bookArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Review: ‘Johsel Namkung: A Retrospective’ published by Cosgrove Editions, 2013

June 2013

Published by Cosgrove Editions, Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective is a collection of one hundred exquisite images selected from a remarkable career in photography spanning six decades.

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Big Meadow, Washington Pass, Washington September, 2000
2000

“I like to give my viewers questions, not answers. Let them find beauty in the most mundane things, like roadside wildflowers and tumbled weeds.”

Johsel Namkung

“When we can find the abstract in nature we find the deepest art.”

Mark Tobey

“Photographs give us information; it seems that they give us information that is very packaged and they give us the information that we are already prepared to recognise obviously. It’s as if the words don’t have the weight they should have, so that one of the statements being made by any photograph is: “This really exists.” The photograph is a kind of job for the imagination to do something that we should have been able to do if we were not so disturbed by so many different kinds of information that are not really absorbed. Photographs have this authority of being testimony, but almost as if you have some direct contact with the thing, or as if the photograph is a piece of the thing; even though it’s an image, it really is the thing.”

Susan Sontag. Excerpt from a speech, Wellesley College photographic symposium, April 21, 1975

This is a superlative book by Cosgrove Editions that celebrates the sixty-year life in photography of the now 94-year-old Johsel Namkung. Rather than a retrospective I see this book as testimony to Johsel Namkung’s vision as an artist and the photographs, as Susan Sontag observes above, as testaments that allow the viewer to have some direct contact with the things that Johsel photographed, to see and feel with him the places that he visited and the things that he saw.

Some of the photographs in this book take your breath away. Taken with a large format camera Johsel’s compositions are heavily influenced by music and are almost fugue-like in their structure. They vibrate and sing like few other landscape photographs that I have ever seen. There is the absence of a horizon, so that his photographs seem to agree with the picture-plane rather than with the world at large.1 Rather, Johsel lets his images flow and in that flow he creates patterning that distinctly creates layers of landscape. The juxtaposing of lines on the landscape is reinforced in the sequencing of the book, where binary opposites are paired on facing pages: feminine / masculine, yang / ying, macro / micro. For example Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989 is printed opposite Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979 (feminine / masculine); Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989 is printed opposite Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991 (yang / ying); and the vast Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987 is printed opposite the almost Japanese-like delicacy of Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980 (macro / micro). Although there are links to Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Toby and photographers Ansel Adams, Minor White and Eliot Porter this work is wholly Johsel’s in its compositional structure – the position that the photographer puts himself in, both physically and mentally, to obtain these most beautiful of images.

Johsel has a love of small triangular shapes within the pictorial frame. They act like small punctum or pizzicato in musical terms and these given details are intended as such by the photographer. The little punctum in Johsel’s individual works become an accumulation of small punctum that resonate throughout the whole testimony of his work – through the placement of rocks and twigs, the use of triangles and layers whose presence Johsel so loves within the photograph. In this sense (that the photograph is written by the photographer), these are photographs of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. Working in the manner of Minor White (photographing in meditation, creating a pathway from the self to the object, from the object through the camera and back to the self, forming a circle), harmonising all elements (visual, physical, elemental, spiritual), Johsel exposes himself as much as the landscape he is photographing. This is his spirit in relation to the land, to the cosmos, even. Like Monet’s paintings of water lilies these photographs are a “small dreaming” of his spirit with a section of the land not necessarily, as in Aboriginal art, a dreaming and connection to the whole land.

As Minor White observes of the “recognition” of such dreaming when working with the view camera,

“First, there is a store of images, experience, ego problems, ideals, fears, which the man brings to his seeing at the start. Second, during the activity of seeing they are matched against the images in the visual world, like matching colours. This is done with some conscious effort and a great deal of unconscious participation. At the moment of matching or “recognition” there is a feeling of important at least, and sometimes a merciless impact. This in turn is secured by exposure – like a sudden gust of wind drops a ripe apple. So we can say “recognition” is the trigger of exposure. In view camera work the lapse between recognition and exposure may be relatively long. There is time for analysis and criticism of image and idea, and exposure sums up the entire experience.”2

Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple.

Oh the joy Johsel must have found when he recognised such invocations, by being aware of his surroundings and his relationship to the earth. I know from my own experience that when you find such a place and recognise it for what it is, it is then an entirely different matter to capture it on film for the camera imparts its own perspective. It is almost as if Johsel and the camera are one, and that the camera itself has disappeared into the landscape (I like the way that you can nearly see his camera but it is actually hidden in the photograph at the bottom of the posting). I get the feeling that Johsel is quite consciously working within an adopted aesthetic – sort of like a tea ceremony – and just making things purposefully and having faith that it is some sort “of way” of doing things. At no point is there any sense of difficulty here – it has all been removed. Yet there was so much physical effort: climbing, walking, waiting, patience, no trace of it. What a heroic act this is!

Johsel approaches a metaphysics of the Real, creating authentic visualisations of the world – an idealised, abstracted Real tending towards a (mental) s(t)imulation. In other words, he photographs the world not to reveal a specific place but a particular state of mind. Is the link to indexicality broken? No, but there is no ultimate truth or origin here, for his is an art of transformation (theatricality) through structure (modernism) which is the essence of aesthetic arts.

“This strategy rejects the search for an origin or ultimate Truth and instead interprets reality as composed, contingent and intersubjective; reality is, therefore, theatrical… Theatricality is made of this endless play and of these continuous displacements of the position of desire, in other words, of the position of the subject in process with an imaginary constructive space.”3

In Johsel’s photographs desire is displaced, ego is removed and his photographs become images of the mind as much as they are of the landscape. This is Johsel at play recognising, becoming these imaginary, constructive spaces. He is in the zone, he becomes the zone, even. Finally we can say: his photographs and his life are transformational; his imagination is the representation of possibility; his work is testimony to that representation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Adapted from Robert Nelson commenting on the painting of Monet. “Impressionist’s ode to beauty trips into light fantastic,” The Age newspaper, Wednesday May 22nd 2013, p. 42

2/ White, Minor. “Exploratory Camera,” 1949 in Bunnell, Peter C. (ed.,). Aperture Magazine Anthology – The Minor White Years 1952-1976. Aperture, 2013, p. 64

3/ Féral, Josette. “Performance and Theatricality: The Subject Demystified,” in Modern Drama 25 (March) 1982, p. 177

Many thankx to Johsel Namkung, Dick Busher and Cosgrove Editions for allowing me to publish the text and photographs in the posting. Dick Busher allowed me to pick the photographs that I wanted to illustrate this posting and for that I am most grateful. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The book has recently taken top honours in two different award competitions among independent publishers for photography books: The Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benny Awards, and the Independent Publishers IPPY Awards.

PS. I think that photographer is very aware of: “Let the subject generate its own composition” (MW) – coming from Weston’s “Composition is the strongest way of seeing.”

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Cougar Lake, Oregon June 1991
1991

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Rainy Pass, Washington July, 1989
1989

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Picture Lake, Mount Baker, Washington July 1979
1979

In his photography Johsel brings attention and importance to elements of nature that most people pass by on their way to the grand vistas. One of my favourite locations in Washington is the Palouse as seen from Steptoe Butte; Johsel’s interpretations of the undulating wheat fields just greening with new growth are sensuous and impressionistic. One feels the slope of the earth, the texture of the tilled fields rather than seeing it. The sophisticated simplicity of his vision is highlighted in a simple composition of a dark pond surface, afloat with delicate grasses; the fine lines flowing this way and that give a sense of constant movement, yet it is a still photograph. In a twig reaching out of the snow, the subtle reflection on a pond in late afternoon light, delicate frozen ripples of ice clinging to river rock, the geometric chaos of tree branches covered in snow, the rich patina of weather-beaten stone, Johsel celebrates the minute in a grand way; it becomes the symbol for the greater whole. Textures, rhythm of line and movement become the foremost elements in his work. Some of Johsel’s images are quiet and abstract, singing a single note, while others are full-out symphonies in a celebration of the rhythms. In particular I find his Korean landscapes extraordinary. In winter the alpine hillsides bare their architecture; ridge after ridge, speckled with leafless birch and pyramidal conifers, they overlap in a crescendo of natural beauty.

Art Wolfe, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington January, 1989
1989

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Oak Creek, Washington March, 1991
1991

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington October, 1977
1977

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Steptoe Butte, Washington October, 1983
1983

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Denali National Park, Alaska September, 1987
1987

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Arrigetch, Alaska September, 1980
1980

Photography as a medium is still relatively young. Introduced publicly in 1839, its definition has remained complicated in discourse and practice, oscillating between practical application – whether scientific illustration, family record, or aid to commerce – and aesthetic or expressive concerns. Debates that arose shortly after its invention, contesting whether photography could be an artistic medium, remained heated a century later and beyond, resolving only after Photoshop and other types of photographic manipulation became commonplace. Questions about the role of the photographer, the relative merits of colour versus black-and-white, truth to the original shot versus darkroom manipulation, investigations about canon, hierarchy, and genre have continued to multiply, as have the social organisations – art schools, technical assistance and supplies, professional and amateur societies, regular shows and publications – that foster photographic work. Becoming a photographer in the middle of the twentieth century, Johsel Namkung emerged at the intersection of all these social and conceptual shifts. Taking advantage of this opening, he made several unconventional choices: deciding to work in colour although it was black and white that signified art photography until the 1970s or later; working abstractly, but hewing to the dictates of straight photography: available light, no darkroom manipulation, print the full negative.

From the acquisition of his first camera, Namkung developed high standards for his photographic practice, recalling to interviewer Alan Lau, “I always had a confidence in myself… I had a sort of a vision toward my photographic future. I knew I was going to be something.”1 Trained first as a musician, from the beginning Namkung defined photography in abstract terms, approaching his motifs in terms of rhythms, tonal relationships, pattern, and texture. Individual works reveal specific affinities. The calligraphic grasses in Lizzard Lake, Stampede Pass, WA, August 1976 suggests Harry Callahan’s images of reeds, which are associated with Abstract Expressionist photography. The lichen-covered stone in Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, WA, September 1976 resembles Jackson Pollock or the famed White Paintings of Namkung’s friend Mark Tobey. The screen of regular tree trunks in Sherman Pass, WA, August 1993, recalls the hatched lines representing driving rain in modern Japanese printmaking. Like limpid watercolor strokes, the rolling hills of the Palouse – distinct in each version of Steptoe Butte, of 1976, 1977, and 1983 – allude to Morris Louis’s colour field paintings.

Namkung’s preface here recounts how successive unusual jobs supplied him with professional training as a photographer. Seattle in the postwar boom years also provided a rich and supportive context for his art. Skilled artists from the ranks of first- and second-generation immigrants, from Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines, gathered in the International District but worked and showed farther afield. Art photography had a popular following and many innovative practitioners; Pictorialism – promoted by annual exhibitions like those organised by the Seattle Camera Club – encouraged aesthetic and technical exploration with cameras. The so-called Northwest Mystics represented only one of several artistic communities exploring abstraction, some emphasising its expressive potential, others seeking formal invention. Creativity was equally celebrated beyond fine art. Rarefied technical challenges were tackled and mastered at The Boeing Company as well as the scientific laboratories of the University of Washington. The richness of this cultural ecology fostered the unique development of Namkung’s career. In return, his thoughtful production has nourished local and international audiences for over four decades.

Elizabeth Brown, Former Chief Curator, Henry Art Gallery, Introduction to Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective

1/ Alan Chong Lau interview of Johsel Namkung conducted in Seattle, Washington, on October 5, 1989, for the Archives of American Art Northwest Asian American Project.

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Shi Shi Beach Buoy, Olympic National Park, Washington August, 1981
1981

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Bissell, Washington December, 1981
1981

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Alaska Lichens, Date Unknown
Nd

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Blue Mountain, Olympic National Park, Washington September, 1976
1976

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Weston Beach, Point Lobos, California May, 1988
1988

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Frenchman Coulee, Washington May, 2002
2002

Johsel Namkung (Korean American, 1919-2013)
Kalaloch Beach, Olympic National Park, Washington October, 1984
1984

Joshel Namkung on Hurricane Ridge, photographed by his friend Ken Levine

Johsel Namkung • A Retrospective website

Cosgrove Editions is an independent publisher of books on photography. We also provide production and printing assistance for artists who self publish their work. Many of our projects have won some of the highest international awards for printing quality.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Garry Winogrand’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Exhibition dates: 9th March – 2nd June 2013

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Utah (Wyoming)
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

“Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.”

Garry Winogrand

Playing God with his film

Form and content. Form and content.

I don’t like the work of Garry Winogrand. Never have, never will. I think his work is overrated and and somewhat trite. That should stir up all the Winophiles who think that he is one of the best street photographers in the history of the medium!

At best his form is average – technical aspects adequate; composition is pretty basic including dull use of tension points within the picture frame; and framing very bland, tilted angles not withstanding. His content is nothing special either, mainly frontal shots of people walking towards him or voyeuristic shots while mingled in crowds, or a mixture of both. As he himself says, “I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph.” By letting the medium describe the world around him. And therein lies part of the problem.

Winogrand just looks – and you can’t fault someone for just looking. It’s just a not very interesting looking.

If I really look at Winogrand’s work I can see that he just states what he saw in shot after shot after shot, indiscriminately. Personally, I find there is a real cynicism in his work. The photographs “describe” his own state of mind – as much as he denies that he (or his state of mind) has anything to do with the act of describing the world through photography. You see, it’s all about how the camera sees the world and not how he sees it. Hence, Winogrand hardly embraces his feelings towards the world and if he does, it is only in a half-hearted manner. For example, he goes a certain way towards the dark (as in the photographs Utah (Wyoming), 1964 above, and Los Angeles, 1964, below) and then stops. The other part of the problem is this: what you can also fault is all the hyperbole that is laid over the top of his work by curators and museums – because on close examination the work really doesn’t justify it. It’s actually not that good.

Winogrand states and summarises but doesn’t solve. He just keeps adding to the list occasionally, under duress, ordering it (photographs of women in the book Women are Beautiful, 1975):

“During his Austin years he was preparing two books, Public Relations and Women are Beautiful. Given his method of printing every image on the contact sheet for the selection process, and given his proclivity for the physical act of shooting, no wonder he wasn’t out on the street as much as he’d like. Yes he had to print, select and publish some prints to survive unless he wanted to teach the rest of his life. I don’t believe he wanted to do that. Had there been a way, I believe he would died a blissful death had he been on the streets clicking away and either letting the exposed film rot or letting someone else process and print them, and arrange the books and shows and collect the money. That’s how much he loved the physical act of shooting.

He felt at home out there, looking for the next image to expose. He was also the boss out there, playing God with his film and deciding where to frame that next battle between form and content, then the next and the next.”1

Playing God with his film…

In some ways Winogrand reminds me of both the king and the court jester. King because he could frame the battle between form and content ad infinitum and jester because he was the fool, standing in front of people, laughing, smiling, obsequious, running hither and yon to get every shot, any shot. See the video below to understand what I mean. Unlike the photographs in Robert Frank’s The Americans, his is not a poetic understanding of the world for the difference between Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand is that the former’s photographs are undeniably poetic while the latter’s are prosaic aphorisms about the world. In Winogrand’s “describing” the social landscape he photographed is reduced to lists of things: “the dislocation of urban life, the rise of the suburb with its growing alienation, the skepticism of youth, and the collusion of the press and the powerful,” rarely pursued by any obvious means and certainly not through poetic evocation.

I think that Winogrand struggled with the question – do I add to the list or do I order the list? Obviously he chose the former, for if there is no order in life there can be no order in the archive. Hence we are left with the “Unfinished” Late Work, an archive of 250,000 images that have remained virtually unknown. A boon for researchers and curators wishing to position Winogrand’s legacy “revealing for the first time the full sweep of his career… creating a vivid portrait of the artist.”

Even when the artist could not be bothered (so why should we bother).
Even when the images were never seen or acknowledged.
The artist streetwise in his omnipotent isolation.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Garza, O. C. Class Time with Garry Winogrand. 2007, p. 19 [Online] Cited 26/05/2013
www.ocgarzaphotography.com/documents/ClassTimewithGarryWinograndfinal2.pdf

“Great photography is always on the edge of failure.”

“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

“I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.”

“I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.”

Garry Winogrand

“We quickly learned Winogrand’s technique – he walked slowly or stood in the middle of pedestrian traffic as people went by. He shot prolifically. I watched him walk a short block and shoot an entire roll without breaking stride. As he reloaded, I asked him if he felt bad about missing pictures when he reloaded. “No,” he replied, “there are no pictures when I reload.” He was constantly looking around, and often would see a situation on the other side of a busy intersection. Ignoring traffic, he would run across the street to get the picture.”

Mason Resnick

“Form and content are two keys which make a memorable street photograph. Consider “form” as the composition, framing, and technical aspects of a photograph. Consider “content” as what is actually happening in the photograph (whether it be an old couple holding hands, a boy holding two bottles of wine, or a man looking through a peep-hole)… Garry Winogrand shot with a 28mm lens for most of his life [using a Leica M4 35mm and Tri-X film pushed to 1200 ASA], which meant that for the majority of his shots he had to be quite close to his subjects (and in front of them). Therefore Winogrand wasn’t Henri Cartier-Bresson (trying to be invisible) but was actively a part of the action and immersed in the crowds. He would be very obviously taking photographs in the streets and would stick out like a sore thumb.”

Eric Kim

Garry Winogrand – Part 1

Garry Winogrand – Fotograf

Garry Winogrand – The Man In The Crowd

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Albuquerque
1957
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, gift of Dr. Paul Getz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Park Avenue, New York
1959
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Central Park Zoo, New York
1967
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Since Winogrand took this photograph of a white woman and a Black man, each holding a chimpanzee dressed in children’s clothing, many critics have noted the picture’s deliberate ambiguity – not only about the circumstances of how these figures came to be here, but also about the way Winogrand chose to frame them with his camera, cutting out most of the surrounding context.

During the 1960s, Winogrand became increasingly reluctant to speak about the “meaning” of his photographs, preferring to focus on their form and technique, in spite of their excessive narrative potential. Perhaps this was a reaction against his photojournalistic and advertising work, which was often illustrative. Winogrand would cite Susan Sontag’s influential essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), which deplored the growing impulse at the time to reduce works of art to their content in order to make them mean something. She argued, like Winogrand, in favor of the pleasure and poetry of seeing.

Anonymous. “Central Park Zoo-New York, New York,” on the Brooklyn Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 14/07/2024

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1974
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Doris and Donald Fisher and Marion E. Greene
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1975
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, gift of Dr. Paul Getz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles
1960
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1960
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
White Sands National Monument, New Mexico
1964
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1969
Gelatin silver print
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Elliot Richardson Press Conference, Austin, Texas
1973
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Elliot Lee Richardson (July 20, 1920 – December 31, 1999) was an American lawyer and politician who was a member of the cabinet of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. As U.S. Attorney General, he was a prominent figure in the Watergate Scandal, and resigned rather than obey President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

Text from Wikipedia website

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York
1969
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Point Mugu Naval Air-Station, California
1979
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Untitled
1970
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Venice Beach, Los Angeles
1979
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

The first retrospective in 25 years of work by artist Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) – the renowned photographer of New York City and of American life from the 1950s through the early 1980s – will debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from March 9 through June 2, 2013. Jointly organised by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Garry Winogrand brings together the artist’s most iconic images with newly printed photographs from his largely unexamined archive of late work, offering a rigorous overview of Winogrand’s complete working life and revealing for the first time the full sweep of his career. More than 300 photographs in the exhibition and more than 400 in the accompanying catalogue will create a vivid portrait of the artist – a chronicler of postwar America on a par with such figures as Norman Mailer and Robert Rauschenberg who unflinchingly captured America’s wrenching swings between optimism and upheaval in the decades following World War II.

While Winogrand is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, his overall body of work and influence on the field remains incompletely explored. He was enormously prolific but largely postponed the editing and printing of his work. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left behind approximately 6,500 rolls of film (some 250,000 images) that he had never seen, as well as proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed. Roughly half of the photographs in the exhibition have never been exhibited or published until now; over 100 have never before been printed.

“There exists in photography no other body of work of comparable size or quality that is so editorially unresolved,” says Rubinfien, who was among the youngest of Winogrand’s circle of friends in the 1970s. “This exhibition represents the first effort to comprehensively examine Winogrand’s unfinished work. It also aims to turn the presentation of his work away from topical editing and toward a freer organisation that is faithful to his art’s essential spirit, thus enabling a new understanding of his oeuvre, even for those who think they know him.”

The exhibition is divided into three parts, each covering a broad variety of subjects found in Winogrand’s art. “Down from the Bronx” presents photographs taken for the most part in New York from his start in 1950 until 1971; “A Student of America” looks at work made in the same period during journeys outside New York; and “Boom and Bust” addresses Winogrand’s late period – from when he moved away from New York in 1971 until his death in 1984 – with photographs from Texas and Southern California, as well as Chicago, Washington, Miami, and other locations. This third section also includes a small number of photographs Winogrand made on trips back to Manhattan, which express a sense of desolation unprecedented in his earlier work.

Winogrand was known as great talker with a flamboyant, forceful personality, and what he said accompanying his slide shows and lectures was often imaginative and very funny. A number of videos edited for presentation in the exhibition will allow visitors to experience the living Winogrand as audiences have rarely been able to do for 30-odd years. A short selection from Winogrand’s experimental 8mm footage taken in the late 1960s will also be on view.

After premiering at SFMOMA in spring 2013 Garry Winogrand will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (March 2 through June 8, 2014); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 27 through September 21, 2014); the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 through January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015).

An Epic Chronicler of Postwar America

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1960s, and in both the content of his photographs and his artistic style he became one of the principal voices of that eruptive decade – so much so that influential Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski anointed him “the central photographer of his generation.”

Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 20,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, rodeos, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America – rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control – seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

Yet if Winogrand was one of New York City’s prime photographers, he was also an avid traveller who roamed widely around the United States, bringing exquisite work out of locations that included Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ohio, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Colorado, and the open country of the Southwest. “You could say that I am a student of photography,” he said, “and I am; but really I’m a student of America.” Winogrand’s expansive visual catalogue of the nation’s evolving social scene has led to comparisons to Walt Whitman, who also unspooled the world in endless lists of people, places, and things.

Winogrand’s pictures often bulge with twenty or thirty figures, and are fascinating both for their dramatic foregrounds and the sub-events at their edges. Even when crowded with people or at their most lighthearted – he was fond of visual puns and was drawn to the absurd – his pictures can convey a feeling of human isolation, hinting at something darker beneath the veneer of the American dream. Early on, some critics considered his pictures formally “shapeless” and “random,” but admirers and critics later found a unique poetry in his tilted horizons and his love of the haphazard.

“Winogrand was an artistic descendant of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, but differed sharply from them,” says Rubinfien. “He admired Frank’s The Americans, but felt the work missed the main story of its time, which in his mind was the emergence of suburban prosperity and isolation. The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand’s work. The other half is a sense of undoing. The tension between these qualities gives his work its distinct character.”

After serving in the military as a weather forecaster, Winogrand first began working as a photographer while studying painting on the G.I. Bill at Columbia University (1948-1951). During that time, he also studied briefly with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. While pursuing his personal work, he began supplying commercial photographs to a number of general-interest magazines such as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, Collier’s, and Pageant, which were then at the height of their power and reach. His career was further shaped by the decline of those magazines and the rise of a new culture of photography centred in the art world.

“Winogrand worked at a moment when the boundaries between journalistic and artistic photography were less certain than they had ever been, yet it was also a time when the most advanced photographers were consciously abandoning journalistic values,” says Greenough. “The social landscape he photographed – the dislocation of urban life, the rise of the suburb with its growing alienation, the skepticism of youth, and the collusion of the press and the powerful – was of concern to many Americans. Yet Winogrand rarely pursued an obvious means to explicate these ideas, preferring poetic evocation over intelligible journalism.”

Winogrand went on to exhibit widely at prominent museums and achieved renown in his lifetime. Yet despite this recognition, he is perhaps the most inadequately understood of all his contemporaries.

“Unfinished” Late Work Thoroughly Investigated for the First Time

The act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making prints or editing for books and exhibitions – he often allowed others to perform these tasks for him. Near the end of his life, he spoke of reviewing and reediting all of his photographs, but never had a chance to oversee the shaping of his legacy, or even to review much of the output of his later years. Because of his working methods and his lack of interest in developing his film toward the end of his life, he left behind more than 2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film, an additional 4,100 rolls that he had processed but never seen – an estimated total of 250,000 images that have remained virtually unknown.

Furthermore, Winogrand published just five modest books during his lifetime – The Animals (1969), Women Are Beautiful (1975), Garry Winogrand (1976), Public Relations (1977), and Stock Photographs (1980) – that represent only a fraction of his work and are mainly confined to narrow topical frames that don’t suggest the full scope of his importance.

“One reason that Winogrand is only now receiving the full retrospective treatment already devoted to peers of his era, including Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Robert Frank, is that any truly comprehensive consideration of his life’s work requires contending with the practical and ethical issues surrounding the vast archive he left behind,” says O’Toole. “In the absence of explicit instructions from him regarding how he wanted his work to be handled after he was gone, its posthumous treatment has been the subject of ongoing debate and raises provocative questions about the creative process and its relationship to issues specific to the medium.”

“Some argue that what was left behind should be left alone, and that no one should intrude upon the intentions of an artist,” adds Rubinfien. “But the quantity of Winogrand’s output, the incompleteness with which he reviewed it, and the suddenness of his death create a special case in which the true scope of an eminent photographer’s work cannot be known without the intervention of an editor.”

Now housed at the Center for Creative Photography of the University of Arizona, Tucson, Winogrand’s “unfinished” work was initially organized in the years just after his death by several colleagues and friends in preparation for the artist’s first major museum retrospective, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA) in 1988. Exhibition curator John Szarkowski felt the quality of Winogrand’s work had significantly deteriorated in the last 15 years of his life, and included only a small group of pictures from the mysterious late work in MoMA exhibition.

Nearly 30 years have elapsed since the last attempt to grapple with the complete arc of Winogrand’s career. Benefiting from new curatorial research undertaken for this project, the current exhibition will provide a long-awaited reevaluation of his accomplishments. As one of the first museums to recognise photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA has collaborated with the National Gallery of Art – who, like SFMOMA, is known for its photography scholarship – in a multi-year endeavour to spearhead the presentation of this important exhibition and publication.”

Press release from the SFMOMA website

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1961
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1963
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
San Marcos, Texas
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Coney Island, New York
c. 1952
Gelatin silver print
Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; digital image
© The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Fort Worth, Texas
1974-1977
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1950
Gelatin silver print
Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1962
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Venice Beach, Los Angeles
1980-1983
Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Grand Central Station
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
Los Angeles
1964
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
1968
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984)
New York
c. 1969
Silver gelatin photograph
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Opening hours:
Monday – Tuesday: 10am – 5pm
Wednesday: Closed
Thursday: 12 – 8pm
Friday – Sunday: 10am – 5pm

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Edward Weston. Leaves of Grass’ at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 21st April 2012 – 31st December 2012

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Grand Canyon, Arizona
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you,
You must travel it for yourself.

It is not far, It is within reach,
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know,
Perhaps it is every where on water and land.”

Walt Whitman. Part of Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass. 1855

Very little information about this exhibition on the website which is a pity because the photographs are exceptional, even if some do recall the style of other artists of the same era (Charles Sheeler, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Clarence John Laughlin, and Walker Evans for example).

In 1941, “Weston was commissioned to take photographs for a pricey two-volume edition of “Leaves of Grass.” So over the course of nearly 10 months, Weston and his wife, Charis, drove more than 24,000 miles, through 24 states. Of the nearly 700 photographs he developed, he sent 74 to the publisher. Forty-nine appeared in the book.” (Mark Feney) “Over the course of the project Weston managed to produce some of the most compelling images of his later career that took his photography in a new and important direction. Like Whitman’s epic poems, they draw us into the history of this nation, the beauty of its landscape and the forthrightness of its ordinary citizens.” (Encore)

“Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country’s virtues and vices. Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer Emerson’s call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson’s influence, stating, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.”

The first edition was published in Brooklyn at the Fulton Street printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s, on July 4, 1855. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. Sales on the book were few but Whitman was not discouraged. The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. “That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.” About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover.

The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. “Grass” was a term given by publishers to works of minor value and “leaves” is another name for the pages on which they were printed. Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to Emerson, the man who had inspired its creation. In a letter to Whitman, Emerson said “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed.” He went on, “I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy.”” (Amazon website)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Boulder Dam
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
The Brooklyn Bridge
1941
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
From 515 Madison Avenue, New York
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Schooner, Kennebunkport, Maine
1941
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine
1941
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
 Shenandoah Valley, Virginia
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Mammy’s Cupboard, Natchez, Mississippi
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Gulf Oil, Port Arthur, Texas
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
White Sands, New Mexico
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Woodlawn Plantation House, Louisiana
1941
Photograph, gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In 1941, the Limited Editions Club of New York invited photographer Edward Weston to illustrate its deluxe edition of Walt Whitman’s epic poem Leaves of Grass. The commission inspired Weston and his wife, Charis, to take a cross-country trip, throughout the South, the Mid-Atlantic states, New England, and back to California, in their trusty Ford, which they nicknamed “Walt.” Weston’s photographs from this project – mostly made with large, 8 x 10 camera – are exceptionally wide-ranging, with a particular focus on urban and man-altered landscapes. Although he never wanted his images to literally reflect Whitman’s text, Weston did relate to the poet’s plainspoken style and his emphasis on the broad spectrum of human experience. Weston wrote of the Whitman book: “I do believe… I can and will do the best work of my life. Of course I will never please everyone with my America – wouldn’t try to.

Text from the MFA Boston website

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Girod Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Meraux Plantation House, Louisiana
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Belle Grove Plantation House, Louisiana
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Bessie Jones. St. Simons Island, Georgia
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Mr. and Mrs. W. P. Fry, Burnet, Texas
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Walt Whitman (American, 1819-1892)
Part of Song of Myself
from Leaves of Grass
1855

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Mr. Brown Jones, Athens, Georgia
1941
Gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Charis Wilson
1941
Photograph, gelatin silver print
The Lane Collection
Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Artwork: Hamzeh Carr. ‘Lord Buddha’ 1926

November 2012

Hamzeh Carr
Lord Buddha
1926
Frontispiece
From Sir Edwin Arnold. The Light of Asia. London: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd
Limited edition of 3,000 copies

Absolutely divine. In the flesh, the colouring and radiance of these plates has to be seen to be believed.
God they knew how to print back then!

I shall be posting more of these stunning works over the coming weeks. They deserve to be seen and meditated upon. Please click on the artwork for a larger version of the image.

Marcus

Please click on the image for a larger version of the art work.

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘In Focus: Picturing the Landscape’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 22nd May – 7th October 2012

Curator: Brett Abbott

Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dahshoor, From the East
1857
Albumen silver print
11.6 x 16.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

“Hence the photographer’s most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically.”

Edward Weston. The Complete Photographer. January 20, 1943

Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Sir John Frederick William Herschel (British, 1792-1871)
Valley of the Saltina near Brieg at Entrance of the Simplon
1821
Graphite drawing made with the aid of a camera lucida
19.7 × 29.7cm (7 3/4 × 11 11/16 in.)
Gift of the Graham and Susan Nash Collection
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Dr Samuel A. Bemis (American, 1793-1881)
View within Crawford Notch, New Hampshire
c. 1840
Daguerreotype
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Boston dentist Samuel Bemis, one of the first Americans to use a daguerreotype outfit successfully, practiced photography during his summer months in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. His landscape views of the area are the earliest surviving American photographs to depict untamed nature. Here he depicts a scene of rugged beauty.

An innovative amateur, Bemis was not a masterful technician of the complicated daguerreotype process. The dark tone of the sky and the light areas along the slope of the mountain indicate inadequate processing of the daguerreotype plate.

John Beasly Greene  (American, 1832-1856)
Thebes, Village of Ghezireh
1853-1854
Salted paper print from a waxed paper negative
9 1/8 x 12 inches
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

John Greene was an archaeologist, the well-to-do son of a banker from Boston who lived in Paris, and a photographer. By 1853 the twenty-one-year-old Greene had learned to use Le Gray’s waxed-paper process, the technique of choice for traveling Frenchmen. That same year he made the first of two expeditions to Egypt and Nubia, bringing back more than two hundred negatives of monuments and landscapes, some ninety-four of which, printed by Blanquart-Evrard in 1854, comprise the album “Le Nil, monuments, paysages, explorations photographiques par J. B. Greene.” So rare are these albums that we assume that Greene published them at his own expense. On his second trip, in 1854-1855, he not only photographed but also excavated, especially at Medinet-Habou. During an archaeological and photographic expedition to Algeria the following winter, this exceptionally talented young man died of an undisclosed illness.

Greene’s Egyptian landscapes are startlingly barren. Coalescing from large, softly nuanced tonal planes, the views seem to shimmer above the page almost to the point of evaporating, like distant desert mirages. Generally, Greene placed the geological or archeological structure of these pictures at a distance, surrounded by sand and sky. This, the most minimal of his visions, sums up the Egyptian landscape. Stretching between the great river and the endless expanse of sky, and between the great river and the desert, is a thin band of fertile earth – the ligament of life that gave rise to a great civilisation. That the picture functions like a diagram may owe to Greene’s knowledge of hieroglyphics; the Egyptian pictograph for “country” is a flat, floating disk, hardly more than a horizontal line.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Charles Marville (French, 1813-1879)
Fontainebleau
1854
Salted paper print
15.9 × 21.3cm (6 1/4 × 8 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Francis Frith (English, 1822-1898)
The Pyramids of Dashour
1856-1857
Albumen silver print
6.8 × 6.5cm (2 11/16 × 2 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef

Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984)
Sugar Pine Cones
Negative 1925-1930; print 1931-1932
Gelatin silver print
11.6 x 16.2cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958)
Kelp on Tide Pool, Point Lobos
1939
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Rather than depicting a traditionally picturesque vista or capturing accurate perspective, photographers of the 20th century began to explore the various but particularly photographic ways that the natural world could be seen through the camera lens. Often this led to spatial experimentation. Taken at Point Lobos in California, this image by Edward Weston plays with the perception, and misperception, of space. The photographer cropped his photograph of a tide pool to show kelp puncturing the water’s surface in the foreground, while in the upper register an underwater landscape appears simultaneously near and far.

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
[Detroit]
1941
Gelatin silver print
8.1 × 11.4cm (3 3/16 × 4 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of Harry Callahan

Callahan referred to this photograph, made shortly after an inspiring encounter with Ansel Adams, as “my first good picture.” Unlike Adams’s dramatic landscapes, Callahan’s composition focuses on an overlooked pedestrian setting in his native Detroit. Raising the horizon line, the artist achieved a delicate, calligraphic interplay among the reeds and telephone poles and their reflections across the surface of a bog.

Wyn Bullock (American, 1902-1975)
Point Lobos Tide Pool
1957
Gelatin silver print
19.1 × 24.1cm (7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Bullock Family Photography LLC. All rights reserved

In Focus: Picturing Landscape, at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Center, May 22 – October 7, 2012, offers a rich trove of landscape photography from some of the most innovative photographers in the genre. Drawn exclusively from the Getty Museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition brings together the work of twenty photographers, spanning the medium from the mid-1800s to the current decade, including Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham, William Garnett, John Beasly Greene, Eliot Porter, Clifford Ross, Toshio Shibata and Edward Weston.

“The range of photographs chosen for this exhibition were selected from hundreds of extraordinary landscape works in the Getty Museum’s photography collection with an eye towards the various ways that photographers have responded to the daunting challenge of depicting the natural landscape photographically,” says Karen Hellman, assistant curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition.

Since the invention of the medium, photographers have turned to the landscape as a source of inspiration. Changing artistic movements and continual technical advancements have provided opportunities for camera artists to approach the subject in diverse and imaginative ways. The Getty originally presented In Focus: The Landscape in June 2008, curated by Brett Abbott. Expanding on the first presentation of photographs, this second exhibition on landscape in the Getty Museum’s In Focus series examines how photographers have sought to capture the breadth and perspective of the landscape through a camera lens. The exhibition is organised around three main themes: nineteenth-century technical developments by photographers such as Francis Frith who captured intriguing views of the Egyptian Pyramids in the 1850s; works that show purely photographic approaches such as those by Edward Weston and Harry Callahan; and more recent ways in which photographers have framed the landscape to make environmental and conceptual statements.

One of the earliest works in the exhibition is actually not a photograph but a drawing made by Sir John Frederick Herschel in 1821 with the aid of a camera lucida, an optical device sometimes used as a drawing aid by artists of the period. The exhibition also includes a very early full-plate daguerreotype of a landscape made by Boston dentist Samuel Bemis in 1840. During the first decades of the 20th century, artistic experimentation flourished and tested the boundaries of the genre. Photographers such as Edward Weston and Harry Callahan sought to explore the landscape as abstraction and pure form. In the second half of the 20th century, photographers began to explore the landscape in more socially conscious ways. Eliot Porter devoted himself to publishing work in concert with conservation efforts. Virginia Beahan has delved into the landscape as a site of human history, rather than simply a subject of aesthetic contemplation.

Contemporary artists continue to be inspired by the rich tradition of landscape photography. Also included in the exhibition is a large-scale photograph by Clifford Ross from his 2006 Mountain series, produced from extremely high-resolution digital files in order to make prints that came as close as possible to replicating reality. Several works will be on view for the first time, including a photograph taken in the forest of Fontainebleau, outside of Paris, by Charles Marville in the 1850s, and a photograph from Point Lobos, California, by Wynn Bullock, as well as a work by the Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata acquired with funds from the Getty Museum Photographs Council.

In Focus: Picturing Landscape is the eleventh installation of the ongoing In Focus series of thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection, and includes twenty-two works by twenty photographers.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

William A. Garnett (American, 1916-2006)
Sandbars, Cape Cod, Massachusetts
1966
Cibachrome print
34.4 x 51cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Estate of William A. Garnett

Nature and photography have been linked since the inception of the medium. Whether driven by the challenge of capturing the expanse and perspective of a vista or by the myriad possibilities of creating a unique artistic experience, the act of depicting the natural landscape has inspired photographers from the 1800s to the present.

To create this image, photographer William Garnett piloted his plane over sand bars in Cape Cod. In addition to the natural beauty of the ocean, the photographer invites us to explore space and perception in a unique way. The undulating forms of the sandbars play with the boundaries between foreground and background. Changing tones of blue challenge us to know if we look at water, sky, or even a view from outer space.

Eliot Porter (American, 1901-1990)
Aspens and Grass, Elk Mountain Road, New Mexico, October 3, 1972
1972
Dye transfer print
26.2 x 20.6cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
Bequest of the artist
© 1990 Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Toshio Shibata (Japanese, b. 1949)
Tsuru City, Yamanashi Prefecture
1989
Gelatin silver print
44.5 × 55.5cm (17 1/2 × 21 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Toshio Shibata

Virginia Beahan (American, b. 1946) and Laura McPhee (American, b. 1958)
Apple Orchard, Manzanar Japanese-American Relocation Camp, Owens Valley, California
1995
Chromogenic print
75.3 × 95.3cm (29 5/8 × 37 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Nancy and Bruce Berman
© Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee

Here Beahan and McPhee delve into the landscape as a site of human history and conflict. With the High Sierra as a backdrop, rusty remnants of the Manzanar relocation camp, used to detain Japanese Americans during World War II, occupy the foreground. In the middle ground stand the desiccated trunks of an orchard, part of an 1860s settlement that was abandoned after the land’s water was diverted in the 1920s to irrigate Los Angeles. The orchard, in turn, had uprooted a community of Paiute Indians, who had lived there for generations.

Virginia Beahan (American, b. 1946) and Laura McPhee (American, b. 1958)
Mount Rainier, Washington
2000
Chromogenic dye coupler print
75.5 x 96.5cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Gift of Nancy Goliger and Bruce Berman
© Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee

Clifford Ross (American, b. 1952)
Mountain IV
2004
Chromogenic colour print
63 x 118 in
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Clifford Ross Studio

A persistent aspect of picturing a landscape has been the concept of the ideal. Recent photographers have framed nature not only to emphasise its beauty but also to highlight its unattainability in a modern context.

Photographer Clifford Ross was inspired to create this image of Mount Sopris while on a family holiday. In order to, as the photographer put it, “grab as much of the mountain as [he] possibly could in one shot,” Ross invented a camera, the R1, which exposes 9 x 18 inch aerial film. When processed by hand and scanned, the negatives produce files with a hundred times higher resolution than those made with the average professional digital camera. Yet even though he pursues a near replica of reality, Ross also manipulates the digital file to re-create the landscape as he remembers experiencing it. Viewers have the ability to examine the scene in greater detail than they might even in person.

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm

The J. Paul Getty Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977’ at the Art Institute of Chicago

Exhibition dates: 13th December 2011 – 11th March 2012

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

Marcel Broodthaers (Belgian, 1924-1976)
Portrait of Maria Gilissen with Tripod
1967
Gelatin silver emulsion on canvas with tripod
Approx. 66 x 43 x 24 inches

Mel Bochner (American, b. 1940)
Surface Dis/Tension
1968
Gelatin silver print on aluminum mount
48 x 46″

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
The California Map Project Part I: California
1969, exhibition copy 2011
Twelve inkjet prints of images and a typewritten sheet
Each image, 20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in); sheet, 21.6 x 27.9cm (8 1/2 x 11 in)
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris
© John Baldessari

Lothar Baumgarten (German, 1944-2018)
The Origin of Table Manners
1971
Chromogenic print
45 x 57.5cm
Collection Sanders, Amsterdam

One of Baumgarten’s early works, The Origin of Table Manners is a wry illustration of the way in which colonial conquerors conflated Western notions of civility with notions of the civilised as part of their alibi for domination. Inspired by a text of the same name by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the work consists of a table draped in a crisp, white tablecloth and set with fine china, with porcupine quills and the feathers of large birds standing in for silverware. When it was first shown, it was installed in a tony French restaurant near Baumgarten’s Paris gallery.

Chris Wiley. “Exhibition Review – Lothar Baumgarten at Marian Goodman Gallery” Nd on the Daylight Books website [Online] Cited 07/11/2024

Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935)
100 Boots
1971-1973
Fifty-one photolithographic postcards
Each 11.1 x 17.8cm (4 3/8 x 7 in)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Margaret Fisher Endowment
Courtesy Ronald Fedlman Fine Arts, New York, NY
© Eleanore Antin

Ger van Elk (Dutch, b. 1941)
The Rose more Beautiful than Art, but Difficult, therefore Art is Splendid
1972
Slide projection, elven chromogenic slides projected onto watercolour in wooden frame
9 4/5 × 12 2/5 in | 25 × 31.5cm
Courtesy of the artist

John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020)
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line (Best of Thirty-Six Attempts)
1973
Portfolio of fourteen photolithographs
Each 24.7 x 32.7cm (9 11/16 x 12 7/8 in)
Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago
© John Baldessari

Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945)
Ausbrennen des Landkreises Buchen (The Burning of the Rural District of Buchen)
1974
Bound gelatin silver prints with ferric oxide and oil on woodchip paper
62 x 45cm
Hall colleciton

The 1960s and 1970s are recognised as the defining era of the Conceptual Art movement, a period in which centuries held assumptions about the nature of art itself were questioned and dissolved. Until now, the pivotal role that photography played in this movement has never been fully examined. The Art Institute of Chicago has organised the first major survey of influential artists of this period who used photography in ways that went far beyond its traditional definitions as a medium – and succeeded thereby in breaking down the boundaries of all mediums in contemporary art. Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-1977 – on view December 13, 2011 through March 11, 2012 – is the first exhibition to explore how artists of this era used photography as a hybrid image field that navigated among painting and sculpture, film, and book arts as well as between fine art and the mass media. More than 140 works by 57 artists will fill the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall in this major exhibition that will be seen only in Chicago.

Bringing to the fore work from the Italian group Arte Povera as well as artists from Eastern Europe who are rarely shown in the United States, Light Years also includes many pieces that have not been on public display in decades by such major artists as Mel Bochner, Tony Conrad, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Emilio Prini. To open the exhibition, the Art Institute has arranged a special outdoor screening of Andy Warhol’s Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. In a first for the United States, Warhol’s Empire will be projected from the Modern Wing’s third floor to be seen on the exterior of the Aon Center on Friday, December 9.

The acceptance of photography as fine art was an evolutionary process. Early 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism articulated a new set of standards for art in which photography played a major role. By the 1930s, modernist photography found a small but influential niche in museum exhibitions and the art market, and vernacular forms such as photojournalism and amateur snapshots became a source of artistic inspiration. Engagement with mass media, exemplified in Pop Art, became prominent in the 1950s. Yet only with the advent of Conceptual Art did artists with training in painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts begin to make and exhibit their own photographs or photographic works as fine art.

Some Conceptual artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, and Valie Export took up photography seriously only for a few key months or years; others, like Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Jan Dibbets, and Annette Messager have worked in photography their entire careers. Photography showed the way forward from Minimal Art, Pop Art, and other movements in painting and sculpture. But it came with its own set of questions that these artists addressed with tremendous innovation. Questions of perspective, sequence, scale, and captioning which have a rich history in photography, were answered in entirely new ways and made into central concerns for art in general.

Photography in these artists’ hands was the antithesis of a separate and definable “medium.” It became instead “unfixed”: photobooks, photolithographs, photo canvases, photo grids, slide and film pieces, and even single prints all counted as valid creative forms. The variety of work showcased in Light Years is crucial to conveying the greatest contribution of the Conceptual era: to turn contemporary art into a field without a medium.

Light Years showcases a great number of works that have not been seen together – or at all – since the years around 1970. Victor Burgin’s Photopath, a life-size print of a 60-foot stretch of flooring placed directly on top of the floor that it records, has not been shown in more than 20 years and never in the United States. Likewise being shown for the first time in the U.S. are pieces by Italian artists Gilberto Zorio, Emilio Prini, Giulio Paolini, and others associated with the classic postwar movement Arte Povera. Paolini’s early photo-canvas Young Man Looking At Lorenzo Lotto (1967), an icon of European conceptualism, has only rarely been shown at all after entering a private collection in the early 1970s. Mel Bochner’s Surface Dis/Tension: Blowup (1969) has not been seen since its presentation at Marian Goodman Gallery in the now legendary 1970 exhibition Artists and Photographs, from which no visual documentation survives. Equally rare and important early works by Laurie Anderson, Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente, Tony Conrad, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, and many others make the show a revelation for those interested in key figures of new art in the 1960s and ’70s. A special emphasis is placed on artists from Hungary, a centre for photoconceptual activity that has long been overlooked in Western Europe and the United States.

Press release from the Art Institute of Chicago

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940-1994)
AW:AB =L:MD (Andy Warhol: Alighiero Boetti = Leonardo: Marcel Duchamp)
1967
Silk screen print with graphite on paper
58.8 x 58.8cm (23 5/16 x 23 5/16 in)
Colombo Collection, Milan
© Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940-1994)
Twins (Gemelli)
September 1968
Gelatin silver postcard
15.2 x 11.2cm (6 x 4 3/8 in)
Private Collection
© Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Bruce Nauman (American, b. 1941)
Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1
1967
Gelatin silver print
157.5 x 105.7cm (62 x 41 5/8 in)
Glenstone
© Artists Rights Society (ARS).

Dennis Oppenheim (American, 1938-2011)
Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y. Material… Solar Energy. Skin Exposure Time. 5 Hours June 1970
1970
Two chromogenic photographic prints, plastic labelling tape, mounted together on green board with graphite annotations
Overall: 81 x 66cm (31 7/8 x 26 in)
Top photo: 20.1 x 25.8cm
Bottom photo: 20.2 x 25.5cm
Image/text area: 41.8 x 25.8cm
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
© Dennis Oppenheim Estate

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60603-6404
Phone: (312) 443-3600

Opening hours:
Thursday – Monday 11am – 5pm
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

The Art Institute of Chicago website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Saul Leiter: New York Reflections’ at the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 24th October 2011 – 4th March 2012

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Taxi
1957
© Saul Leiter, Collection Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

“I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.”

“Seeing is a neglected enterprise.”

Saul Leiter

“Leiter’s sensibility… placed him outside the visceral confrontations with urban anxiety associated with photographers such as Robert Frank or William Klein. Instead, for him the camera provided an alternate way of seeing, of framing events and interpreting reality. He sought out moments of quiet humanity in the Manhattan maelstrom, forging a unique urban pastoral from the most unlikely of circumstances.”

Martin Harrison. ‘Saul Leiter Early Color’

The first of two postings on the underrated, underexposed American photographer Saul Leiter. These photographs are a delightful surprise! Some, like Through Boards (1957, below) are as illuminating as any Rothko going around. His art is not of the documentary gaze but of a brief glimpse, glanz, refulgence of desire ∞ snatched from the nonlinearity of time ∞ cleft in(to) its fabric. What wonderfully composed reflections they are. I absolutely adore them.

The media release states, “… but where his color photography is concerned, he cannot be compared with any other photographer. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer working in color.” Galleries must beware such bombastic claims: other photographers working in colour in the 1940s-50s include Paul Outerbridge, László Moholy-Nagy, Nickolas Muray, Jack Smith, Eliot Porter and William Eggleston to name but a few (also see the posting on the exhibition Beyond COLOR: Color in American Photography, 1950-1970).

The second posting will be from a major retrospective of his work at The House of Photography at Deichtorhallen.

Perhaps this photographer is finally getting the accolades he so rightly deserves.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Haircut
1956
© Saul Leiter, Collection Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Through Boards
1957
© Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Harlem
1960
© Saul Leiter, Collection Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Snow
1960
© Saul Leiter, Collection Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

From 24 October 2011 to 4 March 2012 the JHM is presenting a retrospective exhibition of the work of the American photographer and painter Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Following a long period of obscurity, Leiter’s work has recently been rediscovered in the United States and Europe. This is the first exhibition of his work in the Netherlands.

Saul Leiter is celebrated particularly for his painterly colour photographs of the street life in New York, which he produced between 1948 and 1960. Amid the hectic life of the city he captured tranquil moments of everyday beauty. He was able to transform mundane objects – a red umbrella in a snowstorm, a foot resting on a bench in the metro, or a human figure seen through the condensation on a pane of glass – into what has been described as ‘urban visual poetry’. His photographs are frequently layered, near-abstract compositions of reflections and shadows, which recall paintings by abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, with whom Leiter felt a strong affinity.

Saul Leiter is seen as belonging to the New York School of Photographers, a group of innovative artists, most of them Jewish, who achieved fame in New York in the period 1936-1963, primarily with their images of the street and their documentary photography. His black-and-white work displays a lyricism, dreaminess and surrealism that might prompt comparison with photographers such as Ted Croner, Leon Levinstein and Louis Faurer, but where his colour photography is concerned, he cannot be compared with any other photographer. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer working in colour.

Born in Pittsburgh, Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father. But his growing interest in art led him to abandon his religious studies. Instead, he went to New York and dedicated himself to painting. His friendship there with the abstract expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography, and the work of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, inspired Leiter to take up photography. His friendship with the photographer W. Eugene Smith was another inspiring influence.

The exhibition Saul Leiter: New York Reflections was prepared by the JHM in collaboration with the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. Besides over 60 colour and 40 black-and-white examples of his street photography, a small selection of fashion photographs, paintings, and painted photographs will be shown. Visitors will also be able to watch a recent documentary about Leiter by the British film maker Tomas Leach. This autumn, the publisher Steidl will be publishing the third edition of Early Color, the first book of Leiter’s photographs, compiled in 2006 by Martin Harrison of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Press release from the Jewish Historical Museum website

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Foot on El
1954
© Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Taxi
1956
© Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Reflection
1958
© Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Paris
1959
© Saul Leiter, Collection Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Walk with Soames
Nd
© Saul Leiter, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

Jewish Historical Museum
Nieuwe Amstelstraat
1 1011 PL Amsterdam
Phone: +31 (0)20 5 310 310

Opening hours:
Daily from 10.00 – 17.00

Jewish Historical Museum website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 by Francesc Torres’ at the Imperial War Museum, London

Exhibition dates: 26th August 2011 – 26th February 2012

Many thankx to the Imperial War Museum, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
Steel beams taken from ground zero for storage at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Hangar 17
2009
© Francesc Torres

“Having watched the graphic destruction from my apartment, only two blocks from the Twin Towers, when I entered Hangar 17 at JFK International Airport for the first time in 2006, I was immediately hit by the deep sense that the objects I was confronted with, from large shards of rusted and burnt steel to bikes left forever by their owners, were the symbolic substitutes of the victims. Their overwhelming presence stood for all the people that lost their lives that late summer day a decade ago.”

Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
Twisted steel beams from ground zero dominate the space in JFK International Airport’s Hangar 17, where 9/11 artifacts were housed for study and safekeeping
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
View through a portion of the broadcast antenna that fell from the top of the north tower. A number of fragments of the 360-foot antenna were kept at Hangar 17
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
The collapse of the twin towers created a series of iconic objects, transformed by force and fire from their daily uses into artifacts that tell a story. At Hangar 17, tented enclosures were built for artifacts of various kinds that, in the view of curators and conservators, needed the added protection of humidity control and stillness. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this transformation could be found inside the vehicle tent, where trucks and cars, normally left outside in all conditions, were given shelter
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
Because the Last Column had inscriptions and attachments on all sides, it was raised onto a specially constructed steel cradle at Hangar 17 so conservators had enough clearance to work. A mirror provides a glimpse of tributes on the underside of the column. Visible on the facing side are the taped-on memorials for Firefighter Christian Regenhard, 28, and Deputy Battalion Chief Dennis Cross, 60
2009
© Francesc Torres

The empty shell of Hangar 17 at JFK Airport became a storehouse of memories when it was filled with the material cleared from the World Trade Center site following the September 11 attacks on New York City.

Marking the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Francesc Torres’s work features over 150 projected images which explore inside the hangar and reflect on the emotional power of what remained, from personal belongings to steel girders distorted by the force of the attacks. Alongside the photographs is a section of raw rusted steel over two metres in length from the ruins of the World Trade Center. As well as larger piece (over 1 tonne) that is due to go on display at IWM North in October, these objects are the first pieces of steel from Ground Zero to go on display in the UK. The exhibition will also be on display at the International Centre for Photography in New York and at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Throughout his career, Spanish-American artist Francesc Torres has reflected on the diverse manifestations of culture, politics, memory and power. His latest exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Memory Remains, is a bold and haunting amalgam of all four.

In 2009, Torres was granted rare access to Hangar 17 at John F Kennedy International Airport, a gaping space of over 80,000-square-feet. Within the hangar lie the remnants deemed worth preserving from the September 11 attacks, taken from the 1.8 million tonnes of debris from Ground Zero. For five weeks Torres daily confronted the legacy of terror and the ghosts of that fateful late-summer day, capturing images of objects that stand as symbolic substitutes to the victims.

“Look at it this way”, says Torres, relaying his experience, “it’s a hanger constructed to house a plane, which was transformed into a weapon used for the attack on the towers and now the sediment of that attack is here. With the sound of planes constantly flying overhead it was absolutely surreal.”

According to the photographer, the experience of walking around the hanger after the first day was so emotionally draining that he slept from four o’clock in the afternoon through to ten o’clock the next morning.

“I was absolutely exhausted; physically and emotionally… every single iota of energy I had was gone.”

His efforts have produced some exceptional results, however, displayed on a rolling slideshow in a small room near the entrance of the museum. Among the objects photographed are large shards of rusted, burnt steel, crumpled filing cabinets and a plethora of flattened Port Authority vehicles. Some unexpected pieces of detritus were also found, including a nine-foot, three-dimensional Bugs Bunny, made completely bizarre when juxtaposed by a sign whose letters read chillingly: “That’s All Folks!”

Prior to the Hangar 17 project, Torres documented the excavation of a mass Spanish Civil War grave that he said drew certain comparisons with the material at JFK.

“The clothing is something that just grabs you,” he says, “it’s very uncanny that nothing changes with the victims as historical subjects. The clothing [in Hangar 17] was exactly the same as the clothing I’ve seen in Spain or in the former Yugoslavia; it all has the same patina. The victim becomes universal… the remains have that quality.”

Along with the photographs, the museum has also acquired a section of steel from the structure of the World Trade Center, displayed outside the projection room. It is the first section of raw rusted steel from the ruins at Ground Zero – thought to be the box section from one of windows – to be displayed in the UK.

For the past year, pieces from the hangar have made their way to be placed in memorials in each of the 50 American states, as well as seven other countries across the globe. Some, but not all, of the remaining pieces will be housed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum near the site of the attack, which is something that concerns Torres.

“We have to preserve the hanger as a container. It’s an unbelievable narrative apparatus that had been created almost on the run,” he says.

With a lifelong interest in questions of human memory and meaning, Torres’ work is based on the concept that it is through the remains of history that memory remains. His latest show is an unforgettable testament to those horrendous attacks that capped the 20th century almost a decade ago.”

Text from the Imperial War Museum

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
These three panels, offering a view of the Statue of Liberty from 1977, were salvaged from the Cortlandt Street subway station under the World Trade Center. The spray-painted markings indicate that the area nearby had been searched by rescue workers for survivors or victims
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
9/11, as seen live on television in Barcelona, Spain. Photographed at roughly 3 p.m. local time by Maria Iturrioz de Torres, Francesc Torres’ mother, while they spoke by phone
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
Though most of the vehicles at Hangar 17 came from first responders, this taxi, an emblem of daily life in New York, was also preserved. At left, the tags hanging from the frame indicate its Port Authority inventory number (white) and mark its selection for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Memorial Museum (yellow)
2009
© Francesc Torres

Francesc Torres (Spanish, b. 1948)
During the recovery at the site, some ironworkers would cut religious or other symbols out of pieces of steel from the World Trade Center and give them as keepsakes to family members or other visitors
2009
© Francesc Torres

Imperial War Museum, London
Lambeth Road
London SE1 6HZ
United Kingdom
Phone: 020 7416 5000

Opening hours:
Daily from 10am – 6pm

Imperial War Museum, London website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Color Correction’ by Ernst Haas at Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 20th January – 25th February 2012

Many thankx to Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
 New York
1980
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

“No photographer has worked more successfully to express the sheer physical joy of seeing.”

John Szarkowski

“Bored with obvious reality, I find my fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. Without touching my subject I want to come to the moment when, through pure concentration of seeing, the composed picture becomes more made than taken. Without a descriptive caption to justify its existence, it will speak for itself – less descriptive, more creative; less informative, more suggestive; less prose, more poetry.”

Ernst Haas from “About Color Photography,” in DU, 1961

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Rush Hour, New York City
Nd
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
Nd
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
Nd
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Feed Line, New York City, USA
Nd
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
Nd
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City
1951
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Food Day, New York City, USA
1953
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
3rd Avenue, Reflection, New York City
1952
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1953
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Paris, France
1954
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Frigidaire, Paris
1954
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City
1955
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
 New Orleans
1957
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Park Avenue Taxis
1958
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
 New Orleans, USA
1960
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1962
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Traffic, Mexico City
1963
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1963
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Lights of New York City, New York City
1966
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Torn Poster I, Wave, NYC
1968
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1968
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Greenwich Village, New York City, USA
1970
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
California, USA
1970
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1972
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1973
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1974
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

“Making his first color photographs in 1949, Haas was a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. Known mainly for his commissioned work, whereby he created influential imagery such as iconic Marlboro Man advertisements long before other artists were commissioned to do so, Haas’ work would come to have great influence on later artists, such as Richard Prince, Marc Quinn or Robert Longo. Using color also for his personal work, with a pictorial language recalling at times the works by painter Edward Hopper, Haas has been described as a poet photographer. Haas cropped and abstracted, photographed against the light and out of focus, and used reflections and close-ups to mystify the visible. Interested in the everyday,as well, some of his personal photographs remind of the likes of Lee Friedlander or Stephan Shore.”

Anonymous. “Ernst Haas: Color Correction,” on the Lens Culture website Nd [Online] Cited 15/11/2024

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New Mexico, USA
1975
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Western Skies Motel
1978
C-Print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1981
C-Print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
St Louis, Missouri, USA
1986
C-Print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Christophe Guye Galerie is proud to present Color Correction: by one of the most important and influential artists in the development of colour photography and the history of the medium on a whole, this exhibition spotlights a body of work that poignantly describes the complex ways in which an artist’s ‘career’ took form. Ernst Haas belonged to the best known, most productive and widely published photographers of the twentieth century. Most commonly associated with vibrant colour photography, Haas was famed for his commercial work. It is undoubtedly however his other, private work that really illuminates the power of his sensibility and his true mastery. Unfortunately this side of his creative output has been kept private and thus escaped posthumous appreciation. It is only now, with the efforts and belief in Haas’ ability of a few, such as William Ewing, former Director of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, that this body of work is finally revealed and justly let’s this artist’s aptitude shine. The exhibition Color Correction, and Ewing’s corresponding book published by Steidl, uncovers, with an exciting and novel view, the “other” side of Ernst Haas’ visionary.

Color Correction is the first exhibition in Switzerland to present the to-date little known, non-commission work by the late Austrian-born photographer. Uncovering a new side to a much celebrated body of work, the show will include fifteen new and mostly never before seen large format works, alongside a handpicked selection of rare, vintage dye-transfer prints from the 1950s and ’60s. These astoundingly complex and ultimately enveloping pieces form a group exhibited under the title Colour Correction to coincide with the recent Steidl publication Color Correction, by William Ewing.”These images are of great sophistication, and rival (and sometimes surpass) the best of his colleagues”, says Ewing, revealing works “far more edgy, loose, enigmatic, and ambiguous than his celebrated work.”

“Color correction” is a term used in printing, through which the inked proofs are brought into as close equivalence as possible with the original photograph. Ewing has chosen to use the term metaphorically, to suggest “we owe it to Ernst Haas and our understanding of the history of colour photography, to reevaluate his importance in light of this marvellous imagery, kept under wraps for so many years.” It was in 1962 that the first ever colour photography exhibition, Ernst Haas Color Photography, was held at the prestigious MoMA in New York, and not until fourteen years later would colour photography be given another show at the museum with Color Photography by William Eggleston. Though introducing Haas’ work to a large audience and a major milestone in the history of the medium it would not come to have the same effect on the development of the artist’s career. On the contrary: an exhibition planned by Edward Steichen, renowned photographer and curator of MoMA at the time, it was in the end his predecessor John Szakowski who would actually see it realised. With this shift in curatorial visionary, Szakowski would enforce a different taste. Having the duty to complete Steichen’s idea, but keen to champion his own and dissimilar ideas, Szakowski’s enthusiasm regarding the artist and the exhibition Ernst Haas Color Photography was meek, the praise in his accompanying texts all but faint. Steichen, once in favour of Pictorialism, thus a subjective photography, valued Haas’ profound use of the camera, while Szakowski on the other hand chose to favour a less embellished sentiment; a more hardedge modernist inspired American approach. It was this disregard and clashing of personal agendas that would ultimately and erroneously see Haas excluded from the canon of colour photography; his indisputable talent became the victim of the cyclical debate of what art photography should be.

Making his first colour photographs in 1949, Haas was a member of the prestigious Magnum agency. Known mainly for his commissioned work, whereby he created influential imagery such as iconic Marlboro Man advertisements long before other artists were commissioned to do so, Haas’ work would come to have great influence on later artists, such as Richard Prince, Marc Quinn or Robert Longo. Using colour also for his personal work, with a pictorial language recalling at times the works by painter Edward Hopper, Haas has been described as a poet photographer. By no means the first to use the medium in colour, he was said to be “the first to do it masterfully.” Visionary, Haas early on cropped and abstracted, photographing against the light and out of focus, using reflections, close-up to mystify the visible, abstraction of colour and texture. Interested in the everyday, his photographs remind of the likes of Lee Friedlander or Stephan Shore, but rather than documents his works are “vignettes of personal experience.” The works on display in Color Correction reveal this more abstract side of the artist’s oeuvre.

Haas’ work never received the recognition it deserved. The works presented at Christophe Guye Galerie are based upon this dispute, attempting to reveal the true ability of Haas’ work and restore his rightful place in the medium’s canon.

Haas’ formal language echoes decades past while being extremely contemporary at once. Often shooting inches away from the subject at acute and unexpected angles, Haas work was visionary. Lyrical, evocative, and expressive, while at the same time exact, the artist moved away from obvious reality, finding fascination in transforming it into a subjective point of view. The works on view are to be understood not as informative but as creative; description gives way to suggestion. Color Correction – the exhibition as well as the book – show works that are rich, vibrant, and intelligent alike. With this new view on the body of work of one of the medium’s most important advocates, Color Correction hopes to evoke the excitement Steichen expressed when he first came across Haas imaginarium of seeing: “In my estimation we have experienced an epoch in photography. Here is a free spirit, untrammelled by tradition and theory, who has gone out and found beauty unparalleled in photography.”

Press release from the Christophe Guye Galerie website

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City
1952
C-print, later print
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Brooklyn, New York
1952
C-print, later print
101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1952
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1955
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Bronco Rider, California
1957
C-print, later print
101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
New York City, USA
1963
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Los Angeles, California, USA
1963
C-print, later print
101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in)
Edition of 15
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
Cafe Boi Charbon, Caen, France
1976
C-print, later print
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Ernst Haas (American, 1921-1986)
California, USA
1976
C-print, later print
101.6 x 76.2cm (40 x 30 in)
Courtesy of Ernst Haas and Christophe Guye Galerie

Christophe Guye Galerie
Dufourstrasse 31
8008 Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: +41 44 252 01 11

Opening hours:
Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm

Christophe Guye Galerie website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Swiss Photobooks from 1927 to the present – A Different History of Photography’ at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Zurich

Exhibition dates: 22nd October 2011 – 19th February 2012

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

Eduard Spelterini (Swiss, 1852-1931)
Über den Wolken
Brunner & Co. A.G., Zurich
1928

Albert Steiner was one of the finest Swiss photographers of the twentieth century. Like Ansel Adams, he favoured imposing natural phenomena, landscapes with what might be called good bone structure, (in his case the Alps, in Adams’s comparable work, the American West), and he printed his vision of them in black-and-white, revealing nature in all its majesty. His impressive scenic work has fundamentally shaped the world’s perception of Switzerland as an alpine country of timeless beauty. It spans the period from before World War I – an era of pictorially inspired images that look like oil paintings – to the straightforward and elegantly modern photography of the 1930s. Unlike many other photographers of the same generation active in the same area, Steiner saw photography as a completely appropriate means of creating works of art, and considered himself an artist.

Text from Amazon. Albert Steiner The Photographic Work. Steidl November 21, 2008

Albert Steiner (Swiss, 1877-1965)
Schnee, Winter, Sonne
Rotapfel-Verlag, Zurich-Erlenbach/Leipzig
1930

The Swiss Foundation for Photography (Fotostiftung Schweiz) is marking its fortieth anniversary by presenting a fresh view of Swiss photography – a tour d’horizon covering a range of illuminating photobooks in which not only the great themes of photography are reflected but also the development of photographic styles and modes of expression. Since the late 1920s the book has repeatedly proved itself to be an ideal platform for the presentation of photographic works. Books have not only contributed to the dissemination and transmission of photography but also facilitated the integration of the individual image into a meaningful context.

In the history of photography the photobook plays a major role not only in publicising photographs, but also as an independent means of expression. The significance of many photographers’ works only emerges when presented in book form, in the coherent sequence or series of images. Content, design and printing quality combine to produce an intricate architectural whole.

This jubilee exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the Fotostiftung Schweiz focuses on a selection of photobooks that have influenced photography in Switzerland since the late 1920s. At that time, technical advances made the reproduction of top quality photographic images possible and promptly gave rise to a first boom in illustrated books that placed greater emphasis on the photographs than on the texts. Since then, Swiss photobooks have continued to develop in various directions and have repeatedly attracted considerable attention at international level as well.

With the help of seven thematic areas – homeland, portraiture, mountain photography, the world of work, aerial photography, contemporary history, travel – this exhibition aims at a kind of typology of the Swiss photobook which draws attention to the potential interplay between book and photograph, while also revealing the extent to which modes of expression have altered over the course of time. Concise excerpts from these books exhibited on the walls highlight the basic principle of each photobook – a photograph positioned on a double page still remains an integral part of a larger sequence. The concept, design and reception of photobooks are examined more closely in display cases. A large wall installation is devoted to photobook covers. The photobook is also presented as an object in film form: “reading” illustrated photography books is not just an intellectual but also a sensual act.

Press release from the Fotostiftung Schweiz website

Eduard Spelterini (Swiss, 1852-1931)
Über den Wolken (cover)
Brunner & Co. A.G., Zurich
1928

Swiss balloonist Eduard Spelterini (1852-1931) lived an extraordinary life. Born the son of an innkeeper and beer brewer in a remote village in the Toggenburg area of Switzerland, Spelterini achieved international fame when he became the first aeronaut to fly over the Swiss Alps in 1898. Over the next two decades, Spelterini navigated his balloon through the skies of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and over such sites as the Great Pyramid of Giza and the gold mines of South Africa. Spelterini remains an important figure today because of his achievements in aerial photography. Seeking images to illustrate his lectures, he began taking a camera along with him on his expeditions in 1893, and his breathtaking photographs quickly became the talk of Europe.

Known as the “King of the Air,” the Swiss balloonist Eduard Spelterini enchanted the imaginations of European royalty, military generals, wealthy patrons, and the public alike with his mastery of the most whimsical mode of travel ever invented – the gas balloon. During the course of his storied aviation career, Spelterini flew his balloons over the Swiss Alps, across the Egyptian pyramids, and past the ziggurats of the Middle East, taking breathtaking photographs of landscapes and cities from the sky.

On Spelterini’s first ballooning ventures, he ferried aristocrats between Vienna, Bucharest, Athens, and other European capitals, on flights that became so famous that they were soon jam-packed with an international press corps looking for the next sensational story. Later in his life, Spelterini was the first aeronaut to succeed in the hazardous passage over the Swiss Alps, a trip then thought impossible. Eventually, he decided to bring his camera on every voyage in order to document the full panorama of international vistas he encountered.

Text from Amazon

Eduard Spelterini and the Spectacle of Images: The Colored Slides of the Pioneer Balloonist. Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess; Bilingual edition August 15, 2010, presents a selection of around eighty of Spelterini’s never-before-published colored slides, offering readers an altogether new look at the spectacular work of this pioneer of photography and aviation.

Eduard Spelterini – Photographs of a Pioneer Balloonist. Verlag Scheidegger and Spiess; Bilingual edition December 30, 2007 is the first book after 80 years to present these images of his journeys, reproduced directly from the artist’s original glass negatives. Contextualized by essays that explore both Spelterini’s life and his photographic work, the photographs featured in this volume capture the heady mix of danger and discovery that defined the early years of international air travel when balloons ruled the skies.

Walter Mittelholzer (Swiss, 1894-1937)
Alpenflug (cover)
Orell Füssli, Zurich/Leipzig
1928

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Fabrik (cover)
Rotapfel Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich
1943

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Fabrik
Rotapfel Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich
1943

Jakob Tuggener’s Fabrik, published in Zurich in 1943, is a milestone in the history of the photography book. Its 72 images, in the expressionist aesthetic of a silent movie, impart a skeptical view of technological progress: at the time the Swiss military industry was producing weapons for World War II. Tuggener, who was born in 1904, had an uncompromisingly critical view of the military-industrial complex that did not suit his era. His images of rural life and high-society parties had been easy to sell, but Fabrik found no publisher. And when the book did come out, it was not a commercial success. Copies were sold at a loss and some are believed to have been pulped. Now this seminal work, which has since become a sought-after classic, is being reissued with a contemporary afterword. In his lifetime, Tuggener’s work appeared – at Robert Frank’s suggestion – in Edward Steichen’s Post-War European Photography and in The Museum of Modern Art’s seminal exhibition, The Family of Man, in whose catalogue it remains in print. Tuggener’s death in 1988 left an immense catalogue of his life’s work, much of which has yet to be shown: more than 60 maquettes, thousands of photographs, drawings, watercolors, oil paintings and silent films.The Family of Man,

Book description on Amazon. The book has been republished by Steidl in January, 2012. The classics never go out of fashion!