Just putting this out there in the ether of the cosmos because you never know, its spirit might hear you.
I am looking for a research fellowship or postdoc work in photography anywhere in the world.
I have been working at Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for years, 4 days a week making websites. This is because of my bipolar and anxiety disorder. It has been a job to get me through the tough times. But after my recent photographic research trip to Europe, I realise that I need more stimulus – to fully concentrate on photography at an elite level. To research and write a book on photography.
In 2021 I will have been an artist for 30 years and my first writings date from 1998. I have been writing Art Blart now for 10 years… a lot of research and writing for this cultural memory archive, perhaps used as the basis for a book on the spirit of photography in the 21st century. But I am open to any research project. I have to do something to be able to immerse myself fully in photography.
If you have any ideas or knowledge of friends with connections please let me know at bunyanth@netspace.net.au.
Thank you!
Marcus
New work
All photographs are from a new body of art work I am working on for 2020, provisionally titled ‘(How I) Wish You Were Here’, taken during my recent European research trip. These are difficult photographs to understand but please take the time (critical in looking at photographs) to feel them.
My mentor and friend Ian Lobb said: “This is the most difficult work to organise yet. There is something to see in every picture – but it is so subtle – not everyone will see it, but it is for people who look at pictures a lot. MG0028 (the yellow entrance with stone pillars) is lovely – the entrance painted a warm sickish colour, a sort of terrible colour aesthetically – and the cropping is just a little brutal: what is it really showing at this camera to subject distance?
But it all works brilliantly, and they are all like that – there are subtle things that can’t be traced: i.e. are they the photographer: or are they the camera or are they just inevitable in this world? It is a type of anti-spirituality meets spirituality… and any number of other meeting points.”
And my friend Elizabeth Gertsakis said: “Spatial as well as surface tactile. Fascinated randomness. The human figure appears as a singular frozen device. Post-apocalyptic as well.”
I said: the spirit has left the earth, the body; something NQR. Eventually, the whole purpose of the series is not to tell the viewer where they are in the world, just give little clues as the viewer moves through time and space… something that photography is very good at: disrupting time and space.
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
I love this gritty, inventive, subversive German photography from the late 1970s – early 1980s. Challenge me. Take me bleak places. Tell it like it is, baby…
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Something remarkable happened in the field of photography between 1975 and 1985: important galleries were established and photography increasingly became a coveted item on the art market. Suddenly, collecting and exhibiting photographs in museums was no longer the exception. Photography really stepped into the limelight in style at the so-called Mediendocumenta in 1977. Basic academic reference books were published and a large number of journals were founded. These include both periodicals that since that time have dominated the scholarly discourse, such as History of Photography and Fotogeschichte, as well as magazines designed for the broader public with an interest in photography, including Camera Austria, European Photography, Volksfoto, and Fotokritik.
Among this second group was a journal that was published between 1977 and 1985 with a total of 40 issues, for which its editor, Wolfgang Schulz, who had studied physics and then taught himself photography, chose a name that was as concise as it was ambitious: Fotografie. Zeitschrift internationaler Fotokunst (later Fotografie: Kultur jetzt). Today, this journal seems to have been almost completely forgotten. And yet the achievements of the editor and the contributing authors and photographers surely deserve a closer look. The mix of images and texts they came up with is an important resource for exploring a photography scene that, around 1980, was working hard to establish the medium as an independent art form. At the same time, the 40 issues of Fotografie exude the charm of the open-ended and were shaped by the personal predilections of their editor. An in-depth study of the journal lets us return to the origins of recent photographic history in Germany, which today – surprisingly enough – seem largely to have been buried in the dust of the past.
The exhibition is divided into four sections. It pays tribute to the photographic work of Wolfgang Schulz from the period around 1980, presents works by photographers that for the most part found their way into the MKG collection during that era, displays all 40 issues of the journal Fotografie (unfurling an impressive creative panorama), and lets contemporary witnesses have their say in video interviews as a kind of “oral history.”
Wolfgang Schulz was not merely one of the first journal editors to set himself the task of presenting “a complete overview of contemporary photography with a focus on German photography” but also a notable photographer in his own right. In his photography, as in his editorial work, Schulz tried to evade established norms, while also trying his hand at different styles and subjects. In his Ireland pictures, for example, he followed the narrative tradition of pictorial reportage but simultaneously created a strictly documentary-seeming typology of barns and their various manifestations. With a series of shots of undergrowth, he turned his attention to the unspectacular, and he also portrayed the protagonists on the photography scene who crossed his threshold. For the first time ever, the exhibition is showing his photographic works from the period around 1980.
The photography scene around 1980 was predominantly male: of 147 portfolios published in Fotografie, only 24 presented female photographers. One of the privileged few, Dörte Eißfeldt (b. 1950), combined in her work Große Liebe (True Love, 1980) photographic montage techniques with the serial principle, creating in the darkroom photograms with motifs from her own daily life. Her approach might be dubbed “poetic photography,” the term used by photographer Verena von Gagern (b. 1946) to describe the “representation of private realities.” Von Gagern made pictures in the late 1970s within the “emotional realm” of her own family, among them the image Barbara (1978). Petra Wittmar (b. 1955) pursued by contrast a stricter documentary concept. In her series Spielplätze (Playgrounds, 1979), she takes a critical look at the dreary world of the modern metropolis.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait 1918 Gelatin silver print Image: 11.4 × 8.6cm (4 1/2 × 3 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Some fabulous photographs in series in this posting, which document transformations in landscapes or intimate portraits of people at different times in their lives… and some challenging ones as well. My favourite photographs in series are not represented: Duane Michals narrative fairytales; Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills; and Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanks to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographers often record change through images in series, registering transformations in the world around them. Artists featured in the exhibition photographed faces and places over minutes, months, or years. Historical and contemporary photographs prompt reflection on the ways the passage of time impacts how we see people and spaces.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait 1923 Gelatin silver print Image: 8.9 × 11.7cm (3 1/2 × 4 5/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait 1933 Gelatin silver print Image: 8.9 × 11.4cm (3 1/2 × 4 1/2 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Artists have long used cameras to record change, documenting transformations in landscapes or intimate portraits of people at different times in their lives. Once. Again. Photographs in Series, on view July 9 – November 10, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, features historical and contemporary artists who have revisited people and places to make extended photographic series, prompting reflection on the impact of the passage of time – on photographers as well as their subjects.
The exhibition, drawn primarily from the collection of the Getty Museum, takes its cue from artist Gordon Parks’ trips to Brazil over several decades to document the life of Flávio da Silva. Parks’ photographs are on view in Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story, installed in the adjacent galleries of the Center for Photographs.
Photographing friends and family is a familiar pastime for many, and the exhibition includes the work of several artists who made masterful portraits of loved ones over the course of many years. Alfred Stieglitz photographed artist Georgia O’Keeffe frequently during their tumultuous 30 year relationship, and the photographs on view expose shifts in their rapport as well as changes in Stieglitz’s photographic style over time. Series by Harry Callahan of his wife Eleanor, Paul Strand of his wife, artist Rebecca Salsbury, and Julia Margaret Cameron of her niece Julia Jackson similarly offer fascinating reflections on the changes in relationships over time.
The exhibition also includes compelling contemporary portraits, including photojournalist Seamus Murphy’s record of the physical and emotional toll inflicted upon a family living in Afghanistan under rule of the Taliban, and Donna Ferrato’s documentation of a woman who fled an abusive relationship. Both series register the struggles as well as triumphs.
A number of artists in the exhibition document seasonal and man-made changes in the landscape. In a 1953 series by William A. Garnett, aerial photography is used to capture a walnut grove before and after the trees were felled to make way for a housing development. The startling perspective of Garnett’s images came to play an important role in the burgeoning environmental movement. Richard Misrach used his move to a new home in the hills above Berkeley, California, as an opportunity to take hundreds of photographs of the astonishing range of colours and atmospheric conditions surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset each evening. Several of his richly saturated sunset images are featured in the exhibition. Works by Roni Horn, Jem Southam, and Josef Sudek also trace changes in the natural world, to both political and poetic effect.
“‘Once again’ is a phrase repeated in a poem by William Wordsworth,” says Mazie Harris, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. “He was fascinated by the powerful feeling that arises when revisiting a familiar place. He’s experiencing his surroundings in real time and yet is constantly aware of his memories of being there before. The photographers in this exhibition conjure that same sensation. They offer us the opportunity to see people and places afresh, even as we track the powerful changes wrought by time.”
Once. Again. Photographs in Series, is on view July 9-November 10, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Mazie Harris, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 11/08/2019
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Backstage before Parade of Champions 2015 From the series Physie Courtesy of the artist
Picturing themselves
This is another strong exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, principally due to the integrity of the work and not the investigation of the theme for the exhibition, why take pictures?
I have always loved Alan Constable’s tactile cameras every since I first saw them. Constable is legally blind. He holds photographs of old cameras up to his eyes, a couple of inches away, and scans the images, committing them to memory. He then creates these most wonderful evocations of a seeing machine, almost as though he is transferring his in/sight into these in/operable, beautifully glazed structures. He twists two dimensional, photographic reality into these lumpy, misshapen sculptures, evocations of his memory and imagination. I have three of these cameras in my own collection. I treasure them.
Glen Sloggett’s works is, well… Glen Slogett’s work. What I mean by the statement is that you can always recognise his photographs through his signature as an artist. There is a delicious irony and dark humour present in his work… the cat / dead. The rose / a brothel. The scree of concrete / solidified. Slogett’s insightfulness into our existential condition is evidenced through his unique view of the world, pictured in thought provoking photographs. Nothing is quite as it seems. He has a fantastic eye and aesthetic. I remember the image Cheaper and Deeper (1996) from a book I saw many years ago and it so resonated with me. Just the sensibility of looking at these spaces and contexts. He pokes around in the strangeness of the world and reflects what he sees back to us: life hidden in plain sight, revealed in all its intricacies, in all its mundanity and glory. I really like his work.
Another artist I have a great affection for is David Wadelton. Again, the signature of his work is striking. You know it’s a Wadelton image. What I admire about his work is the persistence of his vision. His intellectual vision, his photographic vision. He sets out on a project and he puts his whole mind and soul into the work, documenting the shifting and changing spaces and places of Melbourne’s suburbs since 1975. What a great eye! The black and white objective newsagents, all Becher frontality, with this seeming emotional detachment when in fact each image is so emotionally charged – through the signage, and through the knowledge that these newsagents are disappearing from our city landscape. And then the colour, some might say kitsch, Suburban Baroque living rooms which picture “mid-century suburban interiors of the formerly working-class northern areas that were the destination of choice for many post-war immigrants from Europe.” Here a different technique, photographed at an angle, off to one side, from above, sometimes central, letting the spaces and colours speak for themselves. Now vanishing, these habitats redolent with pathos and longing for the motherland.
And then Lyndal Irons, an artist whose work I have never seen before. Again, beautifully composed images, the use of a limited colour palette and rouge highlights in Grooming Routine being particularly effective. There is something unnerving about the entire scenario – the fake tans, the too bright lipstick, the fervent admiration, the ecstatic posing… the winners having their photograph taken with their trophies while off to the side others watch (enviously?); the lines of young competitors and a photograph with the instructions: ‘Ideas For Photo Poses’ and ‘Make Sure The Photographer Can See your Number’. The whole charade reminds me of the hideous child beauty pageants in the good ol’ US of A. I would have liked to have seen more photographs from this body of work.
Where the exhibition fails is in its investigation into the theme, why take pictures? The exhibition does not interrogate with any rigour, in fact does not really scratch the surface of why we humans are so obsessed with taking photographs. Through the few lines of text that accompanies the exhibition (below), it offers a few titbits as way of remediation, a few possible ideas to cling to so as to answer the question: perhaps desire, perhaps obsession, curiosity, nostalgia and information. It then throws the photographic work of these artists at us as an answer, but what we are actually looking at is just representation, the outcome of the desire to picture, not an examination of the act itself. What the exhibition really needed was a thoroughly insightful text that examined our impulse to take pictures.
Here is a controversial statement. Every photograph is a self-portrait. What do I mean by this?
When we think back to the cave paintings of the Neolithic period, human beings picture the world around them by painting in colour on the rock that is earth. They picture themselves in that scene by painting what they know of the world around them. Through their imagination and creativity they place themselves in the scene – physically as hunters in the scene, and metaphorically through their relationship to the animals that they know and the objects that they carve, pictured on the cave walls. Theirs is a conscious decision to picture themselves as an infinite presence.
The same with photographs. Every time we press the shutter of a camera, it is a conscious decision to picture our relationship with the world. Through our will (to power), though our imagination and our desire, we place ourselves metaphorically (and physically when actually appear in the photograph) in every photograph. We stand behind the camera but imagine ourselves in that environment, have placed ourselves there to take the photograph. Every photograph is a self-portrait, one that establishes our relationship to the world, our identity, our values, who we are and how we react in each and every context.
These photographs are not memories at the time of their taking, although they make be taken under an impulse to memorialise. They will become memories, as when looking at old photo albums. They are not simply documents either, a recording of this time and place, because there is always the personal, the subjective relationship to the objective. Look at David Wadelton’s photographs of living rooms. Why was he present in all of these spaces? Just to observe, to document, to capture? No… he was their, to imagine, to create, to place himself at the scene, in the scene. Human beings make conscious choices to take photographs for all different kinds of reasons. But the one reason that is never mentioned is that, in reality, they are always picturing themselves.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Centre for Contemporary Photography for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs to view a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Why Make Pictures? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne Photographs: J. Forsyth
Why Take Pictures? returns to one of the fundamental questions in photography, to consider our desire-drive and obsession with taking photographs, the apparatus of the camera and diverse approaches of looking through, or at, the lens. Featuring work by Alan Constable (VIC), Michelle Tran (VIC), Lyndal Irons (NSW), Glenn Sloggett (VIC) and David Wadelton (VIC), Why Take Pictures? considers the divergent motivations and compulsions as to why we take images in the first place.
We all take pictures, leaving every one of us with an extensive collection of images, historically as physical artefacts, but now stored within our digital devices. These collections become vessels of information and nostalgia, desire and curiosity. Why Takes Pictures? interrogates how and why we build up these storehouses of images, as considered through the lens of five exceptional artists.
Traversing documentary, commercial, political and highly personal modes, Why Take Pictures? presents a broad cross-section of different approaches to making photographs. Whether documenting social environments in states of change, examining the discarded or overlooked, prying at the strange behaviour of humans; or through examining the obsession with the camera itself, the artists in Why Take Pictures? are driven to continue to take photographs, like an itch that can’t be scratched.
Press release from the Centre for Contemporary Photography 21/09/2019
Biographies
Alan Constable is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, painting and ceramics. His ceramic sculptures, which he began developing in 2007, reflects his life-long fascination with old cameras, which started at the age of eight when he would make replicas from cardboard cereal boxes. Constable’s finger impressions can be seen clearly on the clay surface, leaving the mark of the maker as a lasting imprint. Constable has been a regular studio artist at Arts Project Australia since 1991. Alongside selection in group exhibitions throughout Australia (including the Museum of Old and New Art in 2017), Constable has presented in a number of solo exhibitions including Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane; Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; South Willard (curated by Ricky Swallow), Los Angeles; Stills Gallery, Sydney; and Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne. Alan Constable is represented by Arts Projects Australia, Melbourne; Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney; and DUTTON, New York.
Hand-built from slabs of clay, Alan Constable’s charing sculptural cameras and optical devices … evoke and absolute obsession with the photographic apparatus. Legally blind, Constable creates his work through appropriating photographs from old books and magazines, holding the images close to his face and committing them to memory. Through recall, Constable reinterprets these images, transforming them from high-precision consumer objects, to tactile sculptures imbued with vitality, personality and warmth. Elegantly clunky, anthropomorphic and on the edge of the surreal, Constable’s compelling works all have ‘fictional’ apertures or viewfinders that can be physically seen through. Asking us to consider the functionality of vision, Constable’s ceramics have a human touch and sensibility that connects us directly to the devices we often consider merely utilitarian.
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled 2018 Earthenware and glaze 9 x 19 x 8cm Courtesy of the artist Alan Constable is represented by Arts Project Australia, Melbourne; Darren Knight, Sydney; Dutton, New York Image copyright the artist, courtesy Arts Projects Australia Photo: Andrew Barcham
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled 2019 Earthenware and glaze Courtesy of the artist Alan Constable is represented by Arts Project Australia, Melbourne; Darren Knight, Sydney; Dutton, New York Image copyright the artist, courtesy Arts Projects Australia Photo: Andrew Barcham
Alan Constable (Australian, b. 1956) Not titled 2018 Earthenware and glaze Courtesy of the artist Alan Constable is represented by Arts Project Australia, Melbourne; Darren Knight, Sydney; Dutton, New York Image copyright the artist, courtesy Arts Projects Australia Photo: Andrew Barcham
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Mermaid Beach 2015 From the series Physie Archival inkjet print 37 x 55cm Courtesy the artist
Lyndal Irons is a Sydney-based photographer and writer focused on local reportage, who is interested in seeking out parts of Australian society that are familiar and accessible, yet not often closely encountered. By recording social histories and building legacies using photographs and words, her work encourages curiosity and a deeper connection to daily life. Irons has presented solo exhibitions at the State Library of New South Wales (2015), the Australian Centre for Photography (2014), and Elizabeth Street Gallery (2014). Lyndal has been a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2017), the Bowness Prize (2015) and the Olive Cotton Award for Portraiture (2015). Lyndal Irons’ Physie series documents one of Australia’s oldest sporting institutions: physical culture (physie) and calisthenics.
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Fans 2015 From the series Physie Archival inkjet print 37 x 55cm Courtesy the artist
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Grooming Routine 2015 From the series Physie Archival inkjet print 37 x 55cm Courtesy the artist
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Junior National Repecharge 2015 From the series Physie Archival inkjet print 37 x 55cm Courtesy the artist
Lyndal Irons (Australian) Ideas for Photo Poses 2015 From the series Physie Archival inkjet print 37 x 55cm Courtesy the artist
Glenn Sloggett (Australian, b. 1964) Pawn shop 2018 C-type print 120 x 100cm Courtesy the artist
Glenn Sloggett has been exhibiting since the mid-90s. He won the prestigious Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award in 2008, and the inaugural John and Margaret Baker Memorial Fellowship for an Emerging Artist in 2001. He has held numerous solo exhibitions, including Cheaper and Deeper, a national touring show organised by the Australian Centre for Photography (2007). Sloggett’s work was featured on the ABC program The Art Life, and has been included in significant survey exhibitions of Australian art, including Australian Vernacular Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2014); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2013-2014); internationally touring Photographica Australis (2002–2004); and nationally touring New Australiana, Australian Centre for Photography (2001). His work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria and Monash Gallery of Art.
Interested in failure as a mechanism, Glenn Sloggett’s series of medium format photograph made with his twin-lens Rolleiflex could almost have been taken on a single walk around the neighbourhood on a strange, sunlit day. Wryly infused with dark humour and intermittent text punctuations such as “ICE IS A BAD THING” and “DO NOT LEAVE CHILDREN IN CARS”, Sloggett ask us to look beneath the surface of his documentary-style images. Why are people leaving their children in their cars? What precarious situation has driven someone to graffiti “is a bad thing” on this sign?
Sloggett’s work is at times bleak, and at others sublime. Looking closely, a cat that appears to be peacefully sunbaking has sunken eyes, an innocuous rose bush was taken in a brothel carpark. dumped concrete on the sidewalk looks like it has been churned up from a Friday night on the town.
Glenn Sloggett (Australian, b. 1964) Industrial dumping 2019 C-type print 120 x 100cm Courtesy the artist
Glenn Sloggett (Australian, b. 1964) Dead cat 2019 C-type print 120 x 100cm Courtesy the artist
Glenn Sloggett (Australian, b. 1964) Brothel car park 2019 C-type print 120 x 100 cm Courtesy the artist
Michelle Tran (Australian, b. 1985) Sachi 2019 Archival inkjet print 79 x 54cm Courtesy the artist and Hart & Co., Melbourne
Michelle Tran (Australian, b. 1985) Madison Shauna 2019 Archival inkjet print 79 x 54cm Courtesy the artist and Hart & Co., Melbourne
Michelle Tran (Australian, b. 1985) Sachi In Shadow 2019 Archival inkjet print 79 x 54cm Courtesy the artist and Hart & Co., Melbourne
Installation views of the exhibition Why Make Pictures? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne showing the work of David Wadelton and his series Living Rooms (top), Milk Bars (middle) and Small business (bottom)
David Wadelton is a Melbourne-based painter and photographer who has documented the changing face of Melbourne’s Northern suburbs since 1975. Wadelton has held over 20 solo exhibitions, including three career surveys: Pictorial Knowledge, Geelong Art Gallery (1998); Icons Of Suburbia, McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin (2011) and The Northcote Hysterical Society, Bundoora Homestead Gallery (2015). Wadelton’s work has been included in Vision In Disbelief, 4th Biennale of Sydney (1982); Australian Culture Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2004); Far-Famed City of Melbourne, Ian Potter Museum of Art (2013); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2014); Crossing paths with Vivian Maier, Centre for Contemporary Photography (2014); The Documentary Take, Centre for Contemporary Photography (2016); Romancing the Skull, Ballarat Art Gallery (2017) and Beyond boundaries – Discoveries in contemporary photography, Aperture Gallery, New York (2019).
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Coburg 2018 From the series Living Rooms Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Reservoir 2017-2019 From the series Living Rooms Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Pascoe Vale South 2018 From the series Living Rooms Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Reservoir 2017 From the series Living Rooms Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Reservoir 2017 From the series Living Rooms Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn 2018 From the series Newsagents Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Broadway, Reservoir 2019 From the series Newsagents Courtesy the artist
David Wadelton (Australian, b. 1955) Watsonia Road, Watsonia 2016 From the series Newsagents Courtesy the artist
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
The Night Journey
The only reason to make art is for yourself… but I hope you enjoy the images and the sequence as much as I enjoyed making it!
The images picture interstitial spaces, un/realities that hover at a median point, a tipping point between the real and the unreal. Which is which is open to question…
Please click on the photographs to see a larger version of the image. They are best viewed on a desktop computer to see the details of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ costs $1000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled 2019 From the series The Night Journey Digital photograph on cotton rag
It’s taken me more than a moment of reflection to write this text. The events are almost too close to write about my surrogate mother in Australia, my friend and fellow artist, Joycie. I can only write about the person I knew, not the time before I knew her – and so this will be a very personal reflection on one of the most incredible human beings that I have ever met.
Do not go gentle into that good night Rage, rage, against the dying of the light
Vale Joyce Evans.
Human, female, lover, mother, grandmother, wife, poet, publisher, writer, romantic, creative, humanist, universalist, spiritualist, bohemian, pioneer, gallery director, teacher, lecturer, collector, philanthropist, activist, artist, feminist, supporter of artists, Indigenous rights, civil rights, and the disenfranchised, exhibitor… and working photographer.
I met the force of nature that was Joyce Olga Evans (1929-2019) through a mutual friend, Alison Inglis, who knew of our love of photography. It was the start of an intense friendship that lasted just seven or eight years until Joycie, as I used to call her, passed away at Easter this year. Before she passed she knew that she had been awarded an OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) for service to photography. This was a long overdue tribute to a pioneer and supporter of photography in Australia, one of the first women to be the director of an independent, commercial photography gallery in this country.
Joyce had an incredible passion for and knowledge about photography, whether it was historical Australian or world photographers and their prints from any era, or contemporary artists here and overseas. Her collection of both local and international photographs was almost unparalleled in private hands in this country. She had such a keen eye. When attending a local auction with her she purchased an original William Mortensen for next to nothing. Nobody else had recognised the power and presence of the image by this master artist.
This incisive vision translated into her work as an artist who was a working photographer. At heart, that’s what Joyce was – a working photographer and a storyteller. She believed in photography like photographers get photography… not like an academic or a theoretician, but like an avid fan, an enthusiast, a passionate collector, a teacher. Photography was an integral part of her life, her soul.
She said to me of being an artist, “If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. The core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry as an artist remains the same. The concerns that you had when you started being an artist are with you until the end. If the core part of your life is the search for truth then that becomes a core part of your identity. It becomes embedded in your soul.”
In this sense, photography becomes something of you, more than just intention – it becomes your essence, your shape…. your physical shape, a tangible thing.
Photography and its spirit inhabited Joyce as Joyce lived in the world. To Joyce, photography was just as much about the world and creativity as it was about the image. The image was just a manifestation of spirit, something that you worked at, recognised, and captured for what it was and could be. As Minor White said, “There is always a dragon in the negative,” and a dragon, that symbol of power, strength, and good luck, lived inside Joyce (see my favourite photograph of her below) and in her work. Her photographs possessed a spiritual and psychological sensation of the place.
As she said, “Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”
Joyce’s commitment to photography was legendary. She was in it for the long haul.
I was always amazed when we were out in public, going to the exhibitions that we loved to visit, that she would always be taking photographs. Whenever she saw something that interested her out would come her beloved iPhone or digital camera, and she would talk to strangers and their children and take their photos. She was a totally open spirit and had no fear about the path she took. People embraced her, talked to her, responded to her energy and spirit. I remember travelling up to Sydney with her to see an exhibition of her favourite photographer, “Our Julia”, Julia Margaret Cameron at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and just observing that sparkle in her eyes, that unparalleled love that transcends all our pasts and futures in the simple moment of being and looking at these photographs.
Joyce was uncompromising. If she thought you were being a fuckwit she told you so in no uncertain terms. But she was a rock on which I came to depend. As someone said of her, “Joyce wasn’t into niceties and didn’t take any shit from anyone! I hope I grow up to be as tough as her. She was a visionary.” She really did not stand fools gladly (thank god), and had little truck for fine art photographers who didn’t understand the medium, its history or their small place within the grand scheme of things. As the playwright Edward Albee commented at the American painter Lee Krasner’s memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in both her life and her work, ‘… she looked you straight in the eye, and you dared not flinch’. It was the same with Joycie. She could see deep inside you to the core of your being.
Joyce loved helping people. She was so generous of her time and energy, of her wisdom and knowledge. Some of the best times of my life were spent in her kitchen talking about art, love and life. People were drawn to her. As Julie Moss has observed, she was “such a strong, creative and vibrant role model for so many female photographers” in a sea of male prejudice and ambivalence. What Joyce did not do is live on her memories… she was ever active, ever inquiring. She stood up for what she believed. A couple of weeks before she passed she said to me, “I don’t want to go yet, I still have so much that I want to do.” She was still raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into that good night.
But what she achieved in her truly remarkable life is a testament to her unquenchable spirit. In a journey full of determination, intelligence, exploration and love she achieved so much and touched so many. I miss her terribly.
I am the (sublime) space where I am, that surrounds me with countless presences.
This photograph, showing students smoking and drinking outside the pub at Largs Bay, was published in an Adelaide newspaper. At the time this was considered to be immoral behaviour. Note the man in the background with his fingers up in a derogatory manner.
The names of the three women who have been identified are from left to right: Joyce Evans (nee Zerfas) photographer, Jill Warwick, deceased, (producer of TV programme “It Could Be You”) Val Groves, psychologist. I have been unable to identify the men. ~ Joyce Evans
“Making photographs that are memorable requires more than just camera, light and a story. It requires a type of harmony, unity, and an indefinable something, which I can best explain as becoming emotionally attached to the subject so that the images almost make themselves.”
Joyce Evans
“Photography for me is a type of communion with my subject. Like everybody else I take photographs which have little meaning. But sometimes I sense an underlying value in the land, a group of people, a location, and then I make photograph, which is satisfying to myself. I think I would like to call that the way in which the quintessential spirit of what I am seeing has stirred me to need to make a photograph of it.
To me, I am alive, and my life and the life of everything in the world is connected. For me it is that universality that is the basis of my idea of the spiritual. I feel uncomfortable about formal organised religion and am perhaps more than a humanist, a universalist.”
Joyce Evans
“Aesthetically, I enjoy the camera’s capacity to record relationships and detail, which my subconscious may perceive, but I may not fully see.
My appreciation of aesthetics goes back to when I studied painting with John Olsen at the Bakery Art School, Sydney in 1967-1968. Olsen made me aware of the power of the edge of the image to relate to what was not shown in the image. My formal education was further enhanced when I did a degree in fine arts at Sydney University 1969-1971. There, Dr Anton Wilhelm taught me how to read an image. My understanding of the limits and potentials of two-dimensional imagery was expounded by Professor Bernard Smith.
Informally, my knowledge of photography and my practice was refined through formative conversations with a wide range of great photographers such as Andre Kertesz, Max Dupain, Ansel Adams and Bill Henson, Julie Millowick and Linda Connor.
Each of these relationships helped me to clarify my photographic position, which is based on a search for the essence of a subject.”
Joyce Evans
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT 2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT 2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT 2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT 2005
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Rain Dreaming, Yuendumu, NT 2005
Joyce Evans short biography
Joyce Olga Evans is well known in Australian photography. In 1976 Joyce opened Church Street Photographic Centre, a pioneer Australian commercial gallery devoted to Photography. It showcased the best of Australian and International photographers. Joyce exhibited works by Frank Hurley, Imogen Cunningham, Bill Henson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Julia Margret Cameron, Max Dupain and many other renowned photographers – she says that they were her teachers.
Passionately dedicated to photography, she has had many solo exhibitions of both her landscapes (she photographed in the Dandenongs and Mt Martha regions in the outer Melbourne; along the Hume Highway; in the Central Desert and outback Australia, most notably Oodnadatta, Oodlawirra, Menindee, and Lake Mungo; vineyards and rural villages in the South of France; the old Jewish cemetery in the centre of Prague; and numerous others) and her portraits (she photographed Australian intelligentsia and personalities, including Marianne Baillieu; Barbara Blackman; Baron Avid von Blumenthal; Tim Burstall; Dur-e Dara; Robert Dessaix; Germaine Greer; Elena Kats-Chernin; Joan Kerr; Ellen Koshland; David Malouf; Dame Elisabeth Murdoch; Lin Onus; Jill Reichstein; Chris Wallace-Crabbe; and innumerable others) throughout Australia and Europe.
Joyce has spent two decades documenting Australia for the National Library of Australia, who are acquiring her life’s work for their permanent collection. When this acquisition is complete the Library will hold over 30,000 analogue images and 80,000 digital files. Also included are diaries and other relevant documents and files. Much of this work is destined for display on Trove, the library’s online viewing resource. She has exhibited extensively in Australia and in France and her photographs are held in many major collections. Joyce has been published widely. Her monograph Only One Kilometre was published in 2003 by Lothian Press. It detailed her many years of studying the unique qualities of the Balcombe Estuary Reserve, at Mount Martha as well as poems and articles by distinguished writers. Her work is held in many collections both locally and internationally.
Joyce Evans also plays an important educational role in Australian photography. She taught history of photography at Melbourne’s RMIT University; appointed inaugural assistant director of Waverley City Gallery (now Monash Gallery of Art), 1990-1991, the first municipal public collection in Melbourne to specialise in photography; established and inaugurated a course on the History of Photography and appointed Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, 1997-2010.
Evans worked as an honorary photographer for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Central Australia and for over ten years documented Australian country towns and events for the National Library of Australia. Important publications on Joyce Evans include a monograph Only One Kilometre (Melbourne: Lothian Press, 2003), and exhibition catalogues with essays by Alison Inglis, Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, Tim Page, Victoria Hammond, and many others.
Anonymous text from the Joyce Evans Photographer website Nd [Online] Cited 16th June 2019. No longer available online
William Yang (Australian, b. 1943) Marcus and Joyce 2018
Being two photographers, the only photograph of Joyce and Marcus together, taken by another photographer William Yang.
Michael Silver (Australian) Joyce Evans 2013
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Joyce Evans standing in front of Max Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ 1937 2018
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Joyce and the dragon 2016
Joyce standing in front of the fireplace at Jacques Reymond’s restaurant for the birthday of her friend Marcus Bunyan. In Chinese mythology the dragon traditionally symbolises potent and auspicious powers and also is a symbol of power, strength, and good luck for people who are worthy of it.
Julia Margaret Cameron (British, 1815-1879) Beatrice 1866 Albumen silver print
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met haringen en rode dahlia’s (Still life with herring and red dahlias) c. 1935 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
I came across these early colour photographs by chance while rummaging around the web – the process (foto-chroma Eilers), the man (Bernard F. Eilers) and his photographs now largely forgotten outside his native Holland.
In this posting I have focused on the still life because I feel these photographs, which are the strongest body of Eilers work. Reminiscent of 17th Dutch still life painting, the photographs possess an inimitable feeling of space and project an indomitable presence that radiates almost magically from the surface of the image. The use of low depth of field and a stunning colour process (where the separated colours are hushed and muted but forward and present) make it possible to imagine picking up the tomatoes from the tin dish.
While the images are tightly framed, apparently simple constructions of light, colour and form… to make them so beautiful, so resonant of life itself, is due to the incredible technical and sensual skill of the artist. The precision of construction, of lighting, of feeling is impeccable. Notice the placement of the bowl of flowers in Table with tablecloth and a vase of red chrysanthemums (c. 1935, below) and its relationship to the pattern and that precise drop of the folded corner of the tablecloth. Or the spiral of the peeled lemon not quite touching the table, while red lanterns ascend like musical notes from the painted vessel in Still life with fruit (1934, below).
These informed, atmospheric and meditative images require the viewer to slow down and apply themselves to the act of looking, the act of imbibing the spirit of the artist, the object and the world. Beautiful, beautiful images, they make my heart sing.
Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) was one of the leading Dutch photographers in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Along with Henri Berssenbrugge and Berend Zweers, Eilers was part of the second generation of Dutch pictorialists and his fine art prints were widely exhibited in the Netherlands during his lifetime. In 1911 he launched his business as a portrait and reproduction photographer. He was one of the Netherlands’ first commercial photographers, undertaking commissions for numerous clients including the Philips Company and Amsterdam-based architects and furniture makers. Around 1935, he created the photographic colour separation technique Foto-chroma Eilers, successfully producing prints of great intensity and depth of colour.
The following photographs were created by digitising 927 glass negatives from the Amsterdam Municipal Archives in 2004.
To achieve first-class picture quality, sets of three practically matching black-and-white negatives had to be selected from a far more sizeable total collection. Assembling these sets was an arduous task: they had not always been filed neatly together and could be found among several glass negative formats, particularly among the 4.5 x 6 cm size. In the end, it appeared that the selection of some sets did not lead to a satisfactory result, but the whole operation nevertheless yielded 309 beautiful prints.
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met Oosterse poppetjes (Still life with Eastern figures) 1934-04/1939-09 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met tinnen en steengoed kannen (Still life with pewter and stoneware jugs) 1934-04/1939-10 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met fruitschaal en drie kruiken op een kastje (Still life with a fruit bowl and three jugs on a cupboard) 1934-04/1936 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met een bloeiende primula, een majolica bord, steengoed kannetje en ander voorwerpen (Still life with a flowering primula, a majolica plate, stoneware jug and other objects) 1934-04/1939-10 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met een glazen fles en een koperen pot (Still life with a glass bottle and a copper pot) 1934-04/1939-10 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met koperen pot en glazen fles (Still life with copper pot and glass bottle) 1920/1939 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met schilderspalet (Still life with painter’s palette) 1934-05/1939-10 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met groenten waaronder prei, boerenkool en uien (Still life with vegetables including leek, kale and onions) 1934-04/1935-10 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met glazen fles en een tinnen schaal met tomaten (Still life with glass bottle and a tin dish with tomatoes) 1920/1939 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met steengoed kannen, fruit, tingoed en gedroogde bloemen van een lampionplant in een fles (Still life with stoneware jugs, fruit, tin goods and dried flowers of a lantern plant in a bottle) 1934-04/1934-12 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met fruit (Still life with fruit) 1934-04/1934-12 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers was a colour magician. Around 1935, he created the photographic colour separation technique foto-chroma Eilers, which would make him world famous. In a time when experiments with colour photography were abundant, he succeeded in producing colour prints that far surpassed those of other fellow pioneers in terms of colour intensity and depth.
The Great Depression of the 1930s was not a good time for Eilers; few people could afford to enlist the services of a photographer. In these years, he decided to devote his leisure time to perfecting three-colour photography. His aim was to expose and print three shots on paper in a single turn. For more than a year and a half, he worked at improving the camera, the filters and the printing foils. Finally, Eilers succeeded in producing perfect colour prints. He named his technique: foto-chroma eilers. The difficult feat he had accomplished brought Eilers praise and honour, but the big photographic industries of the day soon caught up with him; around the same time, Kodak and Agfa introduced the first modern colour films.
For this site, Eilers’s old analogue technique was simulated digitally. The result is a collection of spectacular colour prints originating from a period that is mostly associated with black-and-white photography.
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met dotterbloemen in een glazen vaas en enkele glazen voorwerpen (Still life with dotter flowers in a glass vase and some glass objects) 1934-04/1939-09 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met bloemen van de papaver in een vaas (Still life with poppy flowers in a vase) 1934-07/1939-08 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Stilleven met bloemen van de papaver in een vaas. Opname in de huiskamer van de familie Eilers, Jacob Marisstraat 88, Amsterdam
Still life with flowers of the poppy in a vase. Recording in the living room of the Eilers family, Jacob Marisstraat 88, Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Gedekte tafel met een ontbijtservies (Set table with a breakfast set) c. 1935 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Tafel met tafelkleed en een vaas rode chrysanten (Table with tablecloth and a vase of red chrysanthemums) c. 1935 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met lamp, Japanse poppen en wajangpoppen (Still life with lamp, Japanese dolls and Wajang dolls) 1920/1939 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) was active in many photographic fields. Besides practicing the traditional genres such as townscapes, portraits and still life he also applied himself to architecture, art reproduction and ad photography.
In his lifetime, Eilers was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.
As a professional photographer, Eilers had many customers, including companies like Philips, Verkade and the Dutch car manufacturer Spijker, as well as architects such as Van der Mey, Kramer and De Klerk. His Golden Age as a photographer of architectural subjects coincided with that of the so-called Amsterdam School and its monthly publication Wendingen. Aside from what he described as his sixth sense, “the feeling in space”, Eilers considered a feeling for tone to be of the utmost importance when photographing a building in order to properly reproduce its size and proportions.
Eilers was a gifted technician. This emerges most of all from his pioneering work in the field of colour photography. He excelled in the application of new techniques such as the Lumière sheet and the multi-colour bromine colour printing. Eilers even developed a colour technique of his own: the foto-chroma eilers.
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Stilleven met sierfruit op een tinnen bord (Still life with ornamental fruit on a tin plate) 1920/1935 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Metalen beker met twee oren (Metal cup with two ears) 1920/1939 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Kleurenspectrum gefotografeerd bij daglicht (Color spectrum photographed in daylight) 1934-04/1936 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
Bernard F. Eilers (Dutch, 1878-1951) Zelfportret met drie kleurfilters (violetblauw, groen en oranje) (Self-portrait with three colour filters (violet blue, green and orange)) 1934-04/1936-01 Colour separation 4.5 x 6 mm Stadsarchief Amsterdam
“Varble’s total irreverence is no more evident than in his willingness to “cross party lines,” as he did when he wore his Suit of Armor, constructed with gold VO labels from Seagram’s boxes, to both the 1975 Easter Parade and to West Village leather bars! He was an equal opportunity offender, rubbing up against conformity in all forms.”
Bob Nickas. “Stephen Varble: Now More Than Ever,” on the Affidavit website [Online] Cited 10/04/2019
Confusing queen reigns, on parade
I love doing these posts on artists that certainly I, and I suspect a lot of the readers of this website, would have never have heard of. Artists full of spunk, full of daring-do, artists who rise to challenge the patrons of patriarchy, and the colluders of capitalism (Varble became ever-more critical of commodification and capitalism). Artists who declaim the value of the individual, who shine a light on the plight of the downtrodden and those discriminated against. Can you not once bring yourself to utter the word “AIDS” you bigoted president?
In an era of reactionary religious and right wing hypocrisy – Christian sleaze and paedophilia anyone, anti-Muslim and anti-gay Facebook posts in the Australian election, murderous right wing rampage in New Zealand – now more than ever, we need artists like Stephen Varble (American, 1946-1984). Human beings that speak up and speak out against bigotry, discrimination, and awful men in high places.
“Varble made the recombination of signs for gender a central theme in his increasingly outrageous costumes and performances… [He] sought to make a place for himself outside of art’s institutions and mainstream cultures all the while critiquing them both.” Australian artists such as Leigh Bowery and Brenton Heath-Kerr have a lot to thank Varble for.
He might have risen from the gutter, but his intentions were full of stars.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the ONE Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Varble’s work wasn’t drag in the conventional cross-dressing sense, or “gay art,” which was often defined from a predominantly masculine perspective in the immediate post-Stonewall years. His intention was to stretch and break down the very idea of binary identities, confuse the concept of gender, leave it optional. And this goal puts him well in the framework of queer and transgender thinking now. …
For a series of mid-1970s performances he called “Gutter Art,” he would arrive, elaborately dressed, by limousine (paid for by a Japanese patron, Miyazaki Morihiro) in front of luxury stores on the Upper East Side. Once parked, he unloaded old kitchen utensils from the trunk and started washing them with black ink, as if referring to the domestic life of sweatshop labor. He soon gained notoriety as a kind of cultural terrorist. (Tiffany’s hired guards to keep him out.) He turned up, uninvited, at red carpet events – film premieres, the Met’s Costume Institute gala – to dazzle and deride the guests.
“A chauffeured Rolls Royce glides glacially to the curb in front of the Chemical Bank at New York’s Sheridan Square. The uniformed driver, out in an instant, holds open the passenger door. Rather than a well-heeled person to which such a car would belong, a more hallucinatory sight will emerge, equally glamorous and ridiculous. Two legs appear, only one of which has a shoe. The full length of the body gradually appears, improbably covered in netting and not much else, the entwined nets adorned with crumpled bills. What seem to be bare breasts droop from the chest of a figure of otherwise unidentifiable gender, further confused by a toy fighter jet, poised for takeoff, at crotch level. While no words are spoken, a cartoon speech bubble overhead proclaims, cheerily but with a disgruntled undertow: Even Though You May Be Forged, Chemical Still Banks Best!”
Bob Nickas. “Stephen Varble: Now More Than Ever,” on the Affidavit website [Online] Cited 10/04/2019
The Chemical Bank Protest was Varble’s most notorious and widely reported disruption, and it encapsulated his disdain for commerce, capitalism, and propriety. To contest a forgery against him, Varble went to the Sheridan Square bank to demand his money returned. He created his Demonstration Costume with Only One Shoe from Christmas tree packaging, gold leaf wrappers, and fake money. His costumes often combined different signs of gender, and here he wore tow condoms filled with cow’s blood for breasts and a toy jet fighter as a codpiece. The toy referenced the plane ticket the forger purchase with the money, and one shoe was missing to “symbolise his economic loss.” Hovering over his head, a speech bubble touted, “Even Though You May Be Forged, Chemical Still Banks Best!”
Varble’s performances often affected an ironic enthusiasms for his targets (be it a bank, a boutique, a gallery, or a presidential candidate), and his insincere flattery was meant to provide cover for his disruption of business as usual.
Arriving in a borrowed limousine, Varble boldly entered to make his demands as the line of customers at the teller window gawked. On being told by the manager that he could not be helped, Varble punctured the blood-filled condoms and dipped a pen in the spilled blood to write checks (for “none-million dollars”) in his dramatic, mime-like movements before sweeping out to the sound of applause from the customers.
Installation views of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery showing, at left top, Greg Day’s Stephen Varble with the Enormous Pink Satin and baby Doll (1975); left below Stephen Varble Performing in a Garbage Can at his Loft on Franklin Street (1975); and at centre, Closing Party with Varble’s Enormous Pink Satin Skirt (1975)
Franklin Street Exhibition and Party Performance
in 1976, Varble organised an exhibition of his own work in the loft her share with Jim McWilliams on Franklin Street. He painted the interiors pink, built large decorations, and displayed all his costumes on cut-out mannequins mounted on the walls. The largest piece in the exhibition was a new work the Enormous Pink Satin Skirt, some fifteen feet in length. The object played a central role in the “Gala Ending” party that closed the exhibition, as can be seen in the photograph (main above). For this major event Varble enlisted the help of established gender non-conforming performers such as Mario Montez, Jackie Curtis, and Taylor Mead to act as living mannequins for his most iconic costumes. Modelling Varble’s art they paraded with his satin silhouette dolls through the crowd and did impromptu performances – such as when Agusta Machado enacted a campy drama of claustrophobia in Varble’s refrigerator. Day was there to capture the wild party, managing to take individual portraits of some of the major performers in attendance…
In the midst of the playful chaos, Varble gathered these Warhol stars and others (such as Paul Ambrose and New York drag personality Ruth Truth) inside the Enormous Pink Satin Skirt, and at a designated time they al burst forth dancing. As the exhibition gave attendees a retrospective view of his output the performance provided a testament to Varble’s place in the queer performance culture of New York. As the art critic Gregory Battock remarked, “It was the kind of event only Stephen Varble could have planned: chaotic, meandering, spurious and very New York […] Even though invitations were hard to come by, everybody was there.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery with, at left, Greg Day’s Stephen Varble Destroying his Blue and Green Corrugated Paper Dress from the Camera (October 1975); at second left, Stephen Varble in the Elizabethan Farthingale; and at third left, Stephen Varble in the Suit of Armor (October 1975)
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery
Stephen Varble, Gutter Art flyer [recto] 1975 Xerographic print on paper Courtesy Greg Day and the Leslie-Lohman Museum Photo: Courtesy Greg Day and the Leslie-Lohman Museum
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery
In costumes made from street trash, food waste, and stolen objects, Stephen Varble (1946-1984) took to the streets of 1970s New York City to perform his “Gutter Art.” With disruption as his aim, he led uninvited costumed tours through the galleries of SoHo, occupied Fifth Avenue gutters, and burst into banks and boutiques in his gender-confounding ensembles. Varble made the recombination of signs for gender a central theme in his increasingly outrageous costumes and performances. While maintaining he/him as his pronouns, Varble performed gender as an open question in both his life and his work, sometimes identifying as a female persona, Marie Debris, and sometimes playing up his appearance as a gay man. Only later would the term “genderqueer” emerge to describe the kind of self-made, non-binary gender options that Varble adopted throughout his life and in his disruptions of the 1970s art world.
At the pinnacle moment of Varble’s public performances, the photographer Greg Day (b. 1944) captured the inventiveness and energy of his genderqueer costume confrontations. Trained as an artist and anthropologist and with a keen eye for documenting ephemeral culture as it flourished, Day took hundreds of photographs of Varble’s trash couture, public performances, and events in 1975 and 1976. Varble understood the importance of photographers, and Day was his most important photographic collaborator. This exhibition brings together a selection of Day’s photographs of Varble performing his costume works and also includes Day’s photographs of Varble’s friends and collaborators such as Peter Hujar, Jimmy DeSana, Shibata Atsuko, Agosto Machado, and Warhol stars Jackie Curtis, Taylor Mead, and Mario Montez.
Varble sought to make a place for himself outside of art’s institutions and mainstream cultures all the while critiquing them both. The story of Varble told through Day’s photographs is both about their synergistic artistic friendship and about the queer networks and communities that made such an anti-institutional and genderqueer practice imaginable. Together, Varble and Day worked to preserve the radical potential of Gutter Art for the future.
The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble builds upon the 2018 retrospective exhibition of Stephen Varble’s work at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York, titled Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble, as featured in the New York Times on January 11, 2019. The new ONE Gallery exhibition, with its focus on the collaboration of Varble with the photographer Greg Day, will explore the ways in which Varble’s disruptive guerrilla performance art has lived on primarily through vibrant photographs that captured his inventive costumes, transformed trash, and public confrontations.
The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s photographs by Greg Day is curated by David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble is organised by the ONE Archives Foundation, Inc. Generous support is provided by the City of West Hollywood.
About the ONE Archives Foundation, Inc.
The ONE Archives Foundation, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) dedicated to telling the accurate and authentic stories of LGBTQ people, history and culture through public exhibitions, educational projects and trainings, and community outreach programs. Our exhibitions, school programs, and community outreach programs are free. We depend entirely on members of the public and private foundations for support.
Press release from the ONE Gallery [Online] Cited 10/04/2019
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery showing, at left, a still from Stephen Varble’s video Journey to the Sun (1978-1983); and at right Greg Day’s Stephen Varble in the Piggy Bank Dress (1975)
Stephen Varble (American, 1946-1984) Journey to the Sun 1978-1983 U-matic video transferred to digital, 2018 Courtesy David J. Getsy
Varble receded from the art world and from street performance around 1977, becoming ever-more critical of commodification and capitalism. As he told an interviewer that year, “This is the age of pornography and contempt. The dollar is good. […] The end of capitalism is coming.” Varble instead began to develop private performances and videos about his private mythologies and messianic dreams. His last five years were consumed with working on an epic, operatic work of video art: Journey to the Sun. It started in 1978 as a performance about the mythology of Greta Garbo, and Varble invited friends to his Riverside Drive apartment to view his monologues accompanied by project slides. His ambitions soon outgrew this format, and he turned to video for its ability to combine text, image and performance. He considered these videos to be revivals of illuminated Medieval manuscripts with their rich visual play between words and pictures, and he called his group of collaborators in the video the “Happy Arts School of Manuscript Illumination.” The aim of the “school” was to promote Varble’s vision of societal transformation through the making of modern fables in the form of videos, books, and prints. His “video books,” as he called the tapes, offered an “antidote to nature’s ruin on this heavenly globe.”
Journey to the Sun tells the story of a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence. The tale is a loosely autobiographical fable of an artist who encounters a stern mystical teacher, Sage Purple Pythagoras (played by his partner, Daniel Cahill) who tests the Warbler. Many of Varble’s iconic costumes feature in the video, and he combined elements of his own history with references to literature, religion, and popular culture (notably, Garbo). Combining heavily scripted monologues with improvised performances. Journey to the Sun does not offer a tidy or easily understood narrative. Rather, it sketches a fantastic and surreal visual world in which dreams are realised through the transformations of everyday objects, popular imagery, and rubbish.
To make this “rodeo-paced” video, Varble filled his apartment with drawings and writings on the walls, blacked out the windows, and began filming scenes both scripted and improvised with collaborators. Journey to the Sun is remarkable for its time due to the complexity and density of the video editing – all of which was done by Varble in his apartment. He only completed about thirty percent of his planned work before his death from AIDS-related complications in January 1984. This screening copy presents a continuous segment of around 80 minutes that has been selected from the three surviving U-matic master tapes, but no changes have been made other than the choice of where to begin and end this combined excerpt. This is but a fragment of the much longer video epic Varble hoped would be his major contribution.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition The Gutter Art of Stephen Varble: Genderqueer Performance Art in the 1970s, photographs by Greg Day at ONE Gallery showing Stephen Varble’s Blue Boy
“One afternoon, Stephen invited me to accompany him to a performance in midtown Manhattan. He bought Blue Boy with him. We took the F train uptown from Washington Square. Sitting on the subway car bench and wearing his Chemical Bank Protest attire. Stephen hugged, kissed, fondled and poked Blue Boy. He spoke to him in an affectionate and sometimes argumentative language of moans, “ohs” and clicks. I sat across from him and watched as people entered the car. They stared, laughed, gasped, and made disparaging remarks about his sanity before moving to another part of the subway car. Even riding the train was an opportunity for Stephen to shock.”
Where: Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill When: Monday 20th May 2019, 6-9pm
Joyce Evans photographer celebration… I hope many of you can attend.
A celebration of Joyce and her contribution to art, photography, women’s status, mentorship and philanthropy. At least 30 of her prints will be displayed. Celebrants will talk and recall in their own words experiences with Joyce and her passions. The event will be recorded and made available for non-attendees. Snacks and drinks will be available.
A truly remarkable human being.
Marcus
If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.
If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.
Joyce Evans
Michael Silver (Australian) Joyce Evans Nd
Monash Gallery of Art 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150 Australia Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500
Curators: Wim van Sinderen with the assistance of Hanneke Mantel (both of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography)
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, 1959-2023) Squares, Joy 1985 Gelatin silver print
As a storyteller, Erwin Olaf is a contemporary photographer whose work addresses most current concerns of the world – discrimination, gender, sexuality, taboo, climate change, reality, equality, power, racism, freedom of expression and democracy – through staged studio and outdoor photographs of incredible technical and visual skill.
The key to his work is the twist that he gives his cinematic, perfect worlds – the hidden crack in the facade, the unhinging of the link between reality and representation. These not so perfect worlds are often inspired by stories of the past, whether those stories may be present in the works of Vermeer, the still lives of the Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th century, Caravaggio, the Olympic Games of 1936, Norman Rockwell paintings, film noir, or clothes of the 1950s and 1960s.
The stillness and silence of the photographs subjects let the viewer examine the details of the mise en scène… the perfectly placed Coke bottle and apple, the shredded American flag in Palm Springs, The Kite (2018); the bandaged knee, the dripping ice cream in Rain, The Ice Cream Parlour (2004); and also admire the beautiful textures and lighting of the finished “product”, for Olaf’s aesthetic riffs on subverting theatrical performances and magazine fashion shoots.
Olaf let’s the viewer’s eye move without restraint across the terrain of the photographs, letting them soak up the atmosphere of his hyperreal tableau vivant. Both seductive and disturbing, his photographs challenge us to interrogate our own story – who are we, what do we really believe in, and what can we do to change prejudice and bigotry in a hostile world.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Gemeentemuseum den Haag for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“What I want to show most of all is a perfect world with a crack in it. I want to make the picture seductive enough to draw people into the narrative, and then deal the blow.”
Erwin Olaf
“In 1982, I saw an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe in Amsterdam that blew me off the socks. I just had a Hasselblad, I was inspired by his craftsmanship and the beautiful prints, and I thought: this is what I want too. In the series ‘Squares’ (1983-1993) you clearly see his influence. I started asking people that I knew from the nightlife if they wanted to pose for me in my studio, which I had decorated in a squat of a friend. For example, the boy with the champagne bottle worked in the wardrobe of my favourite disco.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book ‘Erwin Olaf – I am’)
“My earliest work reflects my life in that time. I was a moth – I really loved the nightlife. In the late seventies, the early eighties was a hedonistic period: Disco and the beginning of the punk, the sexual revolution. I loved watching people play with gender, the theatrical of the nightlife, all the roles they could take.”
Erwin Olaf
“The camera offered me a possibility to enter a world that was not mine. I was able to hide behind the camera, but also be part of what I saw. As a photographer, you can look at people. You’re observing. I wanted to focus my gaze on groups that were outside the ‘normal’ society. One of my first photography assignments for school had as a theme ‘what’s normal?’. I still ask myself that.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book ‘Erwin Olaf – I am’)
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography are to honour one of the Netherlands’ most famous photographers, Erwin Olaf (b. 1959), with a double exhibition. Olaf, whose recent portraits of the royal family drew widespread admiration, will turn sixty this year – a good moment to stage a major retrospective. The Hague Museum of Photography will focus on Olaf’s love of his craft and his transition from analogue photojournalist to digital image-maker and storyteller. Olaf will himself bring together some twenty photographs by famous photographers of the past who have been a vital source of inspiration to him. Gemeente Museum Den Haag will show non-commissioned work by Olaf from 2000 to his most recent series, including the work he produced in Shanghai and his most recent series Palm Springs, on display for the first time. Olaf will be showing his photography in the form of installations, in combination with film, sound and sculpture.
Erwin Olaf – Palm Springs: behind the scenes
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, 1959-2023) First Aids Benefit Club Flora Palace Amsterdam, I 1983 Gelatin silver print
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, 1959-2023) First Aids Benefit Club Flora Palace Amsterdam, II 1983 Gelatin silver print
Erwin Olaf (Netherlands, 1959-2023) Squares, Pearls 1986 Gelatin silver print
“Chessmen was inspired by a chance meeting with my former photography teacher at the School for Journalism. A few years after I graduated there, I met him on the street. When I showed him my work in my studio, he said, “Say, would you like to publish a book?” He had recently taken over a publishing house for a pittance. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough work for a book. “Oh,” he said, “you only need sixty-four pages. And if you leave a page white next to each photo, you will need thirty-two photos. “At home I thought about it while listening to the radio – a chess program was just going on. At one point the presenter said: “This is an attacking game with thirty-two pieces. A war game. “I knew immediately: I’m going to make chess pieces. Those few words on the radio were all I needed; I had a clear picture in mind. Earlier I had been thinking about how I could do something with the theme of power. Power is something weird. Why do people abuse their power? Or why do you want it? Why do some people allow others to exercise power over them? From those questions came the idea of ​​a power game and the people who play it. “
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I Am)
“The Blacks series is largely inspired by Janet Jackson’s album Rhythm Nation 1814. In one song, she sings: “In complete darkness we are all the same / It is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us / Don’t let your eyes deceive you.” A few years earlier I had been hitchhiking to Paris and southern France, together with a friend with an Indonesian background. I was admitted without problems in all kinds of clubs, but they refused him at the door. At that time I became much more aware of the fact that the amount of pigment in your skin can have serious consequences. So when I heard Janet Jackson sing, I thought: this is my theme. I can create a group of people where everyone is equal.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I Am)
Journalistic training
Erwin Olaf was studying journalism in Utrecht in the 1980s when, having noticed that he was unhappy, one of his lecturers pressed a camera into his hands. ‘I loved the thing right from the word go,’ says Olaf, ‘the weight, the cool metal in my hand. It felt so natural. And when I took my first photographs, I knew I had found my calling.’ Olaf began taking journalistic photographs of theatre performances, worked for progressive magazines and volunteered for COC Nederland (which represents LGBTI interests). In his early work Olaf often depicted the human body quite graphically, breaching the restrictions on sexuality, the body and gender. He describes himself at that time as an angry adolescent, though his taboo-breaking work was highly significant in terms of visual freedom in the Netherlands.
Early work at The Hague Museum of Photography
The exhibition at The Hague Museum of Photography will start with his early work. Chessmen (1987-1988) was one of Olaf’s first non-commissioned series, which came about when he was given the opportunity to produce a photobook. He had to fill 32 pages and he wanted to focus on the theme of power. He had heard an item on the radio about chess, a game of war consisting of 32 pieces. Olaf portrayed the game in a series of provocative images, featuring visible genitals, small half-naked people with kinky attributes, and extremely fat women in bondage outfits. The series did not go unnoticed. He received criticism for it, but also the Young European Photographers Prize.
Skill
Another early series shows the engagement that has remained important throughout Olaf’s career. Blacks (1990) is based on a song by Janet Jackson with the line, ‘In complete darkness we are all the same. It is only our knowledge and wisdom that separates us’. The series reflects Olaf’s battle for equality, and also his technical skill. In these baroque portraits, literally everything is black as coal, yet Olaf managed to give the images a rich tonality, both with his camera and in the developing process. A self-taught photographer, he has shown himself to be a master, not only of old-fashioned darkroom processes, but also of new techniques that have emerged in rapid succession since the digital revolution. He did pioneering work with Photoshop in the famous series Royal Blood (2000). Thanks to this new technique, he is even better able to experiment to his heart’s delight in his staged photography.
Sources of inspiration
Besides his own work, at The Hague Museum of Photography Erwin Olaf will be bringing together some twenty photographs by photographers who are his most important sources of inspiration, ranging from a vintage still life with roses by the late nineteenth-century photographer Bernard Eilers to self-portraits by Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra. The work of these photographers inspired him, made him look in a different way at his own artistic practice, or pushed his photography in a new direction. By showing these pictures alongside his early work, which is imbued with his love of his craft, Olaf will give visitors to the Museum of Photography an idea of what has shaped him as a photographer.
Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
The exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum will begin, even before the entrance to the galleries, with the life-sized installation Keyhole (2012). The exterior has two long walls with panelling above which framed photographs hang, as in a classic interior. But visitors can watch two films through the keyhole in the doors on either side of the installation. It will be immediately apparent that the Gemeentemuseum is highlighting a new development in the work of Erwin Olaf. Here, he is going one step further, presenting his photography in exciting combinations of film, sound and sculpture.
Social engagement
Erwin Olaf’s work has always been highly personal and socially engaged. The clearest influence on the development of his work has been the events surrounding 9/11. Since then, the bombastic, baroque staging of his previous work has made way for more vulnerability and serenity. This has produced images that are very popular with the public: highly stylised film scenes staged perfectly down to the smallest detail, often bathed in light as if they were paintings, with an uncomfortable underlying message. As in the series Rain (2004), which appears to capture the moment between action and reaction after a shocking event. The series Grief (2007), shot in a 1960s setting, is about the first moment of response, the first tear.
Recent events are also reflected in Olaf’s work. He made the Tamed & Anger self-portraits (2015) in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. In other works he addresses issues like the position of the individual in a globalising world, the exclusion and stereotyping of certain groups of people, and taboos associated with gender and nudity. The exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum will thus afford a glimpse inside Olaf’s turbulent and sometimes dark mind. A visit to the exhibition will be like wandering through his head.
Palm Springs: final part of a triptych
Erwin Olaf’s most recent series, Palm Springs (2018), will premiere at the exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum. It is part of a triptych about cities undergoing change, the other two parts being Berlin (2012) and Shanghai (2017). The Berlin series was produced in a period when dark clouds were gathering above Europe. It highlights Olaf’s concerns about freedom of expression and democracy, and the transfer of power from an older to a new generation. Shanghai is a hypermodern metropolis in China with a population of 24 million. The series made in this city explores what happens to the individual in an environment like this. In Palm Springs, Olaf again focuses on topical issues. One of the key themes is climate change, though at the same time the images also recall the America of the 1960s. In a beautiful series of portraits, landscapes – this was the first time Olaf had photographed landscapes – still lifes and filmic scenes he refers to issues like teenage pregnancy, discrimination, religious abuses and polarisation. The series tells the story of people withdrawing into gated communities as reality invades their paradise.
Photographs of royal family
A very special addition to the double exhibition will be Erwin Olaf’s photographs of the Dutch royal family. As part of the exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum he will bring together many of the photographs that the Government Information Service commissioned him to take of the royal family. He also took the picture that the family used as a Christmas greeting last December. ‘I’m proud of the royal family,’ says Olaf, ‘because they are a binding factor in a democracy that is sometimes very divided. I’m happy to be able to contribute to that.’
Successful artist
The double exhibition will show how Erwin Olaf has developed from angry provocateur to one of the Netherland’s most famous and popular photographers. His work now features in the collections and exhibitions of museums the world over, including China, Russia, The United States of America and Brazil. In 2008 The Hague Museum of Photography showed his Rain, Hope, Grief and Fall series. In 2011 he won the prestigious Johannes Vermeer Prize, and in 2018 the Rijksmuseum purchased almost 500 photographs and videos by Erwin Olaf.
Biggest retrospective to date
Together, the exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum and the Museum of Photography will constitute the biggest retrospective of Olaf’s work ever staged, spanning the period from the early 1980s to his most recent work. In the words of Erwin Olaf: celebrating 40 years of visual freedom.
The double exhibition has been curated by Wim van Sinderen with the assistance of Hanneke Mantel (both of Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and The Hague Museum of Photography), and has come about in close collaboration with Erwin Olaf and his studio.
Press release from the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag website [Online] Cited 04/05/2019
“I made the Royal Blood series to celebrate Photoshop as the new craft. I wanted to make something that was clearly fiction and would be impossible without Photoshop. A theme that was in the air at the time was that violence was suddenly identified with glamor. I never understood why criminals, even murderers, have fans. People worship them! And every cinema is chock full of people watching violence every week. I wanted to expose the attraction of blood, violence and celebrity – that live fast, that young ideal. Now I could no longer do this type of work. The emotion behind it has disappeared – I have already told that story. But it remains an important part of my legacy.”
Erwin Olaf (excerpt from the book Erwin Olaf – I am)
![Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) 'Untitled [Joyce with camera]' 1951](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/joyce-evans-joyce-with-camera-web.jpg "Joyce Evans. 'Untitled [Joyce with camera]' 1951")
!['Stephen Varble, Gutter Art flyer' [recto] 1975](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/stephen-varble-in-the-gutter-web.jpg "'Stephen Varble, Gutter Art flyer' [recto] 1975")
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