hans Natge, Hans Natge Faust, Henrik Galeen The Student of Prague, hierarchy between photography and film, Horst von Harbou, Horst von Harbou Brigitte Helm in Metropolis, Horst von Harbou Georg John, Horst von Harbou Georg John in M - A City searches for a Murderer, Horst von Harbou Metropolis, Horst von Harbou Metropolis photograph, in-house studio photographers, Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman Persona, Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity, intermediate images, Intermediate pictures, interwar avant-garde, interwar years, James Agee, James Stewart in Rear Window, Jean Luc Godard, Jean Luc Godard Pierrot le fou, Jean Paul Belmondo, Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, Jean Seberg, Jean-Luc Godard Breathless, Karl Struss, Karl Struss Gloria Swanson in Male and Female, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Karl Theodor Dreyer La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Key pictures, L'Année dernière à Marienbad, La Dolce Vita, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, large format camera, large-format plate cameras, Last Year at Marienbad, Last Year in Marienbad, Liv Ullman in Persona, Liv Ullmann, M - A City searches for a Murderer, M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, Male and Female film, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch, Marilyn Monroe The Seven Year Itch, Marlene Dietrich, meta-pictures, Metropolis, mise en scène, Nosferatu, Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror, Otto Czeschka, Otto Czeschka Jugendstil illustrations, Otto e mezzo, Panorama pictures, Paul Ronald, Paul Ronald Edra Gale in Otto e mezzo, performative staging process, performativity, Persona, photo montages, photographers re-stage film scenes, Photography between Advertising Art and the Cinema, photojournalism, photomontages, pictorialism, Pierluigi Praturlon, Pierluigi Praturlon Anita Ekberg as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita, Pierre Delphine Seyrig, Pierrot le fou, portrait photos of actors, portraiture of stars, proscenium stage, Psycho, Raymond Cauchetier, Raymond Cauchetier and Angelo Novi, Raymond Cauchetier Jean Paul Belmondo & Jean Seberg, Rear Window, Robert Mitchum, Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter, Sam Shaw Marilyn Monroe, Sam Shaw Marilyn Monroe The Seven Year Itch, Shanghai Express, snapshot photography, Star portraits, Still from Nosferatu a Symphony of Horror, Still from the film Breathless, Still from the film Vertigo, Still from The Night of the Hunter, subjective artistic practices, subjective perception of reality, Susan Sontag, Symphony of a Metropolis, tableaux-vivants, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Night of the Hunter, The Seven Year Itch, The Student of Prague, The Sweet Life, theatrical presentation, traditional live theatre, Vertigo, Vienna, Walter Ruttmann, Walter Ruttmann Berlin - Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Werner Krauss, Werner Krauss in The Student of Prague

Exhibition dates: 4th November 2016 – 26th February 2017

I seem to have a bit of a thing for film and photography at the moment!

More delicious film fascination, this time for the still camera. German Expressionism, film noir, science-fiction, horror, murder and mayhem – photographers using all manner of artistic techniques to get their message across. Now often found in fine art auction houses.

I love the heading “Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity” … “intermediate images” that unite aspects of both media (film and photography) and self-reflexive images that take on a life of their own, developing “a filmic work further in an independent manner, thereby allowing it to be regarded from new perspectives. Such stills often contain self-reflexive commentary on the work’s specifically “filmic” aspects.”

Sensitive, sensual, snapshot; stars and auteurism; murder and mayhem; avant-garde, beauty and sex – it has it all. Great stuff.

Marcus

PS. Look at the amazing colours in Horst von Harbou’s stills for Metropolis (1927) which were produced as transparent foils and elaborately coloured by hand. Never heard of such a thing before, coloured transparent foils.

.
Many thankx to the Albertina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Anonymous
La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc
1927
Karl Theodor Dreyer (director)

Carl Theodor Dreyer (3 February 1889 – 20 March 1968), commonly known as Carl Th. Dreyer, was a Danish film director. He is regarded by many critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest directors in cinema. His best known films include The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet (1955), and Gertrud (1964) …

As a young man, Dreyer worked as a journalist, but he eventually joined the film industry as a writer of title cards for silent films and subsequently of screenplays. He was initially hired by Nordisk Film in 1913.

His first attempts at film direction had limited success, and he left Denmark to work in the French film industry. While living in France he met Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo and other members of the French artistic scene and in 1928 he made his first classic film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Working from the transcripts of Joan’s trial, he created a masterpiece of emotion that drew equally on realism and expressionism.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Who doesn’t know them: that picture from The Seven-Year Itch of a smiling Marilyn Monroe with her white dress blown upward by the air from a subway grate, or the photo of a conspiratorial James Stewart in Rear Window? Regardless of whether one has seen the actual movies, such images are familiar. It’s film stills like these that have burnt themselves into the collective memory and had a major impact on how their films are perceived.

Film stills embody visual traces of films as well as independent photographic images. Taken on set during production, they are based on an elaborate process in which film photographers re-stage film scenes for the still camera.

In the first-ever major exhibition devoted to this hybrid genre, the Albertina is showing 130 film stills taken between 1902 and 1975 in cooperation with the Austrian Film Museum. That was the period during which black-and-white film stills reached their highest level of technical and aesthetic quality, simultaneously covering a sweeping cross-section of various artistic movements from photographic and cinematic history such as Pictorialism and Expressionism. Employing pictures by Deborah Imogen Beer, Horst von Harbou, Pierluigi Praturlon, Karl Struss, and others, three aspects of this genre’s intermedial relationships are highlighted: the functions performed by film stills, the interfaces between photography and film with their breaks and couplings, and the additional artistic value of still photographs as such.

For the Media and the Press

The purpose of film stills is clearly defined: as material for the press and various types of advertising, they help to market films. And alongside their use in trailers, film journalism, and other marketing tools such as posters, film stills also represent a key ingredient of audience expectations pertaining to a film upon its release. Even so, it is the production of visually appealing images – rather than authentic reproduction of the film itself – that is important, here. In display windows and the media, still images visualise different aspects of a production ranging from key scenes to the actual filming work. This motivic variety corresponds to various film still categories: portrait photos of the actors and actresses taken by in-house studio photographers, as well as scene photos and making-of photos, are used in these contexts. And fed into numerous distribution processes, such photos also serve as models for posters, lobby cards, photo books, and press materials.

Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity

Film stills unite functional requirements with photographic and filmic intentions. And in fact, still photography is the only way in which to show visual traces of a production outside of the filmic event – the screening – itself. The challenges that photographers face in taking such shots lie in the difference between the media of moving (projected) film images and static (material) photography. In a complex and laborious process, they work on set to restage film scenes specifically for the still camera, thus transforming the film from a moving to a static medium.

The employment of various photographic strategies makes possible film stills’ “filmic” reception, with momentary photos that evoke a film’s dynamics being just as exemplary here as panoramic shots that require a longer look. Still photos thus repeat a film’s constituent elements, inscribing them onto a photographic medium in various ways and thus functioning as “intermediate images” that unite aspects of both media. They can be read not only as static views of a filmic reality, but also as independent types of photographic image. This quality is reinforced by the fact that stills frequently develop a filmic work further in an independent manner, thereby allowing it to be regarded from new perspectives. Such stills often contain self-reflexive commentary on the work’s specifically “filmic” aspects.

Film Stills at the Interface to Fine Art

Being situated between film and photography, many film stills also possess artistic qualities that are clearly photographic in nature. Here, composition plays a major role as it bears witness to a pictorial conception that differs from that of a filmic image. For while moving images are designed as horizontal arrangements, with the pictorial elements sequenced one after the other to effect their visual continuation, still photographers stage still photos according to the (static) central perspective governed by the camera’s vanishing point. This positions observers at that place which has been assigned them since the Renaissance – that is, looking straight down the picture’s central axis. Correspondingly, many stills exhibit reminiscences of the proscenium stage from traditional live theatre, favouring views that render scenes more immediate and thus more easily legible.

Photographers, in composing their images, often borrow iconographic and stylistic elements from various artistic movements: Expressionism, Art Nouveau, and Pictorialism are examples of these.

And in this way, still photographers depart from the original filmic work and realise their own pictorial ideas. Their photos thus refrain from “authentic” reproduction of a film’s various aspects, instead using these aspects to realise subjective artistic practices, thereby implying a reversal of the classic hierarchy between photography and film.

Press release from the Albertina

Paul Ronald
Edra Gale in Otto e mezzo (Edra Gale in 8½)
1963
Director: Federico Fellini, 1963
Ekatchrome
© Archivio Storico del Cinema / AFE

8½ (Italian title: Otto e mezzo) is a 1963 comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini. Co-scripted by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Brunello Rondi, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, the film features a soundtrack by Nino Rota with costume and set designs by Piero Gherardi.

Horst von Harbou
Georg John in M – A City searches for a Murderer
1931
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum
© Horst von Harbou – Deutsche Kinemathek

M (German: M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder – “M – A city looks for a murderer”) is a 1931 German drama-thriller film directed by Fritz Lang and starring Peter Lorre. It was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou and was the director’s first sound film. It concerns the manhunt for a serial killer of children, conducted by both the police and the criminal underworld. Now considered a classic, the film was deemed by Fritz Lang as his finest work.

Little Elsie Beckmann leaves school, bouncing a ball on her way home. She is approached by Hans Beckert, who is whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg. He offers to buy her a balloon from a blind street-vendor [above] and walks and talks with her. Elsie’s place at the dinner table remains empty, her ball is shown rolling away across a patch of grass and her balloon is lost in the telephone lines overhead.

Unknown artist
Poster for “M”
1931
Director: Fritz Lang (Austria, 1890-1976)
Collection of La Cinémathèque française

Wall texts

Advertising pictures

Aimed at inviting the public to buy a ticket, film stills were used as advertising photographs in cinema lobbies and as press material for the media. Directors and production companies depended on them for promoting their movies, because the film as a projected moving image is immaterial and does not exist beyond the screen. Stills comprise various types of pictures that show different aspects of a movie’s production: scenes, portraits of its actresses and actors, as well as production photographs capturing its shooting.

The production of stills was based on a division of labor. In major production companies like those of Hollywood, still photographers were assigned to the companies’ advertising or publicity departments. Sometimes involving the director, these departments selected the photographs intended for publication. The promotion photographs for the movie palaces’ lobbies were published in sets of twenty to forty pictures each, which visualised characteristic aspects of the film. A wider selection of stills was used for the press. Picture editors adapted the photographs according to their purposes. We find instructions for the material’s reproduction and cropping marks indicating new image areas; retouches deleted undesired elements and changed the motif in line with the planned layout.

Anonymous
Still from Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror
1922
Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Gelatin silver print
© Deutsche Kinemathek

Anonymous
Still from The Night of the Hunter
1954
Silver gelatin print

Anonymous
Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter
1955
Director: Charles Laughton
Gelatin silver print
© The John Kobal Collection

The Night of the Hunter is a 1955 American film noir directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. The screenplay by James Agee was based on the 1953 novel of the same name by Davis Grubb. The plot focuses on a corrupt reverend-turned-serial killer who attempts to charm an unsuspecting widow and steal $10,000 hidden by her executed husband.

The novel and film draw on the true story of Harry Powers, hanged in 1932 for the murder of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The film’s lyrical and expressionistic style with its leaning on the silent era sets it apart from other Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has influenced later directors such as David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Terrence Malick, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, and the Coen brothers.

In 1992, The Night of the Hunter was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma selected The Night of the Hunter in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind Citizen Kane.

Text from the Wikipedia website

The Night of the Hunter film poster 1955

Anonymous
Still from the film Vertigo, Judy behind Madeleine
1957/58
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Silver gelatin print

Vertigo film poster 1957/58

Bud Fraker (attributed to)
Janet Leigh, Vera Miles and John Gavin in Psycho
1960
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Gelatin silver print
© Berlin, Deutsche Kinemathek – Paramount Pictures

Star portraits

Regarded as the supreme discipline of still photography, the portraiture of stars was an integral part of the film industry’s elaborate promotion campaigns. Productions could be effectively marketed by using actresses and actors to project their image. With the emergence of the studio system, Hollywood perfected this business strategy from the 1920s on by employing specialised portrait photographers. These photographers worked in company-owned studios and – unlike set photographers who mostly remained anonymous – were known by name. Relying on sophisticated lighting and drastic retouching, they created the aesthetic of the glamour portrait. Don English perfectly translated the lighting as it had been exactly planned by Josef von Sternberg, the director, for his film in his portrait of Marlene Dietrich for Shanghai Express (1932). Generally, domestic production companies could not afford to run their own portrait studios and were thus unable to exercise any influence on photographic products from outside. This offered both the stars and the studios a certain degree of freedom when it came to the representation and interpretation of a certain look. The photograph taken of Hedy Kiesler (later Lamarr) in her role in Gustav Machatý’s Ecstasy (1933) by the renowned studio Manassé in Vienna is one of the rare portrait stills taken on the set at that time.

Karl Struss
Gloria Swanson in Male and Female
1919
Director: Cecil B. DeMille
Gelatin silver print
© The John Kobal Foundation

Don English
Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express
1932
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Silver gelatin print

Raymond Cauchetier (French, born 1920)
Jean Paul Belmondo & Jean Seberg, Paris, 1959
1959
Still from the film Breathless
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Gelatin silver print

Breathless film poster 1960

Anonymous
Still from the film Breathless
1959
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Gelatin silver print

Georges Pierre
Delphine Seyrig in Last Year in Marienbad
1961
Director: Alain Resnais
Astor Pictures Corporation / Photofest
© Astor Pictures Corporation

Delphine Claire Beltiane Seyrig (10 April 1932 – 15 October 1990) was a Lebanese-born French stage and film actress, a film director and a feminist.

As a young woman, Seyrig studied acting at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne, training under Jean Dasté, and at Centre Dramatique de l’Est. She appeared briefly in small roles in the 1954 TV series Sherlock Holmes. In 1956, she returned to New York and studied at the Actors Studio. In 1958 she appeared in her first film, Pull My Daisy. In New York she met director Alain Resnais, who asked her to star in his film Last Year at Marienbad. Her performance brought her international recognition and she moved to Paris. Among her roles of this period is the older married woman in François Truffaut’s Baisers volés (1968).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Seyrig worked with directors including Truffaut, Luis Buñuel, Marguerite Duras, and Fred Zinnemann, as well as Resnais. She achieved recognition for both her stage and film work, and was named best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Resnais’ Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour (1963). She played many diverse roles, and because she was fluent in French, English and German, she appeared in films in all three languages, including a number of Hollywood productions.

Text from the Wikipedia website

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Last Year at Marienbad is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question, even if it never quite ventures into surrealism. The film’s dreamlike nature has both fascinated and baffled viewers; many have hailed the work as a masterpiece, while others consider it incomprehensible.

At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman’s husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château’s corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers. The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as “A”, the first man is “X”, and the man who may be her husband is “M”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

L’Année dernière à Marienbad Japanese film poster 1961

Artistic pictures

Until the 1950s still photographers used large-format plate cameras, which projected an inverted image onto the focusing screen at the back of the body. These cameras produced technically brilliant pictures, yet were complicated to handle because of their size and comparatively long exposure times. The staging of stills had to be meticulously planned and was fundamentally different from the shooting of a film. While the film camera is geared to the story in motion and its visual continuation in the pictures to follow, actresses and actors posed for the photographer in tableaux-vivants-like arrangements using additional light. The resultant static and apparently artificial compositions mirroring the performative staging process are typical of this kind of photographs. Still photographers drew inspiration from works of art for their mise-en-scène. The anonymous photographer in charge of the stills for Henrik Galeen’s The Student of Prague (1926) quotes the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich’s works in his theatrical presentation of an atmospheric landscape. Horst von Harbou, who frequently worked with the director Fritz Lang, drew on Carl Otto Czeschka’s Jugendstil [Art Noveau] illustrations from 1908 for his stills accompanying the first part of Die Nibelungen (1924). Harbou translated ornamental motifs into two-dimensional pictures, as Czeschka had done before him. Presenting their pictures in exhibitions and providing fine-art prints, still photographers positioned their works as artistically independent achievements.

Anonymous
Werner Krauss in The Student of Prague
1926
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum

Anonymous
Werner Krauss in The Student of Prague (detail)
1926
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum

Intermediate pictures

The difficulty in capturing the scene of a movie in a still lies in the difference between the two media of (moving) film and (static) photograph. Still photographers employ intermedia strategies which facilitate a reading of the still in analogy to the experience of the film. Snapshots evoking the dynamics of the movie are as exemplary of this approach as are series of pictures rendering a sequence in the form of the movement’s individual phases captured at short intervals. Panorama pictures are also related to the film’s spatial and temporal dimensions, since a series of motifs resembling the chronological order of films successively “unwinds” in reading them. Informed by the interwar avant-garde, the photo montages for Walter Ruttmann’s experimental film Berlin – Symphony of a Great City (1927) show an extraordinary solution. They congenially transform the subjective modern filmic point of view by relating the motifs of the film to each other through illogical perspectives and proportions. Some of Horst von Harbou’s stills for Metropolis (1927) were produced as transparent foils and elaborately coloured by hand. Presented in backlight illumination, they established a self-reflexive reference to the cinema as films also reveal their ephemeral quality in their projection.

Anonymous
Berlin – Symphony of a Great City
1927
Director: Walther Ruttmann
Gelatin silver print
© Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (German: Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt) is a 1927 German film directed by Walter Ruttmann, co-written by Carl Mayer and Karl Freund.

The film is an example of the city symphony film genre. A musical score for an orchestra to accompany the silent film was written by Edmund Meisel. As a “city symphony” film, it portrays the life of a city, mainly through visual impressions in a semi-documentary style, without the narrative content of more mainstream films, though the sequencing of events can imply a kind of loose theme or impression of the city’s daily life…

The film displays the filmmaker’s knowledge of Soviet montage theory. Some socialist political sympathies, or identification with the underclass can be inferred from a few of the edits in the film, though critics have suggested that either Ruttmann avoided a strong position, or else he pursued his aesthetic interests to the extent that they diminished the potential for political content. Ruttmann’s own description of the film suggests that his motives were predominantly aesthetic: “Since I began in the cinema, I had the idea of making something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out of the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city.”

Text from the Wikipedia website

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis poster

Horst von Harbou
Brigitte Helm in Metropolis
1927
Director: Fritz Lang
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum
© Horst von Harbou – Deutsche Kinemathek

Horst von Harbou
Metropolis
1927
Director: Fritz Lang
Coloured transparent nitrocellulose film
Austrian Theatre Museum
© Horst von Harbou – Deutsche Kinemathek

Meta-pictures

Some directors supported the production of stills that put characteristic aspects of their films into a new perspective. In his masterpiece Persona (1966) Ingmar Bergman reflects the support material of film by showing the film strip crack and burn up during the projection. This self-referentiality of the medium was visualised by adding perforations to the photographs so that they resembled film frames. The perforations only served to quote the film as a medium; the motifs were actually mounted in black frames afterwards. Elaborate montages not to be seen in the film were also produced for Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. Rear Window (1954) confronts us with a photographer who watches a man whom he suspects of having committed a murder with binoculars and through a long-focus lens. By mounting pictures of the persons in the lens whom Stewart watches from his window in the film, the still photographer emphasised the issue of voyeurism as a central subject of the movie. The Austrian silent movie director Erich von Stroheim used film stills for visualising contents of his films that were regarded as problematic. Because of their length and supposedly questionable sexual passages Stroheim’s movies were regularly cut down by censorship authorities and production companies. This is why stills continuing the movie were planned in advance. The sexual allusions in a scene of Foolish Wives (1922) in which Stroheim embodies a Don Juan figure about to indecently assault a sleeping woman, for example, manifested themselves in a still in which we see him kissing the sleeping woman’s foot.

Anonymous
James Stewart in Rear Window
1954
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Gelatin silver print
© BFI National Archive: London

Anonymous
James Stewart in Rear Window (detail)
1954
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Gelatin silver print
© BFI National Archive: London

Anonymous
Liv Ullman in Persona (detail)
1966
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Silver gelatin print

Persona is a 1966 Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Persona’s story revolves around a young nurse named Alma (Andersson) and her patient, a well-known stage actress named Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who has suddenly ceased to speak. The two move to a cottage, where Alma cares for and talks to Elisabet about intimate secrets, and becomes troubled distinguishing herself from her.

Bergman wrote the film with Ullmann and Andersson in mind for the lead parts, and some idea of exploring their identities, and shot the film in Stockholm and Fårö. Often categorised as a psychological horror, Persona deals with themes of duality, insanity, and personal identity…

Persona has lent itself to a variety of interpretations, with Professor Thomas Elsaesser remarking it “has been for film critics and scholars what climbing Everest is for mountaineers: the ultimate professional challenge. Besides Citizen Kane, it is probably the most written-about film in the canon.” Much of the focus has been on the resemblance of the characters, demonstrated in shots of overlapping faces, and the possibility that the two characters are one. If they are one person, there is a question if Alma is fantasising about the actress she admires, or if Elisabet is examining her psyche, or if the boy is trying to understand who his mother is. In a question of duality, Alma represents soul while Elisabet represents a stern goddess. Susan Sontag suggests that Persona is constructed as a series of variations on a theme of “doubling”. The subject of the film, Sontag proposes, is “violence of the spirit”.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Persona 1966 Swedish B1 Poster

Anonymous
Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman in Persona (detail)
1966
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Silver gelatin print

Key pictures

Stills precede the presentation of a film, decisively informing the expectations held by the public at the time of its release. What is important for a movie’s later success (or failure) is presenting visually enticing pictures rather than conveying an authentic picture of the movie. The most famous example in this regard is Sam Shaw’s still showing a scene of Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955). Shaw highlighted the moment in which Marilyn Monroe stands on a subway grating far more pointedly than Wilder in the film, which neither shows the actress’s whole figure nor the dress billowing so clearly above her waist. The production company did its best for the promotion of the scene in the media: launching an elaborate publicity campaign, it fixed a special date for reporters and journalists to capture the sequence themselves. Such key images become characteristic signatures of a film with their dissemination by the media, sometimes inscribing themselves more deeply into the collective memory than the actual film scenes because of their iconic recognition value.

Anonymous
Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
1919
Director: Robert Wiene
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum

Anonymous
Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt and Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (detail)
1919
Director: Robert Wiene
Gelatin silver print
Austrian Theatre Museum

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (German: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari) is a 1920 German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Considered the quintessential work of German Expressionist cinema, it tells the story of an insane hypnotist (Werner Krauss) who uses a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt) to commit murders. The film features a dark and twisted visual style, with sharp-pointed forms, oblique and curving lines, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, and shadows and streaks of light painted directly onto the sets…

The film presents themes on brutal and irrational authority; Dr. Caligari represents the German war government, and Cesare is symbolic of the common man conditioned, like soldiers, to kill. In his influential book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer says the film reflects a subconscious need in German society for a tyrant, and it is an example of Germany’s obedience to authority and unwillingness to rebel against deranged authority. He says the film is a premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and says the addition of the frame story turns an otherwise “revolutionary” film into a “conformist” one. Other themes of the film include the destabilised contrast between insanity and sanity, the subjective perception of reality, and the duality of human nature.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari poster (1919)

Sam Shaw
Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch
1954
Director: Billy Wilder
Gelatin silver print
© Sam Shaw Inc.- licensed by Shaw Family Archives, Private collection

Sam Shaw
Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch (detail)
1954
Director: Billy Wilder
Gelatin silver print
© Sam Shaw Inc.- licensed by Shaw Family Archives, Private collection

Auteur pictures

The European auteur cinema of the 1950s and 1960s produced films outside the rigid studio system that had been the rule until then. Formal means such as editing and montage were used in an experimental way, and handy cameras made the shooting process more spontaneous. The changes in the production of films went hand in hand with new conditions for still photographers. As the photographers did not belong to the staff of the companies’ promotion departments like their US colleagues, most of their names are known. Whereas Hollywood photographers relied on large-format plate cameras, small-format cameras were used in Europe during the shooting of the film or directly before or after it. This resulted in spontaneous snapshots alongside traditional tableau-like stills. In the wake of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moment, the constitutive act lay in the choice of the right moment. Still photographers such as Raymond Cauchetier and Angelo Novi had already tested this approach as photojournalists in reportages and documentaries before they started working on the set.

Georges Pierre
Anna Karina in Pierrot le fou
1965
Director: Jean Luc Godard
Gelatin silver print
Private collection
© Georges Pierre

Poster for La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) 1959

Pierluigi Praturlon
Anita Ekberg as Sylvia in La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life)
1959
Director: Federico Fellini
Gelatin silver print
Private Collection

La Dolce Vita (Italian for “the sweet life” or “the good life”) is a 1960 Italian comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini, a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the “sweet life” of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar for Best Costumes, and remains one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.

Based on the most common interpretation of the storyline, the film can be divided into a prologue, seven major episodes interrupted by an intermezzo, and an epilogue. If the evenings of each episode were joined with the morning of the respective preceding episode together as a day, they would form seven consecutive days, which may not necessarily be the case.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Hans Natge

Born in Berlin, Hans Natge began his career as a theatre photographer. In the 1920s, he turned to still photography. Taking pictures of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Faust (1926), he came to test a new photographic approach which he called “snapshot photography,” which was to revolutionise the tradition of static and artificial film stills. Using small-format cameras and doing without additional light, Natge photographed during the shooting of the film right next to the cameraman, which permitted him to produce spontaneous and dynamic pictures. As this form of still photography still resulted in blurred pictures and sometimes captured the actors to their disadvantage at that time, Natge also took conventional stills in the case of Faust.

Hans Natge
Still from the film Faust
1926
Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Gelatin silver print

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Feb

Exhibitions: ‘The Rebellious Image: Kreuzberg’s “Werkstatt für Photographie” and the Young Folkwang Scene in the 1980s’ at Museum Folkwang Essen / ‘Kreuzberg – Amerika: Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86’ at C/O Berlin, Germany

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: American, american photographers, Andreas Gursky, Berlin, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, time and works on paper
Tags: 1970s colour photography, 1970s German photography, 1980s German photography, amateur photography, And Suddenly this Expanse, Andreas Gursky, Andreas Gursky Düsseldorf Terrace, Andreas Horlitz, Andreas Horlitz Essen Frühling, Andreas Horlitz Essen Spring, anti-aesthetics of amateur photography, artistic photography, Berlin Werkstatt für Photographie, Bill Eggleston, C/O Berlin, C/O Berlin Kreuzberg - Amerika, Camera Austria, Camera Nr. 8, Camera Nr. 8 August 1970, Christa Mayer, Christa Mayer Portraits aus einer psychatrischen Langzeitstation, Christa Mayer Portraits from a psychiatric long term station, Christa Mayer Untitled 1982, city landscapes, colour photography, Düsseldorf Terrace, documenta 6, documentary photography, Dusseldorf School, Essen Frühling, Essen Spring, Floating Chair, Folkwang Scene, Galerie Nagel, Galerie Wilde, Gelsenkirchen, German art, German Contemporary Photography Award, german photographer, German photography, germany, GHS Essen, Gosbert Adler, Gosbert Adler Ohne Titel, Gosbert Adler Untitled 1982, Joachim Brohm, Joachim Brohm Parking area Nienhausen, Joachim Brohm Revierpark Nienhausen Gelsenkirchen, Kreuzberg, Kreuzberg - Amerika, Kreuzberg's "Werkstatt für Photographie", Larry Clark Tulsa, Larry Clark Untitled, Larry Fink, Larry Fink New York Magazine Party, Larry Fink Peter Beard and friends, Larry Fink Social Graces, Lichttropfen, Müller-/Ecke Seestraße, Medebach, Memphis, Michael Schmidt, Michael Schmidt Müller-/Ecke Seestraße, Michael Schmidt Untitled from "Portrait", Museum Folkwang, New Photography, New Topographics, New York Magazine Party, Otto Steinerts, Parking area Nienhausen Gelsenkirchen, Peter Beard, Peter Beard and friends, Petra Wittmar, Petra Wittmar Medebach, portraits, Portraits aus einer psychatrischen Langzeitstation, Portraits from a psychiatric long term station, postmodern conception of reality, Reining in the picture, Reste Des Authentischen, Reste Des Authentischen: Deutsche Fotobilder der 80er Jahre, Revierpark Nienhausen Gelsenkirchen, Social Graces, Spectrum Photogalerie, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Sprengel Museum Hannover And Suddenly this Expanse, Stadtlandschaften, Stipendium Für Zeitgenössische Deutsche Fotografie, The Rebellious Image, The Rebellious Image: Kreuzberg's "Werkstatt für Photographie" and the Young Folkwang Scene in the 1980, The Remains of Authenticity, The Remains of Authenticity: German Photography in the 80s, topographic photography, urbanity, urbanity and youth culture, Ursula Kelm, Ursula Kelm Self portrait 4, Uschi Blume, Uschi Blume What are you waiting for?, Uschi Blume Worauf wartest Du?, Ute Eskildsen, Volker Heinze, Volker Heinze Bill Eggleston, Wendelin Bottländer, Wendelin Bottländer City landscapes, Wendelin Bottländer Stadtlandschaften, Wendelin Bottländer Untitled 1980, Werkstatt für Photographie, Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-1986, West German photography, What are you waiting for?, Whitehaven Mississippi, William Eggleston, William Eggleston Memphis, William Eggleston Whitehaven Mississippi, Wilmar Koenig, Wilmar Koenig Floating Chair, Wilmar Koenig Portraits, Wolfgang Eilmes, Wolfgang Eilmes Kreuzberg, Worauf wartest Du?, Workshop for Photography, Workshop for Photography 1976-1986, Young Folkwang Scene in the 1980s, youth culture

Museum Folkwang Essen exhibition dates: 9th December 2016 – 19th February 2017
C/O Berlin exhibition dates: 10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

It’s so good to see these essential, vital, rebellious images from Germany as a counterpoint and “additional chapter to the history of West German photography of the time beyond that of the Düsseldorf School,” ie. the New Objectivity of Bernd and Hilla Becher with their austere “images of the water towers, oil refineries and silos of the fast-disappearing industrial landscape of the Ruhr valley.”

“A special artistic approach emerged from a dialog between renowned photographers and amateurs, between conceptual approaches and documentary narrations, between technical mediation and substantive critique and altered the styles of many photographers over time thanks to its direct access to their reality.”

I love the rawness and directness of these images. They speak to me through their colour, high contrast, frontality and narrative. A conversation in art and life from people around the world.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to Museum Folkwang Essen and C/O Berlin for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs from The Rebellious Image exhibition unless it states differently underneath the photograph.

Uschi Blume
From the series Worauf wartest Du? (What are you waiting for?)
1980
Silver gelatine print
27.3 x 40.3 cm
Museum Folkwang, Essen
© Uschi Blume

Michael Schmidt
Untitled, from the series Portrait
1983
© Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst, Archiv Michael Schmidt

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Michael Schmidt
Menschenbilder Ausschnite
1983/97
© Stiftung für Fotografie und Medienkunst, Archiv Michael Schmidt

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Larry Fink
Peter Beard and friends
1976
From the series Black Tie
Gelatin silver print
35.8 x 36.4 cm
© Larry Fink

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Michael Schmidt
Müller-/Ecke Seestraße
1976-1978
from the series Berlin-Wedding
1979
© Foundation for Photography and Media Art with Archive Michael Schmidt

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Wendelin Bottländer
Untitled
1980
From the series Stadtlandschaften (City landscapes)
C-Print
24 x 30.2 cm
Courtesy of the artist
© Wendelin Bottländer

The exhibition The Rebellious Image (December 9, 2016 – February 19, 2017) – part of the three-part collaborative project Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-1986 , held in association with C/O Berlin and Sprengel Museum Hannover – sheds light on this period of upheaval and generational change within German photography, focusing on the photography scene in Essen.

Towards the end of the 1970s, two developments took place in Essen: the first was a revolt, a search for a new path, for a ‘free’ form of artistic photography beyond the confines of photojournalism and commercial photography; the second was the institutionalisation of photography which occurred with the foundation of the Museum Folkwang’s Photographic Collection. Some 300 photographs and a range of filmic statements and documentary material help to bring this era of change and flux in the medium of photography back to life: showing the evolution of new visual languages which – in contrast to the Düsseldorf School’s aesthetics of distance ‘ placed an emphasis on colour, soft-focus blurring and fragmentation.

The show sets out from the climate of uncertainty that developed in the wake of the death of Otto Steinert in 1978, who, as a photographer, teacher and curator, had been particularly influential in Essen in the field of photojournalism. In the area of teaching, photographic design began to come to the fore, while with the founding of the Photographic Collection at Museum Folkwang under Ute Eskildsen, the institutionalisation of artistic photography began. Young students – among them, Gosbert Adler, Joachim Brohm, Uschi Blume, Andreas Horlitz and Petra Wittmar – developed a form of photography that was divorced from typical clichés and commercial utility. The impulse behind this development was provided by the Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt. In 1979 and 1980, he taught in Essen and fostered a close dialogue with the Berlin and American scenes.

Over seven chapters, The Rebellious Image traces the development of photography in the 1980s in Germany: the show presents the early alternative exhibitions of these young photographers and provides an insight into the formative projects of the first recipients of the Stipendium Für Zeitgenössische Deutsche Fotografie (German Contemporary Photography Award) awarded by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung. It shows how these young photographic artists refined topographic and documentary photography through their work with colour and their deliberate adoption of the anti-aesthetics of amateur photography. The Rebellious Image reflects on the debates and themes of the exhibition Reste Des Authentischen: Deutsche Fotobilder der 80er Jahre (The Remains of Authenticity: German Photography in the 80s). The largest and most ambitious photographic exhibition of this era, it took place in 1986 at the Museum Folkwang. This exhibition brought together representatives of the Berlin Werkstatt für Photographie, graduates of the Essen School and artists from the Rhineland who were united by their postmodern conception of reality. As such, The Rebellious Image presents a different, subjective perspective, which developed parallel to the objectivising style of the Düsseldorf School and their aesthetic of the large-format images.

The exhibition brings together important and rarely exhibited groups of works by former students in Essen such as Gosbert Adler, Volker Heinze, Joachim Brohm, Uschi Blume, Andreas Horlitz and Petra Wittmar. References to the American photography of the time – such as Stephen Shore, Larry Fink, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark or William Eggleston – make the preoccupations of this young scene apparent. In addition, with works by Michael Schmidt, Christa Mayer and Wilmar Koenig, members of the Berlin Werkstatt für Photographie are also represented.”

Press release from Museum Folkwang Essen

C/O Berlin is presenting the exhibition Kreuzberg – Amerika from December 10th, 2016 to February 12th, 2017. The exhibition is part of the project about the Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-1986, in which C/O Berlin, the Museum Folkwang Essen and the Sprengel Museum Hannover are presenting the history, influences and effects of the legendary Berlin-based photographic institute and its key players in an intercity cooperation.

“We try to help students to recognise or even find their personality, where photography becomes irrelevant with regard to its commercial applicability.” – Michael Schmidt, 1979

Starting in the 1970s, a unique departure in photography took place in Germany. A younger generation in various initiatives quickly established a new infrastructure for a different perspective on photography and consciously defined the medium as an independent art form – to this very day. The Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography), founded in Berlin by Michael Schmidt in 1976, is one of these innovative models and as an institution was completely unique. That’s because it offered an openly accessible cultural production and intensified adult education beyond academic hurdles and without access limitations. A special artistic approach emerged from the unconventional dialog between renowned photographers and amateurs, between technical mediation and substantive critique as well as on the basis of documentary approaches. Its special access to reality defined styles for a long time. The Werkstatt für Photographie reached the international level through exhibitions, workshops and courses and established itself as an important location for the transatlantic photographic dialog between Kreuzberg, Germany and America. A unique and pioneering achievement!

In the beginning of the Werkstatt für Photographie, a strict documentary perspective prevailed that was based on the neutral aesthetic of the work of Michael Schmidt and concentrated on the blunt representation of everyday life and reality in a radical denial of common photographic norms. He and the young photographer scene later experimented with new forms of documentary that emphasised the subjective view of the author. They discovered colour as an artistic form of expression and developed an independent, artistic authorship with largely unconventional perspectives.

The Werkstatt für Photographie offered anyone who was interested a free space to develop their artistic talents. In addition to its open, international and communicative character, it was also a successful model for self-empowerment that at the same time was characterised by paradoxes. That‘s because the vocational school set in the local community developed into a lively international network of contemporary photographers. The students were not trained photographers but rather self-taught artists and as such had a freer understanding of the medium than their professional counterparts. Moreover, the majority of teachers had no educational training but were all active in the context of adult education. At that time, there were also no curators for photography in Germany but the Werkstatt für Photographie were already independently hosting exhibitions alternating between unknown and renowned photographers…

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Werkstatt für Photographie, C/O Berlin, the Museum Folkwang Essen and the Sprengel Museum Hannover are presenting a joint exhibition project, which for the first time portrays the history, influences and effects of this institution and its key players divided between three stages. Furthermore, the three stages outline the situation of a changing medium, which focuses on independent, artistic authorship encouraged by consciousness of American photography. As such, they’re designing a lively and multi-perspective presentation of photography in the 1970s and 1980s that adds an additional chapter to the history of West German photography of the time beyond that of the Düsseldorf School.

Text from the C/O Berlin website

Andreas Gursky
Düsseldorf, Terrace
1980
C-Print
43.2 x 49.4 cm
© Andreas Gursky, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017
Courtesy of the artist + Sprüth Magers

Joachim Brohm
Revierpark Nienhausen, Gelsenkirchen
Parking area Nienhausen, Gelsenkirchen
1982
From the series Ruhr, 1980-83
C-Print
22.2 x 27.2 cm
© Joachim Brohm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

Reining in the picture
Joachim Brohm

Born in Dülken, Brohm studied at the Gesamthochschule, Essen and was one of the few photographers who used colour photography in the late 1970s. In his series Ruhr he tries to create a new view of the Ruhr area through the occasional recording of urban space. Brohm’s approach coincides with the claim of the then current “New Topographics” to capture the social reality in the direct environment in a documentary style. In the German-speaking photo landscape here he took a leading role.

Larry Fink
New York Magazine Party, New York City, October 1977
1977
From the series Social Graces
1984 © Larry Fink

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Wilmar Koenig
Floating Chair
1984
From the series Die Wege (The Ways)
C-Print
162 x 126.8 cm
Courtesy Berlinische Galerie, Berlin
© Wilmar Koenig

“The working-class district of Kreuzberg at the end of the 1970s on the outer edge of West Berlin – and yet the lively center of a unique transatlantic cultural exchange. In the midst of the Cold War, the newly founded Werkstatt für Photographie (Workshop for Photography) located near Checkpoint Charlie started an artistic “air lift” in the direction of the USA, a democratic field of experimentation beyond traditional education and political and institutional standards. A special artistic approach emerged from a dialog between renowned photographers and amateurs, between conceptual approaches and documentary narrations, between technical mediation and substantive critique and altered the styles of many photographers over time thanks to its direct access to their reality. The Werkstatt für Photographie reached the highest international standing with its intensive mediation work through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, image reviews, discussions and specialized courses.

In 1976, the Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt founded the Werkstatt für Photographie at the adult education center in Kreuzberg. Its course orientation with a focus on a substantive examination of contemporary photography was unique and quickly lead to a profound understanding of the medium as an independent art form. When the institution was closed in 1986, it fell into obscurity.

C/O Berlin is addressing the history of the Werkstatt für Photographie in its contribution entitled Kreuzberg – Amerika (December 10, 2016 – February 12, 2017). Within the context of adult education, a unique forum for contemporary photography emerged. A special focus is placed on the exhibitions of the American photographers that were often presented in the workshop for the first time and had an enormous effect on the development of artistic photography in Germany. The exhibition combines the works of faculty, students and guests into a transatlantic dialogue.

The Museum Folkwang in Essen is exploring the reflection of the general change of those years in its own Folkwang history with its work entitled The Rebellious Image (December 9, 2016 – February 19, 2017). After the death of the influential photography teacher Otto Steinerts in 1978, a completely open and productive situation of uncertainty reigned. Essen became more and more of a bridgehead for the exchange with Berlin and a point of crystallization for early contemporary photography in the Federal Republic. Along with Michael Schmidt, who made provocative points during his time as a lecturer at the GHS Essen, Ute Eskildsen counted among the key players at Museum Folkwang as a curator. Early photography based in Essen addressed urbanity and youth culture, discovered color as a mode of artistic expression, asked questions following new documentarian approaches, authentic images and attitudes and contrasted the objective distance of the Düsseldorf School with a research-based and subjective view.

The Sprengel Museum Hannover complements both exhibitions with a perspective in which the focus rests on publications, institutions and exhibitions that encouraged the transatlantic exchange starting in the mid 1960s. Using outstanding examples And Suddenly this Expanse (December 11, 2016 – March 19, 2017) tells of the development of the infrastructure that laid the foundation for and accompanied the context of the documentarian approach. The photo magazine Camera also takes on an equally central role as the founding of the first German photo galleries such as Galerie Wilde in Cologne, Lichttropfen in Aachen, Galerie Nagel in Berlin and the Spectrum Photogalerie initiative in Hanover. The documenta 6 from 1977 and the photo magazines that emerged in the 1970s, particularly Camera Austria, have separate chapters devoted to them.

Werkstatt für Photographie 1976 – 1986
A cooperation between C/O Berlin, Museum Folkwang, Essen, and Sprengel Museum Hannover

Sprengel Museum Hannover
And Suddenly this Expanse
December 11, 2016 – March 19, 2017
www.sprengel-museum.de

C/O Berlin
Kreuzberg – Amerika
Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
December 10, 2016 – February 12, 2017
www.co-berlin.org

Text from the Museum Folkwang Essen website

Larry Clark
Untitled
1971
From the series Tulsa
Silver gelatin print
© Larry Clark, Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th Dezember 2016 – 12th February 2017

Camera Nr. 8, August 1970
1970
C. J. Bucher Verlag Luzern, Schweiz,
Title: John Gossage, Kodak TRI-X
Sprengel Museum Hannover

From the exhibition at Sprengel Museum Hannover And Suddenly this Expanse
December 11, 2016 – March 19, 2017

Christa Mayer
Untitled
1983
From the series Porträts aus einer psychatrischen Langzeitstation/Porträts auf einer Station für psychisch Kranke (Portraits from a long term psychiatric facility)
Gelatin silver print
28.3 x 28.1 cm
© Christa Mayer, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017

From the exhibition at C/O Berlin Kreuzberg – Amerika
Die Berliner Werkstatt für Photographie 1976-86
10th Dezember 2016 – 12th February 2017

Museum Folkwang
Museumsplatz 1, 45128 Essen

Opening hours:
Tue, Wed 10am – 6pm
Thur, Fri 10am – 8pm
Sat, Sun 10am – 6pm
Mon closed

Museum Folkwang website

C/O Berlin
Hardenbergstraße 22-24, 10623 Berlin

Opening hours:
Daily 11 am – 8 pm

C/O Berlin website

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Apr

Exhibitions: ‘Werner Bischof: Point of View’ and ‘Helvetica’ at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne

By Dr Marcus Bunyan Leave a Comment

Categories: beauty, Berlin, black and white photography, colour photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, fashion photography, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, photographic series, photography, photojournalism, portrait, psychological, reality, space, street photography, surrealism, time and works on paper
Tags: A pleasant sleeping, Aerial view of New York City, Brandenburg Gate Berlin, Breast with grid, Courtyard of the Meiji shrine, Courtyard of the Meiji shrine Tokyo, Demonstration on the Piazza del Duomo, Du magazine, Enfants des rues, Famine stricken area, Famine stricken area State of Bihar, Harbour of Kowloon, Harbour of Kowloon Hong Kong, Helvetica, LIFE Magazine, magnum photos, On the road to Cuzco, On the road to Cuzco Valle Sagrado, Penguins of Edinburgh Zoo on a walk, Stallion Remus, Street children, Swiss photographer, Swiss photography, The Swiss Worker at the steelworks of Winterthur, Valle Sagrado, Werner Bischof, Werner Bischof A pleasant sleeping, Werner Bischof Aerial view of New York City, Werner Bischof Americana USA, Werner Bischof Army Boot, Werner Bischof Brandenburg Gate, Werner Bischof Breast with grid, Werner Bischof Courtyard of the Meiji shrine, Werner Bischof Demonstration on the Piazza del Duomo, Werner Bischof Enfants des rues, Werner Bischof Famine stricken area, Werner Bischof Harbour of Kowloon, Werner Bischof Helvetica, Werner Bischof Oak Tree, Werner Bischof On the road to Cuzco, Werner Bischof Penguins of Edinburgh Zoo on a walk, Werner Bischof Plants, Werner Bischof Point of View, Werner Bischof Stallion Remus, Werner Bischof Streams, Werner Bischof Street children, Werner Bischof The Swiss Worker at the steelworks of Winterthur, Werner Bischof Zebra Woman, Zebra Woman

Exhibition dates: 27th January – 1st May 2016

Curators: Marco Bischof, Werner Bischof Estate, for the exhibition Point of View and Daniel Girardin, Musée de l’Elysée, for the exhibition Helvetica.

After seven years of constructing this website, finally I can talk about an exhibition on one of my favourite humanist/social documentary photographers. This fact alone shows how rare it is to get to see his photographs in an exhibition, let alone display them online, such is the control that agencies have over the artist’s work.

Personally, I prefer the earlier, more avant-garde work around the time of the Second World War which has more bite, more of a cutting edge. But then again how can you argue against the sheer beauty and formalism of Harbour of Kowloon (1952, below) or the “atmosphere” of that wondrous photograph Courtyard of the Meiji shrine (below) where the snow has been falling since 1951. I remember starting out as an artist, seeing this image and staring in disbelief at this vision.

Perhaps that is a good metaphor for Bischof’s work: that of a visionary, for you never sense the presence of the photographer in his work (unless he wants you to!) but always know that it is a Bischof photograph. The photographs are almost ego-less, which is one reason I suppose that they are so damn good. The artist gets physically close to the subject matter (as in Stallion Remus, 1944 and On the road to Cuzco, 1954) and then lets the subject reveal itself. This is such an art, to be present and absent in the work at the same time.

It is a great sadness that Bischof died so young (at age 38, when the jeep in which he was travelling plunged off a cliff in the area of Peña de Águila, in the Peruvian Andes) and that the work of such a sympathetic photographer is not as well known as the work of that other Swiss photographer, Robert Frank. Bischof’s work lives and breathes in the top echelons of photography but somehow, you never hear of him. In my humble opinion, one of the great photographers of all time.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to the Musée de l’Elysée for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Werner Bischof, Point de vue et Helvetica

Installation views of the exhibition Werner Bischof: Point of View and Helvetica at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne
Photo: © Yannick Lüthy / Musée de l’Elysée

Werner Bischof (1916 – 1954)
Demonstration on the Piazza del Duomo
Milan, Italy, 1946
© Werner Bischof / Magnum Photos

Werner Bischof (1916 – 1954)
Army Boot
Zurich, Switzerland, c. 1941
© Werner Bischof/Magnum Photos
From the exhibition Helvetica

To mark the centenary of the birth of Swiss photographer Werner Bischof (1916-1954), the Musée de l’Elysée is presenting a retrospective of his work entitled Point of View, produced by Magnum Photos (Paris). The exhibition offers almost 200 original and sometimes unpublished prints selected from the Werner Bischof Estate (Zurich). The exhibition will also display contact sheets, books, magazines and private letters. Several projections will give a contemporary approach to his work. The exhibition will present his work in Switzerland (1934-1944), Europe (1945-1950), Asia (1951-1952), and North and South America (1953-1954).

A second exhibition, produced by the Musée de l’Elysée and entitled Helvetica focuses exclusively on Bischof’s Swiss years, the period of training, studio work fashion and advertising and then the war years in Switzerland during which he became a press photographer working for the magazine DU. The exhibition Helvetica is the subject of the first publication of the “Collection – Musée de l’Elysée”.

Text from the Musée de l’Elysée website

“The Swiss genius is an exceptional photographer possessing tremendous technical knowledge and experience for his age (he’s only 32 years old), being able to make great pictures, both inside studio (a sphere in which she gets superb results thanks to his lighting mastery, the control on the depth of field, etc) and with persons in outdoor assignments, where by means of his great humanistic sensitiveness, intuition, precision in the timing on pressing the release shutter button of his cameras, outstanding grasping to capture the most representative moments and passion for his trade, also creates very powerful and meaningful images once and again, taking care of the most minute details, even when working under the most extreme contexts, since he’s a great perfectionist… Throughout all of his career as a professional photographer, Bischof proved to be an accomplished master of medium format made using a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 (6 x 6 cm) Rolleiflex medium format cameras. He also used a rangefinder 35 mm Leica IIIc camera with Leitz Elmar 5 cm f/3.5 lens with which he likewise got great photographs.”

Extract from José Manuel Serrano Esparza. “Werner Bischof: A Master of Photography whose work goes on being very alive,” 23rd July 2013 [Online] Cited 07/04/2016.

“Another timeless photographic icon in which stands out the lavish level of detail in the garment of the boy and his typical hat, along with the intricate texture of the sack he is wearing on his back, the impression of volume of his right hand, the fibrous musculature in his calves, the soft bokeh in the mountainous area which can be seen in the background and above all a millenary synergy between man and nature that Werner Bischof realized was endangered.” – José Manuel Serrano Esparza

“Bischof creates a kind of living landscape highlighted by its unmatched formal and compositive precision, masterfully using the natural light, obtaining plentiful details and exceedingly delicate transitions and hues of gray scales, exploiting the capacities of square medium format to the utmost. The very pure whites of the snow on the ground, the temple roof and the tree tops are likewise worth being mentioned.” – José Manuel Serrano Esparza

The Musée de l’Elysée
18, avenue de l’Elysée
CH - 1014 Lausanne
T: + 41 21 316 99 11

Opening hours:
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Closed Monday, except for bank holidays

The Musée de l’Elysée website

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Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Études’ 1994

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: 'Études' 1994

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Dr Marcus Bunyan

Dr Marcus Bunyan is an Australian artist and writer. His work explores the boundaries of identity and place. He writes the Art Blart blog which reviews exhibitions in Melbourne, Australia and posts exhibitions from around the world. He has a Dr of Philosophy from RMIT University, Melbourne and is currently studying a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne.

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Archive for the 'Berlin' Category

Exhibition dates: 23rd June – 15th October 2017

Writing sociology: picturing an uncertain cultural landscape

Exhibition dates: 10th March – 5th June 2017

The work of Jan Coplans left and centre

Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures at right

Beginnings

Expressive Gestures

Bodies as Photographic Material

Wall texts

Motion Studies

Models for Artists

Dance

Picture Stories

Portraits of Actresses and Actors

Actionist Stagings of the Body

Exhibition dates: 12th February – 18th June 2017

New vision

About the artist

Exhibition dates: 10th November 2016 – 7th May 2017

Portraits

Experiments

Bodies

Documents

Objects, Perspectives, Abstractions

Exhibition dates: 4th November 2016 – 26th February 2017

For the Media and the Press

Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity

Film Stills at the Interface to Fine Art

Wall texts

Advertising pictures

Star portraits

Artistic pictures

Intermediate pictures

Meta-pictures

Key pictures

Auteur pictures

Hans Natge

Museum Folkwang Essen exhibition dates: 9th December 2016 – 19th February 2017 C/O Berlin exhibition dates: 10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017

Exhibition dates: 27th January – 1st May 2016

Marcus Bunyan black and white archive: ‘Études’ 1994

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Museum Folkwang Essen exhibition dates: 9th December 2016 – 19th February 2017
C/O Berlin exhibition dates: 10th December 2016 – 12th February 2017