Curators: Maike Steinkamp and Joachim Jäger, Neue Nationalgalerie
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Skull 1983 Oil on canvas 55 x 50cm
Continuing our Gerhard Richter odyssey travelling through the bodies of his work, from ‘photo-paintings’ to huge abstract squeegee paintings (see the trailer from the excellent film Gerhard Richter Painting below) to different ‘overpainted photographs’ from last week’s posting on the subject.
“The works in this exhibition highlight the tension between abstraction and figuration, between photography and painting, which underlies Richter’s entire oeuvre.”
Enjoy!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Neue Nationalgalerie for allowing me to publish the art works in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Uncle Rudy 1965/2000 Photo-painting 87 x 50cm Edition 111
… One Always Paints One’s History Gerhard Richter
Richter’s ‘photo-paintings’ are based on photographs, images of celebrities and elements of consumer culture found in magazines and newspapers.
The mechanical process of copying photographic images is tempered by Richter’s characteristic ‘blurring’ of the painted image. Made by lightly brushing the wet pigment with a soft brush, this alteration of the painted surface parallels our actual perception of the world which is always passing, in flux and never fixed and still.
A family photograph album was one of the few items Richter took with him when he fled Dresden for the West and some of these family snapshots provided the basis for early photo-paintings whose muted blue, brown and grey tones, resemble historical photographs. Blurring and other treatments of the painted surface are Richter’s means of maintaining the emotional distance, stillness and banality of such photographs while communicating the weight of historical events and physical reality.
Works such as Aunt Marianne [below] and Uncle Rudi [above] sit at the intersection of personal and national histories yet are treated in a similar manner to found, anonymous images from the media. The truths behind the blurred veil of these family portraits were in some cases only explicit years after their making. For example, Richter was unaware of the tragic life story of his Aunt and her death in a Nazi sanatorium when he painted their double portrait, which includes the artist as a baby in the foreground.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Tante Marianne (Aunt Marianne) 1965/2019 Photo-painting 100 x 115cm
Freedom
Freedom can often require leaving something or someone behind. It comes at a price.
When Gerhard Richter left East Germany in March 1961 he had to do it covertly. He travelled as a tourist alone, first to Moscow and then to Leningrad. On the return the train stopped at West Berlin where Richter stashed additional suitcases he had brought with him, before returning to Dresden to collect his wife, Marianne Eufinger, known as ‘Ema’.
The borders between the Communist, German Democratic Republic and West Germany were being sealed – just months away from the erection of the Berlin Wall that was to divide the two Germanys for 28 years until its demolition in 1989. Trains and subways were still operating between the Soviet-occupied East and West Berlin making it the last remaining link to the free west.
Richter had a friend drive himself and Ema from Dresden to East Berlin where they boarded a train (without suitcases, which drew suspicion) for the western sector of Berlin where they registered as refugees. Between 1958 and 1961, 700,000 people fled East Germany for the West. Richter’s parents were never allowed to leave East Germany or to visit their son. They died in 1967 and 1968.
Richter was nearly thirty years old when he left East Germany. In Dusseldorf, where he studied and eventually taught, he began to number his works and reject almost everything he had done that was associated with his previous life. But your past never leaves you.
Richter has never been defined by a specific style and has used a variety of materials, techniques and methodologies during his career, like many young artists today. This represented a creative freedom for Richter who had spent more than a decade as a student and young apprentice in East Germany painting murals and making art within the narrow socialist confines of the German Democratic Republic. His academic training in Dresden did however, equip him with skills and technical facility that found expression later in still life paintings, portraits and landscapes.
Memory
The late writer, critic and essayist, John Berger once asked the question,
‘What served in place of the photograph; before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory’.
Photographs have been central to the art of Gerhard Richter. One of the few things he took with him to West Germany was a family album of photographs – some of which became the basis for later paintings. After arriving in West Germany, Richter began to systematically collect photographs, clippings from magazines and books and eventually took many thousands of his own photographs. This accumulation of photographic and reproduced images became the basis for his vast life-long project called Atlas.
Richter’s Atlas includes an extraordinary range of imagery, from harrowing images of the Holocaust to tender images of his children. It was created at a time before digital photography became so common place – when photographs were understood to be a trace of something or some time. Like footprints, fossils, markings on a tree – traces of what has been. Digital technology has changed photography from something we once looked at and reflected upon to something we Send. Once they were an index of memory, now we distribute them in their millions, and forget them.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Herr Heyde 1965/2001 Photo-painting 54.8 x 64cm Edition 119
A special exhibition by Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
“Gerhard Richter. 100 Works for Berlin” shows for the first time the long-term loan of the Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung to the Nationalgalerie. The central work in the exhibition, held in the Grafisches Kabinett of the Neue Nationalgalerie, is the series “Birkenau” (2014), consisting of four large-format, abstract paintings. “Birkenau” is the result of Richter’s long and in-depth engagement with the Holocaust and the possibilities of representing it. Alongside the “Birkenau” series, other works from various phases of Richter’s career will be exhibited, among them “Squatters’ House” (1989), “4900 Colours” (2007), and “Strip” (2013/2016). There is also another large group of works from Richter’s striking series of overpainted photographs, in which he addresses the tension between photography and painting. The exhibition has been realised in close collaboration with the artist.
In an oeuvre spanning six decades, Richter (b. 1932 in Dresden) has repeatedly explored the possibilities and limits of painting. The works in this exhibition highlight the tension between abstraction and figuration, between photography and painting, which underlies Richter’s entire oeuvre. From the 1960s onwards, he addressed the question of whether or not art was still possible after the Holocaust and the terror regime of National Socialism. Since then, Richter, who moved from East Germany to West Germany in 1961, has repeatedly addressed the topic of German history and his own family history. In this exhibition we are displaying photo editions of the paintings “Aunt Marianne”, “Uncle Rudi”, and “Mr. Heyde”, which Richter painted based on photographs and rendered blurry by smudging the oil paints. For him this was a way to avoid direct depiction.
He is also concerned with the refusal of a direct image in his abstract paintings, which he has made since 1976. Richter now paints with intense colour and in several layers. The paint is applied with a squeegee, mixed and at the same time partially scraped off again. Layers of colour tear open and the lower surfaces shine through, which gives the image a pronounced, deep structure. The result is an interplay between chance and conscious decision in which the process of creating the work of art remains visible.
In 1999 Richter made “Black, Red, Gold” (1999) for the entrance hall of the Reichstag building, which houses the German Bundestag, a work made of enamelled glass plates that he intends as a sign of a new beginning. In this exhibition we show the small-format glass work “Black, Red, Gold” (1999), which refers to the Bundestag version. It is presented in combination with two mirror works, the photo editions, and the paintings “Skull” (1983) and “Squatters’ House” (1989).
In the work “4900 Colours”, which is composed of 196 individual square panels, each of which is subdivided into 25 colour squares, Richter returned to the investigation of colour fields that he first undertook from 1966 to 1974. At the time, he was fascinated by industrially produced colour sample cards, their smooth perfection, their accuracy of colour reproduction and the possibilities of variation. The squares were the exact opposite of emotional emphasis, sublimity or expressiveness – that is, of properties that until then had seemed to be characteristic for painting. In 2007 he returned to the topic with two paintings, in the context of his work on the south transept window for the Cologne Cathedral and “4900 Colours”. For “Strip”, Richter divided the “Abstract Picture” (724-4) from 1990 into ever smaller segments by means of a computer-controlled process, stretched them out by mirroring the axes and rearranged the sections. The result is a combination of seemingly randomly-found striped motifs and their deliberate ordering by the artist. Both “Strip” and “4900 Colours” are a radical evolution of abstract painting in which Richter tested the boundaries of the medium once again and took it to its logical conclusion.
The notion of painting’s possibilities and limits also plays a central role in the cycle “Birkenau” from 2014. Richter’s starting point was four photographs from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, secretly taken in August 1944 by Jewish prisoners who risked their lives to do so. They are the only known photographs from the extermination camp that were taken by the victims themselves and they were only published after the Second World War. In 1967 Richter had already included one of these photos in his “Atlas”. But it was not until the publication of these images in Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Images Despite Everything (2008), in which the French philosopher used them to analyse how the Holocaust could be represented, that Richter felt the impetus to address the subject again.
Richter transferred the four motifs with charcoal and oil paint to individual canvases and then decided to paint over them abstractly. With each additional layer of paint, the painted photographic originals disappeared a little more until they were finally no longer visible to the viewer. Richter thus carried out a process of abstraction, born of the conviction that he could not do justice to the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust with a direct depiction. His abstract painting offers moments of form and colour that create a melancholic, thoughtful mood, especially in the many black and grey surfaces. The abstract does not exclude the figurative; instead, the works create a space between showing and not showing, enabling a broad range of open-ended reflection. Opposite the four “Birkenau” paintings is a large, grey, four-part mirror. Almost since the beginning, Richter’s paintings were accompanied by sculptures made of glass and mirrors, with which he explores the boundary between “natural” and “artistic” images in a variety of ways. The mirrors refer to an external reality and enable personal reflection for everyone in the room.
The relationship between abstraction and figuration, photography and painting, appears on a new level in the series “Overpainted Photos”, begun in 1986. These are small-format photographic prints, often 10 x 15 centimetres, which the artist draws from his own private collection: photos of museum visits, trips, walks or his family. Despite their small dimensions, they play an important role in the artist’s development: they embody the interface between abstract painting and the representation of a photographic image as no other group of artworks does.
In 2021 the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation committed a total of 100 artworks to the collection of the Nationalgalerie (National Gallery) as a permanent loan that will be on display at the Museum of the 20th Century upon its completion. From March through October 2021 the “Birkenau” cycle was on display in the Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery). Beginning in April 2023, the exhibition “Gerhard Richter. 100 Works for Berlin” will be shown in the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery). In the future, it will be presented with curatorial or artistic interventions in ever-changing contexts. Exhibition catalogues will be available.
In the future, this group of works will be on display in a dedicated room on the upper levels of the Museum of the 20th Century (now under construction). The exhibition in the Grafisches Kabinett (prints and drawings room) of the New National Gallery contains 41 paintings and mirrors, 20 overpainted photographs, and 31 colour sketches in a 500-square-metre space. All are loans from the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation to the Nationalgalerie.
Biography
Gerhard Richter was born on 9 February 1932 in Dresden. Between 1949 and 1950 he worked as a sign and stage painter, and in 1951 he was accepted at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Dresden. In 1956 he completed his studies in mural painting. In 1961, Richter moved from the GDR to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he began a second course of study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düs-seldorf (Düsseldorf Art Academy). There he began his artistic work on the threshold between painting and photography. Beginning in 1963, he made paintings based on illustrations and private photo albums, the motifs of which he slightly blurred.
From 1971 to 1994 Richter taught painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. At the same time he expanded his own spectrum of painting. Various groups of works – paintings, colour panels, landscapes, monochrome grey pictures, objects, mirror and glass – emerged in rapid succession. For his intensely coloured abstract paintings, which he has made since 1976 and which form the most extensive group in his oeuvre, he has used home-made squeegees in addition to paintbrushes since the early 1980s. With these tools he creates completely independent compositions shaped by chance. In between, Richter repeatedly painted smaller groups of realistic landscapes, still lifes, portraits and also history paintings, such as the cycle “18. Oktober 1977” (1988), in which he addressed the death of the RAF terrorists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. In the “Overpainted Photographs”, which he has been making since 1986, the artist combines painting and photography in another unique way.
In 1998 Richter was commissioned to design the foyer of the Reichstag building, for which he created the “Black, Red, Gold”, consisting of six large-format enamelled glass panels. In 2007, Richter’s south transept window in the Cologne Cathedral is finished. At the same time, he created the monumental painting “4900 Colours”. From then on Richter focused more on glass, though he had already begun to use it in 1967. He also began to work with digital images. It was not until 2014 that Richter re-turned to painting. He painted the cycle “Birkenau”, in which he revisited his decades-long preoccupation with the Holocaust. In 2019 the artist founded the Gerhard Richter Art Foundation. In 2021 the foundation gave the Nationalgalerie one hundred works, including the “Birkenau” cycle, as a long-term permanent loan.
Text from the Neue Nationalgalerie
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Besetztes Haus (695-3) (Occupied house (695-3)) 1989 Oil on canvas 82 x 112cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Schwarz, Rot, Gold (Black, Red, Gold) 1999 Resin paint on glass 99 x 99cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Birkenau 2014 Oil on canvas 260 x 200cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Birkenau 2014 Oil on canvas 260 x 200cm
“Birkenau” by Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, one of today’s most important artists, created an abstract painting entitled Birkenau in 2014. In the four-part work, which consists of large-format paintings of equal size, Richter used as his models authentic photographs that were secretly taken in 1944 by the Sonderkommando (special task force) of the Jewish prisoners in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Among other things, the Sonderkommando was responsible for burning the bodies from the gas chambers.
A Polish resistance group smuggled a camera with a black and white film into the camp, and this was later used to take a total of seven photos. A Polish woman, Helena Datoń, then brought the film out of the camp in a toothpaste tube, thereby enabling the photographs to be published. These photos later became famous because they were used as vital evidence of the unspeakable crimes in Birkenau.
Through the discussion on the creation of Richter’s work Birkenau, these shocking photographs finally have become a special part of public memory. At the same time the artist has completely concealed them in his work, thus making them invisible. This makes his painting a remarkable place of remembrance.
…
In 2008 Gerhard Richter first saw four reproductions of the photographs taken at that time in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, dated 11th February. Fascinated by the impact of the photographs he decided to include them in his collection of photographs and motifs (the famous Atlas), which constitute, as it were, a documentation of his iconographic memory. He finally completed painted copies of the four photographs and hung them in his studio. Soon after that, he decided to use them as models for a work that was to bear the title Birkenau. After numerous considerations and studies he produced the final version in 2014, consisting of four large-format abstract paintings (oil on canvas, each measuring 260 x 200 cm).
Richter, however, made the Birkenau originals completely invisible by painting over them. Birkenau thus became a purely abstract work. However, the title, the documentation provided by the artist and the museum presentation, in which the work was consequently exhibited along with the photographic originals, make the original templates present in a more than subtle way. The knowledge of the original photos is thus constantly present.
Since the first presentation of the work in the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden in 2016, the creation process, its impact and the manifold contexts of Richter’s Birkenau have been frequently and extensively described, reviewed and interpreted.[8] It is significant, however, “that the work, which is dedicated to the Holocaust, is also a remarkable memorial of the history of Poles in Germany, something that the artist has personally acknowledged.[9] Without the Polish resistance movement Richter’s Birkenau would not have existed.
By covering the visible source of this memory with a painterly gesture, Richter has constructed a place of remembrance and stimulated a debate on the subject.[10] He creates a balance between the memory and the aesthetics of the abstract, which allows a peculiar double existence of both areas. Out of respect for what happened in the Birkenau camp, Richter does not show the harrowing documents, but makes them tangible and tangible in his paintings through artistic means. The artistic work entitled Birkenau contains the camp Birkenau, “present but not visible”.[11]
The artist addresses what is probably the darkest chapter in human history and takes viewers on a tightrope walk between memory and aesthetics, cruelty and beauty, bewilderment and curiosity, leading them to the borderline between what is obvious and what is being repressed. However, in the end aesthetics win out: the painting is what Richter as an artist has to contribute to this theme. It is an “image in spite of everything,” which, as Richter observed, is primarily intended to provide us with solace.[12]
[8] See above all: Gerhard Richter, Birkenau, Museum Frieder Burda, Köln 2016 and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richters Birkenau-Bilder, Köln 2016
[9] Jacek Barski: Conversations with Gerhard Richter on 12. and 26. March 2018
[10] Paul Valéry (1871-1945) referred to the paradox of memory in his Cahiers (1921-1922): “Sensitivity is the instantaneous / incessant / phenomenon that charges the ‘memory’ in a certain direction – through quanta; and that discharges it again – again through quanta – in the same direction. If the charge ‘memory’ itself is felt, then we are dealing with the phenomenon of expectation. Waiting means perceiving an upgrowth. However, the discharge not only reduces the charge, but also allows it to grow or at least makes it more suitable for all dischargers… Memory is therefore not accumulation, but construction. The content of memory is an act – a current event”; Paul Valéry, Cahiers, Paris 1973-1974, quoted from the German edition: Frankfurt am Main, 1989, volume 3, p. 441.
[11] “Present but not visible” is part of the postmodern discourse as a dictum at the latest since 2006 (year of publication of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, New York, 2006, German Edition Against the Day, see here p. 593).
Over decades of artistic production, Gerhard Richter has repeatedly explored the possibilities and limits of painting. His work constantly alternates between figuration and abstraction.
From the very beginning, Richter was concerned with the question of whether or not art was still possible after the Holocaust and the terror regime of National Socialism. Photo editions in the exhibition recall Richter’s early, significant works on this subject. He found a multi-layered and globally acclaimed artistic response in 2014 with the painting cycle “Birkenau.” The four paintings are the central work of this presentation. The starting point is photographs from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Richter transferred the motifs with charcoal onto four canvases and then decided to paint over them abstractly. With each layer of paint, the painted copies of the photographs disappeared a little more until finally they were no longer visible to the viewer. The “Birkenau” series is juxtaposed with a four-part grey mirror, which actively involves us, the viewers, in the work and invites us to reflect.
The exhibition also presents artworks from various creative phases. Above all, Richter’s colour-intensive, abstract pictures, such as the series “Aladdin” (2010), are on display. The monumental paintings “4900 Colours” (2007) and “Strip” (2013/2016) are also shown here. In the case of the latter, 2 x 10 metre work, Richter prepared it with the support of an image-generating computer programme. Two other groups of works created in recent years include the significant series “Overpainted Photographs” and the luminous colour sketches.
The presentation was developed in close collaboration with the artist. In the future, interventions by artists from in various fields will present Gerhard Richter’s art in ever-new contexts.
Text from the Neue Nationalgalerie
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 13.2.98 1998 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 25.2.98 1998 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 28.2.98 1998 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
When Gerhard Richter first started painting over photographs in the early 1990s he realised that these small works summarised much of what he was trying to achieve on a larger scale. By adding thick paint to the seamless ‘perfect’ surface of a photograph, the integrity of something we take for granted and habitually accept as representing reality, is compromised and thrown into question. Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings often appear similar at first glance. Only when we have the opportunity to see several together, do we begin to see the subtle nuances and often radical differences between them. Gerhard Richter has said on many occasions that he distrusts the world as it is represented through photographs, the media, religion and ideologies. For him painting provides the means to apprehend the world through a language not made of words but of acts of looking, thinking, gestures, doubt and hope. Painting has a language of its own and can only be understood through resisting the temptation to describe it with words.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 17. Nov 99 1999 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 20.6.05 2005 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Aladdin 2010 Lacquer behind glass on aluminium Dibond 40 x 50cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) MV. 133 2011 Painted over photograph 10.1 x 15.1cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) MV. 134 2011 Painted over photograph 10.1 x 15.1cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) MV. 136 2011 Painted over photograph 10.1 x 15.1cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) MV. 140 2011 Painted over photograph 10.1 x 15.1cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) MV. 142 2011 Painted over photograph 10.1 x 15.1cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 19. März 2015 2015 Painted over photograph 10.0 x 14.8cm
A common response by many thousands of people following the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001 was incomprehension. The ‘reality’ of the situation was almost impossible to accept or understand. The event was immediately and constantly compared to a movie. The French theorist, Jean Baudrillard commented that the repeated broadcasts of the footage served ‘to multiply it to infinity and, at the same time, they are a diversion and a “neutralisation” – the more we see the events, the less comprehensible they become’.
Baudrillard was interested in the way that photographic media affect our perception of reality and the world. He believed that the overwhelming amount of imagery that we consume in the forms of television, film and video, computer games and the internet results in a ‘hyperreality’, a simulation of the real.
Gerhard Richter said that, ‘Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture – no matter whether good or bad. … I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good – better than anything I could ever say on the subject’.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 22.6.16 2016 Painted over photograph 12.6 x 18.8cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) 25.6.16 (1) 2016 Painted over photograph 12.6 x 18.7cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Abstract painting 2016 Oil on wood 200 x 250cm
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Abstract painting 2016 Oil on wood 175 x 250cm
Many of Richter’s large abstract paintings also derive from an observation of natural phenomena: ‘They do set up associations. They remind you of natural experiences, even rain if you like’.
In his abstract paintings, Richter uses a squeegee to rub and scrape the paint across his canvases to create a blurring of one area of colour into another. Often there’s a feeling that you’re looking at an out of focus photograph.
Gerhard Richter (German, b. 1932) Abstract painting 2016 Oil on wood 40 x 30cm
The first of two postings on the work of one of my favourite artists, the great Gerhard Richter – this time on his miraculous overpainted photographs, abstractions which hover between one medium and the next, thither and yon.
“Richter began these works in 1986. All of the formats exhibited are unusually small, each being about 10 x 15cm. The basis for his pictures was ordinary photographs, most of which he took himself and had developed in a conventional photo lab. The photos are not artistic in any way. They are snapshots of family celebrations and trips, people, landscape or architecture, including a view of Dresden. The Overpainted Photographs are intimately linked to Richter’s artistic works. Every day, after working on his large-format paintings in his studio, Richter dragged the photographs through the remaining wet paint on the squeegee. The result depended heavily on chance, and surprising new realities were formed.” (Press release from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden)
Creative juxtapositions enlighten these new realities: the smeared stalagmite of green and yellow paint in 8. Juni 2016 (8)(2016, below) echoes the vertiginous mountainous landscape beyond; curtains of paint in 4. March 2003 (2003 ,below) hide sunbathing bodies whilst echoing the breaking waves in the background; and coloured skeins rain down on a tower in 29.1.2000 (Firenze) (2000, below) portending its destruction.
These active interventions, action photo-paintings, gestural abstractions are spontaneous in form and intelligent in conception. They combine elements of both mediums to create interstitial spaces, spaces that promote an evolution in the way in which we conceive of space,1 a world of liquid transformations realised through shifts between photo and picture, reality and presence, memory and awareness – a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains the mystery of the object… and the world.
Bravo!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Adapted from Kovac, Tom. “Curve Gallery,” in van Schaik, Leon (ed.,). Architectural Design. Vol. 72. No. 2. (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, p. 60.
Many thankx to the Albertinum at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In 1991 Gerhard Richter commented on the creation of these works:
“Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture – no matter whether good or bad. That’s all theory. It’s no good. I once took small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good – better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”
Text from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website
“What works for me about the series is the balance between the paint and the photograph beneath it. There are works in the series where the two seem to work together and others where they fight for primacy. The act of adding paint is a simple gesture but somehow Richter uses it to add a layer of complexity to the image. We are left with hints about the photographs and can, to an extent, imagine the gestures used to obscure them – certainly the texture of the paint offers clues – but piecing together the evidence provides a tantalisingly incomplete picture. For me, the work is all the stronger for that.”
Ann Jones. “Veils of abstraction,” on the Image Object Text website 22/09/2012 [Online] Cited 12/10/2023
The exhibition at Albertinum shows a selection of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs for the first time in Dresden. 36 of the selected works come from the holdings of the Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung, founded by the artist in 2019; 36 additional works are loans from private collections.
Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre from the past six decades is shaped by a dialogue and a confrontation between figurative and abstract visual strategies. In no other workseries by the artist do the two styles enter into a symbiosis like the one in the small-format Overpainted Photographs. Richter began these works in 1986. All the formats exhibited are unusually small, each approximately 10 × 15cm.
In 1991 Gerhard Richter commented on the creation of these works:
“Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture – no matter whether good or bad. That’s all theory. It’s no good. I once took small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good – better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”
Standard photographs usually taken by the artist himself and developed at an ordinary photo lab serve as the foundation for these works. The shots themselves are entirely lacking in artistic quality. They are snapshot motifs of family celebrations and excursions, people, landscapes, or architectures, including a view of Dresden.
The Overpainted Photographs are closely linked to his painterly oeuvre. After his daily work on the large paintings in the studio, Richter pulled these photographs through the remaining wet paint on the squeegee. In this way, the result of this action is strongly determined by coincidence and surprising new realities emerge. With the declared end of his painterly work in 2017, Gerhard Richter also concluded work on the Overpainted Photographs.
Text from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden website
As a Dresden first, the Gerhard Richter Archiv, run by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden is exhibiting a selection of Gerhard Richter’s Overpainted Photographs. Of the 72 works on show in the Albertinum, 36 are from the holdings of the Gerhard Richter Kunststiftung, a foundation established by the artist in 2019, and 36 from private collections.
Richter’s oeuvre of the past six decades is marked by interacting and opposing representational and abstract artistic strategies. In his small-format Overpainted Photographs, these two styles develop a symbiosis that is stronger than in any of the artist’s other groups of works.
In 1991, Gerhard Richter described how the works came about: “Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred per cent picture. And painting always has reality: you can touch the paint; it has presence; but it always yields a picture – no matter whether good or bad. That’s all the theory. It’s no good. I once took some small photographs and then smeared them with paint. That partly resolved the problem, and it’s really good – better than anything I could ever say on the subject.”
Richter began these works in 1986. All of the formats exhibited are unusually small, each being about 10 x 15cm. The basis for his pictures was ordinary photographs, most of which he took himself and had developed in a conventional photo lab. The photos are not artistic in any way. They are snapshots of family celebrations and trips, people, landscape or architecture, including a view of Dresden.
The Overpainted Photographs are intimately linked to Richter’s artistic works. Every day, after working on his large-format paintings in his studio, Richter dragged the photographs through the wet paint left on his doctor blade. The result depended heavily on chance, and surprising new realities were formed. In 2017, Gerhard Richter announced his retirement from painting, and at the same time the end of his work on the Overpainted Photographs.
A catalogue is being published to accompany the exhibition. Dietmar Elger: Gerhard Richter. Overpainted Photos, published by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Buchhandlung Walther & Franz König, Cologne, 2023, 120 pages, 77 colour illustrations, 3 b&w illustrations. ISBN 978-3-7533-0538-7
Press release from the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
This is a strange group of photographs with which to investigate the “long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it,” for while the many historical portrait photographs depict a link between fashion and photography of the self (through the need to fit into a regimented cultural norm), many of the vernacular images are not about fashion, are a kind of non-fashion, where the people who “pose” for the photographs are just wearing whatever they are in at the time… thereby undermining the premise of the exhibition, that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion.
Indeed, despite the assertion that historical genres such as street photography “inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms”, most selfies taken today through the ubiquity of the phone camera are not carefully crafted, are the very antithesis of the old purpose of a portrait: that is, to picture how we choose to dress, adorn, and re/present ourselves at a particular moment in time.
In today’s contemporary age self is more about the style and context of the individual (as pictured in a photograph) rather than about the fashion (the latest style; the manner of doing something) of the individual or the collective.
Today, style is casual, informal, ephemeral, temporary… which leads us to pose the questions, are historical photographs evidence of a self-expression of more substance, compared to the rapid self, the throw away self, the narcissistic self of today? Are selfies today just a shallow expression of self or are they intended to be more, can they be more?
Today, there is less a consciousness of fashionability than there is the ability to enact the self without resort to fashion. As Yves Saint Laurent once said, “Fashion fades, style is eternal.”
While visual representations of identity continue to shape our understandings of self and each other “with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium” this is no longer achieved through the definition of self as “fashionable” (as defined on a hierarchical scale of who is fashionable and who isn’t, who is beautiful and who isn’t) – rather, it is through the equivalence of a nonhierarchical expression of self where everything becomes valuable, every selfie and portrait of equal awareness and importance in a collective and individual consciousness of self.
The very non-fashion of contemporary self expression is a non-performance, an anti-ritual if you like (which destroys the ritual of production of consumable fashion), which negates fashion as defining the self, much as photography of the self does not define who we are but is only a very small facet of a multi-layered identity.
All of which makes the premise of this exhibition (that the performance of self becomes a visual language through the picturing of fashion) and the first part of its title – Fashioning Self – highly problematic.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Many thankx to my friend and artist Elizabeth Gertsakis for her help in providing thoughts and inspiration for this text.
Many thankx to the Phoenix Art Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Louis Carlos Bernal (1941-1993) was born in Douglas, Arizona, and grew up in Phoenix. After completing his M.F.A. at Arizona State University in 1972, he joined the faculty of Pima Community College in Tucson, where he remained for the duration of his career, developing and heading its photography program. In 1979, Bernal, along with four other photographers – Morrie Camhi, Abigail Heyman, Roger Minick, and Neal Slavin – received funding from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to photograph Chicano culture in the Southwest for an exhibition and a book project entitled ESPEJO: Reflections of the Mexican American. The commission brought him closer to his ethnic roots and fueled a passionate direction for his work that gained him international recognition for championing regional diversity while symbolizing his exploration of identity as a Mexican American.
Following a tradition of Latin American documentary street photography, Bernal photographed in the barrio – a young girl and her grandfather in a corner barber shop, a girl taking her quinceañera, or locals posing in front of colourful wall murals – images that captured the unique character of Chicano life. He wrote, “My images speak of the religious and family ties I have experienced as a Chicano. I have concerned myself with the mysticism of the Southwest and the strength of the spiritual and cultural values of the barrio.”
Bernal also centered on the family and the home, believing these two elements combined to form the most significant structure within the Mexican-American community. As he wandered streets from Texas to Los Angeles, and met people who were soon drawn to charismatic personality, he was often invited into their homes. He asked permission to photograph them surrounded by their treasured possessions, their family portraits and mementos, and their shrines decorated with saints, candles, and flowers. His subjects appear at ease and confident in front of his camera, a product of Bernal’s deep respect for them. Bernal’s interest in what people chose to surround themselves with led him to photograph the interiors of homes without people. These sensitive portraits of both prized and everyday items in living rooms, bedrooms and gardens were perhaps his most significant innovation.
Bernal’s interest in strong compositional design and technical expertise are evident in both his skilfully printed black-and-white images and his colour work that luminously captures the bright pinks, blues, and greens of interior painted adobe walls, window curtains, and religious icons. He felt a particular urgency to document the streets, people, homes, and artefacts in historic neighbourhoods, as many were undergoing rapid changes or being bulldozed to make way for urban renewal. In recording the Mexican- American experience of Southwest towns and barrios, Bernal created a visual document that preserves the specific iconography and reveals many aspects of this distinct culture.
The Louis Carlos Bernal Collection contains 98 fine prints, both black-and-white and colour, and research materials that include project records, correspondence, clippings, writings and publications.
Anonymous. “Louis Carlos Bernal,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
Kozo Miyoshi was born in Chiba, Japan in 1947. He graduated from the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art in 1971. He began his photographic career in the 1970s and started shooting an 8 × 10-inch large format camera in 1981. In 2009 he upgraded to an ultra large format 16 × 20-inch camera which he continues to use on his travels. Miyoshi’s photographs have received international acclaim for their unique and sincere approach to his fleeting subjects.
From the seedy streets of Los Angeles to empty living rooms and apartments across the United States, the photographs of Dennis Feldman (b. 1946) explore the ways popular entertainment seeps into American consciousness. Pictures from his most acclaimed series, Hollywood Boulevard, 1969-1972, invite subjects from social parade of Los Angeles’s famed sidewalk to animate their self-styled identities. His American Images series, published in 1977, pursues other disclosures, revealing tensions that have come to define the underside of the American dream. In some pictures, people relish the escape and freedom symbolised by cars and movieland, while others seem to search for more elusive horizons. Like Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Frederick Sommer – pioneering photographers whom he considers mentors – Feldman carefully crafts compositions that do not judge their subjects. Instead, they pry apart the world of appearances to reflect on fantasy and desire as they intertwine with paths of everyday life.
Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression examines the role of photography in shaping, sharing, and shifting identity.
About the exhibition
Whether for a selfie or formal portrait, we all craft our appearance and identity for a public audience. We consider cultural and social norms, the emotions we wish to express or hide away, where we’re going and with whom, and the purpose of the photograph when choosing how we dress, adorn, and present ourselves. The resulting images serve as a window into a particular moment of our life, with intimate details that alert viewers to who we are, as filtered through the photographic medium.
Organised by Phoenix Art Museum and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression features 54 works of street, documentary, and self-portrait photography from 1912 to 2015 that explore this long-intertwined relationship between fashion as a tool for self-expression and photography’s role in chronicling it. Iconic views by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Linda Rich, John Simmons, David Hume Kennerly, Teenie Harris, and more illuminate the dialogue that occurs between photographer and subject – the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.
Alongside these works drawn from CCP’s outstanding collection, Fashioning Self also features a rotating display of social media images reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the Museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents, and our collective social media followings to take their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or in their environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker in a world where cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi (国吉 康雄, Kuniyoshi Yasuo, September 1, 1889 – May 14, 1953) was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.
Social documentary photographer Max Yavno (1911-1985) identified the odd charm that constitutes the identity of a place and people. Born in New York, Yavno was a social worker from 1932-1936; this background clearly informed his photographic career. His humanistic sensibility is revealed in his work, which includes street photographs made in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yavno is best known for his depictions of these great American cities and the cultural and social detail of their inhabitants, many of which distinctively reflect their era.
In 1936, Yavno began photographing New York street life for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project. As his interest in photography burgeoned, Yavno joined the Photo League and served as its President in the late 1930s. Through this organisation he met Aaron Siskind who became his roommate and lifelong friend. During World War II, Yavno served in the United States Army Air Force as a film and photography instructor. Following the war, he relocated to San Francisco and continued teaching. There, Yavno began a freelance career with clients including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. During this time Yavno achieved success both as a fine art and a commercial photographer.
Yavno was included in “Seventeen American Photographers,” a 1947 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This placed him alongside established photographers Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. Following this pivotal exhibition, Yavno published The San Francisco Book in 1948 and The Los Angeles Book in 1950, both of which chronicled the urban landscape and its population. By 1952, Edward Steichen had purchased Yavno’s prints for The Museum of Modern Art, New York. With recommendations by Edward Weston and Steichen, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953. From 1954-75, Yavno owned and operated a thriving commercial photography studio in Los Angeles.
In 1975, the sixty four year old photographer closed his studio to allow for more personal pursuits. Yavno continued to photograph California, but also worked in Mexico, Morocco, Israel, and Egypt, securing funds for the later trips from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Photography of Max Yavno was published by University of California press in 1981, to accompany a retrospective at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Yavno continued to make and exhibit photographic works until his death in 1985.
The Max Yavno Archive contains papers, records of commercial assignments, correspondence, information regarding the Photo League, memorabilia, photographic materials and over 800 fine photographs.
Anonymous. “Max Yavno,” on the Centre for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
Marion Post Wolcott was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and at the University of Vienna. Upon graduation in 1932, she returned to New York to pursue a career in photography and attended workshops with Ralph Steiner. By 1936, she was a freelance photographer for Life, Fortune, and other magazines. She became a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1937 and remained there until Paul Strand recommended her to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, where she worked from 1938 to 1942. Wolcott suspended her photographic career thereafter in order to raise her family, but continued to photograph periodically as she traveled and taught, in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and New Mexico. In 1968 she returned to freelance photography in California and concentrated on colour work, which she had been producing in the early 1940s. Wolcott’s photographs have been included in group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, ICP, and elsewhere. Among other honours she has received are the Dorothea Lange Award, and the 1991 Society of Photographic Education’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The several books on her life and career include Paul Henrickson’s Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life of Marion Post Wolcott (1992).
Wolcott’s documentary photographs for the FSA are notable for their variation in subject matter. Because she joined the organisation late in its existence, Stryker often gave her assignments intended to complete projects already begun by others. Wolcott’s photographs show wealthy and middle-class subjects in addition to the poor people and migrant workers who appeared in most FSA photographs. Her body of work provides a view into another side of the 1930s in America, among that small percentage of people who could afford to escape the damaging effects of the Depression.
Lisa Hostetler
Handy et al. Reflections in a Glass Eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch Press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 232 “Marion Post Wolcott,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
Francis J. Bruguière (American, 1879-1945) Self-portrait with Friend c. 1912 Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Gift of James Enyeart
This spring, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) presents Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression, a new major photography exhibition organised by PhxArt and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson. It will be on view from March 8 through November 12 in the Doris and John Norton Gallery for the Center for Creative Photography at Phoenix Art Museum.
Spanning the 1910s through the present, Fashioning Self explores the long-intertwined relationship between self-expression, fashion, and the photographic medium, with more than 50 works by Dennis Feldman, Laura Volkerding, Louis Carlos Bernal, Tseng Kwong Chi, David Hume Kennerly, Helen Levitt, Teenie Harris and others drawn from the CCP collection. These fine-art photographs are displayed alongside a social-media feed of community photos and selfies to spark reflection on the dynamic between photographer and subject, particularly as new technologies, self-styling, and the photographic medium continue to shape visual culture and personal and collective identities around the globe.
“Since the mid-1800s, photographers have captured our world and the captivating cast of characters who inhabit it, documenting all the varied and nuanced presentations of style and expression,” said the Sybil Harrington Director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum, Jeremy Mikolajczak. “Fashioning Self: The Photography of Everyday Expression sparks fascinating conversations around historical photography genres, including street photography, and how they inform contemporary evolutions, such as selfies and carefully crafted social-media platforms, while also exploring the give-and-take between self-performance and art making.”
Fashioning Self showcases 54 works of street, documentary and self-portrait photography that present slices of everyday public life in the United States from 1912 through 2015. Featured works include those by Garry Winogrand, Marion Post Wolcott, Kozo Miyoshi, Laura Volkerding, Tseng Kwong Chi, Joan Liftin and Rosalind Solomon.
The exhibition’s fine-art images are complemented by a rotating display of social-media photos reflecting community members and individuals from across the United States. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the museum and CCP will invite visitors, Arizona residents and the institutions’ collective social-media followings to snap their own selfies and portraits in the galleries or other environments and share them via the hashtag #FashioningSelf for display in Norton Gallery. By placing these contemporary, real-time images in conversation with works by renowned photographers of the Americas, the exhibition interrogates what it means to be an artist or maker when cameras are commonplace and everyone curates a feed.
“I am excited for visitors to contribute their own photos to Fashioning Self and engage with works from CCP’s collection in a fun and unique way,” said Rebecca A. Senf, chief curator at CCP and curator of Fashioning Self. “By participating in the gallery’s regularly updated social-media feed, they will be included in a century-long history of photographers who have fashioned, captured and distributed visual representations of identity, while considering how technology, digital platforms, and the ubiquity of the camera continue to shape our understandings of self and each other.”
Educator and photographer Laura Volkerding (1939-1996) began her artistic career making prints and drawings, and discovered her passion for photography in 1972, at age thirty-three. Volkerding studied fine arts at the University of Louisville and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology where she received a Master’s degree in graphic design. She taught at University of Chicago from 1970 to 1980, and then served as a senior lecturer in photography at Stanford University until her death in 1996.
Citing photographs by Walker Evans and Art Sinsabaugh, as well as Chicago’s modernist architecture as visual influences, Volkerding’s early photographic work depicts quirky vernacular architecture, campgrounds and suggestive landscapes. In the late 1970s, Laura Volkerding, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Frank Gohlke, and Lewis Baltz were among twenty-four photographers chosen to participate in an intensive project entitled Court House that documented historic court house architecture across America. Published in 1979, the monograph Court House: A Photographic Document exhibits a diverse and inclusive examination of America’s architectural heritage. In 1980, Volkerding moved to California and embarked on a project documenting the development of the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay waterfronts creating panoramic images by joining continuous frames of 5 x 7 inch negatives into a more expansive view.
Volkerding experimented with multiple photographic formats before settling, in 1984, on the rich clarity of prints produced with a Deardorff 8 x 10 inch view camera. This same year, Volkerding discovered the subject that would drive her work for over a decade: Les Compagnons du Devoir, a French sculpture apprentice community founded in medieval times. Their history of sculptural practice and reverence for craftsmanship resonated for Volkerding. She was attracted to the figurative and architectural forms that populated their work space. Volkerding photographed classrooms and apprentice projects, foundries and workshops, and cathedral restoration projects. The images suggest the presence of the craftsmen, but are devoid of the actual artisans, thus alluding to the longer craft tradition rather than the contemporary individuals. In addition to making many photographs of Les Compagnons in France, Volkerding photographed other sculpture workshops in Quebec, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Italy, and the United States. This body of work was exhibited at Stanford in 1986; in 1988 she was awarded her second Guggenheim fellowship. The Center for Creative Photography published a related monograph, Solomon’s Temple: the European Building-Crafts Legacy, shortly before Volkerding’s death.
The Laura Volkerding Endowment and the naming of the Laura Volkerding Reading Room at the Center for Creative Photography serve to perpetuate her important role in photography. The Laura Volkerding Archive contains photographic work prints, negatives, personal papers, and a substantial collection of multi-colour intaglio prints and one-colour lithographs, as well as 968 fine prints.
Anonymous. “Laura Volkerding,” on the Centre for Creative Photography Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
“Our choices about clothing, makeup, hairstyles and accessories are a component of the way we communicate who we are, what we value, and what is important to us,” says Rebecca A. Senf, Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography …
“These prints are not just evidence of the photographer’s process; they are also evidence of the self presentation process of the people who appear in the pictures,” says Senf. “When you have your portrait made, there’s a process that goes behind thinking about what you’ll wear, how you’ll do your hair and what kind of sense of yourself are you trying to convey through the picture.”
Featuring works by Helen Levitt, Tseng Wong Chi, Charles “Teenie” Harris and Dennis Feldman, among others, Fashioning Self considers both the formal and informal ways in which people employ visual signifiers to transit their identities to the world. Whether donning ball gowns and fur wraps, cowboy hats and boots, bandana and chest tattoos, or unironic trucker hats, each subject conveys an intuitive sense of ease and authenticity that comes from being true to who they are.
Senf brings this integrity to the curation of the show, offering a broad array of images sparkling with individual expressions of character and poise that can resonate with the widest possible audience. “One of the most exciting things about photography is that it’s functioning as a visual language and people are using it to communicate ideas,” she says.
John Gutmann received his bachelor’s degree from the State Academy of Arts and Crafts in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and studied with master painter Otto Mueller, one of the founding members of the New Realist movement in Germany. Gutmann moved to Berlin in 1927 where he earned his master’s degree at the State Institute for Higher Education. The arts were flourishing in Berlin, and the city’s vibrant social scene provided inspiration for subject matter and aesthetic. Gutmann’s paintings were done in the vein of well-known German painter Otto Dix, who represented Berlin nightlife as both dizzily exciting and darkly isolating. In 1933, due to the rise of the Nazi regime, Gutmann was no longer able to exhibit his paintings or teach and began to experiment with photography as a means of supporting himself. He bought a Rolleiflex camera, shot three rolls of film, and immediately secured a contract with a German agency, Presse-Foto, to photograph in America and send pictures back for German publications. That same year he arrived in San Francisco and started to document America from the detached eye of an anthropologist. By 1936 he had secured a teaching position at San Francisco State College, where a decade later he founded its creative photography program, one of the first in the country. By the end of the thirties, Gutmann switched agencies to Pix, Inc., a New York-based agency, which promoted his work for publication in magazines such as Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Life, and Look. During World War II, he studied at the Signal Corps Motion Picture School in Queens and made still and motion pictures for the United States Army Signal Corps. He focused much of his work during this time on China, Burma, and India. Gutmann retired from teaching in 1973 and began to print and edit his earlier work for exhibition and publication. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a two-man exhibition in 1976 of John Gutmann and Walker Evan’s work focusing on images of the Great Depression and the American culture that emerged from it. Two years later he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1984 his first publication titled The Restless Decade was published by Harry N. Abrams, showcasing his work from the 1930s. Beginning in 1989 a major retrospective, Beyond the Document, traveled from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gutmann died on June 12, 1998 in San Francisco.
Gutmann brings a strong modernist sensibility to his black-and-white documentary photographs. Using a Rolleiflex camera and shooting from the waist, he combines unusual angles, close cropping, and careful – almost classical – framing to create works that are as poetic as they are impactful. Like Walker Evans, he finds beauty in ordinary and everyday subjects such as advertisements, street scenes, and automobiles–subjects he would return to throughout his career. His straight-style depictions of Depression-era America often include an element of humour, capturing quiet moments of human drama, charged with anxiety, but also hope.
Anonymous. “John Gutmann,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
David Noyes Jackson (September 16, 1922 – July 13, 2001) was the life partner of poet James Merrill (1926-1995).
A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill’s play, “The Bait.” They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Key West, Florida, and Athens, Greece. “It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew,” wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, Familiar Spirits (2001).
Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill’s and Jackson’s ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in The Book of Ephraim (printed for the first time in Divine Comedies, 1976, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1977).
Jackson collaborated with James Merrill on much of his most significant poetic output. The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell: Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980) were all written with Jackson’s assistance. Together, they constitute the epic trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover, a 560-page apocalyptic poem published in its entirety in 1982.
He and James Merrill are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery, Stonington. Jackson’s former wife and Merrill’s friend, Doris Sewell Jackson is buried behind them.
Rosalie Thorne “Rollie” McKenna (November 15, 1918 – June 14, 2003) was an American photographer. Writers photographed by McKenna include Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Truman Capote. McKenna had a long-term friendship with John Malcolm Brinnin, who helped her come in contact with many of the people she photographed. In addition to portraiture, McKenna also had an interest in architecture, particularly the architecture of Stonington, Connecticut.
John Yang (1933-2009) was an American architect and photographer. Born in China, he settled in the United States with his family in 1939. His interest in photography began as a child and was later developed when he was a student at The Putney School in Vermont where he was classmates with other future photographers such as Tim Asch. In the summer of 1951, he studied with Minor White at The California School of the Fine Arts. He graduated from Harvard College majoring in Philosophy, and in 1957 he earned a MA in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania studying under Louis Kahn. Before becoming a photographer full-time, Yang worked as an architect and continued in that practice until 1978.
Yang photographed the architecture and streets of New York as well as the surrounding landscape and gardens. Using traditional equipment and alternative darkroom techniques, he produced exquisite large format contact prints, often toned rich magentas: 11″ x 14″, 8″ x 10″, 5″ x 7″ and 10″ x 78″ panoramas. All work was printed by Yang himself.
Harold Jones (born 1940) has contributed to photography as an artist, educator, curator and arts administrator. Born in Morristown, New Jersey in 1940, he graduated from the Maryland Institute with a BFA in Painting and Photography, and from the University of New Mexico with an MFA in Art History and Photography. After graduation Jones worked as an assistant curator at the George Eastman House and in 1971 became the first director of LIGHT Gallery in New York City, the first gallery to exclusively represent contemporary photographers, such as Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. In 1975 Jones became the founding director of the Center for Creative Photography and then went on to start the photography program at the University of Arizona where he taught for the next 30 years. Presently he is professor emeritus and volunteer coordinator of the Voices of Photography oral history project at the Center. Jones continues to be a constant student and practitioner of photography.
Harold Jones’s photography is difficult to categorise, and there are no generalisations that satisfactorily describe his varied body of work. His original training in painting and photography led to a practice that Jones referred to as “photodrawings” – gelatin silver prints worked with a variety of hand-coloured surfaces. Over the years, Jones used ink, food colouring, and oil paints as well as a variety of chemical toners to produce effects that range from subtle to direct. The resulting images are unique and cannot be duplicated. Initially he was ambivalent about altering the surfaces of his prints, feeling that it was an impure practice, but ultimately concluded that creating the photograph was the first phase of drawing, and surface treatments and colouring constituted the second phase. Jones’ approach has varied even within his unaltered prints. He has worked with both multiple and long-duration exposures to capture motion. Jones’s subjects are everyday objects arranged in compositions that require viewing and re-viewing. The photographer has described his delight in the process in which a person moves beyond a superficial reading of his work for closer inspection. His images reinforce the idea that a world continues beyond the picture plane; that one is seeing a fragment of a larger whole. Although he often photographs mundane objects, such as a water tower or laundry hanging, his unusual vantage points or unexpected cropping, produce a range of effects from humour to mystery.
The Harold Jones Archive contains over 150 prints, including a number of unique photodrawings, correspondence, biographical materials, teaching and exhibition files, records of the Society for Photographic Education, publications and clippings, and ephemera covering his career. Correspondents include Robert Heinecken, Jim Alinder, Robert Fichter, Beaumont Newhall, Jerry Uelsmann, and many others. An archive highlight is: University: A Photographic Inquiry, 1984-85: a 2-volume maquette from a project titled Universe City, containing 44 gelatin silver prints and 3 colour prints. Jones’s career can also be studied at the Center for Creative Photography through the LIGHT Gallery archive.
Anonymous. “Harold Jones,” on the International Center of Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 28/09/2023
David Hume Kennerly (born March 9, 1947) is an American photographer. He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his portfolio of photographs of the Vietnam War, Cambodia, East Pakistani refugees near Calcutta, and the Ali-Frazier fight in Madison Square Garden. He has photographed every American president since Lyndon B Johnson. He is the first presidential scholar at the University of Arizona.
The photographer Rosalind Fox Solomon turned her camera on Washington, D.C., between 1977 and 1979. With access to spaces ranging from artist studios to the White House, Solomon made probing portraits, such as this one of First Lady Rosalynn Carter aboard Air Force 2. During her years as first lady, Carter (born in Plains, Georgia, in 1927) expanded the role of the presidential spouse, regularly attending cabinet meetings and representing her husband, Jimmy Carter, in an official capacity at home and abroad.
Carter continues to devote her life to public service. For more than four decades, she has championed the needs of people with mental illness while also advocating on behalf of numerous other causes, including the Equal Rights Amendment, early childhood immunisation, the Cambodian refugee crisis, and homelessness. In 1982, she and her husband co-founded the Carter Center to promote peace and human rights worldwide. They jointly received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.
Text from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery website
Curators: Dr Grace Blakeley-Carroll and Shelly McGuire
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Students Protesting during a May Day March on Flinders Street, Melbourne 1951 Photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
At far-left, John Clendenin, philosopher and president of University of Melbourne SRC. Banner-bearer Jill Warwick, later a TV Producer, vice-president UniMelb SRC. The Forum Theatre on Flinders Street in the background.
That bohemian force of nature who was Australian artist, curator, teacher, writer, philanthropist, poet, gallery owner and collector Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) would have been the first to admit that she was not the most naturally gifted photographer the world has ever known. But Joyce worked assiduously at her craft for over 70 years and became a very fine image maker, picturing her beloved Australia through landscape, documentary and portrait photographs for many a decade.
Joyce had an innate knack of putting people at their ease when having their photograph taken. Never without a camera close at hand, she would approach complete strangers anywhere and ask them whether she could take their portrait… and she was never refused. She had the most gracious way about her, as though she was speaking in communion with her subject: whether that be the contemplation of the Australian landscape, Indigenous Australians, or up close and personal portraits of the ordinary or famous. As author Professor Sasha Grishin observes in his book Joyce Evans (National Library of Australia, 2022) she “was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality… [who] pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.”
Joyce worked hard at her craft and it rewarded her soul in so many unconditional ways. Her energy for life and photography was full of unbridled enthusiasm. It is therefore a blessing that this passion has now found a permanent home: her complete photographic archive, the Joyce Evans Archive, is now housed at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, an institution for which she did much work over the years. And it is wonderful that they have staged this small exhibition of 27 of her photographs. My only quibble would be the lack of photographs of Indigenous Australians in the exhibition. Other than the portrait of Aboriginal activist Faith Bandler (1951, below) there are no other photographs of her immense engagement with Aboriginal communities and peoples in this exhibition – which is a great shame. Joyce was very proud of her photography of and relationship with remote Aboriginal communities and their people and it would have been nice to see that energy reflected in the photographs in this exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Joyce Evans was a cherished friend of Marcus Bunyan.
Many thankx to the National Library of Australia for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The career of Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) spans more than six decades of landscape, documentary, and portrait photography. Her work is preserved through the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, one of our largest collections of images by a contemporary Australian photographer, and contains images which capture essential aspects of Australian life.
“We believed we had an obligation, neither social nor political, to make a difference. We were brought up as children to believe that we had an obligation to make that difference.
If we can find out what we are… that is the artist. This goes to the core element of your being, and the core element of your enquiry remains the same.
If the core part of your life is the search for the truth then that becomes a core part of your identity for the rest of your life. It becomes embedded in your soul.”
Joyce Evans
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Richard Woolcott AC at NUAUS Conference, Largs Bay, S.A. 1951, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013 Photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Richard Arthur WoolcottAC (11 June 1927 – 2 February 2023) was an Australian public servant, diplomat, author, and commentator.
The [photographic] form that Joyce found so early in her life was the music and poetry of humanist photographs, images that are subjective, lyrical, and reveal a state-of-mind. Here is passion and belief in the life of human beings, and the exquisiteness, beauty (and death) of the lived moment. You could label them “social documentary photography” if you were so inclined, but labels don’t capture the frisson of the creative process nor the joyous outcome of Joyce’s portraits. It’s as though Joyce, in a mixture of consciousness and unconsciousness, is making love to the world through her images: neither rational nor cerebral they evoke sensations and feelings, of being here and there, in that past space and time, now, all these years later. These were epic days of change and transformation – of nations, of continents, of cultures and of people. There was death and destruction but there was also such happiness, hope and joy.
Further, what her photographs also depict is the rise of an informed Australian social consciousness after the Second World War. Her important historical and personal photographs shine a light on forgotten people, times, places and actions, such as the broad based youth movements opposition to the atomic bomb, associations and friendships which eventually form the basis for the progressive social and political protest movements of the 1960s. The voices raised later in support of feminism, gay liberation, free love and Vietnam anti-war protests did not appear fully formed, for there was a history of activism… a slow build, a groundswell of public opinion that was the basis for such emerging actions. Nothing ever emerges from nothing.
Marcus Bunyan. “Nothing emerges from nothing,” foreword from the book We Had Such High Hopes: Student Activism and the Peace Movement 1949-1952, A Photographic Memoir by Joyce Evans. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Faith Bandler 1951, printed 2012 Photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Faith Bandler AC MBE (27 September 1918 – 13 February 2015; née Ida Lessing Faith Mussing) was an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage. A campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders, she was best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians.
‘I don’t know what sort of photographer I am, but I try to be an honest one.’ ~ Joyce Evans.
The career of Joyce Evans OAM (1929-2019) spans more than six decades of landscape, documentary, and portrait photography. Her work is preserved through the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, one of our largest collections of images by a contemporary Australian photographer, and contains images which capture essential aspects of Australian life.
This collection-in-focus display contains highlights from the Library’s Joyce Evans Archive, and can be seen in our Treasures Gallery from Tuesday 4 April 2023. Entry to the Gallery is free and no bookings are required.
You can read more about Evans’ life in the NLA Publishing title, Joyce Evans by Sasha Grishin.
Text from the National Library of Australia website.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Cotswold Farm, Menzies Creek, Victoria 1982 Colour photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Moon over Coober Pedy, South Australia 1988, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013 Colour photograph 35.2 x 35cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Windmill on Weerewa/Lake George, New South Wales c. 1983-2012 Colour photograph 35.6 x 37.2cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Desert Car on Gunbarrel Highway, Northern Territory 1991 Colour photograph 21 x 50.6cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Mud Football, Derby, Western Australia 2000, printed 2012 Inkjet on Hahnemuhle photo rag paper 34.3 x 41cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) The Big Galah and Tourist Gift Shop, Kimba, South Australia c. 2006-2012 Colour photograph 33.6 x 50.7cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Gertrude, Boola Boolka Station, New South Wales 2006 Colour photograph 33.9 x 50.7cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Evidence of Severe Drought at Menindee Dam, Menindee, New South Wales 2006 Colour photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Uluru, Northern Territory 1987 Colour photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her 40s, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was 50. She never developed a signature style, nor had she become a template photographer, but she possessed a definite photographic personality. …
As a documentary photographer, Evans considered herself a hunter and gatherer waiting to find the image. She remarked, “as an artist, you channel the energy of the place – the image comes to you as a gift.”
Her oeuvre is remarkable for its diversity and includes landscapes, roadkill, portraiture, social documentation, brothels and erotica – all brought together through a unifying sensibility, the Evans photographic moment. She was also an artist with a social conscience and pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.
Many of Evans’s photographs demand slow viewing and open up gradually. Uluru, Northern Territory, 1987 (above), shows the rock as if carved by nature. In one sense, it is a very simple photograph in which two colours meet – the brilliant red ochre of the rock and the fathomless blue of the sky. It is also an immensely complex photograph with the mysterious slit – like the womb of the earth – in the centre of the composition and galvanising the viewer’s attention.
Gradually, as you focus into the image, there are signs of human presence at the top of the rock: two climbers on the chain pathway, contrasted with organic shapes created through centuries of erosion – a contrast between the temporal and the eternal. Despite the sense of stillness and silence, there is also considerable movement as the light plays over the textured surfaces.
The photograph is rare in that it defines a space but also distils the spiritual essence of the place and asserts an atmosphere of mystery and contemplative presence.
In 2016, when I was working on a monograph on Evans’s work, she noted: “As a photographer – I have a voice – it is an Australian voice, as I do not know intimately any other culture. It comes at a time when you say: ‘This is my country’. One of the sub-texts, when I pick up a camera, is that I always try to identify the stereotypical that is always defined by that which is on the edge.”
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Barbara Blackman 1989 Photograph 30 x 40.7cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Barbara Blackman AO (née Patterson; born 22 December 1928) is an Australian writer, poet, librettist, broadcaster, model and patron of the arts. In 2004, she donated $1 million to a number of Australian music organisations, including Pro Musica, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian National University’s School of Music and the Stopera Chamber Opera Company. In 2006, she was awarded the Australian Contemporary Music Award for Patronage. Barbara Blackman was married for 27 years to renowned Australian artist Charles Blackman.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Philanthropist Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, Langwarrin, Victoria 1995 Photograph 24.9 x 37.0cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Dame Elisabeth Joy Murdoch, Lady Murdoch AC DBE (née Greene; 8 February 1909 – 5 December 2012), also known as Elisabeth, Lady Murdoch, was an Australian philanthropist and matriarch of the Murdoch family. She was the wife of Australian newspaper publisher Sir Keith Murdoch and the mother of international media proprietor Rupert Murdoch. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1963 for her charity work in Australia and overseas.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Bernard Smith, Victoria 2004, printed 2013 Colour photograph 47.5 x 37.5cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Bernard William Smith (3 October 1916 – 2 September 2011) was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, considered the founding father of Australian art history, and one of the country’s most important thinkers. His book Place, Taste and Tradition: a Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945) is a key text in Australian art history, and influence on Robert Hughes. Smith was associated with the Communist Party of Australia, and after leaving the party remained a prominent left-wing intellectual and Marxist thinker.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) Stephen Dupont 2009, printed by David Chisolm and Joyce Evans, 2013 Photograph 35.6 x 35.6cm Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
Stephen Dupont (b. 1967) is an Australian photographer and director working on films, commercials, magazine and newspaper assignments and long term personal projects.
Joyce Evans (Australian, 1929-2019) William Yang 1996 Photograph Joyce Evans Archive National Library of Australia
“William Yang [Aust., b.1943] belongs to a generation of artists who used photography to document alternative lifestyles and celebrate social diversity during the latter decades of the 20th century…Yang is the type of social documentary photographer who carries a camera around his neck, ready to capture things with a certain immediacy, as they happen around him.” ~ Museum of Contemporary Art
Joyce Evans was an unusual phenomenon in the Australian photography scene. Her conversion to photography did not occur until she was already in her forties, while her engagement in professional photography had to wait until she was fifty. She never developed a signature style, nor did she become a template photographer, but she possessed a sensibility that has become characteristic of her work, so that you can quickly recognise a Joyce Evans photograph. She was an artist who possessed a definite photographic personality.
Evans combined documentary photography, social photography, landscape photography and studio practice. She also had a social conscience. Although avoiding didactic images or illustrative propaganda, in her documentary work and in her choice of subjects, she had pursued an agenda that shone a light on racism, social inequality and environmental degradation.
This stylish and generously-illustrated monograph shows how Evans’ photography was about capturing not only the surface appearances, but ultimately the essences, of her subjects. It illustrates the Evans’ belief that in silence and stillness you come to feel the spirit of the subject, and that capturing this spirit was the photographer’s goal.
About the author
Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA established the academic discipline of Art History at the ANU and was the Sir William Dobell Professor of Art History and Head of Art History and Curatorship at the ANU until December 2013. He works internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for services to Australian art and art history. He has published over 25 books and over 2,000 articles and catalogue essays dealing with various aspects of art.
Text from the National Library of Australia website.
Photographers: the exhibition features work by Katalin Arkell, Peter Arkell, Cyril Arapoff, Chris Bethell, A.R. Coster, Firmin, John Galt, David Granick, Bert Hardy, Brian Harris, Hawkins, Nick Hedges, David Hoffman, Tom Learmonth, Steve Lewis, Jack London, Marketa Luskacova, Anthony Luvera, MacGregor, Monty Meth, Douglas Miller, Moyra Peralta, Ray Rising, Reg Sayers, Andrew Scott, Alex Slotzkin, Norah Smyth, Humphrey Spender, Andrew Testa, Paul Trevor, Edith Tudor-Hart, as well as several unknown photographers.
1902: a policeman disturbs a rough-sleeping youth in Whitechapel, one of many photographs by the American author Jack London that illustrated his book The People of the Abyss.
Another insightful, socially-minded (ie. actively interested in social welfare or the well-being of society as a whole) exhibition from Four Corners who champion creative expression, education and empowerment and build upon almost 50 years of radical, socially-engaged approaches to photography and film.
“This timely exhibition draws shocking comparisons with today’s housing precarity, high rents and homelessness. From Victorian slums and the first model estates, to the mass postwar council house construction and the subsequent demolition of many tower blocks, it ends with post-Thatcherite gentrification and its impact on affordable housing.” (Press release)
I have included bibliographic information on the artists in the posting where possible.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. For more information on slum photography and urban poverty please see the essay by Sadie Levy Gale. “Exposed,” on the AEON website 21 August 2023 [Online] Cited 31/08/2023
Many thankx to Four Corners for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Jack London (American, 1876-1916) Homeless people in Itchy Park, Spitalfields 1902 From People of the Abyss
NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition
Images of housing, homelessness and resistance in London’s East End
Our summer exhibition explores how photographers have represented conditions of housing and homelessness for over a century. From workhouses to slums, damp council flats to Thatcherite gentrification, images reveal the systemic poverty that East Londoners have endured and how the medium of photography has been used to campaign for change. We are delighted to feature new artwork by Anthony Luvera, which addresses economic segregation in Tower Hamlets’ housing developments, a phenomenon known as ‘poor doors’. Created with a forum of local residents, this examines the rise of market-driven ‘affordable’ housing and the state of social housing today.
This exhibition is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We particularly thank Getty Images Hulton Archive and Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives for their generous contributions which made this exhibition possible. We are grateful for the kind support of Report Digital.
Text from the Four Corners website
Jack London (American, 1876-1916) View in Hoxton 1902 From People of the Abyss
NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition
Jack London (American, 1876-1916) Homeless women in Spitalfields Garden 1902 From People of the Abyss
NOTE: Photograph not in the exhibition
Not many people know that the famous American author Jack London was also a skilled documentary photographer and photojournalist. He took thousands of pictures over the years from the slums of London’s East End to the islands of the South Pacific.
In 1902 Jack London visited his namesake city London where he took pictures of its people and their everyday life. In the book “The People of the Abyss”, London describes this first-hand account by living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several months, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor.
Even before, Jack London had talked about a book on the London slums with George Brett, one of his publishers. Thus, the writer knew what he was ought to expect ‘down there’: “He meant to expose the underside of imperialism, the degradation of the workers…”. The “evolutionary Socialist” wanted to find “the Black Hole of capitalism”.
With this preconceived vision in his mind, he disguised himself as an American sailor who had lost his ship and went into the East End taking pictures and experiencing their life. To be more precise, he wandered about Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. Jack London disguised as one of the working-class poor and pretended to be one of them, which made it easier for him to get to know the conditions of their everyday life. …
In his 1903 “The People of the Abyss”, the American gives this description of the poor Londoners: “the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town… It is incontrovertible that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country.”
1914: residents of a street in Bow, photographed by the activist and suffragette Norah Smyth. A street in Bow in 1914 where the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS) took care of children during the first world war. Smyth documented children in Bow through a series of intimate street photographs.
Norah Smyth
Smyth, a suffragette, socialist and pioneering female photographer was a founding member of the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) and right-hand woman to Sylvia Pankhurst, who set up the federation in 1914.
Her years of activism included a spell as a prominent member of the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) during the 1920’s. Her active participation in the international socialist movement came to an end with the dissolution of the CWP. After twelve years in the East End of London, it was time to move on. Smyth decided to join brother Maxwell in Florence, where she took up a post at the British Institute.
1920: a poverty-stricken family make a meal from a loaf of bread in Shadwell, traditionally an area of slum housing where the population lived in closely packed tenements.
Exhibition reveals East End’s history of poor housing and homelessness
Opening at Four Corners Gallery this month, Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End takes a visual journey from workhouses to slums, damp tower blocks to homeless shelters, exploring how photographers have represented these conditions for over a century. It sheds light on little-known histories: the tenants’ rent strikes of the 1930s, post-war squatting, and ‘bonfire corner’, a meeting place for homeless people at Spitalfields Market for more than twenty years.
This timely exhibition draws shocking comparisons with today’s housing precarity, high rents and homelessness. From Victorian slums and the first model estates, to the mass postwar council house construction and the subsequent demolition of many tower blocks, it ends with post-Thatcherite gentrification and its impact on affordable housing.
The exhibition features new work by the artist Anthony Luvera, which addresses the rise of economic segregation in recent housing developments across Tower Hamlets, a phenomenon commonly known as ‘poor doors’. Also titled Conditions of Living, this socially engaged artwork by Luvera is built upon extensive research into the social, political, and economic contexts behind the rise of market-driven ‘affordable’ housing provision and the state of social housing today, and is created in collaboration with a community forum of local residents who live in the buildings themselves. This new work builds upon Luvera’s twenty-year career dedicated to working collaboratively with people who have experienced homelessness, and addressing issues of housing precarity and housing justice.
Anthony Luvera says: ‘London is one of the world’s last major cities still to ban the practice of allowing property developers to build ‘poor doors’, despite proclamations by successive governments and mayors about stopping the appalling practice. My work with people experiencing homelessness began twenty years ago in Spitalfields. To be back in Tower Hamlets creating this new work about economic segregation in housing developments and the broken social housing system feels urgent, especially at a time when the costs of living crisis has sunk its claws into the lives of ordinary working people.’
Carla Mitchell, Artistic Director at Four Corners says: ‘this is a highly relevant exhibition, given the extortionate London rents which create forms of social cleansing for long established local communities. We were inspired by Four Corners’ own building, which was a Salvation Army working men’s hostel.’
Four Corners
We are a cultural centre for film and photography, based in East London for fifty years. Our exhibitions explore unknown social histories that might not otherwise be told.
Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives
THLHLA holds outstanding resources for the study of the history of London’s East End. Run by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, collections cover the areas of Bethnal Green, Poplar and Stepney. Explore the changing landscape and lived experiences of individuals and communities in Tower Hamlets through original documents, images and reference books.
1932: portrait of an impoverished family in Stepney. Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most significant documentary photographers of the period. Closely affiliated with the Communist party, she recorded the conditions of the working class.
Edith Tudor-Hart
Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky, was one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Vienna, she grew up in radical Jewish circles. Edith married Alex Tudor-Hart, a British doctor, and the pair moved to England. There she worked as a documentary photographer, closely associated with the Communist Party, compiling a remarkable archive of images of working people in London and later, the south of Wales. Although still active in the 1950s, the difficulties of finding work as a woman photographer led eventually to Tudor-Hart abandoning photography altogether.
1940: a couple carry their salvaged belongings after bomb damage to their home, photographed by photojournalist Bert Hardy, best known for his work for Picture Post
Bert Hardy
If one photographer sums up the spirit and sheer brilliance of the seminal British newsweekly Picture Post, it is Bert Hardy (1913-1995). Alongside Bill Brandt and Don McCullin, former Victoria & Albert curator Mark Haworth-Booth regarded Hardy as one of the three greatest British photojournalists from the genre’s Golden Age. Indeed, Hardy stands alongside Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Werner Bischoff as the giants of 20th-century photography.
London born and entirely self-taught, Hardy was one of the UK’s first professionals to embrace the 35mm Leica in favour of a traditional large-format press camera. The smaller camera and faster film suited his instinctual shooting style and allowed him to consistently create something unique even in high-pressure situations. His confidence and courage enabled him to produce some of the most memorable images of the Blitz and postwar England and Europe. An inspiration to a generation of photojournalists, Hardy was often greeted as warmly by his subjects as he was by his peers – so much so one dubbed him the ‘professional Cockney’.
Anonymous. “Bert Hardy,” on the Getty Images Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 04/08/2023
1951: workers stand on the ruins of Trinity church in Poplar, which was destroyed during the Blitz, and overlook new housing built in the wake of slum clearances.
Monty Meth
Monty was born above a barber’s shop in Bethnal Green, east London, the youngest of three sons of Millie Epstein, a domestic servant, and Max Meth, a Czech Jewish immigrant who found intermittent work as a bread roundsman and tailor.
Educated at the local Mansford St Central school, Monty learned photography at the Cambridge and Bethnal Green boys’ club, which he credited with rescuing him from teenage pilfering, and at 14 went to work as a messenger for the Fleet Street picture agency Photopress, then on to the Topical Press agency. He returned after second world war service in the Navy to become a prize-winning photographer and photojournalist.
Martin Adeney. “Monty Meth obituary,” on The Guardian website Sun 28 Mar 2021 [Online] Cited 03/08/2023
1961: the now demolished Stifford Estate in Tower Hamlets, built in the late 1950s to replace slum housing, and comprised of three 17-storey tower blocks. Photographed by lifelong Stepney resident David Granick, who recorded the East End pre-gentrification.
David Granick
David Granick (1912-1980) was a photographer who lived in the East End his whole life. His colour slides laid untouched until 2017 when a local photographer, Chris Dorley-Brown, examined them at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives. These images capture the post-war streets of Stepney, Whitechapel, Spitalfields and beyond in the warm hues of Kodachrome film at a time when black and white photography was the norm.
David Granick was born in 1912 and lived his whole life in Stepney. A Jew, a keen photographer and a long-serving member of the East London History Society, he gave lectures on various local history themes illustrated with colour slides taken by himself or his fellow members of the Stepney Camera Club. Bequeathed to Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives after his death in 1980, where they have been preserved ever since, these photographs show the East End on the cusp of social change.
The London East End In Colour 1960-1980 David Granick 2019 Hoxton Mini Press
Photojournalist David Hoffman has spent more than 40 years photographing the happenings on the streets of London, with a particular focus on his East End hometown, and with his lens predominantly focused on those less fortunate than most.
His subjects have included the homeless, the addicted, and the enraged, and spanned slums, shelters, and the streets, in good spirits and bad.
‘Really, my work is about oppression,’ he explains, ‘It’s not about class, but how people’s lives are constrained and shaped by society. And that’s most visible at the bottom of society. You and I are constrained, too, but in far less, and far less damaging, ways.’ Besides, he adds, ‘No one’s going to get a feature published on how the middle class is having a tough time.’
What defines his work, Hoffman says, is that ‘I’m always looking for extremes.’
Hoffman’s first photographic training came from a course at the University of York, where, with Chris Steele-Perkins, he set up a Student Union-sponsored darkroom. Steele-Perkins went on to work for Magnum Photos and become their president. In contrast, after two years Hoffman ‘slung the course in at the same time that they slung me’.
He moved back to London in 1969, to the East End in 1970, and worked ‘rubbish jobs’ to support his photography.
‘I did van driving and jobs like that. I would work to save up money, and then take time off to do photography (until my money ran out).’ A polytechnic course helped: ‘It was a poor course and taught me nothing but I had three years being supported on grants so I could really put some effort into my photography’, and squatting ‘meant that I didn’t have to spend my time working to raise the rent and could build my photography into a survivable income.’
1975: homeless men in Spitalfields, photographed by the Czech documentarist Markéta Luskačová.
Marketa Luskacova
Marketa Luskacova’s work is marked by her own lived experiences. Themes like cultural identity and social behaviour are at the core of her candid photographs. Born in Prague in 1944 during the communist regime, Luskacova graduated from Charles University with a degree in Sociology in 1967 and studied Photography at FAMU (1967-1969). Around this time, she began to take photographs as a means to document local traditions in some of the poorest communities of Slovakia.
She moved to London in 1975, where she continued her career as a photographer. She began to document her surroundings, producing captivating portraits of everyday life in some of the least privileged areas of the city. She felt particularly drawn towards the cultural atmosphere of Brick Lane and Spitalfields street markets, where she used to buy her own groceries.
‘I was poor and I needed to do my shopping there as it was the cheapest place to buy things. I could identify with the people in Brick Lane because they were immigrants and they were in need of cheap goods. Once I had done my shopping, I would leave my bag with a stall holder while I took my photographs.’
In her series London Street Markets, Luskacova documents daily life in the city, capturing powerful and emphatic portraits of its people and their traditions and offering a glimpse into the diverse cultural fabric of London East End’s society in the seventies.
‘I don’t go to Brick Lane regularly anymore, sometimes six months pass between one visit and another … I photographed what I saw there and what I thought it was good to record, be it a face or a smile, an animal or a shoe. I believe in the evidential quality of photography, and I know that unless things are done in a visually interesting way they are not remembered.’
1976: children play on rubble on waste ground on Usher Road, Tower Hamlets.
Tom Learmonth
Born in Liverpool but brought up in England, Wales, India and Australia, he studied on the first BA degree in photographic arts in the UK, at the Polytechnic of Central London. “There I developed a social and political view of what photography could and should do,” he says. “My work concentrated on the community in the East End of London. After graduating I worked in community photography projects in the East End and freelanced as a photojournalist in the wide sense of the word; I wrote as well as photographed.”
1978: Mrs Baldwin on the balcony of her flat on the Mansford Street Estate, Bethnal Green. The estate of more than 700 homes was built over 20 years from 1957.
1994: bailiffs move along rooftops towards protesters as they evict occupants of Claremont Road on the route of the M11 motorway, prior to the demolition of the houses.
2004: assisted self-portrait of Ruben Torosyan by Anthony Luvera. Luvera started the project in 2001, helping homeless people to document their lives and experiences.
Anthony Luvera
Anthony Luvera (born 1974) is an Australian artist, writer and educator, living in London. He is a socially engaged artist who works with photography on collaborative projects, which have included working with those who have experienced homelessness and LGBT+ people. Luvera is an Associate Professor of Photography at Coventry University… Luvera has worked extensively with people who have experienced homelessness. Many of these projects use his “assisted self-portrait” methodology, where the subject of the photograph, assisted by Luvera, makes and selects the pictures.
I had never wanted to photograph homeless people before. I’d read the (de)constructive writings by photo critics on ‘others’, poverty and representation. I knew about the complexities of the find-a-bum school of photography trounced by Martha Rosler. So in December 2001, when it was put to me by a friend to get involved as a photographer at Crisis Open Christmas, the annual event for homeless people in London, the invitation threw me. “I’d much prefer to see what the people I met would photograph.”
Over the following months, the conversation with my friend about photography and homelessness bounced louder in the back of my head. I became extremely interested in how homeless people have been represented and in questions about the process of representation itself. To what degree could the apparently fixed proximities between photographer, subject and camera be dismantled and reconfigured? How could a ‘subject’ become actively involved in the creation of a representation? What use, if any, would all this serve in the meanings offered in the final presentation?
I sourced 1,000 cameras and processing vouchers, and spent every day and many late nights at the following Crisis Open Christmas…
Between 25 and 40 people dropped in to each following weekly session. Around a big communal table, we gathered to look at the photos, to show and tell the stories held in the images, and to drink endless cups of tea. The sessions were high-energy, swarming with vibrant personalities. The youngest participant was 19 and the oldest was nearing 90. Different people got involved for different reasons. Some wanted to make snapshots of their special times, favourite places, friends and family. While others had ideas about art and concepts to explore with photography. I explained how to use the cameras and listened to each participant’s ambitions, encouraging everyone to simply go and do it. I never brought along photography books or showed my own photographs, nor did I tell any of the participants how or what to photograph. When looking at the photographs I asked each participant to pull out their favourites, or the images that best represented what they wanted to show. With permission I took scans of these photographs and held the negatives in a file. Release forms and licenses were provided, written especially for the project by specialist intellectual property copyright lawyers. Permission was not always given, which was always completely respected.
I never asked why anybody was homeless. Though over time stories came out with the photographs. In the four years the sessions have taken place I have worked with over 250 people. Every person I’ve met has a very different and particular story to tell. Some are entirely abject, while others are remarkable for their ordinariness. All are compelling in their own way. And while there may be commonalities between the experiences of particular individuals, not one situation of any participant could be seen as being broadly representative of the cause or experience of homelessness.
Ruben Torosyan
Ruben Torosyan left Georgia in the late 1980’s when the country was still under harsh Soviet rule. Not issued a birth certificate and unable to get a passport, Ruben was determined to get to the capitalist West to create a better life for himself. He spent over five years traveling across Europe attempting to obtain political asylum in over 15 different countries. In every place he was unsuccessful, largely for the same bureaucratic reasons, boiling down to the incredible fact that Ruben has absolutely no official way of proving who he is or where he comes from. In Spain Ruben smuggled himself on to a shipping freight container. Squished in with bottles and bags for his excrement, and packets of biscuits to eat, he travelled for 35 nights in complete darkness to get to New York. After failing to get legal rights to remain there, and escaping detainment, he struggled on the streets of Brooklyn in conditions worse than back home in Georgia. After two years, determined not to go back to Georgia, Ruben did the same shipping container trip to Ireland to get to London, where shortly after we met.
Ruben came to the sessions with a very clear idea about what he wanted to use the cameras to photograph in making his contribution to the archive; the discrepancy between what he expected London to be and what, in his experience, it actually was. Ruben’s depictions of dirty, litter strewn streets (serendipitously replete with the newspaper headline, “I Feel Used”), a naked man with mental health issues running down the road, people begging and a poor woman walking by without shoes, are for him, depictions of the filthy, hostile, brutal and ugly place that is London. Where there is “no mercy and the food is rubbish”.
Anthony Luvera. “Photographs and Assisted Self-Portraits,” in Source, Issue 47 2006 published on the Anthony Luvera website [Online] Cited 03/08/2023 (with permission of the author)
Four Corners 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN Nearest tube: Bethnal Green, Central Line
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11am – 6pm Thursday 11am – 8pm (July and on 31 Aug)
A short text this week because I’m suffering from sinusitis and headache.
Annelies Štrba’s “intimate family scenes… breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction” are the antithesis – or anti-thesis – of last weeks posting were the curators conceptualised 1930s American documentary photography as a sort of reality-dream.
Here there is no need to conceptualise such a response to the photographs for Štrba’s unconventional, poetic photographs really are a mixture of dream and reality. At the limits of visibility Štrba’s glances, glimpses, clefts, over / under exposures, double exposures, colour disfigurations and ingressions – the process by which a potentiality enters into actuality – offer to the viewer a “no place” of becoming, where “recognition” is the trigger of exposure.
Like the sudden gust of wind drops the ripe apple. (Minor White)
It is difficult in a posting to leave an “impression” of an artists body of work in so few photographs, especially an artist who works in series of images. Therefore, I heartily recommend viewing the familial architectural Shades of Time series (1970-1997) on Annelies Štrba’s website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is an observer and magician: She captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. When her children were small, the camera was part of everyday family life; at night, the mother would develop her prints in the darkroom. Again and again, she adopted new techniques and forms of presentation, for instance when she began working with video in the 1990s and when she eventually started to paint over photographs printed on canvas. While her earlier analogue works play with snapshot aesthetics, her video stills and edited digital photographs achieve the intensity of expressionist paintings.
The Fotostiftung Schweiz collection contains a big group of Štrba’s early black-and-white photo canvases and colour photographs – intimate family scenes, but also bleak facades of large-panel-system buildings and high-rises.
This retrospective exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, presents these works for the first time. They are positioned around two newly conceived projections of the work cycles with which Annelies Štrba translated her view of the family into images: Shades of Time brings together photographs taken between 1974 and 1997, showing the children Sonja, Samuel and Linda as they grow up. Noonday is dedicated to her children’s children. When these series are seen together, the interweaving of eras becomes tangible. The visual worlds, characterised by subjectivity and intuition, merge to form one comprehensive cosmos.
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned contemporary artists using photography. In her works, she captures fleeting moments and creates dream images; life and art intertwine. This exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz presents, for the first time, large-format photo canvases from the collection and a projection specially conceived for Fotostiftung Schweiz.
The exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” focuses on Annelies Štrba’s early works. Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and the projection Shades of Time show images from the years 1974 to 1997. These works are framed by her later expressionist video stills, a newly conceived projection with photographs from the years up to 2015 and staged scenes of fairy-tale princesses sleeping in enchanted landscapes. All the pictures revolve around the theme of family. Their juxtaposition enables an understanding of how this artist’s personal and artistic development over time is reflected in her view of children and grandchildren.
From the attic to Kunsthalle Zurich
Despite her photographic apprenticeship, which she commenced at the age of 16, Annelies Štrba is a self-taught artist, as she never attended an art school. In 1969, she married Bernhard Schobinger, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil, where the pair lived. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes.
It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in photographs that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Annelies Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition. Against all expectations and advice (from the men involved), Annelies Štrba decided to enlarge her intimate sketchy pictures on photo canvases, in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and the visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Shades of Time: changes in the visual language
As the children grew older and the artist became more successful, her radius of movement increased: In the 1990s, Annelies Štrba received a studio scholarship from Landis+Gyr. She travelled to England, Scotland, Ireland and Japan, and exhibited in Berlin, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo. In 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released her extensive monograph Shades of Time (which has long since been out of print). In this book’s series of images, a change can be seen in her visual language and attitude to life over the years: landscapes passing by the car window, house facades, gardens, but above all Sonja and Linda as young women continuing the game with the camera, on equal footing, and obviously enjoying it. The birth of the first grandchild, Samuel-Maria, brings a Madonna-like depiction of maternal love and care into Štrba’s visual cosmos – a motif that had been absent until then, not least because the mother had remained hidden behind the camera.
First video works and video stills
Also in 1997, Štrba produced her first video, because a filmed portrait of the artist was required for the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by this technique, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images. By adjusting or saturating the colours and using visual distortion, she created special aesthetics that looked painterly and technical at the same time. The motifs also liberated themselves more and more radically from the domesticity of the previous years. Landscapes, cityscapes and flowers served as visual composition elements, as did the silhouettes of her adult daughters.
However, still photography and children did come back to dominate Annelies Štrba’s imagery once again. From countless photographs of her grandchildren, especially Linda’s daughter Shereen, a new cycle of works emerged, culminating in the 2015 publication Noonday: Colourful scenes, many of which were taken at the artist’s home in Amden, show a children’s paradise comprising brightly coloured fabrics, cushions, blankets and a trove of princess dresses.
“My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”
The photo canvases that were purchased in 2015 and 2021 with support from the Förderverein Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others, and supplemented by generous donations from the artist, are presented for the first time in this exhibition, whose title quotes a poem by Emmy Hennings, The motifs also appear in a digital interpretation of the Shades of Time slide show, newly conceived in 2020. In addition, Štrba has composed a projection from the Noonday picture series specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur, with a soundtrack produced by her son, Samuel Schobinger. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. The inclusion of selected video stills, mounted behind glass in a large format, also visualises the themes of the artist’s life and her tireless pursuit of image forms for her cosmos.
With the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds”, Fotostiftung Schweiz continues its commitment to honouring female photographers. Like previous presentations of female artists, such as Pia Zanetti and Manon, this show offers a focused retrospective on an oeuvre that shaped the history of photography in Switzerland. The exhibition was curated by Teresa Gruber, curator at Fotostiftung Schweiz.
Press release from the Fotostiftung Schweiz
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Linda (1991, below); Hiroshima (1994, below); and Linda and Sonja with Samuel-Maria (1995, below)
Annelies Štrba (b. 1947) is a keen observer, but also a magician: She intuitively captures fleeting moments, then transforms them into images that come across as symbolic. Today, she is one of Switzerland’s most internationally renowned artists working with photography. Her first solo exhibition though, in 1990 at Kunsthalle Zurich, was provocative. An unknown at the time, she appeared in public with her intimate family scenes, defying all expectations and breaking away from the rules of perfect photographic reproduction. Shortly afterwards, Annelies Štrba’s works were exhibited in Berlin, London and New York. She has continued to amaze ever since. Always open to new stylistic devices, techniques and modes of presentation, she translates her view of the world into unconventional poetry.
In this exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz, her early work comes to the fore: Black-and-white photo canvases, colour photographs and (in a reconceived digital interpretation from 2020) the slide show Shades of Time present images from the 1970s through to 1997. They show Štrba’s children Sonja, Samuel and Linda growing up. There are also indications of an initial shift in the visual language here, towards more movement and a playful handling of motifs, in which the daughters participate as young women. These almost traditional works are framed by the video stills created later. By means of manipulation carried out on the monitor, colours are remixed and stills dissolve into shimmering structures.
Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren then brought her back to photography. With a mobile phone camera and digital photography, she accompanied her heroines and heroes through everyday life, opening up a new colourful cosmos, which she encapsulated under the title Noonday in 2015. From that group of works, Štrba has also composed a projection, specifically for this exhibition in Winterthur. The Shades of Time and Noonday projections run alternately in the exhibition, one after the other, uniting their eras in a never-ending flow of images. Finally, princesses sleeping in fairy-tale landscapes (usually granddaughter Shereen is the performer) whisk the observer away to the land of dreams: The artist had begun to work on the picture surfaces with brush and paint. Štrba made reference to art history and her own images, reproducing, defamiliarising and creating objects, into which the marks of time are, in turn, inscribed.
In 2015 and 2021, Fotostiftung Schweiz was able to purchase a group of Annelies Štrba’s canvases, with support from the society Friends of Fotostiftung Schweiz, among others. These works were supplemented by generous donations from the artist. Representing various phases of her early work, they are now being exhibited together for the first time – and confronted with later works.
Biography
Annelies Štrba was born in 1947 in Zug. After training as a photographer and completing her first professional assignments, she married Bernhard Schobinger in 1969, whom she accompanied and assisted in his work as a goldsmith and artist. Štrba came into contact with the art scene in her husband’s gallery for contemporary art, which he opened in Richterswil. Mostly though, she took care of their three children: Sonja, Samuel and Linda. With the little ones in tow, she sold selected clothes and shoes for the punk and new wave scene at the Bürkliplatz flea market in Zurich to support their modest household. Meanwhile, without any ambition at first, she documented family life with her camera, developing her prints at night in the attic and storing them in boxes. It was in Bernhard Schobinger’s 1987 publication Devon-Karbon-Perm that Štrba’s photographs first attracted attention. Her presentation of Schobinger’s jewellery in pictures that look raw and unmediated, and reproductions of handmade prints with scratches and streaks, bear witness to a confident photographic language, vehemently rejecting any smoothness, perfection or conformity. However, it was not until 1990, at the age of 43, that Štrba first appeared as an artist in her own right. Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, who was Kunsthalle Zurich’s curator at the time, offered her an exhibition.
Triptych
The first room of the exhibition introduces Annelies Štrba’s various spheres by means of a brightly coloured triptych – a group of three, albeit constituting one female figure. By extracting two stills from a video work and mirroring one of them, the artist has created a ‘community’ and arranged it as a psychedelic altarpiece: Shown frontally and immersed in golden brown, the internally calm queen is bowed to by her brightly dressed servants on the left and right – one in blue, the other in magenta, with glowing contours. Due to the coarse resolution of the video images, the surface and figure disintegrate into pixel-like patches of colour, bringing to mind the structure of paintings. The pictures’ saturated defamiliarised colouring makes reference to expressionist works.
Canvases
For her first exhibition, at Kunsthalle Zurich in 1990, Annelies Štrba enlarged her photographs on canvases in formats of up to 100 by 150 centimetres. From the very start, she emphasised the difference between a mother’s snapshots hoarded in a photo album and these visual works that were now revealed to the public. The formats and the rough unprotected surface of the canvases gave the photographs the presence of paintings. At the same time, they came across like washed-out yellowed pictures from a bygone era. Štrba abstracted and thereby intensified the peculiar mood of the everyday scenes. She superimposed a heaviness, a seriousness, on the photographs of the children playing, sleeping or sitting together in the kitchen, which turned them into symbolic images of the human condition: loneliness in togetherness, eeriness in the familiar, the depths of the family.
Kitchen pictures
The kitchen was the heart of the Richterswil house in which Annelies Štrba and Bernhard Schobinger raised their three children Sonja, Samuel and Linda together. Here, they did not merely cook and eat, but also received visitors, discussed and pondered. In this room, which looks cramped and humble, cosiness and chaos merge. Years pass, and suddenly adult daughters are sitting at the same table. The video Max, Annelies Štrba’s first video piece, marks a turning point in her oeuvre and shows a bizarre kitchen spectacle. Although all movements are in slow motion, the activeness of Sonja and Linda setting and clearing the table contrasts with the rather passive attitude that they exhibit in many photographs. In flowing dresses, they make preparations, but these do not lead to anything and instead seem to represent an inherently strange ritualistic process. Annelies Štrba produced this video when a filmed portrait of the artist was required for a 1997 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and she did not want to leave the making of it to anyone else. Enthused by the possibilities for manipulation offered by the technology, which was new to her, she put the still camera aside and concentrated on video works, in addition to video stills produced as stand-alone images.
Shades of Time projection
Also in 1997, Lars Müller Publishers released an extensive monograph that encompassed Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. Its title, Shades of Time, was provided by a sign on a shop front, photographed from a moving car during a trip to England. Years and impressions pass by in an associative and only roughly chronological sequence. The shots of sleeping and playing children are replaced by house fronts and landscapes. The heaviness of the early domestic scenes dissolves into increasing movement and colourfulness. This shift in photographic language can also be interpreted autobiographically. In 2001, Annelies Štrba conceived a slide show in which the images were projected in groups of three, with a techno audio accompaniment by Peter Ford. The duplication and mirroring of some individual motifs give rise to arrangements that sometimes appear ornamental or even sacral. The digital version of this projection was made in 2020, in collaboration with video company in Zofingen.
Noonday projection
While growing up, Annelies Štrba’s grandchildren presented her with a new world of images: a chaotic clarity, a banal colourfulness, in which there is also room for laughter and group photos. Annelies Štrba cleverly combined the children’s joy in dressing up and acting with spontaneous photo shoots. Mostly though, she reacted impartially to life as it happened, proudly taking part in the daily routine and marvelling at it. Štrba herself remains invisible, but her backdrop, her colourfully designed nest, as if made for her little protagonists, frames the action. In 2015, the book Noonday, comprising over three hundred pages, was released by Lars Müller Publishers. In 2023, the artist has collaborated with video company to compose a Noonday projection, adding new motion to the captured moments, with the accompaniment of a soundtrack by her son Samuel Schobinger.
Buildings
Already in her first exhibitions, Annelies Štrba placed architectural photographs between the pictures of her children. The bleak facades of residential blocks and high-rise buildings that she photographed on her travels through Silesia contrast with the depictions of cosiness at home. Often, the photographer seems to just glance at these buildings in passing. People also live in most of them, including families. On the other hand, the ruins of Einstürzende Neubauten (collapsing new buildings) captured in the Polish city of Sosnowiec recall Soviet planning and memorialise the Berlin band of the same name, founded in 1980. Štrba’s interest in experimental and electronic music is also incorporated into her video works and projections.
Fairy-tale pictures
The motif of sleeping children connects the Shades of Time and Noonday groups of works with NYIMA and Momoka. For the latter, Annelies Štrba edited digital photographs, some of which were taken in the context of Noonday, but also took new photographs: staged scenes, mostly featuring her granddaughter Shereen. All of them show resting girls – in forests, in meadows or on sofas, seemingly immersed in deep sleep. In their princess dresses, they appear to be from another time. Defamiliarisation of colours and superimposition of multiple exposures transform the photographs into visualisations of these dainty figures’ dreams. Aesthetically and compositionally, they resemble the famous painting by the Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, which depicts the drowned Ophelia lying in a stream, surrounded by plants, flowers and her magnificent gown. The romantic beauty of Štrba’s pictures can also evoke associations with the relationship between sleep and death.
Sleeping children
The exhibition’s final room completes the circle and leads back to the beginnings of Annelies Štrba’s photographic oeuvre. While the kitchen has already been examined as an important motif, we now look into the bedroom or children’s room. The artist remembers how, after long evenings in the darkroom, she used to find her children asleep. She would often feel an urge to photograph them like this, cosy in their nests, or surrounded by evidence of play. However, the bed is also a platform on which the state of being awake can be presented: Time and time again, the artist produced portraits of her children sitting on beds.
Text from the exhibition leaflet
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at right, Linda with Shereen (2000, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Annelies Štrba – “My Otherness Colourfully Unfolds” at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich showing at left, Nyima 410, Nyima 409, Nyima 408 (2009, below); and on the right a photograph from the series Shades of Time (1970-1997)
In Tibetan Nima (also spelled as “Nyima”) is also a female or male given name which means ‘the sun’, also the one with radiance of the Sun. And in Hebrew as a female given name it means ‘grace, mercy’.
Curator: Dr. Josie R. Johnson, Capital Group Foundation Curatorial Fellow for Photography at the Cantor Arts Center
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cypress Root and Rock, Seventeen Mile Drive 1929 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
On November 18, 1929, Edward Weston drove north from his home in Carmel to traverse the scenic coastal route of Seventeen Mile Drive. He made nine photographs of cypress roots and rocks that day, including this image. Less than three weeks earlier, the stock market had crashed, setting off a panic that plunged the United States into the Great Depression. Money troubles plagued Weston throughout his life, but on this November day, he was completely enthralled with the landscape. He wrote in his daybooks soon after that these photographs were “among the best seen and most brilliant technically I have yet done.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Transcending reality
While I admire the clever recontextualisation of the work of American photographers from the 1930s in this exhibition – into the sections Natural Wonders, Divine Figures, Everyday Splendors, Living Relics, The World of Tomorrow, Street Theater and Surreal Encounters – I am unsure that those photographers would ultimately see their work as a fusion of reality and dream, their documentary photographs “being both real and dream-like” that the concept of this exhibition proposes.
While all photographers use their imagination to visualise and take their photographs, to then extrapolate that these images are both reality-dream is, to my mind, a theoretical fancy that takes a kernel of the truth and views the images through a contemporary lens. Nothing wrong with that I hear you say and as the photographer Richard Misrach observes, “Photographs, when they’re made, can shift meaning with time, and often do.” And I agree that the meaning of photographs changes over time, is an ever fluid and shifting feast.
But can you imagine any of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers out in the field saying to themselves, “Oh! let’s take a dreamscape of these poor travelling people trying to survive the deprivations of hunger, poverty and joblessness”. It just wouldn’t happen. They didn’t think like that because it was a different era. They were concerned with representing with clarity and focus, with compassion and imagination not the melding of reality and dream, but the visceral feeling of the life being lived under the most trying of circumstances.
Following on from thoughts on the stunning landscape photographs of Ansel Adams in the last posting, one has to agree with Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne when she says that,
“The term “landscape” can be ambiguous and is often used to describe a creative interpretation of the land by an artist and the terrain itself. But there is a clear distinction: the land is shaped by natural forces while the artist’s act of framing a piece of external reality involves exerting creative control. The terms of this ‘control’ have be theorised since the Renaissance and, while representations of nature have changed over the centuries, a landscape is essentially a mediated view of nature.”1
All photographs are a mediated view of reality, captured through the imagination of the artist and (usually) the gaze of the camera lens… but that does not necessarily mean that they are a melding of reality and dream: of course they can be – but in the context of 1930s American photography what is more likely is that the artists where attempting to create something that transcends the moment. As that fantastic American landscape photographer Robert Adams observes,
“At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands in front of the camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect – a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”2
To my mind American photographers of the 1930s took photographs not only to document but also to honor what was greater and more interesting than they were. Not as a melding of reality-dream as this exhibition proposes, but as an exploration of what is possible through the interface of the image and imagination, the interface as Ansel Adams put it “between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself.”
Finally, the unknown to me photographs of Wright Morris are superb because of their very capricious fidelity.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Isobel Crombie. Stormy Weather. Contemporary Landscape Photography (exhibition catalogue). Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2010, p. 15 2/ Robert Adams. Why People Photograph. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1994, p. 179
Many thankx to the Cantor Arts Center for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
In the fall of 1930, Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, yet Bass-Becking penned this statement one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. This exhibition of over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks offers an alternative understanding of 1930s photography in the US by taking Bass-Becking’s phrase as its point of departure.
The work of five photographers featured in the Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at the Cantor Arts Center – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Woven into this display is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries that present new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, this exhibition contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination.
“If you have a conscious determination to see certain things in the world you are a potential propagandist; if you trust your intuition as the vital communicative spark between the reality of the world and the reality of yourself, what you tell in the super-reality of your art will have greater impact and verity. … without the elements of imaginative vision and taste the most perfect technical photograph is a vacuous shell.”
Ansel Adams. “Exhibition of Photographs” (1936), reproduced in Andrea Gray. Ansel Adams: An American Place, 1936. Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, 1982, p. 38 quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 17.
The present exhibition [exhibition of contemporary photography in November 1930 at Harvard University] attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limits of reproduction or imitation. … Photography exists in the contemporary consciousness of time, surprising the passing moment out of its context in flux, and holding it up to be regarded in the magic of its arrest. It has the curious vividness and unreality of street accidents, things seen from a passing train, and personal situations overheard or seen by chance – as one looks from the window of one skyscraper into the lighted room of another forty stories high and only across the street.
Lincoln Kirstein, introductory note, Photography 1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930, n.p. quoted in Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 26.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Migrant Mother, California 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The Cantor Arts Center is pleased to present Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941, an exhibition featuring over 100 photographs, periodicals, and photobooks. This material collectively pushes against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary, and instead illustrates that artists of this era frequently used photography to ignite the imagination. The exhibition and the expansive art historical narratives it illuminates result from Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s study over the past three years of the Cantor’s Capital Group Foundation (CGF) Photography Collection – a major gift of over 1,000 twentieth-century American photographs.
Currently serving as the museum’s CGF Curatorial Fellow for Photography, Johnson comments: “The Cantor’s holdings of American photography from the 1930s are especially rich, and the generous terms of the Capital Group Foundation Fellowship enabled me to delve deeply into this fascinating chapter of photo history. Sifting through these prints allowed me to set aside what I thought I knew about this material and take a fresh look, giving me a new appreciation for the novel approaches these artists developed in the midst of a profoundly difficult historical moment.”
The work of five photographers from the CGF Collection – Ansel Adams, John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, Wright Morris, and Edward Weston – comprises the core of the exhibition. Its conceit draws from a curious phrase by Stanford biology professor Laurence Bass-Becking about the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream.” Though few people today would associate dreaminess with the Great Depression, Bass-Becking penned this statement in the fall of 1930, one year into the economic turmoil that would last until the nation’s entry into World War II. Reality Makes Them Dream exemplifies the spirit of experimentation that Bass-Becking describes by highlighting an undercurrent of artistic practices in the United States that were sometimes more akin to those of Surrealism taking place concurrently in Europe.
To tease out these under-examined connections, and de-emphasise the association of American photography of the 1930s with the unbiased documentation of real people and events, works by the five core CGF artists are interwoven with a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, both iconic and overlooked, such as Walker Evans, Hiromu Kira, and Dorothea Lange. Edward Weston’s bold experimentation with forms both natural and man-made – exemplified by highly evocative works such as Pepper No. 35 (1930) and Egg Slicer (1930) that inspired Bass-Becking’s comment – blends harmoniously with contemporary prints from the community of Japanese-American photographers in Los Angeles that often supported Weston’s work. Examples of fashion and editorial photography, including colour images by Toni Frissell and Paul Outerbridge, draw connections across the galleries with photographs of airplanes, household items, and tourist sites made by seasoned artists and amateur hobbyists alike. Helen Levitt’s surreal tableaux on the streets of New York echo Berenice Abbott‘s studies of the metropolis with multiple layers of history jumbled into the same block. Ansel Adams’s pristine images of the Sierra Nevada hang alongside little-known photographs by Seema Weatherwax, his darkroom assistant in the late 1930s who was similarly enchanted with nature but developed a vision all her own. Despite gaining the respect of not only Adams, but also Weston, Lange, and Imogen Cunningham, Weatherwax shared her own work publicly for the first time in 2000 at the age of 95. Her photographs evidence her technical abilities and, not unlike her peers on view in this exhibition, find beauty in the everyday. Altogether, these photographs effectively illustrate Johnson’s three year exploration of the collection which revealed that despite the very real financial, political, and cultural challenges of the Great Depression, certain photographers chose not to focus on the camera’s cold mechanical precision, but rather used it as a medium to spark their imaginations – fusing reality and dream into one. …
The first exhibition curated by a CGF fellow, Reality Makes Them Dream is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue. It features an essay by Johnson and contributions from the community of photography scholars at Stanford University – Kim Beil, associate director of the ITALIC arts program for undergraduates; Yechen Zhao (PhD in art history ’22); Anna Lee, photography curator for special collections at the Stanford Libraries; Rachel Heise Bolten (PhD in English ’22); Altair Brandon-Salmon (PhD candidate in art history); Marco Antonio Flores (PhD candidate in art history); and Maggie Dethloff, PhD, assistant curator of photography and new media at the Cantor.
Press release from the Cantor Arts Center
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Gano Grain Elevator, Western Kansas 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
In Dr. Josie R. Johnson’s exhibition … Johnson interweaves the Capital Group Foundation Collection images with additional works by other artists, building narratives that nuance our understanding of American photography in the 1930s. Her essay pushes against longstanding narratives that overemphasise the purity of straight photography and the veracity of documentary photography in this decade. Her research reveals instead that many artists used the medium of photography to fuse reality and dream into one.
Johnson divides Reality Makes Them Dream into seven sections exploring subjects commonly photographed in the 1930s as being both real and dream-like. Looking beyond well-traveled approaches to photographs captured in the decade defined by the Great Depression, “Natural Wonders” features awe inspiring organic forms from still life and nature photography. “Divine Figures” presents methods of elevating the human figure to the status of a god-like being in portraiture, nude studies, dance photography, and photographs of modern labourers. “Everyday Splendors” explores the transformation of commonplace scenes and objects into vibrant masses of shapes and textures. The portraits, architectural photographs, and still life images in “Living Relics” exemplify the tendency of these photographers to depict emblems of a purer and more noble past that they hoped to reclaim. “The World of Tomorrow” considers the opposite end of the temporal spectrum, where photographers captured glimpses of a futuristic, machine-driven utopia in urban or industrial scenes. “Street Theater” encompasses street photography and urban architectural studies that approach their subjects as if they are actors and stage sets in their own make-believe world. Finally, “Surreal Encounters” highlights Surrealist strands in the work of American photographers as they emphasised the uncanny and fantastical in the physical world around them.
Veronica Roberts, Director of the Cantor Arts Center
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Sculptor’s Tools, San Francisco, California 1930, printed c. 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1930, a meeting with the photographer Paul Strand inspired Ansel Adams to abandon the use of soft-focus camera settings and textured printing papers in pursuit of “absolute realism.” However, Adams did not renounce the photograph’s capacity to convey an artist’s imaginative vision; instead, he launched a crusade for photography to be recognised as a “pure art form.” This image of the tools belonging to the San Francisco sculptor Ralph Stackpole stages Adams’s main argument at the time: Photography is no less a form of art than sculpture, so long as the artist’s tools (a camera or a hammer and chisel) are employed directly, without imitating another medium.
Wall label from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Sumner Healy Antique Shop 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judge Leonard Edwards Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Woven into this exhibition is a diverse selection of photographs by their contemporaries, adding breadth to this survey of American photography of the 1930s and presenting new narratives about artists and images, from the iconic to the overlooked. This project interprets the term “American” loosely, encompassing photographers who lived in the United States for extended periods but who did not necessarily hold citizenship, as well as locations including Alaska and Hawaii, which were then still US territories. Thirteen of the forty-two photographers featured in this catalogue were born outside the United States, reflecting diasporic patterns that brought Japanese immigrants in the early 1900s and European immigrants – especially Jews fleeing antisemitism – in the 1910s and mid-1930s.7 Many turned to photography as a way to earn a living, and their photographs often expressed their enchantment with the dramatic natural landscapes or unfamiliar cultural practices they encountered in their newly adopted nation.
Together, this material demonstrates that Bass-Becking’s idea [Bass-Becking used a curious phrase to describe the photography of his friend Edward Weston: “Reality makes him dream”] offers an interpretive lens for a much wider swath of photography than either he or Weston might have realized. Against the typical history of 1930s photography that views the work of this period as primarily documentary in style and purpose , this project contends that a key goal for artists of this period was to use photography to ignite the imagination, even while pursuing an increasingly transparent approach that mirrored the world as they saw it. From the delicate curve of a seashell to the jostle of a crowded city street, reality made the photographers and their audiences dream.
Footnote 7. Another ten were second- and/or third-generation immigrants.
Josie R. Johnson. “Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 11.
Natural Wonders
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) Dogwood, Yosemite National Park, California 1938 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams is best known today for the majestic landscape photographs he made throughout his life, but in the 1930s he gravitated toward tightly framed images of a more intimate scale. This photograph of dogwood blossoms exemplifies Adams’s close looking at nature from this period. Even among the grand vistas of Yosemite, he often turned his lens to humbler sights while retaining the same density of detail across the picture plane, illuminating multitudes in a patch of moss or a pile of pine needles. Adams explained at the time: “Honest simplicity and maximum emotional statement suggests the basis of a critical definition of photography as an Art Form – that is, as a means of more than factual statement.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cedric Wright (American, 1889-1959) Wildflowers 1930s-1940s Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
George Cedric Wright (April 13, 1889 – 1959) was an American violinist and a wilderness photographer of the High Sierra. He was Ansel Adams’s mentor and best friend for decades, and accompanied Adams when three of his most famous photographs were taken. He was a longtime participant in the annual wilderness High Trips sponsored by the Sierra Club. …
In an article published in 1957, which included eight full-page photographs, Wright described his thoughts about how high mountain beauty resembles great music: “Beauty haunts the high country like a majestic hymn, sings in cold sunny air, the brilliant mountain air – makes of sunlight a living thing – floats in cloud forms – filters changing floods of light ever clothing the mountains anew. Beauty arrives in deep voice of river and wind through forest, swelling the chorus, giving sonority universal proportions.”[Wright, Cedric. “Trail Song: An Artist’s Profession of Faith” Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club. 42 (6): 50-53]. He dedicated these words to Sierra Club leader William Edward Colby, and they became part of the introduction to Wright’s posthumous book, Words of the Earth.
Bradford Washburn (American, 1910-2007) Mount La Perouse c. 1933 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Bradford Washburn became a well-known mountaineer and aerial photographer while still in college. In the early 1930s, he climbed and surveyed multiple peaks in the Fairweather Range of southeastern Alaska, including Mount La Perouse. Although Washburn’s photographs functioned as topographical records and route maps, he also displayed them in artistic contexts, where they elicited deeply poetic and emotional responses from viewers. In the 1940 issue of U.S. Camera Magazine, an editor wrote of Washburn’s Alaskan photography: “Sea and mountain and plain, join island and cape and bay in a beauty that is the true setting for the fantasy of northern lights and midnight sun. … Here is an America that is no more a last frontier or hinterland, but a fruitful part of America, present – a glowing promise to America, future.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Henry Bradford Washburn Jr. (June 7, 1910 – January 10, 2007) was an American explorer, mountaineer, photographer, and cartographer. He established the Boston Museum of Science, served as its director from 1939-1980, and from 1985 until his death served as its Honorary Director (a lifetime appointment). Bradford married Barbara Polk in 1940, they honeymooned in Alaska making the first ascent of Mount Bertha together.
Washburn is especially noted for exploits in four areas.
1/ He was one of the leading American mountaineers in the 1920s through the 1950s, putting up first ascents and new routes on many major Alaskan peaks, often with his wife, Barbara Washburn, one of the pioneers among female mountaineers and the first woman to summit Denali (Mount McKinley).
2/ He pioneered the use of aerial photography in the analysis of mountains and in planning mountaineering expeditions. His thousands of striking black-and-white photos, mostly of Alaskan peaks and glaciers, are known for their wealth of informative detail and their artistry. They are the reference standard for route photos of Alaskan climbs.
3/ He was responsible for creating maps of various mountain ranges, including Denali, Mount Everest, and the Presidential Range in New Hampshire.
4/ His stewardship of the Boston Museum of Science.
Hy Hirsh (American, 1911-1961) Untitled Late 1930s Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Hyman Hirsh (October 11, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – November 1961, Paris, France), was an American photographer and experimental filmmaker. He is regarded as a visual music filmmaker, as well as one of the first filmmakers to use electronic imagery (filmed oscilloscope patterns) in a film. …
Photography style
Hirsh’s early photographs were influenced by California photography movement Group f/64, who had first exhibited in 1932 at the de Young Museum where Hirsh later worked. In 1932. Hirsh’s photo work from that period used sharply focused black and white renderings and little manipulation in their process. Hirsh was then influenced by the social documentary of the Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers who recorded the impact of the Great Depression on displaced workers and their families. Hirsh followed suit, exploring social issues through visages of vacant lots, rusted machinery, and other images of urban decay. Recognition for these photographs led to seven exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco from 1935 to 1955. A 1936 group show entitled “Seven Photographers” at L.A.’s Stanley Rose Gallery put him alongside the leading figures of West Coast photography, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Brett Weston. Hirsh also appeared in the publication U.S. Camera in 1936, 1937 and 1939.
In 1943 San Francisco Museum of Art featured Hirsh in a solo exhibition. By now Hirsh had moved away from the straight-ahead aesthetic of Ansel Adams and Group f64, and his artistic photography took more cues from the world of experimental film. He made surrealist self-portraits by superimposing negatives of himself with broken sheets of glass. Later in Paris, as a study for one of his films, he shot colour slides of old wall posters that were peeling, exposing layers of posters underneath.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Bananas 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Despite his many accolades, Edward Weston struggled to support himself throughout his career as a photographer. He found an important group of patrons in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, where several artist groups sustained a lively community of photographers in the 1920s and ’30s. The play of light, movement, and space in Shinsaku Izumi’s The Shadow (below) exemplifies their experimental ethos. In this context, the photographer Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979) organised three exhibitions of Weston’s photography between 1925 and 1931. At the final exhibition, he purchased this print (above) from Weston, perhaps because he shared Weston’s excitement for the pictorial possibilities of the rhythms and textures in a bunch of bananas.
Wall label from the exhibition
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (June 7, 1910 – November 24, 1990) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty, the Jim Crow South, and deprivation. …
Post trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
Career
While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do “ladies’ stories”, Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.
Post’s photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered.
In 1941 she met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Post Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA, but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Post Wolcott’s images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. The first monograph on Marion Post Wolcott’s work was published in 1983. Wolcott was an advocate for women’s rights; in 1986, Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough. … Speak with your images from your heart and soul” (Women in Photography Conference, Syracuse, N.Y.).
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Pepper No. 35 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ansel Adams (American, 1902-1984) High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon National Park, California c. 1935, printed 1979 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Divine Figures
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Overview of the City 1935 Gelatin silver print Gift of Ayleen Ito Lee Cantor Arts Center Collection
In 1935, 25 of Stackpole’s bridge photographs were shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Peter Stackpole (1913-1997) was an American photographer. Along with Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, and Thomas McAvoy, he was one of Life Magazine‘s first staff photographers and remained with the publication until 1960. He won a George Polk Award in 1954 for a photograph taken 100 feet underwater, and taught photography at the Academy of Art University. He also wrote a column in U.S. Camera for fifteen years. He was the son of sculptor Ralph Stackpole.
Peter Stackpole (American, 1913-1997) Mother and Daughter 1934 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection
Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) Langston Hughes, Chicago, Illinois, 1941 1941, printed 2002-2003 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Ekstasis (Torso) 1935 Gelatin silver print Given in memory of Belva Kibler by Barbara Morgan Cantor Arts Center Collection
Barbara Morgan first attended a performance by Martha Graham’s modern dance company in 1935. The experience so deeply impressed her that she began photographing Graham and her fellow dancers regularly, becoming a recognised expert in the genre within a few years. Morgan typically captured a dancer’s entire body, but for Graham’s solo in Ekstasis, she explained: “When by moving a light which cast a certain shadow I suddenly felt a heroic scale evoked. … The torso expressed it all, and I felt as if I were on a lonely shore between Egypt and archaic Greece discovering a forgotten Venus.”
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Class, Olympic High Diving Champion, Marjorie Gestring 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marjorie Gestring, a future Stanford undergraduate from Los Angeles, won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in women’s springboard diving at age 13. John Gutmann photographed Gestring the following spring at a diving exhibition held as part of the weeklong festivities for the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. For Gutmann, the “rigid geometry” of her dives struck him as an “absolutely modern machine style.” More broadly, his image of Gestring soaring through the air captures the ethos of a moment when, having just completed the longest suspension bridge in the world, humans seemed capable of any accomplishment.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Nude (Charis) Floating 1939, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Herbert Matter (American born Switzerland, 1907-1984) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Herbert Matter (April 25, 1907 – May 8, 1984) was a Swiss-born American photographer and graphic designer known for his pioneering use of photomontage in commercial art. Matter’s innovative and experimental work helped shape the vocabulary of 20th-century graphic design. …
As a photographer, Matter won acclaim for his purely visual approach. A master technician, he used every method available to achieve his vision of light, form and texture. Manipulation of the negative, retouching, cropping, enlarging and light drawing are some of the techniques he used to achieve the fresh form he sought in his still lifes, landscapes, nudes and portraits. As a filmmaker, he directed two films on his friend Alexander Calder: “Sculptures and Constructions” in 1944 and “Works of Calder” (with music by John Cage) for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
Russell Lee (American, 1903–1986) Jim Norris and wife, homesteaders, Pie Town, New Mexico 1940 Dye transfer print Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang (Chinese-American, 1910-1969) Chief Owasippe 1939 Gelatin silver print The Michael Donald Brown Collection, made possible by the William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Art Acquisition Fund and the Asian American Art Initiative Acquisitions Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Chao-Chen Yang came to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago. He photographed in his spare time, regularly submitting prints like this one to the national circuit of photography salons. At first glance, this photograph might appear to be a portrait of the man named in the title. In fact, “Owasippe” references a legend about a Potawatomi chief who died waiting for his sons to return from a journey. The story originated in Michigan around the turn of the 20th century; by the 1930s, it had been popularised around the Midwest by the Boy Scouts of America. Yang likely heard the tale in Chicago and photographed a model whose true identity remains unknown. Although the headdress was familiar to settler audiences as a shorthand for “Native,” the one in this photograph references different cultural traditions than those of the Potawatomi. Reality thus became fodder for a fantasy that captured the interest of many viewers in the late 1930s, when Yang’s photograph won multiple awards from camera club juries across the country.
Wall label from the exhibition
Chao-Chen Yang (1910-1969) was a Chinese American photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Born Hangchow, China, Yang received degrees in foreign relations and art education from the University of Hwin-Hwa, Shanghai, and became the director of the Department of Art at the Government Institute in Nanking. Coming to the United States in 1934 to work at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, he took night courses in art at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1935 to 1939. He was transferred to Seattle as Deputy Consul and founded the Seattle Photographic Society in 1941. He served as director of the Northwest Institute of Photography and concentrated in colour photo printing processes.
Lit dramatically from above, the face of the “chief” emerges stoically from beneath a feathered headdress, the sartorial signifier of “Indianness” lifted by white Americans from the Oceti Sakowin Oyate of the Northern Plains (plate 27 [here above]). Concentrating on some distant point beyond the frame, he squints as if staring into the sun, but the nondescript background suggests that the photograph was likely made in a studio setting. All the better to decontextualize and generalize its subject, because the aim is not to reproduce the specificity of an Indigenous person, but to practice the visual shorthand popularized decades earlier by the photographer Edward S. Curtis and his North American Indian portfolios (fig. 2).1 The stereotyping function of this picture is reinforced by its title: “Chief Owasippe” is not Oceti Sakowin Oyate, but an invented leader of the Potawatomi, whose name continues to adorn the oldest Boy Scout camp in the United States, founded in 1911 in Michigan by a group of businessmen from Chicago.
Yet this reductive representation of the “vanishing Indian” – whose authenticity and natural purity came from his exteriority to the temporal and societal boundaries of modernity – was produced by a recent arrival to the United States with no personal connection to the politics of Indigenous assimilation, domination, and expropriation that underpinned this representational type. Chao-Chen Yang, employee at the Chinese consulate in Chicago, made this picture while enrolled in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. The photograph is his attempt to speak a foreign language: not English per se but the dialect of American identity, which is so filled with fantasy and contradiction that it feels right, with the theme of this exhibition in mind, to call it a language of dreams. What fluencies must the photographer possess to move freely within another person’s dream?
By the time Yang took this photograph, American artists’ fetishistic valorization of Indigenous culture had turned away from the Plains tribes from which the chief’s feather headdress originates and toward the southwestern tribes in New Mexico. In the 1920s, writers and artists including D. H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan, John Sloan, and Marsden Hartley projected an “authenticity” onto Pueblo visual culture, which justified their appropriation of its subject matter and form to create a native modernist aesthetic.2 Many photographers did the same, including Ansel Adams and Wright Morris (plates 47 and 48). For its time, Yang’s photograph spoke a dated form of Indigenous appropriation, but the numerous exhibition stamps on the version of the print held by his estate reveal that this image was widely received by photography clubs across America – New York, Denver, all the way to Seattle, where Yang would become deputy consul in 1941.
Vexingly, the racist exoticization and flattening of Indigenous identity performed by the photograph also demonstrate its creator’s fluency with the visual language of artistic-minded amateur photographers in America…
Yechen Zhao. “Photographic Fluency (Its Pleasures and Pains): Kyo Koike and Chao-Chen Yang,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 55.
Everyday Splendors
Shinsaku Izumi (Japanese-American, 1880-1941) The Shadow c. 1931 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
In The Shadow (c. 1931, above), Izumi plays with the late-afternoon light, picturing a man riding a bike. In the upper-right-hand corner of the image, we see part of the front wheel; the entire rear wheel; the bicycle seat; and the cyclist’s feet, perfectly balanced and planted on pedals, riding past our line of vision. The rest of the image shows the bike traveling past a rectangular manhole cover, on the left side; and, on the right, the front wheel appears prominently as it casts a long shadow, with the individual spokes disappearing with each rotation. Against the brushed surface of the street, hard and soft patterns of gray emerge diagonally across the image…
The Shadow [is] a study of motion, light, and shadow, and, on another level, a metaphysical commentary on “the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life.”
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the Wilkins family making biscuits for dinner on cornshucking day at Mrs. Fred Wilkins’ home near Tallyho, Granville County. North Carolina 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Judith Hochberg and Michael Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Sonya Noskowiak (American, 1900-1975) Washing, San Francisco, California 1937 Gelatin silver print San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sonya Noskowiak (25 November 1900 – 28 April 1975) was a 20th-century German-American photographer and member of the San Francisco photography collective Group f/64 that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She is considered an important figure in one of the great photographic movements of the twentieth century. Throughout her career, Noskowiak photographed landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. Her most well-known, though unacknowledged, portraits are of the author John Steinbeck. In 1936, Noskowiak was awarded a prize at the annual exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She was also represented in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Scenes from San Francisco” exhibit in 1939. Ten years before her death, Noskowiak’s work was included in a WPA exhibition at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California.
Photography
Noskowiak primarily focused on landscapes and portraits between the 1930s and 1940s. Noskowiak embraced straight photography and used it as a tool to give newer meaning to her photographs. She emphasized the forms, patterns, and textures of her subject, to enrich the documentation of it.
Her earliest works reflect the work of photographers of her period and their thoughts on Pictorialism. In her earliest works, such as City Rooftops, Mountains in Distance (the 1930s), there is a graphic quality to how she abstracted the piece. There is the dark, strong industrial structure that contrasts with the light sky. There are almost no logs seen on the buildings, as if they are they are blurred beyond readability. This is an example of the ‘New Objectivity’ movement, which focused on a harder, documentary approach to photography.
Noskowiak often composed her photographs to intersect her subjects, which gave a more dynamic feel to her photographs. Examples of these are provided by her works Kelp (1930) and Calla Lily (1932). The composition crops the boundaries of the kelp plant and flower and draws the viewer’s eye to the texture of the plants. The kelp is so abstracted that if not for the title it would be unrecognisable. In Calla Lily, her use of chiaroscuro gives a luminous, almost floating feeling to the photograph.
Her photograph Agave (1933) is an intimate viewing of the cactus plant – another example of a composition separating the object from what is made visible shown and emphasising the plant’s beautiful pattern.
Noskowiak utilised the same technique of straight photography in her pictorial portraits and commercial works. The same intimacy shown in Agave can be seen in portrait works such as John Steinbeck (1935) and Barbara (1941). In both, she creates an intimate atmosphere, in which the viewer feels as though they are there interacting with the subjects. Even in her more commercial works, Noskowiak’s style and technique still remained important. In her untitled 1930s photograph, you have a model with a broad-brimmed hat that conceals her face. The composition of the piece relieves viewers from thinking about the photograph as an advertisement. The cropping and position of the model offers closeness, and viewers get the feeling of being in the moment with the model more than simply responding to the photo as an advertisement.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Cement Worker’s Glove 1936, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Junk 1934 Gelatin silver print Gift of Florence Alston Swift San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Henry Swift Collection
Seema Weatherwax (Jewish-American, 1905-2006) Yosemite 1940 Gelatin silver print Courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Stanford Libraries
Seema Aissen Weatherwax was a photographer and social activist who was part of the Film and Photo League, worked with Ansel Adams in Yosemite, and shot Woody Guthrie and migrant workers at a California FSA camp. …
Emigrating from Tsarist Russia with her parents in 1913 to escape persecution and the conscription act, Seema Aissen graduated from high school and began studying science courses in Leeds, England. A few years after her father’s death, her mother took the three daughters to Boston to join relatives, and Seema became involved in photography. She moved to Southern California in 1929, lived in Tahiti for a year, and upon returning to Los Angeles joined the Film and Photo League in 1934. Ansel Adams asked her to run his darkroom in Yosemite in 1938. The following year she assisted Adams with the first Camera Workshop in Yosemite. In 1941 Seema met the writer Jack Weatherwax, and together with folk singer Woody Guthrie visited the Shafter Farm Security Administration Camp, managed by noted civil rights advocate Fred Ross. At Shafter she photographed Dust Bowl refugees and their surroundings. The Weatherwaxes moved to Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Following the death of her husband, Seema continued her activism, including working with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and at the age of 95 organized the first exhibition of her work. She passed away in 2006, two months shy of her 101st birthday.
Text from the Online Archive of California website
Prints made by Seema at Yosemite reveal a photographer whose confidence in her technical abilities allows her to pursue photography in daunting weather conditions7 and to render transcendent beauty through everyday forms, both natural and man-made. Her work from this period focuses not only on postcard-ready vistas but also on the physical structures that locate and organise human experiences within these natural surroundings: like a slush-covered road impressed by tire tracks, or a fawn viewed through a gridded windowpane. 8 In one winter scene from 1940, titled simply Yosemite, tall wooden utility poles with triple cross-arms anchor a dozen snow-coated cables (plate 38 [above]). Set amidst dark tree trunks laced with white boughs, these power lines are resplendent in the snow. They stream down the vertical axis of the scene, indelible reminders of a Yosemite modernised for tourism – reminders that Adams typically left out of his artistic work. Seema’s prints from the 1940s are variously signed “Seema,” “Seema Aissen,” and later “Seema Weatherwax,” reflecting the surname she adopts upon marrying writer and political activist Jack Weatherwax in 1942.
Anna Lee. “Seema (Sophie) Aissen Weatherwax: Photographer,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 72.
Living Relics
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Meeting House, Southbury, Connecticut 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris developed a personal practice of pairing his photographs with texts, publishing the first of many of these combination projects in 1940. The page-long text paired with a variation of this photograph does not describe an observed scene but rather a scene imagined by the narrator, who sits “like a man caught in a spell” seeing “what nobody’d seen before.” By presenting this text with his photograph of an unidentified, weather-worn wooden building, Morris vaguely evokes a moment from the past, but leaves its meaning open to interpretation. As with memories and daydreams, the viewer’s impressions are subjective and imprecise, if not total figments of the imagination.
Wall label from the exhibition
Wright Morris (1910-1998) was a renowned writer and affective photographer. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers. Devoid of figures, his photographs depict everyday objects and atmosphere. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style.
Born in Nebraska, Morris attended Pomona College in Claremont, California. After graduation he traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. This same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. In 1956, Morris won the National Book Award for his tenth book, the unillustrated A Field of Vision. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962-1974 at San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. Morris’s acclaimed novel, Plains Song won American Book Award for Fiction 1981.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
Anonymous. “Wright Morris,” on the Center for Creative Photography website Nd [Online] Cited 04/07/2023
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) House in Winter, near Lincoln, Nebraska 1941, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Wedding Cake House, Kennebunkport, Maine 1941, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Eroded Plank from Barley Sifter 1931, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Alma Lavenson (American, 1897-1989) Eucalyptus Leaves 1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
The next year Lavenson made her own picture specimen, titled Eucalyptus Leaves, a forking branch against white ground (plate 49 [above]). The leaves are rounded, almost gingko-like, the stems slender and bending, a young plant or newer shoot, likely blue or silver dollar gum. It is hard to make sense of the light, which comes from the left, above, and the right – which is to say that there is an unnatural quality to the photograph. This looks like a studio picture, though Lavenson rarely worked indoors. But there are ways the photograph is in conversation with others made during this period, after she met Weston in 1930. It is a graceful picture, attentive to form and surface. Almost a decade later Lavenson would write, “In all my work – whether shacks or flowers or landscapes – I aim for perfection of texture and fineness of detail.”2 Up close the silver gelatin print has a lithographic quality, in its etched shadows and shining branch, the velvet opacity of the leaves.
Footnote 2. Alma R. Lavenson. “Virginia City: Photographing a ‘Ghost Town,'” in U.S. Camera Magazine 10 (June-July 1940), 66, quoted in Audrey Goodman. A Planetary Lens: The Photo-Poetics of Western Women’s Writing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021, p. 75.
Rachel Heise Bolten. “Eucalyptus Leaves,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 87.
The World of Tomorrow
Akira Furukawa (American born Japan, 1890-1968) Cargo 1929 Bromoil Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Egg Slicer 1930, printed 1952-1955 by Brett Weston Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Ruth Bernhard (American born Germany, 1905-2006) Kitchen Music 1930-1933 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Hiromu Kira (American, 1898-1991) The Thinker c. 1930 Gelatin silver print Dennis and Annie Reed Collection
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. 1937 Gelatin silver print Elizabeth K. Raymond Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen (American, 1917-1991) Times Square in the Rain 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Lou Stoumen began photographing Times Square when he first moved to New York City at age 21. Decades later, he still recalled the day he made this photograph, when he rode an elevator to the top of the Times Building, then waited to snap the shutter until the rain “turned the great X of Broadway and Seventh Avenue into silvery rivers.” Stoumen continued photographing this famed stretch of the city for nearly half a century, but he remembered the years around 1940 as special: “Those days Manhattan was the center of the world, and Times Square was its heart.”
Wall label from the exhibition
It was raining in New York. Streets slick as oil, people hurrying past the trams and buses in Times Square with their umbrellas up. September 1940: the penultimate year of peace for America. An ocean away, bombs were falling on London, nightly. But here, for now, people could still think of it as a European war.
Some of the crowds in Lou Stoumen’s photograph Times Square (plate 59 [above]) might have come to catch Gone with the Wind, Wallace Beery’s new western Wyoming, or Busby Berkeley’s latest musical spectacular Strike Up the Band, starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. Times Square: Here are the cinemas and the burning neon lights and the billboards for cigarettes and automobiles and cold, fizzy drinks. All the things you can buy and see during an autumn in New York.
Lou Stoumen was 23 when he made the photograph: The elevator at 1475 Broadway took him up the first 19 stories and then he took the stairs up the final six flights, to the top, and walked out onto the roof ledge.1 From there he pointed his camera out at 46th Street and Broadway capturing the TIMES sign from behind. The building had once been the home of the New York Times, but the newspaper had departed in 1913 and now the sign stood as an announcement of a location, a cry too, an exclamation of the times. …
Margaret Bourke-White photographed Drilling Rig, The Texas Co. (1937) (plate 56) within the oil well’s tower, looking up at the vertiginous pipes that pumped petroleum from beneath the ground. The cutting shadows cast by the latticework of the rig patterns the image with a rigorous geometry, all forms reduced to a series of rectangles and triangles. Humanity has disappeared from view, to be replaced by science and engineering, unchallengeable, mathematically correct.
Bourke-White had begun working for the newly established Life magazine a year earlier, already one of America’s most prominent news photographers.5 Yet she had been fascinated with shooting machinery since the late 1920s, claiming that “the beauty of industry lies in its truth and simplicity; every line is essential therefore beautiful.”6 The drilling rig is undoubtedly elegant; shorn of context, it becomes impossible to establish its scale or relationship to its environment. It stands as an autonomous creation, a pure distillation of form as function. Irresistibly, its towering pipes and metal superstructure, disappearing into the distance at the top of the photograph, recall the skyscrapers of Stoumen’s New York. Their symbiosis is more than coincidence: It is the drilling rig that enables the tower block. This is the stuff that the World of Tomorrow is built upon.
1/ William A. Ewing. Ordinary Miracles: The Photography of Lou Stoumen. Los Angeles: Hand Press, 1981, p. 22. 5/ Stephen Bennett Phillips. Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection, in association with Rizzoli, New York, 2002, p. 83. 6/ Margaret Bourke-White in 1930, quoted in Theodore M. Brown. Margaret Bourke-White: Photojournalist. Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1972, p. 31.
Altair Brandon-Salmon. “Sign of the Times,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, pp. 101-102.
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) “Switch to Dodge,” An American Altar, Detroit 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Street Theater
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Corrugated Tin Façade 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets 1936 Gelatin silver print Gift of Daniel Mattis Cantor Arts Center Collection
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Powerhouse and Palm Tree, near Lordsburg, New Mexico 1940, printed 1979-1981 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Center of town. Woodstock, Vermont. “Snowy night” 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift of Michael and Sheila Wolcott Cantor Arts Center Collection
Marion Post Wolcott made this photograph halfway through her three-year appointment as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration. Though most of her work (and that of the FSA overall) was understood at the time as “documentary” or factual in nature, this is one of several photographs by Post that tended to stir the imagination. For instance, Sherwood Anderson reproduced this photograph in his 1940 book on rural America, Home Town, to illustrate his metaphor for New England winters as times of peaceful slumber.
Wall label from the exhibition
Aaron Siskind (American, 1903-1991) Untitled from St. Joseph’s House c. 1938 Gelatin silver print Vincent Bressi Fund Cantor Arts Center Collection
Robert Disraeli (American born Germany, 1905-1988) Sunday – After Church 1933 Gelatin silver print Cantor Arts Center Collection Committee for Art Acquisitions Fund
Wright Morris (American, 1910-1998) Untitled 1940 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt (American, 1913-2009) New York c. 1940 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
Helen Levitt avoided the descriptive or symbolic titles favoured by the previous generation of photographers, preferring instead to leave her photographs untethered to specific people or locations within New York. The viewer is thus given free rein to make associations or compose narratives from the streetscapes in each photograph, just as the shoe shiner in this image may have conjured his own daydream from the action unfolding on the street.
Wall label from the exhibition
Surreal Encounters
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monster on Broadway, New York City 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
John Vachon (American, 1914–1975) Girl on Lobster, Washington, D.C. 1938 Gelatin silver print Gift of R. Joseph and Elaine R. Monsen Cantor Arts Center Collection
By the early 1930s, discussions about Surrealism had spread from the art world into the mainstream, even if few Americans subscribed to, or even understood, its main tenets. Not long after, Americans began to use the words “surreal” and “surrealistic” to describe anything bizarre or dreamlike. Each of these three photographs could have fit this unofficial classification; by locating the extraordinary among the ordinary – a monster in the city, a woman riding a lobster, and another woman enacting the text on the magazine in her hands – each image is thoroughly uncanny.
Wall label from the exhibition
John Gutmann (American born Germany, 1905-1998) Monument to the Chicken Center of the World, Petaluma, California 1936 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
After photographing the town of Petaluma, north of San Francisco, John Gutmann sent dozens of prints to his agent in New York. He explained: “This little town of 9,000 inhabitants and its surrounding ranches is today one of the greatest, if not the greatest poultry center in the world. … Thousands and thousands of little chicken houses, covering the country, the low built hatcheries, the many signs and symbols, trucks fully loaded with poultry or eggs give a very unique character to this district.” Gutmann photographed this roadside monument several times, likely noticing the traces of past vandalism visible in this image.
Wall label from the exhibition
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Hot Coffee, Mojave Desert 1937, printed 1977 by Cole Weston Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
Although Edward Weston regarded his photography with the utmost seriousness, his writings and accounts from friends reveal a spirited sense of humour. This photograph offers a rare example of this playful side. According to Charis Wilson, Weston’s travel companion at the time, they were struck by the absurdity of the hot coffee advertisement in the middle of the desert; the fact that the location bore the name “Siberia” added a second layer of irony.
Wall label from the exhibition
Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) The Repulsive Bed 1941 Gelatin silver print Gift from the Alinder Collection Cantor Arts Center Collection
In the summer of 1941, Edward Weston visited Louisiana with Clarence John Laughlin as his guide. Before driving to the same building that Walker Evans had photographed six years earlier, they visited another antebellum plantation house where Laughlin photographed a friend among the ruins. Weston shared Laughlin’s fascination with the ornate architecture, laden with history as it slowly deteriorated back into swampy earth. Yet Laughlin understood these forces as an embodiment of Surrealism. For him, New Orleans was a place “unparalleled in its violence of decay” but also where “the human spirit reached a singular flowering” in the face of this destruction.
Wall label from the exhibition
Dubbed “The Father of American Surrealism,” Clarence John Laughlin (American, 1905-1985) was the most important Southern photographer of his time and a singular figure within the burgeoning American school of photography. Known primarily for his atmospheric depictions of decaying antebellum architecture that proliferated his hometown of New Orleans, Laughlin approached photography with a romantic, experimental eye that diverged heavily from his peers who championed realism and social documentary.
Referring to his own fraught relationships with women, Laughlin described this ethereal photograph of a woman lounging atop a collapsed, tattered bed in a decaying house as an “Image of those who endure marriage, without love, because of convention. [The] marriage bed becomes repulsive, and part of it turns into a monster head.” The veil across the woman’s face gives her a haunting look, as if she is fading away along with the house around her. The cracks in the wall reinforce the idea of a fractured, failing marriage, while the shadows envelop her in darkness.
Text from the High Museum of Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, White Chapel, Louisiana 1935, printed 1974 Gelatin silver print Gift of Dr. J. Patrick and Patricia A. Kennedy Cantor Arts Center Collection
Walker Evans admired the photography of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), a French photographer whose images of Paris caught the interest of a new generation of photographers shortly before his death. Though neither photographer self-affiliated with Surrealism, Evans recognised that “in some of his work [Atget] places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists.” Evans occasionally emulated Atget’s style, as in this image of an empty Louisiana plantation house, leading some American critics to describe Evans’s photography in a manner befitting a Surrealist. One 1938 review stated, “In some miraculous way [Evans’s] objects or persons acquire a super-reality, the implications of which echo across the years to startle and haunt, to jolt and to enchant.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Nathan Lerner (American, 1913-1997) Uncommon Man 1936, printed 1983 From Nathan Lerner – Fifteen Photographs: 1935-1978 Gelatin silver print Gift of the Mattis Family Cantor Arts Center Collection
Frederick Sommer (American, 1905-1999) Jack Rabbit 1939 Gelatin silver print Gift of Lisa and John Pritzker San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Sommer’s Jack Rabbit (1939) was one of the first 100 negatives the artist made with his new 8 x 10 inch view camera recommended by his friend Edward Weston.1 Living in the arid climate of Arizona to protect his lungs against the recurrence of tuberculosis, the casualties of the desert – rabbits, horses, coyotes – became some of Sommer’s signature photographic subjects.2 Weston, too, had a penchant for photographing dead things. Weston’s preference was for the corpses of birds, often those of shore birds near his coastal California home.3 Photo historian Robin Kelsey has made an excellent comparison of the two artists’ “rival” treatments of deceased animals, grounded in their diametrically opposed aesthetic concerns. As in Jack Rabbit, Sommer used evenly dispersed light to create a visual field that privileged no one thing above the rest,4 reflecting both an aesthetic and a philosophical orientation concerned with the essential oneness of the world.5 On the other hand, Weston treated his dead birds in the same manner as his nudes or his peppers, expressing what he termed “the universality of basic form.”6 Using light to emphatically trace the contours of the birds’ forms, Weston visually separated them from their backgrounds and transformed them into abstract objects. Aligned with their concerns, the two artists typically chose different moments of death and decay to capture: For Sommer it was desiccated or decaying bodies and for Weston it was stripped bones or newly deceased bodies.
Although Weston’s Dead Man, Colorado Desert (1937) similarly focuses on the clearly defined form of a newly deceased body,7 there are crucial distinctions in its composition. Whereas Weston’s birds are photographed from above, aiding in their abstraction, the dead man is photographed from an angle to the side, which emphasizes both his human features and the bramble-filled space that he occupies (plate 83 [below]). His waist, legs, and one arm continue outside the frame to the top right. This makes Dead Man fundamentally different from Weston’s birds, because the man exists not as an abstract form, but as a body in space, a space that we can imagine Weston and his wife and collaborator Charis Wilson sharing and a space that we can imagine inhabiting ourselves.
Maggie Dethloff. “Violable Edges: Frederick Sommer’s and Edward Weston’s Photographs of Death in the Desert,” in Josie R. Johnson. Reality Makes Them Dream: American Photography, 1929-1941. Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2023, p. 131.
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Vulture, Mojave Desert 1937
Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958) Dead Man, Colorado Desert 1937 Gelatin silver print The Capital Group Foundation Photography Collection at Stanford University Cantor Arts Center Collection
While traveling through the Colorado Desert on a photography excursion for his Guggenheim Fellowship, Edward Weston came across the corpse of a recently deceased man. He had apparently become ill and stranded while traversing the harsh landscape. Despite the unexpected, and certainly disturbing, nature of this encounter, Weston seamlessly fit the subject into his photography practice. He made two photographs, one of which Life magazine published alongside a short narrative by Weston titled “Desert Tragedy.” In the text Weston explained: “He must have died that day. But whatever aid he got came too late, hunger and privation had wasted his body and the merciless sun had dried him up. But he was quite beautiful in death.”
Wall label from the exhibition
Cantor Arts Center 328 Lomita Drive at Museum Way Stanford, CA Phone: 650-723-4177
Frames of reference: spaces that humans construct (mainly interiors that serve specific functions) – for example, spaces of pleasure, corporate arenas, sanctioned death chambers, subterranean spaces, human habitats for captured animals, fields of industrial agriculture.
Format: The square format perfectly supports the themes being investigated, balancing and tensioning the pictorial plane within each image.
Colour palette: The limited colour palette of each image heightens the atmosphere and focuses the senses of the viewer.
Lighting: As in a movie set or theatrical production, whether ambient light, spot light, interior light.
Staging: Nothing is out of place. These are utilitarian/utopian/dystopian spaces.
Everything is perfectly ordered within Devlin’s human(less) worlds… and yet the photographs are instilled with a hyperreality where everything is not as it seems, where spaces exist as a “reality” we do not normally perceive.
The luscious heart shaped red bath surrounded by a halo of lights and flowered red carpet; the unexpected, alien flippers in the round portal of an undersea lodge; “a surgical lamp that looks like an oversized star in the night sky which illuminates the pictorial space”; a bright yellow electric (in colour and intent) chair that looks like an oversized piece of Lego; the ether-reality of the purple haze glacier paradise at the Matterhorn. The spaces are full of human presence even as we acknowledge their physical absence. Their fossilised fingerprints are all over these fantastical creations – these disturbing, sometimes grim, fairy tales.
While acknowledging a debt to the history of photography through the New Color Photography movement, New Topographics, “the direct and objective methodology pursued by August Sander”, and “the strict comparative typology practiced by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher” … the photographs are most definitely Devlin’s own. They hold a particular signature, more theatrical than ever New Topographics, Sander or the Bechers.
“The way each space is staged can tell us something about its intended impact and use.” And the recognition and interpretation of that staging can ultimately tell us as much about the artist as about the space itself: perfectionist, environmentalist, passionate creative artist who perceives difference in the everyday, who is aware, aware of the different realities that life (re)presents.
It’s best to view Devlin’s work in the complete series to get the full immersive effect. More photographs from each series can be found on the Lucinda Devlin website.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Lucinda Devlin – Frames of Reference
American artist Lucinda Devlin rose to fame in the 1990s with a series of soberly observed photographs of execution rooms in US correctional facilities titled “The Omega Suites.” The images caused a sensation at the Venice Biennale in 2001. One of the motifs had already attracted attention in 1992 when it was featured in a controversial advertising campaign for an Italian fashion label. “The Omega Suites” is one of nine photographic series, along with a video, on view in Frames of Reference, the first large-scale survey to be devoted to Lucinda Devlin in Europe.
Devlin, once part of the New Color Photography movement, seeks out her motifs mainly in interiors that serve specific functions. Most of her subjects are in the USA, but she has also done projects in Germany and other countries. In the mid-2000s, the artist added landscape scenes to her repertoire.
One searches in vain for people in Devlin’s pictures, and yet her images tell of human sensitivities and values, evoking existential life questions. In the series “Pleasure Ground” (1977-1990), for example, Devlin provides glimpses of hotel rooms with fantasy themes, discotheques, and beauty salons – places that promise relaxation and enjoyment. By contrast, the interiors in the “Corporal Arenas” series (1982-1998) have an unsettling effect.
Operating rooms for human or animal patients, treatment spaces, and morgues are reproduced here in all objectivity. Viewers are compelled to reflect on their own feelings and experiences in such settings.
It was themes such as these that led the photographer to pursue the project she titled “The Omega Suites” (1991-1998). Devlin did not intend her photographs taken in maximum security prisons to be understood as a statement for or against the death penalty.
Contemplation of these very specific spaces is instead meant as an encouragement to engage personally with a difficult subject.
With the support of a DAAD grant, Devlin shot her series “Water Rites” (1999-2002) in German spas, adding a new twist to “Corporal Arenas.” “Water Rites” takes a look at what are in some cases time-honoured institutions devoted to promoting well-being as well as to healing and convalescence. In Devlin’s “Subterranea” series (ongoing since 1980), she focuses her lens on caves and tunnels that have been made accessible for various uses, reproducing in her pictures the luminous colours generated by artificial lighting schemes installed underground. The way each space is staged can tell us something about its intended impact and use. That Devlin’s interests extend beyond spaces occupied by humans is evident from her “Habitats” series (ongoing since 1985), which spotlights zoo enclosures and aquariums that are modelled on natural animal habitats.
With “Field Culture” (primarily since 2007), the artist has turned to the question of how humans shape the outdoor environment. Here she investigates industrial agriculture in the USA, where genetic engineering and the need to generate sufficient energy are major factors in food production.
Devlin has found an enduring source of inspiration in the vast expanses of Lake Huron, to which she dedicated a series between 2010 and 2019 called “Lake Pictures,” with images illustrating the beauty and grandeur of nature. She presents similarly imposing views of salt lakes and salt flats in Utah in the series “Salt” (ongoing since 2014).
The documentary and serial nature of Devlin’s projects suggests close parallels with the style of depiction represented in the collection of Die Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur. In the 1980s, while working as a university professor and curator, the artist already developed a fascination with the direct and objective methodology pursued by August Sander in his portraiture. And her photos also echo in some ways the strict comparative typology practiced by the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Here as well, compelling correlations can be found among the Cologne collection’s central holdings.
The exhibition has been made possible by generous loans from the artist; Galerie m, Bochum; DZ Bank, Frankfurt/Main; and private lenders.
A publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Gabriele Conrath-Scholl, Lucinda Devlin, and Claudia Schubert, as well as an interview conducted with the artist by Lisa Le Feuvre (Steidl Verlag, approx. 300 pages, DE/EN).
Press release from Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
This series marks the beginning of Lucinda Devlin’s artistic work. Recorded between 1977 and 1996, for example in imaginative theme hotels, in spa and cosmetic areas, in discotheques or striptease bars. Where people seek pleasure and distraction from the toils of everyday life, where desires and dreams provide the incentive to set up these spaces. In their functions and legitimised offers, they are still rarely factual and people are presented in a virtually unrecorded way. They are “stages” for which social agreements exist, but also “space capsules” that are temporary and can become private, taboo-free zones. Socially harmonious, ritualised manners are to be expected as well as one’s hedonistic and borderline actions.
Red emerges as a prominent colour in Pleasure Ground, it signals warmth, love and eroticism. All the more so when in the vicinity of these “islands of happiness” as in the case of the humble Creative Pines Motel little more than highways, gas stations and fast food places. They appear flooded red light retreats with frivolously rigged equipment, even more of the rough world relieved. Lucinda Devlin’s numerous emblematic images in this group of works succeed. That of the heart-shaped whirlpool at Pocono Palace is one of them. The camera stands in the luxurious tub and exposes with the self-timer in the ceiling mirror installed above. This technical trick enabled Devlin to capture the big red heart framed with mirrors and lights undistorted and centred in the picture. The narrow square frame emphasises the rounded shape as well as the oscillating between near and deep space.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
For Lucinda Devlin, the question of physical well-being is of great importance: how much control over your own body and personality is given and in which moments one is in other hands or spheres of influence is handed over. Aspects that make them different in the field of medical treatment and examination rooms for humans and animals. So explores the photographer in her series Corporal Arenas, created between 1986 and 1998, insights into sometimes highly specialised rooms that are mostly shielded from the outside world connect with exceptional situations up to death, while the rooms present themselves as workplaces for certain professional groups.
The picture Operating Room # 8, Forrest General Hospital Hattiesburg is a salient example that meets both the requirements of an operating room clarified as well as the skilful implementation of the subject. He is almost in the middle of the picture operating table provided with a cover protected by cloths. Essential for the constellation is a surgical lamp that looks like an oversized star in the night sky which illuminates the pictorial space above the table to the floor while the surroundings disappear in the dark. This light and line management creates a balanced image geometry. The furnishings thus gain a type spiritual power. Even an altar can be associated.
The other practice rooms considered by Devlin are also connected by a pragmatic decor with smooth, easy-to-clean surfaces and prevailing artificial light. Mostly, however, these are lighter and can be walked through visually. Lucinda Devlin’s pictures also connect in this way to soberly presented documentation views from health technology or from textbooks. But what sets her recordings apart is that they are far removed from any idealised model and in them material ageing and signs of wear as well as irregularities in the arrangement of objects have their place.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
With her views of execution rooms in American prisons, in which are electric chairs, operating tables for administering lethal injections are located or the massive lockable entrances of gas chambers are show, Lucinda Devlin raises awareness of an oppressive topic: the enforcement of the death penalty, which applies in the US and in other countries. However, the photographer is concerned with her project – which took place between 1991 and 1998 in over 20 correctional facilities in various US states – which is neither a sensation nor an accusation. Again, she relies on her thoughtful restrained imagery, which is characterised by realistic colouring and precise perspective and line management of the pictorial space. Not only finding execution rooms with windows and executioners’ technical rooms but also neighbouring cells in which the convicts spend their last hours. There are also rooms for witnesses to witness the execution through a window. To carry out the photographic work Lucinda Devlin completed extensive research. Only the locations of the institutions were laboriously located by her – at that time without the internet – each visit prepared by prior correspondence. A selection of extensive correspondence can be seen in the exhibition showcases.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
At the end of the 1990s, Lucinda Devlin developed her Water Rites series. The series is themed with and performs in conjunction with Corporal Arenas, facilities that deal with the physical and mental well-being of the people. Specific objects are the typical spa and bathing landscapes with its extensive range of medical treatments and wellness offers. Lucinda Devlin has visited traditional spa towns where the element of water is used and therapeutic measures for healing are practiced. The American art historian Michael Mackenzie states that that the construction periods of the baths visited by Lucinda Devlin can be divided into three phases: “The earliest is the architecture of the 19th century with its high tiled rooms, with the equipment made of cast iron and stainless steel. They are followed by the cool clinical rooms of the healthcare industry during the post-war period and finally as a recent development spaces that are modelled like ice caves or Arabian oases and the surprising fantasy rooms of American hotels from the Pleasure Ground series” (in: Lucinda Devlin: Water Rites, Göttingen 2003, p. 6)
An overview of the motifs from Water Rites confirms that the photographer is especially looking at manageable parts of the room as well as utensils and furnishings in which the room is dressed, which she encounters at eye level with her camera and gives an optical order by maintaining the central perspective; thus creating an emblem that, like a trademark, has a direct visual access allowed. Again in this series, Lucinda Devlin asks to what extent the body and thus the affected individual has the possibility and ability to control and regulate these influences, or whether this is done by the person or is desired at all.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
As with the Habitats series, Subterranea dates back to the 1980s. The subject of the series are different natural cave formations in America and Europe, Lucinda Devlin also has tunnels from the former mining industry included.
The cave is always in its uses, as well as in representational contexts, been connected with basic human needs and issues. Due to its circumstances, it can be considered the archetype of dwelling, it can be used as a shelter as well as serve a place of worship. Early evidence of human expression can be found in caves, one thinks, for example, of the paintings of Lascaux in France or of those in Spanish Altamira. For Lucinda Devlin, who designs functional spaces as an expression of cultural self-understanding and cultural acceptance, caves may appear to be downright predestined, and this is exactly what she visually reflects. A look at art history reveals a long iconographic tradition of cave representations. In the visualisation of Christian themes for example the birth of Jesus not only in a stable, but often in one cave shown. His grave is also sometimes located in a rock cave. Saints such as Aegidius are depicted in cave settings. In the psychoanalytic Dream Interpretation can symbolise the unconscious or a reference to caves be female sexuality.
Caves are shrouded in mystery, dark and cool, you can get inside them get lost and never find out. They are fear rooms or can offer protection and be a hiding place in threatening situations. This complexity and ambivalence is captivating in Lucinda Devlin’s recordings in which transparent, iridescent colours are definitely perceptible. The images contrast light and dark, allow a glimpse into corridors whose end cannot be made out and offer bizarre sculptural rock formations.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
In 2010, the first recording was made on the shore of Lake Huron, which is one of the five great lakes of the USA. Until 2019 Lucinda Devlin worked on this series, which differs conceptually and compositionally from its other series. First it is noticeable that they always have a view looking out over the shore viewpoint photographing the lake towards the east. The central picture element is the horizon which Devlin takes at the same height and in the centre of each picture. Accurate to the second, Lucinda Devlin has the time, day, month and year noted for each photograph. Through this precision, combined with the rigorous image structure, the series has the character of a painterly quality for all empirical series that brings together comparative meteorological observations. Seasons, light situations, sky formations and the texture of the water can be understood so clearly that in their interaction they become the real actors. They seem endless variations and leave impressions of a high degree of artistic abstraction which emerge to invite contemplation and reflection.
In addition, it is important to Lucinda Devlin to point out the existential importance in reference to the element of water, from which life arose and without it no life is possible on planet earth. Lake Huron offers the photographer an essential, at the same time exemplary, field of exploration which brings significant habitat to the region, its biodiversity threatened from environmental pollution and climate change.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur
The Habitats series has been photographed in numerous zoos and aquariums since the 1980s originating mainly in America. In this decade lies the beginning of Lucinda Devlin’s interest in the animal world and in particular how humans interact with the creatures they handle. In order to trace this request, zoological gardens were a very suitable terrain. The photographer especially likes aquariums, her fascination with the element of water can also be felt here, mirrored repeatedly. But basically, aquariums are like the enclosures of zoos around constructed purpose-built spaces, around replicas of natural habitats, ideally the needs of the respective animal adjusted. Lucinda Devlin argues that this must inevitably be an illusion, as in a touching picture of a pygmy hippopotamus in the Berlin zoo from 1999. The animal stands on the bottom of its pool and nudges its snout against a glass border. As can be in front of a shop window with goods on offer the zoo visitor – currently the viewer of the photograph – from a safe distance look at every movement of the living being in front of him. About zoology and animal science, it is a central function of zoological gardens to meet this human need to see. This is also intended as a mastery of man over nature.
And yet, in Lucinda Devlin’s Habitats series, there are photographic compositions that seem to elude real space. So drift in a picture three jellyfish through seemingly infinite deep blue waters in one, in others a shark swims directly towards the viewer. Habitats is the only series showing those for whom the spaces have been created.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
Lucinda Devlin also sees the outside space as a designed space, shaped according to human needs and ideas. Her series Field Culture redeems this to a particular degree by showing the diverse phenomena of industrial agriculture in the USA. In the Corn Belt states and beyond, which are characterised by large-scale cultivation of grain, cotton or soya, for example, is in what the photographer finds her own expressive motifs. Monocultures prevail in these areas, geared towards maximum yield and profit. Such conditions can only be with appropriate plant breeding, often implemented using genetic engineering, chemical fertilisers and intensive energy management. Lucinda Devlin has the necessary structures, constructions and buildings in her series to provide numerous insights. In numerous photographs technology dominates nature, traditional forms of tillage are a thing of the past, direct contact with the earth is only a marginal phenomenon. A shot of the view into a magenta-coloured illuminated greenhouse, the futuristic-surreal. Another shot shows the entrance to one wind turbine reminiscent of a rocket.
Lucinda Devlin sees her Field Culture series in the tradition of the legendary New Topographics. It was under this name in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, an exhibition of photographs by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel were shown. They all have a critical view of the environment they encounter: no untouched nature, no romantic moods, no reverential bowing to nature characterise her pictorial creations. Rather, it is a far-reaching urban sprawl with highways and related motels, parking lots and gas stations, industry and peripherals that determine the American landscape.
Text translated from the German by Google Translate from the Photographische Sammlung / SK Stiftung Kultur
I love artists who push the boundaries of seeing / being, body / Self, self / spirit.
Artists who see and feel the world in unique and tantalising – excites the senses or desires of (someone) – ways.
Hannah Villiger is one such artist.
Her fragmentary, space-related assemblages (Works or Blocks) investigate the representation of the female body, “its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin.” (Exhibition text)
But more than that, it is the conceived ‘idea in the mind’ strangeness of Villiger’s out of body gridded experiences… that promote in the viewer an acknowledgement of the physicality, touch, and emotion of actually living and feeling in the human body and beyond. Touch your skin, run your hands over the shape of your mouth, feel your ears, raise your foot, look at your reflection. Marvel at the bodies distortion, energy, spirit. For there is only one you. “I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it.”
You are unique. An individual, unique, sentient animal. A human – being.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Museum Susch for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“With my Polaroid camera I listen to my naked, bare body, the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it. Thus I create images that I can correct immediately.”
Hannah Villiger
“The longest distance between the camera and any body part is between raised arm and my toes. I always trigger the camera myself, sometimes without looking through the viewfinder. I tilt the camera to an angle of 90, 180, 270 degrees. I turn myself – literally – upside down.”
Hannah Villiger. On My Book Envy
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) was an extraordinary voice in the late 20th-century contemporary art, but her work came to an abrupt end with her untimely death. She became known above all for her photographic works based on the body.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s oeuvre in fifteen years. Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Villiger’s large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes. Her oeuvre spans from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
Running from 4 January to 2 July 2023, Muzeum Susch presents Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me, a comprehensive survey dedicated to the Swiss artist Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) with contributions from contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud (b. 1990) and Manon Wertenbroek (b. 1991).
The exhibition Hannah Villiger: Amaze Me offers new perspectives on the work of this important Swiss artist. Hannah Villiger’s (1951-1997) large-format works based on Polaroid photographs make a lasting contribution to the genre of the self-image within art history. At the same time, her explorations of the body can be discussed against the background of numerous contemporary themes.
Muzeum Susch is hosting the largest presentation of Hannah Villiger’s work in fifteen years. The exhibition spans her oeuvre, from the drawings she made in the 1970s to the black-and-white photographs and works with the Polaroid camera that she created from the 1980s onwards. These fragmentary close-ups of her own body, greatly enlarged via an internegative and mounted on aluminium, are presented individually or assembled into space-related ensembles. The results are unlimited possibilities of at times spectacular views of the body. On display are vintage prints, existing though often still unknown individual works, as well as so-called blocks, large-format assemblages of up to fifteen square picture panels. Some of these will be shown for the first time in the exhibition in Susch.
The exhibition expands the view of Villiger to include contemporary themes and issues. The focus is on the representation of the female body, one’s own perspective, as well as that of others, on the human physique, its classification in the media, questions of surface, space and body, and the objectification of the body. In Villiger’s work, the skin – where humans enter a dialogue with their environment – is a setting for highly topical questions of gender and ethnicity, as well as vulnerability and healing. The body was the artist’s primary working material. We encounter it abstracted or deconstructed; it can be human, but also of plant or artificial origin. Although Villiger’s early death brought her oeuvre to an abrupt end, her works point unwaveringly to the present.
The undiminished relevance of Villiger’s work is underscored by the inclusion of works by the contemporary artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Lou Masduraud and Manon Wertenbroek. These younger women artists present thematically related works – distributed throughout the entire exhibition – in dialogue with Villiger and at the same time represent strong contemporary positions. The artists have been selected based on their exploration of similar themes to those of Villiger. Bachzetsis in collaboration with Julia Born presents This Side Up, a video installation of the artist moving in all directions in a confined space, much like the way Villiger writhes, turns and shapes her own body under the eye of her Polaroid camera. Masduraud presents Petrifying basin (kisses with the nymphs), a sculptural installation and small wall objects that playfully and sensually rethink organic life and anchors mythological traditions in the present day. And finally, Wertenbroek presents a selection of objects addressing the boundaries between the skin and surrounding world and reflects on themes such as unveiling and veiling.
On the exhibition and Hannah Villiger, Muzeum Susch’s found Grazyna Kulczyk says, “Female artists are no longer afraid to document their bodies being destructed due to illness or ageing – often the artworks become projects showing chronicles of pain. Observing and recording their own bodies has become a form of manifesto for female artists, reclaiming the subjectivity of the body. Female artists have painted, photographed and sculpted themselves. In this way, the shame of nakedness or imperfection has often become a point of pride. Hannah Villiger, through photographs of her body, become the body’s conscious sculptor.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph on the latest research on Hannah Villiger’s practice and influence. Villiger is often likened to an artist’s artist, which has inspired the editors to invite artists who knew her to contribute texts, including Katja Schenker, Beat Streuli, and Claudia and Julia Müller. The book, part of a series of monographs by Muzeum Susch and Skira, will be published in March 2023.
Hannah Villiger (1951-1997) grew up as the fourth of five children in Cham (CH). After completing her studies at the School of Applied Arts in Lucerne, Villiger spent a period travelling and living between Toronto, Rome, Montefalco and Switzerland until she finally settled in Basel in 1977. In Basel, she produced her first black-and-white photographs as well as wood and Plexiglas objects. In 1980 Villiger fell ill with open tuberculosis and spent a month isolated in the Basel Cantonal Hospital, followed by a stay in a sanatorium in Davos. Despite her poor health, Villiger continued to create and exhibit her work. From 1981 to 1982 she undertook a world road-trip with Susan Wyss, with whom she had been in a relationship since 1975. In the early 1980s, Villiger began to use Polaroid cameras primarily to explore her body, serving as a working material, and increasingly moved away from the classic black-and-white and colour photographs. In 1988 in Paris, she met Mouhamadou Mansour (“Joe”) Kébé, with whom she had a son with in 1991. Between 1992 and 1997, Villiger taught at the Basel School of Art and Design. She died of heart failure in 1997.
Upon his tomb is inscribed this epitaph: “Cole – Photographer”
‘Photographer’ could have had the prefix: ethical, conscientious, brave, magnificent. But there is no need… Ernest Cole was a photographer.
Cole fled South Africa in 1966 in order to publish his seminal book about living under apartheid, House of Bondage (1967), and then lived a nomadic existence around the world until his death, never returning to the country of his birth.
I feel so sad that this legend of photography died penniless and living rough on the streets of New York in 1990.
But then I rejoice in the photographs that he left us. For (unlike so many photographs) they are memorable. They make us remember that we must respect each other – through an ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality.
“Respect is not fear and awe, it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation … It is clear respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core. It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms.”1
Respect exists only on the basis of freedom … and love.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, pp. 28-29.
Many thankx to FOAM for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to my friend and fellow artist Drager Meurtant for visiting the exhbition for me and allowing me to publish his photographs of the exhibition in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knew what I must do. I would show the world what the white South African had done to the black.”
Ernest Cole
“Cole was born Ernest Levi Tsoloane Kole in 1940, to a working-class Black family in a Black township outside the city of Pretoria. Growing into that society he came to know, with a depth of understanding that only belonging could bring, both its richness and the hardship and humiliation imposed by apartheid. As a boy he photographed people in the township for a shilling a time. By the age of eighteen he had begun to work as a photojournalist, and within a few years he was deeply committed to his essay on what it meant to be Black under apartheid. At age twenty-six, to escape the Security Police and to publish his seminal book, House of Bondage, he went into bitter and destructive exile. Cancer killed him in 1990. Apartheid destroyed him.”
David Goldblatt
Foam x Aperture: Celebrating the Legacy of Ernest Cole
For the current exhibition House of Bondage by Ernest Cole, Foam has joined forces with Aperture to host a special online event celebrating the enduring legacy of Ernest Cole (1940-1990). During the evening, a distinguished panel of experts will share their insights and reflections on Cole’s powerful photographic work, which captured the brutal realities of apartheid-era South Africa, exposing the dehumanising effects of racial oppression in the daily life of black South Africans.
The Mines
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at left, Cole’s Pensive tribesmen, newly recruited to mine labour, awaiting processing and assignment (1960-1966, above)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing at right an Untitled image from Cole’s House of Bondage (1960-1966, below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam
Foam proudly presents the first overview of the work of South African photographer Ernest Cole. The exhibition includes parts of his archive, which had long been considered lost. The overview was assembled in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust, which in 2017 secured control of Cole’s archive. Restless and tenacious, yet dedicated and empathetic. It is difficult to define the enigmatic South African photographer Ernest Cole (1940-1990). He is celebrated for his tireless documentation of Black lives in South Africa under apartheid: a regime of institutionalised racial segregation that was in effect from 1948 to the early 1990s.
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
Cole lived a nomadic life, exiled from his native South Africa for his photographic publication House of Bondage (1967). The chapters from this book form the narrative for this exhibition. The book openly denounced the apartheid regime and was promptly banned in South Africa. In risk of arrest, Cole had gone into exile in 1966. He would never return to South Africa again.
Living between Sweden and the United States, Cole continued to document Black lives in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. However, being Black and stateless proved debilitating there too, and a publication of his American work would never materialise. Towards the end of his life, Cole became increasingly disillusioned and reportedly started living on the streets of New York. He died at age 49 from pancreatic cancer. Much of Cole’s work had been considered lost, until the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017.
Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
About the exhibition
As one of the first Black freelance photographers, Cole offered with his work an unprecedented view from the inside. Born in a township, Cole experienced the strains of apartheid first-hand. By having himself reclassified from ‘black’ to ‘coloured’, he managed to access places where most South Africans were banned. He risked his life exposing the grim reality of racial segregation, by documenting miners inside the mines, police controls and the demolition of townships, among others.
This exhibition shows the rediscovery of 60,000 negatives and contact sheets in the safety deposit boxes of a Swedish bank in 2017. Besides (colour) images from his time in America, the archive contains unpublished photographs and contact sheets from House of Bondage. The exhibition in Foam is the first large scale overview of Cole’s work to include parts of his retrieved archive.
The photographs in this exhibition were taken between 1958-1966, unless stated otherwise. All contact sheets are modern prints from scans. Original titles and text from House of Bondage are in quotation marks or italics. The exhibition pens in tandem with the launch of two volumes published by Aperture: the first a republication of House of Bondage, the second presenting US work for the first time in history.
This exhibition was made in collaboration with the Ernest Cole Family Trust and Magnum Photos.
Press release from Foam
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the background at left the section of the exhibition entitled ‘Banishment’
Banishment
Cole secretly visited Frenchdale, a remote government detention camp. Its inhabitants were banished without trial, on account of their political views. Cole recorded the basis conditions under which they lived in exile, sometimes for decades. Cole’s presence in the camp was unauthorised, and he recalls having to hide from the police during his stay. When he left, he was relieved. “For them and infinity of unremarkable days stretched ahead. For me the frightful nothingness of Frenchdale was about to end (…) ironically, as I re-entered the restricted black life of Johannesburg, I felt free.”
Cole’s anger about apartheid education is inescapable in his chapter ‘Education for Servitude’, for which he visited various Bantu schools. His images and handwritten notes from a visit to a school in Vlakfontein in 1965 testify to overly crowded and understaffed classrooms in which children are studying to be “educated for servitude”.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs from the section ‘Education for Servitude’: in the bottom image at left, Cole’s Earnest boy (1960-1966, below); and at right, Teacher toward end of her day in school, South Africa (1960-1966, below)
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage (see photographs below)
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing photographs and contact sheets from Cole’s series Black Spots from Cole’s House of Bondage Photo: Drager Meurtant
“African township is bulldozed out of existence to make way for white expansion. Government trucks will move residents and their few possessions to matchbox houses in new locations, usually in remote areas, perhaps not even named on the map. Even to live there, families must qualify. People at right did not, and thus have not only had their homes razed, but have nowhere to go.”
Installation view of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing Nightmare Rides (1960-1966, all below) from the House of Bondage Period Photo: Drager Meurtant
Encouraged by his boss Jürgen Schadeberg, and inspired by other photographers at Drum – such as Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani and Alf Kumalo – Cole became one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photojournalists. Working in Johannesburg but not being allowed to live there, he commuted to the office by train. The platforms and carriages were segregated and overcrowded leading to bizarre situations that inspired the series ‘Nightmare Rides’. The item was commissioned by the Rand Daily Mail and first published in the Netherlands in 1962 as Mensen als vee [People as Cattle] in Katholieke Illustratie.
“Twice each day, at the morning and evening rush hours, the segregated station platforms are a bizarre sight. At one end, a few white trailers stand about, surrounded by space. At the other, a dense mass of Africans is congregated, crowded and compressed.”
Installation views of the exhibition Ernest Cole: House of Bondage at Foam, Amsterdam showing in the bottom image at right, Untitled (Police and Passes) (1960-1966, below) from the House of Bondage Period Photos: Drager Meurtant
“The standard by which the police operate is cruelly simple. To them every black man is a criminal suspect. In a technical sense, the police are not far off the mark to be so suspicious. The laws of apartheid are a far-reaching tangle of restrictions, reaching so deeply into everyday life that it is a rare African who does not violate some law.”
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