Auguste and Louis Lumière (French, 1862-1954) (French, 1864-1948) Bangles 1893-1900 ALL Chroma 8.4 x 17.8cm The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna – Permanent loan by Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt
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.
In my eyes, that would have made the exhibition even better!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Albertina Modern for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Gracious thankx also to Karin Svadlenak-Gomez for allowing me to use her wonderful photographs of the exhibition in the posting, noted below each image. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing in the bottom image, Léon Vidal’s photograph Oriental Onyx Saucier, 16th century, from Le Tresor artistique de la France, c. 1876-1878 (below)
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
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing at left, Heinrich Kühn’s Twilight 1896 (below); and at right, Heinrich Bachmann’s Winter Landscape 1903
One of my personal highlights from True Colours was the section dedicated to pictorialist photography. Emerging in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pictorialism sought to elevate photography to the level of fine art, favouring soft focus, painterly compositions, and atmospheric effects. In fact the Albertina modern had a whole exhibition on Pictorialism in 2023, which was a great joy to me.
Heinrich Kühn’s Twilight (1896, above), produced through the autochrome process, was a standout for me, its subtle gradations of light and shadow creating an almost dreamlike serenity. Kühn was also one of the pioneers of the autochrome process, the first commercially successful colour photography method introduced by the Lumière brothers in 1907. Autochromes used a fine layer of dyed potato starch grains to filter light, creating rich and softly textured images. Kühn masterfully employed this process to enhance the painterly, impressionistic quality of his photographs, further bridging the gap between photography and fine art. Seeing these images up close, I was reminded of how photographers of the past fought for their medium to be recognised as more than mere documentation – it was, and remains, an art form in its own right.
Karin Svadlenak-Gomez. “Photography in Full Spectrum,” on the ViennaCultgram website 13th March 2025 [Online] Cited 25/03/2024
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna Photo:Karin Svadlenak-Gomez
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing Anonymous. Laboratory Still Life 1906
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing two photographs by Atelier D’Ora with at right, Maria Delvard as Tambour 1913
The aesthetics of fine art photography had their greatest impact on studio photograph. In the early twentieth century, such progressive studios as Atelier d’Ora (later called Atelier d’Ora Benda) adopted the reformed portrait style and its elaborate techniques. The bromoil and broccoli transfer processes finally offered an alternative to gum prints, so that works in colour could be produced in a much less complicated and inexpensive way.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing Kurt Husnik’s three photographs Untitled 1950s
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing Kurt Husnik’s Untitled 1950s
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing at left, Hans Madensky’s Fashion Portrait – Student of the Vienna-Hetzendorf School of Fashion 1952 (below)
The exhibition True Colors – Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 answers this question with outstanding works from the Albertina Museum’s photo collection.
The desire for colour in photography has dominated the world of photography from the very beginning. True Colors traces the development of colour photography, from the first experimental techniques in the 19th century to generally applicable analog colour photography.
Even in the early days of photography, daguerreotypes and salt paper prints were colored by hand to create colorful images. Monochrome pigment papers, which enjoyed great popularity until the 1890s, also contributed to the broad chromatic diversity of 19th century photographs.
The first successful color process, which was reserved for an exclusive circle, was introduced in 1891. The brilliant images in the so-called interference colour process are based on the physical principle of standing waves, which also allows us to see coloured reflections in soap bubbles. The unique pieces from the Albertina Museum’s Collection represent a unique focal point.
The autochrome process, which was introduced in 1907, brought about a major change in image culture. It was also practicable for amateurs and helped its inventors, the Lumière brothers, to achieve great commercial success. However, it was mainly used as a glass slide for projection. At the same time, around 1900, fine art printing processes were developed that used color pigments to produce multicolored image solutions. They fulfilled the artistic aspirations of the Pictorialists and were commonplace in large photo studios until the 1930s. For a long time, the challenge was to obtain colored prints on paper. This was also achieved at the beginning of the 20th century with the use of various three-color processes, which were assembled in several steps.
Kodak finally achieved the breakthrough to easy-to-use and therefore mass-market colour photography in 1936 with the first 35mm colour slide films. These products revolutionised the use of colour photography in the following decades, which form the conclusion of this Albertina Museum exhibition.
True Colors provides an insight into the rich holdings of the Albertina Museum’s photography collection, the historical part of which is based on the collection of the Höhere Graphische Bundes- Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (GLV). The exhibition demonstrates the great public interest, the constant development and the various fields of application of historical photography in colour. True Colors also explores the impact of popular colour processes on the visual culture of the early 20th century.
The exhibition is on view from 24 January until 21 April 2025 at the Albertina Modern
Photochrom Print Collection (photographer) The Falls of the Rhine, by Bengal Light, Schaffhausen, Switzerland Between 1890 and 1900 Print no. “16491”.; Forms part of: Views of Switzerland in the Photochrom print collection.; Title from the Detroit Publishing Co., Catalogue J-foreign section, Detroit, Mich.: Detroit Publishing Company, 1905. Photomechanical print, photochrom, colour
True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955
Today, colour photography is omnipresent, but the knowledge about its complex genesis is not very familiar. This exhibition highlights the multifaceted developments that were initiated starting in the mid-nineteenth century to bring colour into photography. Thanks to the extensive photographic collection of the Imperial-Royal Institution of Graphic Education and Research, the Albertina possesses unique holdings of important examples from this exciting chapter of photographic history.
As early as the middle of the nineteenth century, individual scientists managed to create unique photographs in color, which, however, were not intended for everyday use. Therefore, it was common from the early days to employ colouration or toned photographic papers. In 1891, Gabriel Lippmann achieved a crucial success in direct color photography by formulating the interferential colour process, which produced brilliantly vivid images. The Lumière brothers finally accomplished the first revolution in color photography: in 1907, they brought industrially manufactured autochromes to market. It was now for the first time that photographers and amateurs could access a practicable process for the production of colour glass slides. Thanks to more elaborate three-colour processes and Pictorialist fine art printing, which were developed around the same time, it was also possible to produce photographs in colour on paper.
The desire for colour in photography, which had been evident since it had existed, continued to prevail in the twentieth century. A decisive breakthrough was achieved by the Kodak Company in the mid-1930s, when it produced the first 35 mm photographic color slide film. Starting out from the USA, more practical materials for analog color photography, which had been developed gradually, also established themselves in Europe after World War II. It was now impossible to stop the triumph of modern colour photography.
All objects on display here come from the holdings of the Albertina or are on permanent loan from the collection of the Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt [Higher Federal Institution of Graphic Education and Research].
Chromatic Diversity
Before it was possible to produce color photographs, photographers made use of a number of methods to bring color into their images. Even in the early days, daguerreotypes and salted paper prints were coloured by hand. While daguerreotypes were usually colored only partially, salted paper prints were sometimes heavily painted over. The so-called pigment papers, which enjoyed great popularity from the 1850s onward, enabled monochrome prints in various colours. Industrial manufacturers offered a wide range of nuances that could be variably used depending on the motif. Another way of lending prints uniform colour effects were toning baths. It was thus variable methods that were employed to produce photographs displaying a rich chromatic diversity.
A vital contribution to photography in colour was the introduction of the so called orthochromatic negative plates. In 1873, Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovered the sensitisation of the photographic emulsion, so that the plates truthfully rendered the brightness values of blue, orange, yellow, and green. Earlier, the grey values of the blue areas had appeared overly bright, while the other colours had often seemed too dark. With the development of so-called panchromatic negative material it became possible from 1902 on to accurately record the entire visible spectral range according to tonal values. This progress was crucial for colour photography, as an incorrect recording of the tonal values during a shot could result in a distorted colour impression in the final product.
A Solitaire – the Interferential Colour Process
The interferential colour process, with which Gabriel Lippmann went public in Paris in 1891, is considered a first milestone in direct color photography. The method ensured permanently stable, brilliantly vivid colour images. It is based on the interference of light waves caused during exposure by the reflections of incident light rays off a reflective layer of mercury behind the negative. In the photographic emulsion, the finest layers are created alongside the standing waves, in which accumulations of silver are deposited. The spacing between the layers corresponds to the wavelength of the recorded colour, so that when the image is viewed at the correct angle, the individual parts reflect their original colour. Standing waves are the phenomenon that also causes the colour effects on soap bubbles.
The process, which had its pitfalls, was enthusiastically received by specialists. The Lumière brothers, who as producers of photographic plates were highly interested in colour photography, collaborated with Lippmann to improve emulsions. The Berlin-based scientist Richard Neuhauss also dealt intensively with this method, based on the research conducted by the Viennese photochemist Eduard Valenta. Due to its chromatic purity, the spectrum offered itself as an ideal motif for images. Neuhauss’s plates fascinate us not only because of their luminous colours, but mainly for their wide range of motifs, which was facilitated by the reduction of exposure times.
Photomechanical Color Printing Processes
Since the development of chromolithography in 1837, color reproductions had been increasingly used for luxury volumes. In combination with photography, the printing plates could either be exposed directly, or the photographic images were transferred to the plates by means of transfer printing. This and related procedures led to an increase of elaborately produced publications of scholarly character. For the work Le Trésor artistique de la France, which contained high-quality colour reproductions of art objects held by the Louvre, the French photographer Léon Vidal developed a complex process referred to as photochromie. Photographic prints constituted the base layer onto which he printed several tinted lithographic plates. Through the additional use of metallic colours or papers and a layer of varnish, Vidal achieved three-dimensional effects.
Another important step was the introduction of the collotype process, which, from 1868 onward, allowed printing black-and-white photographs in halftones. Institutions like the Imperial-Royal Austrian Trade Museum in Vienna published such luxurious scholarly publications as the illustrated volume Orientalische Teppiche [Oriental Rugs], which appeared in 1892. For this work, black-and-white collotypes and the chromolithographic plates were partly each executed across the entire surface and partly combined with each other in order to document the knotting technique and the colouration of the objects equally accurately. A colour sample based on the original rug was first painted on the collotype and then transferred by lithography. Up to thirteen individually tinted printing plates were employed in the process. Both publications stand out for the effort to imitate the object character in the coloured reproduction.
Commercial Successes – the Autochrome and Other Color Screen Processes
In 1893, in search of a viable color process, the industrialists Auguste and Louis Lumière developed the ALL Chroma, a transparency made up of three coloured layers. Since its production and use involved a high input of costs and time, the method did not prevail, despite the vivid colors it produced. Following further research, the Lumière brothers eventually achieved a breakthrough with the autochrome in 1907, which was to revolutionise colour photography for the first time. The autochrome is also a positive transparency, yet based on the principle of additive color synthesis. A glass plate functioning as carrier material is covered with a photosensitive layer on one side. A mixture of red, green, and blue starch granules is applied on top of it, forming an irregular pattern. The image is created after exposure and negative and positive development, as the granules fuse together to form coloured areas when viewed in transmitted light. Its vibrant colors and uncomplicated handling earned the inventors of this method great commercial success. The autochrome was no longer exclusively accessible to specialists. The process was not only employed for scientific images, but also and mainly in amateur photography.
In addition to the autochrome, there were numerous products relying on the principle of additive color synthesis, such as the Joly process, which had already been developed in England ten years earlier and which was based on a grid of vertical lines. By 1910, further colour screen processes had made it onto the market, such as Omnicolore or the Agfacolor plate. But the autochrome remained the most widely used colour process until the early 1930s because of its unsurpassed chromatic brilliance.
Colour by “Indirect” Means – Three-Colour Processes
Three-colour photographic printing methods on paper are based on the principle of subtractive colour mixing. The processes, their implementation differing in detail, followed a multistep procedure. At first, three subsequent black-and-white shots were taken behind red, green, and blue filters. The so called colour separation negatives were then inverted into positives. From the three positives, three matrices – in the complementary colours cyan, magenta, and yellow – were then produced. The colour image was finally composed of these three colours.
For the pinatype, three matrices were transferred onto a sheet of prepared paper. What mattered for an accomplished picture was not only proper colour adjustment, but also an absolutely precise alignment of the images. The still life of various laboratory utensils demonstrates the individual steps leading to a colourful picture. The so-called interpositives provide the basis for the coloured matrices, which, printed one upon the other, provide the final version of the picture. Apart from still lifes, photographers also employed this technique, which was developed to market maturity by Ernst König in 1905, for portraits. In these photographs, they showcased their creative skills in handling colour.
Pictorialist Endeavors – Fine Art Printing Processes
Artistic photography around 1900 was propagated by wealthy amateurs who wished to elevate photography to the level of fine art. Their ambition was to be able to manipulate the photographic print by hand, as the mechanical aspect of photography was criticised as being inartistic. The gum bichromate print, a so-called fine art printing process, allowed them to control the work as much as possible. A mixture of pigments, gum arabic, and photosensitive salts was applied to coarse paper and then exposed. After washing out the unexposed areas, the image became visible. For multicolor works, this process could be repeated as often as desired, each time using a different pigment. This advancement of the gum bichromate printing technique toward multicolour printing was first implemented by members of the Camera Club in Vienna, an association of amateur photographers. The possibility of creating such colourful images that could be used as decorative works of art on the wall and sometimes reach large dimensions, was particularly enthusiastically received in German-speaking countries.
Paths to Modern Colour Photography
The consequential breakthrough to mass-market color photography was achieved in the mid-1930s, when the companies Eastman Kodak (USA) and, shortly thereafter, Agfa (Germany) put so-called modern multilayer films with dye couplers on the market. By 1936, the first 35mm colour slide films and, by 1942, the first colour films and corresponding photographic papers for the negative-positive process were available, the latter of which revolutionised colour photography a second time. Yet the outbreak of World War II initially delayed the spread of these innovations in Europe. But from the 1950s onward, the triumph of modern analog colour photography could not longer be stopped.
However, contemporary high-quality copying and printing processes were still extremely expensive and complicated. The Duxochrome and dye-transfer processes, for example, were valued not only for the brilliance and stability of their colours, but also because they could be manipulated during the production process. But due to the high cost of production, they were mainly used for commercial purposes. Product and fashion photography accommodated the needs of advertising and the press. In Vienna, the photographers Arthur Benda and Hans Madensky were very successful in these fields.
Text from the Albertina Museum
Installation views of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern Photos:Karin Svadlenak-Gomez
Ernst König (German, 1869-1924) Still-life with flowers 1905 Pinatype Photo:Karin Svadlenak-Gomez
Installation view of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna showing Kodak Company. Photo Magazines for Amateurs 1957-1959
Installation views of the exhibition True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna Photos:Karin Svadlenak-Gomez
True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern poster
The Albertina Museum Albertinaplatz 1 1010 Vienna Phone: +43 (0)1 534 83 0
So many words, so much verbiage about the work of American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013).
I’d rather not add to that noise.
It is well to reinforce the meaning of an image with text but it is not necessary.
Just be aware …. of the beauty of the image and your feelings towards it.
Lucidly, appreciate the integrity of the image.
Nothing more but certainly nothing less.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. It’s wonderful to see the earlier black and white work, breadcrumb trail of the colour work to come.
Many thankx to Foam for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“Photographs are often treated as important moments, but really they are fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world.”
Saul Leiter
“I may be old-fashioned. But I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.”
Saul Leiter, In No Great Hurry, 2013
“His photos feel – as Akiko Atake puts it – like “quiet stolen glimpses”; moments plucked from the everyday and preserved in the eye of Leiter’s camera.”
“I’ve always felt a closeness to Japan in Leiter’s work; the photographs in the snow; the women under their umbrellas; the improbable perspectives and revolutionary compositions reminiscent of Japanese woodblocks, ukiyo-e; the presence of the seasons and the verticality of the compositions evoking Japanese scroll paintings, kakajiku; the beauty he found in cracks and broken surfaces, in the unfinished, the worn out, the imperfect – the endurance of the elements and the effects of time. There is a “mono no aware”* beauty to his photographs, in the color work especially – an acute awareness of the beauty of the transient, of the ephemeral, which might explain, in part, their magical and poetic essence.”
“Leiter was destined to become a rabbi like his father, but moved to New York to be a painter, then choosing photography – which appalled his father. Beginning in 1948, Leiter using an Argus C3 camera, then a Leica and a Rolleiflex
In the 2012 documentary, In No Great Hurry, Saul Leiter said: “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.” These tender and graceful depictions of “the things that are hidden” – images that Leiter rarely showed – retain their essential mystery, defying interpretation.”
* mono no aware = a Japanese concept that describes a poignant awareness of the transient nature of existence, a sensitivity to the beauty of things that are fleeting, and a gentle sadness at their passing
Leiter’s love of beauty, Bonnard, Japan, Buddhism, Ukiyo-e prints, Japanese scroll paintings, “ma” (space), kyūdō, haiku.
“The unorthodox and seemingly disproportionate compositions… the emphasis on shapes; the presence of calligraphy; unusual viewpoints and perspectives, everyday subject matter; the ubiquity of women; and a fondness for the ordinary and the ephemeral”
~ Leiter’s complex and impressionistic photographs are as much about evoking an atmosphere as nailing the decisive moment.
~ Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
~ Photographs are often considered important moments, but according to Leiter they are tiny fragments of an unfinished world. Such is his own world: little fragments of images juxtaposed and conjoined, amassing and forming vast, ever-expanding fields.
~ He photographed that which obstructs, hides, encloses, and thus reveals new depths of reality.
~ Everything is a matter of balance, exactitude and humility in the works of this man, who nonetheless accorded great importance to imperfection.
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions.
About the artist
Saul Leiter (1923-2013) began painting and photographing in his teenage years, gaining an early recognition for his paintings. After moving to New York in 1946, he turned to photography as a profession while continuing to paint. His abstract forms and groundbreaking compositions possess a painterly quality that distinguishes them from the works of other photographers of that era. His work significantly contributed to the emergence of what is now known as the New York School of photography.
In 1957, he began working for major publications like Esquire and Harper’s Bazaar, balancing his commercial success with his personal passion for street photography in his Manhattan neighbourhood. Leiter’s groundbreaking work in colour photography gained widespread acclaim with the release of his first book, Early Colour (2006). By the time of his death in 2013, Leiter had achieved international recognition, with his work featured in numerous museum exhibitions and publications worldwide.
Text from the Foam website
Installation views of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam
Saul Leiter remained dedicated to painting throughout his career, producing many gouaches (opaque watercolours), which were essential to his artistic expression. While most of his works are abstract, with large areas of colour, some feature playful lines that suggest landscapes or figures. His expressive use of colour is distinctive, often favouring muted tones like soft violets, mauves, and faded ochres or yellows. Although Leiter is best known for his photography, his paintings reflect a similarly poetic and intimate vision of the world.
Text from the Foam Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph The Pull (c. 1960, below)
Leiter was a keen observer as life unfolded before him, somehow finding a way to reliably pluck a sublime split-second out of a mundane moment. ‘I like to take things that are very common and to find something in them,’ he once said.
Installation view of the exhibition Saul Leiter – An Unfinished World at Foam, Amsterdam showing Leiter’s photograph
Foam is proud to present a major retrospective exhibition of the celebrated American artist Saul Leiter (1923-2013). Leiter is seen as one of the most important photographers of the 1950’s in the United States, and a pioneer of colour photography. This exhibition brings together over 200 works, consisting of photography, both black-and-white and colour, as well as his abstract paintings. His eclectic oeuvre reveals a practice using shadow, light, and reflections to craft layered compositions. For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of colour to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in colour. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and colour. Once lost to obscurity, his work was rediscovered in the mid 2010s for its ground-breaking role in the emergence of colour photography.
Leiter was a self-taught photographer whose strong sense of curiosity made him a lifelong student. He maintained his experimental and spontaneous approach throughout his career, which is evident in both his street photography and fashion work.
Upon his death in 2013, Leiter left behind a remarkable collection of approximately 15,000 black-and-white prints, at least 40,000 colour slides, a similar number of black-and-white negatives and over 4000 paintings, only a handful of which have been seen publicly. The exhibition An Unfinished World offers visitors the chance to admire the endless poetry of Saul Leiter’s artistic practice through his paintings, photography and unique view on the world around him.
“This ambidextrous painter and photographer recognised no limits. If, in the silence of his studio, his movement inscribed on paper imperceptible little rhythmic abbreviations, like an everyday exercise, his gaze penetrated the tumult of the city, challenging what draws the eye and scrutinising what is not seen.”
“If only we give them just a little more attention, these voices also tell us that the images are fragments containing enigmas, and that they journey through time and endure, intact, despite the darkness that may prevail in the world.”
“For nearly sixty years, Leiter photographed daily, capturing everyday moments of New York City life. With various techniques and mediums, and the use of telephoto lenses, Leiter would enhance the painterly quality of his images and transform seemingly mundane street scenes into visual poetry. New York, a symbol of modernity in the 1950s, became the backdrop for Leiter’s aesthetic discoveries. By shooting in the rain and snow, and using windows and other reflective surfaces, he created abstract images. A red umbrella, a green traffic light, or the yellow flash of a passing taxi add an unexpected play of color to his photographs. In the 1940s and 1950s, Leiter was virtually the only non-commercial photographer to work in color. The use of aged or damaged film allowed him to include surprising compositions with shifts in light and color.”
Exhibition dates: 6th October, 2024 – 6th April, 2025
Curator: Andrea Nelson, associate curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Cleaning the Drapes 1967-1972, printed 2007 From the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home Inkjet print Image: 44.2 x 60.4cm (17 3/8 x 23 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Collectors Committee and Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Martha Rosler originally distributed photocopies from this series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, as flyers at anti – Vietnam War demonstrations. She made the original photomontages by combining gritty news photographs of fighting in Vietnam with homerelated advertisements culled from glossy women’s magazines. Here Rosler paired a woman cleaning patterned drapes with two tired soldiers smoking amid rocks and sandbags. The woman’s vacuum wand points to and echoes the soldiers’ rifles. The jolting collision of war imagery and affluent domestic space gives visual form to the description of the conflict as “the living room war” – so called because it appeared on television news nightly.
Wall text from the exhibition
“Ce n’est pas une pipe mais de la photographie, sous toutes ses formes variables et multivalentes”
René Magritte’s 1929 painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe is also known as La Trahison des images … The Treachery of Images.
Treachery – the betrayal of trust – is an apposite word in relation to photography of the 1970s. Finally, once and for all, documentary photography in America broke free of the West Coast fine art photography tradition of mainly white male artists and the “aura” of the fine art print (Walter Benjamin). Photography betrayed the trust placed in the authenticity of the image and its link to the “truth” of reality represented in the photograph to become a medium of variability, in concept, execution and outcome. Photography became whatever you wanted it to be.
Documentary photography and its link to the reality of the referent – its assumed representation of a truth that existed in reality – began to be subsumed into the whole of photography, just part of a conceptual, art, performative, staged, street, cameraless, documentary, fashion, photojournalist, activist, amoebic (from the Greek ἀμοιβή amoibe, meaning “change”), and viral (Paul Virilio) medium.
Photography had always been a medium of communication but now became multi-perspectival – whether that be imaginings of the mind relayed through photographs, conceptual ideas about the world and how we interact with it created and staged through photographs, or new colour photography that challenged the orthodoxy of fine art black and white West Coast American photography.
As Anne-Marie Willis observes on the On This Date In Photography website, “any curator who would challenge the orthodox Beaumont Newhall-style photo history limited to images that are distinctively photographic, aesthetic, and “Straight” … would open a Pandora’s box full of photographs pervasive across so many fields, of such limitless subject matters, and crossing so many disciplines that their histories in photography would be obscured.”1
This is the alleged treachery of multi-perspectival photography, the betraying of photographic histories that stretched back to the beginnings of the medium… but it had to be done for photography to fully open itself up to the imaginings of the human and the media flows of the world. “It was a time when photography challenged the art photography norm: photography should not, could not be restricted to what was considered ‘art’.”2
Thus, it is a great joy to see photographs from this stimulating exhibition, photographs that challenge the established “norm” of what photography should be. But what is surprising to me when looking at the complete list of photographs in this exhibition is the important artists who changed the face of photography in the 1970s who are not represented at all or only have one or two images on show:
Gordon Parks 0 Garry Winogrand 1 Lee Friedlander 2 Diane Arbus 1 Robert Mapplethorpe 0 Robert Heinecken 0 Richard Avedon 0 Andy Warhol 1 Polaroid Cindy Sherman 0 Barbara Kruger 0 Nan Goldin 1 Stephen Shore 1
Diane Arbus, who was instrumental in changing portrait photography at the time, only has one photograph in the exhibition; Barbara Kruger and Robert Heinecken, both “para-photographers” whose work stood “beside” or “beyond” traditional ideas associated with photography have none; Stephen Shore who, along with William Eggleston, was responsible for making colour photography acceptable in art photography has only one photograph.
But most surprisingly of all, Cindy Sherman whose Untitled Film Stills were made predominantly between 1977-1980 and who casts herself as clichés or feminine types, becoming both the artist and subject in the work … is not there at all. Her loss, her evisceration, and the absence of “arguably one of the most significant bodies of work made in the twentieth century and thoroughly canonized by art historians, curators, and critics,”3 is unfathomable.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anne-Marie Willis quoted in Dr James McArdle. “DECEMBER 14: CONTEXT,” on the On This Date In Photography website 15/12/2019 [Online] Cited 26/02/2025
2/ Ibid.,
3/ Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Cindy Sherman, 2012, p. 18 quoted in the “Untitled Film Stills” page on the Wikipedia website
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Roadside Ambush 1967-1972, printed 2007 Inkjet print Image/sheet: 50.8 x 61cm (20 x 24 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash
Rosler originally distributed photocopies of House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home at anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. “I saw House Beautiful not as art,” she later reflected. “I wanted it to be agitational.” The artist created the original photomontages, from which these collages are derived, by combining news photographs of scorched battlefields in Vietnam with glossy advertisements for US homes, layering images of soldiers within cut-out silhouettes of men from polo-shirt advertisements; and splicing pictures of soldiers’ burials with those of military marches. By tying the destruction abroad to untroubled affluence at home, Rosler gave visual form to the description of the conflict as “the living-room war” – so called because it was the first war to be televised.
The exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines how new approaches to documentary photography that emerged during the 1970s reflected a radical shift in American life – and in the medium itself.
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the US – soaring inflation, energy crises, the Watergate scandal, and protests about pressing social issues – and the profound upheaval that rocked the country formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Now on view at @ngadc, The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography explores this compelling and contested moment of reinvention when the genre’s association with objectivity and truthfulness came into question. Featuring works from over eighty artists, the exhibition delves into how the camera was used to examine life in the US from a diverse range of perspectives, and in doing so, transformed the practice of documentary photography.
The ’70s Lens: A Conversation with Anthony Hernandez
Artist Anthony Hernandez discusses 50 years of work with curator Andrea Nelson on October 24, 2024. The conversation celebrates the exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography (October 2024 – April 2025).
Anthony Hernandez (b. 1947, Los Angeles, California) has crafted a richly varied oeuvre, ranging from a distinctive style of black-and-white street photography to colour photographs of abstracted details of his surroundings. Much of Hernandez’s work focuses on his native Los Angeles, revealing a unique insight into the people and landscape of the much-pictured city. Hernandez is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the Rome Prize (1999) and has been named a United States Artists Fellow (2009).
Eggleston is celebrated for his use of colour photography, which he began experimenting with in the late 1960s. Eggleston’s 1976 exhibition Colour Photographs, held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is considered a pivotal moment in the development of colour photography as a contemporary art form and widely credited with increasing recognition of the medium.
Since first picking up a camera in 1957, Eggleston has photographed his family, friends and the people that he encountered in his everyday life, particularly in his native Memphis. Eggleston is said to find the beauty in the everyday and his work has inspired many present day photographers, artists and filmmakers, including Martin Parr, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch and Juergen Teller.
Anthony Friedkin (American, b. 1949) Young Man, Troupers Hall, Hollywood 1969 From the series The Gay Essay Gelatin silver print National Portrait Gallery Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
In 1969, Anthony Friedkin was only 19 years old when he set out to document the queer communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The resulting project, The Gay Essay, is an expressive and nuanced portrait. Friedkin charts various facets of the culture, from street life and protests to parades and drag performances.
Friedkin’s photographs record the beginnings of the gay liberation movement in California. With a respectful intimacy he pictures individuals living true to themselves while defying prevailing social norms.
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Mel Bochner (American, 1940-2025) Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography) (details) 1970 10 offset lithographs on notecards and envelope Sheet (each): 12.7 x 20.32cm (5 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
When Mel Bochner started documenting his works of sculpture with a camera, he realised that his practice had “become about photography without [my] wanting it to.” He studied the history of the medium and found conflicting ideas about what photography is or should be. By illustrating these “misunderstandings” with quotes from notable figures and sources, Bochner underscored the gap between a photograph itself and what it purports to represent. He even fabricated three of the quotations, further playing on photography’s tenuous relationship to truth. The photograph of the artist’s hand and forearm is also a misunderstanding: it is much smaller than the actual body part it depicts. It also appears to be a negative of a Polaroid photograph, but Polaroids exist only as positive prints.
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Mel Bochner was a key figure in the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s and 70s. Bochner was part of a group of artists who challenged the traditional notion of art as a physical object to be admired for its aesthetic qualities and instead sought to explore the ideas and concepts behind the object, often using language and text as their medium.
Bochner’s early works were influenced by his interest in mathematics and logic, which he applied to create intricate geometric patterns. As his practice evolved, he incorporated language and words into his artwork, exploring the relationship between language, thought, and perception.
Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 23.7 × 16.1cm (9 5/16 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Anthony Barboza’s photography has been integral in shaping the image of Black America. A founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a group of Black photographers formed in New York in 1963, Barboza went on to establish a thriving commercial and personal practice focused largely on Black subjects. His affirmative representations of African Americans in daily life – like this photograph of two ultra-stylish men standing in front of a hotel coffee shop in midtown Manhattan – contributed to an empowering narrative for the Black community in the face of inequality and adversity. Describing his approach to making pictures on the street, Barboza commented, “”The photograph finds you, you don’t find the photograph.”
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Anthony Barboza (American, b. 1944) New York City 1970s Gelatin silver print Image: 23.7 × 15.9cm (9 5/16 × 6 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Hillcrest, New York 1970 Gelatin silver print Image: 20.3 x 30.5cm (8 x 12 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
The fracturing of the image plane, where multiple, diverse realities are represented within one photograph, deconstructing the reality of fine art photography. ~ Marcus
Lee Friedlander’s layered compositions wittily observe connections between American life and commerce. In this dizzying photograph, Friedlander captures himself, at center, in a sideview mirror while at a filling station. In the reflection behind him we see a strip mall with the stores’ signs reversed. Near and far vie for attention and parts of the composition are blocked from our view.
The photograph with a World War I memorial similarly features vertical elements that break up the composition into separate frames. At left, the memorial’s soldier with rifle – who appears to be on guard – goes completely unnoticed as pedestrians make their way along a street full of storefronts.
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Kenneth Josephson (American, b. 1932) Wyoming 1971 From the History of Photography series Gelatin silver print Image: 22.8 x 14.1cm (9 x 5 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Kenneth Josephson’s conceptual photography experiments with playful illusion to explore and question his medium. Josephson was a graduate among the first generation of photography candidates from the Illinois Institute of Design. A student of such masters as Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan, and Minor White, Josephson went on to teach for 35 years at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he routinely taught the “Introduction to Photography” course as it inspired him to continue experimentation.
“This photograph of a photograph held in space causes the viewer to question assumptions about truthful representation according to size and scale; it also draws attention to the principle that photographic reality is constructed through an artist’s ideas and choices. The subject of the photograph is photography itself, and the ways that life is documented, manipulated, trivialised, and celebrated with photographs.”
Lewis Baltz (American, 1945-2014) Tract House #4 1971 From the portfolio The Tract Houses Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 14.5 × 22.5cm (5 11/16 × 8 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist)
Lewis Baltz’s The Tract Houses captures the austere geometry of the shoddily built homes that sprang up in California’s suburban landscape beginning in the mid-1940s. Straight-edge architectural details, positioned strictly parallel to the picture plane, recall the reductive forms of minimalist art. Entire, recently constructed houses appear forlorn. None of the pictures include shadows, clouds, or people. Baltz’s series is a powerful critique of the transformation of the American landscape into an unending terrain of anonymous architecture. At the same time, the exquisitely rendered tones and textured surfaces emphasise the subtle beauty to be found in this bleak environment.
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With his iconic, minimalist photographs of suburban landscape, Lewis Baltz was at the forefront of a revolutionary shift in the medium of photography. Baltzs work exemplifies the ways in which photography started to loose the bonds of its isolation within its own segregated history and aesthetics and began to take its place among other media. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Baltz became fascinated by the stark, man-made landscape rolling over Californias then still-agrarian terrain. His earliest portfolio, The Tract Houses (1971), and his preliminary forays into a minimal aesthetic, The Prototype Works (1967-1976), illuminate his drive to capture the reality of a sprawling Western ecology gone wild.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A young man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.7 x 36.5cm (14 13/16 x 14 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection Gift of Stephen G. Stein
Diane Arbus prowled New York’s public spaces looking for humor and strangeness in the everyday. Here a young couple walks in Central Park, wearing similar clothes, hairstyles, and dejected expressions. Arbus’s carefully composed but disorienting photograph – the subjects are in crisp focus while the background is blurred – compels us to look anew at the familiar. Is this couple unhappy in love or expressing the uncertainty of the times? Arbus made this photograph the year she died. Her influence on documentary photography would continue through the decade.
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Eleanor Antin (American, b. 1935) Philip Steinmetz (American, 1944-2013) (photographer) 100 Boots (details) 1971-1973 51 halftone prints (postcards) image/sheet (each): 11.5 x 17.75cm (4 1/2 x 7 in.) National Gallery of Art Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
In this epic visual narrative, black rubber boots stand in for a fictional hero traveling from California to New York City. Eleanor Antin created temporary installations with the boots, had them photographed (by Philip Steinmetz), and made 51 postcards, copies of which she mailed to approximately 1,000 people and institutions involved in the arts. The journey starts at a Bank of America and ends at Central Park – after a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, where the boots and a set of postcards and photographs were later exhibited. Using the postal service, Antin bypassed the traditional gallery system, which had long overlooked women artists. While many of these scenes are humorous, the empty army boots also recall the Vietnam War and the soldiers who did not come home.
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100 Boots, 1971-1973
For her 51-piece instalment 100 Boots Eleonor Antin positioned one hundred ordinary black rubber boots on various locations all over Southern California and consequently in New York City. She took photos, printed them on postcards and assembled a mailing list of about a thousand names – mainly artists, writers, critics, galleries, universities and museums – who received the various postcards over a period of two and a half years between 1971 and 1973. The first card, 100 Boots Facing the Sea, was mailed on the Ides of March, 1971, unannounced and without further comment. A few weeks later it was followed by 100 Boots on the Way to Church and three weeks thereafter by the next one.
In a total of 51 photographs, Eleanor Antin documented the travels of the 100 Boots, her so called “hero” – from a beach close to San Diego to a church, to a bank, to the supermarket, trespassing, under the bridge, to a saloon and on their travels eastward. Finally, on May 15th, 1973 100 Boots arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time, 100 Boots had long become an epic visual narrative and a picaresque work of conceptual art.
Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018) Walapai, Arizona 1971 Gelatin silver print Image: 26.51 x 39.85cm (10 7/16 x 15 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
In 1975 New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape opens at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, N.Y. It includes photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr.
“Henry Wessel began taking photographs while majoring in psychology at Pennsylvania State University in the mid-1960s. Travel throughout the United States in subsequent years led him to direct his gaze increasingly to details of human interaction with the natural and man-made environment. Wessel’s move to the West Coast in the early 1970s inspired him to incorporate light and climate into his work. His inclusion in the seminal exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape, organised in 1975 by the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, solidified his reputation as a keen observer of the American topography.”
Text from Pacific Standard Time at the Getty
John Simmons (American, b. 1950) Will on Chevy, Nashville, Tennessee 1971, printed 2024 Gelatin silver print Image: 30.48 x 20.32cm (12 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
A fashionably dressed older man crosses the street with his umbrella. A young woman turns to look at the camera while holding hands with a man in uniform. These were people John Simmons encountered while studying art at Fisk University in Nashville. Raised on Chicago’s South Side, Simmons had first published photographs as a teenager in the African American newspaper Chicago Defender. Refuting white-centered media’s failure to show positive imagery of the Black experience, Simmons has focused on people enjoying everyday life.
“I always feel like my subject and I were meant to share that moment together,” he has said. “So many of the pictures I take, it was like our paths were meant to cross.”
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Simmons began his career at 15 as a photographer for the oldest African American-owned newspaper, The Chicago Daily Defender in 1965. Over his decades long career, he’s photographed icons of the Civil Rights Movement, turbulent protests and demonstrations, famed musicians and poignant intimate moments of everyday life. “I’m glad to see photographs I took back in my teens are still relevant today,” he says.
Helen Levitt frequently made photographs of children on the streets of New York City, exploring their relationships to the urban setting as they played, imagined, and discovered together. After decades of working in black and white, Levitt became an early advocate of color documentary photography. Color allowed her to tell a fuller story of everyday life. Here, the green of the boy’s T-shirt is echoed in the poster and frame behind him. “I thought my photographs would be closer to reality if I got the color of the streets,” she said. “Black and white is an abstraction.”
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Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) Ronald Reagan 1972 From the series Suburbia Gelatin silver print Image: 16.4 x 21.6cm (6 7/16 x 8 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Over the course of a year, Bill Owens made photographs of the housing developments that had recently sprung up outside of Oakland and San Francisco. With an eye to humor, he captured the apparent conformity and materialism of the new suburbs. Here, a home is decorated for Christmas. At center, Nativity figures sit atop a television console showing an old film featuring Ronald Reagan, who had been a movie actor before becoming a politician. Owens also respected the liberation that many suburbanites felt, as well as their determination to build better lives. In his book Suburbia (1972), he included quotations from his subjects describing the opportunities and challenges they faced in their new environments.
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Owens began his photographic career in the late 1960s as a staff photographer for a local newspaper in Livermore, California. During this period, he began his most noteworthy project, “Suburbia,” which would become a major body of work in American documentary photography.
“Suburbia” was published as a book in 1973, featuring Owens’ images and conversations with suburban dwellers. The project’s goal was to investigate the goals, aspirations, and inconsistencies of suburbia life, offering a critical yet sympathetic study of the American Dream.
Owens’ images depicted scenes of backyard barbecues, family gatherings, children at play, and the myriad rituals and social interactions that constituted suburban areas. He highlighted both the humor and the underlying intricacies of suburban life through his good observation and direct attitude.
What distinguished Owens’ work was his ability to see past the surface and capture the soul of his subjects. His images conveyed a sense of realism by portraying suburbanites in their natural settings and enabling their tales to flow through genuine moments captured in time.
Owens’ art struck a chord with a large audience because it highlighted a huge societal transition in America during the 1970s. Owens’ images challenged the idealized image of suburban life by exposing the hardships, wants, and inconsistencies inherent in the pursuit of the American Dream.
Anonymous. “Bill Owens,” on the Photo.com website Nd [Online] Cited 06/20/2025
See how documentary photography transformed during the 1970s.
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the United States. Americans witnessed soaring inflation, energy crises, and the Watergate scandal, as well as protests about pressing issues such as the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay liberation, and the environment. The country’s profound upheaval formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Activism and a growing awareness and acceptance of diversity opened the field to underrepresented voices. At the same time, artistic experimentation fueled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like.
Featuring some 100 works by more than 80 artists, The ’70s Lens examines how photographers reinvented documentary practice during this radical shift in American life. Mikki Ferrill and Frank Espada used the camera to create complex portraits of their communities. Tseng Kwong Chi and Susan Hiller demonstrated photography’s role in the development of performance and conceptual art. With pictures of suburban sprawl, artists like Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal challenged popular ideas of nature as pristine. And Michael Jang and Joanne Leonard made interior views that examine the social landscape of domestic spaces.
The questions these artists explored – about photography’s ethics, truth, and power – continue to be considered today.
Text from the National Gallery of Art
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Doughboy. Stamford, Connecticut 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.8 x 27cm (7 x 10 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Robert B. Menschel Fund
William Eggleston has said that he has “a democratic way of looking around,” where nothing is more important or less important. For him, everyday subjects are not boring but instead offer visual richness. Here, that richness has a pronounced edge. Eggleston directed his lens up to a red ceiling with a single bare lightbulb at center. We glimpse only the top of a doorframe and a fragment of an explicit poster. The saturated, bloodlike color that dominates the composition is shocking, even menacing. It also challenged Eggleston technically as he developed his skills with dye imbibition printing. Commonly known as dye transfer, the process was labor intensive but allowed for customisation and a wide range of colours and tones.
Viewers of a certain age will recognize this setting as the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. HoJos, as they were nicknamed, were once ubiquitous along America’s highways. The cheery saturated colors belie the scene’s subject: a couple having a bad travel day. A man in suit and tie works under the hood of a beat-up Chevy Impala. His partner, wearing a pale pink skirt and top, arms crossed, appears frustrated. The cars zooming by seem to mock their immobility. Part of Mitch Epstein’s Recreation series, which documented Americans engaging in leisure activities, the photograph today evokes melancholy and nostalgia. Explaining his early turn to colour film, the artist said, “The world is in color, so why not photograph in color?”
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I started to work in colour, which was a radical, and some thought foolish, move in 1973. Colour photography was not yet a medium for serious photography – it was used almost exclusively for slick advertising and illustration. Within a month of shooting in colour, though, I wanted to do nothing else…
As I developed, I learned that a photograph is other than the thing itself photographed, and this freed me to think about how I could use photography to fictional effect, even while my pictures were drawn from the real world…
Photography remains a tool with which I form and sharpen my response to the world around me. Anything and everything is photographable in an infinite number of ways. That excites me.
Mitch Epstein in Lewis Blackwell. PhotoWisdom: Master Photographers on Their Art quoted quoted in “Mitch Epstein – Meet The Master Photographer,” on the Milkbooks website Nd [Online] Cited 06/02/2025
Adams’ photographic vision is extra ordinary and I cannot fault his individual photographs. I become engrossed in them. I breathe their atmosphere. He has a resolution, both in terms of large format aesthetic, the aesthetic of beauty and of using materials, light and composition… that seems exactly right. He possesses that superlative skill of few great photographers, and by that I mean: sometimes he has true compassion** / parallel to a religious compassion, but not based on something higher / just perfect human. In some of his photographs (such as East from Flagstaff Mountain, Boulder County, Colorado 1975) he possesses real forgiveness, in others there is the perfection of cruel, the perfection of de/composition.
** achieved by Arbus, Atget and sometimes by Clift, Gowin.
And then, each image holds small clues vital to the overall conversation that is the accumulation of his work and it is in their collective accumulation of meaning that Adams’ photographs grow and build to shatter not just the American silence on environmental issues, but the deafening silence of the whole industrialised world. In their holistic nature, Adams’ body of work becomes punctum and because of this his work produces other “things”, things as great as anything the French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician Roland Barthes wrote about. As in Barthes’ seminal work Camera Lucida, Adams’ work reminds us that the “photograph is evidence of ‘what has ceased to be’. Instead of making reality solid, it reminds us of the world’s ever changing nature.”1
Marcus Bunyan. “The quiet of the great beyond,” on the exhibition American Silence: The Photographs of Robert Adams at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, May – October 2022 on Art Blart: art and cultural memory archive website, September 25, 2022 [Online] Cited 06/02/2025
1/ Anonymous. “Roland Barthes,” on the Wikipedia website Nd [Online] Cited 23/09/2022
Michael Jang (American, b. 1951) Study Hall 1973 Gelatin silver print 15.5 × 23.5cm (6 1/8 × 9 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Charina Endowment Fund
In Study Hall, Michael Jang’s extended family sits together on a couch reading comics and a television guide, a messy tray of Kraft Teez Dip and potato chips on the table in front of them. The covers of the decidedly not studious publications block their faces, becoming stand-ins for their portraits. In Aunts and Uncles (nearby), relatives are caught joking around while posing for an official family portrait in silly sunglasses.
Jang’s humorous photographs of his Chinese American family and the trappings of their suburban lives offer a refreshing take on the often staid genre of family portraiture. They also debunk the 1970s stereotype – think The Brady Bunch – that the “all-American” family could only be white.
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In his series The Jangs, Michael Jang photographed family at home. His humorous photographs of their suburban lives expanded the concept of the “all-American” family – the Chinese American Jangs didn’t look like The Brady Bunch.
In Study Hall, Jang’s cousins and aunt sit together on a couch reading comics and a television guide, a messy tray of potato chips and dip on the table in front of them. The covers of decidedly not studious publications block their faces, becoming stand-ins for their portraits.
Jang’s delightful series was almost entirely forgotten. The photographs, which he had first made while a student, sat in a box in the artist’s house for decades while he established a career as a commercial photographer.
In the 2000s, Jang reconsidered this series and shared it with museums, which began adding the photographs to their collections. His photographs took on a new light in the wake of a rise of anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, Jang wheat pasted images from The Jangs on buildings in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Lena on the Bally Box, Essex Junction, Vermont 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 22 x 32.5cm (8 11/16 x 12 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Anonymous Gift in honor of Sarah Greenough and Andrea Nelson
The final and most essential selection in this posting – Susan Meiselas’ 1972-1975 Carnival Strippers series – goes behind the “front” to document the lives of women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. “Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.” (Booktopia)
Intense, intimate and revealing, the series proves that we can think we know something (the phenomenal) and yet photography reveals how strange and different each world is – whether that be in trying to understand the mind of the artist and what they intended in a constructed photograph or, in this case, having an impression of someone else’s life, a life we can perceive (through the “presence” of the photograph) but never truly know (the noumenal).
Susan Meiselas (American, b. 1948) Tentful of Marks, Tunbridge, Vermont 1974 Gelatin silver print Image: 19.7 x 29.4cm (7 3/4 x 11 9/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection Museum Purchase, Photography Acquisition Fund
In Tentful of Marks, Susan Meiselas trains her camera from backstage on the legs and high heels of a carnival dancer. The all-male audience – the “marks” of the title – are in sharp focus, and they crowd around the small stage, lustfully gawking up at her. Meiselas spent three summers documenting women who performed striptease at small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. In addition to making photographs, she recorded audiotapesof conversations with the dancers, giving them agency to describe their experience. Meiselas saw her project as a collaboration. Merging listening and looking, it expanded perspectives on a largely invisible and – from the dancers’ perspective – misunderstood world.
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Installation view of the exhibition The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography at the National Gallery of Art, Washington showing at left, Milton Rogovin’s photograph Jimmy Webster with His Father, Verne (1973, below); and at right, Jimmy Webster (1985)
Milton Rogovin (American, 1909-2011) Jimmy Webster with His Father, Verne 1973 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.4 x 15.5cm (6 7/8 x 6 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Pierre Cremieux and Denise Jarvinen
Verne Webster, sitting on his front stoop, looks guardedly at the camera while sheltering his toddler son Jimmy in a protective embrace. This is an early work from Milton Rogovin’s 30-year series documenting Buffalo’s Lower West Side. The project focused on a six-block neighbourhood that was among Buffalo’s most diverse and most impoverished. Rogovin asked permission to photograph his subjects, let them choose their poses and settings, and gave them free prints. He returned every decade or so to photograph the same individuals. A nearby picture shows Jimmy 12 years later. Looking back at Rogovin’s photographs in 2003, Jimmy Webster said, “Whenever you look at his photographs, you just see people for who they are.”
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John Baldessari (American, 1931-2020) Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line: (best of thirty-six attempts) 1973 Colour offset photolithographs National Gallery of Art Library David K. E. Bruce Fund
West Coast conceptual art has a whimsical air. Artists such as John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha created scenarios that lampoon both the pretense of “high art” and the self-seriousness of conceptual art, particularly as the latter was developing in New York. Beneath the humor, however, their works spoke to more substantive issues like artistic failure and social mores. In 1973 Baldessari photographed his 36 attempts to throw three balls in the air to form a straight line. He never succeeded but included his 12 best attempts in a portfolio.
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Henry Wessel (American, 1942-2018) Utah 1974 gelatin silver print Image: 26.5 x 39.7cm (10 7/16 x 15 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) Holden Street July 13, 1974 Chromogenic print Image: 20.5 x 25.4cm (8 1/16 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art Diana and Mallory Walker Fund
Stephen Shore’s photograph may appear casual, but it is carefully constructed. The vertical of the lamppost draws our attention to the shadowed foreground. Buildings and sidewalks on each side act as perspective lines that meet in the brighter background. Shore was exploring how three-dimensional space is rendered in two dimensions, particularly in a colour photograph. He was also examining where a once-powerful New England industrial town abruptly ended and the verdant countryside began. The lack of people, saturated colours, and clarity of detail – made possible by using a large-format 8 × 10 camera – give the picture an air of timelessness but also hyperreality.
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Thomas Barrow (American, 1938-2024) Dart 1974, printed 1994 From the series Cancellations Gelatin silver print 23.9 × 34.6cm (9 7/16 × 13 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Randi and Bob Fisher Fund
In Dart, Thomas Barrow photographed a huge arrow that appears to have plunged from the threatening clouds above into a parking lot shared by Snappy Photos, a Goodwill drop-off bin, and a K-Mart. The work is part of his series Cancellations, documenting the suburban sprawl overtaking much of the United States. Barrow “cancelled” his images before printing by slashing the negatives with an icepick. (“Cancelling” refers to the practice of defacing a printing plate or negative to ensure no more official prints can he made from it.) This action calls attention to the photograph’s surface and its materiality, which in turn emphasise the choices Barrow made in its production.
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Thomas F. Barrow is an artist working with photography more than he is a photographer… For Barrow, the ideas are what matter, not the material they are realized with.
Barrow’s Cancellations series is an early expression of this artistic philosophy. Created between 1973-1981, it began when Barrow moved from Rochester, New York to Albuquerque, New Mexico to teach at UNM. Like many photographers of this era (Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Robert Adams) Barrow was struck by the transformation underway with the (sub)urbanization of the Western landscape. However, he was inspired to do more than document with his camera; he wanted to challenge his viewers while subverting some fundamental truths of photography. Inspired by a cancelled Marcel Duchamp etching (a process where the etching plate is defaced to indicate that no more official prints may be made), he began defacing his negatives with an ice pick and hole punch, “cancelling” them before making the images.
Almost 40 years later, it’s still unclear whether Barrow is canceling the photograph or the scene in the picture. He is certainly calling attention to the matrix that produced the photograph, an unheard of practice at the time and still rare today. By defacing his negatives, he has created photographs that are as much about the physical image as they are about the subject in the photograph.
David Ondrik. “Cancellations by Thomas Barrow,” in Fraction Magazine Issue 49 on the Fraction Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 07/02/2025
Blythe Bohnen (American, 1940-2022) Self-Portrait: Triangular Motion, Small 1974 From the series Self-Portraits: Studies in Motion Gelatin silver prints National Gallery of Art Gift of Herbert and Paula Molner
Most self-portraits offer some idea of the artist’s physical appearance and perhaps psychological state. The focus of Blythe Bohnen’s intentionally distorted self-portraits, however, is altogether different. Bohnen was interested in the physical element of artmaking – specifically, the role of her body’s movements or gestures in the creative process. Photographs usually capture an instant, but Bohnen instead used exposures of several seconds and the precise, predetermined gestures identified in her titles to distill the essence of motion. The portraits, blurry and disorienting, become more of a performance in time, condensed into a single image.
For the works in his series Altered Landscape, John Pfahl playfully juxtaposed the organic and natural with the manipulated and constructed. In this picture, he placed six oranges on a path in the woods. Typically, if the fruits were all the same size they would appear to grow smaller the farther from the camera they were located. Here, however, the artist has reversed that expectation, with the smallest orange sitting nearest the camera and the largest in place at the top of the picture. Through his staging, Pfahl makes the viewer aware of how a camera, by recording three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface, actually produces a distorted view.
Wall text from the exhibition
In 1981, Peter C. Bunnell observes in his Introduction to James Alinder’s book Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl, “Our momentary, fragmented and captured vision of disorder and emotion has been replaced by a cool rendering of purposefulness as if to accord another dimension of positivism to the moving force of contemporary human awareness. Pfahl’s work is an attack on the problems of space and, ultimately, existence from a rational point of view.”
Forty years later, these photographs seem not so much rational, or picturesque, as spiritual. The human construction touches the earth lightly, almost reverentially. As Pfahl notes, utmost care is taken not to alter the actual subject in a way he would consider harmful to his positivist respect for nature. In this delicate footprint, these photographs are very prescient of the dangers of our own Anthropocene – of climate change, of raging bushfires, drought, flood and bio-exinction. We are literally destroying this planet and its creatures. Bunnell states, “Pfahl’s imagery is a sure manifestation of the belief that society can produce an art suitable to its nature and, in this case, a specific kind of photographic presence that expresses current societal values.”
Unfortunately, it’s all too late. The lesson has not been learned.
Marcus Bunyan on the exhibition John Pfahl Altered Landscapes at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California, November – December 2019
Anthony Hernandez (American, b. 1947) Washington, DC #11 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.1 × 27.31cm (7 1/8 × 10 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase)
Anthony Hernandez cleverly uses the crook of a woman’s raised arm to frame a fruit seller on the street behind her. A Los Angeles – based photographer, Hernandez was invited to Washington, DC, in 1975 to participate in The Nation’s Capital in Photographs, a bicentennial documentary project organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Ignoring the city’s monuments, Hernandez captured life in commercial downtown areas where the architecture and people on the street defined the landscape. This sparsely populated composition evokes urban alienation. Neither figure seems aware of the other, and both look small against the austere modern building and grate-covered sidewalk that fill the background.
Wall text from the exhibition
Anthony Hernandez’s 1970s photographs of urban inhabitants are often focused on odd-looking people staring right at the camera. His subjects often appear surprised and slightly perturbed, as if caught unaware in private moments of thought or conversation.
Following two years of study at East Los Angeles College and two years of service in the United States Army as a medic in the Vietnam War, Hernandez took up photography in earnest around 1970. He walked the streets of his native Los Angeles, observing its inhabitants. In order to work quickly and intuitively, he would pre-focus the camera and then wait for subjects to come into the zone of focus – only briefly bringing the camera to his eye as he walked past them. He repeated this strategy in other cities, including London, Madrid, Saigon, and Washington, D.C.
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Memo Center with Wall Plaque c. 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 33.3 × 43.1cm (13 1/8 × 16 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
Dotted curtains, a flowered light switch plate, and a humorous wall plaque add a personal touch to this carefully framed picture of a so-called memo center – an area near a wall phone where notes could be jotted down that was popular in 1970s homes. A practitioner of what she called “intimate documentary,” feminist artist Joanne Leonard recorded familiar but often overlooked domestic spaces traditionally associated with women. She explained, “Through my work as an artist I’ve discovered that the realms of the personal and the public are rarely as separate as I once imagined.”
Wall text from the exhibition
In the 1970s Leonard began examining how domestic spaces are transformed through the presence of technology by photographing the interiors of her neighbours’ homes in West Oakland, California, later moving on to other locations. She captured personal objects in bedrooms and found repetition in the common appliances present in kitchen after kitchen. She also documented the proliferation of “memo centers” – areas where notes could be jotted down near the location of a telephone, which at this time was still tethered in place by a cord.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Gallery label from 2022
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Lupe’s Kitchen Window, San Leandro, California c. 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 41.8 x 43.1cm (16 7/16 x 16 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1987) Susan Sontag 1975 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.15 x 37.15cm (14 5/8 x 14 5/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Stephen G. Stein Employee Benefit Trust
Robert Cumming (American, 1943-2021) 67-Degree Body Arc Off Circle Center 1975, printed 2022 Inkjet print Image: 148.59 x 185.42cm (58 1/2 x 73 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of David Knaus
Sometimes Cumming used his own body as an eccentric subject, as in “67-degree body arc off circle center” from 1975. Shown in profile with his hips thrust forward, his torso arched back and his neck and head awkwardly aligned with the angle of his legs, he’s a mathematical or scientific demonstration whose geometry turns the graceful rationality of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” on its ear. The title’s geometric forms drawn around his body on the surface of the photograph might have been made with an oversized pen-nib, into which the hand on Cumming’s hip is discreetly hidden.
The artist’s photograph, like a drawing, is an artifice.
His work as a painter, sculptor and performance artist informed his distinctive, often witty approach to images made with a camera, which Cumming began to explore in 1969 and continued for more than a decade. Artists as diverse as Eve Sonneman, Jan Groover, Lew Thomas, Judy Fiskin and Lewis Baltz were blurring traditional boundaries in different but Conceptually cogent ways. Photography would never be the same.
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) House #3 c. 1975-1976, printed 1997-2004 Gelatin silver print Image: 16.1 x 16.3cm (6 5/16 x 6 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection
At the far end of a decrepit room, the phantom-like figure of the photographer appears to be merging with, or emerging from, the wall. In contrast to the sharply rendered interior, she is an ethereal blur whose face can barely be made out. Both the creator and subject of most of her work, Francesca Woodman staged dreamlike performances that explore self-portraiture, the female body, and architectural space. Although sometimes carefully planned, they more often represented her spontaneous, imaginative responses to an environment. Woodman made this photograph in an abandoned house in Providence when she was in her late teens.
Wall text from the exhibition
The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the United States. Americans witnessed soaring inflation, energy crises, and the Watergate scandal, as well as protests about the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay liberation, and the environment. The profound upheaval that rocked the country formed the backdrop for a revolution in documentary photography. Activism and growing support of multiculturalism opened the field to underrepresented voices, while artistic experimentation fuelled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like.
The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines this compelling and contested moment of reinvention when documentary photography’s automatic association with objectivity and truthfulness came into question. The photographs on view record subjects, communities, and landscapes previously overlooked and expand the boundaries of the genre. During this turbulent decade, documentary practice became more deeply entwined with fine art, while conceptual and performance artists used the medium to preserve their ideas and record their actions. An openness to individual expression and a turn from black and white to color film further transformed a field previously celebrated for accurately representing the world and its social ills.
Drawn primarily from the National Gallery’s collection and featuring some 100 photographs by more than 80 artists, The ’70s Lens is on view from October 6, 2024, through April 6, 2025, in the West Building.
“The profound upheaval in American life during the 1970s inspired artists to question the objective nature of documentary photography,” said Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery. “The extraordinary photographs on view in this exhibition explore their diverse and compelling responses, revealing relevant connections to today’s thinking about community and who gets to represent it, as well as broader concepts including photographic truth, equity, and environmental responsibility.”
The Exhibition
Organised thematically, The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography examines how the many documentary approaches that emerged during the 1970s reflected a radical shift in American life – and in photography itself.
Seeing Community
Spurred by the civil rights movement and a growing recognition of the rich ethnic and cultural diversity within the United States, photographers – especially from the Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ communities – reclaimed documentary practice to represent the fullness of their lives. Responding to a history of misrepresentation by outsiders, Anthony Barboza, Frank Espada, Mikki Ferrill, Nan Goldin, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, John Simmons, among others, focused their cameras on close-knit neighborhoods, often their own, building trusting relationships with the people they photographed. These artists worked collaboratively with their subjects to challenge preconceived notions of their communities.
Experimental Forms
Influenced by the groundbreaking photographs made by Roy DeCarava and Robert Frank beginning in the 1950s, a new generation of documentary photographers used the camera to visualise the world and their place in it. By combining clear-eyed observation with individual expression, artists such as Jim Goldberg, Sophie Rivera, and Shawn Walker revealed the complexity of the human condition from a more personal perspective. Others, such as Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernandez, and Garry Winogrand, focused their attention on the irony and ambivalence rooted in American culture of the time, depicting everyday life with a psychological frankness. Together their revitalization of portraiture and street photography merged documentary practice with fine-art photography.
Conceptual Documents
Documentary photography became central to the practice of many conceptual artists in the 1970s. For them, the idea behind a work was more important than the finished object. John Baldessari, Thomas Barrow, and Robert Cumming interrogated the conventions of photography’s widely assumed objectivity and truthfulness by highlighting the difference between photographic appearance and reality. Others, like Susan Hiller and Dennis Oppenheim, used the camera to record their creative process, often integrating photographs with texts to address larger social issues about gender and the environment.
Performance and the Camera
Documentary photography was also integral to performance-based art during the 1970s. Many artists used the medium to record their otherwise ephemeral actions – including those who made performances specifically for the camera. This photographic documentation became a new form of art inseparable from the overall conception of the performance. Senga Nengudi in collaboration with Maren Hassinger explored the elasticity of the body through choreographed actions. Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman examined their identities through interventions in the environment, while Tseng Kwong Chi, Marcia Resnick, and David Wojnarowicz staged journeys and constructed histories that pushed the boundaries between truth and fiction.
Life in Color
The art world’s embrace of color film in the 1970s transformed documentary photography. Commercial color processes had existed for more than 50 years, but serious documentary photography was strictly associated with black-and-white prints. Color photography’s status changed gradually over the decade, and especially in the wake of an exhibition of William Eggleston’s mundane but incisive photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976. Pictures of everyday life made in color by William Christenberry, Mitch Epstein, Richard Misrach, and John Valadez held an immediacy that fascinated viewers and offered a new framework for reflecting on contemporary life.
Alternative Landscapes
The 1970s witnessed a radical shift in how landscapes were understood and photographed. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, and Joe Deal challenged popular ideas of nature as pristine and timeless with pictures of environmental destruction and suburban sprawl. From grain elevators to roadside motels, Frank Gohlke and John Schott focused on structures that form the built environment, revealing how humans have shaped their surroundings. The artists in this section documented with an austere eye, and at times subversive wit, a rampant consumer culture and the damage done in the name of progress.
Intimate Documentary
Many photographers in the 1970s turned their cameras on themselves and close family members to analyze the social landscape of domestic spaces. Often informed by second-wave feminism, they prioritized interiors and life at home as topics for artistic examination. Joanne Leonard has described her narrative-rich scenes of everyday life as “intimate documentary,” while Bill Owens observed the rise of suburbia as both a place and a mentality. Concerned that documentary photography was losing its activist force, Martha Rosler and Eleanor Antin engaged with politics – especially the home front during the Vietnam War – more directly.
Sunil Gupta documented the emergence of a gay public space in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 1970s. The India-born Gupta had arrived from his adopted home in Montreal in 1976 to study business, but quickly decided instead to fine-tune his photographic skills. Energized by the overtly gay environment – a result, in part, of LGBTQ+ demonstrations in 1969 known as the Stonewall uprising – he started photographing people on the streets. Not impartial, Gupta was enthralled by those he encountered, including two stylishly dressed men who seem to acknowledge Gupta’s camera. In the Christopher Street series, Gupta recorded the then extraordinary act of being openly gay – a practice both political and deeply personal.
Still moved by this project, the artist has recently started making large-scale prints from his original negatives.
Wall text from the exhibition
This series was shot in New York in 1976 when I spent a year studying photography with Lisette Model in the New School… I spent my weekends cruising with my camera, it was the heady days after Stonewall and before AIDS when we were young and busy creating a gay public space such as hadn’t really been seen before.
Ana Mendieta (Cuban-American, 1948-1985) Untitled 1977-1978 From the Silueta Series Gelatin silver print Image: 33.8 x 49.5cm (13 5/16 x 19 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Collectors Committee
In her Silueta Series, Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta used the outline of her body to carve and shape silhouettes into the land. Informed by her interest in Afro-Cuban ritual, her fusion of performance and earthworks explored spiritual connections between nature and the female body. Mendieta’s exile with her family from Communist Cuba to the United States in the 1960s left her with a deep sense of loss. She remarked, “I have no motherland; I feel a need to join with the earth.” Photography was crucial in documenting these ephemeral pieces, preserving them before they were lost to the elements. Hauntingly beautiful, the pictures enable Mendieta’s practice to be both transitory and enduring.
Wall text from the exhibition
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 From the series Social Graces Gelatin silver print 37.2 × 38cm (14 5/8 × 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Tony Podesta Collection, Washington, DC
In the photography of Lynne Cohen, you won’t see a single person. But you’ll find their traces everywhere. Her images feel haunted by people, as if the action has just ended or has yet to begin. Despite their absence, however, people are the true subject of the artist’s gaze. Former Gallery curator Ann Thomas explained in her essay for the 2001 National Gallery of Canada exhibition No Man’s Land: The Photography of Lynne Cohen: “While her photographs do not include human beings, they are on occasion more revealing about human behaviour than any group portrait.”
From her earliest photographs in 1971 to her final works before her death in 2014, Cohen made deadpan images of interior spaces, training her lens on the everyday peculiarities of living rooms, offices, banquet halls, social clubs, learning centres, salons, laboratories and shooting ranges. Her signature style used flat lighting, deep focus and symmetrical compositions to lend her works what she termed “a cool, dispassionate edge.” The works can be funny, sinister, maddening, familiar, bizarre and often surreal.
Although in later years Cohen would make prints large enough to envelope the viewer – introducing colour and shifting her choice of subject from domestic interiors and clubhouses to more restricted environments, such as military installations – her conceptual mission never wavered from the start. Her photography investigates how setting makes a simulation of experience, how reality is more engineered than we may care to recognize and how the spaces we design also design us in turn.
Chris Hampton. “Lynne Cohen: Art Surrounds Us,” on the National Gallery of Canada website November 22, 2024 [Online] Cite 07/02/2025
Joanne Leonard (American, b. 1940) Dining Area and Patterned Wallpaper, Blake Street, Berkeley, California c. 1977 Gelatin silver print Image: 18 x 17.7cm (7 1/16 x 6 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of the Artist in honor of her daughter, Julia Marjorie Leonard
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Diner) 1978-1979 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.15 x 24.13cm (6 3/4 x 9 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art Gift of Funds from Heather Muir Johnson
“Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”
~ David Wojnarowicz , Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
David Wojnarowicz made a series of pictures featuring friends donning a homemade mask of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Staged at sites around New York that were significant to the photographer, the surrogate self-portraits explore parallels between Wojnarowicz and Rimbaud – both gay artists who rebelled against the social mores of their times. The historical figure with its unchanging expression appears alone or apart from others, a man eerily out of time. The series also documents many of the then vibrant spaces of gay life shortly before the AIDS epidemic ravaged the city’s gay community. Wojnarowicz died from AIDS-related complications at the age of 37.
Wall text from the exhibition
Sophie Rivera (American, 1938-2021) Untitled 1978 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 25.4 x 25.4cm (10 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art Estate of Martin Hurwitz
Bathed in light against a dark background, each sitter in Sophie Rivera’s portrait series of fellow New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent, known as Nuyoricans, addresses the viewer directly. To find her subjects, Rivera asked passersby in her Harlem neighborhood if theywere Puerto Rican. If so, she invited them to her home to have their pictures taken. The mutual trust between artist and subject is reflected in the sitters’ grace and dignity.
Rivera, who defined herself as “an artist, Latino, and feminist,” sought to make Nuyoricans part of the distinguished history of American portrait photography. As she noted, “I have attempted to integrate my cultural heritage into an artistic continuum.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Rivera’s monumental portraits of Puerto Ricans in New York (or Nuyoricans) counteract the stereotypes that have circulated in the mass media. The artist found her subjects by asking passersby outside her building if they were Puerto Ricans. If they said yes, she invited them to her studio and photographed them against a dark background. Rivera’s subjects remain anonymous but never powerless. Her direct photographs allow the unassuming individuality of everyday people to speak for itself.
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, 2013
Multidisciplinary artist John Valadez has long been committed to depicting the lived experiences of Chicanx Angelenos like himself. Using the camera to record the world around him, Valadez first made photographs principally as source material for his drawings and paintings. In 1978 he exchanged black and white for colour film and made a series of powerful full-length portraits. His subjects included people he knew, such as the stylish young couple dressed for a birthday party, as well as people he encountered on the street, like the two men sporting identical clothes. Valadez’s aim, he said, was to capture people who weren’t being seen – by doing so, he has become a key chronicler of Chicanx identity.
Tseng Kwong Chi leaps into the air in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, mimicking the joy of a first time visitor to New York. This work is from Tseng’s series East Meets West, which was inspired in part by the thaw in Chinese – United States relations following President Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972. A performance artist and photographer, Tseng made self-portraits as his adopted persona, Ambiguous Ambassador, at popular spots across the country. Assuming the guise of a Chinese official, Tseng – wearing what is now called a Mao suit – mischievously exposed cultural biases and notions of “the other” in American society. He made his selfies with a shutter release cable, which is visible in his right hand.
Wall text from the exhibition
Tseng Kwong Chi, known as Joseph Tseng prior to his professional career (Chinese: 曾廣智; c. 1950 – March 10, 1990), was a Hong Kong-born American photographer who was active in the East Village art scene in the 1980s.
Tseng was part of a circle of artists in the 1980s New York art scene including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Cindy Sherman. Tseng’s most famous body of work is his self-portrait series, East Meets West, also called the “Expeditionary Series”. In the series, Tseng dressed in what he called his “Mao suit” and sunglasses (dubbed a “wickedly surrealistic persona” by the New York Times), and photographed himself situated, often emotionlessly, in front of iconic tourist sites. These included the Statue of Liberty, Cape Canaveral, Disney Land, Notre Dame de Paris, and the World Trade Center. Tseng also took tens of thousands of photographs of New York graffiti artist Keith Haring throughout the 1980s working on murals, installations and the subway. In 1984, his photographs were shown with Haring’s work at the opening of the Semaphore Gallery’s East Village location in a show titled “Art in Transit”. Tseng photographed the first Concorde landing at Kennedy International Airport, from the tarmac. According to his sister, Tseng drew artistic influence from Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.
In these images Tseng inhabits a persona he referred to as the “Ambiguous Ambassador.” Wearing a Mao suit (the grey uniform associated with the Chinese Communist Party) and mirrored sunglasses, he poses next to landmarks and monuments, many of them emblems of American national identity. Like the Untitled Film Stills of Cindy Sherman – also produced in the late 1970s – East Meets West is a groundbreaking photographic work that illuminates the changeable and socially constructed nature of identity. It is also a rare piece of conceptual art to specifically reflect on the racialised experiences of Asian people in the United States. …
A gay man, Tseng was well-aware of the signifying power of dress, gesture, and posture. His donning of the Mao suit can be understood as racial camp – a playful, self-protective manoeuvre that did not prevent Tseng from being misinterpreted but did allow him to take control of the manner of the misreading. To those who perceived the levity with which Tseng wore the suit, something was revealed about his ironic sensibility. The dissonance of his appearance – the fact that the suit looked both “natural” and “unnatural” on him was not effaced but highlighted, at least to the knowing beholder. But when people were unable to see past type, the misconception did not come at the cost of Tseng’s psychic humiliation.
Tseng went on to create roughly 150 images comprising East Meets West. His performance of “Chineseness” in these photographs reveals his acute awareness of the stereotypes of Euro-American Orientalism. His blank, robotic demeanour in images such as Disneyland, California invite stock associations of the Chinese as “Yellow Peril,” and the repetition of this pose in numerous photographs would seem to tap into White America’s century-long dread of being overrun by Asian immigrants. In other images, Tseng’s stylishness and humor come through – some of the earliest photographs picture him coolly strolling the boardwalk and beaches of the popular gay vacation spot of Provincetown, Massachusetts, appearing more like a character from a French New Wave film than a visitor from the People’s Republic of China. The shutter release Tseng plainly grasps in many pictures reminds us that he is the author of these varied depicted realities; that, even as he presents himself to the Orientalist gaze, he is in command of the means of representation. Given that racial identities circulate and perpetuate via staged images – and that European American assumptions have traditionally driven those images – this is a significant gesture.
The Gullah Geechee – enslaved people who labored on the Sea Island plantations, and their descendants – built communities all along the eastern coast of the US, from North Carolina to Florida…
From 1977 to 1982, Moutoussamy-Ashe visited Daufuskie, building relationships with the Gullah Geechee people and snapshotting rare pictures of their quotidian life. Born in Chicago, Illinois, the photographer had just returned from a six-month independent study in west Africa before she traveled to the island. At the time of her initial visit, there were only 80 permanent residents left on Daufuskie, a drastic drop from the thousands of Gullah people who had once resided there. Today, just 3% of the island’s population is Black.
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s series of monochrome images include candids of weddings, stills of a church gathering and everyday portraits of the island, showing a way of life that is treasured and fast fading.
Like many historic Black alcoves, Daufuskie has been altered by decades of gentrification. After the American civil war, many Gullah people who were already on Daufuskie made the island their permanent home once the plantation owners had left. They cultivated the land and preserved their rich culture and language, an English-based creole. But development, unfair zoning practices and other challenges have caused a sharp decrease in the Black population on the island.
Moutoussamy-Ashe’s photos offer a more private understanding of Black folks in Daufuskie, one not defined by white developers who have turned Daufuskie into a destination for tourists. The area is a placid haven in Moutoussamy-Ashe’s images. Jake and his Boat Arriving on Daufuskie’s Shore, Daufuskie Island, SC, for instance, features a man paddling a boat across a rippling river. Swooping trees frame either side of the man, who peacefully rows the vessel. The landscape looks expansive, with the scenery appearing to go on for miles. Such scenes of stillness would become rare as residents were largely driven out by the encroachment of others.
Between 1977 and 1981, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe made extended visits to Daufuskie Island in South Carolina. The island’s relative isolation from the mainland allowed its inhabitants, who descended directly from enslaved people, to keep their distinct Gullah language and culture. Moutoussamy Ashe’s landscapes, still lifes, and portraits convey a holistic impression of the community. She captured residents’ dignity and joy – as in this photograph of a bride in fuzzy slippers, sharing a laugh with her maid of honor – but she also recorded their uncertainty in the face of development. Daufuskie’s permanent Gullah population had dwindled to 85 residents by the time Moutoussamy-Ashe published her photographs as a book in 1982.
“I see myself as a fine-arts photographer with a documentary foundation,” Shawn Walker has explained. “I look for the truth within the image, the multi-layers of existence and the ironies in our everyday lives.” Walker grounded his photographic practice in the Harlem community where he was born and raised. He joined the Kamoinge Workshop and learned from a collective of Black photographers. Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), Walker created a series of self-portraits that reveal only his silhouette. Here, the photographer pictures his reflection in a window while looking directly at us: “I look into the intersections of dark and light, into the shadows that grow the seeds of existence.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Jim Goldberg (American, b. 1953) Vickie Figueroa 1981 Gelatin silver print Image/sheet: 35.4 x 27.6cm (13 15/16 x 10 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art Corcoran Collection, Gift of the Artist
“My dream was to become a schoolteacher. Mrs. Stone is rich. I have talents but not opportunity. I am used to standing behind Mrs. Stone. I have been a servant for 40 years. Vickie Figueroa.”
Jim Goldberg (American, b. 1953) Clyde Norbert 1978 From the series Rich and Poor Gelatin silver print Corcoran Collection Gift of the Artist, 1994
Framed against a tall window, Clyde Norbert appears slight, flanked by his modest but carefully ordered possessions. The caption in Norbert’s own words speaks to his contrasting bold ambition: “I am going to build an empire.” In his series Rich and Poor, Jim Goldberg made portraits of both wealthy and marginalised San Franciscans where they lived. He radically shifted the relationship between photographer and subject by asking the people he photographed to respond to his pictures by writing directly on them. He believed this collaboration, which he referred to as “total documentation,” “would bring an added dimension, a deeper truth” than a photograph alone.
Wall text from the exhibition
The ’70s Lens: Reimagining Documentary Photography poster
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
Raúl Cañibano grew up in both Havana and the eastern part of the country, and in 1998 he returned to the east to develop his series Tierra guajira (Country Land), a project strongly linked to his childhood memories. There, rural life and labor remained little changed despite the vast social and political waves that had swept across the nation in the intervening years.
This is an exhibition on a subject that I had little knowledge of before constructing the posting.
Imagine
Being born after the Cuban Revolution in 1953.
Being a child during the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 (a clandestine invasion of Cuba by a brigade of Cuban exiles planned and executed by the CIA, with the support of the US government) and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 (when nuclear missile sites were being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba).
The fear of invasion and nuclear war.
Imagine
Growing up in a nation full of national fervour and revolutionary heroes, a “cult of personality”.
Growing up in country that defied the United States of America to stand on its own two feet but was plagued by shortages of foods, fuel, and other necessities, where “hundreds of thousands of Cubans, especially skilled workers and wealthy investors, emigrated to the United States (principally to Miami, Florida), Spain, and other countries”1 even as the country drew closer to the Soviet Union.
Growing up in a country where prominent dissidents were jailed and repressive laws enacted.
Imagine
Living under a communist regime where, when Soviet troops withdrew in 1991, there was high unemployment, energy conservation and severe internal “shortages of food, medical supplies, raw materials, and fuel which were exacerbated by the ongoing U.S. trade embargo.”1
Imagine
Growing up gay in a country where during The First Period (1965-1979) LGBTQ+ individuals were imprisoned in labor camps called Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAPs); and during The Second Period (1980-2004) “the homophobia possessed by the government led to more acts of oppression toward LGBTQ+ individuals, but the government also extended more rights to gays.”2
Imagine
Growing up to be an artist, a photographer, living and working under the regime.
Living in a country as a creative person and trying to subversively comment on the precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba (questioning the power of photography and its relationship to political authority) without ending up in prison.
Despite these conditions of becoming, Cuban photographers continue to photograph their own lives and the life and spirit of the people. Through reality, myth and fantasy, through rituals, personal history, queer identity, race and gender they examine Cuban culture and history from a constructive and/or critical perspective.
The light of the artist and the light of the people shines on.
Many thankx for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left, Adrián Fernández’s Untitled No. 1 2017 (below) from the series Pending Memories (Memorias pendientes); and at right in the banner image a reproduction of Liudmila & Nelson’s photograph Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002 (below)
Liudmila & Nelson (active Cuba, founded 1994) Liudmila Velazco (Cuban born Russia, b. 1969) Nelson Ramírez de Arellano (Cuban born Germany, b. 1969) Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002 From the series Absolut Revolution Gelatin silver print 15 1/2 × 23 in. (39.3 × 58.4cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, Gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker
The José Martí monument holds a powerful, symbolic place in the history and psyche of the nation. From its base, Fidel Castro routinely addressed vast crowds gathered in the expansive Plaza de la Revolución. Is Liudmila & Nelson’s imagining of a flooded Havana meant to represent the nation, battered by forces beyond its control, still standing strong, or a revolution that has sacrificed the lives of its people for its own survival? Where art and literature are scrutinised by official censors, it pays to retain plausible deniability, even in photography, a medium often thought to be unambiguously truthful.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the evolution of photography in Cuba over nearly five decades, from the 1960s to early 2000s.
The exhibition looks at contemporary Cuban photography from its role in promoting the Cuban Revolution after Fidel Castro’s 1959 takeover of the Batista government to engaging in social and political critique following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Over the subsequent years, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the changing prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
Showcasing approximately 100 images, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography celebrates the acquisition and promised gift to the MFAH of some 300 photographs from Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker.
Text from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston website
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left, Reynier Leyva Novo’s Un día feliz FC No. 11 (A Happy Day FC No. 11) 2016 (below); and at right the section “Celebrating the Revolution” including at third right, Alberto Korda’s Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico) 1960 (below); at second right, Raúl Corrales’ Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 (below); and at right, Osvaldo Salas’ Five Points of Fidel (Cinco puntos de Fidel) 1982 (below)
Reynier Leyva Novo (Cuban, b. 1983) Un día feliz FC No. 11 (A Happy Day FC No. 11) 2016, printed 2024 From the series Un día feliz From the series A Happy Day Inkjet print 39 3/4 × 39 3/4 in. (101 × 101cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern, Jereann Chaney, and Carl Niendorff
In meticulous digital postproduction, Reynier Leyva Novo removed Fidel Castro from a photograph by Alberto Korda, the photographer most credited with establishing the iconography of the triumphant revolution and its leaders. Here, Castro’s presence is suggested only by the photographers stretching to film and photograph him addressing the crowds gathered below in the Plaza de la Revolución. What would modern-day Cuba look like without the imagery of its charismatic leader that fed a cult of personality for half a century? This is what Leyva Novo asks in his series Un día feliz (A Happy Day), begun in the year of Castro’s death.
Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography
Just 90 miles from one another, Cuba and the United States are uneasy neighbours. For American tourists, Havana was a permissive playground with cabarets, casinos, beaches, and brothels until Fidel Castro’s revolutionary forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, asserted the nation’s independent status, and cracked down on organised crime and prostitution. The new government nationalised many foreign-owned sectors of the economy in 1960, prompting the United States to impose a crippling trade embargo that remains in place. The botched invasion by anti-Castro exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, covertly backed by the CIA, and the construction of Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba the following year, turned these close neighbours into seemingly permanent adversaries.
Beyond a few iconic images, the rich photographic production of Cuban artists of the past 65 years largely fell out of view for American audiences because of this estrangement. Inspired by an exhibition of work by young Cuban photographers organised by Houston’s FotoFest International in 1994, the Museum has since built a deep and representative collection that reveals the ways photographers have pictured the realities and aspirations of the Cuban people while skirting the prescriptions of their government’s propagandists and the proscriptions of its censors.
This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs assembled by the Chicago-based collector Madeleine Plonsker during nearly two decades of visits to the island, an acquisition that propels the Museum to the forefront of institutions collecting Cuban photography.
Celebrating the Revolution: The “Epic” Generation and Contemporaries
Immediately after Fidel Castro’s forces toppled the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, photographers rose to the challenge of depicting the heroes of the revolution for a largely illiterate populace on the island and a curious world beyond. Alberto Korda, Raúl Corrales, and Osvaldo Salas were given entrée to the most exclusive circles of power, granted access to all important events, and provided with a platform of mass communication in the official newspapers and magazines. Celebrating the accomplishments of the new government, they came to be known as the “epic” generation. Other photographers of the early post-revolution years paid tribute to the aging veterans of the late 19th-century war for independence from Spain and to the rural peasants and urban labourers who sustained the island.
Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara, stoic and implacable at a memorial for victims of an explosion in Havana’s harbour, is undoubtedly the best known of all Cuban photographs. The image sat mostly unused in the artist’s files from 1960 to 1967, when Che was captured and assassinated by government forces in Bolivia while trying to organize a popular revolution. He was lionised in Cuba as the exemplar of revolutionary self-sacrifice, and Korda’s portrait of him came to function like a secular image of a martyred saint, appearing on everything from billboards to refrigerator magnets and tattoos to book covers.
Raúl Corrales (Cuban, 1925-2006) Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 Gelatin silver print The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Gift of the estate of Esther Parada
Raúl Corrales’s Cavalry records an event at which the nationalisation and expropriation of a plantation owned by the United Fruit Company were celebrated by reenacting a famous scene from Cuba’s late 19th-century war for independence from Spain. With reenactments such as this, the triumph of the revolution was linked to a decades-long struggle to shake off the bonds of colonialism. Corrales’s photograph of smiling guerrillas wearing matching straw hats, riding horses, and waving Cuban flags also conjures associations with heroic 19th-century history paintings.
The title of this photograph, taken in 1982, links Fidel Castro’s gesture to a crucial speech 20 years earlier aimed at President John F. Kennedy amid the Cuban Missile Crisis. Castro outlined five conditions for Cuba’s consent to the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from its territory:
1/ Ending the economic blockade and other commercial and economic pressures 2/ Ending subversive activities 3/ Ending pirate attacks 4/ Ending violations of Cuban airspace 5/ Withdrawal from the Guantanamo Naval Base and its return to the Cuban government.
At the time, however, Castro was unaware that President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were already discussing missile withdrawal without Cuba’s participation.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the section “Celebrating the Revolution” including at left, Alberto Korda’s Heroic Guerrilla (Guerillero heroico) 1960 (above); at second left, Raúl Corrales’ Caballería (Cavalry) 1960 (above); and at third right, Osvaldo Salas’ Five Points of Fidel (Cinco puntos de Fidel) 1982 (above)
Celebrating the acquisition of some 300 Cuban photographs from the Chicago-based collectors Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker, Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography traces the medium’s evolution in Cuba over nearly six decades – from promoting the Revolution following Fidel Castro’s 1959 overthrow of the Batista government, to engaging in social and political critique in more recent times as the triumph of the Revolution increasingly gave way to economic hardship and political repression. Particularly in the years after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban photographers created powerful personal expressions by exploring individual identity, the body and spirit, Afro-Cuban heritage, and the margins of society, all while navigating the fluctuating prescriptions and proscriptions of official cultural policy.
The exhibition of some 100 works will be on view September 29, 2024 through March 16, 2025, in the Museum’s Nancy and Rich Kinder Building for modern and contemporary art.
“With the acquisition of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, now boasts the most complete collection anywhere of post-Revolution Cuban photography, with an emphasis on the years since 1990: nearly 700 works by more than 80 Cuban artists,” commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams Chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “We are enormously grateful to Mrs. Plonsker, who assembled the collection through the lasting relationships she forged with artists over many visits to Cuba from 2005 to 2020.”
“The strengths of the Plonsker Collection are unparalleled, in terms of telling the complex and compelling story of post-Revolution Cuban photography,” commented Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of photography at the MFAH. “Combined in this exhibition with works already in the Museum’s holdings, the collection allows us to chronicle that story from the ‘epic generation,’ whose work would define the image of the Cuban Revolution, to the succeeding generations of photographers, who questioned the power of photography and its relationship to political authority and who created highly personal work in the context of a greater awareness of international contemporary art.”
Prologue: The “Epic” Generation
The exhibition begins with a brief prologue featuring works by the so-called “epic” generation of photographers – Alberto Korda, Raul Corrales and Osvaldo Salas among them – who used the medium to further the ideals of the Cuban Revolution, celebrating its heroes and promoting its ambitions. It opens with Korda’s iconic portrait of Che Guevara, Guerrillero Heroico (1960), the most widely reproduced and recognised of all Cuban photographs.
Gallery 1: Life in Post-Revolution Cuba
The first gallery presents images of daily life in Cuba, primarily from the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with photographs that reference patriotic themes: the Cuban flag, veterans, a military parade and public portraits of 19th-century Independence hero José Martí and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. While ostensibly honoring the new Cuba, many of the images question both the power of photography and its relationship to political authority. An Untitled 1992 photograph by José Figueroa depicts dozens of freshly made prints of Alberto Korda’s iconic portrait of Che laid out on a bed – Figueroa was Korda’s longtime printer – and suggests the ubiquity of that iconic image as both propaganda and commodity. Other photographs in this section of the exhibition depict the hardships and aspirations of rural Cubans in the post-revolutionary era as well as the day-to-day joys of life divorced from political concerns. Photographers in this section include Pedro Abascal, Raúl Cañibano, María Cienfuegos Leiseca, José Julián Martí, Humberto Mayol and Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui.
Gallery 2: Memory, the Body, and Identity
The second section of the exhibition marks a pivotal shift in Cuban photography. As the nation plunged into economic, social and political crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union [1991] and the loss of its financial support, a time that Castro dubbed the “Special Period,” many photographers turned from documentation of the public sphere to a more personal and poetic exploration of the private realm. Photographers treated the body, often their own, as the path through which to examine their present situation through the lens of Afro-Cuban rituals, personal history, queer identity, race and gender. This particularly rich section features exceptional work by Juan Carlos Alom, Arien Chang Castán, José Manuel Fors, Alejandro González, Eduardo Hernandez Santos, Cirenaica Moreira, René Peña, and others.
Gallery 3: Myth and Reality
In the final section of the exhibition, composed primarily of work made since 2005, photographers address the current political, social and economic situation more directly than in previous years – but slyly still, in order not to run afoul of government dictates and official arbiters of culture. This most recent generation of photographers, born well after the Revolution, came of age in the depths of the Special Period, and began their artistic careers with a greater awareness of international contemporary art. Again, national symbols appear – the Cuban flag, currency, stamps, historic events – but this time with a knowing nod to their emptiness. The precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba and the widespread desire for emigration are common subjects.
This gallery includes work by Adrián Fernández, Alejandro González, Glenda Léon, Liudmila & Nelson, Yasser Piña Peña, Sandra Ramos, Esterio Segura, Lisette Solórzano, and others.
Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right, Adrián Fernández’s Untitled No. 1 2017 (below) from the series Pending Memories (Memorias pendientes)
Inspired by industrial remnants, unfinished construction projects, propaganda billboards, and carnival decorations, Adrián Fernández collaborated with architects, engineers, and computer specialists to combine a lens-based photograph (the landscape) with a digitally constructed image of the back of a fictional structure. It is easy to imagine this structure, set along the Malecón (Havana’s seaside esplanade), as the remains of a once-grand declaration, facing north like a challenge to the United States and as a greeting to anyone arriving in Havana by sea. Fernández intends this image to be a metaphor for today’s teetering ruins of the Cuban Revolution’s grand ambitions.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text for the section “Picturing Life: Joys and Hardships in Postrevolution Cuba”
Picturing Life: Joys and Hardships in Postrevolution Cuba
As Cuba increasingly adopted Soviet-style economic, social, political, and cultural policies beginning in the 1970s, many photographers referenced patriotic themes such as the Cuban flag, a military parade, and public portraits of Fidel Castro and independence hero José Martí. While ostensibly honouring the new Cuba, some of these artists began questioning both the power of photography and its relationship to political authority. Given the government’s control of culture, however, any criticism of the island’s situation was necessarily masked behind politically defensible images. Some photographers stepped away entirely from government-sanctioned subjects, styles, and platforms, and instead frankly depicted the hardships and aspirations of rural Cubans in the post-revolutionary era, as well as the day-to-day joys of life – particularly in childhood – divorced from political concerns.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at second right, José A. Figueroa’s Untitled 1992 from the series The Image (below)
José A. Figueroa (Cuban, b. 1946) Untitled 1992, printed 2023 From the series The Image Gelatin silver print 40 x 50cm The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern in honor of Raquel Carrera
Over the course of decades, Alberto Korda’s protégé and longtime printer José Figueroa printed thousands of copies of Korda’s iconic portrait of Che Guevara. As he worked to fulfil the never-ending demand for Guerrillero heroico, in 1992, 25 years after Che’s death, Figueroa photographed dozens of fresh prints laid out on his bed to dry, an image that revealed his own awareness of the changing nature and role of photography in Cuba from servant of the socialist revolution to commodity and social commentary.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at second left, Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui’s Untitled 1992 from the series Zoo-Logos (below); and at third right, Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui’s Untitled 1992 from the series Zoo-Logos (below)
The challenge for Cuban artists has long been to find a way to portray life candidly and critically without triggering the attention of censors. For Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui, this process began with trips to Havana’s zoo, where he photographed visitors, employees, caged animals, and even the adjacent slaughterhouse, where horses were killed to feed the large cats. By the 1990s, the zoo had become home to neglected creatures enduring their confinement as best they could, a metaphor for the extreme circumstances of life in 1990s Cuba.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right, María Cienfuegos Leiseca’s Untitled 2011 from the series La familia se retrata (below)
María Cienfuegos Leiseca (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2011 From the series La familia se retrata From the series Family Portrayed Inkjet print 15 11/16 × 23 5/8 in. (39.9 × 60 cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
In Cuba, a narrow island spanning just 118 miles at its widest point, beach excursions are common, often bringing together several generations of a family. For her series of family portraits at the beach, María Cienfuegos Leiseca asked her subjects to choose how they wished to be represented. Unlike the solemn, carefully posed formal portraits seen throughout art history, Cienfuegos Leiseca’s photographs capture the spontaneity of a joyous family reunion.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at third right, Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo’s Untitled 2017 from the series Casa Redonda (below)
Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo (Cuban, b. 1986) Untitled 2017, printed 2021 From the series Casa Redonda From the series Round House Inkjet print 13 9/16 × 20 1/2 in. (34.5 × 52cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum purchase funded by Madeleine Plonsker
The family Volkswagen dating to his childhood has become a playground for Alfredo Sarabia Fajardo’s young children and a way to connect to his father who died when the younger Alfredo was just six. “I frequently travel with my family, just as my father did with me, even using the same or similar objects,” the photographer explained. “As a natural consequence of this, I reactivate the memories of my childhood, refresh the nostalgia, and end up reliving some of those experiences. I like to think of it as a creative legacy that gets renewed, embodying the very spirit of a journey.”
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text for the section “Turning Inward: Memory, the Body, and Identity”
Turning Inward: Memory, the Body, and Identity
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba lost its principal political ally, trade partner, and financial supporter. The nation plunged into desperate economic times, which Fidel Castro dubbed a “special period in a time of peace.” Basic necessities such as food and fuel were rationed, if available at all, even as governmental control of social and cultural life eased. Working with expired or improvised materials, many photographers turned from documentation of the public sphere to a more personal and poetic exploration of the private realm, taking Cuban photography into new aesthetic and social territory. Often, photographers used their own bodies as vehicles to examine Afro-Cuban ritual, personal history, sexual identity, race, and gender.
Gory originally presented this series – perhaps the most prominent example of experimental Cuban photography of the 1980s – as an installation of nine photographs. Eight are photomontages in which a pool ladder in the foreground gives access to an alternate world in the middle distance; the final image presents the empty pool, with an aura of abandonment. When first shown, each photograph was accompanied by a text fragment from Michael Ende’s The Mirror in the Mirror: A Labyrinth (1984). The first of those phrases began: “Like a swimmer who has gotten lost under a layer of ice, I look for a place to emerge, but there is no place. All life long I swim holding my breath.”
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right top, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (below); and at second right, Alejandro González’s 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 from the series AM-PM (below)
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2008 From the series Conducta impropia From the seres Improper Behaviour Chromogenic print 23 × 22 15/16 in. (58.4 × 58.3cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, Gift of Madeleine and Harvey Plonsker
Not without setbacks, major advances in LGBTQ+ legal rights had occurred in Cuba by the 2000s, and most legal prohibitions against homosexuality had been lifted. Alejandro González was on hand for the second annual event in observance of the International Day Against Homophobia in 2008. There, he carried out the first part of a series titled Improper Behavior – large, extreme close-up portraits of participants, so close that the subjects’ gender becomes hard to identify. Although frontal and straightforward as a mugshot, they are nonetheless assertive of power rather than subservient to it.
The title of Alejandro González’s series Conducta impropia is an intentional reference to the 1984 documentary of the same name by Cuban exiles Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal detailing the Castro government’s oppression of Cuba’s gay population.
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 From the series AM-PM Inkjet print 21 1/4 × 21 1/4 in. (54 × 54cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
“In 2005, I started getting interested in social topics and people,” Alejandro González has said. “I was seeing what was happening in society, and I was feeling that I was not participating.” A night creature himself at age 31, Alejandro González began with a candid look at youth culture in the wee hours of the morning along Havana’s 23rd Street, a hub of nightlife. Using a Rolleiflex camera, with its square format and characteristically low vantage point, his method was straightforward, and his pictures – almost always made with the permission of his subjects – felt undeniably authentic.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at right top, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (above); and at second right, Alejandro González’s 2:57 am, 24 de dic de 2005, Vedado, La Habana, Cuba 2005 from the series AM-PM (above); and at third right, Alejandro González’s Untitled 2008 from the series Conducta impropia (below)
Alejandro González (Cuban, b. 1974) Untitled 2008 From the series Conducta impropia From the series Improper Behaviour Chromogenic print 23 3/8 × 17 3/8 in. (59.3 × 44.2cm) The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The Madeleine P. Plonsker Collection, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment
A month after beginning his series Improper Behaviour with close-up portraits, Alejandro González continued the project by photographing jubilant young people at a gay pride party at Mi Cayito, a popular gay beach east of Havana that little more than a decade earlier had been subject to police raids, arrests, fines, and threats of imprisonment.
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showing at left the wall text from the section “Questioning the Revolution: Cuban Photography in the Twentieth-First Century”
Questioning the Revolution: Cuban Photography in the Twentieth-First Century
Artists of the present generation were born long after the glory days of the Cuban Revolution and came of age in the hardship years of the 1990s. Nonetheless, they began their artistic careers with a greater awareness of international contemporary art. Working in a more conceptual and experimental manner, these artists address the current political, social, and economic situation more pointedly, albeit slyly, so as not to run afoul of government dictates and official arbiters of culture. For many, the very symbols that once celebrated the new nation – its flag, currency, stamps, passports, and more – have become vehicles for a veiled critique of the current state of Cuban society. The precarious nature of life in present-day Cuba and the widespread desire for emigration have become common subjects.
Installation views of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts showing at left, Houston Liudmila & Nelson’s photograph Absolut Revolution – La Isla (Absolut Revolution – The Island) 2002
Installation view of the exhibition Navigating the Waves: Contemporary Cuban Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts
Born, raised, and schooled in Havana, Jorge Luis Álvarez Pupo continued to think of himself as Cuban even when residing abroad. His series Wandering Paths is a visual reflection on the theme of migration. Now living and working in Belgium, Álvarez Pupo said the series takes “as inspiration the moment I realised that I myself had become an immigrant, even when visiting my own country. It reflects on people who have been forced to leave their environment to face the unknown, which is not always welcoming.”
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 1001 Bissonnet Street Houston, TX 77005
Opening hours: Wednesday 11am – 5pm Thursday 11am – 9pm Friday 11am – 6pm Saturday 11am – 6pm Sunday 12.30pm – 6pm Closed Monday and Tuesday, except Monday holidays Closed Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day
John Vachon (American, 1914-1975) Untitled photo [possibly related to Farms of Farm Security Administration clients, Guilford and Beaufort Counties, North Carolina, April 1938] 1938 Negative
Please note: photograph not in the exhibition
Contested ground
This exhibition traces, through the development of documentary photography, the interweaving strands that make up the fluidity of identity, race and culture that is the American South, addressing through a variety of photographic processes and styles across a large time period the concerns that have engaged human beings in this area for decades and now centuries: freedom, equality, liberty, nation, religion and economic subjugation. As the introductory panel says, “A Long Arc” demonstrates “how Southern photography has shaped American concepts of race, place, and history.”
Gregory Harris, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, observes that, “one of the main themes of the exhibition is how race is articulated and how racial hierarchies and racial stereotypes are reinforced through photographs across the history of photography.” “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845″ shields viewers from nothing, presenting the South as a chilling microcosm of U.S. culture. The region’s history of violence, disenfranchisement and political strife are not censored in the exhibit.”
Periods and themes addressed in the exhibition include but are not limited to the Antebellum South, abolition of slavery, American Civil War, Reconstruction era, Jim Crow era, Farm Security Administration, Southern Gothic, Civil Rights Movement and, “in the most modern section, images dive into Southern femininity, the growing acceptance of interracial relationships in the Deep South and the emergence of a thriving LGBTQIA+ culture.”
This is such a complex and contested field to address in one photographic survey exhibition but it seems to me an admirable way to interrogate the ongoing histories and injustices of the American South. As my friend and fellow photographer Colin Vickery observes, “the sheer variety of images gives a richness of viewing experience that I think goes some way towards illustrating life, in all its complexities and contradictions, of the region.” Well said.
“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845” succeeds in surveying the South in its most complete form: not as a place that is “backward,” but as a place that has forever been the epicenter of contention and change. Documentary photography thrives in the South because the region has always been ground zero of the social disorder reverberating throughout the nation, a place that seems lost in the past. Modern photographers honor the region’s complicated legacy by accenting even the most idyllic, beautiful scenes with a nod to its brutalistic history. The South is not the South without acknowledgment of the bloodshed on its soil…”1
While I am certainly no American scholar, far from it, to me this opposition of utopian and dystopian seems to reflect the infinite duality of the American psyche: the desire for attainment of money and success (any one can become president, anyone can make good) versus the dark underbelly of a brutal history: puritanical, one nation under god, a nation conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … except that’s never going to happen, forever and ever amen.
Indeed this richly layered and nuanced exhibition seems to be more fully focused on the dystopic rather than any celebration of American South culture per se and here I am particularly thinking of all the achievements in the areas of arts, literature, food, music – for example the energy of gospel, bluegrass and jazz. Yes, there are poetic photographs in the exhibition but there is little sign of joy or happiness in any of the images.
Margaret Renkl observes that, “The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world,”2 and the stoicism of these lives, but I have struggled to find but a single photograph that evidences the joy of living among the assembled throng in this posting. Which is why I have included that most singular image at the top of the posting (not in the exhibition) by John Vachon of a Black American smiling and laughing. What a joy!
The Southern landscape can be seen as the repository of memory, history, and trauma but it can also be seen as the repository for families, love, kindness, respect and connection between human beings – not always opposition and conflict. And while the photographs in the exhibition “ask us to contemplate the dark, sublimated aspects of American popular culture, including violence, shame, and fear” they also ask us to share our experiences of who we are across time, race and culture. The photographs are memory containers for (still) living people.
By which I mean
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.
As we look back into these photographs the people in them look forward to us, and live in us here and now. They expect more from us, to fight still against the further rise of intolerance, racism and right wing fascism, and to grasp that the joys and mysteries of life should be open to all.
Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I have a strong attraction to the American South. People there have a marvellous exterior – wonderful manners, warm friendliness until you touch on things you’re not supposed to touch on. Then you see the hardness beneath the mask of nice manners.”
Elliott Erwitt
“When it comes to the unspeakable facts in the history of America, it’s largely the artists who’ve been willing to show us what others would not.”
“The foundation of this country is built upon speakable tensions – between ideas that we love and hold dear, between liberty, equality, and slavery itself.”
Sarah Lewis
The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Or of the scarred but beautiful landscapes they call home. Or of the ramifications of an unresolved history still unspooling in this history-haunted part of the country. …
The magnificence of a retrospective like this is not just the accounting offered by its historical sweep, but the way it conveys the immense complexity of this region, to inspire a renewed attention to the cruel radiance of what is. Suffering does not always lead to compassion and change, but photographs like these remind us that standing in witness to suffering surely should.
“… no small part of the show’s richness is the allowance it makes for inwardness and mystery. “Southern Gothic,” after all, is no less a part of the region’s cultural baggage than “Lost Cause” or “New South.” Among the most memorable images here, because they’re often the most inscrutable and / or evocative, come from Mann, E.J. Bellocq, Clarence John Laughlin, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.”
Unidentified photographer Georgian house, with posed African-American family, Norfolk Harbor, Virginia Late 1850s Whole-plate ambrotype Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg Photo: Steven Paneccasio
Unidentified photographer Young biracial artilleryman Undated Ambrotype High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
The majority of photographs made during the Civil War were inexpensive, small, portable portraits for soldiers on the field and their families at home. As precious keepsakes, these portraits served as testaments to familial bonds, social relations, economic positions, and political ideologies. In carefully orchestrating their dress, accoutrement, and bearing, sitters signaled their allegiances or staged their transformation from citizen to soldier. The opportunity to reinvent themselves before the camera at times even led to a bit of fakery, as soldiers sometimes gussied themselves up with props and uniforms that did not always fit with their military rank.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Abott Pratt (American born England, 1818, active 1844-1856) View of Main Street, Richmond, Virginia 1847-1851 Half-plate daguerreotype Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Floyd D. and Anne C. Gottwald Fund
One of a handful of known daguerreotypes of the city of Richmond, this view of Main Street looking east toward Church Hill was probably taken from the window of William Pratt’s first “Virginia Daguerriean Gallery,” in the centre of the city’s printing and publishing industry. The distinctive roof of the Richmond Masonic lodge is visible in the distance, as is the three-story City Hotel just beyond the trees to the east. The hotel served as one of the major auction houses for enslaved individuals, as did the firm Pulliam & Davis across the street.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Take an epic journey through the American South from 1845 to today. In A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, presented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, encounterthe everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity and its critical impact on the development of photography. This is the first major exhibition in more than 25 years to explore the full history of photography in and about the South.
A Long Arcexplores the American South’s distinct, evolving, and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how photographers working in the region have reckoned with the South’s fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity. Organised chronologically, the exhibition traces the South’s shifting identity in more than two hundred photographs made over more than 175 years.
The exhibition’s individual sections delve into the themes of photography before, during, and after the Civil War; documentary photography of the 1930s and ’40s; images of a post-World War II South in economic, racial, and psychic dissonance with the nation; photography as catalyst for change during the civil rights movement; reflective narrative photography of the late 20th century; and contemporary photography examining social, environmental, and economic issues.
A Long Arc presents a richly layered archive that captures the region’s beauty and complexity. Offering a full visual accounting of the South’s role in shaping American history, identity and culture, the exhibition includes photographs by Alexander Gardner, George Barnard, P.H. Polk, Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby, Ernest Withers, William Eggleston, William Christenberry, Baldwin Lee, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Susan Worsham, Carolyn Drake, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross, and others.
Text from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website
Unidentified photographer Woman wearing secession sash c. 1860 Ambrotype High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
In 1860-61, patriotic fervour (both pro- and anti-secession) was at its height, according to the Creative Cockades website. Women, in particular, wore dresses or other garments festooned with cockades, or they might wear a sash, such as this Southern woman. The reality of a bloody war had not yet set in and many thought the coming conflict would be minimal.
In South Carolina, civilian men and women, and even companies of soldiers, wore palmetto emblems during the Civil War, according to Hinman Auctions.
“Southern cockades were generally all blue, all red, or red and white,” according to Creative Cockades. “Once again, center emblems include stars, military buttons and pictures, but additionally Southern products such as palmetto fronds, pine burs, corn or cotton were used.”
Smith & Vannerson (77 Main St., Richmond, Va) Gilbert Hunt (c. 1780-1863), Virginia freed slave 1861-1863 Salt print on card stock 7 3/8 x 5 1/4 inches print Public domain
Gilbert Hunt was an African-American blacksmith in Richmond who became known in the city for his aid during two fires: the Richmond Theatre fire in 1811 and the Virginia State Penitentiary fire in 1823. Born enslaved in King William County, Hunt trained as a blacksmith in Richmond and remained there most of the rest of his life. After the Richmond Theatre caught fire on December 26, 1811, he ran to the scene and, with the help of Dr. James D. McCaw, helped to rescue as many as a dozen women. He performed a similar feat of courage on August 8, 1823, during the penitentiary fire. Hunt purchased his freedom and in 1829 immigrated to the West African colony of Liberia, where he stayed only eight months. After returning to Richmond, he resumed blacksmithing and served as an outspoken, sometimes-controversial deacon in the First African Baptist Church. In 1848 he helped form the Union Burial Ground Society. In 1859, a Richmond author published a biography of Hunt, largely in the elderly blacksmith’s own words, but portraying him as impoverished and meek, a depiction at odds with the historical record. Hunt died on April 26, 1863, and a notice in the next day’s Richmond Dispatch described him as “a useful and respected resident of Richmond.” He was buried at Phoenix Burying Ground, later Cedarwood Cemetery, and eventually part of Richmond’s Barton Heights Cemeteries.
Dionna Mann. “Gilbert Hunt (ca. 1780-1863),” in Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 07 December 2020
Gilbert Hunt, a skilled blacksmith from Richmond shown here gripping a hammer, understood the power of photography as a tool for self-creation, especially for the formerly enslaved. Hunt, who was lauded for rescuing numerous people from two blazing fires, one in 1811 and one in 1823, ultimately purchased his freedom for $800 in 1829. Over the next three decades, he led a remarkable life, traveling to Liberia to explore the possibilities for Black resettlement with the American Colonization Society before returning to Richmond and serving as an outspoken pastor and blacksmith. This portrait was commissioned by a benevolent society in Richmond who sold prints to raise funds for the elderly Hunt.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
McPherson & Oliver, Baton Rouge William D. McPherson (? – October 9, 1867) and J. Oliver (?-?) Peter or The Scourged Back of “Peter” an escaped slave from Louisiana April 2, 1863 Albumen silver print (carte de visite) High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Public domain
“Overseer Artayou Carrier whipped me. I was two months in bed sore from the whipping. My master come after I was whipped; he discharged the overseer. The very words of poor Peter, taken as he sat for his picture.”
Gordon, a runaway slave seen with severe whipping scars in this haunting carte-de-visite portrait, is one of the many African Americans whose lives Sojourner Truth endeavored to better. Perhaps the most famous of all known Civil War-era portraits of slaves, the photograph dates from March or April 1863 and was made in a camp of Union soldiers along the Mississippi River, where the subject took refuge after escaping his bondage on a nearby Mississippi plantation.
On Saturday, July 4, 1863, this portrait and two others of Gordon appeared as wood engravings in a special Independence Day feature in Harper’s Weekly. McPherson & Oliver’s portrait and Gordon’s narrative in the newspaper were extremely popular, and photography studios throughout the North (including Mathew B. Brady’s) duplicated and sold prints of The Scourged Back. Within months, the carte de visite had secured its place as an early example of the wide dissemination of ideologically abolitionist photographs.
The photograph of “Whipped Peter,” who fled a Louisiana plantation after a savage whipping, was among the most widely circulated images of the 19th century. “Peter barely survived the beating that made his back a map,” writes the scholar Imani Perry in an Aperture monograph that accompanies the exhibit, “and then ran to freedom, barefoot and chased by bloodhounds.”
The raised scars in that photograph were undeniable in a way that other accounts of slavery’s brutality, however powerful, had not been. The image tells the truth about slavery “in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach,” wrote a journalist of the time, “because it tells the story to the eye.”
During the Civil War, studio photographers produced and disseminated carte de visite portraits, or small format photographs that could be mass produced, of enslaved and emancipated Black individuals to promote abolitionist causes and reinforce support for the Union Army. Some were meant to shock and spur abolitionist outrage, especially among those who may have only heard accounts of cruelty. This portrait was made in a Union camp in the South where a formerly enslaved man named Peter – often misidentified as Gordon – sought refuge after escaping from a plantation. The image of his horrific whipping scars testified to the violence of slavery and contradicted the narrative that slavery was an economic concern rather than a racist institution. After Harper’s Weekly reproduced the image, photography studios throughout the North duplicated and sold prints to raise funds for abolitionist causes.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mathew B. Brady Studio (American, active 1844-1873) Slave Pens, Alexandria, VA 1862 Albumen silver print (carte de visite) High Museeum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
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
Better known for his later views commissioned by the Union Pacific Railroad, A. J. Russell, a captain in the 141st New York Infantry Volunteers, was one of the few Civil War photographers who was also a soldier. As a photographer-engineer for the U.S. Military Railroad Con struction Corps, Russell’s duty was to make a historical record of both the technical accomplishments of General Herman Haupt’s engineers and the battlefields and camp sites in Virginia. This view of a slave pen in Alexandria guarded, ironically, by Union officers shows Russell at his most insightful; the pen had been converted by the Union Army into a prison for captured Confederate soldiers.
Between 1830 and 1836, at the height of the American cotton market, the District of Columbia, which at that time included Alexandria, Virginia, was considered the seat of the slave trade. The most infamous and successful firm in the capital was Franklin & Armfield, whose slave pen is shown here under a later owner’s name. Three to four hundred slaves were regularly kept on the premises in large, heavily locked cells for sale to Southern plantation owners. According to a note by Alexander Gardner, who published a similar view, “Before the war, a child three years old, would sell in Alexandria, for about fifty dollars, and an able-bodied man at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. A woman would bring from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, according to her age and personal attractions.”
Late in the 1830s Franklin and Armfield, already millionaires from the profits they had made, sold out to George Kephart, one of their former agents. Although slavery was outlawed in the District in 1850, it flourished across the Potomac in Alexandria. In 1859, Kephart joined William Birch, J. C. Cook, and C. M. Price and conducted business under the name of Price, Birch & Co. The partnership was dissolved in 1859, but Kephart continued operating his slave pen until Union troops seized the city in the spring of 1861.
Even before photographs of battle fortifications and mass graves and prison camps and cities in ruin brought home in detail the enormous scale and human cost of the Civil War, images of the realities of enslaved people in the South inspired widespread moral outrage and aided the abolitionist movement. Southern politicians had been lying about both the benevolence of enslavers and the “three-fifths” nature of Black humanity since the founding of this country, but the real truth about slavery began to come clear to most people outside the South only when the first photographs of enslaved people emerged.
“Slave pens at Alexandria,” reads the hand-labeled reproduction of a photo by the celebrated Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady. Think about the cold fact of that label for a moment. The places where enslaved people were imprisoned before being sold weren’t called jails. They were called pens. Built to contain livestock.
At the start of the Civil War, Northerners arriving in Alexandria, Virginia, were shocked to find a site known as the “old slave pen.” Designed by slave traders, these locations housed enslaved individuals as they awaited auction in the District of Columbia or before being transported south. Mathew Brady’s 1862 photograph of the notorious slave trading firm Price Birch & Company (see nearby case) testified to the utter inhumanity of slavery. Made in 1863, Russell’s photograph captured the site when it served a different function, as a holding cell for Confederate prisoners of war.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Unidentified photographer “Ram”, 2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A c. 1864 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
Organised in Nashville in 1864 and dispatched until 1866, Battery A of the 2nd regiment of the US Colored Light Artillery accompanied the infantry and cavalry troops into battle with horse-drawn cannons. More than twenty-five thousand Black artillerymen, many of whom were freedmen from Confederate states, served in the Union Army. Artillerymen, including the cannoneers shown here, were required to handle hundreds of pounds of supplies, such as the gun, its limber, a travelling forge, and caissons to store the ammunition. Though many batteries were relegated to everyday garrison duty, Battery A fought in the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where these photographs chronicling the loading and firing of the gun may have been taken.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George N. Barnard (American, 1819–1902) Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga., No. 1 1864 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Mrs. Everett N. McDonnell
On September 1, 1864, the Confederates abandoned Atlanta, and Barnard headed to the evacuated city with his camera to explore its elaborative defenses. Barnard presents nine views of the destruction of Atlanta – half made during the war, half in 1866. Collectively, the series remains among the most celebrated by any nineteenth-century American photographer. This view is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced of all Barnard’s war photographs. The subject is an abandoned Confederate fort with rows of chevaux-de-frise running through the landscape. As he did in one-third of the photographs in Sherman’s Campaign, Barnard used two negatives to produce the print: one for the landscape, one for the sky. The powerful effect seems to have inspired the set designers of many Civil War motion pictures, from Gone with the Wind (1939) to the present.
George Barnard was one of several photographers who worked for Civil War photographer Mathew Brady before setting out on his own in 1863. Barnard’s best-known works are striking images of General Sherman’s March to the Sea as the Union Army burned nearly everything in its path between Atlanta and Savannah. He published sixty-one albumen plates from this project in 1866 as an album titled Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. More than a documentarian, Barnard wanted his landscapes made in the wake of destruction to convey the emotional complexity that followed the end of the war. He carefully retouched his negatives and often combined two negatives – one exposed for the ground and the other for the sky – to create moody, atmospheric images.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
A.J. Riddle (American, 1825-1893) Union Prisoners of War at Camp Sumter, Andersonville Prison, Georgia. View from the main gate of the stockade, August 17 1864 Albumen print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
Andersonville prison was created in February 1864 and served until April 1865. The site was commanded by Captain Henry Wirz, who was tried and executed after the war for war crimes. The prison was overcrowded to four times its capacity, and had an inadequate water supply, inadequate food, and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 (28%) died. The chief causes of death were scurvy, diarrhoea, and dysentery.
Unidentified photographer Picket station of colored troops near Dutch Gap Canal, Dutch Gap, Virginia 1864 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Dimensions High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family
A Long Arc presents the diversity, beauty, and complexity of photography made in the American South since the 1840s. It examines how Southern photography has articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its complex history. It shows the role played by Southern photography at key crisis points in the country’s history, including the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement. And it explores the ways that photographers working in the region have both sustained and challenged its prevailing mythologies.
As both region and concept, the South has long held a central place within American culture. Profoundly influential American musical and literary movements emerged here, and many great political and social leaders hail from the region, yet histories of violence, disenfranchisement, and struggle dating back centuries continue to reverberate and shape it. For these reasons, the South is perhaps the most mythologized, romanticised, and stereotyped place in America.
The many contradictions inherent in this country’s history, ideals, and myths are arguably closer to the surface in the South’s unruly landscape and diverse faces than elsewhere in the United States. This makes it ideal terrain for photographers to critically engage with and examine American identity. Through the pictures in this exhibition, the South – so often dismissed as backward or marginalised as a place of alluring eccentricity – emerges as the fulcrum of both American photography and American history.
1845-1865: To Vex the Nation: Antebellum South and the Civil War
Photography arrived in the American South very soon after its introduction in Europe in 1839. By the early 1840s, numerous portrait studios popped up throughout the region, affording people a way to preserve their likenesses. Portrait photography in the antebellum South was most distinctive for how it projected and channelled racial and social identity at a moment of intense debate over slavery. It was not unusual for Southern slaveholders to commission photographs of their children with enslaved members of their households, a means of reinforcing social hierarchies. Yet, significantly, the medium also offered free Black Americans a means to declare their presence and self-possession in a society that did not regard them as citizens.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, photography emerged as a crucial medium through which Americans witnessed and confronted the horrors of modern warfare and understood the conflict’s significance to themselves and to their country. The mass mobilisation of soldiers coincided with the development of cheaper and faster ways of making pictures, fuelling a vibrant market for Civil War portraits. These precious keepsakes allowed sitters to display their political allegiances and sustain connections between the battlefield and the home front.
While portraiture was the most common form of photography at this time, the demand for photographs of battlefields, military encampments, and sites of conflict grew throughout the course of the war. These pictures circulated widely as both photographs and as newspaper illustrations made from photographs. Images of carnage, ruin, and especially the destruction of Southern cities helped Americans grasp the enormity of loss. They also introduced an enduring photographic trope: the Southern landscape as the repository of memory, history, and trauma.
Organised in Nashville in 1864 and dispatched until 1866, Battery A of the 2nd regiment of the US Colored Light Artillery accompanied the infantry and cavalry troops into battle with horse-drawn cannons. More than twenty-five thousand Black artillerymen, many of whom were freedmen from Confederate states, served in the Union Army. Artillerymen, including the cannoneers shown here, were required to handle hundreds of pounds of supplies, such as the gun, its limber, a traveling forge, and caissons to store the ammunition. Though many batteries were relegated to everyday garrison duty, Battery A fought in the Battle of Nashville in December 1864, where these photographs chronicling the loading and firing of the gun may have been taken.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) Destruction of Hood’s Ordnance Train 1864 From Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
This dramatic bird’s-eye view documents the aftermath of the destruction of a Confederate military train filled with gunpowder. When abandoning Atlanta, Confederate General John Bell Hood ordered his troops to set the boxcars on fire so that the Union army would never be able to make use of the train. The explosion also completely levelled the nearby mill, leaving evidence of only a few rail wheels and axles.
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) Ruins in Charleston, S.C. 1865-1866, printed 1866 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
Before the war, landscape photography in the South was rare and usually indicated the social or economic function of a place. But as the war spread throughout the South, photographers not only documented the military encampments on the battlefields but often rendered the landscape itself as an object of contemplation, reverie, and mourning. In this work, Barnard carefully seated two figures amid the rubble, their gazes casting out onto the ruined city. Posed as observers taking in the scope and spectacle of tragedy, they stand in for the viewers who experienced the war from afar. Photographs like these also served rhetorical purposes by making the immense destruction seem like divine retribution. As Sherman himself wrote, “I doubt any city was ever more terribly punished than Charleston, but as her people had for years been agitating for war and discord, and had finally inaugurated the Civil War, the judgment of the world will be that Charleston deserved the fate that befell her.”
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
George Barnard – widely considered one of the most important documentarians of the Civil War – began working with photography only several decades after its invention. The limitations of this burgeoning technology influenced how, when, and where Barnard shot his images. At the time, it was essentially impossible to capture quick motion, so Barnard primarily documented the effects of the war on landscapes and architecture. His richly detailed images are filled with anecdotal details that help tell the story of the Civil War and Sherman’s massive campaign through the South.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
George N. Barnard (American, 1819-1902) The “Hell Hole” New Hope Church, Georgia 1861-1866 Albumen silver print from glass negative Addison Gallery of American Art
The Battle of New Hope Church (May 25-26, 1864) was a clash between the Union Army under Major General William T. Sherman and the Confederate Army of Tennessee led by General Joseph E. Johnston during the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War. Sherman broke loose from his railroad supply line in a large-scale sweep in an attempt to force Johnston’s army to retreat from its strong position south of the Etowah River. Sherman hoped that he had outmaneuvered his opponent, but Johnston rapidly shifted his army to the southwest. When the Union XX Corps under Major General Joseph Hooker tried to force its way through the Confederate lines at New Hope Church, its soldiers were stopped with heavy losses.
John Reekie (American, 1829-1885) A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia 1865, published 1866 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family, and the Addison Gallery of American Art
Few of the photographs in the Sketch Book evoke the intense sadness of A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia, one of the seven photographs Gardner included by the still-obscure field operative John Reekie. It is the only plate in the second volume that shows corpses, here being collected by African American soldiers. Four soldiers with shovels work in the background; in the foreground, a single labourer in a knit cap sits crouched behind a bier that holds the lower right leg of a dead combatant and five skulls – one for each member of the living work crew. Reekie’s atypical low vantage point and tight composition ensure that the foreground soldier’s head is precisely the same size as the bleached white skulls and that the head of one of the workers rests in the sky above the distant tree line. It is a macabre and chilling portrait – literally a study of black and white – that is as memorable as any made during the war.
Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833-1909) Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN 1865 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald Marilyn Keough Family
Note the framed photographs at far left on the wooden slat fence advertising the photographer’s work and examples of his carte de visite photographs to the left and right of the entrance. This photograph must have been taken not long after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on 15th April 1865 as the president’s image above the door is surrounded by black mourning cloth ~ Marcus
Isaac H. Bonsall was one of many enterprising photographers who took advantage of the public’s growing demand for portraits at the onset of the Civil War. In 1862, the New York Tribune published an observer’s account of the onslaught of travelling portrait studios among the army: “A camp is hardly pitched before one of the omnipresent artists in collodion and amber […] pitches his canvas gallery and unpacks his chemicals.”
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Isaac H. Bonsall (American, 1833-1909) Bonsil’s Photo Gallery, Chattanooga, TN (detail) 1865 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Lucinda Weil Bunnen Fund and the Donald Marilyn Keough Family
1865-1930: Less Splendid on the Surface
Between 1865 and 1930, the South experienced the abandonment of the promises of Reconstruction and the violent and legal enforcement of racial segregation. Yet this period also witnessed rebuilding of cities and industries, the founding of new institutions (including a significant number of Black schools), continued cultivation of the land, and the development of creative cultures that spread throughout the nation. Photography bore witness to these developments. Some photographers used the camera to sell an idyllic vision of the South that was at odds with the harsh reality, while others documented injustice and poverty with the goal of calling broader attention to the region’s struggles.
During this period, photography also became an increasingly familiar part of everyday life, accelerated by the rise of “penny picture” photography studios, cheap snapshot cameras, and the proliferation of inexpensive stereographs (a form of 3D photography) that brought the wonders of the world – and the South – into nearly every household. The greater accessibility of photography also opened the profession to a growing number of women and Black makers. Community portraiture in particular flourished, giving ordinary people the opportunity to document their lives and envision themselves as modern citizens. Across the South, studio photographers produced thousands of pictures – of public events, private celebrations, city streets, architectural views, and landscapes – that reveal the texture of everyday life and observe the ways people in the South lived, both together and apart from each other.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
John Horgan Jr. (American, 1859-1926) James Richardson’s Plantation, Jackson, MS 1892 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
As Alabama’s “first commercial and industrial specialist,” in the 1890s John Horgan Jr. photographed the vast cotton plantations owned by industrial magnate Edmund Richardson, who also founded the lucrative and exploitative practice of convict labour (leasing prisoners from the state for forced, unpaid labour in exchange for supplying housing). Photographing at a plantation owned by Richardson’s son James, Horgan shows Black labourers, including young children, engaged in the backbreaking toil of harvesting and sorting cotton. Though made almost thirty years after the abolition of slavery, Horgan’s views of antebellum-style labour were a form of propaganda that minimised the conditions of extreme poverty and inequality that shaped African American life in the South.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Florida. Tomaka River. The King’s Ferry 1898 Chromolithograph Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Gift of an Anonymous Donor
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) St. Charles Street, New Orleans 1900 Chromolithograph High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in memory of Charlotte Mann Pailet (1924-1999)
The painter, explorer, and survey photographer William Henry Jackson is best known for his images of the American West, many of which he produced as part of the United States Geological Survey. In 1897, Jackson became a director of the Detroit Publishing Company in a venture to publish colour lithographic prints from black-and-white negatives by himself and other photographers. These views were taken across the United States, including the American South, and were widely disseminated as prints and postcards.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Henry Jackson (American, 1843-1942) Cotton on the Levee 1900 Chromolithograph High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in memory of Charlotte Mann Pailet (1924-1999)
The first major exhibition of Southern photography in more than 25 years, A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, will be on display at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from Oct. 5, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025.
A Long Arc comprises more than 175 years of photography from a broad swath of the American South – from Maryland to Florida to Arkansas to Texas and places in between. Visitors to the expansive exhibition will encounter everyday lives and ordinary places captured in evocative photos that contemplate the region’s central role in shaping American history and identity. The exhibition also examines the South’s critical impact on the development of photography.
“The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is excited to present A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, an astounding exhibition of powerful images of our shared Southern – and American – history by many of this country’s foremost photographers,” said the museum’s Director and CEO Alex Nyerges. “The exhibition also includes a number of captivating images of Richmond and the Commonwealth from the museum’s ever-growing collection of photographs.”
A Long Arc is organised by the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia) and co- curated by Gregory Harris, the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family curator of photography at the High Museum of Art, and Dr. Sarah Kennel, the Aaron Siskind curator of photography and director of the Raysor Center for Works on Paper at VMFA.
“A Long Arc reckons with the region’s fraught history, American identity and culture at large, asking us to consider the history of American photography with the South as its focal point,” said Dr. Kennel. “The exhibition examines the ways that photographers from the 19th century to the present have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape and culture.”
More than 180 works of historical and contemporary photography are featured in A Long Arc, which includes many from VMFA’s permanent collection.
Organised chronologically, A Long Arc opens with an exploration of the years from 1845 to 1865, where visitors will encounter compelling photographs made before and during the American Civil War. Photographers of this time, including Alexander Gardner and George Barnard, transformed the practice of the medium and established visual codes for articulating national identity and expressing collective trauma. Following the war, photographs made from 1865 to 1930 reveal the South’s incomplete project of Reconstruction, including new industries, a rise of community- based photography studios, the erection of white supremacist monuments and scenes conveying social division.
With the emergence of documentary photography in the 1930s, photographs made in the South raised national consciousness around social and racial inequities. During this time, Farm Security Administration photographers working in the region, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott, defined a kind of documentary approach that dominated American photography for decades and recast a Southern vernacular into a new kind of national style.
During the 25 years following World War II, from 1945 to 1970, photography in the South was characterised by an incongruence between America’s optimistic image of itself and the enduring shadow of Jim Crow-era segregation. Artists like Robert Frank, Clarence John Laughlin and Ralph Eugene Meatyard made jarring and unsettling photographs that revealed economic, racial and psychic dissonance at odds with conventional images of American prosperity, while photographs of the civil rights movements by Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon, Doris Derby and James Karales galvanised and shocked the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for justice.
Photography in the South exhibits a sense of reflection, return and renewal in the three decades following the tumult of the 1960s, as artists like Sally Mann, William Eggleston and William Christenberry created narrative, self-reflexive bodies of work that simultaneously sustained and interrogated the South’s brutal histories and enduring cultural mythologies.
A Long Arc concludes with a wide-ranging and provocative selection of photographs made in the past two decades. Artists like Richard Misrach, Lucas Foglia, Gillian Laub, An-My Lê, Sheila Pree-Bright, RaMell Ross and Jose Ibarra Rizo explore Southern history and American identity in the 21st century as forged by legacies of slavery and white supremacy, marked by economic inequality and environmental catastrophe and transformed by immigration, technology, urbanisation, globalisation and shifting ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual identities.
A complex and layered archive of the region, A Long Arc captures how the South has occupied an uneasy place in the history of American photography while simultaneously exemplifying regional exceptionalism and the crucible from which American identity has been forged over the past two centuries.
Press release from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
This is an early photograph by the self taught photographer James Van Der Zee when he was only 21 years old, made in Phoebus, Virginia where he had moved with his wife Kate L. Brown. He returned to Harlem in 1916 and became a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, his portrait of black New York people and culture becoming the most comprehensive artistic photographs of the period.
In the years following the Civil War, numerous schools were founded throughout the South to educate the emancipated Black population. Literacy, which was strictly forbidden by plantation overseers, became a beacon of hope and accomplishment for Black Americans. This dedication to education was so strong among freed peoples that the literacy gap between white and Black communities in the American South closed within a generation. The Whittier Preparatory School in Phoebus, Virginia, was distinguished among its peer institutions for its expanded curriculum, including classes up to ninth grade that encompassed art and music education and dedicated science facilities.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Ernest Joseph Bellocq (American, 1873-1949) Storyville prostitute / Storyville Portrait, New Orleans c. 1912, printed 1966 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Storyville was born on January 1, 1898, and its bordellos, saloons and jazz would flourish for 25 years, giving New Orleans its reputation for celebratory living. Storyville has been almost completely demolished, and there is strangely little visual evidence it ever existed – except for Ernest J. Bellocq’s other wordly photographs of Storyville’s prostitutes. Hidden away for decades, Bellocq’s enigmatic images from what appeared to be his secret life would inspire poets, novelists and filmmakers. But the fame he gained would be posthumous. …
E. J. Bellocq wasn’t just photographing ships and machines. What he kept mostly to himself was his countless trips to Storyville, where he made portraits of prostitutes at their homes or places of work with his 8-by-10-inch view camera. Some of the women are photographed dressed in Sunday clothes, leaning against walls or lying across an ironing board, playing with a small dog. Others are completely or partially nude, reclining on sofas or lounges, or seated in chairs.
The images are remarkable for their modest settings and informality. Bellocq managed to capture many of Storyville’s sex workers in their own dwellings, simply being themselves in front of his camera – not as sexualised pinups for postcards. If his images of ships and landmark buildings were not noteworthy, the pictures he took in Storyville are instantly recognisable today as Bellocq portraits – time capsules of humanity, even innocence, amid the shabby red-light settings of New Orleans. Somehow, perhaps as one of society’s outcasts himself, Bellocq gained the trust of his subjects, who seem completely at ease before his camera. …
In 1958, 89 glass negatives were discovered in a chest, and nine years later the American photographer Lee Friedlander acquired the collection, much of which had been damaged because of poor storage. None of Bellocq’s prints were found with the negatives, but Friedlander made his own prints from them, taking great care to capture the character of Bellocq’s work. It is believed that Bellocq may have purposely scratched the negatives of some of the nudes, perhaps to protect the identity of his subjects.
From 1898 to about 1923, New Orleans’s legally protected red-light district, known as Storyville, flourished with saloons, jazz clubs, gambling halls, and brothels. The prostitutes of these establishments were the favourite subjects of E. J. Bellocq, a photographer from a wealthy family of creole origins who was better known at the time for his industrial pictures of ships and machinery for local companies. His personal photographs of the women of Storyville do not glamorise or eroticise their subjects but instead show them in their private quarters, often at ease in varying states of dress. Although Bellocq destroyed many of his negatives before his death, in the mid-1960s the photographer Lee Friedlander discovered a cache of Storyville glass plates, made prints from them, and showed them at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1970, launching the once-obscure Bellocq into newfound, posthumous fame.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Mining Phosphate and Loading Cars Near Columbia, Tennessee c. 1898 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Flooding the Rice Fields, South Carolina c. 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) A Turpentine Farm – Dippers and Chippers at Work, Savannah, Georgia 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Alligator Joe’s Battle with a Wounded Gator, Palm Beach, Florida 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Unidentified photographer Keystone View Company (American, 1892-1972) Hoeing Rice, South Carolina 1904 Albumen silver print (stereocard) Addison Gallery of American Art
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) A Young Oyster Fisher, Apalachicola, Florida 1909 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Museum Arts purchase fund
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) A little spinner in a Georgia Cotton Mill 1909 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
As a member of the National Child Labor Committee, Lewis Hine was an activist who deployed photography as an instrument of social reform. At the turn of the 1900s, there were two million children in the labor force, and Hine traveled to mines, textile mills, and factories to document their dismal working conditions. In order to gain access to these sites, he often posed as a salesman, insurance agent, or other profession. His photographs of children working in textile mills in Georgia appeared in pamphlets and posters throughout the country, contributing to a shift in public perception that ultimately led to child labor laws, many of which are still in effect today.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Cherokee Hosiery Mill, Rome, Georgia 1913 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Murray H. Bring
Doris Ulmann (American, 1884-1934) Laborers, Kingdom Come School House c. 1931 Platinum print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase
Doris Ulmann was an American photographer, best known for her portraits of the people of Appalachia, particularly craftsmen and musicians, made between 1928 and 1934.
Prentice Herman Polk (American, 1898-1984) The Boss c. 1932 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund
P. H. Polk worked as the official photographer for Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, a private, historically Black land grant university that was founded in 1881. For more than forty-five years, Polk documented the school’s activities and its illustrious faculty and staff. He made photographs that challenged stereotypical images of Black life in the South by chronicling scientific, industrial, and academic advancements by Black innovators and capturing portraits of nearby residents. At a time when most popular images portrayed Black Southerners as subservient, Polk showed the aptly named “boss” standing self-assured, in full control of her image and addressing the camera confidently.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Louise Dahl-Wolfe (American, 1895-1989) Black Man In Bijou Theatre, Nashville, Tennessee 1932, printed later Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
The Bijou Theatre became the Nashville flagship of the Bijou Amusement Company, one of the first African American theatre chains in the south.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Three Generations of Texans (Now Drought Refugees) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
The artwork captures a poignant and compelling scene of three men representing different generations, standing together, likely under difficult circumstances as suggested by the title referencing them as “drought refugees.” The expressions, attire, and the stark composition tell a visual story of resilience and hardship, which is characteristic of Dorothea Lange’s work. The photograph’s detail and the subjects’ piercing gazes evoke a sense of solemn dignity despite their apparent adversities, reflecting the social realism movement’s focus on the lives of everyday people affected by social and economic issues.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) House in New Orleans c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) West Virginia Living Room 1935 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Atlanta Foundation
Evans made this photograph during the first year of the photography division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration). The mission of this newly formed government agency was to document the hardships of the Great Depression and the positive effects of New Deal policies. The furnishings of this coal miner’s home are spare and worn; the walls are decorated with commercial advertisements that reflect a prosperity this family was not likely to experience. But this photograph transcends its immediate mission as government propaganda. Rather than a condescending look at poverty, “West Virginia Living Room” captures the dignity of the family. The barefoot boy sitting awkwardly in the chair looks straight into the camera and challenges the viewer. His direct stare shows no shame and asks for no pity.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Gift of Norman Selby (PA 1970) and Melissa G. Vail
On assignment for Fortune, Walker Evans collaborated with writer James Agee in Hale County, Alabama, for three weeks, recording the lives of three families of white tenant farmers. The photographs offer a raw, direct perspective on a sharecropper’s life yet also diminish the depth and nuance of their subjects. In the original title, Evans referred to Allie Mae Burroughs as a sharecropper’s wife, anonymising her and negating her role in the farm’s operations. Yet through the photograph, her face has become one of the defining images of the Great Depression. The story never ran in Fortune, whose wealthy readers wanted no reminder of the impoverished conditions of rural America, but it was published in 1941 as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and remains one the most influential works of photography and literary nonfiction.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Penny Picture Display, Savannah 1936 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Sherritt Art Purchase Fund
Walker Evans was enthralled by the traditional and folk cultures of the South. He developed a direct, often flat manner of photographing that echoed the spareness of the signage and architecture he encountered throughout the region. In his photograph of a portrait photographer’s studio window, he plays on the consonance between the flatness of the window, the plane of his camera, and the resulting photographic print. In photographing the anonymous photographer’s advertisement, he not only condenses time, labor, individuality, and generations but also flattens history. When he made this image, forty percent of Savannah’s population was Black, a fact belied by the over two hundred white faces that make up the image.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Arthur Rothstein (American, 1915-1985) Weighing Cotton, Texas 1936 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Howard Greenberg
Plantation owner’s daughter checks weight of cotton.
1930-1945: The Cruel Radiance: A New Documentary Tradition
The impact of the Great Depression on the American South – a region that was already poorer than the rest of the nation – was devastating. In addition to economic havoc, many of the other problems convulsing the country – poverty, racism, and the erosion of rural cultures – appeared in their most concentrated and vivid forms in the South. Photographers responded to these crises with indelible images of hardship and injustice that they hoped would spur reform and modernize the region. In this way, the Great Depression changed the course of American photography by cementing the concept and practice of documentary photography as a tool for social reform.
Most of these documentary photographs were produced under the auspices of the federal government as part of a New Deal effort to provide relief to rural areas. From 1935-1942, some two dozen photographers were hired by the government to capture images of rural poverty in order to raise both public sympathy and congressional support for resettlement and other forms of aid. Although there was not a single native Southerner among them, together this group of photographers produced around sixteen thousand photographs of the region and profoundly changed how the nation saw the South, and by extension, itself. Widely reproduced in newspaper articles, magazines, exhibitions, and photo books, these documentary projects brought the South into national focus and debate.
Not all of the photographers who flocked to the South during this time sought to document its stricken conditions. The region’s seeming resistance to progress also seduced photographers who saw vestiges of agrarian life that nurtured distinctive folkways and vernacular architecture – that is to say, buildings based on regional or local traditions. To them, this South – so different from the rapidly changing urban centres in the Northeast and Midwest – resembled a cultural eddy, an alluring place cut off from the flow of time where one could photograph the beautiful remnants of a largely imagined past.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Margaret Bourke White (American, 1904-1971) Louisville Flood Victims 1937, printed later Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
In January 1937, the swollen banks of the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky, and its surrounding areas. With one hour’s notice, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White caught the next plane to Louisville. She photographed the city from makeshift rafts, recording one of the largest natural disasters in American history for Life magazine, where she was a staff photographer. The Louisville Flood shows African-Americans lined up outside a flood relief agency. In striking contrast to their grim faces, the billboard for the National Association of Manufacturers above them depicts a smiling white family of four riding in a car, under a banner reading “World’s Highest Standard of Living. There’s no way like the American Way.” As a powerful depiction of the gap between the propagandist representation of American life and the economic hardship faced by minorities and the poor, Bourke-White’s image has had a long afterlife in the history of photography.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Displaced Tenant Farmers, Goodlett, Hardeman County, Texas July 1937 Gelatin silver print Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
“All displaced tenant farmers, the oldest 33. None able to vote because of Texas poll tax. They support an average of four persons each on $22.80 a month.” ~ Dorothea Lange
Six Tenant Farmers Without Farms exemplifies the best of Lange’s Depression-era photographs from the deep South. The dignity of her subjects – young farmers who had lost their livelihood when tractors replaced horse-and-plow tilling of the land – is immortalised by Lange, who portrays them with clear compassion but no sentimentality.
Text from the Sotheby’s website
Prentice Herman Polk (American, 1898-1984) Mildred Hanson Baker 1937 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts John C. and Florence S. Goddin, by exchange
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Formerly Enslaved Woman, Alabama 1938 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art
Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era portrait of a woman who had been born enslaved offers a poignant and understated meditation on the legacy of slavery. Lange’s empathic approach to portraiture was distinct for its ability to express the lasting effects of trauma, poverty, and prejudice in the lives of formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Her photographs demonstrate how the deprivation of the Jim Crow era was compounded by the aftermath of World War I and the Great Depression, making life in the South increasingly turbulent for Black Americans.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Peter Sekaer (Danish, 1901-1950) Irish Channel, Future Site of St. Thomas Housing Project, New Orleans c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art Museum purchase
St. Thomas Development was a notorious housing project in New Orleans, Louisiana. The project lay south of the Central City in the lower Garden District area. As defined by the City Planning Commission, its boundaries were Constance, St. Mary, Magazine Street and Felicity Streets to the north; the Mississippi River to the south; and 1st, St. Thomas, and Chippewa Streets, plus Jackson Avenue to the west. In the 1980s and 1990s, St. Thomas was one of the city’s most dangerous and impoverished housing developments. It made national headlines in 1992 after the deadly shooting of Eric Boyd.
It is interesting to compare photographs by Walker Evans and his assistant Peter Sekelear, whose pictures reflect similar interests with different eyes. Both photographers turned their attention to the vernacular, bringing a sense of place into focus. Many of the photographers exhibiting in A Long Arc were neither southern nor poor. This calls into question the contribution that 1930’s depictions of southern poverty had on stereotyping, imploring viewers to feel sorry for the destitute rather than questioning the systems that kept their communities impoverished.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
Russell Lee (American, 1903-1986) Louisiana 1939 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Black Man Using “Colored” Entrance to Movie Theatre, Belzoni, Mississippi 1939, printed later Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Ann and Ben Johnson
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Waiting to be Paid for Picking Cotton, Inside Plantation Store, Marcella 1939 Gelatin silver print Collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg
Mike Disfarmer (American, 1884–1959) Wallace Sloane, Elliot Smith and Brother Homer c. 1940 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Jane and Clay Jackson
Mike Disfarmer operated the only professional photography studio in Heber Springs, Arkansas, between the 1930s and ’50s. His spare and at times severe portraits offer a plainspoken vision of rural, predominantly white America during and after the Great Depression. For most of his sitters, being photographed was an unusual occurrence, and a visit to the studio marked a milestone. People often posed for Disfarmer in groups, as in his portrait of three young men casually draping their arms around each others’ shoulders, reinforcing their sense of familiarity and friendship, perhaps on their last night together before one of them heads off for military service.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) Time Phantasm, Number Six 1941 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Joshua Mann Pailet in honor of his mother, Charlotte Mann Pailet; her family members Josef, Jiri and Alma Beran Mann, all of whom perished in the Holocaust; and Sir Nicholas Winton, the British hero who orchestrated Charlotte’s escape with 669 Czechoslovakian children in 1939
A strong southern penchant for the surreal can be observed in images like those by Clarence John Laughlin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Emmet Gowin. Laughlin photographed a decaying antebellum structure alongside Edward Weston in 1941. His soft focus and presence of a ghostly figure in a window create a mysterious mood in contrast to the sharp reality of Weston’s image. And his use of a mask and slight camera shake in “The Masks Grow to Us” transforms a beautiful face into an hypnagogic visage.
Twenty years later, Meatyard photographed his sons in similarly abandoned structures and fields in the countryside surrounding Louisville, Kentucky. Also known for employing masks, Meatyard creates a dreamlike reverence for vanishing rural life in some of the best quality prints of his that we have ever seen. Emmet Gowin’s balmy composition of his multi-generational family splayed around their backyard with two watermelons is, like so many images of the south, both prosaic and magical.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Woodland Plantation 1941 Gelatin silver print New Orleans Museum of Art
In 1941, Clarence John Laughlin and Edward Weston photographed alongside one another for a few days as Weston traveled the South making photographs to illustrate a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Both photographers produced images of the same location but in notably different ways. Weston, who is known for his mastery of sharp focus and a rich tonal range, created a precise and balanced view of the scene. Meanwhile, Laughlin, who was dubbed the “Father of American Surrealism” for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture, spun a more ambiguous and haunting tale. He even posed Weston’s collaborator and wife, Charis Wilson, as a ghostly apparition on the second floor.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Masks Grow to Us 1947 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Robert Yellowlees
1945-1970: History as Myth, Progress as Peril
Following World War II, two competing visions shaped popular views of the South: one based on the country’s image of itself as optimistic and prosperous and the other grounded in the continued poverty, racial violence, and segregation that marked the region. Photographers grappled with the dissonance between conventional images of American affluence and progress in popular culture and mass media and the reality of life for many in the South by making a startling mix of images, from powerful examples of photojournalism to more subjective pictures that explored psychological and emotional states.
As the first Black staff photographer for LIFE, in 1956 Gordon Parks shocked Americans with lush, colourful pictures made in Mobile, Alabama, that powerfully revealed the ugliness and psychological anguish of segregation. Other photojournalists traveling to the American South – including Elliot Erwitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson – homed in on the contradictions between Southern gentility and the reality of race relations. While these photographers continued to employ the documentary style that had taken shape in the 1930s, with its crisp focus, straightforward compositions, and faith in the possibilities of objectivity, others, like Robert Frank, broke from this tradition to make raw, searing, and idiosyncratic pictures that grasped something elemental about American culture.
Other photographers – especially those who knew the South intimately – turned inward. Some, like Virginia native Emmet Gowin, chose to photograph their families and loved ones, seeking sustenance in what was closest at hand. Others, like the Kentucky optician-turned photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, embraced a dreamlike surrealism to create pictures suffused with social and psychological tension, capturing the alienation produced within such a divided society.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978) Young Girl, Tennessee 1948 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund
In the late 1940s, many photographers traversed the country with the support of fellowships and grants to capture the spirit of postwar America. Consuelo Kanaga traveled throughout the South, concentrating her lens on communities of color. Rather than dwelling on hardships or poverty, she presents her subjects with dignity, often framed in spare compositions that focus on the emotions conveyed in their facial expressions. Emblematic of this approach, her photograph of this contemplative girl silhouetted against a light sky while gazing upward echoes classical portraiture.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978) Josie Hill, Wife of a Lynch Victim, Irwinton, Georgia 1949 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Ben Bivins
Born in Germany, Marion Palfi worked as a freelance photographer and portraitist in Berlin before emigrating to the United States in 1936. Shocked at the racial and economic inequalities she encountered, she devoted her photographic career to documenting various communities to expose the virulent effects of racism and poverty. In 1949, she made this portrait of Josie Hill, widow of Caleb Hill, the victim of the first reported lynching of that year. A father of three, the twenty-eight year old Hill had been arrested for allegedly stabbing a man. After the sheriff left the jail’s front door open and the keys to the cell on his desk, Hill was pulled from jail in the middle of the night and shot to death. Two white men were charged with the crime, but the all-white grand jury did not indict them.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) North Carolina (segregation fountain) 1950 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
W. Eugene Smith (American, 1918-1978) Maude at Stove 1951 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Floyd D. and Anne C. Gottwald Fund
In December 1951, LIFE published W. Eugene Smith’s photo essay on Maude Callen, a nurse and midwife who worked in rural South Carolina. Smith’s powerful photographs illuminated Callen’s extraordinary efforts to serve her patients, who were among the poorest and most neglected in the country. As detailed in the magazine, “Callen drives 36,000 miles within the county each year, is reimbursed for part of this by the state, and must buy her own cars, which last 18 months. Her workday is often sixteen hours and she earns $225 a month.” After the article was published, readers sent donations totalling more than $27,000, allowing Callen to build a clinic and train others to become healthcare workers.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley, New Orleans 1955 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
In 1955 and 1956, Switzerland-born photographer Robert Frank travelled across the United States with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. With an incisive, unsparing eye, he sought to understand and decode the brutal beauty of his adopted home. Raw, violent, tender, and edgy, his photographs of an America plagued by racial division, economic disparity, consumerism, and wilful ignorance shocked viewers for how they savagely undercut the country’s postwar view of itself as prosperous, peaceful, and progressive. In the South, Frank was keenly attuned to the persistence of segregation. His photograph of a New Orleans trolley, white people up front and Black people behind, succinctly captures the ruthlessness and anguish of racial stratification.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Café, Beaufort, South Carolina 1955 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Charleston, South Carolina 1955-1956 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama 1956 Inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation
Gordon Parks was the first African American photographer to work for LIFE – the preeminent picture magazine of the day – and published some of the 20th century’s most iconic photo essays about social justice. In 1956, the magazine published Parks’s “Segregation Story,” a photo essay comprising twenty-six colour photographs depicting a multigenerational family in Alabama. Despite the grave danger he faced as a Black photographer working in the South at the height of Jim Crow, Parks firmly believed that photographs could alter a viewer’s perspective and expose a wide readership to the pervasive effects of racial segregation.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Gordon Parks (American, 1912–2006) Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama 1956, printed 2012 Inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of The Gordon Parks Foundation Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation
“Ondria Tanner and Her Grandmother Window-Shopping, Mobile, Alabama”was taken in 1956 by Gordon Parks during the Jim Crow era as part of his 1956 LIFE series “Segregation Story.”
Gene Herrick (American, b. 1926) Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama 1956 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted on February 22, 1956, by Lieutenant D.H. Lackey as one of the people indicted as leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott. She was one of 73 people rounded up by deputies that day after a grand jury charged 113 African Americans for organizing the boycott. This was a few months after her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955 – the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person – to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Unidentified Photographer Elizabeth Eckford Entering Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas 1957 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
The Little Rock Nine were the first Black students to integrate Arkansas’s Little Rock Central High School on September 25, 1957, three years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional. After being stopped during multiple attempts to get in the school, they were finally able to enter while escorted by the 101st Airborne Infantry. This press photograph shows Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine students, resolutely proceeding into the school building flanked by uniformed soldiers while white students jeer at her.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Charles Moore (American, 1931-2010) Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested, Montgomery, Alabama 1958 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
On September 3, 1958, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to enter the Montgomery courtroom that was hearing a case involving his friend and colleague, the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, King was arrested and charged with loitering. Charles Moore, a photographer for the Montgomery Advertiser, captured the moment as police officers aggressively placed him in handcuffs. Like many of the most well-known photographers of the civil rights movement, Moore was white, and his race allowed him to photograph many violent incidents involving law enforcement at close range. This photograph contributed to an outpouring of outrage and support for King’s cause after its release nationwide by the Associated Press.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Henri Cartier-Bresson (French, 1908-2004) The Daughters of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia 1960 Gelatin silver print 9 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (24.13 × 16.51cm) Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is a women’s heritage organisation best known for honouring Confederate veterans of the Civil War, memorialising the Confederacy, and promoting the “Lost Cause” interpretation of southern history, which positions Old South slavery as a benevolent institution, Confederate soldiers as heroic defenders of states’ rights, and Reconstruction as a period of northern aggression, through its monuments and educational campaigns. Members are required to prove that they are bloodline descendants of men and / or women who served honourably in the Confederal States of America.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) Prescience #135 1960 Gelatin silver print Collection of Joe Williams and Tede Fleming
Ralph Eugene Meatyard (American, 1925-1972) Romance (N.) from Ambrose Bierce #3 1962 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Leonard Freed (American, 1929-2006) Children in the Mirror, Johns Island, South Carolina 1964 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) A female protester being arrested and led away by police, Birmingham, Alabama 1963 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Anonymous gift
Bill Hudson (American, 1932-2010) An African American high school student, Walter Gadsden, 25, is attacked by a police dog during a civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963 1963 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Sandra Anderson Baccus in loving memory of Lloyd Tevis Baccus, M.D.
“[Hudson] took a photo on May 3, 1963, of Walter Gadsden, an African-American bystander who had been grabbed by a sunglasses-wearing police officer, while a German Shepherd lunged at his chest. The photo appeared above the fold, covering three columns in the next day’s issue of The New York Times, as well as in other newspapers nationwide. Author Diane McWhorter wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution that Hudson’s photo that day drove “international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution”.
An experienced photographer of the civil rights movement, Bill Hudson often avoided hostility from the police by keeping his camera hidden under his jacket and only bringing it out at the optimal moment. He was in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park when he captured the moment a police officer grabbed fifteen-year-old protestor Walter Gadsden by the collar and pulled Gadsden toward his police dog. The photograph emblematised police brutality and was published in newspapers and magazines across the country, sparking nationwide support for the civil rights movement.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
An optician from Lexington, Kentucky, Ralph Eugene Meatyard considered himself a “dedicated amateur.” He became widely known for his enigmatic scenes and dreamlike portraits that infuse the everyday with a sense of mystery and unease. Meatyard often staged his own family as actors, clad in rubber masks and enacting cryptic dramas that reveal the influence of Southern gothic literature. In this photograph of his son Christopher reclining in a bucolic field littered with masks, youthful innocence reckons with intimations of mortality.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Matt Herron (American, 1931-2020) The March from Selma 1965 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Gloria and Paul Sternberg
Selma to Montgomery marches
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement. …
The first march took place on March 7, 1965, led by figures including Bevel and Amelia Boynton, but was ended by state troopers and county possemen, who charged on about 600 unarmed protesters with batons and tear gas after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the direction of Montgomery. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. Law enforcement beat Boynton unconscious, and the media publicised worldwide a picture of her lying wounded on the bridge. The second march took place two days later but King cut it short as a federal court issued a temporary injunction against further marches. That night, an anti-civil rights group murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston. The third march, which started on March 21, was escorted by the Alabama National Guard under federal control, the FBI and federal marshals (segregationist Governor George Wallace refused to protect the protesters). Thousands of marchers averaged 10 mi (16 km) a day along U.S. Route 80 (US 80), reaching Montgomery on March 24. The following day, 25,000 people staged a demonstration on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.
1956-1968: Civil Rights and the Language of Activism
From the start, photography was both a document of and engine for the civil rights movement. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1956 to the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, photographs of the civil rights movement galvanized and shocked the nation with raw depictions of violence and the struggle for racial justice. Civil rights organisers recognised the power of the medium and ensured that its actions were thoroughly documented. Countless photojournalists, artists, movement photographers, and amateurs documented the marches, sit-ins, and showdowns with counterprotesters and law enforcement, communicating the urgency of these events to the public with an intimate proximity. These photographs appeared in widely circulated publications such as the New York Times, LIFE, Ebony, and Jet and played a crucial role in informing and motivating the public to challenge the complicated and deeply entrenched history of segregation.
On the other side of the camera, activists and organisers skilfully orchestrated their civic actions, knowing the singular power that photographs would have in shaping public opinion. A key tactic of many activists was nonviolent direct action – by refusing to defend themselves even when physically attacked, activists could bring attention to the immorality of the aggressors’ actions and beliefs. Photographs of these violent public scenes lent a sense of martyrdom and principled sacrifice to the protestors’ efforts and sparked a social revolution unlike anything the country had experienced. The photographs gathered here show just a handful of the thousands of selfless acts of courage that helped transform the nation.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) New Orleans 1968 Gelatin silver print Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Museum purchase
Steve Schapiro (American, 1934-2022) Martin Luther King Jr.’s Motel Room Hours After He Was Shot, Memphis, Tennessee 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchased with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
“When Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, LIFE Magazine asked me to go immediately down to Memphis. I had done much civil rights work and had photographed King preaching in Birmingham and in Selma. In Memphis, I first photographed the third-floor bathroom, in the rooming house from which the shot had been fired. Supposedly, it was James Earl Ray standing in the tub and leaning the barrel of his gun in the windowsill pointing at the Lorraine Motel. There was a black hand print on the wall at the side of the tub which I photographed. LIFE ran it as a full-page picture the following week, assuming it was Ray’s. When I went to what had been King’s room at the motel, the door was closed. There were two photographers already inside with Hosea Williams, a King aide. I knocked on the door. One of the photographer blurted out, “Don’t let him in,” but Williams opened the door for me anyway. The room was as it had been. I photographed King’s briefcase which held books he had written (one with my Selma March photograph on its cover) and a newspaper called Soul Force, along with dirty shirts and a few cans. The television was on. A commentator was talking about King on the TV with King’s ghostly image behind him. I made a wide shot of the table with King’s briefcase and dirty shirts on it, and on the wall, the TV set with King’s image. ‘The man’ had left the room, his human form forever lost – but his incidental material belongings, and more than that, the spirit of his image, remained.”
Steve Schapiro, 2017
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Mrs. Martin Luther King Jr. on Her Front Lawn, Atlanta, Ga. 1968 Gelatin silver print 20 x 16 inches High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Wanda Hopkins
Bob Adelman (American, 1930-2016) Mule Wagon for the Poor People’s Campaign, Memphis, Tennessee 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
1970-2000: Returns and Renewals
Following the tumultuous civil rights era, in the 1970s the South grappled as much with its history as with its future. Although the region continued to expand and diversify, particularly in urban centers like Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte, many photographers turned their lenses inward, exploring the past and their surroundings in an intimate and subjective manner. This shift in approach can be seen in a strong emphasis on portraiture, especially of family and community members. Meanwhile, the rise of color photography as a widely accepted artistic medium took hold in the South, thanks in no small part to the work of William Eggleston, who merged the casual banality of a snapshot with an enchanting use of color. In the process, he established a new Southern photographic aesthetic: the ordinary rendered extraordinary though lurid, eye-popping colour.
Southern photography in this period was also marked by a new interest in landscape as the nexus of history and place. The impact of the civil rights movement and rise of more inclusive and critical histories of the South prompted a new generation of photographers to interrogate the region’s prevailing myths, particularly those that established and reinforced racial hierarchies. Others bore witness to the ways that histories – of slavery in particular, but also economic and environmental destruction – left their traces on the land itself. Meanwhile, the ever-growing cracks in the image of the New South, with its dream of national reconciliation, prosperity, and racial equality, drew the attention of photographers who sought to understand and convey the disparities they witnessed.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Three Boys on a Porch, Beaufort County, S.C. 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the Friends of Photography
Diane Arbus made this portrait on assignment from Esquire for a story about a doctor who fought parasitic diseases and hunger in the impoverished parts of Beaufort County, South Carolina. Arbus’s unflinching depiction of rural deprivation recalls Walker Evans’s photographs made three decades earlier of similar conditions in Hale County, Alabama. Her direct style of portraiture combined with the graphic qualities of the clapboard siding in the background echo the social documentary photography of the 1930s, underscoring how little conditions had changed for the South’s rural poor in the years following the Great Depression.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Doris Derby (American, 1939–2022) Women’s sewing cooperative, Mississippi 1968 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of David Knaus
Emmet Gowin (American, b. 1941) Family, Danville 1970 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
Since the 1960s, Emmet Gowin has made intimate and poignant photographs of his wife, Edith, and her family at their home in Danville, Virginia. Here, he shows three generations lounging in a yard, and though everyone is within touching distance of one another, all are separate, with their attention turned inward. Gowin’s tender composition masterfully imbues the informality of a family snapshot with a sense of deep trust and precise thought, undermining the common stereotype of rural Southerners as backward and disconnected.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Paul Kwilecki (American, 1928-2009) Girl, Battle’s Quarters 1971 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
Paul Kwilecki spent his life in Bainbridge, Georgia, running his family’s hardware store and pursuing a decades-long project of documenting the people and events of the area, believing that “insight into a life in Decatur County is insight into lives everywhere.” The homes in Battle’s Quarters, a working-class neighbourhood, were originally built for lumber workers employed by Battle and Metcalf Lumber Company. Decades later, the company had long since closed, and the area declined economically. Perched on the bumper of an old car, the girl in this photograph assertively faces the camera, rebuking any impulse of pity or shame on the part of the viewer.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Born in Memphis, self-taught photographer William Eggleston photographed everyday life in lush, saturated color. This scene contains nearly all the hues in the colour spectrum, from the violet darkening sky to the boy’s red headscarf. Eggleston made this exposure at dusk, when the waning natural light mixed with the artificial light of streetlamps to dramatic effect. Since the two light sources register differently on film, Eggleston was able to render the scene as strange and fictional, which is fitting as the children masquerade on Halloween.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Untitled (Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background) 1971 Dye transfer print Collection of Winston Eggleston
Though he began his career working in black and white, by the late 1960s the Memphis-born William Eggleston had mastered the expressive possibilities of colour, photographing ordinary subjects around Memphis and making deeply saturated dye transfer prints, a primarily commercial process. He explored how colour could add psychological depth to his photographs, as in this scene awash in shades of brown aside from the stark white car and two figures – a Black man in a white coat and a White man in a black suit. Eggleston emphasises the familiarity between the chauffeur and his employer through their identical stances, yet their attire and physical and psychological distance underscore the rigid social hierarchy that divides them based on race and class.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Jackson, Mississippi (Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi) c. 1972 Dye transfer print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Funds provided by the Museum Purchase Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, matching funds provided by the Volunteer Committees of Art Museums
As a teacher in rural Kentucky, Wendy Ewald worked closely with her students, encouraging and empowering them to tell their own stories through writing and photography. Among her students was a boy named Johnny who created the narratives and staging for the pictures that Ewald would then photograph. In this work, Johnny posed his brother Charles hanging over a clothesline slung with tattered quilts while holding a small revolver in his hand. Yet Charles is careful to point the gun away from the viewer, as if uncomfortable with confrontation or violence – a demeanour echoed in his open, almost tender gaze.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Huntsville, Alabama 1978 Dye transfer print 18 5/16 x 12 3/4 inches High Museum of Art, Atlanta Museum purchase
Nicholas Nixon (American, b. 1947) Yazoo City, Mississippi 1979 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Building, Hale County, Alabama 1980 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Photo Forum
This series of a building in Greensboro stands out among Christenberry’s work due to its clear depiction of time’s cyclical nature. The character of the structure changes so completely from general store to juke joint over the years that it is at first difficult to recognise that the photographs document the same building. With each new name, fresh coat of paint, and architectural modification, the building reflects the surrounding community’s changing economics, culture, and politics through times of decline and rebirth.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
William Christenberry (American, 1936-2016) Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama 1983 Dye coupler prints High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of the artist
After encountering a copy of Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, William Christenberry began to photograph vernacular architecture in Hale County, a rural farming area of central Alabama where his family had lived for several generations. Christenberry was one of the first American photographers to harness and popularise colour photography for artistic purposes, and he chronicled the march of time by returning to photograph specific buildings over decades. He exhibited these photographs – often made years apart – in groups to extend the experience of time through the lifespans of buildings and surrounding landscapes.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Joel Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia 1983 Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Dr. Judy and Kevin Wolman
Joel Sternfeld’s Domestic workers waiting for the bus, Atlanta, Georgia, April, (1983) might be the most mundane of nearly 200 photographs on view in “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.” …
The picture’s title refers to Atlanta, I’d place this as a particular neighborhood in the suburban community of Sandy Springs, where I once lived. If I haven’t been on this exact street, perhaps even in one of these homes, I’ve been within a half mile of it.
That was more like 2003, but whether 1983, 2003, or 2023, I would be willing to bet a dollar to a donut – to use a Southern phrase – the street looks exactly the same today. Lawns uniformly closely clipped. Pine straw covering the landscaping. Everything just so.
Order. Conformity. Genteel. Southern.
There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied.
The women employed dusting and polishing inside the brick mansions wait on the bus because they can’t afford to own a car. I can assure you no one living in any of the houses along the street would be caught dead riding the bus in Atlanta – or even know how to. It’s just not done.
The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems. Doing so reminds us that the struggle for equality extends beyond the dramatic. Beyond the Edmond Pettis Bridge in Selma, or the bus boycotts in Montgomery.
In the tradition of Robert Frank’s book The Americans, Joel Sternfeld embarked on a nationwide road trip for his book American Prospects, which grappled with the state of the country during the Reagan era. Here, three Black women are the only signs of life in the suburban Atlanta neighborhood of Sandy Springs. Driveways segment parcels of land within the seemingly endless subdivision, emphasising the primary mode of transport for the affluent residents. By contrast, the women wait for public transportation to ferry them to and from their jobs maintaining their employers’ homes. Sternfeld’s critical stance lays bare the region’s income and racial inequalities, still present twenty years after the civil rights movement.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Baldwin Lee (American, b. 1951) Nashville, Tennessee 1983 Gelatin silver print
Beginning in 1983, Baldwin Lee made many road trips from his adopted home of Knoxville, Tennessee, throughout the South to photograph. He was drawn to Black Americans, often poor, at work, about town, or gathering on their yards or front porches. His strikingly dynamic and active compositions feel simultaneously spontaneous and meticulous in the way he arranges numerous people into complex scenes. His photographs offer poignant portrayals of daily life in rural and small towns across the South that are empathic, intimate, and often humorous, without shying away from his subjects’ material and economic challenges.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Baldwin Lee (American, b. 1951) Montgomery, Alabama 1984 Gelatin silver print High museum of Art, Atlanta
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Blowing Bubbles 1987 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Lucinda W. Bunnen for the Bunnen Collection
From 1985-1994, Sally Mann photographed her three children – Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia – at the family’s rustic cabin in the Shenandoah Valley. The pictures she created evoke the freedom and tranquility of unhurried days spent exploring outdoors but also capture the complexities of childhood, showing it from both the child and adult’s point of view. In this photograph, Mann presents childhood as at once magical and fleeting. While Jessie delights in producing the shimmering bubbles, Virginia faces us with an anxious expression. If the doll on the railing suggests the innocence of childhood, the pair of abandoned women’s shoes and toy shopping cart hint at its inevitable end.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Deborah Luster (American, b. 1951) Donald Garringer, Angola, Louisiana September 17, 1999 Gelatin silver prints on aluminium Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Eric and Jeanette Lipman Fund
In 1998, Deborah Luster began photographing incarcerated people in Louisiana, aiming to give this population visibility and voice. Some of her sitters posed with objects of importance, while others vividly expressed themselves through gesture and expression. Luster printed the portraits on small metal plates that evoke 19thcentury tintypes, intimate objects meant to be touched and handled. On the back of each plate, she recorded information about the sitter, including name, age, length of sentence, prison job, number of children, and future hopes and dreams. While each photograph commemorates an individual’s existence, the project serves as a disquieting reminder of the dehumanisation, grief, and generational trauma the prison industrial complex produces.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Deborah Luster (American, b. 1951) “REAL,” Transylvania, Louisiana 1999 Gelatin silver prints on aluminium Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Eric and Jeanette Lipman Fund
Richard Misrach (American, b. 1949) Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana 1998 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Commissioned with funds from the H. B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust, Lucinda W. Bunnen, and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund for the Picturing the South series
In 1998, Richard Misrach produced a detailed and disturbing visual study of the ecological degradation along a 150-mile section of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans – a stretch indelibly marked by the more than one hundred petrochemical plants that have spewed pollutants into the air, water, and land surrounding them. Through his evocative large-scale colour photographs, Misrach reveals not only the destruction of the Mississippi’s delicate ecosystem but also the layers of history, power, and politics complicit in engineering a system that has both wreaked havoc on the land and covertly exploited and poisoned nearby residents, primarily African Americans.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree) 1999 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from Jane and Clay Jackson
Even in today’s “New South,” photography is largely a story of dichotomies: turbulent versus languorous, urban versus rural, privileged versus impoverished, and still, white versus Black. What appears to separate current photographic practice from other eras is that image-makers today seem compelled to address such dual realities with a critical, often indicting interrogation of the south’s legacies. Sally Mann’s “Deep South, Untitled (Scarred Tree)” evokes the brutality of the south’s violent history in the scar on her romantically crafted print of an oak tree.
Suzanne Révy and Elin Spring. “A Long Arc,” on the What Will You Remember website March 20, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/12/2024
In this evocative study of an oak tree, Sally Mann focuses on a dark gash across the trunk, its scarred appearance a metaphor for the South’s traumatic history. The combination of beauty and brutality recalls Mann’s description of the South as “a place extravagant in its beauty, reckless in its fecundity, terrible in its indifference, and dark with memories.” The photograph also reveals Mann’s mastery of the 19th-century wet plate process, which enabled her to materially conjure the past in the present.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
An-My Lê (American born Vietnam, b. 1960) Explosion, from the Small Wars series 1999-2002 Gelatin silver print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund
For her series Small Wars, An-My Lê photographed reenactments of Vietnam War battles in North Carolina and Virginia. In these elaborately staged theatrical events with authentically costumed reenactors, Lê photographed in a manner that mirrors the verisimilitude and immediacy of combat photography, blurring the lines between truth and fiction. The blast of fireworks in Explosion mimics the burst of an ordinance being discharged, illuminating the surrounding pine trees and thereby revealing that the battle is set in a temperate forest rather than in a dense Vietnamese jungle.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
In the past twenty-five years, the American South has emerged as one of the most dynamic locales for contemporary photographic production and has nurtured both homegrown talents and attracted photographers from across the world who seek to better understand both the region and the nation. For these artists, bearing witness to the people, places, and culture of the American South is crucial to comprehending the United States’ collective ethos, and the images these artists produce are key to renegotiating our foundational myths and present realities.
The abiding preoccupations of photographers intent on articulating and scrutinising the character of the region touch on a range of overlapping topics and themes: the unruly and understated nature of the landscape coupled with the looming threat of climate change; storytelling and myth making, with a penchant for the gothic and unsettling; history’s persistence in the present and the need to challenge conventional narratives; the rapid urbanisation and globalisation of the region and the attendant shifting demographics; increasingly visible cultural and political division; and across all these other leitmotifs, race and the long shadow cast by slavery and Jim Crow.
In their efforts to expand and complicate both the myths and realities of the region, these contemporary photographers prompt us to redefine our concepts of who, and what, counts as American. They also show how the South continues to serve as a crucible of American identity, the uneasy place where our contradictions meet our aspirations.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Whetstone’s photographs …are drawn from his New Wilderness series, in which he explores contemporary understandings of wilderness and charts ways in which longstanding stories of connection to the natural world around us are encoded in today’s culture. He is interested in the ways in which our identities mediate our relationship with the wild and in our stereotypes relating to rural populations.
For Whetstone the mythical frontier is synonymous with the line between humanity and inexorable nature, and as such, it never disappeared. Instead, it is all around us; indeed, it is in us, underlining as nonsense the idea that we could ever truly tame it. The myth of control over the wilderness animates Whetstone’s photography. Through images made both on his doorstep and across the region in settings from caves to hunting blinds, he explores tenuous moments of human dominance over places in the natural world.
Whetstone finds elements of both human culture and nature in the transitional zone between the two, which for him is the new wilderness… Whetstone’s photographs are a bridge to the inevitable complexity of relationships between humans and nature, which are likely to become ever more pressing as climatological and environmental processes of change weigh heavily in the region over coming decades.
Anonymous. “Jeff Whetstone,” on the Southbound Project website Nd [Online] Cited 23/01/2025
Lucas Foglia (American, b. 1983) Acorn with Possum Stew, Wildroots Homestead, North Carolina 2006 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Gift of Irene Zhou
In the tradition of photographers such as Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, Alec Soth seeks to expose and elevate pedestrian aspects of American life. His poetic images capture the harsh beauty of disenfranchised people and places, underscoring the romantic ideals espoused by American society and the realities of living in such a vast and varied country. Inspired by the writing of Flannery O’Connor, Soth’s project explores spiritual and hermetic life in the South. The photographs include studies that represent a variety of natural subjects such as landscapes, woods, and caves; examples of man-made intervention including tree houses, forts, cabins and tents; and portraits of monks, hermits, and survivalists.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Traveling through the American South, Alec Soth explored the romantic allure of escape through the hermetic lives of outsiders living in the region. He photographed landscapes, structures (tree houses, forts, cabins), and people, primarily men, who choose to live on the outskirts of organized society. Distanced in their compositional and psychological approaches, Soth’s photographs demonstrate empathic insight with the desire for solitude, without shying away from the potentially nefarious impulses that motivate some people to withdraw from the mainstream.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Sheila Pree Bright (American, b. 1967) Untitled 28 2007 From the Suburbia series Dye coupler print High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Hagedorn Family and the Friends of Photography
In her Suburbia series, Sheila Pree Bright creates narratives that allude to socioeconomic status and racial identity. The arrangement of the rooms and their contents invites the viewer to imagine the lives of their inhabitants. Bright’s inclusion in this well-appointed mid-century living room of titles such as The End of Blackness, books about Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso, masks from Africa, and vases from Asia underscore the inhabitant’s refinement and expansive cultural sophistication. Bright’s carefully composed photographs of the interiors of Black-owned homes in suburban Atlanta seek to counter often-stereotyped representations of Black communities in the mainstream media with a more realistic, nuanced view of middle-class African American family life.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Susan Worsham (American, b. 1969) Marine, Hotel near Airport, Richmond, Virginia 2009 Pigmented inkjet print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund
Gillian Laub (American, b. 1975) Prom Prince and Princess Dancing at the Integrated Prom 2011 Pigment print
Although she is from New York and has lived the majority of her life there, Laub spent many years visiting Montgomery County, Georgia, after first learning about its high school’s segregated prom and homecoming dances. Laub became aware of this situation in 2002 when a former student from the school wrote to Spin magazine saying that she, a white student, had not been permitted to take her boyfriend, who was black, to homecoming. Laub took on the assignment of visiting the county to learn more. What she found and began documenting was that two separate proms and homecoming dances were organized by student committees overseen by parents. One set of dances was held exclusively for white students; no students of color were allowed to attend. The other dances were held after the first and could be attended by students of any race but were mostly attended by black students. Separate sets of black and white prom and homecoming kings and queens were crowned for each dance. Laub’s photograph Homecoming Court (2002) captures the only time that the white and black homecoming court appeared together. The white homecoming queen and black homecoming queen were each crowned separately by white and black first graders from the local elementary school, thus reinforcing the teaching of segregation from a young age.
With all her photographic subjects, Laub works carefully to establish strong relationships based on trust. Though members of the community backing the segregated proms met her with hostility, she developed strong bonds with several students and continued to follow up with them over the years during subsequent trips. Julie and Bubba, Mount Vernon (2002) shows two of the students Laub met when she first visited this community. Julie, whose older sister Anna was the young white woman who wrote to Spin, had white friends who were not allowed to socialize with her due to the race of her African American boyfriend, Bubba. Laub captures the couple in a relaxed embrace. They look at the camera openly, without armor or defensiveness. Their relationship, the picture seems to suggest, is something simple and honest that the surrounding community does not support due to entrenched histories of racism.
In 2010, after the community had received national attention because of Laub’s photographs, the school elected to integrate the prom. Although Montgomery County had seen social progress with the integration of the dance, the community was divided once more when one of the school’s former students, twenty-two-year-old African American Justin Patterson, was killed in January of 2011 by a white father who found Patterson in his home with his daughter. In light of this event, Laub began exploring this story and the broader issues of racial violence in the community. Her work resulted not only in a 2015 monograph of photographs, Southern Rites, but also in an HBO documentary film by the same name, as well as a traveling exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography. Her photograph Prom Prince and Princess Dancing at the Integrated Prom (2011, above) shows an interracial couple dancing at the prom, first made possible only the year before. The young princess wraps her arms around her prince, holding him close while they dance. Though enjoying this moment of relaxed intimacy, the young man also seems somewhat anxious, or at least aware, of the continuing dangers of such relationships for men of color in his community. Laub’s intimate photographs dig deeply into the complex emotions of young men and women grappling with the weight of the South’s long history of racism.
Anonymous. “Gillian Laub,” on the Southbound Project Nd website [Online] Cited 23/01/2025
Dawoud Bey’s Birmingham Project bridges gaps of time to foreground how the past continues to resonate in the present. In this diptych, he reframes the tragic events of September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama – the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four African American girls, and in its aftermath, the murder of two African American boys. The series pairs portraits of citizens of contemporary Birmingham: a child the same age as one of the victims with an adult the age the child would have reached had they lived. In this way, Bey memorialises the victims and effectively imagines a future that was never realised.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
For years, RaMell Ross has immersed himself in Hale County, Alabama, a place made iconic in the history of photography by Walker Evans and William Christenberry. Where Evans and Christenberry studied the white residents and decaying architecture, respectively, Ross focuses on the Black community and their untold stories. In iHome, he intertwines present and past by photographing a cell phone screen that shows a white antebellum house, also shown out of focus in the background. He relishes in the anachronism of employing modern technology to view a structure of the past. His inclusion of the hand holding the phone authors a new perspective on time, place, agency, and who gets to write history and imagine the future.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Mark Steinmetz (American, b. 1961) International Terminal, Atlanta Airport 2016 Gelatin silver print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Commissioned with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust and the Picturing the South Fund for the Picturing the South series
Mark Steinmetz spent two years photographing in, around, and above Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world’s most heavily trafficked airport. He considered the activity and interactions that take place at this crossroads of the contemporary South and masterfully captured the ordinary-yet-fascinating human dramas that play out in a decidedly liminal public place. This image of a young woman relaxing on a luggage cart lends a poignant perspective to how this gateway to the wider world is a place of delightful paradoxes: a massive modern complex sitting in the midst of a sublime natural environment; a bustling global transit hub as the site of solitary experiences; and a stifling bureaucratic tangle as a portal to possibility and opportunity.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Irina Rozovsky (American born Russia, b. 1981) Untitled (Traditions Highway) 2018 Inkjet print Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund
Rozovsky’s series Traditions Highway takes its name from Georgia’s State Route 15, a road that runs northsouth through the entire state and passes through Sparta and Athens, towns named after ancient Greek cities, the latter of which birthed the concept of democracy. Rozovsky’s photographs explore contemporary ideas and expressions of democracy, especially as they are situated in the American South, and examine the ways that past and present are layered in the region. Here, an abandoned carriage decorated with hearts in the woods conjures myriad ideas and feelings: the romanticism and dilapidation of the Old South, the tension between beauty and destruction and between the natural and built environments, and the blurred lines between fantasy and reality.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Kris Graves (American, b. 1982) Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia 2020 Pigmented inkjet print High Museum of Art, Atlanta Purchase with funds from the H.B. and Doris Massey Charitable Trust
This was the graffiti covered base to the bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on horseback in Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia. The statue was part of the Robert E. Lee Monument, which was removed in September 2021.
An-My Lê photographed evidence of the social unrest that emerged in Washington, D.C., in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. “It often seems that there are two Americas, left and right, looking at the same place from radically different and irreconcilable perspectives,” she explained. Centered here on the waning moment of a protest, with national monuments and federal buildings as the backdrop, Lê takes a wide view to offer context for a scene. She carefully assembles details that reveal how America’s challenges of the past shape and rhyme with the heated debates of the present.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Immigrants from Mexico and Latin America living in the United States are often perceived as distrustful. The portraits of Jose Ibarra Rizo, an immigrant, show people with pride and dignity, revealing a strong sense of identity. His series, Somewhere in Between, tells the utterly human story of the migrant community in Georgia.
José Ibarra Rizo’s series Somewhere In Between documents the Latinx immigrant experience in the American South. Rizo’s tender photographs focus on a community that is ubiquitous in the region yet often misrepresented or simply invisible in popular media and political debates. This portrait of a man standing in front of his prized roses – hand tightly grasping a bag of insecticide – was made soon after he retired from a gruelling job at a poultry processing plant in Gainesville. Georgia’s poultry industry employs numerous immigrants, including the photographer’s own parents.
Text from the Large Print Guide at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 Hardcover – 1 April 2024
The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Indeed, many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience – from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy- appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity.
A Long Arc: Photography and the American South accompanies a major exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, with more than one hundred photographers represented, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, William Eggleston, Sally Mann, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Alec Soth, and An-My Le. Insightful texts by Imani Perry, Sarah Kennel, Makeda Best, and Rahim Fortune, among others, illuminate this broad survey of photographs of the Southern United States as an essential American story.
Co-published by Aperture and High Museum of Art, Atlanta
I wonder whether you have seen those tv crime shows where the cops are grilling a suspect, and for fear of incriminating themselves they give a “no comment” interview…
What do you think of the composition of these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the lighting in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the use of colour in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the people depicted in these photographs?
No comment
What do you think of the allegedly subtle critique of these patrician families, these far from “ordinary people”?
No comment
My mother said to me, if you can’t say anything constructive don’t say anything at all.
No comment
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thanks to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jeu de Paume showcases the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection.
Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, the exhibition marks the artist’s first European retrospective. Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.
Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.
In “Family Ties,” Tina Barney’s keenly observed portraits offer a window into a rarified world of privilege with a sense of spontaneity and intimacy that remind us of what we hold in common.
In the late 1970s, Barney began a decades-long exploration of the everyday, but often hidden, life of the New England upper class, of which she and her family belonged. Photographing close relatives and friends, she became an astute observer of the rituals common to the intergenerational summer gatherings held in picturesque homes along the East Coast.
These personal, often surreal, scenes present a secret world of the haute bourgeoisie – a landscape of hidden tension found in micro-expressions and in, what Barney calls, the subtle gestures of “disruption” that belie the dreamlike worlds of patrician tableaux.
Newly released, “Family Ties” brings together sixty large-format portraits from three decades that have defined Barney’s career, alongside an interview between the artist and Aperture’s executive director Sarah Meister, and texts by Quentin Bajac and James Welling.
This volume coincides with Barney’s first retrospective exhibition in Europe, on view at Jeu de Paume through January 2025.
In September 2024, Jeu de Paume, Paris, will showcase the vibrant, singular work of influential American photographer Tina Barney, who is best known for exploring intergenerational familial rituals and the subtle nuances of human connection. Spanning over 40 years of the artist’s career, Tina Barney. Family Ties marks the artist’s first European retrospective.
Born in 1945, Tina Barney began taking photographs of her relatives and friends in the late 1970s. A keen observer of family traditions, her work focuses on cultural habits within domestic settings. Her colourful and large-scale portraits may appear as family snapshots at first glance, however many have been carefully staged by the artist, creating intricate tableaux that establish a dialogue with classical painting. This exhibition will also include work from Barney’s editorial practice in which portraits of celebrities and models for fashion magazines and luxury brands share the same complexity, sensitivity, and humor found in her fine art practice.
Spanning the breadth of Barney’s career, the exhibition will include fifty-five large-scale works from Barney’s earliest through her most recent series, including those previously unseen in Europe.
Tina Barney’s experimental approach to photography emerged in the late 1970s. In 1981, she transitioned from working with a hand-held Pentax 35mm camera to a tripod-mounted Toyo 4 x 5 view camera. Through the 1980s, Barney’s early images revealed a world rarely seen in photography, offering the public an intimate look at the inner lives of the East Coast American upper class. At various vacation spots, birthday parties (The Children’s Party, 1986), weddings (Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995), backyard barbecues (Tim, Phil, and I, 1989) and family lunches in and around her house in Rhode Island, Barney probed the social habits of her subjects, exposing a fine line between intense concentration and idle restlessness. Her models pose like actors in a theater or film scene as the artist quickly replays micro-gestures and gives informal instructions. With the spontaneity of a snapshot, The Reception (1985), for example, sees Barney carefully direct the guests of her sister’s wedding.
Between 1996 and 2004, Barney traveled to Italy, the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Spain and Germany, turning her attention to social types and customs instead of individuals. In these works, traditional motifs are often combined with more contemporary features, as figures of the European aristocracy pose in a pictorial manner, reminiscent of British “conversation pieces” of the eighteenth century. Working in large format allows Barney to magnify the exquisite details found in the textures and colours of her subjects’ clothes, furniture, fabrics and decor, drawing particular focus to the visual and material cultures that inform their mannerisms.
The exhibition will explore the theatrical dimension of Barney’s mise-en-scènes, with special attention to her work with her subjects and the construction of space. Barney’s work underscores a certain narrative dimension or tendency. In the early 1990s, Barney began working for several magazines and newspapers, including The Daily Telegraph, W, Arena Homme Plus, Hommes Vogue International and Vogue US, fuelling her attention to the formal and compositional possibilities of photographs where the costumes, setting, and circumstances are already defined.
Departing from a strictly chronological approach, Tina Barney. Family Ties will present specific themes that have traversed Barney’s various bodies of work over four decades. For example, family – a key theme from the very beginning of Barney’s photographic practice in 1976 – may be found in Jill and Mom (1983), an intimate scene where the artist’s sister and mother address the camera in relaxed postures. Nearly twenty years later, The Daughters (2002) revisits the dynamic of a mother and daughter in a portrait of a French family whom Barney had not previously met.
Tina Barney was born in New York in 1945. Her mother, Lillian Fox, was a model turned interior designer. Her father, Philip Henry Isles, came from a long line of investment bankers and art collectors. Throughout her childhood, she was exposed to the practice of photography by her maternal grandfather. She began experimenting with photography when she and her family moved to Sun Valley, Idaho in 1973, where she lived until returning to New York City in 1983. Barney has exhibited her work at major venues across the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and she participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1987. Today, her work is included in many prominent collections around the world. She lives and works between New York and Rhode Island.
Last exhibition posting until the New Year. I need a break!
On the edge of oblivion
Joel Sternfeld – along with artists like William Eggleston, Paul Outerbridge Jr., Stephen Shore and Saul Leiter among others – was a pioneer of colour photography, his large format photographs picturing American contemporary life and identity.
His elegant, luxurious, and slightly twisted if not surreal look at the American landscape and life can be seen as “a darkly funny, bleak, but not unromantic vision of America.” Sternfeld, “peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience.”
Both utopian and dystopian at one and the same time, Sternfeld’s photographs have both a quiet eloquence and an unsettling kick in the pants within the same image, for example updating the historical lineage of Walker Evans (documentary) and Robert Frank (outsider) in colour photographs framing the uneasy nature of American life.
Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980, below) reformulates in colour the tract housing photographs of Bill Owens, William A. Garnett or Robert Adams. His Domestic Workers Waiting for the Bus, Atlanta, Georgia (April 1983, below) comments sublimely, subliminally, to the ongoing racism in the genteel South. “There’s no need for a “white’s only” sign, it’s implied… The picture speaks to America’s structural racism and its racial wealth gap with a whisper, not a scream. Doing so reveals how it’s not just the racist sheriffs and brutes who poured milkshakes over the head of sit-in protesters at the Woolworth’s counter back in the day who are complicit in those systems.”1
Sternfeld’s photographs are full of felt insecurities and idiosyncrasies.
The crumpled car indicative of the alienated landscape the barefoot youth is growing up in that is Kansas City, Kansas (May 1983, below); the family with their myriad possessions in a battered Ford pickup truck heading who knows where (riffing on the FSA photographs of the 1930s) in Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); the migrant family “existing” in their wooden shack in South Texas (January 1983, below); and the baby protected, isolated, left to its own devices in Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below) as the family peers over the precipice into the existential depths.
On and on and on we go… from exhausted renegade elephants to realtors in the desert to abandoned uranium mines to limousines and glaciers. The real and the absurd, ludicrous even, living cheek by jowl, on the edge of oblivion.
There is one particular image of Sternfeld’s that is my favourite and that I think sums up the art of this wonderful artist: After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below). To me it perfectly pictures the dichotomy of American life. The have and have nots. The large expensive car and the beautiful, probably gated, community homes – and the desire for money that provides that lifestyle – dashed away by a force of nature, sweeping both the lifestyle, homes and car into the ravine, like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1510), the ‘garden of lusts’ (and desires for money, home, possessions) descending into the hell of the chthonic earth. Be careful what you wish for.
Sternfeld’s work is worthy of our kind, calm meditation for in the stillness and cinematic quality of his photographs lies everlasting revelation into the human condition as we live and die on this, our one Earth.
Many thanks to the Bruce Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Joel Sternfeld doesn’t just capture America; he exposes it. With each photograph, he peels back layers of familiar landscapes to reveal the ironies, contradictions, and hidden stories that shape the American experience. A pioneer in colour photography, Sternfeld’s lens turns everyday scenes into striking narratives where beauty meets decay, and hope intersects with abandonment. His images, timeless, yet hauntingly relevant – a cross-country journey that invites us to look deeper and question what lies beneath the surface.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects offers a rare encounter with Joel Sternfeld’s profound exploration of the American Dream – its triumphs, fractures, and quiet absurdities. Since its first release in 1987, this series has stood as a seminal work in colour photography, redefining the medium and reshaping our perception of American landscapes. Like his contemporaries William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, Sternfeld used colour to move beyond documentation, crafting layered narratives that invite both reflection and critique. On view through January 5, 2025, Sternfeld’s lens frames America as it is – flawed, resilient, and enduringly hopeful.
In Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Sternfeld confronts us with a haunting testament to industrial intrusion on sacred land. The muted pinks and warm ochres spread across the landscape, evoking the natural beauty of the Navajo Nation’s desert. Yet, at its heart, the photograph holds a darker, fractured reality – the scars of industry etched deeply into the land, an intrusion upon both the environment and the community’s heritage. Sternfeld’s light is gentle yet harsh, and his careful composition balances the serenity of nature against the unease of contamination. It’s a scene that commands attention, evoking reverence while quietly asking us to grapple with the unsettling impact of human intervention.
Coeburn, Virginia brings Sternfeld’s eye for subtle irony to life within the seemingly serene environment of a small town. Here, the frame captures the tension between the landscape’s lushness and signs of quiet disrepair houses sitting precariously against a verdant backdrop, hinting at lives lived in the margins. Through muted earthy tones and a sparing splash of green, Sternfeld avoids romanticising rural life, instead highlighting the fragile balance between nature’s persistence and the impermanence of human structures. The result is a scene that feels both intimate and detached, inviting us to see Coeburn not as a forgotten place but as a testament to resilience and transience.
In Canyon Country, California, Sternfeld turns his lens to the sublime – a canyon that feels at once vast and void, a sprawling testament to the untouched beauty of the American West. Here, the land stretches endlessly, exuding a calm that contrasts sharply with the bustling, culturally charged image of California we often imagine. Sternfeld’s framing, balanced with a quiet geometry, amplifies the canyon’s emptiness while subtly pointing to the tension between this natural expanse and the human inclination to intrude, consume, and commercialise. It’s a scene that invites introspection, leaving viewers to consider California as both escape and spectacle, a space layered with expectation yet stripped bare.
The Bruce Museum’s American Prospects invites us to traverse Sternfeld’s America – a land as haunting as it is beautiful. With a careful eye for color, geometry, and narrative tension, Sternfeld transforms these landscapes into timeless scenes, at once grounded and surreal. Each photograph holds a sense of melancholic grandeur, inviting viewers not just to observe but to confront the quiet dramas embedded in America’s vast, varied, and vulnerable terrain. In Sternfeld’s vision, America is an open road of paradoxes – where beauty meets desolation, and where each mile reveals a new truth we can’t ignore.
Giuliana Brida. “Oct 30 Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects | The Bruce Museum,” in Musee: Vanguard of Photography Culture on the Bruce Museum website Nd [Online] Cited 28/11/2024
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Kansas City, Kansas, May 1983 (below); at centre, Putney, Vermont, October 1978; and at right, Canyon Country, California June 1983 (above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at centre, Sternfeld’s A Bus Stop in Tucson, Arizona (July 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing Sternfeld’s The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Bikini Contest, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (March 1983, below); and at right, The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas (March 1979, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, below); and at right, Two punks sit together in Studio City, California (June 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s South Texas (January 1983, below); at second left, Interstate 79, Bridgeport, West Virginia (March 1983, above); and at right, Wet’n Wild Aquatic Theme Park, Orlando, Florida (September 1980, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s McLean, Virginia (December 1978, above); at second right, Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); and at right, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left centre, Sternfeld’s Glen Canyon Dam, Page, Arizona (August 1983, below); at centre, After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California (1979, below); and at right, Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington (June 1979, below)
Widely acclaimed when it was published in 1987, Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects has come to be regarded as one of the important early monuments of colour photography. Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was one of a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt, and Stephen Shore, who in the 1960s and 1970s began exploring the potential of colour photography as a fine art.
Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of colour and a distinctive personal vision. Inspired by the photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank, he embarked on an ambitious quest to document America, traversing the continent from 1978 to 1983 with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship. American Prospects is the result.
Although Sternfeld saw deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he also went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery. His goal was not to document the failure of the American Dream, but to record what was great, vital, and regenerative about this nation. On one hand, Sternfeld’s imagery includes damaged landscapes and industry in decline. He delights in the curious, bizarre, and accidental in the everyday. Scenes of an elephant collapsed on the road or a firefighter buying a pumpkin while a fire rages in the background convey a sense of absurdity. And yet underlying the series is a vision of a beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, and of the variety and resiliency of the American people. Even today, Sternfeld is optimistic about the American prospect: “America has a tremendous capacity to right itself,” he noted recently. Sternfeld’s vision is as complicated as the nation. His images are deep, rich, and powerful specifically because they are complex and conflicted, at once both critical and affectionate.
Guest curated by Robert Wolterstorff, Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects will mount more than forty large scale colour prints, among them many of the most iconic images from the series, along with others that have never before been exhibited. It coincides with a new edition of American Prospects published by Steidl Press.
Text from the Bruce Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Earl Garvey Realtor, The Mojave Desert, California (July 1979, below); and at right, Wyoming (1994)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Abandoned Freighter, Homer Alaska (July 1984, below); and at second right, Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Matanuska Glacier, Matanuska Valley, Alaska (July 1984); and at right, Abandoned Uranium Refinery, Near Tuba City, Arizona, Navajo Nation (1982)
Beauty, sadness and humor are woven through complex portraits of America in “Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects.” On view at the Bruce Museum Oct. 3, 2024 – Jan. 5, 2025, the exhibition is an ode to the artist’s 1987 landmark photography book, “American Prospects,” and coincides with a new edition published by Steidl Press. The Bruce mounted more than 40 large-scale color prints, ranging from Sternfeld’s most iconic images to never-before-exhibited photographs.
Sternfeld (American, b. 1944) was an early adopter of color photography as fine art. He explored the medium’s potential in the 1960s and 70s with a small cohort of pioneers, including William Eggleston, Helen Levitt and Stephen Shore. Sternfeld initially focused on New York street photography and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. Longing to explore beyond the confines of the urban grid, the award supported his purchase of a Volkswagen camper and a wooden 8 x 10 view camera, his tools as he embarked on a multi-year quest to capture scenes across the country.
The work of documentary photographers Walker Evans and Robert Frank inspired Sternfeld to observe people and places across the United States and record what was great, vital and regenerative about the nation. Despite sensing deep fissures and contradictions in the country at the time, he went on the road with a sense of optimism and discovery, delighting in the curious, bizarre and accidental moments in everyday life.
Sternfeld traversed the nation from 1978 to 1987, taking thousands of photographs. His large-format view camera accommodated 8 x 10-inch sheets of color negative film, with a small shutter opening that achieved great depth of field. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston used the same methods in their famous black-and-white photographs, producing razor-sharp detail and an infinite range of tones. Sternfeld’s pictures were composed carefully around color harmonies, often focusing on pastel hues of two or three dominant colors and were guided by a strong sense of geometry and order despite the visual chaos of life they portrayed.
The resulting images revealed beautiful land and the eternal cycle of the seasons, damaged landscapes and industry in decline and the variety and resiliency of the American people. The artist has referred to the underlying theme of his work as the utopian vision of America contrasted with the dystopian one. The first edition of “American Prospects” featured 55 images created from four-colour plates that capture both America’s beauty and its flaws. The book was published to wide acclaim and is regarded as an important early monument of color photography.
“Joel Sternfeld developed a unique aesthetic for the use of color and a distinctive personal vision,” said guest curator Robert Wolterstorff, the former Susan E. Lynch executive director of the Bruce Museum. “His powerful images are imbued with a sense of irony and depict a vision of Americans that is as complicated as the nation, inviting contemplation on ideas of paradise versus reality through modern conceptions of landscape.”
“American Prospects” includes a 1978 photograph of a farm market in McLean, Virginia that depicts a uniformed fireman shopping for pumpkins as a house fire rages in the background, the autumnal colours coordinating with the flames. Published in Life magazine, the absurd image is one of the most recognised scenes of Sternfeld’s career. Other subjects include an elephant collapsed on a road in Washington state, clouds approaching a busy waterpark in Florida and the landing of the space shuttle Columbia at Kelly Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.
Sternfeld’s work captures details of specific moments in time, serving as an archive for the future as well as a caution toward photography’s manipulative power. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, Sternfeld said, “No individual photo explains anything. That’s what makes photography such a wonderful and problematic medium. It is the photographer’s job to get this medium to say what you need it to say.”
Sternfeld is based in New York and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Rome Prize. His work has been exhibited in institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago), the Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco).
Press release from the Bruce Museum
Joel Sternfeld short biography
Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.
Ever since the publication of his landmark study, American Prospects in 1987 his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).
On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.
Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site… It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).
All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.
His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation – they are an archive for the future.
Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Brattleboro, Vermont (October 1978)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at left, Sternfeld’s Roadside Rest Area, White Sands, New Mexico (September 1980); and at right, The Eagles of Kayenta, Junior High School at Football Practice, Kayenta, Arizona, Navajo Nation (August 1986)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Portage Glacier, Alaska (August 1984, below); and at right, Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Coeburn, Virginia (April 1981)
Installation views of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at right, Sternfeld’s After a Tornado, Grand Isle, Nebraska (June 1980, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Grafton, West Virginia (February 1983); and at right, Prince Manufacturing, Bowmanstown, Pennsylvania (November 1982)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Buckingham, Pennsylvania (August 1978); and at right, Pendleton, Oregon (1980)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing at left, Sternfeld’s Pendleton, Oregon (1980); and at right, Lake Oswego, Oregon (June 1979)
Installation view of the exhibition Joel Sternfeld: American Prospects at the Bruce Museum showing in the bottom photograph at right, Sternfeld’s Near Interlochen, Michigan (February 1981)
I wrote this philosophical text as a flow of consciousness, a layered exposition of my thoughts on space, photography, identity and belonging. I hope I have done the subject justice… in freedom.
within, bridge and fissure
The struggle for identity, for culture, for nation is a struggle inscribed in space. So observes Wendy Garden.1
The spaces that bodies move in, through and over are fluid spaces, permeable spaces, fragmentary and transitory spaces. They are also spaces of displacement and distance which form a kind of ‘alienation’ which derives from the Latin alienare: to render foreign, other.2
Thus the “border” between one and the other – that fluid penumbra (a peripheral or indeterminate area or group), that oscillation of energy across the line – must be constructed to be legible and fixed by those that seek to control such spaces, through the imposition of a coded representation of space itself.3 The border wall between Mexico and America is one such imposition of a coded representation of space which, seeks to control an/other. It is a “direct translation of ideology and temporality into material and spatial culture”3 which masks as much as it represents, through a selective representation of history and memory.
Through systems of surveillance (e.g. CCTV, aerial surveillance, phone taps) and control (e.g. police, government, the judiciary), in which one reinforces the other in a never ending circle, and in the of naming of the ‘other’ (Foucault) – those with privilege embedded and thus emboldened within colonial and imperial systems seek to confirm hegemonic structures of power: for example, who can travel where, who has access adequate to health care, who is seen as an ill/legal alien. “Although Foucault rarely alludes to it in a clear-cut manner, what he describes in Discipline and Punish is the formation of the discursive regime of surveillance which is a central element in the expression of the modern state.”4
But we can counter this narrative.
In his influential book Thirdspace (Blackwell, 1996), the American postmodern political geographer and urban theorist Edward Soja (1940-2015) proposes the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. Firstspace “is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality.”5 Much early photographic practice is rooted in Firstspace, in the passive representation of an undeniable truth, the veracity of the image and its representation of the referent: this existed because it was captured by the camera.
Thirdspace on the other hand, “contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism.”6
Thus photographic Thirdspace as an amorphous space of both the real and imagined is the vibration of energy – doubled – the real and imagined spaces of everyday life, and the real and imagined spaces of photography through which we can contest the contexts of becoming, belonging.
These Thirdspaces of the real and imagined are not spaces of universalising totality which then would be constitutive of history or memory, but in-between spaces in which differences, memories and histories are not denied or negated, hidden, forgotten or repressed. It is not the segregation of black and white, either/or, but the grey areas in-between that interest me: those fluid zones of difference – think Tarkovsky’s film Stalker 1979, in which a guide helps a writer and a professor to infiltrate a restricted area, the Zone.
“The Thirdspace – in which “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the trans-disciplinary, everyday life and unending history”a – allows that none of these couples, such as the phenomenal and the noumenal, can be divided by an either/or attitude. “This… does not mean differences are denied, instead, it most of all means the inevitable reciprocity of any pair of definitions. In such a case both leave a mark on the other. It is a question of both-and – how each of the pair influences the other”b.”7
Both leave a mark on each other. And it is in this marking that social and political relations can be reconfigured, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralise, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.”8 Thus, the physical aspects as well as the attitudes and habitual practices of ‘space’, the arrangements of space and the socialisation of space, “is an order that is itself always undergoing change from within through the actions and innovations of social agents. In short, all ‘space’ is social space ….”9
Following, we can say that social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent (Soja).
“Social and spatial relationships are dialectically inter-reactive and interdependent. Cultural landscapes reflect social relations and institutions, and they shape subsequent social relations. While elites create spatial inequalities and homogeneity simultaneously through their hegemony, non-elites create counter-hegemonic landscapes which reflect their own values. Behavioural resistance to the dominant culture leads to distinctive cultural landscapes: for example, cultural resistance by Maori.
Indeed, dominant ideologies such as those which are religious, political, economic, ethnic or racial, continually define or redefine ‘deviance’ or ‘otherness’ to maintain their power and landscapes of dominance. Space and place are key factors in the definition of deviance and of order and propriety.”10
But as Wael Salah Fahmi insightfully observes, we must not fall into the idea that juxtapositions of social space are just alternating choices of “either/or” or acts of simple resistance: “But “juxtaposition” might imply alternating choices, an “either/or.” Perhaps instead we might think of Lefebvre’s image of interpenetrating spaces, one violating another, yet rising up from within the very “fundament” of the space that wishes to ignore its existence. Here, perhaps, is a spatial dialectic that does not fall into a binary opposition of simple resistance.”11
Spaces that rise up from within each other!
Change that emanates from within through the actions and innovations of social agents… human beings, artists!
Here, the thoughts of that glorious Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator Coco Fusco (b. 1960) – quoted by Jean Fisher – whose work explores gender, identity, race, and power through performance, video, interactive installations, and critical writing are particularly cogent.
“Two imperatives are set in motion: to alter the perceptions of those with privileged access to hegemonic structures of power, and to change the sense of disempowerment of those deprived of political agency. “What is more fundamentally at stake than freedom,” Fusco argues, “is power – the power to choose, the power to determine value, and the right of the more powerful to consume without guilt”: entitlements that Eurocentric cultures have assumed for themselves at the expense of others. These aims are advanced through an exploration of the relationship between the politics and practices of cultural difference and social inequity, in which intellectual, experiential, and artistic alliances are built across nationalistic and geographical boundaries …””12
As Wael Salah Fahmi notes, “spaces constantly juxtapose themselves one against the other” – in real life, in art, in photography. The media saturated world of the “total flow” of images is resistant to interpretation, yet in real life – and in this exhibition – the juxta/position (mapping of space), juxta/posing (posing for the camera) of one space against another, “of image to image calls to attention a line of conflict, either fissure or bridge.”13
The images in this posting draw our attention to fissures (George Rodriguez, Susan Meiselas, Ada Trillo) and bridges (Graciela Iturbide, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello with Colectivo Chopeke). They also possess a multivalent narrative, allowing the work to be accessible to different interpretations, meanings, and values: a new door or path opens up on the basis of very diverse needs and objectives. These images, untraceable gifts from photography itself, are marks of candour and authenticity, both descriptions of a stable object and the fleeting glance (Firstspace and Thirdspace) interacting upon each other. They are an investigation into our fluid identity and shifting place in our worlds.14
In spatial dialectics and in the nuances of contradictions we proceed onwards, paying no heed to the dangers which lie ahead, journeying on to fulfil our desires: to be seen, to be heard, in our difference and uniqueness, enacting change from within.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Word count: 1,435
PS. My friend and Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gertsakis insightfully observes, “The philosophical arguments resonate with the vacillation of the photograph meanings/non-meanings. Spaces that implode from within to further generate the unknown which even in definition become dispersed. The photography around the border/wall is beautiful as well as tortuous as well as unspoken.”
Well said Liz 🙂
Footnotes
1/ Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007
2/ Rob Shields. Lefebvre, Love and Struggle. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 40-41.
3/ Ibid., pp. 79-80.
4/ Jon Stratton. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 19
5/ Garden, Op cit.,
6/ Garden, Op cit.,
7/ A: Edward W. Soja. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57; B: Mika Hannula. “Third space – a merry-go-round of opportunity,” on the Kiasma Magazine website No. 12, Vol. 4, 2001 [Online] Cited 01/05/2016. No longer available online quoted in Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
8/ Michel Foucault. “Of Other Spaces,” in Diacritics Spring 1986, p. 24
9/ Shields, Op cit., pp. 154-155
10/Alexander Trapeznik. “Introduction,” from Public History Review, Vol. 13, 2006, p. 2
11/ Wael Salah Fahmi. “Reading of Post Modern Public Spaces As Layers Of Virtual Images and Real Events,” from The 37th International Planning Congress “HONEY, I SHRUNK THE SPACE” Planning in the Information Age. Utrecht, The Netherlands, 16-20 September, 2001
12/ Jean Fisher. “Witness for the Prosecution: The Writings of Coco Fusco,” in Coco Fusco. The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 226-227
13/ Wael Salah Fahmi, op cit.,
14/ Marcus Bunyan. “Thirdspace,” on the Marcus Bunyan website 2021 [Online] Cited 29/11/2024
Many thankx to the Cleveland 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.
“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there […]”
Frederick Nietzsche, The Will to Power
“Edward Soja employs the concept of First, Second and Thirdspace to demarcate the various spatial dimensions. For Soja Firstspace is the ‘real’, the concrete materiality of spatial forms of the world, while Secondspace interprets this reality through imagined representations of spatiality (Soja 1996: 6). Much early photography participated in perpetuating the belief that photographic space was a Firstspace. The camera lens merely passively and objectively recorded all that was placed before it. However even in the nineteenth century, many practitioners acknowledged the ability of photographs to lie or distort reality.
For Soja, Thirdspace contains both real and imagined spaces simultaneously. Thirdspace permits an intermingling of the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imagined by the experiences, events and political choices that are shaped by the interplay between centres and peripheries (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 31). According to Soja, Thirdspace is a place where issues of race, class and gender can be addressed simultaneously without privileging one over the other. It is a space which enables an-‘other’ way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life (Soja, Thirdspace 1996: 10). Photographic space, as a Thirdspace, is a site from which to contest the dominant ideologies of Firstspace. This has important ramifications for ‘others,’ especially those disenfranchised by colonialism. It may account for the rise of photography as the preferred medium for many artists today interested in issues of identity and the colonial gaze. …
Photographic space can create a spatial reality which allows those who access it to contest, enlarge or in someway recreate their experiences of Firstspace. It never attempts to close off subjectivity or pin identity down, but rather allows fluid and transitory experiments with other ways of being that can then be carried over and inform experiences of Firstspace.”
Wendy Garden. “Photographic Space and the Indian Portrait Studio,” in On Space Issue Seven, Winter 2007
Picturing the Border presents photographs of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present taken by both border residents and outsiders. They range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and proof of political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present, and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. Many serve as counter-narratives to the derogatory narratives of migration and Latino/as in the US that tend to circulate in the mass media.
Capitalising on the prevalent issues of the border today, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. The exhibition shows through these images that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Text from the Cleveland Museum of Art website
George Rodriguez (American, b. 1937) Los Angeles police arrest a Chicano student protester in the neighbourhood of Boyle Heights 1970 Gelatin silver print
Photojournalism from the US-Mexico border currently emphasises stark, divisive images: walls, fences, surveillance devices, border patrols, “coyotes,” and crossing migrants. Yet some of the most compelling artwork dealing with this region attests to several generations of cross-border familial relationships, personal identities that carry markers of both countries, and hybrid cultures that meld influences from the United States, Mexico, and farther south in Latin America. This more complex work demonstrates how border residents have resisted being defined by the border and its conflicts, concentrating instead on a deterritorialised notion of home, along with a sense of self that often transcends both nationalism and gender politics.
The photographs and video works included in Picturing the Border offer a more nuanced portrayal of life in the borderlands. The exhibition positions the US-Mexico border as a cultural framework and highlights how Latinx photographers – many of whom are border residents themselves – have instead formulated alternative photographic vocabularies with regard to place, identity, and race. Photographs range in subject matter from intimate domestic portraits, extended family gatherings, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US border patrol. The earliest images in this exhibition form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at the present moment and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s.
The exhibition is accompanied by an important scholarly publication that brings new insights to the subject of Latinx photography and the history of the US-Mexico border. Picturing the Border has also brought about the opportunity to grow our permanent collection in this area, precipitating recent acquisitions by Laura Aguilar and the donation of an important work by Ada Trillo, who has witnessed firsthand the perils of the unbelievably extensive journey migrants have taken from Central America to the United States.
Although Cleveland is far from the southern border, stories of global migration are woven throughout the CMA’s encyclopeadic collection as well as throughout the community in Northeast Ohio. Picturing the Border puts faces on stories and brings to life the various threads that stitch together an ever-growing understanding of, and empathy for, the migrant experience.
Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art. “Picturing the Border,” on the Cleveland Museum of Art website June 1, 2024 [Online] Cited 19/07/2024
Featuring more than four dozen photographs, Picturing the Border aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what defines citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.
Opening on July 21, 2024, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery, this free exhibition will be on view through January 5, 2025. From intimate domestic portraits, narratives of migration, and political demonstrations to images of border crossings and clashes between migrants and the US Border Patrol, this one-of-a-kind exhibition presents photographs taken by both border residents and outsiders, many of whom are Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican, and tells the story of the US-Mexico borderlands from the 1970s to the present.
“Borders have long been spaces of contention,” says Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art. “The mainstream media in the United States tends to present nationalistic narratives about imminent threats at the border. This reductive and divisive narrative does not often portray the identities, languages, cultures, and social ties among communities. The photographs featured in this exhibition tell a different story that can serve as a counter-narrative and timely new perspective on life in this region.”
The earliest images in Picturing the Border form an origin story for the topicality of the US-Mexico border at present and demonstrate that the issues of the border have been a critical point of inquiry for artists since the 1970s. In addition, they showcase artists who were ahead of their time in presenting ideas about spaces and exclusion as they relate to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identities in the United States.
Exhibition catalogue
A beautifully illustrated 134-page exhibition catalogue accompanies Picturing the Border by Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art, with contributions from Natalie Scenters-Zapico.
The US-Mexico border has undergone dramatic changes over the past six decades, becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised, and militarised, especially in the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Mainstream and conservative news coverage has often reinforced or exacerbated such developments, characterising the border as out of control and describing migrants in derogatory terms, in the process fuelling xenophobic sentiment.
A foil to this reductive and dehumanising narrative, this presentation of Latinx photography offers more nuanced portrayals of life in the borderlands. Ranging from the 1970s to the 2020s, images by Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, and Laura Aguilar, as well as emerging artists such as Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro display alternative photographic vocabularies regarding place, identity, and race. With subject matter spanning from intimate domestic portraits and youth counterculture to border crossings and clashes involving the US Border Patrol, this richly illustrated volume also features scholarly essays and new work by fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico, providing new insights on this fraught and misunderstood region.
Graciela Iturbide’s Cholo/as series from 1986 Los Angeles is perhaps the best encapsulation of the show’s thesis. The women in Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles told Iturbide that they wanted to be photographed under a mural of some mariachis. In fact, these were images of Emiliano Zapata, Benito Juárez and Pancho Villa. We might as well admire their freedom from context. After all, isn’t America all about freedom?
Graciela Iturbide (Mexican, b. 1942) Rosario y Boo Boo en su casa, Los Angeles (Rosario and Boo Boo in their home, Los Angeles) 1986 Gelatin silver print
“Without the camera you see the world one way, with it, you see the world another way. Through the lens you are composing, dreaming even, with that reality, as if through the camera you are synthesising who you are… So you make your own image, interpreting.”
As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.
This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico – risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of gruelling travel. …
Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”
Ada Trillo – La Caravana del Diablo Hardcover/Sewn bound 192 pages/30.5 x 24.8cm Language: English ISBN: 978-94-91525-93-3 November 2021
Every day, thousands of people leave in processions from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador via Mexico for America because of flaring violence, murder (on women) and poor economic conditions in their own country. A journey covering hundreds of kilometres, often on foot, full of fear of being arrested and sent back. Some people even ‘disappear’. Under the Trump administration, despite fierce opposition, ‘The Wall’ was built to keep these immigrants out of ‘The Northern Triangle’, making their passage into America even more perilous.
Photographer Ada Trillo considers it her mission to portray this distressing situation. In ‘La Caravana del Diablo’ she doesn’t look away but confronts us. Ada shows that each of these thousands of migrants is a human being. A human being with a family, with fear, hope and dreams.
More than three thousand kilometers of border have unified the United States and Mexico since the mid-nineteenth century. Some 8,000,000 people live, sometimes in suspense, on both shores of a division as arbitrary as it is controversial. A dividing line that has changed throughout history, affecting those who have remained on one side or the other.
This same space, mythical, liminal, polemic, has become, in the last half-century, above all, one of the most watched and controlled landscapes of the entire planet. It has also become one of the most vulnerable: millions of Mexicans, Central Americans, and many other nationalities have crossed – or tried to cross – the border.
Picturing the Border, a photographic exhibition curated by Nadiah Rivera Fellah[2] and open to the public from July 21, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows other aspects of those living there. The exhibition gathers images taken between the 1970s and the present by North American and Mexican artists such as Louis Carlos Bernal, Graciela Iturbide, Laura Aguilar, Ada Trillo, Guadalupe Rosales, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. The photographs present alternative proposals for understanding and reading the border by placing the people who inhabit it in the spotlight, thus challenging fixed and stereotypical conceptions of identity and culture.
In this exhibition, as in real life, the border stands as a third space, in the same sense proposed by Homi Bhabha: that intermediate space of cultural encounters and dis-encounters from which a new site of enunciation emerges and in which the binary is deconstructed[3]. Edward Soja, in an approach similar to Bhabha’s, regarding the ‘hybridity’ of the spaces of encounters of cultures, defines the thirdspace as the place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure, and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”[4] According to Gloria Anzaldúa, “the convergence [of Mexico and the United States] has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country”[5].
But, what do the exhibited photos tell us about this ‘third space,’ this ‘third hybrid country’ that exists between the United States and Mexico? That third country is occupied not only by illegal migration and drug trafficking – the primary approach from the media – but also by symbols deeply rooted in Mexican and border life, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Cholo culture, the use and appropriation of iconic North American products (such as cars) by Mexican Americans, the Day of the Dead celebrations. These photos open a window for us to look, with respect and wonder, at the life that goes on in private and public spaces, often in a very different way than that imagined by those of us who are not directly associated with that geography. It also reminds us of the student and labor protests and strikes that have taken place in that region.
[3] See: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, New York, 1994. [4] See: Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace. Malden (Mass.): Blackwell, 1996, p. 57. [5] This phrase presides over the exhibition.
Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.
Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it – the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.
Curators: Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist
There are some stunning photographs in this exhibition but their “formula” is well known – aerial photographs of the blighted landscape etched by both geological and human forces (a la Edward Burtynsky, Richard Woldendorp et al) paired with objective, frontal “dead pan” portrait photographs (a la Thomas Ruff, Rineke Dijkstra et al), both forms of topographical mapping (of the land and of the face… as is the regulated presentation) – images which attempt to interrogate “the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants.”
This is strong work but it begs the question: what fresh insight are these photographs giving us into the object of the photographers attention, other than the specifics of “American Southwest” and “Indigenous inhabitants” which turn out to be conceptually and visually generic? Is it necessary for everything to be new again or can work such as this stand in its own right and not just be an echo of what has come before. For the general public the work might seem fresh and new but for the informed observer this is well trodden, indeed trampled ground.
The press release states that “The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.” I don’t feel that with these photographs. Where is the art that expresses through a partnership with the photographer the eloquent, unique voice of the Indigenous inhabitants of this ancestral landscape, its spirit and its fire?
As with any art please make up your own mind.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Denver Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation views of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing the opening wall text (below)
Thirst | Exposure | In Place presents photographs from three projects Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to 2023. The portraits, landscapes, and testimonies make visible the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Exposure examines the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Dine Bikeyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists form Princeton University to address the region’s hazardous waste and pollution left by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to the culture, spirituality, and health.
In place evokes the enduring landscape of the Bears Ears region in Utah, while Thirst presents a selection from a new series about the Great Salt Lake, which is shrinking due to dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds may carry clouds of toxic sediment from the lake bed – by-products from mining, agriculture, and urban development – across the valley and beyond.
Opening wall text from the exhibition
Denver Art Museum Talk with Fazal Sheikh March 9, 2024
Photographer Fazal Sheikh speaks about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place. His photographs address the consequences of industrial land use, engage questions about water use and climate change, and reflect on the ongoing relationship between people and nature. Sheikh discusses the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed, and his collaborations with writers, scientists, and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work.
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Thirst: Great Salt Lake 2022
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
The exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections: Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Text from the Denver Art Museum website
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series Exposure 2019
“The medicine men told our men not to work in the mines, that it was dangerous, but the men needed to support their families and had no choice … My husband, John Guy, worked in the mines like my father. He would arrive home during his lunch break with his clothes caked in uranium dust, and I cleaned those clothes in our home every day. The children played on the tailings pile, but no one from the company ever told us the dangers they were being exposed to.”
Installation view of the exhibition Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place at the Denver Art Museum showing work from the series In Place (Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Four Corners Region), 2017-2020
The Denver Art Museum (DAM) presents Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place, an exhibition created from three projects photographer Fazal Sheikh made on the Colorado Plateau from 2017 to early 2023. Sheikh’s portraits and landscapes shed light on the far-reaching consequences of extractive industry and climate change. Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place will open March 10, 2024, and will be on view through October 20, 2024, in the museum’s Photography galleries, located on level 6 of the Martin Building, and will be included with general admission.
Born in 1965 in New York City, Sheikh creates images of displaced communities and marginalised people that prompt awareness of the world beyond the museum. The photographs in Thirst ǀ Exposure ǀ In Place expose indelible marks on the Colorado Plateau and American Southwest landscape that have been etched by both geological and human forces. Through this beautiful and sometimes frightening new work, Sheikh encourages viewers to witness the consequences of the past and imagine the shape of the future.
“Through expansive aerial shots and intimate portraits, Fazal Sheikh documents these regions and their people with solidarity and honesty,” said Christoph Heinrich, Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “The Colorado Plateau is a region deeply impacted by climate change and economic development. This exhibition offers a nuanced view into the past, present and future lives of its inhabitants.”
Sheikh is best known for his deeply humane photographs of refugees and migrants displaced by war and famine. Focusing on the United States for the first time, Sheikh explores how Indigenous people and the lands they call home have been affected by industrial growth and government policy.
“The aerial photographs in this exhibition remind us of the great age and natural beauty of the Colorado Plateau,” said Eric Paddock, Curator of Photography at the DAM and curator of this exhibition for Denver. “They create an awareness of deep human and geological time and raise questions about the future of the region. In that context, Sheikh’s portraits and accompanying text affirm local communities’ need to protect their sacred spaces and encourage wider recognition of that need.”
The DAM exhibition presents Sheikh’s recent work in three interrelated sections:
Thirst is a new series of aerial photographs that document the decline of the Great Salt Lake in northeast Utah, which is shrinking due to overconsumption and dwindling rain and snowfall. As the lake dries up, winds carry clouds of toxic sediment – by-products from mining, agriculture and urban development – from the lakebed, across the valley and beyond.
Exposure examines the impacts of uranium, coal, oil and natural-gas extraction on the American Southwest and on its Indigenous inhabitants. Sheikh partnered with Utah Diné Bikéyah – a coalition among the Hopi, Navajo, Uintah Ouray Ute, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribes – and with Indigenous elders and scientists from Princeton University – to address hazardous waste and pollution left across the region by short-sighted development and poorly remediated industrial sites. The project reflects on the resilience of Indigenous people in the face of threats to their culture, spirituality and health.
In Place evokes the enduring landscapes of the Bears Ears region in Utah, bringing Sheikh’s photographs together with contributions from scientists and Indigenous communities in and around Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. Visitors are surrounded by images made at a close distance and from high in the air. Sixty-three large colour photographs show the tremendous geological variety and the long cultural continuities of the Four Corners region.
Visitors will reflect upon the transformation – and often devastation – of these landscapes in the context of the past, present and future, while considering the juxtaposition of beauty and catastrophe, as well as intimate, human-scale stories and those spanning vast geological eras and changes.
Jonah Yellowman, spiritual advisor for the Utah Diné Bikéyah intertribal coalition and one of its founding members, will present an offering that represents his Navajo (Diné) spirituality and a deep connection to the land. This offering will be present in the gallery during the run of the exhibition.
Sound recordings taken from seismometer readings by University of Utah geologist Jeffrey Ralston Moore will resonate throughout the gallery space. They represent the otherwise inaudible vibrations of rock formations on the Colorado Plateau.
Taken together, the photographs and collaborations in Thirst | Exposure | In Place lay bare the indelible marks etched on the landscape by geological and human forces. Sheikh asks us to witness the consequences of what has passed and imagine what is yet to come.
Sheikh will speak about his recent work in the Four Corners region and at the Great Salt Lake, in connection with his exhibition in a lecture event at the DAM on March 9, 11am – 12pm. The lecture will take place in the Sharp Auditorium, in the lower level of the museum’s Hamilton Building. Sheikh will discuss the origin of each series, his immersion in the landscapes and communities he photographed and his collaborations with writers, scientists and Indigenous community members that are woven throughout this work. This exhibition follows the Denver Art Museum’s 2017 presentation of Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.
Fazal Sheikh: Thirst | Exposure | In Place is organised by the Denver Art Museum. The exhibition is presented by Jane Watkins, with additional support from the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.
The exhibition was curated in Denver by Curator of Photography, Eric Paddock, in collaboration with Kimberly Roberts, Denver Art Museum Curatorial Associate, and Lauren Thompson, Senior Interpretive Specialist.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster
An offer you can’t refuse
“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)
To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.
This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a
“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1
The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2
Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,
“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)
The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.
In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4
Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.
Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5
Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.
Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991
2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””
David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.
4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024
5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.
Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream
Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.
Introduction
Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976) Chandler, Arizona
2006
From Mowing the Lawn portfolio
Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.
The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.
With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.
Text from the CCCB website
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Land. Provincetown
1976
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938) Dusk. New Jersey
1978
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra
The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.
Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.
Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.
Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) [Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]
20th December 1957
Film negative
Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Untitled (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches
American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.
Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.
Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962) Julianne Moore (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches
Sections of the exhibition
Planning A Dream
When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.
From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.
This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans)
1835
Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892) Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective)
1855
Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper
25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.
After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892) Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield
1857
Lithograph
14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain
Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti) Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J.
1860
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail)
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907) American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction
1874
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress
Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross. August Gast & Co. New York (detail)
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress
Anonymous photographer
Bain News Service (publisher) Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park
1910
Glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain
Anonymous photographer Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont
1917
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey
Anonymous photographer General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama
1939
New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Public domain
Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail
1950
Courtesy Historic New England
Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota
c. 1950
Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis
The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”
The Suburban Room
The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.
And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.
Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.
As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.
Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978) Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites
Detroit 1942
Library of Congress
Public domain
General Electric advertisement It’s a promise
1945
Private collection, Barcelona
Anonymous photographer Aerial view of Levittown
1949
Courtesy Levittown Public Library
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines
1947-1962
Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details)
1947-1962
Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters Time, January 18, 1960
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
John Cheever Time, March 27, 1964
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona
Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978) New Kids in the Neighbourhood
1967
Lithograph
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan
Bill Owens (American, b. 1938) I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.)
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan
The Residential Nightmare
And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.
To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.
Todd Hido (American, b. 1968) Untitled #2214
1998
From the series House Hunting
Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969) Untitled (Elsa)
2005 Left Behind series
Courtesy of the artist
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977) Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.
Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976) Annunciation
2023
Oil on aluminium panel
Courtesy of the artist
Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.
As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.
Text from the Alberto Ortega website
Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993) Observations from McMansion Hell
2023
Digital print on palboard
Courtesy of the artist
McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …
The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.
The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.
This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.
This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.
Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976) Proxy (Haven Ln.)
2012
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist
Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #16
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.
In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.
Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984) Untitled #52
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw
Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972) Contemporary Suburbium
2017
Digital printing on baryta paper
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985) The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition
2019
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.
The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.
Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.
Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.
Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936) The rocking chair (El balancí)
1913
Oil on canvas
National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona
For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.
Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.
The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.
Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.
XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated”
1955
Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia
Barcelona Metropolitan Area Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat
2015
Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997) Mira-sol alert
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.
With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Sant Quirze del Vallès
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
Christopher Willan (British lives Spain) Els Trullols Park-1
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist
The Curators
Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.
Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).
Press release from the CCCB
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona Phone: (+34) 933 064 100
Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00
Closed Monday
![John Vachon (American, 1914-1975) 'Untitled photo [possibly related to Farms of Farm Security Administration clients, Guilford and Beaufort Counties, North Carolina, April 1938]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/john-vachon-untitled-photo.jpg "John Vachon (American, 1914-1975) 'Untitled photo [possibly related to Farms of Farm Security Administration clients, Guilford and Beaufort Counties, North Carolina, April 1938]' 1938")
![Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ask-58_ccp_bernal_ag182-20230302-110020.jpg "Louis Carlos Bernal (American, 1941-1993) 'Untitled [Undocumented worker holding Huelga flag at United Farm Workers Demonstration, El Mirage, Arizona]' Negative 1978, printed 2016")
![Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) '[Image from LOOK - Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]' 20th December 1957](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/brooks-image-from-look-a.jpg "Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014) '[Image from LOOK - Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]' 20th December 1957")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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