Category: colour photography

Exhibition: ‘Smile! How the Smile Came Into Photography’ at Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Exhibition dates: 1st November, 2025 – 22nd March, 2026

Curators: Miriam Szwast with Brit Meyer

Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987)
Warhol, Andy
1972
Polaroid
10.8 x 8.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
©2025 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I went for a new passport photograph yesterday and the nice person took the first photographs, looked at them, and then said “too much smile”, close your mouth more, and took them again with no teeth exposed and my mouth in a thin, rictus line.

How do our “photographic faces” differ from our everyday faces?

Does not smiling in a photograph prevent us from displaying our individual personality?

What different types of smile are there and what do they signify?

“Smiles are complex, with researchers identifying up to 19 types ranging from genuine joy to social masking, with only six occurring during positive emotions. Key types include the genuine Duchenne smile (involving eyes), polite social smiles, and non-enjoyment smiles like contempt or discomfort, signalling various emotional, social, or, in some cases, aggressive messages.”1

Smiling does not just depend on social norms but researchers have found it may actually be programmed into our DNA, creating in built reactions to certain situations.2 From the miserable smile, to the dampened smile, qualifier smile, contempt smile and fear smile, there are many ways we can interact with others and with the camera lens.

From this distance in Australia and having not see the exhibition in person I can’t tell you whether this exhibition addresses the issues of different smiles pictured in photography but it seems unlikely given the text and media images.

For more information on facial expressions please see my text Facile, Facies, Facticity (January 2014) which examines the facticity of the face, in which only through the “thrownness” of the individual rendered in the lines of the human face can we engage with the intractable conditions of human existence.

Say cheese!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Zaria Gorvett. “There are 19 types of smile but only six are for happiness,” on the BBC website, 10 April 2017 [Online] Cited 06/03/2026

2/ Ibid.,

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

Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing at left, Hugo Erfurth’s Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (painter), (1929, below)
Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber

Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927)
Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression
1878
Part of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot)
Photogravure
Image: 10.3 × 7.1cm (4 1/16 × 2 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

NB. PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT IN THE EXHIBITION

Hugo Erfurth (German, 1874-1948)
Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (painter)
1929
Oil pigment print on cardboard
38.3 x 26.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

When Hildegard Seemann-Wechler had her portrait taken in Hugo Erfurth’s studio in Dresden, she was studying painting with Otto Dix. The strict frontality of this picture, the neutral background, and the direct gaze into the camera are softened by the slight hint of a smile at the corners of the artist’s mouth. Hildegard Seemann-Wechler’s bob hairstyle identifies her as a New Woman who rejects conservative role models. Her portrait breaks with the tradition of serious facial expressions in the 19th century and marks the threshold between not smiling and smiling. Collection presentations like this help us to explore our own works. On the back of this picture, the name “Hilde Wächler” is written in pencil. It was only during the preparations for Smile! that we noticed the mistake and were able to assign the person portrayed to her real name. In 1940, Hilde Seemann-Wechler was murdered by the Nazis.

Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (German, 1903-1940)

Hildegard Wechler came from a bourgeois background. She began her studies at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunstgewerbe in Dresden and moved to the Dresdener Kunstakademie in 1921, where she studied with Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Ludwig von Hofmann and from 1927 with Otto Dix, three semesters of which as an individual student. In particular, she was supported by Sterl and Dix. Since that time she was friends with Eva Schulze-Knabe and Fritz Schulze. Since Hans and Lea Grundig also studied at the academy, it can be assumed that she also had contact with them.

After her studies, Hildegard Wechler worked in Dresden as a freelance artist. In 1929 she married the painter Herbert Seemann (1900-1945). In 1931, she had the first symptoms of mental illness. The doctors diagnosed an incurable schizophrenia and referred her to the Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Arnsdorf. She spent eight and a half years there. She was forcibly sterilized at the State Women’s Hospital Dresden.

In 1940 she was transferred to the Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Leipzig-Dösen, on 18. June 1940 to the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Großschweidnitz. On the 3rd In September 1940, a transport commando brought her to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center. She was murdered there shortly afterwards as part of the euthanasia “Aktion T4” as one of at least 14,751 victims of this institution, including the Dresden painters Gertrud Fleck and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, in the gas chamber disguised as a bathroom.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing at right, Man Ray’s Lips, (Lee Miller), (1930, below)
Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Lips, (Lee Miller)
1930
Print
21 x 25.5cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem B

Lee Miller’s closed lips reveal hardly any emotion. And yet every facial expression communicates something about the time and circumstances in which a portrait was taken. Even today, we find fashions in lip positioning when a person is photographed – such as pursed lips in the “duckface” or the slight opening of the mouth in the “fish gape.” The development of dental care is certainly only one of the reasons why we statistically show more teeth when being photographed today than we did a hundred years ago, and why saying “cheese” is supposed to make our faces look their most photogenic.

Smizing, squinching, duck face, fish gape, cheese, or prunes: Beauty ideals and social media have given rise to increasingly mercurial trends in portrait photography. Until the late nineteenth century, having one’s photo taken required the sitter to remain absolutely motionless in order to produce a sharp image, which more often than not resulted in a fixed and lifeless expression.

Smile! How the Smile Came Into Photography, presented in the Museum Ludwig Photography Rooms, investigates how our “photographic faces” have evolved over time. The show assembles a range of anonymous and artistic portrait photographs from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century to recount a history of the smile.

Whether or not we smile when being photographed, or whether we show our teeth, depends on social norms and the photographic technology available. In 1878, the photographer Josef Janssen observed that “the awkward situation in which a person finds themselves at the moment of having their photo taken is in itself enough to prevent them from displaying their individual personality. Motionless and with a fixed gaze, their head leaning on that dreaded, detestable head rest, they are required for a set period of time to stare at a certain point in space that generally offers the eye nothing of interest. What else could this result in but stiffness and lifelessness?”

The fact that people in the nineteenth century rarely smiled when having their picture taken in a photographic studio also reflected contemporary norms regarding how one should appear in a portrait, norms based on conventional ideas of class, gender, and context. Emotions were considered a private matter that had no place in a portrait.

The emergence of silent film played a key role in the appearance of the smile in twentieth-century portraits. Facial expressions were used to convey emotions, filling the frame in tight close-up shots. Parallel to this, headshots increasingly replaced full-body portraits. Then came advertising, where the beaming smiles of actors served to embody the allure of products. The corners of the mouth began to rise ever upward. A 2015 study of student portraits in American yearbooks revealed that smiling in photographs has consistently increased since the start of the twentieth century, with results confirming that women smile more than men. A trend toward increased facial expressiveness can be observed the world over. A look at fashion photography, however, shows that status and coolness are conveyed with barely a smile. As early as 1927, the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer noted that the world – and thus the people in it – had taken on a “photographic face.” The presentation at the Museum Ludwig aims to show that this observation still holds true today and that the smile has a history.

The show is accompanied by a publication with a text by Katharina Sykora. #PhotographyFaces #MLxPhotography

Press release from Museum Ludwig

Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing Afga Advertising tests (around 1965, below)
Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber

These two photographs can be found in the archives of Agfa’s advertising department, which are now kept at the Museum Ludwig. While the color chart in one picture reveals that it is an informal test shot for the photographer, the other picture shows the official version of the advertisement. Only in the official version is everyone smiling – even the man holding the camera in front of his face to take a snapshot of his family. Since advertising has to communicate people’s happiness with a particular product, it contributed enormously to the spread and normalisation of smiling, laughing people in pictures. This is particularly the case with the advertisement of the photo industry. As Christina Kotchemidova writes in her article “Why we say ‘Chesse’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography”: “Obviously, amateurs learned from advertisements (…). The visuals ensured that the advertising ideal was accurately replicated, thus making popular photography an extension of advertising culture.”

Unknown Photographer
Agfa advertising test
around 1965
Color photography
Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Photo studio on the roof
1845
Illustration from Erich Stenger: Siegeszug der Photographie in Kultur, Wissenschaft, Technik, 1950
Archiv Museum Ludwig, Köln

The more light there is, the shorter the exposure time when taking photographs. That is why photo studios in the 19th century were often set up in attics with large windows. In good weather, photographs were sometimes taken directly on the roof. Nevertheless, we can still see the head support that kept the person being photographed motionless for the duration of the shot and helped to ensure that the image was sharp. Such head supports were part of the necessary equipment of a photo studio and certainly did not help the subject to relax. In 1878, photographer Josef Janssen observed: “[…] the predicament in which the person finds themselves at the moment of the shot is enough to prevent them from freely expressing their individuality. Leaning against the much-hated and feared, yet indispensable head support, they are supposed to remain motionless and stare intently for a while at a certain point that usually offers nothing for the eye to look at. What else can be the result of this but rigidity and lifelessness?”

Adolf Hengeler (German, 1863-1927)
“At the photographer’s: ‘Now, young lady, please smile nicely and look friendly!…One, two, three!… That’s it, thank you! Now you can go back to your natural expression!'”
Published in Fliegende Blätter, 1893
Print
47 x 36.4cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“Now, young lady, please make a nice and friendly!… One, two, three!… That’s it, thank you! Now you can go back to your natural expression!” This was the caption accompanying the caricature when it was published in the magazine Fliegende Blätter in 1893. The fact that the subject is depicted wearing a clown mask shows, on the one hand, that people were already familiar with smiling “photography faces” at the end of the 19th century and, on the other hand, that the women portrayed were supposed to appear ‘nice’ and ‘friendly’ through their smiles. The fact that there are other types of smiles was already mentioned in Grimm’s dictionary from 1885, such as happy, cheerful, mischievous, furtive, shy, malicious, bitter, scornful, mocking, and forced. In 2020, Carolita Johnson described in her article “‘I don’t have to smile if I don’t feel like it!’: Covid freed me from politeness and unwanted touching” in The Guardian how wearing face masks during the coronavirus pandemic freed her from the pressure of having to wear the mask of the friendly smiling woman.

Julia Margaret Cameron (English born India, 1815-1879)
Summer-days
1866
Albumen print on cardboard
34.0 x 27.6cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910)
Portrait of Marc de Montifaut
around 1877
Woodburytype on cardboard
22.9 x 18.6 cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (French, 5 April 1820 – 20 March 1910), known by the pseudonym Nadar or Félix Nadar, was a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist who was a proponent of heavier-than-air flight. In 1858, he became the first person to take aerial photographs. Photographic portraits by Nadar are held by many of the great national collections of photographs. His son, Paul Nadar, continued the studio after his death.

Smiling: A Photographic Balancing Act between Seriousness and Laughter

Katharina Sykora

Between spontaneity and strategy: smiling as an indicator of emotion

In everyday life, a smile immediately inspires feelings of happiness. While today we experience smiling as a spontaneous expression of affection, our understanding of smiling as a legible, socially acceptable facial gesture is the result of centuries of debate. It was oten viewed as an expression that sat midway between seriousness and laughter. Discussions around the nature of the smile gained in intensity in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography, which saw many in the aristocracy and the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie discovering themselves anew in portrait studios. Meyers Encyclopaedia (1865) describes smiling as a weaker version of laughing because “it lacks the intermittent exhalation,”1 while in his remarks on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin describes laughter as “the full development of a smile or … a gentle smile as the last trace of a habit, firmly fixed during many generations, of laughing.”2 In both cases, smiling is cast not as an emotion in its own right but as a relative form derived from a strong, joyful feeling. This contrasts with the expressive range of smiles allowed for by the Brothers Grimm: “Smiling,” they write in their German Dictionary (1885) “may be friendly, happy, cheerful, affectionate, gentle, mischievous, furtive, shy, even malevolent, biter, mocking, scornful, or forced.”3

This highlights the long-standing controversy that has historically accompanied discussions around smiling and that continues today. On the one hand, a smile is evaluated based on where it is perceived to sit on a spectrum between seriousness and laughter and – depending on its proximity to either extreme – subjected to positive or negative moral, societal, or aesthetic judgements. On the other hand, because the spectrum between seriousness and laughter contains many nuances, smiling is perceived as a versatile
expression that can attest to a variety of different feelings and communicate a broad range of meanings in social interactions depending on the socio-historical context. The first perspective tends to view smiling within normative parameters, while the second situates it within a kaleidoscope of micro-sociological observations.

An important question running through historical and historiographical discussions of seriousness, smiling, and laughter asks whether these are expressions of inner emotion or learned facial gestures and behaviour patterns. In other words, whether laughing and smiling are anthropological constants common to all humans as immediate expressions of emotion, or whether they are a strategic means of communication used to one’s own advantage in specific situations.

In the mid-nineteenth century, photography played a prominent role in this debate. In his book The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, published in 1862 and containing a hundred photographs,4 the doctor and physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne presented an experiment in which he used targeted electric shocks to trigger a wide range of expressions on a test person whose facial nerves lacked sensation. One of these included a homogenous smile involving all of his features that resembled the kind of
facial expression observed in everyday settngs. But Duchenne was also able to trigger paradoxical facial expressions that could only be induced by electric shocks, such as a smiling mouth combined with eyes and forehead contorted by pain. Through such experiments, Duchenne sought a systematic “orthography of a supposedly universal language”5 of human physiognomy in order to render it more legible. Paradoxically, he disconnected inner affects from their outer manifestations while connectng them all the more strongly in terms of their
meaning, as when, by analogy with the laughing muscle, he describes the nasalis (nose) muscle as a “muscle of aggression” or the frontalis muscle (that moves the eyebrows) as a “muscle of suffering.”6

One far-reaching side effect of Duchenne’s test setup was the realization that
manifestations of human emotion can be manufactured without necessarily corresponding to a felt equivalent. By twinning electro-physical and photographic procedures, Duchenne proved in the field of science what had long been commonplace in the world of the theater – where professional actors routinely simulate emotions – and everyday life – where individuals control their expressions when interacting with others. In this way, Duchenne contributed his “theater of science”7 to the list of “production sites” for the decoupling of facial expression from emotion, where it joined the theatrical stage and milieus of social interaction.

At the same time, Duchenne’s use of electric shocks to produce expressions revealed their dual social function: Anyone could use them as a systematic means of portraying emotion detached from any corresponding internal feeling, and they could be decoded just as systematically by others as “artificial” rather than “natural” displays of sentiment. This benefited another site invested in the social coding of emotions: the increasingly numerous
photographic studios where the middle classes were now able to have portraits made of themselves, creating a specific repertoire of facial expressions as part of a class-specific pose. What these theatrical, scientific, and photographic settings all demonstrate is that seriousness, smiling, and laughter can be performed in a way that is legible. They are part of a social act that always involves two or more people.8 With Duchenne’s contribution to the
visual ordering and classification of seriousness, smiling, and laughter, photography advanced over the course of the nineteenth century to become the primary medium for the representation, communication, and standardisation of emotions. It became a platform for self-portrayal, for the negotiation of social hierarchies and values, and for the establishment and reinforcement of universal forms of emotional expression.

Looking back: a brief discursive and visual history of smiling

The history of smiling, as traced through past discourses and visual representations, reflects the shifts in society’s acceptance of the portrayal of specific emotions and the influence this has had on photographic (self-) presentations of people since the nineteenth century. What immediately becomes clear is that smiling has not always been understood as the midpoint between seriousness and laughter but situated somewhere closer to the later. Even more surprisingly from today’s perspective, laughter and especially smiling historically occupied no place at all in social behaviours and visual representations, and when they did appear, their initial connotations were largely negative.

“Before the twelfth century,” writes the art historian Monika E. Müller, “one can expect to find almost no illustrations of emotion in the form of facial expressions.”9 The reason for this was the dominance of Christian morals, which opposed the portrayal of strong emotions in general. The Greek and Roman Church Fathers shared a negative view of laughter, considering it antithetical to the ideal of a God-fearing person leading a life of humility and atonement. As a result, books of monastic precepts banned laughter as sinful behaviour.10

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, grinning devils increasingly appeared in
portrayals of the Apocalypse, there were chortling henchmen along Christ’s route to Calvary, and there were grotesque heads guffawing on the capitals of cathedrals or in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. These polarising counter-figures were depicted as bystanders, relegated to the edges of the sacred realm. Here, laughter was not an expression of cheerfulness but a sign of vice and evil.

In the thirteenth century, smiling made its first appearance as a positive trait in
Christian iconography but was reserved for Mary, the Christ Child, angels, and those souls resurrected into a state of heavenly bliss. Here, too, exceptions gradually emerged: In the portal of the Last Judgement at Strasbourg Cathedral, for example, we find the Prince of this World (c. 1280) flashing a mischievous grin in the direction of a Foolish Virgin with a flirtatiously simpering smile. This erotically charged tête-à-tête takes on a negative tone, however, once one notices that the Prince’s back is being devoured by snakes and vermin. Moreover, the coquette is shown to be doubly foolish – distracted by her “sinful” fleshly desire for a figure whose true nature is hidden from her, unlike the lamenting Wise Virgins, she has unwittingly dropped the oil lamp that was meant to remain lit in anticipation of Christ’s arrival. In this way, depictions of smiling joined those of laughter in Christian iconography, where their differentiation into the beatific and the seductive supported theological morals.

Once smiling began to feature in secular imagery – as in the statue of Margravine Regelinda in the west choir at Naumburg Cathedral (c. 1250) – the binary Christian model underwent a fundamental reevaluation. In the thirteenth century, a tradition of courtly politeness emerged in which smiling carried positive connotations, signalling friendly attentiveness guided by self-restraint. Books on courtly etiquete established gestural moderation as the norm. Smiling was courtly in a double sense: It bound the nobility together through a shared code of conduct while also distinguishing them from the “uncouth” populous.

As the modern age progressed, further differentiation took place. Courtiers amused each other by engaging in witty repartee. Eliciting a subtle smile that acknowledged one’s skill while remaining shielded from ridicule behind a noncommittal smile of one’s own was the basis of an amicable but increasingly competitive court culture. Smiling became an instrument with which to perpetually renegotiate one’s position within the court hierarchy. As a result, the rules governing seriousness, laughter, and smiling became ever more rigid
and complex, so that only a select few courtiers ever mastered the art of it. This in turn created gender and aesthetic norms: Young girls and high-ranking ladies were expected to wholly avoid displays of loud laughter, as they pointed to a lack of self-control in the “weaker sex,” and its distortion of the facial features was considered inappropriate for the “fairer sex.”

In the Renaissance, these norms were applied to portraits of the wealthy burghers of the urban centers. Here, the hint of a smile was considered acceptable, while open laughter was viewed as the hallmark of courtesans, marginal figures at court who, together with the fool or jester, broke with the rules of politeness through displays of untamed conduct while simultaneously affirming them.

A similarly paradoxical relationship emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the rise in popularity of genre paintings, which often depicted members of the lower classes boisterously laughing during exuberant scenes of eating and drinking and were often filled with erotic allusions. These paintings, mostly by Dutch artists, both challenged and affirmed the cultural conventions around laughter, often involving the viewer by establishing direct eye contact, creating a sense of complicity and shared amusement.

By contrast, in the eighteenth century, the aspiring bourgeoisie increasingly set itself apart, imposing stricter limits on exuberant laughter. With reference to the aristocratic norm of disciplined facial expressions, it adopted smiling as its hallmark. At the same time, it distanced itself from the courtly performance of smiling. Since those at court were all trying to functionalise their facial expressions and tame their emotions, it was no longer possible to trust their smiles.11 From the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, courtly smiling was now
considered unnatural. This reflected changes in affect theory, as Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s pathognomy now postulated congruency between facial expressions and inner emotions.12 The “forced” smiles of the aristocrats at court were contrasted with the “genuine,” “heartfelt” bourgeois laughter that did not hurt anyone or assume superiority. However, such amiable laughter among equals was not part of public displays of bourgeois identity. In public and in official portraits, the bourgeoisie presented themselves with a seriousness that matched their social aspirations. The network building, convivial laughter of bourgeois men and the smiles of bourgeois women were reserved for smaller, more intimate formats such as drawings or miniatures. In other words, such displays of emotion were privatised, confined to salons and the home.

Photography and the smile: a tense relationship

At the end of the 1830s, during this transitional phase when bourgeois culture was still navigating between seriousness and smiling, photography emerged as a new medium for recording and representation. Its specific qualities allowed facial expressions to be captured with great precision while also imposing limits on the expression of emotions such as smiling and laughter.

The indexicality of photography – namely, the fact that the subject must have been present while their likeness was being transferred onto the image – meant that photographs were like a second skin. Just as it was assumed that one’s facial expression was a direct translation of one’s emotion, it was also believed that this emotion was directly imprinted onto the photograph. The indexical promise of photography thus suggested that one was looking directly – through a kind of double, transparent membrane – into the soul of the sitter. For the bourgeoisie, with its imperative of natural, uncontrived expression of emotions, photography thus served as proof of the authenticity of the emotions on display. It is all the more surprising, then, that it was well into the twentieth century before smiles began to appear on the faces of the bourgeoisie in studio photographs. For bourgeois men in particular, the expression of seriousness that prevailed in this context was a strategy that allowed them to present themselves as level-headed, stabilising members of society. The resulting contradiction remained a blind spot in their self-image: Photography as an
apparatus for capturing an indexical authentication of “genuine feelings” turned into its opposite as demonstrative seriousness became part of a bourgeois pose that was legitimated as “real” by the medium’s promise of truth.

Just as important as indexicality is another specific quality of the photographic
medium: the way it cuts through space and time. Since laughing and smiling are “fleeting signs of an emotion as expressive movement,”13 the moment in which a photograph is taken, fixing a single instant in the flow of living time, is especially precarious. While it is easy to maintain a serious expression for a long exposure time, laughter is comparatively brief and consists of a sequence of different expressions. Capturing a laugh at the peak of its crescendo requires a short exposure time, as well as technical skill and psychological foresight on the part of the photographer; they must be able to quickly intuit when to press
the shutter in order to capture the laugh on the sitter’s face, in turn underscoring the photographer’s ultimate control over the image compared to that of the subject. In temporal terms, photographs of laughter thus tend to be “stolen” images, a quality that can be compensated for by the consenting gaze of the sitter. The belated arrival of laughter as a viable photographic motif in the 1920s was, on the one hand, due to technical developments that allowed for shorter exposure times and, on the other, the result of a renegotiation of the power dynamics between the photographer and their subject.

Photographing a smile is different to capturing laughter. A smile can be maintained for considerably longer than a laugh, though not as long as a serious expression. Since smiling is a fluid movement of the mouth and the corners of the eyes, the way a photograph severs the sequence of a smile is both all the more obvious and all the more arbitrary. In the twentieth century, the request to “smile please” performed a function similar to that of “don’t move”
in the studio photography of the previous century. It directed the subject to “freeze” their smile, thus detaching it from any emotion that might have prompted it and seeing it into a pose. As a stabilised facial expression, smiling complied with the technical parameters of photography at the time. On a cultural level, however, it was precisely this compatibility that led to the smiling photo face becoming the norm – as witnessed in the monotony of smiles from family photographs after World War II to the selfies of the 2000s.

How the smiling photo face came to be

“Why do we smile in photographs?” asks the art historian André Gunthert,14 who suggests that this phenomenon may be due to the coincidence of two important developments: the evolving concept of the individual and its self-portrayal in the Western world and the emergence of visual mass media – first illustrated newspapers, then photography, and finally film. These developments influenced each other and continue to do so today: Thanks to
mass media, images are propagated at an increasingly rapid speed, reaching ever greater numbers of people, who model their behaviour on them. Photography, as a genuinely reproducible medium, has been foundational to these developments. As a result, the spread of the smile in photographs is closely linked to the medium’s technical developments and its growing accessibility. It wasn’t until the 1890s that cameras fell into the hands of amateur photographers, a transition made possible by the roll-film camera developed in 1888 by George Eastman. This was followed by ever more lightweight, user-friendly cameras, such as the first Leica made for small-format negatives, prototyped in 1913 and mass produced from 1925, or the Ermanox, designed in 1924, which played a crucial role in photojournalism,
enabling images to be taken in low-light conditions. The studios, where the standards of bourgeois seriousness were still largely upheld, now found themselves in competition with amateur photographers.

This shift altered the relationship between photographers and their subjects. The intimacy of the family or circle of friends made it possible to capture forms of coexistence that were not bound to the strict rules of public image. In such familiar settings, private “snapshots” of laughing or smiling people no longer risked being viewed as “stolen images” that would be exposed to an unpredictable public response. Instead, the pictures remained private, with viewing sessions and the exchange of prints strengthening ties among friends
and family members. As an agent of social cohesion, smiling demonstrated the sitter’s consent to being photographed and was just as important as the shared private enjoyment the resulting pictures generated. From this time, family albums began to contain more and more images of people smiling and laughing. Even in these private photographs, smiles often varied depending on the gender of the subject; bourgeois women and children of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were still confined primarily to the private sphere, with smiling the “natural,” morally acceptable, and aesthetically appropriate mode of expression in this domain. A broad smile while looking directly into the camera continued to be associated more with the lower classes and those on the fringes of society, such as demimondaines, sex workers, and stage performers.

For a long time, studio photography clung to the tradition of a public image based on serious expressions and rigid poses, but it was unable to entirely prevent the new tendency toward smiling from creeping in. The studios countered this with biting satires that ridiculed smiling as improper and “false.” Spontaneous, private expressions of emotion did not make
the transition to the studios, where smiling remained a mask assumed only for the time it took to take a picture.

This changed over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, the photographer
Gilbert de Chambertrand declared the old form of studio photography obsolete. It treated people like statues, he argued, whereas modern portrait photography focused on people influenced by outdoor pursuits, sports, and the cinema whose faces expressed lively emotions.15 Shifts in society, such as the rise of the urban middle classes (the “salaried masses”) and the emancipation of women (the “New Woman”), led to a greater variety of facial expressions in photographic portraits, and an aesthetic shaped by the motion pictures
contributed to a greater expressivity.16 With its extreme close-ups, bold cropping, and shifts in perspective, the New Vision movement was characterised by a formal dynamism that amplified the dynamism of the facial expressions it captured. And the role models multiplied, too: In studio portraits of the 1920s and 1930s, elegant women gaze out at us bearing smiles copied from photographs of famous actresses and sporty young girls laugh warmly at the person behind the camera. In extreme cases, a smile may even appear without a face, in a close-up shot of a mouth with lipstick. As its range expanded, smiling became the norm, fostered by its dissemination via the mass media of magazines and movies through which it eventually conquered the public sphere and official portrait photography.

After World War II, this development intensified, especially in the West, beginning in the United States where the commercialisation of amateur photography had opened up a huge market. An analysis of high school yearbook photographs over several decades shows the gradual trend toward smiling.17 By the 1950s at the latest, “social smiles” that marked those photographed as friendly members of the community had become mandatory.

Spontaneous smiles, which engaged the eye muscles, increasingly gave way to a mere upward curve of the mouth. In public, this more restrained smile became a compulsory sign of polite distance when encountering strangers, as an overly serious expression risked being misconstrued as aggression.18 Pervasive advertising, movies, and later television increasingly blended private and public spheres, ultimately elevating the once-private smile to the status of an omnipresent social norm.

In the United States in particular, this was accompanied by an upgrading of the kind of smile required by photographers, as “please smile” was replaced by calls to “say cheese,” prompting the sitter to smile broadly, showing their teeth. Different reasons have been given for this “cheesy grin”: the need for non-confrontational interactions in times of increasing social insecurity or the desire to display one’s wealth and radiant state of good health. (In the
past, possessing a perfect set of teeth could not be taken for granted and often involved considerable costs.) This time, the media role models were Hollywood stars,19 pin-up models, and the happy families depicted in advertisements.20 In this way, a flourishing post-war America spread its broad smile not only across its own country but across the whole of the Western world.

Since the 1990s, if not before, we have witnessed a strong counter-movement to the dominance of the smile. The concept of “coolness” categorically refuses the call to smile, demonstratively playing with the latent aggression associated with a serious expression, from which it derives the power of its image and gaze. The subject of a “cool” portrait is most often young, versed in street culture and involved in the worlds of music and fashion and their advertising campaigns. The straight face of cool has become the new photo face. Or has
it turned back into the old one? What distinguishes the serious expression of the “cool guy” from that of the bourgeois man in nineteenth-century studio photography? The underlying model of masculinity is comparable, a display of self-confidence, self-control, and defensiveness. The difference lies in the casual pose, the informal clothing, and the overt display of a fit physique, all set against an urban setting or edgy studio backdrop. But it is above all its contrast to the typical cheesy grin that makes not smiling such a surefire fashion
statement. A scene in the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022) offers a striking illustration of this: At a casting session, a number of young male models are asked to pose for the camera. To test their range of facial expressions, instead of asking for “cool” or “cheese,” the photographer alternately calls out “Balenciaga!” and “H&M!” Here, seriousness and smiling have undergone another shift in function and meaning: No longer manifestations of emotion or masks, they have become brands.

Footnotes

1/ Neues Konversations-Lexikon, ein Wörterbuch des allgemeinen Wissens, ed. Hermann J. Meyer, (Hildburgshausen: Bibliographisches Institut, 1865), 10: 474, under “Lachen,” quoted in Timm Starl, “Vom Lächeln: Erörterungen zu einer seltenen fotografischen Erscheinung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Fotografische Leidenschaften, ed. Katharina Sykora et al. (Marburg: Jonas, 2006), 34.
2/ Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton, 1872), 209.
3/ Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885; rep., Munich: dtv, 1984), 14-15, quoted in Starl, “Vom Lächeln,” 33.
4/ Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électrophysiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: Asselin, 1862).
5/ Petra Löffler, Fabrikation der Affekte: Fotografien zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik,” in Fotografische Leidenschaften, 43.
6/ Duchenne de Boulogne, quoted in Petra Löffler, Affektbilder: Eine Mediengeschichte der Mimik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004), 123.
7/ Gunnar Schmidt, Das Gesicht: Eine Mediengeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2003), 51-75.
8/ See Beatrix Müller-Kampel, “Komik und das Komische: Kriterien und Kategorien,” in Lithes, Zeitschrift für Literatur- und Theatersoziologie 7 (2012): 22. See also Werner Rocke and Hans Rudolf Velten, “Einleitung,” in Lachgemeinschaften: Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 13: 22.
9/ Monika E. Müller, “Das Lachen ist dem Menschen eigen … Seine Darstellung in der Kunst des Mitelalters,” in Seliges Lächeln und höfisches Gelächter, exh. cat., Dom- und Diözesanmuseum Mainz (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012), 71. The way strong emotions and passions were portrayed in antiquity, as in the statue of the Laocoön Group or Aristotle’s remarks on the link between affect and physical-facial expressions of emotion, only gained importance later.
10/ Müller, “Das Lachen ist dem Menschen eigen,” 72.
11/ See Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, 5th ed. (Hanover: Schmidtsche Buchhandlung, 1796).
12/ See Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “On Physiognomy: Against the Physiognomists” (1778).
13/ Löffler, Affektbilder, 164.
14/ André Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie? (Lyon: 205, 2023).
15/ See Gilbert de Chambertrand, Le Portrait et l’Amateur (Paris: Paul Montel, 1937), 5, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 36.
16/ In the first half of the twentieth century, Expressionist and Soviet films in particular helped expand the vocabulary of facial expressions seen in modern individuals and their photographic portraits. See Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 36-39.
17/ See Shiry Ginosar et al., “A Century of Portraits: A Visual Historical Record of American Highschool Yearbooks,” in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging 3, no.3 (2017): 421-31, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 15, fn. 7.
18/ Maria A. Arapova has shown that in the Soviet Union, in contrast to countries influenced by the United States, smiling in public was not customary, reserved instead for the private sphere. See Maria A. Arapova, “Cultural
Differences in Russian and Western Smiling,” Russian Journal of Communication 9 (2017): 34-52, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 47, fn. 30.
19/ See Angus Tumble, A Brief History of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2004), quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 12, fn. 2.
20/ See Christina Kotchemidova, “Why We Say ‘Cheese’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (March 2005), quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 14, fn. 6.

August Sander (German, 1876-1964)
Girl with Ball (Mädchen mit Ball)
1910s
Gelatin silver paper
10.7 x 6.9cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
© Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur-August Sander Archiv, Köln / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025

Test images from the photo booth, Kaufhof, Cologne
1920s
Gelatin silver paper
Archiv Museum Ludwig, Köln

The introduction of photo booths in the 1920s meant that portraits could be taken cheaply and without being observed by photographers, which encouraged people to experiment, as we can see in this test strip taken in a Cologne department store.

Unknown photographer
Class photo
1923
Archive Museum Ludwig

A comparative study of school photographs in the USA showed that the corners of the mouth have been rising steadily in portraits since 1900. A comparison of two class photos from the Museum Ludwig archive, taken forty years apart, confirms this: whereas in 1923 the expressions were still serious, in 1963 there are smiling faces. However, the US study also showed that girls and women smile significantly more than boys and men. “Photography faces,” whether they smile or not, are culturally formed faces.

Unknown photographer
Class photo
1963
Archive Museum Ludwig

Average lip curvature over the 20th century

Andy Warhol experimented early on with the Polaroid instant camera. He photographed himself as well as visitors to his studio, The Factory, in New York in the 1970s. He collected the snapshots in several photo albums. Their spontaneity is evident in the fact that they often appear flawed, whether because only the forehead is visible in the picture or because the face of the person portrayed is not yet a standard “photography face.”

Thomas Struth (German, b. 1954)
The Schäfer Family, Meerbusch 1990
1990
C-print
166 x 198cm
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Acquisition with the support of the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
© Thomas Struth

Since the 1980s, Thomas Struth has been photographing families from his circle in their familiar surroundings. While the people in his pictures choose their own clothing, gestures, and looks, he asks them not to smile for the camera. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the photographer explained this as follows: “It is often said that when everyone smiles, they all look the same. But they can’t all look different either. In my opinion, there are enough photos of people laughing.” Ann Katrin Harfensteller-Rufenach adds in her book Dazwischen-Sein. Familienporträts von Thomas Struth und jüngere Positionen in der Fotokunst in Deutschland (Being in Between: Family Portraits by Thomas Struth and Recent Positions in Photographic Art in Germany): “But the unusual size of the camera may also have been fascinating and encouraged an appealing facial expression.” In fact, Thomas Struth photographed this image with a large-format camera on a tripod, similar to the photographers of the 19th century.

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany

Opening hours:
Tuesday through Sunday: 10am – 6pm

Museum Ludwig website

The Photographers’ Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Exhibition dates: 10th October, 2025 – 22nd February, 2026

Curators: Laurie Hurwitz and Shoair Mavlian in collaboration with Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Luriki (1971-1985, below) and Sots Art (c. 1975-1986, below); and at right, a photograph from the series National Hero (1991, below)

“The world is made up of many worlds. Some are connected and some are not.”

From the film Perfect Days, 2023 directed by Wim Wenders

I love this man’s work. I feel very connected to his worlds. His constructed discontinuities. His ruptures, compressions, ambiguities. His social codifications of rich, poor, haves and have nots, and, as someone said, his portrayal of “the overlooked, the uncomfortable, and the unabashedly human.”

“Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large.”1

“By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.”2

Experimental, conceptual, staged, performative, his photographs appeal to my subversive nature, prodding as they do at the status quo. His “rebellious visual language” takes us on a journey – his journey, Ukraine’s journey – “a journey through time, loss, and transformation.”

I wrote of his work in an earlier posting on this exhibition when it was at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris:

“Mikhailov’s photographs are emotionally powerful, politically astute and uncannily effective conversations with the world… about subjects that should matter to all of us: war, destitution, poverty, oppression, and the power of an authoritarian state to control the thoughts and actions of human beings under its control. They are about the freedom of individual people to live their lives as they choose; and they are about the freedom of a group of people which form a country to not be subjugated under the rule of another country to which they are historically linked.

His photographs are about choice and difference, they are about life.

They perform a task, that is, they bring into consciousness … the ground on which we stand together, against oppression, for freedom. Of course, no country is without its problems, its historical traumas, prejudices and corruption but the alternative is being ruled over without a choice, which is totally unacceptable.

Against the “failed promises of both communism and capitalism” and the “economic history that is written on the flesh” of the poor, Boris Mikhaïlov’s Ukrainian diary documents day after day the dis-ease and fragility, but also resilience, of his subjects and the world in which they live. He uses his art as a visual tool for cultural resistance. And the thing about his images is: you remember them. They are unlike so much bland, conceptual contemporary photography because these are powerful, emotional images. In their being, in their presence, they resonate within you.”

In this earlier posting you will find a longer text that I wrote, descriptions of the each of the artist’s series and more images. I hope you can view the posting.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026

2/ Kateryna Filyuk. “Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/2026

Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery, London for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“I chose to focus on ordinary, everyday scenes and the search for formal solutions to translate this mundaneness into photography.”

Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino. Köln: König, 2011, p. 230

“Central themes – heroism, failure, power, the body, identity, absurdity, ideology – recur throughout, not as definitive conclusions but as open-ended provocations that invite sustained contemplation. In this way, the exhibition operates as both a temporal sequence and a constellation of moments – fragmented yet interconnected – that collectively evoke the complexity, contradictions, and richness of Mikhailov’s visionary practice.”

Laurie Hurwitz curator

“The explicit, dramatic and total power of the absolute monarch had given place to what Michel Foucault has called a diffuse and pervasive ‘microphysics of power’, operating unremarked in the smallest duties and gestures of everyday life. The seat of this capillary power was a new ‘technology’: that constellation of institutions – including the hospital, the asylum, the school, the prison, the police force – whose disciplinary methods and techniques of regulated examination produced, trained and positioned a hierarchy of docile social subjects in the form required by the capitalist division of labour for the orderly conduct of social and economic life.”

John Tagg. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993

From the beginning, we conceived two video works as conceptual bookends. At the entrance, Yesterday’s Sandwich – a seminal project from the late 1960s – presents a hallucinatory sequence of double exposures set to music by Pink Floyd. These psychedelic, surreal images, rejecting Soviet visual orthodoxy, open up a new, rebellious visual language. At the exit, Temptation of Death (2019) offers a quieter, meditative counterpoint. Combining images from a crematorium in Ukraine with intimate portraits and cityscapes, it evokes the myth of Charon, ferryman of the dead, and a journey through time, loss, and transformation. Together, these two works, created nearly fifty years apart, frame the exhibition with a meditation on mortality, reinvention, and the fragile persistence of life.

Lucile Brizard. “”Where are we now?”: An Exclusive Interview with Photographer Boris Mikhailov on Ukraine’s Past and Present,” on the United 24 Media website, October 29, 2015 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026

Luriki, 1971-1985

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portrait)
1971-1985
Hand-coloured gelatin silver print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Sots Art, 1975-1986

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Sots Art
1982-1983
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

National Hero, 1992

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'National Hero' 1991

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series National Hero
1991
Chromogenic print
120 x 81cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing at left, photographs from his series Salt Lake (1986, below); at at right in the background, photographs from his series I am not I (1992, below)

Salt Lake, 1986

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Salt Lake
1986
Chromogenic print toned sepia
75.5 x 104.5cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

I Am Not I, 1992

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series I am not I
1992
Sepia silver print
30 x 20cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

A major retrospective of work by influential Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, Ukraine).

Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov, one of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe. Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.

Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering practice, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of his most important series, up to his more recent projects. Viewed today, against the backdrop of current events and ongoing war in Ukraine, Mikhailov’s work is all the more poignant and enlightening.

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

Red, 1965-1978

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Red' 1968-1975

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Red
1968-1975
Digital chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

“The word ‘red’ in Russian contains the root of the word for beauty. It also means the Revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associates red with Communism. Maybe that’s enough. But few people know that red suffused all our lives, at all levels.”

Boris Mikhailov

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Red
1968-1975
Digital chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Yesterday’s Sandwich, 1960s-1970s

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1960s-1970s
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1960s-1970s
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Yesterday’s Sandwich
1966-1968
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Ukrainian Diary is the first major UK retrospective of work by Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv). One of the most influential contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, Mikhailov has explored social and political subjects for more than fifty years through his experimental photographic work.

Described as an outsider, a trickster and ‘a kind of proto-punk’, Mikhailov combines humour, mischief and tragedy in his pioneering work, ranging from documentary photography and conceptual work, to painting and performance. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a powerful record of life in the Ukraine and the tumultuous changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.

From early underground works and images of everyday life in Kharkiv, to his self-depreciating self-portraits which mock traditional Soviet masculine stereotypes, Mikhailov creates an ambiguous, fragmented view of a world in constant flux. His photographs contradict the onesideness of Soviet ideology, especially during the time when photography was heavily controlled and censored in the Soviet Union.

Ukrainian Diary brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including Yesterday’s Sandwich, I am not I, Salt Lake, Red, Sots Art, Luriki, Case History and Theatre of War.

Self-taught and ‘somewhat careless’ (in his words), Yesterday’s Sandwich (1960s-1970s), one of his most important series, began as an accident when a handful of slides stuck together. He was fascinated by the result and continued to randomly layer slides, creating new combinations which ‘reflected the dualism and contradictions of Soviet Society’.

Mikhailov created ‘bad photography’ as a way to undermine official Soviet aesthetics, as introduced in the series Black Archive (1968-1979). Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were an artistic device that Mikhailov described as ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’.

The series Red (1965-1978) bridges documentary photography and conceptual art – over 70 images taken in the late 1960s and 1970s highlighting the colour red in everyday objects and scenes. His documenting of red reveals the extent to which communist ideology saturated daily life.

Together his uncompromising, subversive work is a powerful photographic narrative on Ukraine’s contemporary history.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

About Boris Mikhailov

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. With access to a camera, he took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene. His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series Case History, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine.

Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery

Series of Four, early 1980s

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Series of four
1982-1983
Silver gelatin print, unique copy
From a 20-part series
Each 18 x 23.80cm
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

At Dusk, 1993

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series At Dusk
1993
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Recalcitrant Diarist of the Everyday

Curator and researcher, Kateryna Filyuk, explores the intimate diaristic qualities of Boris Mikhailov’s subversive body of work.

Even before seeing Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, I found myself thinking about its title. The idea of a diary fits naturally with Mikhailov’s work: instead of creating a grand, official narrative inherent to Soviet photography, he developed an intimate and fragmented way of seeing. The term Ukrainian, however, is less straightforward. Some of his more recent bodies of work that directly address Ukrainian events: Parliament  (2015-17); and Temptation of Death  (2014-19), which adopts the Kyiv Crematorium as its binding motif, are not included in the exhibition.

Mikhailov began challenging Soviet photographic norms as early as the mid-1960s, working with a circle of like-minded friends. At the time, photographing “for no reason” could be equated with spying; showing Soviet life as anything less than ideal was seen as an attack on communist values; and photographing the naked body could result in prison. Mikhailov did all of this and more. He turned his camera toward mundane subjects, mixed genres freely and questioned photography’s claim to present an ultimate truth. By subverting idealised Soviet imagery, he proposed a raw, ironic, and unremarkable version of reality, always seeking to capture the spirit of his times through the everyday. Or, better yet, to condense that spirit for others, not through words but through a visual semantics of his own making.

Art historian Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk reflects on whether Ukrainian is an appropriate label for the Kharkiv School of Photography, of which Mikhailov is a founding figure. She writes that ”the school’s activities stretch between two heterogeneous historical realities: on the one hand, Brezhnev’s ‘stagnation’ and the perestroika fatal to the USSR, and on the other, the economically brutal birth of the Ukrainian state.” [2] This dramatic time span, during which Ukrainians experienced long-awaited yet destabilising transformation, offers a more fitting temporality for understanding Mikhailov’s work in Ukrainian Diary. Geographically, most of his projects take place in what was first Soviet Ukraine and later became independent Ukraine. Temporally, however, they exist within a landscape marked by ruptures, discontinuities, and perpetual new beginnings.

In the preface to one of his most audacious works, Case History  (1997-98), Mikhailov reflects on the lack of a photographic record documenting complex historical shifts in Ukraine: ”I was aware that I was not allowed to let it happen once again that some periods of life would be erased.” [3] After returning to Kharkiv from a year in Berlin, he was struck by the stark divide between the newly rich and the newly poor, a process already in full swing. Yet his aim in photographing the homeless did not follow the classic documentary model, such as the USA Farm Security Administration’s work, which sought to highlight a social problem and prompt state intervention. Instead, by showing the everyday lives of those most affected by the collapse, Mikhailov “directly assaults the onlookers’ sensitivity” [4] and “transgresses the acceptable limits of representation,” [5] His goal was not to provoke pity or shock though.

Rather, Mikhailov asserts something more fundamental: the individual’s right to exist and express themselves beyond convention. Through his unwavering attention to ordinary lives, he bears witness to massive transformations unfolding beyond any single person’s control. Ukrainian Diary, then, is not simply a national label or a chronological record. It is a testament to how one artist has persistently documented a world defined by instability, reinvention, and the fragile, but enduring presence, of everyday life.

Kateryna Filyuk

Kateryna Filyuk is a curator and researcher, who holds PhD from the University of Palermo. In 2017-2021 she served as a chief curator at Izolyatsia., a Platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv. Before joining Izolyatsia, she was co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). The co-founder of the publishing house 89books in Palermo, she has participated in curatorial programmes at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2017), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2015-16), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2014) and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2023 Filyuk was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and in 2024 a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg) and the Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome). Currently she develops a two-year scholarly initiative – the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.

Footnotes

1/ Boris Mikhailov, “Everyone has became more circumspect…,” in Tea Coffee Cappuccino (Köln: König, 2011), 230.
2/ Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, The Kharkiv School of Photography: Game Against Apparatus. Kharkiv: Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography, 2020, 17.
3/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 7.
4/ “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 58.
5/ Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” MOKSOP, accessed November 25, 2025

Text from The Photographers’ Gallery website

Installation view of the exhibition Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery, London showing photographs from his series Case History (1997-1998, below)

Case History, 1997-1998

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Case History
1997-1998
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938) from the series 'Case History' 1997-1998

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series Case History
1997-1998
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Urban opera of Boris Mikhailov

Olena Chervonik

In the [Case History] book preface, Mikhailov explains that already in 1997 he vividly apprehended the rupture of Ukrainian society into new, burgeoning social strata, when the new rich and the new poor began to acquire features of class identities with their own psychology and behavioural modalities. The new rich were already hard to approach, protecting themselves with bodyguards and other social fences. The new poor, however, specifically the bomzhes (homeless people with no social support) could still allow an outsider in their midst – this was “a chance”, according to Mikhailov, that could only last for a short period of time. Most of the book’s protagonists had only recently lost their homes. Their rapidly deteriorating social position was still uncertain, malleable, and flickering with hope. Yet, the transformation was inevitable, which propelled the artist to act: “For me it was very important that I took their photos when they were still like “normal” people. I made a book about the people who got into trouble but didn’t manage to harden so far.” [2] …

Mikhailov’s visual pairings deliver unambiguous messages, almost violent in their straightforwardness. Multiple juxtapositions of unconsciously drunk men prostrating under passers-by feet to that of stray dogs, dead or alive, explicitly comment on human’s life disintegration to the state of an animal, its reduction to bare bones – and yes, an animal carcass, a metaphoric sign of abject poverty, is also present in this visual narrative in a scene with two men dragging a piece of spinal vertebrae of a large creature, a cow or, perhaps, a horse. Rotten banana peels sit across the page from infected flaccid limbs and genitalia. A posture of a naked woman reclining on a sullied mattress echoes that of a rubber sex doll staring from the next page. A close-up of a bruised woman’s breast with a crude stitches over a wound parallels gaping cracks of a damaged mail box. Thus the physical body of a homeless person starts speaking about the city as an organism, equally abused and dismembered. Wounds inflected upon flesh are surface manifestations of wounds inflected upon the city and the society at large. …

The majority of Mikhailov’s photographs provide no emotional crutches to lean on, no mechanism of ennobling or aestheticising infected abused flesh of the homeless. It is presented “as is”: frontal, looming large with all its detailed naturalistic vividness. If there is a visual code that Mikhailov activates in these images, it comes from a clinical rather than an art discourse, from surveilling patents for medical records. It is a discourse that John Tagg described as a nineteenth century record-keeping practice associated with certain disciplinary institutions such as an asylum or a prison that with the help of photography created a new social body of dependent subjects upon whom power could be exercised due to their newly-minted subaltern position.

Art, following Barthes’ dictum, domesticates and tames photography [21]. It generates the level of “studium”, accepted cultural knowledge that veils the trauma, renders it familiar, therefore trivial, therefore easily dismissed. Mikhailov makes his viewers constantly oscillate between images that give themselves for contemplation and images that confront with their clinical nature that can be scrutinised and observed but certainly not contemplated. Not one or the other type of image, but the switch between the two unsettles the viewing process. Mikhailov orchestrates poses and gestures of his subjects to create this visual roller-coster of plunging in and out of the aesthetic.

2/ Boris Mikhailov, Case History (Zurich: Scalo, 1985)
21/ Matthias Christen, “Symbolic Bodies, Real Pain: Post-Soviet History, Boris Mikhailov and the Impasse of Documentary Photography,” in The Image and the Witness. Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 52-66

Extract from Olena Chervonik, “Urban Opera of Boris Mikhailov,” on the MOKSOP website, 9th April 2020 [Online] Cited 27/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Dance, 1978

Boris Mikhaïlov (Ukrainian, b. 1938)
From the series Dance
1978
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out, 2013

Boris Mikhaïlov (Russian, b. 1938)
From the series The Theater of War, Second Act, Time Out
2013
Chromogenic print
© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Collection Akademie der Künste, Berlin

The Photographers’ Gallery
16-18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW

Opening hours:
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Saturday: 10.00 – 18.00
Sunday: 11.00 – 18.00

The best of Art Blart in 2025

December 2025

Around the world, 2025 hasn’t been a great year for photography exhibitions. As a friend of mine said on Facebook it has been a dreary year and I would tend to agree with him.

Curatorially, everything was pretty cut and dried, relying on the usual one artist show or group exhibition on a theme with nobody prepared to take a risk on anything creative, inventive even.

I found little to inspire me in terms of idiosyncratic but illuminating pairings of photographers or unusual insights into the conditions and conceptualisation of photographic production and presentation – other than a few of the exhibitions noted below: costume, gesture and expression – yes! the development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous American artists – yes! and the life in self-portraits of a photobooth operator in Melbourne, part magician, part artist – YES!

Out of the 60 postings on Art Blart in 2025 I’ve picked what I think are the 11 best exhibitions, plus a couple of honourable mentions.

I hope you enjoy the selection and a Happy New Year to you all!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Past present,” on the exhibition Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, August 2024 – January 2025

Victor Plumier (Belgian, 1820-1878)
Lady in Costume
About 1850
Daguerreotype, half plate
5 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Gift of the Hall Family Foundation

“The emotions and the sentiments, the gestures and the expressions.
The actor and the stage, the photographer and the sitter.
The staged photograph and the tableaux vivant.
The Self and the Other.” ~ MB

2/ A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, October 2024 – January 2025

Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902)
Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia
1863
Albumen silver print
High Museum of Art
Purchased with funds Lucinda Weill Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keogh Family

“Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events – remembrances of events – brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives. Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for (still) living people.” ~ MB

3/ Marcus Bunyan. “Out in the midday sun,” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
Mayor of Todmorden’s inaugural banquet, Todmorden, West Yorkshire, England, 1977
1977
Gelatin silver print
© Martin Parr | Magnum Photos

“I am always fascinated with the early work of an artist. In essence, the photographs tell you what are the primary concerns for the artist and these themes usually remain with them for the rest of their career. These early black and white photographs provide a window into that ongoing investigation, that golden path. They are more subtle in their modulation of British life than in the later colour work – it’s as though the artist had to change gears with the use of colour developing a more ironic way of seeing British life through a different spatial relationship to his subjects – but in these photographs there is still that deprecating humour that is often missing in the work of his contemporaries…” ~ MB

4/ Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam, January – April, 2025

Saul Leiter (American, 1923-2013)
Pull
c. 1960
Chromogenic print
© Saul Leiter Foundation

“There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” ~ Saul Leiter

5/ True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna, January – April, 2025

Léon Vidal (French, 1833-1906)
Oriental Onyx Sardonyx Cup (16th century)
1876
Photomechanical proof (photochromy using the Léon Vidal process) mounted on cardboard
H. 20.8 ; L. 26.2 cm.
Don Fondation Kodak-Pathé, 1983

“What a wonderful exhibition. It’s so exciting to see the history and development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous, American artists William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, much as I like both artists.” ~ MB

6/ The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March – May 2025

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda
1977
Gelatin silver print
15.9 x 23.7cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024

“Prahran College itself played a critical role in the legitimisation of photography as an art form within Australia. It spearheaded the integration of art photography into tertiary education curricula, fostering an environment where young artists … could experiment formally and conceptually.”

James McArdle. “Epoch,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 25th April, 2025 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025

7/ Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, March – June 2025

Peter Mitchell (British, b. 1943)
Opticians, London, 1975
1975
C-print
© Peter Mitchell

“The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.” ~ MB

8/ Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August 2025

Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

“Through the strip self-portraits Adler took while servicing and then testing the photobooths that he operated in Melbourne, Australia we become immersed in an archive of his world, the exhibition becoming a joyous ode to a man who devoted his life to photography (not in the traditional sense): in turns humorous and historical, a travelogue, his travelogue, through time and space.’ ~ MB

9/ Street Photography. Lee Friedlander, Joseph Rodríguez, Garry Winogrand at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, May – October 2025

Joseph Rodriguez (American, b. 1952) '220 West Houston Street, NY' 1984

Joseph Rodríguez (American, b. 1952)
220 West Houston Street, New York
1984
Gelatin silver paper, print after 1988
25.3 x 37.2cm
© Joseph Rodríguez, Courtesy Galerie Bene Taschen
Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv

“Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval…

Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.” ~ MB

10/ Marcus Bunyan. “Myths of the American West,” on the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West’ 1979-1984 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025

Richard Avedon (American, 1923-2004)
Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, August 23, 1980
1980
Gelatin silver print
© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”” ~ MB

11/ Bernd & Hilla Becher – History of a Method at Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, September 2025 – February 2026

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015)
Wassertürme, USA (Water towers, USA)
1974-1983
Gelatin silver prints
© Estate Bernd & Hilla Becher, vertreten durch Max Becher
Courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur – Bernd und Hilla Becher Archiv, Köln, 2025

“The Bechers’ typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.” ~ MB

Honourable mentions

Typologien: Photography in 20th-century Germany at Fondazione Prada, Milan, April – July, 2025

Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010)
Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969 [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969]
1969
Gelatin silver print, printed 2007
Kicken Berlin
© Heinrich Riebesehl, by SIAE 2025

Objective / subjective
Pattern / randomness
Isolation / extinction
Morphology / mutation
Specific / anonymous
Repetition / difference
Same / other
Structure / creativity
Orientation / disorientation
Universal / individual
Reality / imagination
Documentation / disruption
Omnipresent / unique
Exact / imprecise
Composed / emotional
Staged / snapshot
Concept / feeling
Formal / intuitive
Ritual / subversion
Collaboration / resistance

Et cetera, et cetera…

Inherent in one is the other.

Every photo within a Becher grid contains its own difference. ~ MB

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, April – September, 2025

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Welcome Home
1978-1984
From the series Family Pictures and Stories 1978-1984
© Carrie Mae Weems and reproduced courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin

“Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.

What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.” ~ MB

National Gallery of Art website

Exhibition: ‘Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985’ at the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Exhibition dates: 21st September, 2025 – 11th January, 2026

Curators: The exhibition is co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University.

Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025) 'The Game' 1947 from the exhibition Exhibition: 'Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Sept 2025 - Jan 2026

Thomas Ellis (American, 1963-2025)
The Game
1947
Gelatin silver print
21 x 31.8cm (8 1/4 x 12 1/2 in.)
Courtesy of the Darrel Ellis Estate, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York
Photo: Adam Reich

Thomas Sayers Ellis (October 5, 1963 – July 17, 2025) was an American poet, photographer, musician, bandleader and teacher.

“There’s nothing like a photograph for reminding you about difference. There it is. It stares you ineradicably in the face”

~ Professor Stuart Hall, 2008

This looks to be a “worthy” exhibition on photography and the Black Arts movement but without having seen it in person there is little specific comment I can make about the exhibition. However, some thoughts on the photographs in this posting are possible.

It is a joy for me to be able to learn more about an important area in photographic history, vis a vis “the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture.” (Text from the NGA website)

There are many photographers in the posting who I have never heard of before, whose work I have never seen, and I always like learning, for in learning you may gain some small amount of wisdom and appreciation of different cultures and points of view. I have added biographical information for each artist to their images where possible.

The photographs from the period 1955-1985 mark a shift away from an aesthetic and formalist way of looking at the image where the role of the photographer and the reception of the print was in its primacy (the 1950s-1960s) “towards a more polemical, critical and cultural analysis by Tagg, Sekul, Solomon-Godeau and others in the 1980s and 90s. These shifts from the pictorial to the political … decentre the photographer and bring into focus the photographed and viewing subjects…”1

In these photographs it is not so much the primacy of the artist, the aesthetics of the image, nor the photographs status as art objects, but the people within the images that are the focus of attention. They bring to the forefront of the viewer’s consciousness (or should do) the racial politics at work within photography in the context of discussions around race and representation and the ongoing legacies of Western imperialism.

The photographs demonstrate “that if we do not recognise the historical and political conjunctures of racial politics at work within photography, and their effects on those that have been culturally erased, made invisible or less than human by such images, then we remain hemmed within established orthodoxies of colonial thought concerning the racialised body, the subaltern and the politics of human recognition.”2

They bring to light (aha!) “new ways of seeing that bring the Other into focus”, photographs that challenge us to acknowledge the structural racism that is embedded in daily life which produces adverse outcome for people of color. Through such an acknowledgement we may open up a personally and culturally transformative dialogic space, “a “space of possibilities” where participants listen, engage with, and even transcend their own viewpoints to see issues from multiple angles” – as there can never be a single view point when we “examine” social groups that are subaltern (groups that have been marginalised or oppressed).

From a distance this seems to be one of the problems of the exhibition. It’s all so worthy and righteous, full of the injustice of it all, and perhaps that’s as it should be for those were the times and the culture from which these photographs emerged. But I can’t help but get the feeling that this exhibition seems to feel and read more like a study in cultural anthropology, more a sociological statement than any celebration of Black history and culture from the period. Speaking from the standpoint of a white, middle class artist and writer, there seems to be little joy to be had here – to me one of the essential elements of Black culture, the joy of gospel, jazz, laughter, love – but I’m supposedly on the inside looking out (or is it the outside looking in!). Who am I to say.

What is undeniable is that, as Professor Stuart Hall so succinctly observes, there is nothing like a photograph to remind you of difference, to challenge your perceptions on how you view and interact with the world around you, to open up new ways of seeing. As such, the photographs in this exhibition may allow us deeper insight into the “conditions of our own becoming” (while human beings have agency, the circumstances under which they act and develop their humanity are largely shaped by existing material, social, and historical conditions that they did not choose) of the people that live around us, even as we acknowledge that there is no singular point of view, that cultural forms have no single determinate meaning, and that no one, and “no discipline, whether art- or photo-history, or ethnography or geography, speaks with a single voice.”1

Not one way of seeing, but multiple ways of seeing our fellow human beings.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Catherine De Lorenzo. “Oceanian imaginings in French photographic archives,” in History of Photography, Issue 2, Volume 28, 2004, pp. 137-184

2/ Text from the description of the book by Mark Sealy. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019.

The book examines how Western photographic practice has been used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent visual regimes, and demands that we recognise and disrupt the ingrained racist ideologies that have tainted photography since its inception in 1839.

Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art, Washington for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement. It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”

Co-curator Philip Brookman

Cultural forms set the wider terms of limitation and possibility for the (re)presentation of particularities and we have to understand how the latter are caught in the former in order to understand why such-and-such gets (re)presented in the way it does. Without understanding the way images function in terms of, say, narrative, genre or spectacle, we don’t really understand why they turn out the way they do.

Secondly, cultural forms do not have single determinate meanings – people make sense of them in different ways, according to the cultural (including sub-cultural) codes available to them. For instance, people do not necessarily read negative images of themselves as negative …

Richard Dyer. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. London: Routledge, 1993, pp.2-3

Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)
Coltrane at the Gate
1961
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund

Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936)

Adger Cowans is a pioneering photographer and one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective that played a key role in shaping Black photography in the 1960s and beyond.

In 1958 Cowans worked as an assistant to renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Throughout the 1960s Cowans became involved with influential groups associated with the Black Arts Movement, including Group 35 and Afri-COBRA, which he joined in 1968.

His photographic work spans a wide range of approaches and subjects, from street photography in Harlem to documenting major historical events like the rallies and the funeral of Malcolm X. He also captured iconic jazz musicians, including John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Blinded Birmingham Church Bombing survivor, Sarah Jean Collins, Birmingham, AL, 1963
“Clutching robe in hospital bed, Sarah Jean Collins was near bomb when it exploded in church. Her sister was killed. It will be weeks before she knows whether she can see again.”
September 27, 1963
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 35 x 50 cm (13 3/4 x 19 11/16 in.)
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock

Frank Dandridge is a freelance photojournalist who worked mainly for Life Magazine in the 60’s. He covered numerous assignments, including, The Harlem Riots in 1964, Dr. King’s March on Washington, in 1963, and the terrible Birmingham Bombing in 1963. His photos also appeared in Look, Saturday Evening Post, Pageant, Paris Match, Good Housekeeping, Quick Magazine, the Canadian Film Board, Playboy, and many other national magazines. He won an Art Director’s Award for his photo essay, “The Two Faces of Harlem”, that appeared in Look magazine. His work included photographing many celebrities, including, Bobby Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, President Johnson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Frank Sinatra, The Supremes, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Jimmy Hoffa.

Text from the IMBd website

The photos that Frank Dandridge shot for LIFE magazine paint a vivid portrait of violence and race in 1960s America. He reported on riots in Harlem, in Watts, and in Newark,. He was in Selma, Alabama when Martin Luther King marched in the days immediately after Bloody Sunday. Dandridge’s most famous photo is of Sarah Collins, a 12-year-old girl whose eyes were in bandages after the bombing of a Sunday school class at the16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. That bombing killed four girls, including Collins’ sister, while wounding many others and leaving Collins blind in one eye. The image of Collins in her hospital bed made vivid for America the cruelty of this horrific bombing by four men who were members of a splinter group of the Klu Klux Klan.

Bill Syken. “Race in the 1960s: The Photography of Frank Dandridge,” on the LIFE website Nd [Online] Cited 26/11/2025

Frank Dandridge (American, b. 1938)
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders watched President Lyndon B. Johnson speak on television
1965
Gelatin silver print
© Frank Dandridge
Photo: Frank Dandridge / The LIFE Picture Collection / Shutterstock

Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research

Racism

Racism, when it is embedded in the structures, policies and practices of our social and political institutions can be termed “institutional”. Institutional racism, which will be described by the authors more fully below, is reflected in professional practice and working methods that result in racialized disparities. Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and political philosopher, stands out as one of the earliest academics to explore the nature of racism from a psychosocial perspective. Fanon (1967) talked of “vulgar racism in its biological form”, which was evident for several hundreds of years, being replaced in the mid-20th century by “more subtle forms” (p. 35). In a study of Fanon’s clinical psychology and social theories, McCulloch (1983) refers to this new racism as “cultural racism” – describing this as “a more sophisticated form [of racism] in which the object is no longer the physiology of the individual but the cultural style of a people” (p. 120). Cultural racism believes that the dominant group’s culture is superior to the seemingly “lower” minority groups.

Cultural racism champions the supremacy of cultures. Commonly, some version of European culture or, more specifically, white European culture, rather than the white “race” (Amin, 1989), thereby producing a situation of racism without “races” (Balibar, 1991). It was the American civil leaders Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (Carmichael & Hamilton, 1967), who first described institutional racism:

It takes two, closely related forms … we call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals … the second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing acts … and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type. (p. 2)

Institutional racism forms an array of broader structural racism processes “that exclude … substantial numbers of members of particular groups from significant participation in major social institutions” (Henry & Tator, 2005, p. 352). According to minority mental health models like the racism-induced reactive negative emotionality cycle (Lazaridou & Heinz, 2021), structural racism and institutional racism result in experiences of rejection and emotional alienation in public spaces for Black people and People of Color (Lentin, 2015).

Structural racism in employment, earnings and credit may mutually limit equal access to quality, affordable accommodation. However, when public spaces are sites of surveillance, intimidation and frequent hostility by the police or by ordinary citizens, then the structure of social situations, such as even leaving one’s house and speaking in public, are filled with stress, anxiety, and fear (Chou et al., 2012; Sibrava et al., 2013). There is pervasive evidence that structural racism has destructive impacts on the health and wellbeing of patients from minority groups, including migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers (Alvarez et al., 2016; Bailey et al., 2017; Graham et al., 2016; Noh & Kaspar, 2003).

Felicia Lazaridou and Suman Fernando. “Deconstructing institutional racism and the social construction of whiteness: A strategy for professional competence training in culture and migration mental health,” in Transcult Psychiatry, 2022 Apr 4; 59(2), pp. 175-187.

Installation view of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, September 2025 – January 2026

James Barnor (Ghanian, b. 1929) 'Drum Cover Girl Erlin Ibreck, London' 1966, printed 2010

James Barnor (Ghanaian, b. 1929)
Drum cover girl Erlin Ibreck, Kilburn, London
1966, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
29 × 29cm (11 7/16 × 11 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© James Barnor / Courtesy Galerie Clementine de la Feronnière

In the tradition of Black African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta and Sanlé Sory, Barnor’s photographs present people of all ages and all walks of life – whether in Accra, Ghana or in the suburbs of London, England – through direct and honest studio portraits or in more candid documents of the communities that surrounded him. …

Barnor’s photographs plant the seed of equality and happiness as a way of transmitting this knowledge to others. “He is a living archive, a link between the birth of photography in West Africa and the development of the discipline for the modern era.”2 It is his passion and feeling for the practice of photography, the stories that it tells and his engagement with the spirit of the people that he encounters – as a conversation between equals – that intuitively ground his work in the history of photography and the history of Black culture and makes them forever young.

Marcus Bunyan. “It’s late, but it’s better late than never,” on the Art Blart website October 17, 2021 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025

Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Above this Earth, Games, Games
1968
Collage and acrylic on canvas
Overall: 114.3 x 114.3 cm (45 x 45 in.)
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago
Photo: P.D. Young / Spektra Imaging

During the tumultuous 1960s and 70s, the prolific artist Ralph Arnold (1928-2006) made photocollages that appropriated and commented upon mass media portrayals of gender, sexuality, race and politics. Arnold’s complex visual arrangements of photography, painting and text were built upon his own multilayered identity as a black, gay veteran and prominent member of Chicago’s art community…

Text from the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago

Ralph Arnold (American, 1928-2006)
Soul Box
1969
Assemblage with found objects and collage on Masonite
Framed: 71.1 x 56.8 x 14.9cm (28 x 22 3/8 x 5 7/8 in.)
Private collection of Courtney A. Moore
Photo: Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago

The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.

Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and ﬁlmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.

Photography was central to the movement, attracting all kinds of artists – from street photographers and photojournalists to painters and graphic designers. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. Explore the bold vision shaped by generations of artists including Billy Abernathy, Romare Bearden, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barkley Hendricks, Barbara McCullough, Betye Saar, and Ming Smith.

Text from the NGA website

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985 investigates the role of African American photographers and artists working with photographs in developing and fostering a distinctly Black perspective on art and culture. The Black Arts Movement was a uniquely American creative initiative, closely linked to the civil rights movement and comparable to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s in its impact. Through new institutions and publications, Black writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists explored ways their art could further the American civil rights movement and communicate messages of Black history and identity. Photography and the Black Arts Movement reveals how studio and street photographers, photojournalists, painters, conceptual artists, graphic designers, and community activists used photography to cut across traditional racial boundaries, express messages of empowerment, and advance social justice.

Bringing together some 150 works by more than 100 artists, Photography and the Black Arts Movement also includes objects from Africa, the Caribbean region, and Great Britain, representing artistic dialogues created through travel, migrations, and international engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the movement. Among the artists included are Billy Abernathy, Anthony Barboza, Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Ernest Cole, Adger Cowans, Roy DeCarava, Emory Douglas, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Samuel Fosso, Charles Gaines, Barkley Hendricks, Danny Lyon, Barbara McCullough, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Juan Sánchez, Coreen Simpson, Betye Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Ming Smith, Frank Stewart, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Text from the NGA website

Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
During the summer of 1960, the elders of Orangeburg took to the streets as part of ongoing demonstrations and boycotts in support of civil rights. They are standing outside a segregated supermarket where they were allowed to shop but not sit down for lunch
1960, printed 2024
Inkjet print
37.3 x 55.9cm (14 11/16 x 22 in.)

Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)

Cecil J. Williams (born November 26, 1937) is an American photographer, publisher, author and inventor who is best known for his photographs documenting the civil rights movement in South Carolina.

He began his career at an early age, photographing wedding and family parties. He studied art at Claflin University, while also being a photographer for the university. …

At the age of 14, Williams was one of 25 photographers around the world freelancing for JET magazine. JET caught wind of the movement growing in Orangeburg. They needed an onsite correspondent for constant updates, and someone to document the events. The only time Williams’ work appeared on the cover of JET was his picture of Coretta Scott King speaking at the protest during the 1969 Charleston hospital workers’ strike.

Williams has photographed significant desegregation efforts in South Carolina since the 1950s. Some of his most notable pictures are of the activity during the Briggs v. Elliott case in Summerton. It was the first of five desegregation cases pushing to integrate public schools in the United States. The five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case that declared that having “separate but equal” public schools for whites and blacks was unconstitutional.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Cecil J. Williams (American, b. 1937)
Clara White Mission, Jacksonville, Florida
1960s, printed 2024
Inkjet print
45.7 x 45.7cm (18 x 18 in.)

Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)
Placards of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner at a Demonstration on the boardwalk during the Democratic National Convention, Atlantic City, New Jersey
1964
Gelatin silver print
33.97 × 22.86cm (13 3/8 × 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Anonymous gift

Bob Fletcher (American, b. 1938)

Robert E. “Bob” Fletcher is a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and educator. Born in 1938 in Detroit, Michigan, Fletcher majored in History and English at Fisk University and Wayne State University. In 1963, Fletcher became active in the civil rights movement, taking photographs for and administering the National Student Association’s Detroit Tutorial Program. After moving to New York City, he worked at the Harlem Education Project and set up a photographic workshop.

In the summer of 1964, Fletcher became a Freedom School teacher in Mississippi and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staff as a photographer; he documented the Civil Rights Movement throughout the South, between 1964 and 1968. After returning to New York in 1969, Fletcher set up a photography workshop at the Henry Street Settlement, and taught photography at Antioch College and Brooklyn College Film Studio.

Text from the New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago
1963
Gelatin silver print
14.6 × 15.9cm (5 3/4 × 6 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)

Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)
Dr. Martin Luther King
January 1, 1965
Gelatin silver print
35.1 × 27.3cm (13 13/16 × 10 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Robert A. Sengstacke (American, 1943-2017)

Robert A. “Bobby” Sengstacke spent more than a half century photographing Chicago’s cultural and political landscape, most notably for the weekly newspaper the Chicago Defender, for which he also worked as an editor. The Defender was founded by Robert’s great-uncle Robert Sengstacke Abbott in 1905, and Robert’s father, John Sengstacke, ran the paper for nearly 60 years. In the mid-1950s, after attending Florida’s Bethune Cookman College, Bobby Sengstacke returned to Chicago and honed his skills with fellow photographers Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Le Mont Mac Lemore, and Bob Black. In the years that followed, he became a member of a tight-knit network of South Side photojournalists who created intimate documents of Chicago’s Black community, from Civil Rights rallies led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the city’s lively entertainment scene.

Sengstacke was also a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.

Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website

Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Member of Southern Media Photographing a Young Girl, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus

Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)

The photography of the US civil rights activist and academic Doris Derby … began through documenting the struggles of black people in the segregated south. However, rather than recording the dramatic events and protests of the nine years from her arrival in Mississippi from New York in 1963, Doris chose to capture the everyday human effort required to live through them.

She went into rural communities to witness the work of children in the fields and women living in wooden shacks trying to care for families. “They were looking to find some help, some way to get out of their horrible poverty and despair,” she said. …

Influenced both by the German expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz, who was concerned with the effects of poverty, hunger and war on the working class, and the photographer Roy DeCarava, who captured the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, she also took pictures of children in urban settings, of old and young people attending election events, and those working for the movement, among them the author Alice Walker.

Hannah Collins. “Doris Derby obituary,” on The Guardian website Wed 13 Apr 2022 [Online] Cited 26/11/2025

Darryl Cowherd (American, b. 1940)
Stokely Carmichael, Unknown Chicago Church
c. 1968
Gelatin silver print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

A key figure in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement, Darryl Cowherd has enjoyed an extensive career ranging from photojournalism to broadcast television. At the age of 20, frustrated with work and school, Cowherd followed the advice of his mentor, Chicago-based photographer Robert Earl Wilson, who encouraged him to travel and photograph abroad. Cowherd had initially studied to become a doctor and then worked for the postal service, but neither role proved a lasting fit. After nearly four years in Europe, during which Cowherd honed his photography skills, he returned to Chicago in 1964 and began taking freelance photography assignments while working at a film processing lab. His return to Chicago coincided with the emergence of the Chicago Freedom Movement (1965-67) and the Black Arts Movement (most active in the years 1965-76). An active participant in both movements, Cowherd frequently photographed the activities surrounding them as they grew and gained momentum.

Cowherd was a founding member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a collective that brought together Black artists, writers, intellectuals, and activists on Chicago’s South Side.

Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website

Hiram Maristany (American, 1945-2022)
Juan González, Minister of Information, in the doorway of the first office of the Young Lords
1969, printed 2021
Gelatin silver print
33 x 46cm (13 x 18 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Hiram Maristany

Hiram Sebastian Maristany was a Nuyorican American photographer, and director of El Museo del Barrio (a museum in NYC which specialises in Latin American and Caribbean art, with an emphasis on works from Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican community in New York City) from 1975 to 1977. He was known for his association with, and documentation of, the Young Lords chapter in Harlem, which he co-founded in 1969.

Juan González was a co-founder of the Young Lords, a radical Puerto Rican rights organisation in New York City, where he helped lead the group in protests for social justice. The Young Lords fought for better healthcare, education, and city services, and against police abuse and Puerto Rico’s colonial status. Following his work with the Young Lords, González became a celebrated journalist, co-hosting Democracy Now! and writing for the New York Daily News.

Texts from the Wikipedia website

What Is the Black Arts Movement? Seven Things to Know

Poet Larry Neal, who coined the term Black Arts Movement, described it as “a cultural revolution in art and ideas.” This movement included poets, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, and painters. They came together to make art that advanced civil rights and celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.

This cultural revolution shook up the art world in the 1950s and ’60s. It embodied the struggle for self-determination championed by global freedom movements. New collectives, workshops, and collaborations emerged. Creatives made art that promoted Black dignity, hope, and freedom. They asked, how could art inspire social and political change? And what would it look like?

Photography was a driving force from the beginning, playing a critical role as both a communications tool and art form. Learn more about the movement and photography’s part in it – major themes in our exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985.

1/ Its origins are in the civil rights movement

Our exhibition begins in 1955, more than a decade before Larry Neal named the Black Arts Movement. That year, several events – and photographs of those events – helped catalyse the civil rights movement.

In September, Jet magazine was one of several publications that printed open-casket photographs of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi. Those disturbing images were seen across the country, including by a woman in Montgomery, Alabama: Rosa Parks. That December, Parks sat in the front, “white only” section of a segregated bus. The driver demanded that she give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused. As she later recounted, Emmett Till was on her mind in that moment.

Parks, in turn, was photographed sitting at the front of the segregated bus. Those images, and others like them, brought widespread awareness to the struggles for equal rights. Organisations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) encouraged photography of their marches, demonstrations, and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. SNCC even taught some members to use a camera. Lifelong activist Maria Varela became a SNCC photographer after recognising the need for more images of Black life to support the movement.

2/ Poets, writers, and playwrights led the movement

The beginning of the Black Arts Movement is often pinned to poet, playwright, and writer Amiri Baraka founding the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood in 1965. Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were among the many writers and poets active in the movement. Some collaborated with visual artists, even forming collectives such as the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) in Chicago.

OBAC writers, scholars, painters, and photographers collaborated to create the Wall of Respect community mural in 1967. It commemorated key figures in African American history, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Muhammad Ali, and Nina Simone. The mural was like a two-story collage that covered the facade of a building in the city’s South Side neighbourhood. It incorporated paintings by several artists alongside mounted photographs by Roy Lewis and Darryl Cowherd. At the centre was Amiri Baraka’s poem “SOS,” which opens, “Calling all black people.” The mural was demolished in 1972, but photographs by Roy Lewis and Robert Sengstacke continue to spread its message.

3/ It was inspired by jazz

Music was an equally important part of the Black Arts Movement. Musicians John Coltrane and Sun Ra both performed at a fundraiser for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. Their experimental and expressive jazz inspired Black Arts Movement writers and artists.

In Coltrane at the Gate, photographer Adger Cowans depicted the saxophonist’s energy. Ming Smith captured the magic of a Sun Ra performance. For his homage to saxophonist Charlie Parker (who was commonly known as “Bird”), painter Raymond Saunders embraced the spontaneous spirit of jazz. Saunders collaged a newsprint photograph below the word “bird” written in a chalk-like white script.

4/ It celebrated Black beauty

The Black Arts Movement celebrated the “beauty and goodness of being Black,” as Larry Neal put it. Photographer Kwame Brathwaite helped popularise the phrase “Black is beautiful.” Brathwaite was a pioneer of uplifting Black identity. He helped found groups that challenged conventional standards of beauty and celebrated African heritage. They organised fashion shows, created “Black is beautiful” products, and operated a photography studio.

In Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace), Brathwaite adorned the model with a necklace made from film developing reels to “expose” her beauty. More than a decade later, Carla Williams created a self-portrait that echoed Brathwaite’s work. Showing herself in curlers, Williams challenged popular notions of beauty.

5/ It brought artists together

Small collectives of visual artists and photographers came together around the principles of the Black Arts Movement. In New York, the Kamoinge Workshop photography collective met regularly to critique each other’s work, debate photography’s purpose and aesthetics, and share tips. They created a space for their art by developing their own portfolios and exhibitions. The workshop also produced the groundbreaking Black Photographers Annual between 1973 and 1980.

A group of Chicago artists formed AfriCOBRA. The collective’s founders defined their own aesthetic principles, aimed at creating “images that jar the senses and cause movement” and “images designed for mass production.”

6/ It spread across the Atlantic

The Black Arts Movement made an impact beyond the United States. In Great Britain, Raphael Albert organised and photographed Black beauty pageants in London. James Barnor focused on style, migration, and Black city life in London and in Accra, Ghana. Horace Ové photographed the British Black Power Movement. He also captured scenes of the West African and West Indian communities in London, like his Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival.

Samuel Fosso opened his first photography studio in Bangui, Central African Republic, at age 13. After finishing with clients, Fosso would use his studio to experiment with self-portraits. He wore an array of costumes and adopted personas, often taking inspiration from the pictures of Black Americans he saw in magazines shared by American Peace Corps volunteers.

7/ It influenced generations of artists

By the end of the 1970s, the literary arm of the Black Arts Movement had waned, but a new generation of artists and photographers carried on its spirit. Coming out of art school, photographers such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson explored more personal, metaphorical, and conceptual ideas.

In her Family Pictures and Stories series, Weems made her own family the subjects. The intimate photographs presented a counterargument to claims that many Black Americans faced poverty and struggle as a result of weak family structures. Weems paired the photographs with brief stories about each family member.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Herbert Randall (American, born 1936) 'Untitled (Bed-Stuy, New York)' 1960s

Herbert Randall (American, b. 1936)
Untitled (Bed-Stuy, New York)
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 15.6cm (9 x 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.89.1
© Herbert Randall

Herbert Randall (American, b. 1936)

Herbert Eugene Randall, Jr. is an American photographer who had documented the effects of the Civil Rights Movement. Randall is of Shinnecock, African-American and West Indian ancestry.

Randall studied photography under Harold Feinstein in 1957. From 1958 to 1966, he worked as a freelance photographer for various media organizations. His photographs were used by the Associated Press, United Press International, Black Star, various television stations, and other American and foreign publications. Randall was also a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of African-American photographers, in New York City in 1963.

In 1964, Sanford R. Leigh, the Director of Mississippi Freedom Summer’s Hattiesburg project, persuaded Randall to photograph the effects of the Civil Rights Movement in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Randall had a Whitney Fellowship for that year, and had been looking for a project. He spent the entire summer photographing solely in Hattiesburg, among the African-American community and among the volunteers in area projects such as the Freedom Schools, Voter Registration, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party campaign.

Only five of Randall’s photographs were published in the summer of 1964. One seen worldwide was the bloodied, concussed Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, head of a prominent Cleveland congregation and former conscientious objector to World War II. However, most of his photographs sat in a file at the Shinnecock Reservation, on Long Island, New York.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)
Mother’s Day from the series “Born Hip”
1962
gelatin silver print
17.5 x 13.3cm (6 7/8 x 5 1/4 in.)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council
Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY

Billy Abernathy (Fundi) (American, 1939-2016)

Photographer Billy (Fundi) Abernathy was known for creating images that defined Black confidence, elegance, and style. This work extended to his collaborations with his wife, Sylvia (Laini) Abernathy, with whom he designed album covers for Delmark Records in the 1960s. Around that time, the poet and author Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) encountered Abernathy’s photographs of Chicago and proposed a book project that would combine his poetry with Abernathy’s images. The resulting collaboration, In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style), was designed by Laini and published in 1970. In 1971 the New York Times hailed the book as “an example of the new direction that black art is taking.”

Text from The Art Institute of Chicago website

Charles “Teenie” Harris (American, 1908-1998)
A television playing coverage of James Baldwin at the March for Freedom and Jobs in Washington, DC
1963/2025
Gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Art, Washington

African American artist Charles “Teenie” Harris, captured “the essence of daily African-American life in the 20th century. For more than 40 years, Harris – as lead photographer of the influential Pittsburgh Courier newspaper – took almost 80,000 pictures of people from all walks: presidents, housewives, sports stars, babies, civil rights leaders and even cross-dressing drag queens.”

See the Art Blart posting on the exhibition Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 2011 – April 2012

Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Playground) from the “Playground Series”
c. 1965
Gelatin silver print
25.7 x 19.1cm (10 1/8 x 7 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee

Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)

In 1953, he enrolled at the historically Black college in Petersburg, which was not far from his hometown of Richmond. He began working as a reporter for the school paper, and during that time Draper’s father, who was an amateur photographer himself, sent Louis his first camera. By 1956, Draper’s title at the paper had changed to cameraman. After his revelatory first experience with The Family of Man, a catalogue that accompanied the 1955 photography exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, he decided to leave school during his final semester and move to New York City to become a photographer. Once there, Draper enrolled in a photography workshop led by Harold Feinstein, and was mentored by W. Eugene Smith, one of the most prominent American photojournalists.

In 1963, the same year as the March on Washington, Draper became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a New York-based collective of Black photographers. Workshop members met regularly to discuss one another’s work, produced group portfolios, exhibitions, and publications, and mentored young people all over the city. Draper emerged as one of the group’s teachers, which began his long career as an educator (he worked in numerous teaching roles, including at Pratt Institute and Mercer County Community College). The collective aimed to “create the kind of images of our communities that spoke of the truth we’d witnessed and that countered the untruths we’d all seen in mainline publications.” Kamoinge members wanted to avoid the racial stereotypes prevalent in the media and the violence that was typical of journalistic coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, working instead to represent their communities in a positive light.

Jane Pierce, Carl Jacobs Foundation Research Assistant, Department of Photography, “Louis Draper,” on the MoMA website 2021 [Online] Cited 27/11/2025

Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Untitled (Santos) from the “Playground Series”
1967
Gelatin silver print
32.9 x 22.8cm (12 15/16 x 9 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee

Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)
I Am A Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee
March 28, 1968
Gelatin silver print
19 × 32.6cm (7 1/2 × 12 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922-2007)

Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers was born on August 7, 1922, in Memphis, Tennessee. Withers got his start as a military photographer while serving in the South Pacific during World War II. Upon returning to a segregated Memphis after the war, Withers chose photography as his profession.

In the 1950s, Withers helped spur the movement for equal rights with a self-published photo pamphlet on the Emmitt Till murder. Over the next two decades, Withers formed close personal relationships with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and James Meredith. Withers’s pictures of key civil rights events from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the strike of Memphis sanitation workers are historic. Indeed, Withers was often the only photographer to record these scenes, many of which were not yet of interest to the mainstream press.

Withers photographed more than the southern Civil Rights Movement. Whether Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, and other Negro League baseball players, or those jazz and blues musicians who frequented Memphis’ Beale Street, Withers photographed the famous and not-so famous. Withers’s collection includes pictures of early performances of Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin.

Text from The History Makers website

Louis Draper (American, 1935-2002)
Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi
July 1971
Gelatin silver print
21.5 x 29.2cm (8 7/16 x 11 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Draper Preservation Trust, Nell D. Winston, Trustee

First-of-Its-Kind Exhibition Opening at the National Gallery of Art Explores Photography’s Role in the Black Arts Movement

Never-before-seen photographs alongside images of cultural icons reveal the medium’s central role during a pivotal era of creative expression

The National Gallery of Art presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, an exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers in developing and fostering a distinctly Black visual culture and identity. The first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement, a creative initiative comparable to the Harlem Renaissance in its scope and impact, which evolved concurrently to the civil rights and international freedom movements, the exhibition reveals how artists developed strategies to engage communities and encourage self-representation in media, laying a foundation for socially engaged art practices that continue today. Photography and the Black Arts Movement will be on view in the West Building from September 21, 2025, to January 11, 2026, before traveling to California and Mississippi.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement brings together approximately 150 works spanning photography, video, collage, painting, installation, and other photo-based media, some of which have rarely or never been on view. Among the over 100 artists included in the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

This expansive selection of work showcases the broad cultural exchange between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists of many backgrounds, who came together during the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century to grapple with social and political changes, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African movement through art. The exhibition also includes art from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize the global engagement with the social, political, and cultural ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement.

“Working on many fronts – literature, poetry, jazz and new music, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography – African American artists associated with the Black Arts Movement expressed and exchanged their ideas through publications, organisations, museums, galleries, community centres, theatres, murals, street art, and emerging academic programs. While focusing on African American photography in the United States, the exhibition also includes works by artists from many communities to consider the extensive interchange between North American artists and the African diaspora. The exhibition looks at the important connections between America’s focus on civil rights and the emerging cultural movements that enriched the dialog,” said Philip Brookman, cocurator of the exhibition and consulting curator of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art.

“Photography and photographic images were crucial in defining and giving expression to the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement. By merging the social concerns and aesthetics of the period, Black artists and photographers were defining a Black aesthetic while expanding conversations around community building and public history,” said Deborah Willis, guest cocurator, university professor and chair of the department of photography and imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. “The artists and their subjects helped to preserve compelling visual responses to this turbulent time and their images reflect their pride and determination.”

About the Exhibition

The exhibition draws significantly from the National Gallery’s collection – including more than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others – and from lenders in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 presents the cultural and political titans of the era, including civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians, as well as everyday people, scenes of daily life, and fashion and commercial photography. Structured around nine thematic sections – including explorations of the self, community, fashion and beauty, the media, and ritual – the exhibition weaves a holistic vision of the period and its cultural impact.

Among the works in the first section of the exhibition is a collage by Romare Bearden, 110th Street Harlem Blues (1972). A dynamic mixture of painted paper and photographs, the work illustrates the ongoing vitality of Harlem’s community, echoing the vibrancy and social content of the Harlem Renaissance, which Bearden was exposed to in his early life. Moving into the section titled Picturing the Self / Picturing the Movement, self-portraits by Coreen Simpson, Alex Harsley, and Barkley L. Hendricks underscore a central theme of the exhibition: artists asserting their presence within the broader narrative of the movement and the era, along with the importance of self-representation in their art. A highlight of Representing the Community – a section filled with everyday scenes of people at work and at rest – is Ralph Arnold’s Soul Box (1969), a mixed-media assemblage of found objects and collage, serving as a time capsule that captures stories of the Black Arts Movement.

Photographs were a crucial tool used to communicate the events of the civil rights movement to a national audience. Artists and news media understood the power of photographs to address inequality and advocate for civil and human rights, and some works in the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that defined the era. A rarely seen 1965 photograph by Frank Dandridge captures Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. watching President Lyndon B. Johnson’s televised address following the Selma, Alabama, marches – events that would ultimately lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Depicting Dr. King in a private, domestic moment, the image underscores not just the personal gravity of the moment but the television’s growing role in shaping public understanding of the era’s historic events. One of several works featured in the In the News section, it reflects how photographers responded to the shifting landscape of news media – from still photography to the rise of television.

The Black Arts Movement was instrumental in reshaping fashion, advertising, and media as tools of self-representation and cultural empowerment. A Kraft Foods advertisement (1977), photographed by Barbara DuMetz and featuring a young Black girl holding her doll, illustrates how the movement prompted advertisers to engage Black audiences more thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and models in their campaigns. It is among the highlights of the Fashioning the Self section, along with an editorial photograph by Kwame Brathwaite, the photographer who helped coin the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and many depictions of women in beauty shops, showing the importance of these spaces to forming identity and community.

The exhibition’s concluding section, Transformations in Art and Culture, reflects a shift in the Black Arts Movement’s purpose – from its earlier focus on civil rights to a younger generation’s engagement with more historical and conceptual ideas, while still drawing on the movement’s visual language. Highlights include multimedia and time-based works by Ulysses Jenkins, Charles Gaines, and Lorna Simpson, which explore new and experimental ways to explore Black identity.

Exhibition Publication

Published in association with Yale University Press, the fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition examines the vital role photography played in the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored ways of using art to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, this book reveals how photographs operated across art, community building, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the development of a distinctly Black art and culture. Essays by these distinguished scholars focus on topics such as women and the movement, community, activism, and Black photojournalism, and consider the complex connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.

Press release from the National Gallery of Art

Harry Adams (American, 1918-1985)
Protest Car, Los Angeles
1962, printed 2024
Inkjet print
27.5 x 35.4 cm (11 x 13 15/16 in.)
Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge, Harry Adams Archive
© Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected.
Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge

Harry Adams (American, 1918-1985)

Harry Adams, also known as “One Shot Harry,” was one of the best-known members of the Los Angeles African American community. Having access to the city’s inner circle, he became known for his images of politicians, entertainers, and society figures. Adams worked as a freelancer for the California Eagle and Los Angeles Sentinel for 35 years and had a number of churches and lawyers as clients. His collection is particularly rich in its documentation of African American social life including images of social organisations, churches, schools, civil rights organisations, protests and cultural events. …

The collection of images for the period 1950-1985 is rich in its depiction of the unique lives of African Americans in and around the Los Angeles area. There are many images of important black political leaders, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, and many others.

Text from the California State University Northridge website

Raphael Albert (British born Grenada, 1939-2009)
Beauty Salon, London
c. 1960s
Gelatin silver print
27.3 x 27.3cm (10 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.)
Collection of Autograph, London
© Raphael Albert

Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, the cultural promoter, entrepreneur and photographer Raphael Albert organised and documented numerous black beauty pageants and other cultural events in London. His long and successful career as a promoter and chronicler of pageants included the establishment of Miss Black and Beautiful, Miss West Indies in Great Britain, and Miss Grenada.

These competitions celebrated the global ‘Black is Beautiful’ aesthetic in a local west London context: paired with the obligatory bathing costumes and high heels, Albert’s contestants often sported large Afro hairstyles, inventing and reinventing themselves on stage while articulating a particular and multifaceted black femininity as part of a widely contested and ambiguous cultural performance.

Text from the Autograph website

Ernest Cole (South African, 1940-1990)
Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in white area illegally
1960-1966
Gelatin silver print
Image/sheet: 24.5 x 16.5 cm (9 5/8 x 6 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2022.102.2
© Ernest Cole / Magnum Photos

~ Exhibition: ‘Ernest Cole: House of Bondage’ at Foam, Amsterdam, January – June 2023
~ Text/Exhibition: “Ernest Cole: Journeys through Photojournalism, Social Documentary Photography and Art,” on the exhibition ‘Ernest Cole Photographer’ at The Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, April – July 2013

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Newsman Being Frisked at Muslim Rally in Chicago
1963, printed 1997
Gelatin silver print
47.3 x 33.7cm (18 5/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)

~ Text/Exhibition: “Visible Man / Invisible photographer” on the exhibition Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, October 2022 – January 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime”‘ at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, February 2021 ongoing
~ Photographs: Gordon Parks “The Atmosphere of Crime”, 1957 February 2020
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, July – November 2019
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, January – September 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2014 – June 2015
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument’ at The New Orleans Museum of Art, September 2013 – January 2014
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: 100 Moments’ at New York State Museum, January – May 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Centennial’ at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, February – April 2013
~ Exhibition: ‘Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks’ at the Phoenix Art Museum, August – November 2011

Herman Howard (American, 1942-1980)
Sweet as a Peach, Harlem, New York City
1963
Gelatin silver print
16 x 23.1cm (6 5/16 x 9 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)
View of the crowd as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses civil rights demonstrators at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue, Philadelphia
August 3, 1965
Gelatin silver print
24.8 x 19.7cm (9 3/4 x 7 3/4 in.)
John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries

John W. Mosley (American, 1907-1969)

John W. Mosley (May 19, 1907 – October 1, 1969) was a self-taught photojournalist who extensively documented the everyday activities of the African-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years, a period including both World War II and the civil rights movement. His work was published widely in newspapers and magazines including The Philadelphia Tribune, The Pittsburgh Courier and Jet magazine.

Mosley has been called a “cultural warrior” for preserving a record of African-American life in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, one which combats “negative stereotypes and false interpretations of African-American history and culture”. …

Mosley flourished in his career as a photographer from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was known to photograph as many as four events a day, seven days a week. He traveled around Philadelphia on public transit, carrying his cameras and other equipment.

Mosley shot in black and white film. He used a large-format Graflex Speed Graphic camera. and a medium-format Rollieflex.

Proud of his heritage, Mosley chose to portray the black community positively at family, social, and cultural events that were part of daily life. He photographed individuals and families at weddings, picnics, churches, segregated beaches, sporting events, concerts, galas, and civil rights protests. During a time of racism and segregation, he emphasised the achievements of black celebrities, athletes, and political leaders.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Moneta Sleet Jr. (American, 1926-1996)
Two Teenaged Supporters of the Selma March
1965, printed c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
43.3 x 29.5cm (17 1/16 x 11 5/8 in.)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Johnson Publishing Company
© Johnson Publishing Company Archive. Courtesy J. Paul Getty Trust and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Made possible by the Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Smithsonian Institution

“During the Civil Rights Movement, I was a participant just like everybody else. I just happened to be there with my camera, and I felt and firmly believed that my mission was to photograph and show the side of it that was the right side.”

~ Moneta Sleet Jr.

During Sleet’s 41 years at Ebony, he worked by Martin Luther King Jr.’s side for 13 years, capturing historical moments of the civil rights movement.

Sleet began working for Ebony magazine in 1955. Over the next 41 years, he captured photos of young Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Gillespie, Stevie Wonder, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Jomo Kenyatta, former ambassador Andrew Young in a blue leather jacket and jeans in his office at the United Nations, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Liberia’s William Tubman and Billie Holiday. He gained the affection and esteem of many civil rights leaders, many of whom called on him by name. When Coretta Scott King found out that no African American photographers had been assigned to cover her husband’s funeral service, she demanded that Sleet be a part of the press pool. If he was not, she threatened to bar all photographers from the service. Besides his photo of Coretta Scott King, he also captured grieving widow Betty Shabazz at the funeral of her husband Malcolm X.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Charles Peaker Street Speaker, head of ANPM, after Carlos Cooks passed away, on 125th Street)
c. 1968, printed 2016
Inkjet print
37.2 x 37.2 cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)

Black Is Beautiful.

From Marcus Garvey to the Black Panther Party, these three words powered the political dreams and material possibilities of generations of Black people living in the United States. Over the course of seven decades, the recently departed photographer Kwame Brathwaite constructed a glorious visual lexicon to articulate a Pan-Africanist argument. Whether through his rhythmic documentation of the jazz scene in Harlem and the Bronx, or his cofounding of the African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Brathwaite positioned photography at the nexus of Black artistic, political, and musical expression. Moving between concert halls and boxing rings, portrait studios and protest movement scenes – his Hasselblad in hand – Brathwaite chronicled self-determination and creativity that celebrated Blackness in all of its forms. Each of his photographs brims with bombastic flare and undeniable elegance. Their narrative potential is still transfixing.

“Black Is Beautiful was my directive,” Brathwaite said. “It was a time when people were protesting injustices related to race, class, and human rights around the globe. I focused on perfecting my craft so that I could use my gift to inspire thought, relay ideas, and tell stories of our struggle, our work, our liberation…. Oppression still exists today, and we must keep fighting, keep on pushing until we are free. A luta continua, a vitória é certa – the struggle continues, victory is certain.”

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Esther Adler, Roxana Marcoci, Marilyn Nance, David Hartt, Michael Famighetti. “Remembering Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023),” on the MoMA website, Dec 26, 2023 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025

Doris A. Derby (American, 1939-2022)
Black-owned Grocery Store, Sunday, Mileston, Mississippi
1968
Gelatin silver print
21.9 x 32.7cm (8 5/8 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of David Knaus
© Doris A. Derby

While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.

In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.

Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognised as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.

Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025

Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)
Genie
1971
Gelatin silver print
13.97 × 17.78cm (5 1/2 × 7 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Ray Francis (American, 1937-2006)

Ray Francis was a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop. He received his first camera in 1952, at the age of 15. In 1961 he met Louis Draper, with whom he formed Group 35. In 1963 Group 35 merged with other photographers to create Kamoinge, where Francis contributed significantly by creating a darkroom for the group and working as a photo editor for the Black Photographers Annual.

His photographic work spanned still life, portraiture, and landscape, often using dramatic light and shadow, influenced by Johannes Vermeer’s use of composition. Francis also made contributions as an educator, teaching at the Bedford-Stuyvesant Neighborhood Youth Corps (1966–1969) and later serving as director of the New York City Board of Education’s photography program for Intermediate School 201 from 1970 to 1974.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Kwame Brathwaite (American, 1938-2023)
Untitled (Portrait, Reels as Necklace)
c. 1972, printed later
Inkjet print
74.93 × 74.93cm (29 1/2 × 29 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Renée Harbers Liddell and Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Kwame Brathwaite

Kwame Brathwaite, [was] a photographer, musician and African American activist who was a unique politico-aesthete. With his brother Elombe Brath, he virtually invented the phrase “Black Is Beautiful” in the 1960s by photographing the Grandassa Models in Harlem: young African American women who became the sensational template for beauty, doing away with the usual cosmetic products and the usual white standard of femininity.

Black Is Beautiful became a radical rallying cry, an inspired three-word prose poem and manifesto for change. Simply to assert that black people were beautiful was a liberating force in art, politics and culture, and Brathwaite became a part of Black power’s pan-Africanist movement by photographing Muhammad Ali before his Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. He was the exclusive photographer for the Jackson 5’s African tour, and became the house photographer for the Apollo theatre, building an amazing archive of black musicians, and with Elombe was the driving force behind bringing Nelson Mandela to speak in Harlem.

Peter Bradshaw. “Black Is Beautiful: The Kwame Brathwaite Story – exhilarating record of game-changing photographer,” on The Guardian website Fri 10 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025

Romare Bearden (American, 1911-1988)
110th Street Harlem Blues
1972
Collage
© Romare Bearden Foundation

African-American artist, activist, and writer Romare Bearden was close friends with film producer and photographer Sam Shaw, and he often drew inspiration from Shaw’s creative projects. The portraits incorporated into this collage feature outtakes of extras from a movie Shaw may have documented as set photographer. ⁠ ⁠
⁠
Bearden’s work reflects his improvisational approach to his practice. He considered his process akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Starting with an open mind, he would let an idea evolve spontaneously. “You have to begin somewhere,” he once said, “so you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”

Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Facebook page via DC Gallery, New York

Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”

Colony Little. “A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement,” on the ARTnews website November 20, 2025 [Online] Cited 24/11/2025

Chester Higgins (American, b. 1946)
Father prays over son on Osu Beach, Accra, Ghana
1973
Gelatin silver print
22.8 x 34cm (9 x 13 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Chester Higgins. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

Dawoud Bey (American, b. 1953)
The Blues Singer, Harlem, NY
1976
Gelatin silver print
22.1 x 32.7 cm (8 11/16 x 12 7/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Gift of the Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel

~ Text/Exhibition: “Street cred,” on the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits at Denver Art Museum, November 2024 – May 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April – October 2021
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey: An American Project’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, November 2020 – March 2021

Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)
Kraft Foods advertisement
1977

Barbara DuMetz (American, b. 1947)

Barbara DuMetz (born 1947) is an American photographer and pioneer in the field of commercial photography. She began working in Los Angeles as a commercial photographer in the 1970s, when very few women had established and maintained successful careers in the field, especially African-American women. Over the course of her career, “she made a major contribution to diversifying the landscape of images that defined pop culture in the United States.”

DuMetz is known for her work with African-American celebrities, corporations and images of everyday life in African-American communities. …

DuMetz has been a professional photographer for more than four decades. Over the course of her career, she has produced award-winning images for advertising agencies including Burrell Advertising, J. P. Martin Associates and InterNorth Corporation. Her photographs have appeared in African-American publications including Black Enterprise, Ebony, Essence, Jet and The Crisis. She has taken commercial photographs for corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Delta Air Lines and McDonald’s Corporation.

DuMetz ran and maintained three different photography studios located in the Los Angeles area where she was contracted by department stores, record companies, graphic design studios, advertising agencies, public relations firms, film production companies, actors and business professionals. DuMetz’s has shot photo layouts of celebrities and artists and personalities including Maya Angelou, Ernie Barnes, Bernie Casey, Pam Grier, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Quincy Jones, Samella Lewis, Ed McMahan, Thelonious Monk, Lou Rawls, Della Reese, Richard Roundtree, Betye Saar, Charles Wilbert White, and Nancy Wilson. Her show The Creators: Photographic Images of Literary, Music and Visual Artists, at the Southwest Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2015, included images of over two dozen African-American artists whom she has photographed.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ming Smith (American, b. 1950) 'Sun Ra Space II' 1978

Ming Smith (American, b. 1947)
Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York
1978
Gelatin silver print
15.24 × 22.4cm (6 × 8 13/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Charina Endowment Fund

“You don’t make art for money, especially as a Black artist. You do it because there is that need to create – and that has been part of my survival; that has helped me survive.”

“My work as a photographer was to record, culturally, the period of time in which I lived – and I recorded it as an artist.”

“Oh no, it’s all discovery, it’s all improvisation. It’s like when jazz musicians solo. They improvise, and photography is definitely that, for me.”

“Whether I’m photographing a person on the street, someone I know, or on an assignment, I’m doing it because I admire them. I like the sense of exchange – they’re giving and I’m taking, but I’m also giving them something back. There were certain people who would understand what I was looking for and would try to give me a photograph by posing. Whatever I’m shooting, whether it’s a portrait or a place, my intention is to capture the feeling I have about that exchange and that energy.”

Ming Smith

Coreen Simpson (American, b. 1942)
Self-Portrait
1978
Gelatin silver print
21.6 x 16.8cm (8 1/2 x 6 5/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
© Coreen Simpson

Simpson’s career launched when she became editor for Unique New York magazine in 1980, and she began photographing to illustrate her articles. She then became a freelance fashion photographer for the Village Voice and the Amsterdam News in the early 1980s, and covered many African-American cultural and political events in the mid-1980s. She is also noted for her studies of Harlem nightlife. She constructed a portable studio and brought it to clubs in downtown Manhattan, barbershops in Harlem, and braiding salons in Queens. Her work’s ability to present a wide variety of subjects with “depth of character and dignity” has been compared to that of Diane Arbus and Weegee.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Simpson became a photographer after noticing that she could make better images than the ones used to illustrate her stories as a freelance lifestyle writer. She took the chance to start creating the images she wanted to see. In 1976, she contacted her friend Walter Johnson, a street photographer who worked at a photo lab in Manhattan, with whom she had been acquainted from her modeling days, and asked if he could teach her how to use a camera. He showed her how to use it, and as soon as she got a hold of it, she became unstoppable.

She argues that great images are the key to having a successful published story. “You have to feel good about yourself, and good about the article that you’re presenting to the public,” she says. “So what makes it good? It’s the visuals. The visuals make it good.”

Briana Ellis-Gibbs. “Photographer Coreen Simpson’s illustrious career capturing Toni Morrison and Muhammad Ali: ‘I’ve never gotten bored’,” on The Guardian website Tue 21 Oct 2025 [Online] Cited 30/11/2025

Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)
Grace Jones, New York City
1970s
Gelatin silver print
27 × 23.7cm (10 5/8 × 9 5/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944)

Anthony Barboza (born 1944 in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a photographer, historian, artist and writer. With roots originating from Cape Verde, and work that began in commercial art more than forty years ago, Barboza’s artistic talents and successful career helped him to cross over and pursue his passions in the fine arts where he continues to contribute to the American art scene.

Barboza has a prolific and wide range of both traditional and innovative works inspired by African-American thought, which have been exhibited in public and private galleries, and prestigious museums and educational institutions worldwide. He is well known for his photographic work of jazz musicians from the 1970s – ’80s. Many of these works are in his book Black Borders, published in 1980 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article printed in 1984 in The City Sun, he said, “When I do a portrait, I’m doing a photograph of how that person feels to me; how I feel about the person, not how they look. I find that in order for the portraits to work, they have to make a mental connection as well as an emotional one. When they do that, I know I have it.” Many of his photographs achieve his signature effect through the careful use of lighting and shadows, manipulation of the backdrop, measured adjustments to shutter speeds, composition, and many other techniques and mediums at his command.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Nellie Mae Rowe (American, 1900-1982)
God Loves Us All
1978
Marker on silver gelatin print
15.9 x 29.2cm (6 1/4 x 11 1/2 in.)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment and the American Women’s History Initiative Acquisitions Pool, administered by theSmithsonian American Women’s History Initiative
© 2025 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Nellie Mae Rowe was born in Georgia, in the last year of the nineteenth century – to a once-enslaved father and mother born the year of Emancipation. Rowe laboured as a child, married young, was widowed twice, and worked much of her adult life as a uniformed “domestic” in white households. Although her early life was shaped by segregation and oppression, Rowe’s desire to define herself sparked a joyful and colourful body of art that suffused her home and yard. This undeniable and contagious positivity made Rowe one of the first Black self-taught women to be celebrated for her art.

Rowe saw art-making as a God-given way to convey gratitude and recover a girlhood lost to labor and poverty. She transformed her property into an enriched realm she called her “Playhouse,” embellished with artworks and found objects that brought a heightened animation to her surroundings. Amid a society that rarely featured Black women in works of art and cast them as demeaning stereotypes in popular culture, Rowe took control of the narrative. She depicted friends, neighbours, and herself in drawings and hand-coloured photographs, confident images of Black beauty and free-spirited joy. In a radical act of reclamation, she crafted a world where cultural pride, personal style, and a bit of the unexpected embody the richness of life.

(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)

Text from the Smithsonian American Art Museum website

Carrie Mae Weems (American, b. 1953)
Mom at Work
1978-1984
Gelatin silver print
60.96 × 92.71cm (24 × 36 1/2 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems. The Heart of the Matter’ at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, April – September, 2025
~ Exhibition: ‘Dawoud Bey & Carrie Mae Weems: In Dialogue’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April – July 2023
~ Exhibition: ‘Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video’ at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, January – May 2014

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)
Jake with His Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, South Carolina
1978, printed 2007
Gelatin silver print
31.1 x 46.6cm (12 1/4 x 18 3/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Gift of Funds from Diana and Mallory Walker

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (American, b. 1951)

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, USA) is an American photographer, photojournalist and AIDS activist. Beginning photography at the age of 18, she trained with American street photographer Garry Winogrand before graduating from the Cooper Union School of Art with a BFA in 1975, completing a year of independent photographic study in West Africa. Her 1977 photograph ‘Black Man, White Woman, Johannesburg, South Africa’ emblematised the visual narrative of apartheid at that time, recalling the institutionalised racism Jeanne had herself experienced as an African-American photographer.

Jeanne’s experience in South Africa informed her later work, encouraging her to focus on the contemporary experience of Blackness through humanist street photography. More recently, her photobook Daddy and Me: A Photo Story of Arthur Ashe and His Daughter, Camera (1993), which captures the last year of her husband Arthur Ashe’s life, has been praised as a sensitive record of family and mortality which demystifies AIDS. Following the tragedy of Ashe’s death, Jeanne has become a spokesperson for further AIDS research.

Text from the Hundred Heroines website

Barkley L. Hendricks (American, b. 1940) 'Self-Portrait with Red Sweater' 1980, printed 2023

Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)
Self-Portrait with Red Sweater
1980, printed 2023
Chromogenic print
24.8 × 15.5cm (9 3/4 × 6 1/8 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017)

Barkley L. Hendricks (American, 1940-2017) was an American painter and photographer who revolutionised portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world, including travels to Jamaica, his hometown of Philadelphia, and Connecticut where he last lived and worked. He applied intense focus to his subjects while painting, allowing him to capture their unique personalities. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabits an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.

While the directness of his subjects’ gaze could be piercing, Hendricks invoked humour through the titling of his pieces, mitigating the gravity of the message and allowing for an opening into the work. His paintings are distinctly of their time, grounded in the style of their contemporary present, and simultaneously emphatically timeless. They are a direct engagement with art history, the tradition of portraiture, and a confrontation of institutional portrayal of the black subject.

Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes, including an early series of Basketball paintings that explored abstraction and colour theory. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.

Text from the Jack Shainman website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Miles Davis
1981
Gelatin silver print
22.9 x 34.1cm (9 x 13 7/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)

Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)
Untitled (curlers) #1.2
1984-1985
Gelatin silver print
27.31 × 34.93cm (10 3/4 × 13 3/4 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund

Carla Williams (American, b. 1965)

Los Angeles native Carla Williams is a photographer and curator known for her exploration of identity, race, gender, and representation.

She first encountered photography in 1983 during her sophomore year at Princeton University, studying under Emmet Gowin. Her early work in self-portraiture began at Princeton, where she used the large-format camera to explore her own image. The focus of renewed scholarship, these works reflected on the lack of visibility of African American women in photographic history. Williams earned an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 1991, where her thesis project focused on the themes of self-representation and identity. After graduating, she worked as a curator of photography at institutions in Los Angeles and New York.

Text from the National Gallery of Art website

Juan Sánchez (American, b. 1954)
Mixed Statement
1984
Oil and metallic paint, pencil, colored pencil, oil pastel, marker, paper money, fabric, thread, leaves, painted, printed, torn, and cut-and-pasted coloured paper, and gelatin silver prints on canvas, 3 panels
137.16 x 243.84cm (54 x 96 in.)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Harry Torczyner (by exchange), 2024
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Juan Sánchez, the influential Nuyorican visual artist, teacher, writer, and curator once declared “Political art is a medium used as a weapon to hopefully recapture or regain the positive energy of celebration – to regain the goodness of humanity.” Sánchez, the child of Puerto Rican immigrants, was born and raised in Brooklyn. Encompassing a variety of mediums and techniques, including collage, painting, printmaking, photography, and video, his work is informed by his activism and engagement with issues of colonialism and its legacy, race, class, cultural identity, equality, social justice, and self-determination. At the same time, he has maintained a consistent focus on communities, families, and both personal and political histories in his work.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
Constitution Avenue NW, Washington

Opening hours:
Daily 10.00am – 5.00pm

Vale Martin Parr (English, 1952-2025)

December 2025

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'New Brighton, England' 1983-1985 from the series 'The Last Resort'

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, England
From the series The Last Resort
1983-1985
Pigment print

From life, the absurd, the (un)familiar

The death of the English photographer Martin Parr is very sad news 😦

I feel like I have known his intimate photographs from life for a very long time. Through his beautifully observed and humorous photographs Martin Parr became a national treasure.

Incisive and insightful, his best photographs shone a light on the British class system, British rituals and everyday conversations – “candid and often humorous depictions of everyday life” – captured with visual deftness and containing a wry sense of humour mirroring the British character.

“Parr’s work was at its best when he concentrated on the volume of space within the image plane and the details that emerge from such a concentrated visualisation – whether it be the tension points within the image, assemblage of colour, incongruity of dress, messiness of childhood or philistine nature of luxury.” (MB, 2102)

His photographs have a wonderful frisson about them, a genuine love of and resonance with the things he was imaging. The dirt under the fingernails of the child eating a doughnut, the lurid colours of the popsicle and jacket of the kid with dribble on his face, all fantastic. Images full of incongruity, humour, and pathos. The absurd and the (un)familiar.

And so it goes… we loose another great photographer.

Vale Martin Parr and thank you!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Read my text “Out in the midday sun” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025

“Photography is the simplest thing in the world, but it is incredibly complicated to make it really work.”

“I think the mindset you require is stamina, discipline, and just sheer hard work. There are basically very few shortcuts. You’ve either got that ability to apply yourself to a given situation or a given idea and explore it and resolve it, or you haven’t. Most people are just lazy. The danger with photography is that it looks very easy but in fact, it’s a very difficult medium to really excel well in because basically, people don’t work hard enough – they’re lazy. Don’t be lazy!”

Martin Parr

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, England
From the series Last Resort
1983-1985
Pigment print

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, England
From the series The Last Resort
1983-1985
Pigment print

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'New Brighton, Merseyside' 1984

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025)
New Brighton, Merseyside, England
1984
From the series The Last Resort
Pigment print

Martin Parr (British, 1952-2025) 'England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995' 1994-1995 from the series 'British Food'

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952)
England. Bristol. Car boot sale. 1995
From the series British Food
1994-1995
Traditional C-type print

Martin Parr (British, b. 1952)
From A to B. Tales of Modern Motoring series
1994
Pigment print

Exhibition: ‘Helen Levitt’ at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 24th September, 2025 – 1st February, 2026

Curator: Joshua Chuang

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' c. 1940 from the exhibition 'Helen Levitt' at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, Sept 2025 - Feb 2026

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt’s photographs from 1938-1940 are some of the earliest of her artistic career. “Her interest in photography blossomed when, aged 18, and having dropped out of high school, she began working in the darkroom of a commercial portrait photographer.”1

At the age of 23 she bought a secondhand Leica camera and walked the streets of New York – mainly Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem – observing the social interactions of children and adults in this teeming metropolis. But she was not a flâneuse,2 strolling around the city observing but not interacting with her surroundings … she was fully engaged in the activity of the city.

What amazes me is that her vision as an artist was so well (in)formed at such a young age. And that the concerns and investigations into the nature of play, love and life in New York as a young, strong, independent “New Woman” remained constant throughout her life and decades long photographic career.

In her photographs there is an (in)direct engagement with the people that surrounded her (in her early works “she often hid her camera under her coat to capture candid, unnoticed moments on the streets”), an exchange of energy from the photographer to the subject and back through the camera onto the film… evidencing a generosity of spirit on the part of the artist towards her subjects. Here there is no pressing the camera into the face of the victim a la Garry Winogrand to evince a reaction, but a genuine sense of compassion and empathy towards the people who live in the great city of New York.

Influenced by social realism and the idea the photography could be an agent for change, avant-garde European film, surrealism and contemporaneous dance and theatre Levitt, “decided I should take pictures of working-class people and contribute to the movements,” Levitt later said of that time. “And then I saw pictures of [Henri] Cartier-Bresson and realised that photography could be an art – and that made me ambitious.”1

Levitt’s photographs are performative and theatrical, an engagement between artist, subject and viewer in the cause of art. “In her photographs, she presents the street as an almost theatrical landscape where the smallest interactions and gestures are incredibly resonant.”1

Levitt was not interested in concept nor didactic narrative. She was interested in the presence of the image before you … in just what you see.

As with any great art, the artist (even as she is ambitious) seems to be without ego. She lets the picture and the emotions tell the story without the shadow of the artist getting in the way (unlike much contemporary art and photography). For the work of art to have value in itself.

Thus, her photographs speak to us directly, or not at all.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Sean O’Hagan. “Helen Levitt: the most celebrated, least known photographer of her time,” on The Guardian website Sun 3 Oct 2021 [Online] Cited 28/11/2025

2/ “The flâneuse is not a female flâneur, but she is a version of the flâneur. She does not experience the city in the same way as he does. It is hard to define the archetype of the flâneuse, because the flâneur himself consists of paradoxes and many subcategories. Key concepts for flâneur and flâneuse are the amount of spare time, the aesthetic detachment towards objects, crowd and sceneries they see and their ambiguity about it.”

Akkelies van Nes and Tra My Nguyen. “Gender Differences in the Urban Environment: The flâneur and flâneuse of the 21st Century,” in Daniel Koch, Lars Marcus and Jesper Steen (eds.,). Proceedings of the 7th International Space Syntax Symposium. Stockholm: KTH, 2009

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

“Levitt was part of a highly intellectual cultural and political milieu in New York in the 1930s and her photography reflected her deep interest in surrealism, cinema, leftwing politics and the new ideas that were then emerging about the role of the body in art.”

Walter Moser, curator

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' c. 1938 from the exhibition 'Helen Levitt' at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, Sept 2025 - Feb 2026

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' [113th Street] c. 1938

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1938
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) began photographing the streets of New York, her hometown, in the late 1930s, focusing mainly on poor neighbourhoods such as Hispanic Harlem and the Lower East Side, where the street clearly takes center stage as the setting for everyday life. Her camera was directed mainly at children and their games in the streets. These scenes of children occupy a central place in a body of work that, as a whole, captivates us with its ability to transform everyday scenes into images that convey all the emotion, mystery, and humour that life can contain, and with which the viewer establishes an immediate connection even though they lack an explicit narrative. Her work soon gained the recognition it deserved, and in 1943 the MoMA in New York organised her first solo exhibition (Photographs of Children).

Later in her career, she also became closely interested in film and colour photography. In 1948, she collaborated on the documentary The Quiet One and co-directed In the Street, another documentary about the streets of Hispanic Harlem. Both titles were highly influential in the subsequent evolution of documentary filmmaking by artists such as Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol.

After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 to explore chromatic techniques, she began experimenting with colour photography, a medium in which she would also develop pioneering work.

A socially committed artist, Levitt was one of the first women to forge a professional career in photography. This exhibition is the first to be based on her entire body of work and archives, which have only recently been made available to the public.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Dedicated full-time to her artistic activities, the photographer Helen Levitt (New York, 1913-2009) did not begin to gain public recognition until relatively late in life. Although her name has always been associated with “street photography,” as it was precisely the streets of her native city that provided the context for the production of her images, throughout her career Levitt made forays into film, visited other countries such as Mexico, and also focused on colour photography. Her images, almost invariably ambiguous and mysterious although not necessarily at first glance, are also characterised by their spontaneity, warmth and sensitivity. The movements and gestures of the figures captured by her lens and the communication between them transcend that inclination to “photograph children” which many critics pointed out after her first exhibition at the MoMA in 1943, entitled Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children.

Levitt’s work as a whole goes far beyond the latter aspect, revealing her acceptance of the pleasures, terrors and complexity of existence at all ages, traits often overlooked by the viewer when immersed in the harsh reality of the urban landscape. The exhibition, the first to be devoted to the artist on the basis of the entirety of her work and archives, which have only recently become available for study, offers a broad overview of Levitt’s career through nine sections and around 220 photographs. It includes previously unexhibited images, as well as work produced in Mexico in 1941 and a large proportion of the artist’s work in colour, which she explored from the 1950s onward. It also features her film In the Street, directed by Levitt in collaboration with Janice Loeb and James Agee, and a projection of her colour slides.

Born in Brooklyn to a Russian-Jewish family, Helen Levitt dropped out of high school early and began her photography training in a Bronx studio. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, she pursued independent photography, capturing everyday life in New York neighbourhoods between 1938 and 1942. Her first solo exhibition was at the MoMA in 1943. She also experimented with film, making In the Street, and with colour photography, which gained her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959. Levitt continued to work intermittently,
exploring new settings such as the subway and rural areas. Her creative output is recognised for its ability to capture moments of human connection in complex urban environments.

Key themes

Enigmatic photographs

Helen Levitt’s images possess a mysterious quality that transforms them into true visual enigmas. Her unique and highly perceptive gaze turns everyday scenes into compositions that are hard to define, creating an immediate connection with the viewer even when there is no clear narrative to explain them.

A pioneer with her own voice

Helen Levitt was one of the first women to make her way in the world of photography, especially in the field of street photography. She always avoided constructing an explicit narrative in her images and preferred not to talk about them. Far from diminishing its value, that decision is one of the key traits that make her work so interesting. Despite this characteristic of reserve, Levitt’s photographs connect with the viewer through the universal emotions they convey.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Mexico City' 1941

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
Mexico City
c. 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1942
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1945
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Helen Levitt (1913-2009) became a photographer in the mid-1930s after meeting Henri Cartier-Bresson and seeing his radical new pictures made with a discreet, handheld camera. By the end of the decade, she had developed a unique sensibility, one informed by Surrealism and a love of avant-garde cinema but focused on the interactions of ordinary people in the streets, sidewalks, stoops, and vacant lots of her native city.

Grounded in gritty realism but brimming with subversive humor, mischief, and pathos, Levitt’s pictures are openended and enigmatic, concealing as much as they reveal. Her uncanny photographs of urban children and their games brought Levitt early renown even as she remained attentive to the quiet gestures and movements of a broader swath of humanity observed with her 35mm Leica, especially in Spanish Harlem, where the activity of everyday life often spilled out of doors.

Following a months long foray in Mexico City, Levitt began to work in filmmaking, leading to a long hiatus in her photographic activity. In 1959, advances in the sensitivity colour film spurred her to take to the streets again with her Leica. She continued to photograph in color throughout the 1970s, reverting to black-and-white film for a series of pictures taken in the New York City subway. Levitt continued to photograph intermittently until the early 1990s, when she became known as the “unofficial poet laureate” of New York and her oeuvre universally acknowledged as one of the most timeless and affecting in the history of the medium.

Early Work / Graffiti / Gypsies

Only a few examples survive from Levitt’s first year using a Leica camera. Amid the backdrop of the Great Depression, her pictures of lone figures hunched over or lying on the ground appear documentary in their impulse, while other depictions of people in urban surroundings are notably more ambivalent in their view.

In 1937, while employed by the Federal Art Project to teach at a public school in East (Spanish) Harlem, Levitt noticed the many chalk drawings and messages illicitly scrawled by children on streets and buildings on her way to work, and began to document them in all their variety, innocence, and vulgarity. She sometimes also portrayed the artists themselves posing next to their ephemeral interventions.

Around 1938, on the advice of Walker Evans, Levitt began to use a right-angle viewfinder, a device that allowed her to face one direction while pointing her camera in another. This was particularly effective in recording the uninhibited interactions of the “gypsy” families prevalent in Spanish Harlem and Yorkville. Drawn to their way of life, she also borrowed Evans’s 4 x 5-inch view camera and tripod to make portraits of “gypsy” children in their homes.

1938-1940 / Mexico City / A Way of Seeing

By 1940 Levitt had established her terrain, subject, and approach. In a rare statement, she later described her intent “to seize upon and record those apparently accidental disarrangements that nevertheless and in seeming contradiction provide a more intense apperception of reality.” Uninterested in portraying New York City as a bustling metropolis, Levitt instead saw it as
an environment whose “size and varied character constantly forces into the open material for my camera.” The working class, immigrant neighbourhoods she frequented – where adults chatted on stoops, mothers and children leaned out of windows, and children were left to their own devices – proved to be an especially fertile ground for her work.

In 1941, again inspired by Cartier-Bresson’s example, Levitt, a reluctant traveler, went to Mexico City with a friend to photograph there. Initially struggling with the challenge of working in new environment, she was eventually able to find her artistic footing, producing a body of work that at once acknowledged rawer social realities while locating a subtle lyricism unique to the city and its people. It would be her only trip abroad.

Upon her return to New York City, Levitt picked up where she left off, picking up on more sober themes of melancholy, alienation, and what she referred to as “the deep repressions of the unyoung.” After having photographed for a decade, Levitt collaborated with her friend, the writer and critic James Agee, to edit and sequence a book of her New York photographs. Envisioning the project as an urban counterpart to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his 1941 collaboration with Walker Evans, Agee wrote an extensive essay to accompany Levitt’s pictures that heralded their lyric qualities, the sum of which presented “unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto.” After a series of setbacks, the book, eventually given the title A Way of Seeing, was not published until nearly two decades later in 1965.

In the Street

In the mid-1940s, along with her friend and patron, Janice Loeb, Levitt began to shoot footage around New York City with a home movie camera. They were joined by James Agee, who encouraged them to conceive of an experimental project that would serve as a cinematic extension of Levitt’s still photographs. This led the three of them to collaborate on the pioneering short film that was first screened in 1949 and then released in 1952 under the title In the Street, a forerunner of the cinéma verité style. By the end of the 1940s and for the next two decades, filmmaking became Levitt’s primary occupation.

Color / Subway / 1980s

In 1959, Levitt was granted a Guggenheim fellowship to experiment with “the latest techniques in colour photography.” Her Leica loaded with colour slide film, she walked some of the same streets she had frequented in the 30s and 40s, newly attentive to the chromatic character of her compositions. After the bulk of her slides were stolen by a burglar in 1970, Levitt redoubled her efforts, photographing throughout the decade with renewed zeal, developing an intuitive system of colour that was at once transporting and transparent. In 1974, a continuous projection of forty of Levitt’s slides were featured at MoMA in New York, after which she began to realise select images as dye transfer prints.

Around the same time, Levitt also decided to revisit the subterranean theatre of New York City subway as a site to make pictures, having served as a decoy for Walker Evans’s subway project work more than three decades earlier. With her subjects largely stationary in train cars and platforms, Levitt attended to the nuances of expression and gesture, recording quiet dramas amid unflattering light and cramped quarters.

From the 1980s onwards, Levitt continued to photograph, but only intermittently, working mainly in black and white, both in the city and outside it.

Text from Fundación MAPFRE

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'New York' 1975

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1975
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) 'Brooklyn, New York' 1982

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
c. 1982
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
Nd
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1971
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009)
New York
1976
Gelatin silver print
© Film Documents LLC, courtesy Zander Galerie, Cologne

Fundación MAPFRE
KBr Photography Center
Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 93 272 31 80 (Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)

Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): Closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11am – 7pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

Museum Ephraim-Palais website

Exhibition: ‘Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters’ at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin

Exhibition dates: 18th July, 2025 – 18th January, 2026

Curators: Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, featuring contributions from junior curators of the Refik Veseli School

André Kirchner (German, b. 1958) 'Stralauer Straße, Ecke Waisenstraße' from the series 'Nachtrag Berlin' 1990-1992 ('Stralauer Straße, corner of Waisenstraße' from the series 'Addendum Berlin') from the exhbition 'Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters' at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin, July 2025 - January 2026

André Kirchner (German, b. 1958)
Stralauer Straße, Ecke Waisenstraße
From the series Nachtrag Berlin 1990-1992
Silver bromide baryta paper
34cm x 46cm
Collection of the Berlin City Museum Foundation
© André Kirchner
Reproduction: Dorin Alexandru Ionita, Berlin

This is one of those wonderful, idiosyncratic exhibitions that Art Blart has always liked to promote: small, occluded histories that have great importance to local people; spaces and histories that deserve to be acknowledged in a wider sphere; microcosms of everyday life, work and encounters expanded into the macrocosm of the universe, making us aware of the importance of the seemingly in/consequential in this dance of death we call life.

“This exhibition delves into how these spaces have fostered social and cultural exchange since the 19th century, becoming living capsules of history and community. They reflect the complexities of urban life, showcasing how people shape their surroundings and creating a unique atmosphere that has long inspired artists.” (Press release)

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Hans Baluschek (German, 1870-1935) 'Fleisch am Knochen' (Meat on the Bone) 1924 from the exhbition 'Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters' at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin, July 2025 - January 2026

Hans Baluschek (German, 1870-1935)
Fleisch am Knochen (Meat on the Bone)
Berlin, 1924
Pen and black ink on paper
27.7cm x 35.2cm
Collection of the Berlin City Museum Foundation
Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt, Berlin

Heinrich Zille (German, 1858-1929)
“Eine kleine Freundin hat doch jedermann, eine kleine Freundin braucht man dann und wann…” (“Everyone has a little friend, and one needs a little friend now and then…”)
Berlin, 1924
Lithograph on laid paper
45.5cm x 36.8cm
Collection of the Berlin City Museum Foundation

Mathèos Florakis (Greek, b. 1935)
Naunynstraße, Hinterhof
1979
Coloured lithograph on paper
59cm x 42cm
© MathËos Florakis – Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt Berlin

Manfred Butzmann (German, b. 1942)
Giebelwand (Chausseestraße 16) (Gable wall (Chausseestraße 16))
1988
Watercolour on laid paper
49.8cm x 34cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt, Berlin

Doris Leue (German, b. 1954) 'Hirschhof' 1999

Doris Leue (German, b. 1954)
Hirschhof
Berlin, 1999
Pen and ink on paper
29.5cm x 42cm
Purchased with funds from the German Class Lottery Berlin by the Cultural Administration of the Berlin Senate, 2024
© Doris Leue
Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt, Berlin

Ever wondered about the secret lives tucked away behind Berlin’s bustling streets?

The Museum Ephraim-Palais is inviting you on a captivating journey with its new exhibition, “Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters,” running from July 18, 2025, to January 18, 2026.

From cozy residential nooks to bustling commercial hubs and serene artist retreats, Berlin’s courtyards tell the vibrant story of a city constantly evolving. This exhibition delves into how these spaces have fostered social and cultural exchange since the 19th century, becoming living capsules of history and community. They reflect the complexities of urban life, showcasing how people shape their surroundings and creating a unique atmosphere that has long inspired artists.

“Berlin Courtyards” brings together nearly 100 striking photographs and graphics from the vast collection of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Visitors will discover gems from legendary artists like Heinrich Zille, Hans Baluschek, and Manfred Hamm, alongside contemporary perspectives from photographers like André Kirchner and Günther Steffen.

Adding a fresh layer to the historical narrative are new artistic works by urban researchers Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, specially commissioned for the show. Their multi-sensory exploration of Wedding’s backyards, using texts, photos, videos, and sound, offers an intimate look at these overlooked spaces.

What’s more, the exhibition features a dynamic display of modern-day Berlin courtyards, crowdsourced through the Stadtmuseum Berlin’s “Berlin now!” photo campaign. You’ll see 40 framed photos on the walls, plus 50 smaller photo cards that visitors can rearrange, literally co-creating the exhibition experience. Due to overwhelming interest, the “Berlin now!” photo call has been extended until September 18, giving photography enthusiasts more time to submit their own unique views of Berlin’s courtyards. Selected photos will even be rotated into the framed display in October!

Adding another exciting dimension, junior curators from the Refik-Veseli School in Kreuzberg, mentored by Yella Hoepfner, will share their own “courtyard stories” across five dedicated areas within the Museum Ephraim-Palais, including spaces within the “BerlinZEIT” permanent exhibition. Their personal narratives will engage in a dialogue with objects from the Stadtmuseum Berlin’s collection, offering fresh, youthful insights.

Don’t miss this chance to experience Berlin from a new perspective, delving into the hidden heart of its neighborhoods through the eyes of both historical and contemporary artists.

Press release from Museum Ephraim-Palais

Rudolf Dührkoop (German, 1848-1918)
From the portfolio Das malerische Berlin, Band 1 (Picturesque Berlin, Volume 1)
1911

Ludwig Binder (German born Serbia, 1928-1980)
Hofeinfahrt Kottbusser Straße 6 (Courtyard entrance at Kottbusser Straße 6)
c. 1976
Ludwig Binder’s Photographic Estate – Positives – 43 images titled Ausländer-Läden-Kino
Photograph
24cm x 18.2cm
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Ludwig Binder

Manfred Hamm (German, b. 1944) 'Goerz'sche Höfe, Rheinstraße' 1978

Manfred Hamm (German, b. 1944)
Goerz’sche Höfe, Rheinstraße
Berlin, 1978
Photograph, baryta paper
22cm x 28.1cm
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin

Reinhard Münch (German, b. 1951)
From the series Das Haus Dunckerstr. 16 in Berlin 1058 (The House at Dunckerstrasse 16 in Berlin, 1058)
1985
Baryta paper, silver gelatin
24.9cm x 24.9cm
© Reinhard Münch

Ergun Çağatay (Turkish, 1937-2018)
From the report: “Türken in Deutschland. Die zweite Generation” (“Turks in Germany. The Second Generation”)
1989/90

Werner Brunner (German, b. 1941) From the series 'Berliner Wandbilder' (Berlin Murals) 1974-1990 (Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Esmarchstraße 26, I. Hinterhof)

Werner Brunner (German, b. 1941)
Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Esmarchstraße 26, I. Hinterhof
From the series Berliner Wandbilder (Berlin Murals) 1974-1990
Hahnemühle Digital Fine Art, inkjet printing
30cm x 20cm
© Werner Brunner
Reproduction: Dorin Alexandru Ionita, Berlin

Dr. Barbara Hansen. '"Motive aus dem Osten Berlins 1993-1998. Höfe", Hof in Ostberlin' um 1995 ('"Motives from East Berlin 1993-1998. Courtyards" Courtyard in East Berlin' around 1995)

Dr. Barbara Hansen
“Motive aus dem Osten Berlins 1993-1998. Höfe”, Hof in Ostberlin
(“Motives from East Berlin 1993-1998. Courtyards” Courtyard in East Berlin)
Berlin, around 1995
Colour photograph on PE paper
Approx. 10 x 15cm (HF and QF)
© Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin

Unknown photographer
Hoffest in der Falckensteinstraße 27 (Garden festival at Falckensteinstraße 27)
1920
Postcard
From the collection of Eberhard Müller

Installation view of the exhibition 'Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters' at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin, July 2025 - January 2026

Installation views of the exhibition Berlin Courtyards: Between Everyday Life, Work, and Encounters at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, Berlin, July 2025 – January 2026
Photos: Alexander Rentsch

Yella Hoepfner. 'Junior Curator at Refik-Veseli-Schule' 2025

Berlin backyards have a lot to tell. Since the industrial revolution in the 19th century at the latest, Berlin has been a center of attraction for people from other regions of Germany and from other countries. The history of the city has therefore always been a history of migration.

Due to enormous population growth, spatial expansion and structural densification, Berlin is characterised by backyards like no other city. They are used for residential, educational, commercial, artistic, culinaric and many other purposes. Their history is diverse, just like the people who live there. With the special exhibition “Berliner Höfe” (Berlin Backyards) on the 3rd floor of the Museum Ephraim-Palais, the Stadtmuseum Berlin invites you to explore these urban spaces between past and present.

The backyards are exemplary of urban coexistence with all its contradictions. They show how people shape space. And they encourage us to take a closer look: What can backyards tell us about Berlin? What about ourselves? In short: What is going on there?

Graphics, photography and history

The special atmosphere of the Berlin backyards has repeatedly inspired graphic artists, draughtsmen and photographers to create images. In the exhibition, highlights from the museum collection meet the artistic works of urban researchers Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, which were created especially for “Berliner Höfe”. Using sounds and light, they deal with different sensory impressions from backyards that Örs and Varatharajah encountered in Wedding.

In addition, the junior curators from the Refik Veseli School in Kreuzberg and their mentor Yella Hoepfner present their own spaces in the permanent exhibition “BerlinZEIT” on the first and second floors of the museum. Their individual stories interact with objects from the collection.

Biographical data

Duygu Örs is a researcher, art educator and curator specialising in cultural and urban research. Since 2019 she has headed the education and mediation work of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, since 2025 with Jas Wenzel. At the Institute for Sociology and Cultural Organisation (ISKO) at Leuphana University Lüneburg, she is working on the role of the museum in the ‘Right to the City’ movement.‍ She is also a co-founder of the curatorial research collective Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC). Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Sinthujan Varatarajah (சிந்துஜன் வரதராஜா) writes and researches in Berlin. As a political geographer, Varatarajah focuses on issues of statelessness, im-/mobility and displacement from the perspective of infrastructure, logistics and building culture. Varatarajah has published several books since 2022. Varatarajah’s next book, ‘Where Time Stands Still’, will be published by Carl Hanser Verlag in spring 2026.

Text from the Museum Ephraim-Palais website

Lotti Nass (German, b. 1950) 'Hof mit Baum' (Courtyard with Tree) 2010

Andreas Metz
In der Sandkiste (In the Sandbox)
2020

Birgit Hantke. 'Waldstraße, Moabit' 2021

Andrea Steiner. 'Doch die Toscana?' (But Tuscany?) 2025

Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah
Untitled
2025

Museum Ephraim-Palais
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10178 Berlin

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Exhibition: ‘Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing’ at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Exhibition dates: 13th June, 2025 – 4th January, 2026

Curator: Maria L. Kelly, High Museum of Art assistant curator of photography

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) 'Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37' 1953 from the exhibition 'Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing' at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 - January 2026

Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991)
Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation #37
1953
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Adair and Joe B. Massey in honour of Gus Kayafas

Aaron Siskind was recognised for the ways he rendered his surroundings into often stark shapes and forms, which reflected his fascination with contemporary trends in abstract art. He was an influential teacher at Chicago’s Institute of Design, which was founded by László Moholy-Nagy as the New Bauhaus. This image of a person flying or falling comes from a series Siskind made of the contorted bodies of divers plunging into Lake Michigan. He masterfully created its disorienting effect through tight focus on the floating figure without contextual elements.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

While contemporarily AI-powered technologies are revolutionising the way we interact with and consume media, enabling us to “to process and analyse vast amounts of data quickly, making it easier to find and access the information we need” in the 1920s and 1930s there was also a revolution in the way artists (and their use of the camera) viewed and felt the world – one not based on information, image quality or duplicity in the veracity of the image but one based on the word, perspective – be that point of view, context, close ups, surreality, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, or radical experimentation.

In this departure from traditional photographic methods, “New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.” (Press release)

To me, this New Vision is about experiencing different perspectives – experiencing, sensing, feeling and seeing the world in a new light. After the disasters and machine-ations, the destruction of a conservative way of life before the First World War, here was a way to grasp hold of (and picture) the speed of a new world order, the dreams of physiological analysis, the diversity of new identities, and the fluidity of rapidly evolving technological and social cultures.

While today this (r)evolution continues at an ever expanding pace with the consumption of huge amounts of information and images, I believe it may be advantageous to rest for a while on certain experiences and images … so that we let the daggers drop from our eyes, to ‘not make images’ in our minds eye but just to be present in the viewing of a photograph, so that we appreciate and understand every aspect of the great life spirit of this wondrous earth.

Then and now, new vision.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The New Vision movement of the 1920s and 1930s offered a revolutionary approach to seeing the world. It represented a rebellion against traditional photographic methods and an embrace of avant-garde experimentation and innovative techniques. László Moholy-Nagy, an artist and influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Germany, named this period of expansion the “New Vision.” Today, the term encompasses photographic developments that took place between the two World Wars in Europe, America, and beyond. New Vision photographers foregrounded inventive techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints. These approaches – which also extended to more defined movements like Surrealism – spoke to a desire to find and see different perspectives in the wake of World War I.

Uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s photography collection, the exhibition traces the movement’s impact, from its origins in the 1920s to today, and demonstrates its long-standing effect on subsequent generations.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing

Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages, and light studies, and made photographs that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints.

This exhibition, uniting more than one hundred works from the High’s robust photography collection, will trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham, and Moholy-Nagy will be complemented by a multitude of works by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Installation view of the exhibition 'Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing' at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 - January 2026

Installation views of the exhibition Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 – January 2026
Photos: Mike Jensen

The High Museum of Art presents “Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” (June 13, 2025 – Jan. 4, 2026), an exhibition uniting more than 100 works from the High’s robust photography collection to trace the impact of the New Vision movement from its origins in the 1920s to today. Works include century-old photographs exemplifying themes from the movement and modern and contemporary images that emphasise the relevance of current artistic and social practices as a response to the technological and cultural changes that occurred in the early 20th century.

“This exhibition provides an opportunity to illuminate photographers’ creativity and innovative practices, all inspired by the progression of the medium in the 1920s and 30s,” said High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk. “Many of the works are rarely on view, so it will be an exciting experience for visitors to see them and learn about photographers’ abilities as they reflect reality while experimenting with technique and perspective.” Named by the influential German artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy, the “New Vision” comprised an expansive variety of photographic exploration that took place in Europe, America and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement was characterised by its departure from traditional photographic methods. New Vision photographers foregrounded experimental techniques, including photograms, photomontages and compositions that favoured extreme angles and unusual viewpoints, and these extended to movements such as surrealism and constructivism.

“Experiments in Seeing” features nearly 100 photographers. It also demonstrates how the New Vision movement revolutionised the medium of photography in the early 20th century in response to the great societal, economic and technological shifts spurred by the upheaval of the two World Wars. Photographs from that era by Ilse Bing, Alexander Rodchenko, Imogen Cunningham and Moholy-Nagy have been complemented by a multitude of photographs by modern and contemporary artists such as Barbara Kasten, Jerry Uelsmann, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Abelardo Morell to demonstrate the long-standing impact of the movement on subsequent generations.

The first section of the exhibition delves into experimental techniques that foreground the light-sensitive aspects of photography, followed by works created through in-camera manipulations or additions to the surfaces of the prints. Subsequent sections explore inventive methods of capturing unexpected views of the world articulated with radical angles or detailed close-ups. Other works showcase surreal approaches to subjects such as humanlike forms and bodies, the use of mirrors and doubling, and everyday scenes heightened by uncanny moments or distorted through the interplay of light, shadow and water.

“Not only does the early 20th century and its art movements continue to be influential, but that time also echoes our current moment – one that feels similarly consequential and innovative with the development of new emerging technologies and methods of communicating,” said Maria L. Kelly, the High’s assistant curator of photography. “The movements and happenings of a century ago are akin to those of today and those shown in the exhibition. There remains a desire for alternative ways to see and approach the world through art, and particularly through photography.”

“Photography’s New Vision: Experiments in Seeing” is on view in the Lucinda W. Bunnen Galleries for Photography located on the Lower Level of the High’s Wieland Pavilion.

Press release from the High Museum of Art

“Light was considered the medium that permits photography. But for me it became the main subject: the protagonist of my photography.”

Ilse Bing, c. 1920s

Light Experimentation

After the trauma of World War I, many artists felt compelled to reconsider conventional art making methods to better reflect and engage with the world. Some photographers turned their attention to the essential element of photography: light. Through innovative visual investigations, cameraless photographs were produced, viewes of the world altered, and scientific discoveries made.

Experimentations with illumination and light-sensitive paper in the darkroom gave rise to photograms, enabling artists to pursue abstraction and to wield light as a sculptural element. The process of solarisation – reversing tones in a print using a flash of light during developing – provided an unconventional view of a subject. Early attempts to capture traces of light on film led to scientific innovations such as using strove lights to freeze movement, depicting magnetic fields, and tracing electrical currents on light sensitive paper.

These processes aim to reveal the invisible, with the elements of change as a constant companion. While artists can insert some control over the elements, the process ultimately shapes the final image. Many artworks in this section exist as unique prints, challenging the assumption of the reproducibility of photography, and emphasising the singularity of the creative moment.

Wall text from the exhibition

Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) 'The Light That Never Was on Land or Sea' c. 1925 from the exhibition 'Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing' at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 2025 - January 2026

Francis Bruguière (American, 1879-1945)
The Light That Never Was on Land or Sea
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1977)
Light Drawing #8 (Smoke)
1938-1939
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Hilary Leff and Elliot Groffman

Ilse Bing (American born Germany, 1899-1998)
Untitled [Seated Woman with Necklace, Solarized]
1943
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Estate of Ilse Bing Wolff

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Camera Movement on Flashlight, Chicago
c. 1949
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Dr. Robert L. and Lucinda W. Bunnen, Collections Council Acquisition Fund, Jackson Fine Art, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer and Murphy, Jane and Clay Jackson, Beverly and John Baker, Roni and Sid Funk, Gloria and Paul Sternberg, and Jeffery L. Wigbels
© 2018 The Estate of Harry Callahan

Abelardo Morell (American born Cuba, b. 1948)
Still Life with Wine Glass: Photogram on 20″ x 24″ Film
2006
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography
© Abelardo Morell

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948)
Lightning Fields 182
2009
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2012
© Hiroshi Sugimoto

Inspired by William Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography who was fascinated with electromagnetic conduction, Hiroshi Sugimoto began applying charges of electricity directly to unexposed photographic film. After months of honing his technique in the darkroom, he managed to achieve remarkable results with a handheld wand charged by a generator. His Lightning Fields photographs are made without a camera or lens. Here, the abstract visual trace of an electric charge measuring over 400,000 volts sweeps across the composition, reading like the textures of a human hand, the upward tentacles of a fern, or the stark branches of a tree.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Hans-Christian Schink (German, b. 1961)
2/26/2010, 7:54 am – 8:54 am, S36° 49.622′ E 175° 47.340′
2010
From the series 1h
© Hans-Christian Schink

Abelardo Morell (American born Cuba, b. 1948)
Camera Obscura: View of Philadelphia from Loews Hotel Room #3013 with Upside Down Bed, April 14th, 2014
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art Atlanta, gift of Dr. Roger Hartl
© Abelardo Morell

V. Elizabeth Turk (American, b. 1945)
Calaeno
2018
Van Dyke print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Elizabeth Turk

V. Elizabeth Turk is an Atlanta-based photographer whose work explores the connections between the human body and the natural world. To make this print, Turk used an analog process from the 1800s that involves coating a large sheet of paper with light-sensitive chemicals. She then arranged her model on top of the sheet and exposed it to light, creating a ghostly silhouette, before repeating the exposure with plants. The resulting photogram is a unique image in which botanical forms intersect with the body, alluding to bones, veins, and skin and suggesting a visceral bond between humans and the environment.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

“The limits of photography are incalculable; everything is so recent that even the mere act of searching may lead to creative results. […] The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as of the pen.”

László Moholy-Nagy 1928

Radical Viewpoints

From photography’s inception in 1839, camera technology involved cumbersome equipment and time-consuming development processes until the advent of lightweight cameras in the 1920s. Photographers were then able to work more nimbly, transforming photography into a medium capable of capturing fleeting moments, unusual viewpoints, and multiple perspectives. The exploration of unexpected angles became a hallmark of New Vision photography. Sharp diagonals, extreme vantage points, and shortened perspectives opened novel pathways of perceiving otherwise commonplace environments.

Alexander Rodchenko, a pioneer in this method, championed the camera’s ability to reveal, stating, “in order to teach man to see from all viewpoints, it is necessary to photograph […] from completely unexpected viewpoints and in unexpected positions […] We don’t see what we are looking at. We don’t see marvellous perspectives.” This approach aimed to provide a fuller impression of subjects, prompting viewers to seek and appreciate what might otherwise be overlooked.

Though these early photographs may not appear groundbreaking today, their makers’ carefully considered methods transferred how photography is used. This is evident in photographers’ creative interpretations of their surroundings over the past century.

Wall text from the exhibition

Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956)
Sbor na demonstratsia (Gathering for a Demonstration)
1928
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Joseph and Yolandra Alexander, Moscow/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
© Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Alexander Rodchenko was a key figure in the movements of New Vision and Constructivism – abstract and functional art that reflected an industrial society. Advocating “to achieve a revolution in our visual thought,” he explored various methods, such as photographing from unexpected angles, to capture dynamic views and expose new realities. With a new, lightweight 35 mm camera, he often photographed from his apartment balcony to create dramatic scenes of the street below. The perspective in this photograph flattens the building’s stories into one visual field, giving the image a theatrical quality as an onlooker peers over the railing.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
The Bridge
1929
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Arnold H. Crane
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

A central figure among twentieth-century American photographers, Walker Evans created works in his early career that sample from the New Vision aesthetic, which he may have encountered while abroad in Paris in 1926. His photographs of New York City, made after he returned to the United States, feature dramatically angled or cropped scenes of architecture and city life. Evans made numerous photographic studies of the Brooklyn Bridge from both below and on the bridge, portraying it less as a recognisable landmark and more as a hulking expanse whose form fills each tight frame.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian 1895-1946)
Stage Set for Madame Butterfly
1931
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Moholy-Nagy, a leader of the New Vision, had an expansive artistic practice that included painting, photography, sculpture, film, and more. As a teacher at the Bauhaus, which connected art and industry, he believed in technology’s potential to advance art and society. In 1929, he became set designer at the Kroll Opera House and created avant-garde sets with translucent and perforated materials, often making light itself a sculptural element. Lucia Moholy, a photographer, writer, teacher, and Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, was commissioned as Kroll’s stage photographer. In this image, which either artist may have made, the sharp angle shot from above complicates the set of Madame Butterfly, emphasising intersecting, moving elements and heightening areas of light and shadow.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983)
Esme Swimming, Parkroyal on Pickering, Singapore
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Irene Zhou
© Lucas Foglia

Close Ups

Similar to the practice of using unusual angles to offer unexpected perspectives, some photographers began capturing highly detailed, close-up views of objects. This approach affords a study of texture, pattern, and structure that may otherwise go unnoticed by the human eye. By eliminating surroundings that could offer a narrative, the physicality of the object becomes the primary focus, allowing it to transcend beyond its everyday existence.

Practitioners of straight photography in the United States and the concurrent New Objectivity movement in Germany shared a core desire to unearth a balance of the familiar and the foreign within intricate images of forms. While Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston perfected carefully composed studies of plants and other natural matter, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Alexander Rodchenko, and Ralph Steiner explored scientific and industrial objects. Such images celebrated the technological advancements of the time and revealed how mechanical structures often mimic those found in nature, suggesting a shared framework, and a shared beauty, between humanmade and natural. The emphasis on detail and abstraction invites viewers to reconsider their perceptions of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in the world around them.

Wall text from the exhibition

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Americanus
1929
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976)
Agave Design I
c. 1920
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation
© The Imogen Cunningham Trust

Edward Weston (American 1886-1958)
Palma Cuernavaca II
1925
Palladium print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection to mark the retirement of Gudmund Vigtel
© Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents

Ralph Steiner (American, 1899-1986)
Electrical Switches
1929
Gelatin silver print
8 x 10 5/16 inches
Purchase with funds from Georgia-Pacific Corporation

Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999)
Weed Against Sky, Detroit
1948
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the Callahan and Hollinger Families
© 2018 The Estate of Harry Callahan

Eugenia de Olazabal (Mexican, b. 1936)
Espinas
c. 1985
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of the artist

“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.”

Susan Sontag, 1973

Surreality

Surrealism emerged as an artistic movement in reaction to the horrors of World War I. The often disconcerting imagery and literature of the movement reflected a world that felt disorienting and chaotic and captured how the very foundations of reason and humanity were tested and questioned through the realities of war. In his Surrealist Manifesto (1924), French writer Andre Breton advocates for a rejection of rational ways of approaching the world in four of dreams and imagination as pathways to new creative expressions.

Photography played an important role in the Surrealist movement. Artists valued how the medium could capture spontaneous moments that reveal the unexpected, be manipulated to stage scenes, or be altered with darkroom processes. They harness photography in a multitude of ways to create dreamlike and unconscious associations with reality. In these galleries, artists explore uncanny moments and create links to the human psyche by focusing on humanlike forms and fragmented body parts, mirrored and doubled views, and the impact of light and shadows in space.

Wall text from the exhibition

Eugène Atget (French, 1857-1927)
Men’s Fashions (Avenue des Gobelins)
1925, printed 1956
Gelatin silver print
Purchase

Eugène Atget was the great chronicler of Paris at the turn of the century. His vast photographic archive captures a city on the precipice of modernisation. Though his photographs of empty city streets were documentary in nature, the Surrealists admired their dreamlike quality and claimed Atget as one of their own despite his protestations. They believed any photograph could shed its original context and intent when viewed with a surrealist sensibility. Atget’s photograph of mannequins peering out of a shop window appealed to the movement by embodying the uncanny valley, where the human likeness of a nonhuman entity evokes both affinity and discomfort in viewers.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982)
Composition
1932, printed 1972
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Dr. Joe B. Massey in honor of Maria L. Kelly

Florence Henri is well known for her manipulations of light and form that create complex, surrealist scenes. She used angled mirrors to frame, obscure, and replicate portions of scenes to dissolve a sense of perspective and space, as seen in this still life comprising mirrors, pears, and an image of the sea. After only one semester studying under László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus in 1927, Henri shifted her focus from painting to photography and began using various experimental techniques such as photomontage, multiple exposures, photograms, and negative printing.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Barbara Kasten (American, b. 1936)
Construct NYC
1984
Dye destruction print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
© Barbara Kasten

Barbara Kasten’s art is as much about the process of setting up innovative still life scenes as it is about the photographs she makes of them. Her Constructs series focuses on large-scale complex assemblages that she builds in her studio using a wide variety of materials, including painted wood, plaster, mirrors, screens, and fibers. Her work is not digitally altered; instead, she complicates the scene using mirrors and light, much in the tradition of Florence Henri, whose photograph is also on view in the exhibition.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Manipulations

This final section features photographers from the New Vision period to the present day who experiment with physically manipulating photographs. Through approaches such as double exposure, photomontage, surface alteration, and multilayering, they challenge and expand our perceptions of reality. The artworks in this section prioritise the creative process through labour, intention, intervention, and theatricality.

Double exposures is the process of photographing multiple images with the same negative within the camera, resulting in layered images that often provide a frenetic, multifaceted view of a scene. In contrast to the in-camera process of double exposure, photomontage combines separate images in the darkroom to produce a final photograph that emphasises the image’s artifice and absurdity. Physically disrupting the surface of photographs with alterations such as adding unnatural colour, drawing connections, stitching into prints, or inscribing texts augments the visual experience and offers emotional and narrative depth. Finally, whether through ancient visual techniques like the camera obscure or new technologies like digital screens, these artists create enigmatic scenes by layering and physically transforming subject, composition, and image.

Wall text from the exhibition

Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992)
Protest
1940
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase

Charles Swedlund (American, b. 1935)
31 St. Beach
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Steven Nordman
© Charles Swedlund

Jerry Uelsmann (American, 1934-2022)
Untitled
1964
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum

Lucinda Bunnen (American, 1930-2022)
Untitled
1974
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Lawrence and Alfred Fox Foundation for the Ralph K. Uhry Collection
© Lucinda Bunnen

Duane Michals (American, b. 1932)
Untitled
1989
From the Indomitable Spirit Portfolio
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (American, b. 1982)
Studio (0X5A8180)
2021
Archival pigment print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Foundation
© Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Noémie Goudal (French, b. 1984)
Phoenix V
2021
Dye coupler print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase through funds provided by patrons of Collectors Evening 2023

Noémie Goudal visualises “deep time” (geological history of the planet) and paleoclimatology (study of past climates) to challenge our perception of the world. Referring to the ancient continental split two billion years ago that formed South America and Africa, this image features the Phoenix atlantica, a palm tree that grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Goudal arranged strips of photographic prints of the palms made on one continent in front of the physical palms on the other and rephotographed the scene. The resulting image interweaves the two continents, creating a glitchy, kaleidoscopic view meant to unsettle our sense of stability and the constancy of the planet.

Text from the High Museum of Art website

Naima Green (American, b. 1992)
It Lingers Sweetly
2022
Pigmented inkjet print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the LGBTQIA+ Photography Centennial Initiative

Naima Green’s practice centres connection and collaboration to cast a tender lens on her own queer community of colour. Her lyrical portraits take shape in intimate domestic spaces and airy outdoor environments that embody havens for the people in those spaces. Through double exposure and serial photographs, she provides what she calls “multiple entry points” into a moment in time, translating movements and emotions into a single image. She explains her interest in double exposure “as a means of capturing things that can’t be held in just one way … ,” allowing her to “play with loosening the narrative and letting go of some control.”

Text from the High Museum of Art website

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Fahey/Klein Gallery website

Exhibition: ‘Paul Outerbridge: Photographs’ at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 25th September – 8th November, 2025

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959) 'Girl with Fan' c. 1936 from the exhibition 'Paul Outerbridge: Photographs' at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, September - November 2025

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Girl with Fan
c. 1936
Vintage color carbo photograph
17 x 13 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

I think I was born in the wrong era!

My favourite era in the history of photography is the period between the wars.

The avant-garde photographers of the period were so inventive, challenging the act of looking through modern photographs featuring radical perspective, fragmentation, scale, concept, construction, colour, aesthetics, identity, gender, fashion, performance, photogram, photo collage, to name just a few.

Favourites include Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) and her magnificent book MÉTAL (1928) with its dissection of the Eiffel Tower; Florence Henri (Swiss born United States, 1893-1982) and her experimental compositions featuring mirrors and reflections; Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1954) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1972) and their subversion of gender norms; August Sander (German, 1876-1964) and his archetypal photographs from “People of the 20th Century”; Alexander Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) and his revolutionary photographs; Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) revealing photographs of New York subway passengers; Jakob Tuggener’s (Swiss, 1904-1988) alchemical photographs picturing the world or work and industry; Helmar Lerski‘s (Swiss, 1871-1956) metamorphosis of the human face; and Margaret Bourke-White‘s (American, 1906-1971) modern industrial America to name, again, just a few.

There are so many fantastic photographers from this period, pushing the boundaries of what was possible in photography without loosing sight of the stories they wanted to tell, and the immediacy and presence of the photograph.

Paul Outerbridge Jr. is another from the period, a much under appreciated artist in the vanguard of experimental photography, “a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form…

Throughout his career, Outerbridge pursued abstraction as both a visual language and an artistic philosophy. His still lifes, nudes, and commercial commissions all demonstrate his preoccupation with fractured planes, geometric tension, and the transformation of the commonplace into the extraordinary.” (Press release)

That’s what I like about this man’s photographs: their bold but radical simplicity, clear visualisation of the pictorial statement, and formal abstracted beauty.

His photographs are, and will remain, a joy to be/hold.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959) 'Ide Collar' 1922 from the exhibition 'Paul Outerbridge: Photographs' at Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, September - November 2025

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Ide Collar
1922
Platinum photograph
4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Wine Glass on Checker Board
1922
Vintage platinum photograph
4 1/8 x 3 3/16 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Jello Mould in Dish
1923
Vintage platinum photograph
5 x 4 3/4 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Men’s Scarfs
1924
Vintage platinum photograph
4 5/8 x 3 7/8 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Woman in Bed (under satin sheets)
c. 1933
Vintage silver gelatin photograph
15 3/8 x 13 9/16 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present Paul Outerbridge: Photographs, a landmark exhibition celebrating the visionary work of Paul Outerbridge (1896-1958), one of the most resourceful and provocative photographers of the twentieth century. This exhibition brings together a rare selection of Carbo prints, silver gelatin photographs, and platinum prints, tracing the evolution of a modernist whose daring vision helped redefine the possibilities of photography through Cubist experimentation and radical abstraction.

Outerbridge emerged in the 1920s as a bold innovator, transforming ordinary objects, such as milk bottles, collars, eggs, into fractured Cubist constructions of light and form. His platinum and silver gelatin prints reduced subjects to intersecting planes and geometric rhythms, revealing a structural beauty aligned with the avant-garde movements of his time. These works positioned him among artists and contemporaries such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Edward Steichen, and demonstrate his embrace of Cubism’s challenge: to fracture reality and reassemble it as pure abstraction.

In the 1930s, Outerbridge turned to the technically demanding Carbo process, creating some of the most vibrant and enduring color photographs of the era. Here too, abstraction was his guiding principle. Color became a tool not just for description, but for reimagining form, flattening, faceting, and animating planes into startling compositions that rival the abstract canvases of Picasso and Kandinsky. His photographs were hailed as both artistic and technical sensations. As Outerbridge observed:

“One very important difference between monochromatic and color photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state.”

Outerbridge’s practice blurred the boundaries between fine art and commercial photography. His Ide Collar (1922), published in Vanity Fair, was more than an advertisement. It was celebrated as both functional and formally radical. A chessboard of fractured black-and-white squares disrupted by the crisp curve of a collar. Duchamp himself hung the photograph in his Paris studio, recognising its affinity with the readymade and its radical modernist edge.

Paul Outerbridge’s work appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, House Beautiful, and McCall’s, and in exhibitions worldwide. After relocating to Southern California in 1943, he continued to write about and practice photography until his death in 1958. Today, his technical virtuosity, daring subject matter, and relentless pursuit of beauty secure his place as a pioneer who expanded the medium’s expressive range.

Text from the Fahey/Klein Gallery website

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Girl in Bathing Suit
1936
Color carbo photograph
13 1/16 x 9 15/16 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Window with Plants
1937
Color carbo photograph
14 x 11 9/16 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Political Thinking
1938
Color carbo photograph
15 7/16 x 12 11/16 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Paul Outerbridge Jr. (American, 1896-1959)
Nude with Mask and Hat
c. 1936
Color carbo photograph
17 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches
© Paul Outerbridge; courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Fahey/Klein Gallery
148 North La Brea Avenue,
Los Ángeles, CA 90036

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