I loved putting the Florence Henri and the skull together. Too exhausted after a long day at work to say much else!
Marcus
Many thankx to Museum Bellerive for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
In 1930 Stern and Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach founded ringl+pit, a critically acclaimed, prize-winning Berlin based photography and design studio. They used equipment purchased from Peterhans and became well known for innovative work in advertising. The name ringl+pit is from their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen).
Intermittently between April 1930 and March 1933, Stern continued her studies with Peterhans at the Bauhaus photography workshop in Dessau, where she met the Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola. In 1933 the political climate of Nazi Germany led her to emigrate with her brother to England, where Stern set up a new studio, soon to resume her collaboration there with Auerbach.
Stern first traveled to Argentina in the company of her new husband, Horacio Coppola in 1935. The newlyweds mounted an exhibition in Buenos Aires at Sur magazine, which according to the magazine, was the first modern photography exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, she became a citizen of Argentina.
In 1948 Stern began working for Idilio, an illustrated women’s magazine, targeted specifically at lower / lower-middle class women. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stern created Los Sueños as illustrations for the woman’s magazine Idilio and its column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (Psychoanalysis Will Help You). Readers were encouraged to submit their dreams to be analysed by the ‘experts’ as an aid for its readers to find “self-knowledge and self-aid that would help them succeed in love, family and work”. Each week, one dream would be selected, analysed in depth by the expert, Richard Rest, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. Stern’s photomontages are surreal interpretations of the readers’ dreams that often subtly pushed back on the traditional values and concepts in Idilio magazine by inserting feminist critique of Argentinian gender roles and the psychoanalytic project in her images. The Idilio series has often been compared to Francisco Goya’s Sueños drawings, a series of preliminary drawings for his later body of work, Los Caprichos; they have also been directly compared to Los Caprichos themselves.
Stern provided photographs for the magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959 and continued to teach until 1985.
In 1985, she retired from photography, but lived another 14 years until 1999, dying in Buenos Aires on 24 December at the age of 95.
Avant-garde photographs seem like pictures from a dream world. From new kinds of compositions and perspectives to photomontage, technical experiments, and staged scenes, Real Surreal offers a chance to rediscover the range and multifacetedness of photography between the real and the surreal. The exhibition leads the visitor through the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in Germany, Surrealism in France, and the avant-garde in Prague. Thanks to rare original prints from renowned photographers between 1920 and 1950, this exhibition offers a chance to see these works in a new light. In addition to some 220 photographs, a selection of historical photography books and magazines as well as rare artists’ books allow visitors to immerse themselves in this new view of the world. Furthermore, examples of films attest to the fruitful exchanges between avant-garde photography and cinema during this time.
An exhibition in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Artistic polymath Herbert Bayer was one of the Bauhaus’s most influential students, teachers, and proponents, advocating the integration of all arts throughout his career. Bayer began his studies as an architect in 1919 in Darmstadt. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting with Vasily Kandinsky and typography, creating the Universal alphabet, a typeface consisting of only lowercase letters that would become the signature font of the Bauhaus. Bayer returned to the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928 (moving in 1926 to Dessau, its second location), working as a teacher of advertising, design, and typography, integrating photographs into graphic compositions.
He began making his own photographs in 1928, after leaving the Bauhaus; however, in his years as a teacher the school was a fertile ground for the New Vision photography passionately promoted by his close colleague László Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy’s students, and his Bauhaus publication Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, photography, film). Most of Bayer’s photographs come from the decade 1928-38, when he was based in Berlin working as a commercial artist. They represent his broad approach to art, including graphic views of architecture and carefully crafted montages.
In 1938 Bayer emigrated to the United States with an invitation from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, to apply his theories of display to the installation of the exhibition Bauhaus: 1919-28 (1938) at MoMA. Bayer developed this role through close collaboration with Edward Steichen, head of the young Department of Photography, designing the show Road to Victory (1942), which would set the course for Steichen’s influential approach to photography exhibition. Bayer remained in America working as a graphic designer for the remainder of his career.
Introduction by Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, 2014 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 01/10/2021.
Genia Rubin (actually Jewgeni Germanowitsch Rubin, 1906-2001) was a Russian fashion and portrait photographer and painter .
Rubin left Russia in 1927 and initially assisted the cameraman Karl Freund in Berlin. He then studied photography at AGFA IG Farben. In 1929 Rubin went to Paris, where he worked as a still photographer in the Pathé film studios and as a portrait photographer. In 1931 he returned to Berlin, met the photographer Rolf Mahrenholz and opened his own photo studio on Berlin’s splendid boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm. It was soon discovered and launched by Franz Wolfgang Koebner, editor-in-chief of the popular magazines Das Magazin and Elegante Welt. In 1935 Rubin moved back to Paris, where he met Harry Ossip Meerson; after his departure for America Meerrson took over his studio. During this time Rubin photographed fashion for “Femina”, Harper’s Bazaar and Australian “The Home”. After the war he met the English court photographer Baron (Stirling Henry Nahum); until 1956 he worked alternately as a “fashion guest photographer” in “Baron’s Studios” in London and as a Parisian photo correspondent for the Daily Express.
Rubin had started to paint in Paris at this time. Through his acquaintance with André Breton, for example, he came into contact with contemporary painting in Paris and was among other things. In 1947 he took part in the international surrealist exhibition at the Maeght Gallery .
In 1957 Rubin stopped photographing fashion and took pictures of parks, gardens, palaces and art objects in France, England and Italy for “Maison et Jardin” (“House and Garden”, Condé-Nast ). From 1959 he devoted himself again to modern painting, also as a collector.
“… Olga Solarics (1896-1969) and her husband Adorjan von Wlassics (1893-1946) ran the Manasse’ Foto-Salon in Vienna from 1922-1938. Olga seems to have been the one interested in the photographic nude. She (or they) exhibited at the 1st International Salon of Nude Photography in Paris in 1933…”
“… Studio Manasse, which flourished in the 1930s in Vienna, captured more than just portrait photography bursting with erotic charge; it immortalised the fluid state of beauty and the ‘new woman’: confident in her own sexuality as she struggled to redefine her position in the modern world. Each picture offers a conflict of concepts, as provocative poses are presented in such traditional roles that the cynicism intended renders them humorously absurd. Adorjan and Olga Wlassics, a husband-and-wife team, founded Studio Manasse in the early 1920s. The first Manasse illustrations appeared in magazines in 1924, a booming industry at the time, as the movie industry skyrocketed and publications aimed to satisfy a public obsessed with glimpses into the world of glamour. Attracting some of the leading ladies of the time from film, theatre, opera, and vaudeville, Studio Manasse created masterpieces, employing all the techniques of makeup, retouching, and overpainting to keep their subjects happy while upholding an uncompromised artistic vision. Moulded bodies were dreams with alabaster or marble-like skin; backgrounds were staged so that the photographer could control each environment. And as their art found a home, the Wlassics found themselves able to afford a style of life similar to those reflected in their photographs. Their clients ran the gamut, from the advertising agencies to private buyers. When the Wlassics opened a new studio in Berlin, their business in Vienna was managed more and more by associates, until 1937, when the firm’s name was sold to another photographer. Adorjan passed away just 10 years later; Olga remarried and died in 1969… “
Text from the Historical Ziegfeld Group website Nd [Online] Cited 20/06/2016, No longer available online
I finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time further photographs from a trip to England in 1994 forming a new sequence. The photographs picture my now ageing mother (these were taken over 20 years ago), an English fair, medieval tiles and Highgate Cemetery, among other subjects.
The image of my mother plays off against a land that is noting an absence – maybe an absence of a certain type of yang force… even the “strong draught horse” seems to come from another time.
My friend and mentor Ian Lobb said of the sequence: “Wow – that is really good Marcus”. Praise I value highly indeed.
The photographs form a sequence and should be viewed horizontally. Please click on the long small image below to see them in this format, and then click again to enlarge the images.
Unfortunately, WordPress only allows vertical presentations of images in this blog format that I am using – but I have still presented them for you to see in the posting below in horizontal form.
Please click on the first image below to see the spacing of the sequence, and click again to enlarge the sequence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) England 1994 Second sequence
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Maman 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bridge, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with graves 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) IOTA, 1893, Napoli, Cantanese Domenico, age 14 with gravestones 1994 Gelatin silver print
December 20th 1893, a mounted messenger galloped into Boscastle with news that a large ship was driving ashore, but by 4 pm the 1000-ton iron barque IOTA of Naples had crashed under the great Lye rock off Bossiney Cove. Her crew leapt for the rocks, but two fell and were crushed under the barque’s bilges, while Domenico Cantanese, aged fourteen, was swept away… Only the body of the young cabin boy was recovered from the sea, he’s buried in the windswept graveyard of St Materiana Church Tintagel, where a wooden cross and a lifebuoy bearing his name and ‘Iota, Napoli, 1893’ still marks his grave.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Esther 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Three crosses four graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Death’s pathway 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Descending 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Landscape, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Five angels 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with flowers 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tree, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Co-curators: Joel Smith, the Morgan’s Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head of Photography, and Lisa Hostetler, Curator in Charge of Photography at the Eastman Museum
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) Historic Spanish Record of the Conquest, South Side of Inscription Rock 1873 From the album Geographical Explorations and Surveys West of the 100th Meridian Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, purchase
In 1873 O’Sullivan joined Lieutenant George Wheeler’s Geographic Survey in New Mexico and Arizona. At El Morro, a sandstone promontory covered with ancient petroglyphs and historic-era inscriptions, the photographer singled out this handsomely lettered sentence to record and measure. It states: By this place passed Ensign Don Joseph de Payba Basconzelos, in the year in which he held the Council of the Kingdom at his expense, on the 18th of February, in the year 1726. Nearby, the rock record now bears another inscription that reads T. H. O’Sullivan.
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition. I wish I could see it.
While Sight Reading cuts across conventional historical and geographic divisions, with the exhibition being organised into nine “conversations” among diverse sets of works, we must always remember that these “themes” are not exclusory to each other. Photographs do cross nominally defined boundaries and themes (as defined by history and curators) so that they can become truly subversive works of art.
Photographs can form spaces called heterotopia, “a form of concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault, to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror… Foucault uses the term “heterotopia” (French: hétérotopie) to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye.”1
In photographs, there is always more than meets the eye. There is the association of the photograph to multiple places and spaces (the histories of that place and space); the imagination of the viewer and the memories they bring to any encounter with a photograph, which may change from time to time, from look to look, from viewing to viewing; and the transcendence of the photograph as it brings past time to present time as an intimation of future time. Past, present and future spacetime are conflated in the act of just looking, just being. Positioning this “‘annihilation of time and space’ as a particular moment in a dynamic cycle of rupture and recuperation enables a deliberate focus on the process of transition.”2 And that transition, Doreen Massey argues, ignores often-invisible contingencies that define spaces those relations that have an effect upon a space but are not visible within it.3
Photographs, then, form what Deleuze and Guattari call assemblages4, where the assemblage is “the processes by which various configurations of linked components function in an intersection with each other, a process that can be both productive and disruptive. Any such process involves a territorialization; there is a double movement where something accumulates meanings (re-territorialization), but does so co-extensively with a de-territorialization where the same thing is disinvested of meanings. The organization of a territory is characterized by such a double movement … An assemblage is an extension of this process, and can be thought of as constituted by an intensification of these processes around a particular site through a multiplicity of intersections of such territorializations.”5 In other words, when looking at a photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot or Timothy H. O’Sullivan today, the meaning and interpretation of the photograph could be completely different to the reading of this photograph in the era it was taken. The photograph is a site of both de-territorialization and re-territorialization – it both gains and looses meaning at one and the same time, depending on who is looking at it, from what time and from what point of view.
Photographs propose that there are many heterotopias in the world, many transitions and intersections, many meanings lost and found, not only as spaces with several places of/for the affirmation of difference, but also as a means of escape from authoritarianism and repression. We must remember these ideas as we looking at the photographs in this exhibition.
2/ McQuire, Scott. The Media City. London: Sage Publications, 2008, p. 14.
3/ Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 5 in Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, pp. 163-164.
4/ Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolisand London: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987.
5/ Wood, Aylish. “Fresh Kill: Information technologies as sites of resistance,” in Munt, Sally (ed.,). Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001, p.166
Many thankx to the Morgan Library & Museum for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World exhibition sections
As its name declares, photography is a means of writing with light. Photographs both show and tell, and they speak an extraordinary range of dialects.
Beginning February 19 the Morgan Library & Museum explores the history of the medium as a lucid, literate – but not always literal – tool of persuasion in a new exhibition, Sight Reading: Photography and the Legible World. A collaboration with the George Eastman Museum of Film and Photography, the show features more than eighty works from the 1840s to the present and reveals the many ways the camera can transmit not only the outward appearance of its subject but also narratives, arguments, and ideas. The show is on view through May 30.
Over the past 175 years, photography has been adopted by, and adapted to, countless fields of endeavour, from art to zoology and from fashion to warfare. Sight Reading features a broad range of material – pioneering x-rays and aerial views, artefacts of early photojournalism, and recent examples of conceptual art – organised into groupings that accentuate the variety and suppleness of photography as a procedure. In 1936, artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) defined “the illiterate of the future” as someone “ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.” The JPEG and the “Send” button were decades away, but Moholy-Nagy was not the first observer to argue that photography belonged to the arts of commentary and persuasion. As the modes and motives of camera imagery have multiplied, viewers have continually learned new ways to read the information, and assess the argument, embodied in a photograph.
“Traditional narratives can be found throughout the Morgan’s collections, especially in its literary holdings,” said Colin B. Bailey, director of the Morgan. “Sight Reading encourages us to use a critical eye to read and discover the stories that unfold through the camera lens and photography, a distinctly modern, visual language. We are thrilled to collaborate with the Eastman Museum, and together unravel a rich narrative, which exemplifies photography’s deep involvement in the stories of modern art, science, and the printed page.”
The exhibition
Sight Reading cuts across conventional historical and geographic divisions. Featuring work by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), John Heartfield (1891-1968), Lewis Hine (1874-1940), Harold Edgerton (1903-1990), John Baldessari (1931-2020), Sophie Calle (b. 1953), and Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931-2007; 1934-2015), among many others, the exhibition is organised into nine “conversations” among diverse sets of works.
I. The Camera Takes Stock
Photography’s practical functions include recording inventory, capturing data imperceptible to the human eye, and documenting historical events. In the first photographically illustrated publication, The Pencil of Nature (1845), William Henry Fox Talbot used his image Articles of China to demonstrate that “the whole cabinet of a … collector … might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way.” Should the photographed collection suffer damage or theft, Talbot speculated, “the mute testimony of the picture … would certainly be evidence of a novel kind” before the law.
A century later, Harold Edgerton, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used the pulsing light of a stroboscope to record states of matter too fleeting for the naked eye. Gun Toss, an undated image of a spinning pistol, is not a multiple exposure: the camera shutter opened and closed just once. But during that fraction of a second, seven bright flashes of light committed to film a seven-episode history of the gun’s trajectory through space.
William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877) Articles of China c. 1843, printed c. 1845 Salted paper print from calotype negative Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
In The Pencil of Nature (1845), the first photographically illustrated publication, Talbot used Articles of China to demonstrate that “the whole cabinet of a … collector … might be depicted on paper in little more time than it would take him to make a written inventory describing it in the usual way.” Should the collection suffer damage or theft, Talbot added, “the mute testimony of the picture … would certainly be evidence of a novel kind” before the law.
Harold Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Gun Toss 1936-1950 Gelatin silver print Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
Edgerton, an electrical engineer, used the rapidly pulsing light of a stroboscope to record states of matter too fleeting to be perceived by the naked eye. This image of a spinning pistol is not a multiple exposure: the camera shutter opened and closed just once. But during that fraction of a second, seven bright flashes of light committed to film a seven-episode history of the gun’s trajectory through space.
John Pfahl (American, 1939-2020) Wave Theory I-V, Puna Coast, Hawaii, March 1978 1978 From the series Altered Landscapes Chromogenic development (Ektacolor) process prints, 1993 George Eastman Museum, purchase
In this sequence, Pfahl twisted the conventions of photographic narrative into a perceptual puzzle. The numbered views appear to chronicle a single event: a wave breaking on the shore. Close inspection, however, reveals that the numeric caption in each scene is made of string laid on the rock in the foreground. The exposures, then, must have been made over a span of at least several minutes, not seconds – and in what order, one cannot say.
II. Crafting A Message
The camera is widely understood to be “truthful,” but what photographs “say” is a product of many procedures that follow the moment of exposure, including page layout, captioning, and cropping of the image. During World War I, military personnel learned to interpret the strange, abstract looking images of enemy territory made from airplanes. Their specialised training fundamentally altered the nature of wartime reconnaissance, even as the unusual perspective unique to aerial photography introduced a new dialect into the expanding corpus of modern visual language. An Example of an Annotated Photograph with Local Names of Trenches Inserted (1916), on view in the exhibition, shows that the tools of ground strategy soon included artificial bunkers and trenches, designed purely to fool eyes in the sky.
In László Moholy-Nagy’s photocollages of the late 1920s, figures cut out of the plates in mass market magazines appear in new configurations to convey messages of the artist’s devising. Images such as Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) (1927) propose a new kind of visual literacy for the machine age. To contemporary eyes, Moholy’s collages seem to foreshadow cut-and-paste strategies that would later characterise the visual culture of cyberspace.
László Moholy-Nagy (American born Hungary, 1895-1946) Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) 1927 Collage, pencil, and ink George Eastman Museum, Purchased with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company
To make his photocollages of the late 1920s, Moholy-Nagy cut figures out of photographs and photomechanical reproductions and arranged them into new configurations that convey messages of his own devising. By extracting the images from their original context and placing them into relationships defined by drawn shapes and volumes, he suggested a new visual literacy for the modern world. In this world – one in which images course through mass culture at a psychotic pace – a two-dimensional anatomical drawing acquires sufficient volume to cast a man’s shadow and a circle of bathing beauties cues up for a pool sharp. To contemporary eyes, the language of Moholy-Nagy’s photo collages seems to foreshadow strategies common to the visual culture of cyberspace.
Unidentified maker An Example of an Annotated Photograph with Local Names of Trenches Inserted c. 1916 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum
During World War I, aerial photography progressed from a promising technological experiment to a crucial strategic operation. As advances in optics and engineering improved the capabilities of cameras and aircraft, military personnel learned to identify topographic features and man-made structures in the images recorded from above. Such training fundamentally altered the significance and practice of wartime reconnaissance. At the same time, the unusual perspective unique to aerial photography introduced a new dialect into the expanding corpus of modern visual language.
PhotoMetric Corporation, 1942-1974 PhotoMetric Tailoring c. 1942-1948 Gelatin silver prints George Eastman Museum
In an effort to streamline the field of custom tailoring, textile entrepreneur Henry Booth devised a method for obtaining measurements by photographing customers with a special camera and angled mirrors. The system was said to be foolproof, making it possible for any sales clerk to operate it. The resulting slides were sent to the manufacturer along with the customer’s order. A tailor translated the images into physical measurements using a geometric calculator, and the company mailed the finished garment to the customer.
III. Photographs in Sequence
Photography’s debut in the late 1830s happened to coincide with the birth of the modern comic strip. Ultimately the narrative photo sequence would lead to the innovations that gave rise to cinema, another form of storytelling altogether. Exact contemporaries of one another, Eadweard J. Muybridge in the United States and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) in France both employed cameras to dissect human movement. Muybridge used a bank of cameras positioned to record a subject as it moved, tripping wires attached to the shutters. The result was a sequence of “stop-action” photographs that isolated gestures not otherwise visible in real time. Beginning in 1882, Marey pursued motion studies with a markedly different approach. In the works for which he is best known, he exposed one photographic plate multiple times at fixed intervals, recording the arc of movement in a single image.
Étienne Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) Chronophotographic study of man pole vaulting c. 1890 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Exchange with Narodni Technical Museum
Exact contemporaries, Muybridge and Marey (the former in the United States, the latter in France) both employed cameras to dissect human movement. Muybridge used a bank of cameras positioned and timed to record a subject as it moved, tripping wires attached to the shutters. The result was a sequence of “stop-action” photographs that isolated gestures not otherwise visible in real time. Beginning in 1882, Marey took a markedly different approach. In the works for which he is best known – such as the image of the man pole-vaulting – he exposed a single photographic plate multiple times at fixed intervals, recording the arc of movement in a single image. In Marey’s chronophotograph of a man on a horse, the action reads from bottom to top. The convention of arranging sequential photographic images from left to right and top to bottom, on the model of written elements on a page, was not yet firmly established.
William N. Jennings (American, b. England, 1860-1946) Notebook pages with photographs of lightning c. 1887 Gelatin silver prints mounted onto bound notepad paper George Eastman Museum, Gift of 3M Foundation; Ex-collection of Louis Walton Sipley
With his first successful photograph of a lightning bolt on 2 September 1882, Jennings dispelled the then widely held belief – especially among those in the graphic arts – that lightning traveled toward the earth in a regular zigzag pattern. Instead, his images revealed that lightning not only assumed an astonishing variety of forms but that it never took the shape that had come to define it in art.
Bernd Becher (German, 1931-2007) Hilla Becher (German, 1934-2015) Industriebauten 1968 Gelatin silver prints in presentation box George Eastman Museum, Purchase
The photographs in this portfolio were made only a few years into what would become the Bechers’ decades-long project of systematically documenting industrial architecture in Europe and the United States. The straightforward and rigidly consistent style of their work facilitates side-by-side comparison, revealing the singularity of structures that are typically understood to be generic.
IV. The Legible Object
Some photographs speak for themselves; others function as the amplifier for objects that can literally be read through the image. In her series Sorted Books, American artist Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968) composes statements by combining the titles of books drawn from the shelves of libraries and collections. Indian History for Young Folks, 2012, shows three books from the turn of the twentieth century that she found in the Delaware Art Museum’s M.G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings. The viewer’s eye silently provides punctuation: “Indian history for young folks: Our village; your national parks.” Though at first glance it appears merely to arrange words into legible order, Katchadourian’s oblique statement – half verbal, half visual – would be incomplete if divorced from the physical apparatus of the books themselves.
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) The Artist and the Gravedigger (Denistoun Monument, Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh) c. 1845 Salted paper print from calotype negative George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alvin Langdon Coburn
Hill, his two nieces, and an unidentified man pose for the camera at the tomb of Robert Denistoun, a seventeenth-century Scottish ambassador. Contemplative poses helped the sitters hold still during the long exposure, even while turning them into sculptural extensions of the monument. Hill puts pen to paper, perhaps playing the part of a graveyard poet pondering mortality. Above him, the monument’s Latin inscription begins: “Behold, the world possesses nothing permanent!”
Robert Cumming (American, 1943-2021) Submarine cross-section; feature film, “Gray Lady Down” – Stage #12, March 14, 1977 1977 Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, Gift of Nash Editions
In the Studio Still Lifes he photographed on the backlots of Universal Studios, Cumming sought to portray the mechanisms behind cinema vision “in their real as opposed to their screen contexts.” Admiring yet subversive, his documents use strategies native to the still camera – distance, point of view, and clear-eyed testimony – to translate Hollywood’s familiar illusions into worksites where “marble is plywood, stone is rubber, … rooms seldom have ceilings, and when the sun shines indoors, it casts a dozen shadows.”
Nina Katchadourian (American, b. 1968) Indian History for Young Folks 2012 From Once Upon a Time in Delaware / In Quest of the Perfect Book Chromogenic print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchase, Photography Collectors Committee
In her ongoing series Sorted Books, Katchadourian composes statements by combining the titles of books from a given library – in this case, the M. G. Sawyer Collection of Decorative Bindings at the Delaware Art Museum. Though her compositions are driven by the need to arrange words in a legible order, Katchadourian’s oblique jokes, poems, and koans would be incomplete if divorced from the cultural information conveyed by the physical books themselves.
V. The Photograph Decodes Nature
As early as 1840, one year after photography’s invention was announced, scientists sought to deploy it in their analysis of the physical world. Combining the camera with the microscope, microphotographs recorded biological minutiae, leading to discoveries that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain by observing subjects in real time. Similarly, the development of X-ray technology in 1895 allowed scientists to see and understand living anatomy to an unprecedented degree. Such innovations not only expanded the boundaries of the visible world but also introduced graphic concepts that would have a profound impact on visual culture. In other ways, too, nature has been transformed in human understanding through the interpretive filter of the lens, as seen in Sight Reading in the telescopic moon views of astronomers Maurice Loewy (1833-1907) and Pierre Henri Puiseux (1855-1928) and in the spellbinding aerial abstractions of William Garnett (1916-2006).
William Garnett (American, 1916-2006) Animal Tracks on Dry Lake 1955 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased on the Charina Endowment Fund
After making films for the U.S. Signal Corps during World War II, Garnett used GI-Bill funding to earn a pilot’s license. By the early 1950s, he had the field of artistic aerial landscape virtually to himself. This print, showing the ephemeral traces of wildlife movement on a dry lake bed, appeared in Diogenes with a Camera IV (1956), one in a series of exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art that highlighted the great variety of ways in which artists used photography to invent new forms of visual truth.
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) “Tea Pot” Rock 1870 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Jackson made this photograph as a member of the survey team formed by Ferdinand V. Hayden to explore and document the territory now known as Yellowstone National Park. Hayden’s primary goal was to gather information about the area’s geological history, and Jackson’s photographs record with precision and clarity the accumulated layers of sediment that allow this natural landmark to be fit into a geological chronology. The human figure standing at the left of the composition provides information about the size of the rock, demonstrating that photographers have long recognised the difficulty of making accurate inferences about scale based on photographic images.
Dr Josef Maria Eder (Austrian, 1855-1944) Eduard Valenta (Austrian, 1857-1937) Zwei Goldfische und ein Seefisch (Christiceps argentatus) Two goldfish and a sea fish (Christiceps argentatus) 1896 From the book Versuche über Photographie mittelst der Röntgen’schen Strahlen (Experiments on photography using X-rays) Photogravure George Eastman Museum, Gift of Eastman Kodak Company; Ex-collection of Josef Maria Eder
As early as 1840 – a year after photography’s invention was announced – scientists sought to deploy it in their analysis of the physical world. Combining the camera with the microscope, microphotographs recorded biological minutiae, leading to discoveries that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to obtain by observing subjects in real time. Similarly, the development of x-ray technology in 1895 allowed doctors to study living anatomy to an unprecedented degree. Such innovations not only expanded the boundaries of the visible world but also introduced graphic concepts that would have a profound impact on visual culture.
Dr James Deane (American, 1801-1858) Ichnographs from the Sandstone of Connecticut River 1861 Book illustrated with 22 salted paper prints and 37 lithographs George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alden Scott Boyer
These photographs, which depict traces of fossils discovered in a sandstone quarry, illustrate a book written by Massachusetts surgeon James Deane, who was the author of texts on medicine as well as natural history. Published posthumously using his notes and photographs as a guide, the volume is an early demonstration of photography’s potential as a tool of scientific investigation.
VI. The Photograph Decodes Culture
The photograph not only changed but to a great extent invented the modern notion of celebrity. Modern-age celebrities live apart from the general public, but their faces are more familiar than those of the neighbours next door. Since the mid-nineteenth century, viewers have come to “know” the famous through accumulated photographic sightings, which come in formats and contexts that vary as much as real-life encounters do. In four images that would have communicated instantly to their intended viewers in 1966, Jean-Pierre Ducatez (b. 1970) portrayed the Beatles through closeups of their mouths alone. The graphic shorthand employed by Jonathan Lewis in his series The Pixles is of a more recent variety, but he, too, relies on the visual familiarity conferred by tremendous celebrity. Each print in the series reproduces the iconic art of a Beatles album cover at life size (12 x 12 inches) but extremely low resolution (12 x 12 pixels). Like celebrities themselves, perhaps, the images look more familiar to the eye at a distance than close-up.
Unidentified maker U. S. Grant c. 1862 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Timothy H. O’Sullivan (American born Ireland, 1840-1882) A Council of War at Massaponax Church, Va. 21st May, 1864. Gens. Grant and Meade, Asst. Sec. of War Dana, and Their Staff Officers 1864 From the series Photographic Incidents of the War Albumen silver print stereograph George Eastman Museum, Gift of Albert Morton Turner
Modern celebrities live apart from the general public, yet their faces are more familiar than those of the neighbors next door. Since the mid-nineteenth century, viewers have come to “know” the famous through accumulated photographic sightings, which come in formats and contexts that vary as much as real-life encounters do. First as a Union hero in the American Civil War and later as president, Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) lived in the public imagination through news images, popular stereographs, campaign buttons, and ultimately the (photo-based) face on the $50 bill. Grant was even a subject for Francois Willème’s patented process for generating a sculpted likeness out of photographs made in the round – an early forerunner to the technology of 3-D printing.
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Abbey Road 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Please Please Me 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Jonathan Lewis (British, b. 1970) Rubber Soul 2003 From The Pixles Inkjet print George Eastman Museum, By exchange with the artist
Synecdoche is a poetic device in which a part stands in for the whole. (In the phrase “three sails set forth,” sails mean ships.) In four images that would have communicated instantly to their intended viewers in 1966, Ducatez portrayed the Beatles solely through close-ups of their mouths. The graphic shorthand Lewis employs in his series The Pixles is of a more recent variety, though he, too, relies on the visual familiarity conferred by tremendous celebrity. Each print in the series reproduces a Beatles album cover at life size (12 x 12 inches) but extremely low resolution (12 x 12 pixels).
VII. Meaning is on the Surface
Photographs are not just windows onto the world but pieces of paper, which can themselves be inscribed or otherwise altered in ways that enrich or amend their meaning. The group portrait Joint Meeting of the Railway Surgeons Association, Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis (1920) is contact printed, meaning that the negative was the same size as the print. After the portrait sitting, the photographer appears to have presented the developed film to the sixty-four sitters for signing during the three days they were assembled for their convention. The result is a document that unites two conventional signifiers of character: facial features and the autograph.
Gravelle Studio, Indianapolis (American, active 1920) Joint Meeting of the Railway Surgeons Association, Claypool Hotel, Indianapolis 1920 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased as the gift of Peter J. Cohen
Panoramic group portraits such as this are made using a banquet camera, which admits light through a narrow vertical slit while rotating on its tripod. This image was contact printed, meaning the negative was the same size as the print. The photographer appears to have presented the developed film to the sixty-four sitters for signing during the three days they were assembled. The result is a document that unites two conventional signifiers of character: facial features and the autograph.
Keith Smith (American, b. 1938) Book 151 1989 Bound book of gelatin silver prints, thread, and leather Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
This unique object unites the arts of photography, quilting, and bookmaking. The composite image on each right-hand page appears to be made of prints cut apart and sewn together. In fact, Smith began by printing patchwork-inspired photomontages in the darkroom. He then stitched along many of the borders where abutting images meet, creating the illusion of a photographic crazy quilt.
VIII. Photography and the Page
News of the world took on a newly visual character in the 1880s, when the technology of the halftone screen made it practical, at last, to render photographs in ink on the printed page.
Among the earliest examples of photojournalism is Paul Nadar’s (1820-1910) “photographic interview” with Georges Ernest Boulanger, a once-powerful French politician. The article’s introduction explains that the photographs were printed alongside the text in order to provide evidence of the encounter and to illustrate Boulanger’s dynamic body language during the conversation.
Stephen Henry Horgan (American, 1854-1941) Shanty Town April 1880 Photomechanical printing plate A Scene in Shantytown, New York, c. 1928 Lithograph George Eastman Museum, Gift of 3M Foundation; Ex-collection of Louis Walton Sipley
Paul Nadar (French, 1856-1939) Interview with Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger 1889 Le Figaro, 23 November 1889 Photomechanical reproduction George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company; ex-collection Gabriel Cromer
Among the earliest examples of photojournalism is Nadar’s “photographic interview” with Georges Ernest Boulanger, a once-powerful French politician who had fallen out of public favour by the time this was published. The article’s introduction explains that the photographs were printed alongside the text in order to provide evidence of the encounter and to illustrate Boulanger’s body language during the conversation.
Lewis W. Hine (American, 1874-1940) Italian Family Looking for Lost Baggage, Ellis Island 1905 Ellis Island Group, 1905 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum, Gift of Photo League Lewis Hine Memorial Committee
In an effort to counter American xenophobia in the early years of the twentieth century, Hine photographed immigrants as they arrived at Ellis Island, composing his images to stir sympathy and understanding among viewers. He understood the importance of disseminating his photographs and actively sought to publish them in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets. The white outline in the photograph on the right instructs the designer and printer where to crop the image for a photomontage featuring figures from multiple portraits.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) La Poupée (Puppet) 1936 Gelatin silver print Collection of Richard and Ronay Menschel
John Heartfield (German, 1891-1968) Hurrah, die Butter ist alle! (Hooray, the Butter Is Finished!) 1935 Rotogravure George Eastman Museum, purchase
This is one of 237 photomontages that Heartfield created between 1930 and 1938 for the antifascist magazine Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung(Worker’s Pictorial Newspaper). It is a parody of the “Guns Before Butter” speech in which Hermann G.ring exhorted German citizens to sacrifice necessities in order to aid the nation’s rearmament. The text reads: “Iron ore has always made an empire strong; butter and lard have at most made a people fat.” Heartfield combined details from several photographs to conjure the image of a German family feasting on tools, machine parts, and a bicycle in a swastika-laden dining room, complete with a portrait of Hitler, a framed phrase from a popular Franco-Prussian war-era song, and a throw pillow bearing the likeness of recently deceased president Paul von Hindenburg.
Unidentified maker Certificate of Marriage between Daniel W. Gibbs and Matilda B. Pierce c. 1874 Tintypes in prepared paper mount George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Graphic cousins to one other, these wedding certificates are equipped with precut windows for photographs of the bride, groom, and officiant. The portraits, in partnership with the printed and inscribed text on the forms, contribute both to the documentary specificity of the certificates and to their value as sentimental souvenirs.
IX. Empire of Signs
The plethora of signs, symbols, and visual noise endemic to cities has attracted photographers since the medium’s invention. Their records of advertisers’ strident demands for attention, shopkeepers’ alluring displays, and the often dizzying architectural density of metropolitan life chronicle sights that are subject to change without notice. The photographer’s perspective on contemporary social life – whether it is anecdotal, as in John Thompson’s (1837-1921) Street Advertising from Street Life in London (1877), or haunting, as in Eugène Atget’s (1857-1927) Impasse des Bourdonnais (c. 1908) – is embedded in each image.
John Thomson (Scottish, 1837-1921) Street Advertising 1877 From Street Life in London, 1877 Woodburytype George Eastman Museum, Gift of Alden Scott Boyer
Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927) Impasse des Bourdonnais c. 1908 Albumen silver print George Eastman Museum, Purchase
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) At the Time of the Louisville Flood 1937 Gelatin silver print George Eastman Museum
The plethora of signs, symbols, and visual noise endemic to cities has attracted photographers since the medium’s invention. Their records of advertisers’ strident demands for attention, shopkeepers’ alluring displays, and the often dizzying architectural density of metropolitan life chronicle sights that are subject to change without notice. The photographer’s perspective on contemporary social life – whether it is ironic, as in Margaret Bourke-White’s image of a line of flood victims before a billboard advertising middle-class prosperity, or bemused, as in Ferenc Berko’s photograph of columns of oversized artificial teeth on the street – is embedded in each image.
Ferenc Berko (American born Hungary, 1916-2000) Rawalpindi, India 1946 Gelatin silver print George Eastman House, Gift of Katharine Kuh
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) New York 6 1951 Gelatin silver print The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Richard and Ronay Menschel
Alex Webb (American, b. 1952) India 1981 Chromogenic development print George Eastman Museum, Purchased with funds from Charina Foundation
The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street New York, NY 10016-3405 Phone: (212) 685-0008
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Winter – Apsaroke 1908 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Not only was he one of the greatest ethnographic photographers of all time (as well as being an ethnographer recording more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and writing down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages) … he was also an aesthetic photographer. Looking at his photographs you can feel that he adhered to the principles of the nature and appreciation of beauty situated within the environment of the Native American cultures and peoples. He had a connection to the people and to the places he was photographing.
Curtis created a body of work unparrallleled in the annals of photography – an ethnographic study of an extant civilisation before it vanished (or so they thought at the time). Such a project stretched over thirty years, producing 45-50 thousand negatives “many of them on glass and some as large as fourteen by seventeen inches” of which 2,200 original photographs appeared in his magnum opus:
“The North American Indian: a twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of books hand – bound in leather, with hand-set letter press text and hand -pulled photogravure prints, all printed on handmade, imported etching stock. [It] contained more than 2,200 original photographs, printed in photogravure, and nearly 4,000 pages of anthropological text including transcriptions of language and music. Each set included twenty quarto-size volumes containing approximately seventy-five original photogravures and two hundred pages of text. The volumes were supplemented by bound portfolios, each containing approximately thirty-six oversize gravures on eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch etching stock. Curtis offered subscribers their choice of three premium handmade papers: Dutch Van Gelder, Japanese Vellum, and India Proof Paper (commonly known as tissue).” (Text from the Cardoza Fine Art website)
While all great photographers have both technical skill and creative ability it is the dedication of this artist to his task over so many years that sets him apart. That dedication is critically coupled with his innate ability to capture the “spirit” of the Native American cultures and peoples, their humanity. In other hands this material could have felt dead but as the text from the Cardoza Fine Art website states:
“Having become deeply impassioned by the power and dignity of the American Indian, Curtis began to realise for the first time that he might create a record preserving the history of these magnificent people and their extraordinary culture. In the same letter to Grinnell, Curtis went on to say, “But I can start-and sell prints of my pictures as I go along. I’m a poor man, but I’ve got my health, plenty of steam, and something to work for.” Curtis was thirty-two years old, with a family and a thriving business. His willingness to put at risk everything he had worked for up until then is a testament to his enlightened view of humanity, the strength of his individualism, and his creative genius… Yet Curtis had no way of knowing that he was about to embark on a thirty-year odyssey that would have unforeseen tragic consequences; his wife would divorce him, and he would lose his family, his financial success, and his physical and emotional health – all in the pursuit of his big dream.”
He might have been a poor man but he was strong in spirit. You can feel it in his work. And he had a vision – “It’s such a big dream, I can’t see it all.”
For that dream and for his inspiration, we are eternally grateful.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Palm Springs Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All texts about each tribe are taken from the Wikipedia website.
“When he started in 1896, Indians were at their low ebb, with a total population that had dwindled to less than 250,000. Many scholars thought they would disappear within a generation’s time. Curtis set out to document lifestyle, creation myths and language. He recorded more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and wrote down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages.”
Thomas Eagan, biographer of Edward S. Curtis
“One of Curtis’ enthusiastic early backers, Theodore Roosevelt – who authored the introduction to Volume One – was, “like many of Curtis’ eventual supporters,” writes Valerie Daniels, “more interested in obtaining a record of vanishing Native American cultures as a testament to the superiority of his own civilization than out of any concern over their situation or recognition of his own role in the process.” Though Curtis did not necessarily share these views, and later became “radical in his admonition of government policies toward Native Americans,” he also had to please his financiers and his audience, most of whom would have felt the way Roosevelt did. We should bear this cultural context in mind as we take in Curtis’ work, and ask how it shaped the creation and reception of this truly impressive record of both American history and American myth.”
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) A Mono Home 1924 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Mono
The Mono/ˈmoʊnoʊ/ are a Native American people who traditionally live in the central Sierra Nevada, the Eastern Sierra (generally south of Bridgeport), the Mono Basin, and adjacent areas of the Great Basin…
Throughout recorded history, the Mono have also been known as “Mona,” “Monache,” or “Northfork Mono,” as labeled by E.W. Gifford, an ethnographer studying people in the vicinity of the San Joaquin River in the 1910s. The tribe’s western neighbours, the Yokuts, called them monachie meaning “fly people” because fly larvae was their chief food staple and trading article. That led to the name Mono. The Mono referred to themselves as Nyyhmy in the Mono language; a full blooded Mono person was called cawu h nyyhmy.
Today, many of the tribal citizens and descendants of the Mono tribe inhabit the town of North Fork (thus the label “Northfork Mono”) in Madera County. People of the Mono tribe are also spread across California in: the Owens River Valley; the San Joaquin Valley and foothills areas, especially Fresno County; and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Kutenai Duck Hunter 1910 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Kutenai / Ktunaxa
The Ktunaxa (English pronunciation: /tʌˈnɑːhɑː/tun-ah-hah; Kutenai pron. [ktunʌ́χɑ̝]), also known as Kutenai (English /ˈkuːtᵊneɪ, –ni/), Kootenay (predominant spelling in Canada) and Kootenai (predominant spelling in the United States), are an indigenous people of North America. There are four bands that form the Ktunaxa Nation and the historic allied and through intermarriage kindred Shuswap Indian Band in British Columbia, in Montana together with the Bitterroot Salish (also known as Flathead) and Upper Pend d’Oreilles they are part of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. There are also the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho in Idaho and small populations in Washington in the United States, where they are part of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.
The Kutenai language is an isolate, unrelated to the languages of neighbouring peoples… The Ktunaxa people today live in southeastern British Columbia, Washington State, Idaho, and Montana. In Montana they are known as Ksanka. Ktunaxa is the term that these tribes call themselves, which is pronounced Ta-na-ha, with a barely perceptible ‘k’ sound at the beginning of the word. Traditionally these people have been known as Kootenay or Kootenai, which is an anglicisation of the Blackfoot word used to refer to the Ktunaxa, so in some of their tribal organisations and activities, the Ktunaxa refer to themselves as Kootenay, or in Montana, Kootenai.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) An Oasis in the Badlands 1905 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
This classic Curtis image was made in the heart of the Bad Lands of South Dakota. The subject is Red Hawk who was born 1854 and was a fierce warrior who ultimately engaged in 20 battles, including the Custer fight in 1876. This lyrical image is widely considered to be Curtis’ most important and beautiful Great Plains peopled landscape. Curtis loved the visual and metaphorical qualities of water, and the image conveys the beauty of water as an aesthetic element. The compelling composition and subject matter have helped make this one of Curtis’ most sought-after images, even one hundred years after it was originally created.
Text from Cardoza Fine Art website
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Canyon de Chelly – Navaho 1904 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Canyon de Chelly
Canyon de Chelly long served as a home for Navajo people before it was invaded by forces led by future New Mexico governor Lt. Antonio Narbona in 1805. In 1863 Col. Kit Carson sent troops to either end of the canyon to defeat the Navajo population within. The resulting devastation led to the surrender of the Navajos and their removal to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico.
Navaho
The Navajo (Navajo: Diné or Naabeehó) are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States. They are the second largest federally recognised tribe in the United States with 300,460 enrolled tribal members as of 2015.The Navajo Nation constitutes an independent governmental body that manages the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners area, including over 27,000 square miles of land in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The Navajo language is spoken throughout the region with most Navajo speaking English as well.
The states with the largest Navajo populations are Arizona (140,263) and New Mexico (108,306). Over three-quarters of the Navajo population reside in these two states.
The Long Walk
Beginning in the spring of 1864, around 9,000 Navajo men, women and children were forced to embark on a trek of over 300 miles (480 km) to Fort Sumner, New Mexico for internment at Bosque Redondo. The internment at Bosque Redondo was a failure for many reasons as the government failed to provide an adequate supply of water, wood, provisions, and livestock for 4,000-5,000 people. Large scale crop failure and disease were also endemic during this time, as well as raids by other tribes and civilians. In addition, a small group of Mescalero Apaches, long enemies of the Navajo, had been relocated to the area resulting in conflicts. In 1868, a treaty was negotiated between Navajo leaders and the Federal government allowing the surviving Navajo to return to a reservation on a portion of their former homeland. The Navajos were not provided with much protection that other enemies of the Navajos would swoop in and take Navajo women and children back to their camps and force them to work as slaves. While at Bosque Redondo the government did not provide the Navajos with food or shelter and some Navajos froze during the winter because of poor shelters that they had to make on their own.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Untitled (Raven-ma) – Qagyuhl 1914 Gelatin silver Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Watching the Dancers 1906 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Three Hopi girls, wrapped in heavy blankets and wearing the squash blossom hairstyle of maidens, sit and stand on an adobe rooftop, watching a pueblo dance below. A fourth girl is hidden behind the girl at right, with only a single twist of her hair visible over the standing girl’s shoulder. The standing girl glances suspiciously at the photographer, Edward Curtis, who has invaded the girls’ privacy with his camera’s presence. In this photograph, the onlookers have themselves become an event to be witnessed.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Curtis visited the Hopi on multiple occasions and went as early as 1900, went back in 1902, 1904, 1906, 1911, 1912, and 1919, so dating which images where shot when can pose something of a challenge, but he does note that the traditional squash blossom hairdo was discontinued by the second decade of the twentieth century. In these early images, “Watching the Dancers” and “The Hopi Maiden,” Curtis captured young unwed women at a time when they still wore their hair in the traditional style. So one can understand that such images confirmed his, and other’s views, that traditional ways of life where passing, and for Curtis, it confirmed the popular view, which his images helped to cement in the popular imagination – that Native Americans were a “vanishing race.”
The Hopi are a Native American tribe, who primarily live on the 2,531.773 sq mi (6,557.26 km2) Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona. As of 2010, there were 18,327 Hopi in the United States, according to the 2010 census.The Hopi language is one of the 30 of the Uto-Aztecan language family. The majority of Hopi people are enrolled in the Hopi Tribe of Arizona but some are enrolled in the Colorado River Indian Tribes…
The name Hopi is a shortened form of their autonym, Hopituh Shi-nu-mu (“The Peaceful People” or “Peaceful Little Ones”).The Hopi Dictionary gives the primary meaning of the word “Hopi” as: “behaving one, one who is mannered, civilised, peaceable, polite, who adheres to the Hopi way.” In the past, Hopi sometimes used the term “Hopi” and its cognates to refer to the Pueblo peoples in general, in contrast to other, more warlike tribes. Hopi is a concept deeply rooted in the culture’s religion, spirituality, and its view of morality and ethics. To be Hopi is to strive toward this concept, which involves a state of total reverence and respect for all things, to be at peace with these things, and to live in accordance with the instructions of Maasaw, the Creator or Caretaker of Earth. The Hopi observe their traditional ceremonies for the benefit of the entire world.
Traditionally, Hopi are organised into matrilineal clans. When a man marries, the children from the relationship are members of his wife’s clan. These clan organisations extend across all villages. Children are named by the women of the father’s clan. On the twentieth day of a baby’s life, the women of the paternal clan gather, each woman bringing a name and a gift for the child. In some cases where many relatives would attend, a child could be given over forty names, for example. The child’s parents generally decide the name to be used from these names. Current practice is to either use a non-Hopi or English name or the parent’s chosen Hopi name. A person may also change the name upon initiation into one of the religious societies, such as the Kachina society, or with a major life event.
The Hopi have always viewed their land as sacred. Agriculture is a very important part of their culture, and their villages are spread out across the northern part of Arizona. The Hopi and the Navajo did not have a conception of land being bounded and divided. They lived on the land that their ancestors did. On December 16, 1882 President Arthur passed an executive order creating a reservation for the Hopi. It was much smaller than the Navajo reservation, which was the largest in the country.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Bear’s Belly – Arikara 1908 Photogravure Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Born in 1847 in the present day North Dakota, Bear’s Belly was a highly respected and honoured warrior and became a member of the Bears in the Medicine Fraternity. He acquired his bearskin in a dramatic battle in which he single-handedly killed three bears, thus gaining his personal “medicine”. This image was printed as a photogravure, plate 150 from Portfolio V, with the text below from the accompanying Volume V of Curtis’ The North American Indian.
Born in 1847 at Fort Clark in the present North Dakota. He had no experience in war when at the age of nineteen he joined Custer’s scouts at Fort Abraham Lincoln, having been told by old men of the tribe that such a course was the surest way to gain honours. Shortly after his arrival, Custer led a force into the Black Hills country; in the course of which, the young Arikara counted two first coups and one second. Bear’s Belly fasted once. Going to an old man for advice, he was taken to the outskirts of the village to an old buffalo skull, commanded to strip, smear his body with white clay, and sit in front of the skull. When he had taken the assigned position, the old man held up a large knife and an awl while he addressed the buffalo skull: “this young man sits in front of you, and is going to endure great suffering. Look upon him with great favour, you and Neshanu, and give him a long, prosperous life.” With that he cut pieces of skin from the faster’s breast and held them out to the buffalo skull. Bear’s Belly married at the age of nineteen. He became a member of the Bears in the medicine fraternity and relates the following story of an occurrence connected with that event:
“Needing a bearskin in my medicine-making, I went, at the season when the leaves were turning brown, into the White-Clay hills. All the thought of my heart that day was to see a bear and kill him. I passed an eagle trap, but did not stop: it was a bear I wanted, not an eagle. Coming suddenly to the brink of a cliff I saw me three bears. My heart wished to go two ways: I wanted a bear. But to fight three was hard. I decided to try it, and, descending, crept up to within forty yards of them, where I stopped to look around for a way of escape if they charged me. The only way out was by the cliff, and as I could not climb well in moccasins I removed them. One bear was standing with his side toward me, another was walking slowly toward him on the other side. I waited until the second one was close to the first and pulled the trigger. The farther one fell; the bullet had passed through the body of one and into the brain of the other. The wounded one charged, and I ran, loading my rifle, then turned and shot again, breaking his backbone. He lay there on the ground only ten paces from me and I see his face twitching. A noise caused me to remember the third bear, which I saw rushing upon me only six or seven paces away, I was yelling to keep up my courage and the bear was growling in his anger. He rose on his hind legs, and I shot, with my gun nearly touching his chest. He gave a howl and ran off. The bear with the broken back was dragging himself about with his forelegs, and I went to him and said, “I came looking for you to be my friend, to be with me always.” Then I reloaded my gun and shot him through the head. His skin I kept, but the other two I sold.”
Text from the Cardoza Fine Art website, November 23, 2011 [Online] Cited 21/05/2016. No longer available online
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Sioux Mother and Child 1905 Platinum print Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Sioux
The Sioux/ˈsuː/ are a Native American tribe and First Nations band government in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation’s many language dialects. The Sioux comprise three major divisions based on language variety and subculture: the Santee, the Yankton-Yanktonai, and the Lakota.
The Santee (Isáŋyathi; “Knife”) reside in the extreme east of the Dakotas, Minnesota and northern Iowa. The Yankton and Yanktonai (Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna; “Village-at-the-end” and “Little village-at-the-end”), collectively also referred to by the endonym Wičhíyena, reside in the Minnesota River area. They are considered to be the middle Sioux, and have in the past been erroneously classified as Nakota. The Lakota, also called Teton (Thítȟuŋwaŋ; possibly “Dwellers on the prairie”), are the westernmost Sioux, known for their hunting and warrior culture.
Today, the Sioux maintain many separate tribal governments scattered across several reservations, communities, and reserves in North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Montana in the United States; and Manitoba and southern Saskatchewan in Canada.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Apache Maiden 1906 Platinum print Courtesy of the Christopher G. Cardozo Collection
Palm Springs Art Museum is presenting the extraordinary Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks exhibition, featuring vintage photographs that represent an important historical documentary of the Indians of North America; and Changing the Tone: Contemporary American Indian Photographers, showcasing works by living artists of Native American heritage. The exhibitions are on view now through May 29, 2016.
Beginning in 1900, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) set out on a monumental quest to create an unprecedented, comprehensive record of the Indians of North America. The culmination of his 30-year project led to his magnum opus, “The North American Indian,” a twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of handmade books containing a selection of over 2,200 original photographs. Today One Hundred Masterworks stands as a landmark in the history of photography, book publishing, ethnography, and the history of the American West, producing an art historical record of enormous and irreplaceable importance.
One Hundred Masterworks presents an extraordinary selection of vintage photographs by Curtis that highlight both iconic and little known images that reveal the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual qualities of his art. The exhibition showcases seven photographic print mediums including photogravure, platinum, goldtone (orotone), toned and un-toned gelatin silver, cyanotype, and gold-toned printing-out paper prints. Arranged by geographic region, the exhibition includes a selection of Curtis’s most compelling and rare photographs that look beyond the documentary nature of his work to focus on his aesthetic and technical contributions to the art of photography. Accompanying the exhibition is a 184-page catalogue available for purchase at the Museum Store at Palm Springs Art Museum.
In conjunction with Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks, the museum presents a special installation of photographs taken by Curtis on loan from the collections of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, along with a selection of Native American objects from Palm Springs Art Museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks has been organised by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis / New York City / Paris / Lausanne, in collaboration with Palm Springs Art Museum. The Palm Springs showing is funded in part by the museum’s Western Art Council and its Gold Sponsors Donna MacMillan and Harold Matzner, and Mary Ingebrand-Pohlad, along with support from Carol and Jim Egan, Terra Foundation for American Art through Board Member Gloria Scoby, Luc Bernard and Mark Prior, and the museum’s Photography Collection Council. Exhibition Season Sponsors are Dorothy Meyerman and Marion and Bob Rosenthal.
Changing the Tone: Contemporary American Indian Photographers features photographs and videos by artists of Native American heritage including Gerald Clarke, Will Wilson, Kent Monkman, Nicholas Galanin, Shelley Niro, and Lewis de Soto. In images that reflect on portraiture, cultural heritage, and their relationship to the land, these artists offer diverse perspectives on Native American identity as well as on critical issues around photography as a documentary medium, i.e., the extent to which it is fact, fiction, or some combination of both. These works provide a contemporary context for Curtis’s historical photographs. Changing the Tone is organised by Palm Springs Art Museum with generous support from Roswitha Kima Smale and John Renner.
Press release from the Palm Springs Art Museum
More images from the exhibition
These reproductions are freely available online (from websites such as the Library of Congress and Wikipedia).
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Self Portrait 1899 Photogravure
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Chief Joseph – Nez Perce 1903 Photogravure
The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.
I believe much trouble would be saved if we opened our hearts more.
Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them an even chance to live and grow.
It does not require many words to speak the truth.
Chief Joseph
Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt, Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it in Americanist orthography, popularly known as Chief Joseph or Young Joseph (March 3, 1840 – September 21, 1904), succeeded his father Tuekakas (Chief Joseph the Elder) as the leader of the Wal-lam-wat-kain (Wallowa) band of Nez Perce, a Native American tribe indigenous to the Wallowa Valley in northeastern Oregon, in the interior Pacific Northwest region of the United States.
He led his band during the most tumultuous period in their contemporary history when they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the Wallowa Valley by the United States federal government and forced to move northeast, onto the significantly reduced reservation in Lapwai, Idaho Territory. A series of events that culminated in episodes of violence led those Nez Perce who resisted removal, including Joseph’s band and an allied band of the Palouse tribe, to take flight to attempt to reach political asylum, ultimately with the Lakota led by Sitting Bull, who had sought refuge in Canada.
They were pursued eastward by the U.S. Army in a campaign led by General Oliver O. Howard. This 1,170-mile (1,900km) fighting retreat by the Nez Perce in 1877 became known as the Nez Perce War. The skill with which the Nez Perce fought and the manner in which they conducted themselves in the face of incredible adversity led to widespread admiration among their military adversaries and the American public.
Coverage of the war in United States newspapers led to widespread recognition of Joseph and the Nez Perce. For his principled resistance to the removal, he became renowned as a humanitarian and peacemaker. However, modern scholars, like Robert McCoy and Thomas Guthrie, argue that this coverage, as well as Joseph’s speeches and writings, distorted the true nature of Joseph’s thoughts and gave rise to a “mythical” Chief Joseph as a “red Napoleon” that served the interests of the Anglo-American narrative of manifest destiny.
Nez Perce
‘The Nez Perce’/ˌnɛzˈpɜːrs/ (autonym: Niimíipu) are an Indigenous people of the Plateau, who live in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, which is on the Columbia River Plateau. They are federally recognized as the Nez Perce Tribe and currently govern their reservation in Idaho. Anthropologists have written that the Nez Perce descend from the Old Cordilleran Culture, which moved south from the Rocky Mountains and west into lands where the tribe coalesced. Their name for themselves is Nimíipuu (pronounced [nimiːpuː]), meaning, “The People,” in their language, part of the Sahaptin family…
Nez Perce is a misnomer given by the interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition at the time they first encountered the Nez Perce in 1805.It was a French term meaning “pierced nose.” This is an inaccurate description of the tribe. They did not practice nose piercing or wearing ornaments. The “pierced nose” tribe lived on and around the lower Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest and are commonly called the Chinook tribe by historians and anthropologists. The Chinook relied heavily upon salmon, as did the Nez Perce. The peoples shared fishing and trading sites but the Chinook were much more hierarchical in their social arrangements.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) At the Old Well – Acoma 1904 Photogravure
Acoma Pueblo (/ˈækəmə/; Western Keresan: Haak’u; Zuni: Hakukya; Navajo: Haak’oh) is a Native American pueblo approximately 60 miles (97 km) west of Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. Three villages make up Acoma Pueblo: Sky City (Old Acoma), Acomita, and Mcartys. The Acoma Pueblo tribe is a federally recognised tribal entity.The historical land of Acoma Pueblo totaled roughly 5,000,000 acres (2,000,000 ha). Only 10% of this land remains in the hands of the community within the Acoma Indian Reservation.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Geronimo – Apache 1905 Platinum print
Geronimo
Geronimo (Mescalero-Chiricahua: Goyaałé[kòjàːɬɛ́] “the one who yawns”; June 16, 1829 – February 17, 1909) was a prominent leader from the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache tribe. From 1850 to 1886 Geronimo joined with members of three other Chiricahua Apache bands – the Chihenne, the Chokonen and the Nednhi – to carry out numerous raids as well as resistance to US and Mexican military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo’s raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache-American conflict, that started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848…
Geronimo was not counted a chief among the Apache. At any one time, only about 30 to 50 Apaches would be numbered among his personal following. However, since he was a superb leader in raiding and revenge warfare he frequently led numbers larger than his own following. Among Geronimo’s own Chiricahua tribe many had mixed feelings about him – while respected as a skilled and effective leader of raids or warfare, he emerges as not very likeable, and he was not widely popular among the other Apache. Nevertheless, Apache people stood in awe of Geronimo’s “powers” which he demonstrated to them on a series of occasions. These powers indicated to other Apaches that Geronimo had super-natural gifts that he could use for good or ill. In eye-witness accounts by other Apaches Geronimo was able to become aware of events, as they happened, though they were at a far distant place, and he was able to anticipate events that were in the future. He also demonstrated powers to heal other Apaches.
Apache
The Apache (/əˈpætʃiː/; French: [a.paʃ]) are culturally related Native American tribes from the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico. These indigenous peoples of North America speak Southern Athabaskan languages, which are related linguistically to Athabaskan languages in Alaskaand western Canada. Apache people traditionally have lived in Eastern Arizona, Northern Mexico (Sonora and Chihuahua), New Mexico, West Texas, and Southern Colorado. Apacheria, their collective homelands, consists of high mountains, sheltered and watered valleys, deep canyons, deserts, and the southern Great Plains…
Apache groups are politically autonomous. The major groups speak several different languages and developed distinct and competitive cultures. The current post-colonial division of Apache groups includes Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, and Plains Apache (also known as the Kiowa-Apache). Apache groups live in Oklahoma and Texas and on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. Apache people have moved throughout the United States and elsewhere, including urban centres.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) The Piki Maker 1906 Vintage goldtone
Piki is a bread made from corn meal used in Hopi cuisine.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Qahatika Girl 1907 Photogravure
Qahatika
The Qahatika (or Kohatk) were a Native American tribe of the Southwestern United States. They were apparently a sub-tribe of the Tohono O’Odham, and lived in the vicinity of present-day Quijotoa, Arizona.
According to Edward Sheriff Curtis, the Qahatika belonged to the Pima group of tribes and lived in five villages “in the heart of the desert south of the Gila River”, about forty miles from the Pima reservation. A legend said that after the Pima suffered defeat in a war with Apache, the tribe fled and split. One splinter of the tribe, the ancestors of Qahatika, went into the barren desert and settled there in separation from other Pimas. The Qahatika, according to Curtis, managed to find land suitable for growing wheat. Their method of “dry farming” relied exclusively on winter rainfall: the soil near their villages was capable of retaining winter moisture for a whole season, and a few winter rains guaranteed a fair crop in summer. The Qahatika seen by Curtis were “almost identical in appearance” to Pima and Papago. They retained the Pima art of basket weaving and developed their own tradition of pottery. Their houses were built almost exclusively of dried giant cactus carcasses.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Shot in the Hand – Apsaroke 1908 Photogravure
Crow or Apsaroke
The Crow, called the Apsáalooke in their own Siouan language, or variants including Absaroka, are Native Americans, who in historical times lived in the Yellowstone River valley, which extends from present-day Wyoming, through Montana and into North Dakota, where it joins the Missouri River. Today, they are enrolled in the federally recognised Crow Tribe of Montana.
Pressured by the Ojibwe and Cree peoples (the Iron Confederacy), who had earlier and better access to guns through the fur trade, they had migrated there from the Ohio Eastern Woodland area to settle south of Lake Winnipeg, Canada. From there, they were pushed to the west by the Cheyennes. Both the Crow and the Cheyennes were then pushed farther west by the Lakota (Sioux), who took over the territory from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the Big Horn Mountains of Montana; the Cheyennes finally became close allies of the Sioux, but the Crows remained bitter enemies of both Sioux and Cheyennes. The Crow were generally friendly with the whites and managed to retain a large reservation of over 9300km despite territorial losses. Since the 19th century, Crow people have been concentrated on their reservation established south of Billings, Montana. They also live in several major, mainly western, cities. Tribal headquarters are located at Crow Agency, Montana.
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952) Waiting in the Forest – Cheyenne 1910 Photogravure
Cheyenne
The Cheyenne (/ʃaɪˈæn/shy-an) are one of the groups of indigenous people of the Great Plains and their language is of the Algonquian language family. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American groups, the Só’taeo’o or Só’taétaneo’o (more commonly spelled as Suhtai or Sutaio) and the Tsétsêhéstâhese (also spelled Tsitsistas). These tribes merged in the early 19th century. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognised groups: Southern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Cheyenne, who are enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana.
Palm Springs Art Museum 101 Museum Drive Palm Springs CA 92262
Curators: Matthieu Rivallin, collections officer, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, and Pia Viewing, curator – researcher at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
François Kollar is a magnificent photographer. He produced strong images that possess few histrionics, even less ego. They simply just are.
People quoted in this posting comment that in his photographs “human measure is omnipresent”; that you never loose the sense of scale; that there are “frequent contrasts between near and far, the intimate and the monumental”; that his photographs are “an anthropological investigation into the behaviour, gestures and postures of people at work”; that “Men and women and their functions and roles in the production process are recurrent elements.”
All these statements are true.
Further, his images are sensitive, beautiful, show no traces of any social movements, and little sign of emotion. As Dominique Vautrin observes, “François Kollar is a photographer who resembles his images: somewhat mysterious, beautiful, and discreet…” And as the text from Jeu de Paume states, “He revealed himself to be a temperate photographer, somewhere between the barebones modernism of Bauhaus and a humanist approach to photography.” Other photographers who could fit into this playlist could be Bill Brandt in England, Walker Evans in America and Wolfgang Sievers in Australia.
But what a splendid description – a “temperate photographer”. Showing moderation and self-restraint… there is far too little of that in contemporary photography. A humanist with an avant-garde edge, a photographer whose vision was clear and consistent throughout his oeuvre, who could turn his hand to anything: advertising, fashion, avant-garde, double exposures, solarisation, photomontage, documentary reportage, surrealism, constructivism, modernism.
Joseph Nechvatal comments that Kollar’s work is poignant. This is an incorrect word to describe the work, for the photographs never evoke a keen sense of sadness or regret. They are of a different order altogether. Let me explain.
There is a wonderful stoicism about the people who Kollar chooses to photograph, who inhabit his world of work. The endurance of work without the display of feelings and without complaint. Labour is not represented in any glorified way, not as a noble undertaking, and certainly not heroic (although the worker can be represented as intimate and monumental). The workers are represented as an adjunct to the machine but not in a cyborg fashion. In his photographs there is a distinctness about the worker which sets the human apart from the machine, even as he is “deeply embedded within their functions and roles in the production process.” I don’t believe that people understand this separation, preferring instead to comment on the embedding of the human within machine processes. But something was bothering me when I looked at these images and I have pondered long and hard over how to interpret them. There was something I could not put my finger on and it is this…
In the work of Lewis Hine, the workers are in the present looking to the future. In the work of François Kollar there is no justification for the work it is just work… being there in the present. No ego, no elevation of experience or emotion, and the photographs are just so. Just being in the world. The thing itself. Nothing more, nothing less. It seems simple when you say it like that, but the concept is very complex – to allow the photograph to materialise from consciousness, as a sort of previsualisation of experience – of being a poor, working class immigrant (which Kollar was) picturing his own.
That he achieved such photographs “with his 5 x 7 large-format camera and cumbersome lighting equipment” is a testament to the dedication to his craft, to his work, and to his roots – a connection to the working man and woman. These are honest and forthright photographs of what most humans do for most of their life: work at a job they may not like – to pay the bills, to put food on the table. The lighting is superb, the compositions eloquent, the characters in his images unforgettable (Kollar particularly likes portraits of men shot from below with their arms folded) but it is the balance between the subjective and objective which is so finely honed in his work. The dispassionate nature of humans when at work is balanced by the aesthetics of the artist and the humanity of the individual.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. View an interesting video of the exhibition and the work of François Kollar on Vimeo.
This retrospective features an ensemble of 130 vintage prints, some of which are previously unseen, as well as others from the photographer’s family’s bequest to the state. It puts Kollar’s work in the spotlight and shows how he managed to lift the veil on the working world in the 20th century. As visitors discover the documentary, artistic and historical qualities of the material on show, they will be able to observe how individuals found their place in society by the means of their occupation and realise the profound changes that took place in industry between the 1930s and the 1960s.
François Kollar. Courtesy Jeu de Paume
“Without falling into hammy Socialist Realism style, Kollar rendered French working class heroes in beautiful, discreet, lush black-and-white tones. These images of the working person endow them with qualities of excellence, nobility, and respect, and evoked in me mixed sensations of hard materialistic capability and human tenderness. These images of men and women, such as “Nettoyage des lampes. Société des mines de Lens, Lens (Pas-de-Calais)” [1931-34, below], show people deeply embedded within their functions and roles in the production process. In that sense, they contrast with Dorothea Lange’s famous and beautiful Migrant Mother series and the uninhabited, rigorously stark industrial scenes photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher…
Kollar’s distinctive aesthetic provides a strong, sweet spot amid the sour struggles for employment taking place today in economies shaped by histories of slavery, colonialism, union-busting, sexual exploitation, and corporate capitalism. His artistic style, one that colorlessly abstracts, unifies, and embeds the worker within his or her technological environment, broadens the social politics of employment beyond the heroic human. Rather, he depicts through his unifying, ashen tones the conjunction of laborer and machine. In these photographs, the human worker is bound up with non-human apparatuses in cyborg fashion, depicting a complex technological laborer who is no less real and worthy of our aesthetic delectation.”
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Construction des grands paquebots, Rivetage de tôles d’un pont de navire, chantier et ateliers de Saint-Nazaire à Penhoët Construction of large ships, riveting the sheets of a ships deck, site workshops of Saint Nazaire Penhoët 1931-1932 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 28.9 x 23.5cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar: “A Working Eye” from 09 February 2016 until 22 May 2016 at Jeu de Paume, Paris
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Dans le port, à bord. Super Ile de France: cisaillage au chalumeau oxhydrique. Société des chantiers et ateliers de Saint-Nazaire à Penhoët In port, on board. Super Ile de France: cutting using the welding torch. Company building sites and workshops of Saint Nazaire Penhoët 1931 Vintage silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Dans le port, à bord. Champlain: grattage du pont. Société des chantiers et ateliers de Saint-Nazaire à Penhoët In port, on board. Champlain: scraping the bridge. Company building sites and workshops of Saint Nazaire Penhoët 1931 Vintage silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Dans le port, à bord. “Negre” soutier, Bordeaux (Gironde) In port, on board. “Negro” help, Bordeaux (Gironde) 1931 Vintage silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar was born in Szenc, Hungary in 1904 (now the Slovakian town of Senec) and died in Créteil, France in 1979. He was first employed on the railways in his native country and then worked as a lathe operator at Renault’s Boulogne-Billancourt factory, before becoming a professional photographer at the age of 24 after gaining solid experience as a studio manager at the Parisian printer’s, Draeger. His in-depth knowledge of the world of work, in sectors as diverse as advertising, fashion, industry, handicrafts and agriculture, allowed him to portray tools, materials and gestures with exceptional professional expertise.
This retrospective features an ensemble of 130 vintage prints, some of which are previously unseen, as well as others from the photographer’s family’s bequest to the state. It puts Kollar’s work in the spotlight and shows how he managed to lift the veil on the working world in the 20th century. As visitors discover the documentary, artistic and historical qualities of the material on show, they will be able to observe how individuals found their place in society by the means of their occupation and realise the profound changes that took place in industry between the 1930s and the 1960s.
In 1930 Kollar got married and set up his own studio in Paris. His wife, who was his first model, worked faithfully by his side throughout his life. He worked for advertising agencies and famous luxury brands and excelled in showcasing the qualities of his models, forms and fabrics thanks to his feeling for light and texture. François Kollar worked with several fashion magazines, notably Harper’s Bazaar for which, over the course of more than fifteen years, he produced many photographic series, particularly images shot on location. Whether he was photographing the period’s fashion celebrities (Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Pierre Balmain) or models and adverts for the major fashion houses (Hermès, Molyneux, Oméga, Christofle and Worth et Coty perfumes…), he experimented with a wide variety of modern photographic techniques, freely creating original compositions using backlighting, double exposures, overprinting and solarisation…
In 1930, after exhibiting at “Das Lichtbild”, an international photography exhibition in Munich alongside Florence Henri, André Kertész, Germaine Krull and Ergy Landau, François Kollar received a major commission from a publishing company, Horizons de France entitled La France travail (1931-1934) that would establish his reputation as one of the period’s greatest industrial reporters. During the war he refused to collaborate with the powers that be during the German occupation and left the public eye, moving with his wife and three children to the Poitou-Charentes region and only returning to photography in 1945 on his return to Paris. In the 1950s and 1960s, Kollar covered numerous industrial subjects in France and abroad.
Text from the Jeu de Paume website
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) La Tour Eiffel (The Eiffel Tower) 1930 Montage of a negative and interpositive, period photomontage 18 x 24cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Bouche du tunnel Sainte-Catherine, Sotteville-lés-Rouen St. Catherine tunnel mouth, Sotteville-lés-Rouen 1931-1932 Vintage silver gelatin photograph Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Étude publicitaire pour Magic Phono, portrait de Marie Bell en photomontage Advertising study for Magic Photo, Marie Bell portrait photomontage 1930 Vintage silver gelatin photograph Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Publicité pour machine à écrire Hermès Advertising for the Hermes typewriter 1930 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 30.1 x 23.7cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Escalier chez Chanel Staircase at Chanel 1937 Vintage silver gelatin photograph Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Gabrielle Chanel 1938 Silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Le mannequin Muth, Balenciaga The model Muth, Balenciaga 1930 Vintage silver gelatin photograph Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Haute couturière Elsa Schiaparelli in a window of her showroom at 21 Place Vendôme in Paris 1938 Vintage silver gelatin photograph Courtesy Jeu de Paume
The design of the three large exhibition halls, which sometimes suffers from inadequate lighting, is completed by numerous documents (leaflets, magazines, personal albums) and an extensive slide show. The rooms are color-coded: white, blue-grey, and light beige, corresponding to the curators’ pedagogical intention. The beige in the last room is particularly interesting because it nearly blends in with the wooden frames, thereby intensifying the magical black-and-white tones in François Kollar’s work.
In addition to the documentary dimension of his work, the power of this photographer lies in his evocation of a “journey”: hence the exhibition walls are brimming with gems such as Les enseignes lumineuses (“Illuminated signs”, above), La bouche du tunnel (“The entrance of the tunnel”, above), or La fabrique à papier (“Paper factory”), advertisements for Hermès or Chanel (above), and many other photographs which, I have no doubt, will resonate with the visitor.
François Kollar is a photographer who resembles his images: somewhat mysterious, beautiful, and discreet, such as his small picture of a river outside the city of Abidjan. A Working Eye which conveys the nobility of men who, one day, had to travel far from home to earn their living.
François Kollar was commissioned by the publishers Horizons de France for a major documentary investigation into the world of work. He took a large number of photos, a part of which were published in a work that has since become famous: La France travaille. This ensemble comprises the main part of the exhibition. The photographer criss-crossed the whole of France, observing the country through the prism of work. Kollar delivered more than 2,000 images covering agricultural and industrial activity in twenty regions of France, including Paris and its suburbs. Horizons de France published La France travaille between 1932 and 1934 in the form of fifteen separate booklets, which are presented in the exhibition in relation to a selection of around sixty prints. The images are organised by theme. Each theme corresponds to a type of raw material used in industry: coal, iron, products of the sea, glass, textiles etc. Slideshows are used to underline the extent of this archive and the variety of photos it contains, as well as analysing it from a contemporary point of view.
The fifteen booklets that comprise La France Travaille constitute “an anthropological investigation into the behaviour, gestures and postures of people at work” (Jean-François Chevrier, ‘La France travaille: les vertus de l’illustration’, Jeu de Paume, Editions de La Martinière). These fifteen volumes touch on the revolutions taking place across the country – factories, hydroelectric installations etc – as well as the place of the workers in these infrastructures. Apart from the recognition that he had earned in the world of fashion and luxury products, it was through his work to fulfil this commission, the most important in France in the 1930s, that Kollar distinguished himself as a photographer and an ‘industrial reporter’.
From 1931 to 1934, just before the major protests led by the Popular Front, François Kollar (1904-1979) traveled across France meeting its working population. This wide-ranging survey of the working world, which featured 1400 illustrations, was published in 1934 in booklets entitled La France Travaille (France at Work). With his 5 x 7 large-format camera and cumbersome lighting equipment, this Slovak immigrant of humble origins convinced miners, winemakers, boatmen and railroad men to pose for him during their daily routines. The images from La France Travaille, negatives and positives, are preserved at the Bibliothèque Forney and distributed exclusively by the Agence Roger-Viollet.
François Kollar’s body of work covers two major periods in photographic history and the history of the 20th century: the 1930s and the 1950s-1960s. This retrospective at the Jeu de Paume is part of a cycle of exhibitions devoted to the emblematic photographers of the period, such as Laure Albin Guillot, André Kertész, Claude Cahun and Germaine Krull. The exhibition gives pride of place to the photographer’s three children’s bequest of negatives, prints, magazines, press cuttings and advertising pamphlets that was accepted by the French state in 1987.
The exhibition is organised chronologically following the photographer’s life and career, starting with his experimentations in the 1930s (self-portraits and photomontages) with his wife and close collaborator, Fernande. Right from the start of his photographic work in the field of advertising and fashion, François Kollar asserted his talent with photo shoots for Oméga, Christofle, Hermès and Worth et Coty perfumes. For many years he worked with such magazines as Harper’s Bazaar, L’Illustration, VU, Voilà, Le Figaro Illustré and Plaisir de France. Following his coverage of the transformation of the working world in the 1930s, during the 1950s and 60s industrial reports in French West Africa and in France set the tempo for the later years of his career.
Thanks to his experience as a manual worker in Renault, François Kollar’s photography demonstrates his awareness of the world of industry and industrial spaces. ‘Un ouvrier du regard’ bears witness to his high level of technical expertise, both in the studio and on location and his deep-seated interest for industrial trades. It highlights the wide variety of subjects photographed by François Kollar throughout his career, a variety that is mirrored in the techniques he used, as well as the evolutions in the working world as it transitioned from handicrafts and cottage industries to industrial production.
The central part of the exhibition is devoted to the high point of François Kollar’s career, La France travaille. This commission from the publishing company Horizons de France comprises some fifteen booklets produced between 1931 and 1934. The reports, indexed by sector – from agriculture to the steel industry, including the maritime industry and electricity production – were produced with the aim of showcasing France’s leading companies and the figure of the working man, contributing in this way to idealising the image of men and women at work. Taken as a whole, these reports constitute a unique chronicle in images of the world of work and French society from the beginning of the 1930s up until the 1960s. During this entire period, François Kollar endeavoured to photograph the mechanised world of serial production, standardisation and the rationalisation of production.
Through a play with light, transparency and chiaroscuro effects, as well as compositions that highlighted different textures, François Kollar managed to reveal a sensitive side to industrial landscapes. He revealed himself to be a temperate photographer, somewhere between the barebones modernism of Bauhaus and a humanist approach to photography. At the beginning of his career, François Kollar had immortalised dresses, jewellery and objets d’art for Harper‘s Bazaar in a manner that demonstrated his attention to the gesture and the ‘intelligence of the hand’. Kollar’s work is characterised by an approach that is simultaneously sensitive and distant: sensitive to shape and light in the situations in which objects and human bodies are portrayed; distant because of this lens between him and the general population. The camera’s lens distanced him from the ordinary men and women and their demands, which explains why his work shows no traces of any social movements, although they were frequent at the time (1929 and 1931-1936).
The retrospective provides the means to fully-apprehend the diversity of a photographer who was himself a ‘worker’ (ouvrier) at the service of his clients – whether advertising companies, clients from the world of fashion and the media, or industrialists – but who nevertheless managed to preserve a strong photographic identity and a unique view on his times. Throughout his body of work, François Kollar bears witness to the ideology of progress that drives the capitalist economy, whilst preserving his characteristic objectivity.
First part
The first part of the exhibition features Kollar’s experimental period including self-portraits taken in his Parisian studio, as well as his work for advertising firms and the fashion industry. This section is made up of photos that reflect the spirit of the modern world he lived in and bear witness to Kollar’s desire to develop an experimental and expressive style of photography through an almost playful approach to his models, objects, lighting and composition. Detailed documentary resources enable visitors to understand the context of his advertising work and the photos for the blossoming illustrated magazine sector, which were published in L’Illustration, Vu, Voilà, Art et Médecine and Plaisir de France, amongst others.
Second part
The central part of the exhibition, devoted to La France travaille (1931-1934), features vintage prints and slideshows, as well as archives and publications. This photographic commission constitutes a unique record of the world of work in the 1930s. Kollar photographed every sector of activity: industry, agriculture, aviation, handicrafts, as well as the automobile, maritime and railway industries. Men and women and their functions and roles in the production process are recurrent elements in François Kollar’s images. Published in the form of fifteen themed booklets, printed in photogravure by Editions Horizons de France, Kollar’s photographs were used to illustrate texts by popular authors from the period (Paul Valéry, Pierre Hamp, Lucien Favre…) dealing with the main professions in French industry.
Third part
The third part of the exhibition presents works by Kollar from the period following on from La France travaille, notably fashion photography and commissions for industrial reporting assignments. Thanks to his reputation as a talented advertising photographer, François Kollar was much in demand for portrait work and he notably photographed Coco Chanel, Elisa Schiaparelli and the Duchess of Windsor. Although his collaboration with Harper’s Bazaar came to an end in 1955, Kollar continued to enjoy a successful career in industrial photography. Amongst his numerous photographic series, the Jeu de Paume has chosen to show in particular the 1951 commission from the French State for a report on French West Africa (now Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal), as well as a series of photos showing the workshops of the Union Aéromaritime de Transport. In this way, the exhibition highlights the transformations in the world of work during the 20th century and the place occupied by men and women at a time when the world was in a state of upheaval because of global conflicts, as well as in the midst of rebuilding itself.
Text from Jeu de Paume
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled 1930
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled 1930
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Fleur d’ail (Garlic flower) 1930 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 29.4 x 22.6cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
FRENCH WEST AFRICA (A.O.F.) COMMISSION ED BY THE FRENCH STATE, 1951
When France invested massively in the 1950s in the construction of infrastructures in French West Africa, Kollar went to document this milestone in the relationship between France and its colonies, notably today’s Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal. His photos were published in the magazines of French West Africa to portray France’s initiatives in a positive light. Continuing to play his part in the ‘manufacture’ of consensual, positive images, Kollar continued his career by taking photos of men and women at work in factories, building roads or on ships plying their trade… “What François Kollar wants to portray is a sort of gradual disengagement of the colonial power, (…) but also how behind the ‘modernity’ (which is the subject of his remit) lies a form of tradition, rather as if he wanted to show how the two aspects are in contradiction with each other” (Pascal Blanchard, ‘Francois Kollar. Afrique 50. Dans l’oeil de la propagande’, Jeu de Paume, Editions de La Martinière).
Text from Jeu de Paume
INDUSTRIAL REPORTS 1950-1960
Back in Paris in 1945, François Kollar re-established his contacts and started receiving commissions from French industry once more. His photos powerfully document the relationship between the human body, the machine and the working environment. “In Kollar’s images, the human measure is omnipresent; one almost never loses the sense of scale […] with frequent contrasts between near and far, the intimate and the monumental”. (Jean-François Chevrier, ‘La France travaille: les vertus de l’illustration’, Jeu de Paume, Editions de La Martinière). Indeed the design of new industrial buildings took the question of ergonomics into account, which went hand-in-hand with the evolutions in the roles and tasks of factory workers. Amongst others, François Kollar worked for the Union Aéromaritime de Transport, (an airline that mainly served Africa, and French West Africa in particular, later to become UTA); the potash mines of Alsace; Moulinex; Christofle; and Poliet-et-Chausson. Kollar, who learnt how to use colour photography techniques early on, used this new medium for some of these reports.
Text from Jeu de Paume
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Chaussures Bata, Rufisque, Senegal Bata Shoes, Rufisque, Senegal 1951 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 22.6 x 24.8cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Poliet et Chausson, Gargenville 1957-1958 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 29.7 x 21.6cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled [Emplacement de traverses, usine Cima, Croix] [Replacement of sleepers, Cima factory, Croix] c. 1954 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 29.7 x 21.6cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Type de laiterie dans une ferme Normande Type of dairy farm in Normandy 1950 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 15.5 x 11.5cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Fabrication de corps de chauffe de chauffe-eau, usine Brandt, France Manufacturing water heater, heater factory Brandt, France 1950 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 13.6 x 8.9cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled [Fabrication des moulins à légumes, usine Moulinex, Alençon] [Production of vegetable mills, Moulinex factory, Alençon] 1950 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 29.6 x 21.6cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled [Emboutissage des couverts, Christofle, France] [Stamping cutlery, Christofle, France] 1957-1958 Vintage silver gelatin photograph 30 x 21.6cm Donation François Kollar, Médiathèque de l’architecture et du patrimoine
Other François Kollar photographs
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled 1931 Silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled 1936 Silver gelatin photograph
François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Construction 1936 Silver gelatin photograph
Jeu de Paume 1, Place de la Concorde 75008 Paris métro Concorde Phone: 01 47 03 12 50
Unknown photographer (Australian) Hobart Town – from Kangaroo Point 1891 1891 Albumen photograph 34.5 x 22.2cm
This albumen photograph of Hobart, Tasmania was taken in 1891 by an unknown photographer. Mount Wellington is behind the city. The photograph is one that is possibly not known before of this place. Kangaroo Point is now known as Kangaroo Bluff. I have scanned and lightly cleaned the image.
A memory of a different time and place.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Nick Henderson for allowing me to scan this wonderful image.
Unknown photographer (Australian) Port Arthur, Tasmania 1891 Albumen photograph 34.5 x 22.2cm
In memory of all those that lost their lives 20 years ago today at Port Arthur, Tasmania.
This albumen photograph of Port Arthur, Tasmania was taken in 1891 by an unknown photographer. I have scanned and lightly cleaned the image. The photograph is one that is possibly not known before of this place.
Looking down on St. David’s Anglican Church with Mason Cove in the distance, with rowing boats in the river and sailing boats hidden at left behind the trees.
In front of the church a man and boy pose for the camera, the man with his hands on his hips head topped with pork pie hat, the boy wearing an oversized hat, possibly a boater, with his hands hanging limply by his side.
To the left, washing hangs on the line to dry with, behind, weeping willows and an ornamental, circular stone fountain in the middle of a sparse garden paddock.
To the right is Settlement Road with The Commandant’s Garden in the distance.
A memory of a different time and place.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Nick Henderson for allowing me to scan this wonderful image.
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Caged 2011 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Taken as a whole, the artist Roger Ballen’s body of work is exceptionally strong. From his early documentary series Dorps (1986) and Platteland (1996) which featured alienated and poverty poverty stricken whites in South Africa struggling with their place in the world after Apartheid; through my favourite series Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005) and Boarding House (2009) which portrayed down and out whites on the fringe of South African society in a surrealist, performative art; to the more recent Animal Abstraction (2011), I Fink U Freeky (2013) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) … through each of these series you can trace the development of this preternatural artist, whose work seems to exist almost beyond nature itself.
The move from documentary photographer to director / collaborator / actor / observer was critical to the development of Ballen’s art. As the text on the Outland web page on Roger Ballen’s website states, “Where previously his pictures, however troubling, fell firmly into the category of documentary photography, these pictures move into the realms of fiction. Ballen’s characters act out dark and discomfiting tableaux, providing images which are exciting and disturbing in equal measure. One is forced to wonder whether they are exploited victims, colluding directly in their own ridicule, or newly empowered and active participants within the drama of their representation.” [No longer available online]
From the videos included in this posting, it is obvious that the latter statement is the correct interpretation. Through this thematic development, the viewer may come to understand the nature of the artist’s collaboration with the people, places and things that he photographs. The empathy that these photographs and videos evidence, the interchangeable director/actor roles, and the connection that he has with his subject matter gives insight into the compassion of this man. He never judges anyone. He accepts them for who they are and works with them to create these challenging art works.
Apparently these photographs, “have a singular ability to cause disquiet to the viewer.” Personally, they have never caused me disquiet for I find them quite fascinating. They follow on from a long line of photographers who have observed the marginalised in society, from the circus freak show photographs, through Diane Arbus and Arthur Tress (who also has a book called Theater of the Mind) to Joel Peter-Witkin and Roger Ballen. Much like the earlier Robert Frank’s seminal book The Americans, which featured an outsider photographing a world from a different point of view, Ballen moved to South Africa from America in 1982 and has never fully lost that outsider status. As John McDonald observes, “He has been there long enough to be an insider, but retains the probing eye of an outsider, able to see a side of life that native-born can’t see, or don’t wish to see.” And that is the point: all of these artists, with their probing eyes, can perceive difference and accept it on its own terms. They portray the world through a horizontal consciousness (an equal “living field” if you like), not a hierarchical system of privilege, power and control, where some are better, more worthy than others.
But what nature is he investigating? Is it human nature and its ability to survive under the most dire circumstances? Is it the nature of the relationship of the body to its environment, or the human to animals, or the relationship between our souls and our subconscious? It’s all of these and more. Ballen probes these nexus, the strands that connect and link our lives together: our dreams, nightmares and desires. His photographs act as a form of binding together, bringing the periphery of society into the centre (of attention). He creates an extant reality in which we are asked to question: how do we feel towards these people and how do we feel about our own lives?
He achieves this creation through the use of what I call “heightened awareness” – both situationally and subconsciously. Ballen is fully aware and receptive towards the conditions of his environment and his dreams. Instead of a desire to possess the object of his longing and then to be possessed by that desire (desire to possess / possessed by desire) Ballen has learnt, as Krishnamurti did, not to make images out of every word, out of every vision and desire. Ballen understands that he must be attentive to the clarity of not making images – of desire, of prejudice, of flattery – because only then might you become aware of the world that surrounds us, just for what it is and nothing more. He accepts what he can create and what is given to him by being fully aware. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action.1 His images become a blend of the space of intimacy and world-space as he strains toward, “communion with the universe, in a word, space, the invisible space that man can live in nevertheless, and which surrounds him with countless presences.”2
His photographs become an enveloping phenomenon in which the viewer is draped in their affect… this ‘wearing of images’ is both magical and all encompassing.
We are the people in his pictures. We are their dreams.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ Concepts from Krishnamurti. Beginnings of Learning. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978, pp. 130-131.
2/ Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. (trans Maria Jolas). Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. xxxv.
Many thankx to SCA Galleries for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Archetypal levels of the deeper subconscious pervade my photographs… When I create my photographs I often travel deep into my own interior, a place where dreams and many of my images originate. I see my photographs as mirrors, reflectors, connectors into the mind… The light comes from the dark.”
“These pictures are a very complex way of seeing, a very complex way of viewing the world and you know perhaps this went back to the time I was in my mother’s stomach… I can’t really say what exactly is the primary cause of what I do.”
“So the thing is is my pictures, my better pictures or a lot of my pictures, embed themselves deeply in the subconscious, because the mind isn’t ready for those photographs, they don’t have any corresponding experience in some way or another, so the pictures tend to have more of an impact on the person’s deeper mind than something we would normally think of as disturbing because the pictures get into the mind. People aren’t used to having things get in there and stay in there and threaten their image of themselves in some way or another and so that’s why they call them disturbing, they’re not actually disturbing a better way of saying it is that if somebody has some kind of consciousness they’re actually enlightening.”
Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen’s Asylum of the Birds (full film)
To mark the publication of his long-awaited new monograph Asylum of the Birds, photographer Roger Ballen, with director Ben Crossman, has produced this psychologically powerful, unforgettable film that follows Roger into a world synonymous with his photographs, as never before seen on film.
Roger Ballen’s Outland (2015)
Phaidon Press has released a revised version of the iconic book Outland by photographer Roger Ballen. Film maker Ben Jay Crossman takes us on a journey to the Outland to show us the mind inside the mind.
ROGER BALLEN: PHOTOGRAPHS 1982-2009 Part 3: Outland
Roger Ballen talks about his past projects leading up to his current work in the celebrated exhibition ROGER BALLEN: PHOTOGRAPHS 1982-2009, on display at George Eastman House from Feb. 27 – June 6, 2010. Hear more from the curator of the exhibition, Eastman House director Dr. Anthony Bannon, discussing Ballen’s work in ‘Embracing Difficult Art’
His raw, black & white images are alluring, fascinating and disturbing. He is one of the most important and exciting photographers of the 21st century. The intriguing work of Roger Ballen is coming to Australia, to Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), this March in the artist’s first major Sydney exhibition. Staged to coincide with the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind is a provocative exhibition of 75 contemporary works created by the artist over the last two decades.
Professor Colin Rhodes, Dean of the University of Sydney’s contemporary art school and curator of the exhibition, said: “For a long time Roger Ballen’s photography has trodden a path where others are too timid to tread, toying with our innermost dreams, nightmares and desires. The raw, atmospheric exhibition spaces at Sydney College of the Arts [the site of the former Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital] are the ideal setting to articulate this core aspect of Ballen’s work.”
Born in New York in 1950, Ballen has lived in Johannesburg since the 1970s. His work as a geologist took him across the countryside and led him to explore, through the camera lens, the smaller South African towns. His early photographs of the hidden lives of people living on the fringes of society made considerable impact, receiving acclaim from American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag among others.
Through the medium of black and white photography, Ballen has achieved a unique integration of drawing, painting and installation that have been compared to the masters of art brut. His peculiar and somewhat shocking imagery confronts the viewer and drags them into the work. Viewers are participants in the work – not merely observers – taking them on a journey into the recesses of their minds, as Ballen explores his own.
Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind consists of five sections that see people, birds, animal and inanimate subjects become the ‘cast’ in an exhibition that is hard-hitting, psychological theatre. The Sydney exhibition includes a new installation work created onsite at SCA by Ballen in response to the site’s mental health history, in the labyrinth of underground cells of the former Rozelle hospital.
The show includes Ballen’s award-winning music video ‘I Fink U Freeky’ (2012) by South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord, which has received over 76 million hits on YouTube and earned a cult following. In addition, the public will be able to access his equally remarkable video works Outland and Asylum of the Birds.
The worldwide impact of Ballen’s work was celebrated in major retrospective exhibition at Washington DC’s Smithsonian National Museum of African Art from 2013 to 2014. It was this exhibition that drove Rhodes’ interest to bring Ballen’s work to Australia.
“When I first saw Ballen’s work en masse, I was struck by the role of drawing in his photos and what seemed to me a relationship with Art Brut or Outsider Art. The artist’s interest in and knowledge of Outsider Art is a key part of understanding the growth of Ballen’s identity as an international artist,” said Professor Rhodes.
Roger Ballen will present a public talk in Sydney at SCA on 9 March, ahead of the official opening of his Sydney exhibition on Tuesday 15 March. Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind is showing at SCA Galleries from 16 March to 7 May 2016. A 96-page book will accompany the exhibition featuring Ballen’s photography and an essay by Professor Rhodes.
Press release from SCA Galleries
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Bewitched 2012 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Untitled 2015 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Twirling Wires 2001 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Mirrored 2012 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Ballen has no qualms about creating dramatic scenarios in his search for “archetypal” symbols that speak to the viewer’s subconscious. He began as a documentary photographer but over the years his pictures have become filled with drawings, paintings and sculptural brac-a-brac, created by the artist himself, or by his subjects. In works such as Collision (2005) or Deathbed (2010), there are no figures, but the human presence is implied by a face drawn on a pillow or the broken head of a doll. The walls in both photos are covered in crude drawings and dirty marks – signs of previous occupation…
[Ballen] argues that these images are primarily psychological, not sociological. He wants to address that deep, dark part of the mind that Freud called “the Id”. As a concept it’s more poetic than biological – a shared repository of instinctive drives that remains buried under the trappings of civilisation…
Despite the extreme nature of her work, Diane Arbus remained within the documentary tradition, whereas a figure such as Joel-Peter Witkin constructs his own theatrical tableaux in the studio. Ballen’s work is somewhere between these two poles. The subjects of his photographs are society’s misfits, but his approach is shamelessly theatrical. His figures are not posing passively, they are collaborating with someone who has won their trust, creating a form of ad hoc performance art in bare, filthy rooms…
It’s more interesting to ask what Ballen feels when he enters such environments. To take these photos he has immersed himself in a world of violence and madness. If he has built up a rapport with his subjects it is by treating them not as freaks, but as people with their own sense of dignity. He refuses to buy into conventional distinctions about what is normal and abnormal, presumably as a legacy of his early exposure to the counterculture and the anti-psychiatry movement.
John McDonald. “Roger Ballen,” on the John McDonald website April 7, 2016 [Online] Cited 25/04/2016
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Lunchtime 2001 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Take off 2012 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Cat and Mouse 2001 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) School Room 2003 Image courtesy of the artist and Stills Gallery
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Portrait of sleeping girl 2000
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Deathbed 2010
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Three hands 2006
Roger Ballen (South African born America, b. 1950) Head inside shirt 2001
SCA Galleries Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney) Kirkbride Way, off Balmain Road, Lilyfield (enter opposite Cecily Street) Phone: +61 2 9351 1008
Curators:Lead Curator: Diane Dufour (Director of Le Bal); Co-Curators / Organisers: Matthew Witkovsky (Art Institute of Chicago), Walter Moser (Fotomuseum Winterthur), and Duncan Forbes.
Installation photograph of the exhibition Provoke: Between Protest and Performance – Photography in Japan 1960-1975 at the Albertina, Vienna
I absolutely love Japanese photography from this period.
Subjective photographs with a gutsy pictorial language: rough, grainy, and blurred intimations of a postwar reality mated with “the search for a new Japanese identity.”
An identity (pop!) art with an elemental, chthonic twist containing a dark sensuality which produced images that pull no punches. Wonderful stuff.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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.
The Japanese photo magazine Provoke, which ran for three issues in 1968 and 1969, is viewed as a one-of-a-kind agglomeration of post-war artistic efforts. In the world’s first-ever exhibition on this topic, the Albertina examines the complex genesis of this magazine and thereby presents a representative cross-section of photographic trends present in Japan between the 1960s and 1970s.
With around 200 objects, this showing unites works by Japan’s most influential photographers including Daidō Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki. In light of the massive protest movements active in Japan during this period, their photographs arose at a historical turning point between societal collapse and the search for a new Japanese identity. These images thus represent both an expression of this political transformation and the renewal of prevalent aesthetic norms.
This exhibition is a coproduction between Albertina, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Le Bal (Paris), and Art Institute of Chicago.
The three numbers of Provoke were printed in small editions of only one thousand copies each. Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Kōji Taki, and Takahiko Okada founded the magazine; Daidō Moriyama joined the group with the magazine’s second issue. While the first two numbers were dedicated to the subjects Summer 1968 and Eros, the last issue had no focal theme.
The photographers of Provoke worked spontaneously and dynamically, often without looking through the viewfinder of their small-format cameras. This made for a rough, grainy, and blurred (“are,” “bure,” “boke”) pictorial language influenced by Ed van der Elsken and William Klein. This language broke with traditional photography defined by sophisticated compositions, perfect tonal values, and the vintage print. The tonal quality of pictures reproduced through printing differed from that of traditional photographic prints, and the pictures were regarded as independent works in their own right. Contrary to the objectives of the traditional matter-of-fact documentary photography, they mirrored their authors’ subjective experience of Japan’s postwar reality. The manifesto in the first Provoke issue defined photography as an autonomous medium independent of spoken language and aimed at “provoking” thoughts and ideas. The title of the magazine Provoke: Provocative Materials for Thought expresses this intention.
Wall text
Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015) | For a Language to Come
The photographer, theorist, and critic Takuma Nakahira and Kōji Taki were responsible for the discursive orientation of Provoke. Nakahira’s works rejected the rules of photojournalism and its claim of rendering facts in a generally valid, objective way. They were also critical of the visual mass media which increasingly pervaded the everyday life of Japan’s consumerist society. According to Nakahira, the media, having lost all relation to reality through the information explosion, were only concerned with presenting a virtual reality. Nakahira did not regard the photograph as an artist photographer’s means of expression but as a mere mechanical document of his subjective perception.
It is the relationship between photography and language which is central for Nakahira’s photography. This is not only evident in Provoke but also in his book For a Language to Come published in 1970. This volume assembles a non-linear and unhierarchical sequence of snapshots evoking imaginary, post-apocalyptic sceneries which not least reveal the photographer’s skepsis about the US consumerist culture spreading throughout Japan.
Wall text from the exhibition
Three Waves of Protest Books
The protest books can be divided into three groups. From the 1960s, mainly collective publishing projects highlighted social unrest such as mass demonstrations and strikes organised by the trade unions against the ratification of the Security Treaty. The trade union publication Rope Ladder and Iron Helmet, for example, documents the occupation of a publishing house by its employees. The second wave saw primarily individual publications by various photographers such as Kazuo Kitai’s book Resistance. It depicts the students’ activities, and its rough and grainy pictorial language became important for Provoke. The third wave of protest books, generally designed by students and published from 1967 on, focused on violent street fights in Tokyo directed against the Vietnam War. The collectively produced volume Sanrizuka – The Hokusō Plateau on Fire. Document 1966-71 deals with the protests against the construction of the airport in Sanrizuka, in which students joined forces with the local farmers.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation photographs of the exhibition Provoke: Between Protest and Performance – Photography in Japan 1960-1975 at the Albertina, Vienna
Shōmei Tōmatsu is seen as a key figure for Provoke. He photographed the sociopolitical changes in Japan from the 1950s on, depicting US military bases, the consequences of dropping a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, and the student protests in a new, symbolic documentary style. The pictures’ subjective approach revolutionised traditional documentary and reportage photography, which strove to convey a comprehensible story and a clear social message. The strategies developed by Tōmatsu are to be found in the Provoke artists’ works in a pointed form.
Tōmatsu also supported the Provoke photographers as an exhibition organiser and editor. Together with Takuma Nakahira and Kōji Taki, he prepared the first major exhibition of Japanese photography in 1968, which was to stimulate the founders of the magazine to explore the medium. Tōmatsu and Nakahira edited the photo galleries I am a King in the magazine Gendai no me (The Contemporary Eye), which for the first time assembled works by the photographers who would form the Provoke group.
Pictures taken in the context of performances breach the boundary between photographic documentation and live action and emphasize performative aspects of the medium like the brief act of pictorial production and the materiality of the picture. For his series Kamaitachi, Eikō Hosoe portrayed the butoh and performance artist Tatsumi Hijikata from 1965 on. The performer incorporated the demon Kamaitachi in scenes specifically staged for the camera, visualising the photographer’s memories of World War II. As Hosoe used his camera in a very dynamic way, the shooting may be seen as a happening involving two artists.
Competing with Provoke, Nobuyoshi Araki produced a number of Xerox photography books from 1970 on. Araki and his assistants xeroxed photographs and sent the copies bound between black covers to colleagues and friends. The production process resembling a happening, the use of technically inadequate means, and the preference of copies over the original defied classical photography in ways to be found in the Provoke magazines.
Also inspired by Provoke, Jirō Takamatsu turned to conceptual photography. For Photograph of Photograph he employed a photographer to take pictures of pictures from his family albums. The snapshot-like pictorial language manifesting itself in reflections and random image sections defamiliarises the album pictures. Like in Daidō Moriyama’s series Accident, processes connected with the production of prints become a visible element of work that questions the supposed factuality of the medium.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Japan was shaken by massive, partly violent waves of protests. The key event was the ratification of the Security Treaty between Japan and the United States in 1960. Japan’s role as a military base for the war against Vietnam, the construction of Narita Airport in Sanrizuka, and the neoliberal activities of big concerns also led to protests. The years between 1960 and 1975 saw the publication of about eighty publications on the protests and the assessment of Japan’s recent history, particularly the US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, connected with it.
Published by artist photographers, student associations, trade unions, and professional photo journalists, the protest books were produced in different ways. They were aimed at spreading information and mobilising people for further protests. The strategies of subversive self-representation were characterised by an innovative design: appeal-like combinations of texts and images, suggestive sequences, dynamic croppings, and an interplay of inferior materials and sophisticated layouts.
Though the members of Provoke, excepting Moriyama, were active politically, they held the opinion that the possibilities of protest photography had been exhausted and that it could not bring about political change. Nevertheless, Provoke followed the models developed by it. The most striking feature next to layout and printing techniques is the protest photographers’ abstract and blurry aesthetic resulting from technical shortcomings.
The Japanese photo magazine Provoke, which ran for three issues in 1968 and 1969, is regarded as a highlight of post-war photography. The Albertina, in the world’s first-ever exhibition on this topic, is taking a close look at this publication’s creators and its long genesis. The presentation encompasses a representative cross-section of Japanese photographic trends during the 1960s and 1970s. With around 200 objects, the exhibition Provoke unites works by Japan’s most influential photographers – including Daidō Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Shōmei Tōmatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki. Before the backdrop of the massive protest activities in Japan during this period, they created their images out of an awareness of being at a historical turning point between societal collapse and the search for a new Japanese identity. These works thus represent both an expression of this political transformation and a renewal of prevalent aesthetic norms.
This exhibition places Provoke in a historical context, focussing on the dialogue between the group’s photography in particular and contemporary protest photography and performance art in general.
Photography is examined as a document of – and/or a call to – protest against injustice: the period around 1960 saw numerous books published in connection with the first great wave of protests in Japan against renewal of the alliance with the USA. A few of them document the demonstrations themselves, while others deal with related themes – above all with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The years during which Provoke was published saw these protests, which were staged employing great creativity, give rise to a captivating visual world of resistance to the illegal actions of large corporations and the despotism of the neoliberal Japanese state.
As the 1960s wore on, the protest movements intensified, leading to a flood of photo volumes and prints. The makers of Provoke – critic Kōji Taki, author Takuma Nakahira, critic and photographer Takuma Nakahira, and photographers Yutaka Takanashi and Daidō Moriyama – were of the opinion that journalistic photography had exhausted itself and that it was impossible to effect long-term change through direct political action. But even so, in their texts and their photos, they oriented themselves on the aesthetic strategies to which Japan’s protest photography had given rise: their works feature strikingly innovative graphic design that employs image sequences, pithy text/image combinations, dynamic outtakes, and the interplay of specifically chosen cheap materials (rough paper, low-resolution printing) with fold-outs and unusual formats.
The exhibition concludes by examining the Japanese photography of its chosen period as a variant of performance art and/or as documentation of live actions: Daidō Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and Nobuyoshi Araki are among those photographers who, around 1970, developed great interest in portraying darkroom work or other processes connected to the production of photographic prints as visible and active components of photographic creativity. They were preceded in their efforts by dance performers such as Tatsumi Hijikata, who worked with filmmakers and photographers, as well as by groups like the Hi-Red Center, which blurred the distinctions between photographic documentation and live actions in which photography and other media played a role.
But such influences worked both ways: directly inspired by the activities of the photographers of Provoke, Hi-Red Center member Jiro Takamatsu and Koji Enokura turned to photographic conceptual art in the early 1970s.
From the mid-1960s, Yutaka Takanashi focused on the urban change of the metropolis. Tokyo’s massive expansion, the modernisation of its infrastructure, and its ruthless industrialisation were captured in spontaneous pictures often shot from a driving car. Unlike his Provoke colleagues’ works, Takanashi’s photographs are easier to read, less pessimistic, and show a stronger affinity to classical documentary photography. He composed all his pictures by looking through the viewfinder.
In close collaboration with the book designer Kōhei Sugiura, Takanashi published the artist book Toshi e (Towards the City). Embedded in a cardboard box, its two volumes comprise a number of different, partly overlapping work groups: while the smaller one, titled Tokyo-jin (Tokyoites) contains pictures of the city’s inhabitants from 1966, the larger one explores Tokyo’s new topography, documenting its outlying districts. Shot in the Provoke era, the pictures’ blurriness and apparent exposure mistakes testify to the group’s influence.
Daidō Moriyama’s series Accident interlinks sociopolitical subjects, references to Western art, and media-analytical considerations. Against the background of Japan’s strengthening consumerist culture, Moriyama, inspired by Andy Warhol’s pop art pictures, relied on everyday mass media. Next to demonstrations and pop culture motifs, Moriyama, alluding to Warhol’s work Silver Car Crash of 1963, photographed police posters that campaigned for safe driving with deterrent pictures of car accidents. Reflections on the material and blurs resulting from the pictures’ enlargement emphasise the reproduction process. Moriyama questions the illusionary nature of photography and underlines their material quality. Regarding contents, the series investigates the conflict between the US consumerist culture’s attraction and the quest for a Japanese identity.
This mega-exhibition has been a popular success for the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, with over 300,000 visitors during its run. But does that make it an interesting, or even memorable, exhibition? Personally, I think this is an exhibition based on a curatorial concept, an interesting concept, that does not then lead to a memorable exhibition. I will explain why.
The idea behind the exhibition, to compare and contrast the work of Andy Warhol (one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century) and the work of Ai Weiewei (that denizen and superstar of contemporary art and free speech, in China and around the world) is sound but in reality, on actual viewing, the relationship between the ideas of both artists seems rather forced.
While the synergy of ideas between both artists is present – “a vocabulary which celebrates freedom of speech and, at the same time, the wisdom of pop culture” – evidenced through the symbology of popular culture and the specificity and uniqueness of the original, the installation of the work does neither of the artist’s work justice.
In this game of comparisons (where Andy Warhol’s photographs of New York sit opposite those of Ai Weiwei’s, where Andy Warhol’s portraits of Chairman Mao sit diagonally opposite Ai Weiwei’s) neither artist’s work can be contemplated as a whole… and it is Warhol’s work that comes out a poor second best in this artistic exchange.
Why?
Mainly because both artist’s are talking about completely different things from completely different eras and it is Ai who dominates the conversation. As Monica Tan observes in an article on the Guardian website, “In their art, Ai aggressively engages with politics and current affairs… while Warhol was forever occupied with consumerism, pop culture iconography and celebrity.”1
With regard to the work of Ai Weiwei there is the key word, aggressively. His brazen installations simply overwhelm the sophistication of the work of Andy Warhol, and this should never have happened, should never have been allowed to happen. The exhibition does not do Warhol’s work justice.
Ai Weiwei comments, “We’re dealing with different societies, Andy Warhol and I. We are involved with very different social and political circumstances. But we’re both trying to face out reality honestly and to give a better illustration of our time.”2
While the last sentence is true, facing out reality honestly does not mean that both mens work can be understood or compared in the same breath, which is what happens in this exhibition. For each artist’s work I felt there was no space to breathe in the whole eight galleries. The visitor needs at least three hours, and a couple of visits, to get through all of the work and at the end of it all you feel is rather exhausted and only a little enlightened.
After the forced curatorial concept of the whole exhibition, this is my second major criticism of the show: the unnecessary “noise” of the installation. Everything and the art kitchen sink (preferably teamed with an ancient Chinese sink with ceramic flowers growing out of it) has been thrown at the installation of the exhibition, not necessarily to its benefit.
Susan Sontag despairs of the “ambience of distraction” that pervades contemporary museums – less room to contemplate, more rooms for noise.
The NGV seems particularly adept at this distraction and this exhibition is just another example of the phenomenon. Room after room is filled to the brim with artefacts which are then placed on more noise – busy, repetitious wallpaper!
Andy Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of Mao (1972) are hung on his Mao Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015), on the exterior of Ai Weiwei’s Letgo room (2015) meaning that you can’t really “read” the colours of the silkscreens properly as they are subsumed amongst this mass of wallpaper noise. A similar thing happens with Warhol’s Electric Chairs (1971) silkscreens and his Electric Chair (1967) painting which are hung on Warhol’s Washington Monument Wallpaper (1974, reprint 2015). This means that the luminosity of the colours of the silkscreens and painting completely loose their impact if you were viewing the works against a plain wall. They just blend into the gallery wall.
It’s as though the curators at the NGV are frightened of empty wall space, both in the number of objects in a room and the lack of negative space (plain coloured walls) behind the art works. And this is not a singular occurrence of this phenomenon at the NGV… the exhibition David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me featured this installation technique while the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Greatwas nearly ruined by garish wall colourings and patterned floors. Less is more.
Speaking of which, some of superstar of the contemporary art world Ai Weiwei’s work was, dare I say it, woeful. When he hits the mark, such as in bodies of work like the photographic series Study of Perspective (1995-2011, below), his incisive commentary on freedom and surveillance With Flowers(2013-2015) or his installation of S.A.C.R.E.D. Maquettes(2011), which depicts scenes from the detention cell where he was held without charge by the Chinese government for eighty-one days – he is masterful as an artist, in complete control of his visual and symbolic language.
But then you have pieces of work such as the dire Letgo (2015) (focusing on Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights and freedom of speech) made of pseudo-LEGO which is just a hideous and ugly art work that has very few redeeming features. There also seems no logical reason to remake the famous photographic triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995, below) in children’s building bricks. To no particularly good effect, why is this statement, this re-imagining being made?
Similarly, when Ai remakes a pair of handcuffs in jade and wood, Handcuffs (2015), other than the historic qualities of the materials in relation to the history of China and issues of freedom of speech, where does the work actually take you? Not very far. Noise, noise and more noise, just a symptom and comment on our social media society.
The third major criticism of this exhibition and the most crucial to its failure to be a memorable exhibition: is its lack of TIME.
Lumping both Warhol and Ai Weiwei side by side, cheek by jowl, gives neither artist’s work the time to breathe and the viewer no time to contemplate, to IMAGINE, the relationship between the two artists. Two artist’s from different eras separated by time. Here, time (and space) is conflated as though the intervening period between them never existed. My idea was this: first, have the first four gallery rooms full of Warhol’s work so that you could understand the ambience of his colour and subtlety, yes subtlety, of his visual language. Then a dark passageway before emerging into four galleries of Ai Weiwei’s work. In this way, you could have understood each artist’s work independently of each other in a holistic way, and then made you own linkages between the two artist’s works… instead of, oh look, here’s Warhol’s photographs of NY and, oh, there’s Ai Weiwei’s photographs of NY!
This simplistic, popularist, comparative curatorial strategy never allows these major artists work room to breathe or the time and space to exist in the sphere and realm of each other. Warhol’s work is denuded by Ai’s aggressive, contemporary take on politics and freedom of speech. Warhol did not deserve that. A sense of TIME and SPACE is what this exhibition needed in its installation in order for the viewer to be able to fully contemplate and IMAGINE the relationship between the two artists. To trust the intelligence of the viewer to make the connections, not treat them as some number walking through the door. Less noise and more imagination.
2/ “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 29.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Marilyn Monroe, the electric chair, Mickey Mouse, Mao Zedong, wallpaper, disasters, comic books, the Empire State Building, dollar bills, Coca-Cola, Einstein – no one knows how many works he left behind; they are varied and miscellaneous, touching upon almost all the important personalities and things of his time, and encompassing almost any possible means of expression: design, painting, sculpture, installation, recordings, photography, video, texts, advertising … Andy Warhol’s creations have rebelled against traditional, commercial, consumerist, plebeian, capitalist and globalised art… no matter when or where he was he was always taking photographs and recording; he was several decades ahead of his time. …
Andy Warhol was a self-created product, and the transmission of that product was a characteristic of his identity, including all of his activities and his life itself. He was a complicated composite of interests and actions; he practiced the passions, desires, ambitions and imaginations of his era. He shaped a broad perception of the world, an experimental world, a popular world, and a non-traditional, anti-elitist world. This is the true significance of Andy Warhol that people aren’t willing to accept, and the reason that he is still not recognised as a true artist by everyone.”
Ai Weiwei. “Ai Weiwei: A tribute to Andy Warhol,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, pp. 31-32.
“Warhol is someone I think of as a unique treasure from the past century, which I call the ‘American Century’. His work has all the qualities of that time and reflects all its mythologies. Warhol’s value has always been underrated. He was many evades ahead of his time. I think, even today, he is still one of the most important figures in contemporary art.”
Ai Weiwei quoted in “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 27.
Gao Yuan Ai Weiwei 2012 Image courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio
This major international exhibition features two of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei.
Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Andy Warhol Museum, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, explores the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern art and contemporary life, focusing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV presents more than 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media.
Presenting the work of both artists, the exhibition explores modern and contemporary art, life and cultural politics through the activities of two exemplary figures – one of whom represents twentieth century modernity and the ‘American century’; and the other contemporary life in the twenty-first century and what has been heralded as the ‘Chinese century’ to come.
Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei premieres a suite of major new commissions from Ai Weiwei, including an installation from the Forever Bicycles series, composed from almost 1500 bicycles; a major five-metre-tall work from Ai’s Chandelier series of crystal and light; Blossom 2015, a spectacular installation in the form of a large bed of thousands of delicate, intricately designed white porcelain flowers; and a room-scale installation featuring portraits of Australian advocates for human rights and freedom of speech and information.
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria website
Ai Weiwei in conversation with Virginia Trioli
Icons and iconoclasm
Andy Warhol is among the most influential artists of the twentieth century. He was a leading figure in the development of Pop Art, and his influence extended to the worlds of film, music, television and popular culture. Warhol created some of the most defining iconography of the late twentieth century through his exploration of consumer society, fame and celebrity, media and advertising, politics and capital.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist, social activist and one of today’s most renowned contemporary artists. His provocative work encompasses diverse fields, including visual art, architecture, curatorial practice, cultural criticism, social media and activism. Ai’s practice addresses some of the most critical global issues of the early twenty-first century, such as the relationship between tradition and modernity, the role of the individual and the state, questions of human rights and the value of freedom of expression.
In this gallery we are introduced to the artists through their engagement with self-portraiture and self-representation, and through some of their most iconic, performative and iconoclastic works. These works not only attest to both artists’ transformation of aesthetic value through artistic innovation and experimentation, but also reference their shared interest in cultural heritage and vernacular expression in the United States and China, respectively.
The source image for Warhol’s numerous portraits of Mao Zedong is the frontispiece to the Chairman’s famous Little Red Book of quotations. Mao’s image was in the media spotlight in 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon travelled to China, and his official portrait could be seen on the walls of homes, businesses and government buildings throughout the country. It was also extremely popular among literary and intellectual circles in the West. Warhol’s repetition of the image as pop-cultural icon underlines the cult of celebrity surrounding Mao, and the ways in which the proliferation of images in media and advertising promotes consumer desire and identification.
Text from exhibition wall panel
Cultural revolutions
Andy Warhol’s Mao paintings, based on a photograph of Mao Zedong taken from his famous Little Red Book of quotations (1964-1976), adopt the subject matter of totalitarian propaganda to create pop portraits of the communist leader. Created in 1972, the year US President Richard Nixon travelled to China – signalling a thawing of relations between the two nations after almost three decades of intense political rivalry – Warhol’s paintings address the cult of personality surrounding Mao. Warhol’s Mao paintings, prints and wallpaper highlight not only the status and influence of the Chinese leader at the height of the Cold War, but also the instrumental role the repetition of images played in establishing his fame.
In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, avant-garde artists in China embraced a wide range of aesthetic positions, including Pop and postmodern critiques of Socialist Realism, sometimes known as cynical realism, to recalibrate historical Chinese images and propaganda. These deadpan critiques of official state imagery are apparent in Ai Weiwei’s large-scale, hand-painted images of Mao produced in the mid 1980s in New York. Ai’s representations of Mao subject the communist leader to various distortions familiar from television signals and screens and painterly gestural abstraction.
This self-portrait was shot by Ai in an elevator while being taken into police custody in 2009. On the night before the trial of a fellow political activist in Chengdu Ai was preparing for, Chinese police officers forced their way into his hotel room around 3 am and arrested him. This candid, documentary-style snap plays on the tradition of the ‘selfie’ in contemporary social media, transforming the form into a political tool. Illumination is a defiant expression of personal autonomy.
Images of death and disaster were a recurrent theme for Warhol from the early 1960s onwards – a preoccupation fatefully realised at a personal level in 1968 when he was shot and seriously injured by the radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas. The gun in the painting is similar to the .22 pistol that Solanas used. While it may be read as autobiographical, Warhol’s Gun series can also be considered in the tradition of still life. It reflects on the ubiquity of violence in popular culture and the media, as well as the role of guns in US culture.
Andy Warhol’s and Ai Weiwei’s practices, like those of many artists, began with a strong interest in drawing. Following art school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Warhol relocated to New York and worked as a commercial illustrator throughout the 1950s. His professional success was largely due to a simple yet sophisticated style and his ability to create art quickly using the ‘blotted line’ technique – a signature style which combined drawing with very basic printmaking. One of his best known advertising campaigns in the 1950s was for I. Miller Shoes; other clients included book publishers, record companies and fashion magazines. These early drawings are of a more personal nature and reveal Warhol’s interest in themes explored in later paintings, screen-prints and films, such as beauty, celebrity, commodities and urban life.
Ai’s early drawings display the poetic sensibility of a young artist whose childhood was largely spent in western Xinjiang Province, a remote desert area where his father, the eminent poet and intellectual Ai Qing had been sent for manual labour and ‘re-education’ during the Cultural Revolution. Made in the late 1970s, when Ai became involved in burgeoning democracy movements and the avant-garde artists’ collective the Stars group, the drawings – while classical in appearance – are marked by an individualistic world view and artistic experimentation at odds with the officially sanctioned aesthetics of Socialist Realism.
Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe were made from a production still from the 1953 film Niagara, and are among his first photo-silkscreen works. Warhol recalls that he began using this process in August 1962: ‘When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make silkscreens of her beautiful face – the first Marilyns’. The repetition of Monroe’s image can be read as a memorial for the deceased American icon as well as a reflection of the media’s insatiable appetite for celebrity and tragedy.
It is perhaps surprising, in view of his self-consciousness and fondness for the anonymity of silkscreen printing, that Warhol produced many self-portraits over a twenty-year period. In Self-Portrait No. 9 his gaunt, disembodied image floats against a starry black background, partially concealed by a fluorescent camouflage pattern – an eloquent reflection on the nature of fame and privacy in an age of mass media. Produced only months before Warhol’s death from surgical complications, this haunting self-portrait is sometimes interpreted as a postmodern death mask.
Nine months before his untimely death due to complications after gall bladder surgery, Warhol undertook a large series of iconic self-portrait paintings. Many viewers and critics alike regard these gaunt staring faces as memento mori, or reminders of human mortality. Each work centres on a levitating head surrounded by a halo of spiky hair. Monumental in scale, the works have a melancholic, haunting quality created in part by the use of dark tones and a dense black ground, and in part by variations across the series in the ghostlike negative photographic reproduction.
The first series of Warhol paintings on a silver background – the Electric Chairs and Tunafish Disasters of 1963 – suggest that the artist’s silver paintings are related to death. Even in the Liz paintings, which appear to highlight Elizabeth Taylor’s Hollywood career, there is an underlying theme of mortality. Warhol created this portrait when Taylor was at the height of stardom, but also very ill with pneumonia. He later recalled: ‘I started those a long time ago, when she was so sick and everyone said she was going to die. Now I’m doing them all over, putting bright colours on her lips and eyes’.
Warhol returned to the Statue of Liberty image many times during his career, repeatedly adapting the iconic form from different stylistic angles. In this work, Warhol focused on Lady Liberty’s face to produce a heroic celebrity portrait. The painting was created in 1986 – 100 years after the statue arrived in New York as a gift from France. The Fabis logo in the painting’s left corner is that of a French cookie company. Warhol played with all sorts of brands and logos in large-scale paintings of this period, often juxtaposing brands on top of images in contradictory and humorous ways.
The Study of Perspective series of photographs depicts Ai defiantly raising his middle finger to architectural monuments symbolic of state and cultural power. Measuring the distance between the artist and his subject, the composition of these works invokes the spatial relationship between the individual and the state while also echoing the unforgettable image of a lone demonstrator blocking the path of a military tank at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei at the NGV maps out where the two artists intersect. Works such as Ai’s neolithic urn defaced with a Coca-Cola logo seem to echo Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. But it would be reductive to call Ai “the Andy Warhol of 2015”. He says the show is interesting because it simultaneously highlights how close but also “so far away, so far apart” the artists are in their respective cultural backgrounds.
In their art, Ai aggressively engages with politics and current affairs (such as his moving roll call of the more than 5,000 students that died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake) while Warhol was forever occupied with consumerism, pop culture iconography and celebrity.
A frisson is created by their respective portrayals of Mao Zedong hung in tandem. Ai says Warhol was a “very keen and very sensitive” artist, but portrayed the chairman as “no different to Marilyn Monroe or a Coca-Cola sign – purely a sign or signature of that time.”
The Chinese artist has a very different relationship to the ruthless political leader who he says was “very responsible” for damaging the nation, the destruction of so much Chinese tradition and so much personal, family crisis (Ai’s father, the notable poet Ai Qing, was exiled to Xinjiang as part of the late 1950s anti-rightist campaign).
In another room Warhol’s photographic impressions of China during a 1982 visit face Ai’s photos of his life in New York. Ai finds it strange Warhol visited the country since it was “every bit” the opposite of what he believed. “He said China was not beautiful because it didn’t have McDonald’s yet.”
AW: Contemporary art always changes its own form; it is always questioning its own condition. Social media is a way to connect and, for me as an artist, it is also a way to connect to reality and search for new expressions and ways to communicate. This has become essential because contemporary art is not a series but a practice. It is connected to our inherent human need to express our inner world, and to make that association possible with others. Social media is the best for this purpose.
MD: Warhol’s Polaroids and portrait paintings not only document his social milieu but also constitute a form of history painting. You recently embarked upon two major portrait projects, including Trace, 2014, and Letgo, 2015, focusing on Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights and freedom of speech. Can you expand on the relationship between portraiture, celebrity, dissidence and political authority?
AW: These things differ a lot and they form different sections of human expression. As humans, our feelings relate to our desires, fears, anxieties or inner needs for justice and fairness. Above all, we have the idea of right or wrong, but we also make aesthetic judgements about proportion, light, colour, shape and sound. All these aspects have to work together to express ourselves.
Our values are not abstract. They are really about out wellbeing as humanity. We’re dealing with different societies, Andy Warhol and I. We are involved with very different social and political circumstances. But we’re both trying to face out reality honestly and to give a better illustration of our time.
Ai Weiwei quoted in “Max Delany in conversation with Ai Weiwei,” in Gallery magazine, January-February 2016. National Gallery of Victoria, 2016, p. 29.
A major international exhibition featuring two of the most significant artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei – will open at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, in December 2015, and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, in June 2016.
Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Warhol, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, will explore the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern and contemporary life, focussing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV will present over 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media.
Presenting the work of both artists’ in dialogue and correspondence, the exhibition will explore modern and contemporary art, life and cultural politics through the activities of two exemplary figures – one of whom represents twentieth century modernity and the ‘American century’; and the other contemporary life in the twenty-first century and what has been heralded as the ‘Chinese century’ to come.
Ai Weiwei commented, “I believe this is a very interesting and important exhibition and an honour for me to have the opportunity to be exhibited alongside Andy Warhol. This is a great privilege for me as an artist.”
Ai Weiwei lived in the United States from 1981 until 1993, where he experienced the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, among others. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) was the first book that Ai Weiwei purchased in New York, and was a significant influence upon his conceptual approach. Ai Weiwei’s relationship to Warhol is explicitly apparent in a photographic self-portrait (taken in New York in 1987) in which Ai Weiwei poses in front of Warhol’s multiple self-portrait, adopting the same gesture.
Each artist is also recognised for his unique approach to notions of artistic value and studio production. Warhol’s Factory was legendary for its bringing together of artists and poets, film-makers and musicians, bohemians and intellectuals, drag queens, superstars and socialites, and for the serial-production of silkscreen paintings, films, television, music and publishing.
The studio of Ai Weiwei is renowned for its interdisciplinary approach, post-industrial modes of production, engagement with teams of assistants and collaborators, and strategic use of communications technology and social media. Both artists have been equally critical in redefining the role of ‘the artist’ – as impresario, cultural producer, activist, and brand – and both are known for their keen observation and documentation of contemporary society and everyday life.
Andy Warhol (born Pittsburgh 1928 – died New York 1987) was a leading protagonist in the development of Pop Art, and his influence extended beyond the world of fine art to music, film, television, celebrity and popular culture. Warhol created some of the most defining iconography of the late twentieth century, through his exploration of consumer society, fame and celebrity, media, advertising, politics and capital.
The NGV will present over 200 of Warhol’s most celebrated works including portraits, paintings and silkscreens such as Campbell’s Soup, Mao, Elvis, Three Marilyns, Flowers, Electric Chairs, Skulls and Myths series; early drawings and commercial illustrations from the 1950s; sculpture and installation, including Brillo Boxes 1964, Heinz Tomato Ketchup Boxes 1964, and Silver Clouds 1968; films such as Empire 1964, Blow job 1964, and Screen Tests 1965, among others from Warhol’s extensive filmography; music and publishing; alongside a selection of previously unseen work. The exhibition will also bring together a wide range of photography including over 500 Polaroids documenting Warhol’s friends, colleagues, artistic and social milieux.
Ai Weiwei (born Beijing 1957) is an artist and social activist who is among the most renowned contemporary artists practicing today. One of China’s most provocative artists, his work encompasses diverse fields including visual art, architecture, publishing and curatorial practice, cultural criticism, social media and activism. Ai Weiwei’s work addresses some of the most critical global issues of the early twenty-first century, including the relationship between tradition and modernity, the role of the individual and the state, questions of human rights, and the value of freedom of expression.
For the NGV exhibition, a suite of major commissions will be premiered, including a new installation from the Forever bicycles series and a new monumental work from his Chandelier series, among others. These will be presented alongside key works by Ai Weiwei from his early drawings in the 1970s, readymades of the 1980s, and painting, sculpture and photography of the 1990s and 2000s. New and recent installations, including new configurations of major works such as S.A.C.R.E.D. 2013 and Trace 2014, will sit alongside a wide range of photography, film and social media from over the past four decades. It will be the most comprehensive representation of the artist’s work in Australia to date.
Three major illustrated publications
The Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei exhibition will be accompanied by a suite of three dynamic and visually-led publication formats: a deluxe collectors’ book in a presentation case, including an original limited-edition print by Ai Weiwei; a prestigious hardback edition; and sumptuous paperback volume. The major publications will explore the conceptual, formal, strategic and historical resonances between both artists’ work.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Andy Warhol’s expanded cinema and multimedia performance the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), featuring legendary rock group The Velvet Underground and Nico, debuted in April 1966 at The Dom, a Polish meeting hall in New York City. In the context of Warhol’s own practice, the EPI evolved from his work as a filmmaker, the social environment of his studio and earlier performances known as Andy Warhol, Up-Tight, in which members of Warhol’s entourage antagonistically confronted the audience while The Velvet Underground played onstage.
The EPI was a sensory assault – an immersive sound-and-light environment involving numerous collaborators. Warhol shot new footage that was projected simultaneously with older films as part of the show. Danny Williams helped orchestrate light effects, including strobes, spotlights and assorted coloured gels and mattes; Jackie Cassen created psychedelic slides; Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar staged dance routines with sadomasochistic theatrics; and The Velvet Underground performed their proto-punk songs and avant-garde rock improvisations at ear-splitting volume.
This evocation of the EPI is the result of detailed research by The Andy Warhol Museum into the original performances. It includes films that were projected during the shows, digitised copies of the slides, mattes that were used and live recordings of the Velvet Underground and Nico.
In Ai’s series of Coloured Vases, ongoing since 2006, Neolithic and Han dynasty urns are plunged into tubs of industrial paint to create an uneasy confrontation between tradition and modernity. In what might be considered an iconoclastic form of action painting, Ai gives ancient vessels a new glaze and painterly glow, appealing to new beginnings and cultural change through transformative acts of obliteration, renovation and renewal.
Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans were first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, in 1962, and he returned to the subject repeatedly throughout his career. The works’ readymade commercial imagery, mechanical manufacture and serial production ran counter to prevailing artistic tendencies, offering a comment on notions of artistic originality, uniqueness and authenticity. The familiar red-and-white label of a Campbell’s Soup can was immediately recognisable to most Americans, regardless of their social or economic status, and eating Campbell’s Soup was a widely shared experience. This quintessential American product represented modern ideals: it was inexpensive, easily prepared and available in any supermarket.
First created in late 1963, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Box recasts the Duchampian readymade through the lens of American popular culture. Warhol produced approximately 100 of these boxes for his exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, in March 1964, where they were tightly packed and piled high in a display reminiscent of a grocery warehouse. Unlike Duchamp’s use of real objects as readymade works of art, Warhol’s Brillo Soap Pads Boxes are carefully painted and silkscreened to resemble everyday consumer items. For philosopher Arthur C. Danto, Warhol’s Brillo boxes marked the end of an art-historical epoch and represented a new model of how art could be produced, displayed and perceived.
The assembly and replication of readymade bicycles in Ai’s Forever Bicycles series, ongoing since 2003, promotes an intensely spectacular effect. ‘Forever’ is a popular brand of mass-produced bicycles manufactured in China since the 1940s and desired by Ai as a child. Composed from almost 1500 bicycles, this installation suggests both the individual and the multitude, with the collective energy of social progress signalled in the assemblage and perspectival rush of multiple forms.
Forever Bicycles disconnects the bicycles from their everyday function – reconfiguring them as an immense labyrinth-like network. The multi-tiered installation also achieves an architectural presence, much like a traditional arch or gateway to the exhibition.
Experimenting with decoration – one of modernist painting’s most controversial subjects – Warhol’s Flowers prints were exhibited in tight grids at his first show at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City, in 1964. A subsequent series was exhibited in Paris, where more than 100 works were hung almost edge to edge, mimicking the decorative effect of wallpaper. The source photograph, taken by Patricia Caulfield, appeared in the June 1964 issue of Modern Photography magazine. Caulfield sued to maintain ownership of the image, and while the suit was settled out of court, the issues of authorship and copyright it raised remain relevant to contemporary art debates.
Text from exhibition wall panel
Flowers
Flowers in Western art history have symbolised love, death, sexuality, nobility, sleep and transience. In Chinese culture flowers also carry rich and auspicious symbolic meanings; from wealth and social status to beauty, reflection and enlightenment. The flower is a repeated motif in Andy Warhol’s work, from his earliest drawings and commercial illustrations to his Pop paintings and prints, first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, in 1964. While the production of Warhol’s Flower paintings and silkscreens through the 1960s and early 1970s coincided with the burgeoning Flower Power movement, their bold plasticity, mechanical reproduction and seriality also suggested a more commercial undercurrent to the counterculture.
Flowers feature repeatedly in the work of Ai Weiwei, from his celebrated Sunflower Seeds, 2010, to a new installation, Blossom, 2015, composed of thousands of delicate white flowers created in the finest traditions of Chinese porcelain production. Along with poetic ideals of beauty, remembrance and renewal Ai directs the symbolism of flowers towards political ends in projects such as With Flowers, 2013-15, a daily act of placing fresh flowers in the basket of a bicycle outside Ai’s studio, for the benefit of surveillance cameras trained upon it. The act was a form of protest against the Chinese authorities’ confiscation of the artist’s passport and restriction of his right to travel freely.
Andy Warhol fanatically recorded his everyday life on audiotape, celluloid and photographic film. He moved effortlessly between underground, avant-garde and glamorous social circles and his photographs of the 1970s and 1980s provide an intimate insight into his social world. They also show his keen observation of the urban life, architecture, advertising, popular culture and personalities of his adopted New York City. When Warhol visited China in 1982, he turned his photographic gaze to the people and significant sites of a culture in transition.
Ai Weiwei lived in New York for a decade from 1983 onwards, and his New York Photographs document the young artist’s social context as part of the city’s Chinese artistic and intellectual diaspora community. The images also show his participation on the margins of the New York art world; his commitment to social activism; his involvement with influential poets, such as Allen Ginsberg; and his identification with the work of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Warhol.
In one photograph, taken at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987 – the year of Warhol’s death – Ai, in his late twenties, identifies himself explicitly with Warhol by adopting a Warholian pose in front of the Pop artist’s multiple Self-Portrait of 1966.
This stark, singular image of an empty electric chair is one of Warhol’s most austere works. It is based on a 1953 death chamber photograph taken at New York’s notorious Sing Sing Prison, where the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed in January 1953 at the height of the Cold War. Warhol used this image for all of his Electric Chair paintings and prints, varying the cropping and background colours. As Warhol noted: ‘You’d be surprised how many people want to hang an electric chair on their living-room wall. Specially if the background colour matches the drapes’.
The Electric Chairs series of prints from 1971 employ imagery first developed in Warhol’s paintings of 1967. The repeated single image derives from a photograph of the electric chair in New York’s Sing Sing Penitentiary released by the press service Wide World Photo on the day two Soviet spies were executed in 1953, at the height of the Cold War. Warhol’s treatment, using pastel decorator colours applied in a painterly manner, contrasts with the macabre scene devoid of human presence.
Ai’s major installation S.A.C.R.E.D., [is] a series of architecturally scaled dioramas depicting scenes from the detention cell where he was held without charge by the Chinese government for eighty-one days in 2011. The work consists of six parts to which its acronymic title refers: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy and Doubt. The maquettes serve as archaeological evidence of the denial of personal freedom and dignity that Ai and many other dissidents have experienced, and cast him in the dual roles of rebel and victim of oppression.
Text from exhibition wall panel
The individual and the state
The relationship between individual freedom and state power is a relevant subject for both Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Warhol began exploring the electric chair as a motif in 1963, and the image remains a potent symbol of state disciplinary power. The artist’s celebrated Death and Disaster series – including representations of political assassinations, guns and knives, the hammer and sickle and most-wanted men – also explores the glamorisation of violence in the United States. These works, as well as the spectacular images of capital itself in Warhol’s Dollar Signs series, might be seen as a grand narrative of his time.
As an artist and human rights activist committed to freedom of expression, Ai Weiwei has been a longstanding advocate of individual acts of resistance against state, political or corporate power. Ai’s irrepressible impulse to defy the authority of the state is illustrated through his art and political activism. Vocal criticisms of Chinese government policy made by Ai on his blog led to its shutdown by authorities in 2009, and he was detained without charge for eighty-one days in 2011. Ai regained the right to travel only recently, in July 2015, when his passport was reinstated.
Warhol’s full-length portraits of Elvis Presley were first shown in 1963, accompanied by a series of portraits of film star Elizabeth Taylor. These large-scale screen-printed paintings show Warhol’s innovative painterly approach in the early 1960s. The image of popular American singer and actor Elvis Presley – derived from a publicity still for the film Flaming Star (1960) – captures him at the height of his acting career. The painting references the power and transience of fame while also highlighting violence in the cultural mythology of America.
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![François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled [Emplacement de traverses, usine Cima, Croix]' [Replacement of sleepers, Cima factory, Croix] c. 1954](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/kollar_18-web.jpg "François Kollar (French born Slovakia, 1904-1979) Untitled [Emplacement de traverses, usine Cima, Croix]' [Replacement of sleepers, Cima factory, Croix] c. 1954")
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![Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Silver Liz [Ferus Type]' 1963](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/exhi032777-web.jpg "Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Silver Liz [Ferus Type]' 1963")
![Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick [ST308]' 1965](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/exhi037605-web.jpg "Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987) 'Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick [ST308]' 1965")
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