In my humble opinion Diane Arbus is the best portrait photographer of the 20th century.
As can be seen in the quotation from a 1939 high-school essay on Plato when Arbus was just 19 years old (below), latent inside her was an appreciation of difference, uniqueness, and the importance of life – all awaiting an out, an emanation of her spirit later manifested in her photographs through the picturing of her subjects.
Arbus found her mature voice as an artist, her métier if you like, when in 1962 she switched from a 35mm camera to a 2 1/4 inch twin-lens reflex (TLR) Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), a square format which became her iconic signature.
In the photograph Nancy Bellamy’s bedroom, N.Y.C. 1961 (1961, below) we therefore have evidence of the early results of the use of this new camera. In this photograph I believe you can feel how Arbus is still getting used to his new way of seeing the world, for you have to approach your visualisation of the world in a completely different way when constructing the image plane in a square format. Here she is still unsure as to where to place the camera. The light is fantastic coming in through the window and flooding the room but the out of focus left wall is weak and simply does not work with the image.
Fast forward to 1963-1965 and we see Arbus in complete control of her physical and emotional environment. In photographs from this period, whether medium distance portraits showing subjects in situ or tightly cropped portraits with minimal backgrounds, we see her undoubted mastery of natural light, flash, construction and tensioning of the image plane but, above all, in control of the feeling that emanates from the photographs that flows to the viewer.
Whether direct / acceptance / this is who I am (Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey, 1963, 1963 below) to contained / introspective (Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966, 1966 below) – but never the dreaded “dead pan” – and on to the inscrutable / open / closed looks on each of the three faces in the photograph Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 (1963, below), Arbus is the master at conjuring, no what is the word I’m looking for … Arbus is the master at materialising the energy of a person or place before our very eyes.
As the press release so eloquently states, “Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.”
An unspoken exchange between photographer and subject. A moment of revelation, or revelatio, where the curtain is pulled back to reveal our innermost secrets. Visualised by Arbus without judgement.
As the years progress towards 1968-1970 Arbus becomes bolder still. In photographs such as A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below), Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968 (1968, below) and Mexican Dwarf in his hotel room, N.YC., 1970 (1970, below) we see and feel such an intimate bond between the photographer and the subject – all crap cut out, all extraneous noise gone, just the baring of the soul of the sitter looking directly into the camera. As Minor White used to say, a communication / communion between the photographer and the subject, back through the lens of the camera and onto the film, forming a Zenian circle of energy, hoping for a revelation of spirit in the negative and subsequent print – whether that be from a rock, a landscape or a portrait.
And in two photographs from the same sitting, we can begin to understand how Arbus achieved her aim. In the photograph Transvestite at the birthday party, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) we have the subject in situ, in context, laughing, happy, enjoying her birthday party surrounded by her things. Then things change. In Transvestite with her birthday cake, N.Y.C. 1969 (1969, below) Arbus closes in on this wonderful human being on her bed with her birthday cake. Isolating her from the background through the use of flash, there she is, fag in hand, staring directly into the camera in all her strength and vulnerability. Arbus evinces what it is to be this human being, she has empathy for the subject in these intimate settings.
I believe that Arbus’ empathy for her subjects was greatly enhanced by the waist level engagement with her sitters when using her medium format camera. Instead of bringing the camera up to the eye, Arbus looks down into the viewfinder to locate and ground the energy of her subjects, and the camera is nestled at solar plexus / belly button, with all the connection to mother, blood, energy and water (Amniotic Fluid) from which we all come. When singing and in yoga practice, breathing comes from the stomach and the energy flows in an out of the navel, the Manipura (solar plexus) in yoga, linked to personal power, emotional balance, and metabolism, acting as a hub for energy distribution.1 Having used an old Mamiya twin-lens C220 medium format camera myself I can totally appreciate the unique perspective and energy such a camera position brings to picturing the world.
“These archetypal images have become deeply embedded in the collective conscience where conscience is pre-eminently the organ of sentiments and representations. The snap, snap, snap of the shutter evinces the flaws of human nature, reveals the presence of a quality or feeling to which we can all relate. As Arbus states, the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated. That is why these photographs always capture our attention – because we become, we inhabit, we are the subject.”2
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ The (navel) is seen as a powerful energy centre in many traditions (Yoga, Ayurveda, TCM) and science, representing our origin, core strength, digestion (Agni/digestive fire), self-esteem, and life force (prana).
2/ Marcus Bunyan commenting on the exhibition Diane Arbus at Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2011 – February 2012
Many thankx to David Zwirner for allowing me to publish the 5 images and installation photographs in the posting. All other photographs are used under fair use conditions for the purposes of eduction and research. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.”
Diane Arbus
“There are and have been and will be an infinite number of things on earth: individuals all different, all wanting different things, all knowing different things, all loving different things, all looking different. Everything that has been on earth has been different from any other thing. That is what I love: the differentness, the uniqueness of all things and the importance of life…. I see something that seems wonderful; I see the divineness in ordinary things.”
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at left, Arbus’ Girl sitting on her bed with her shirt off, N.Y.C., 1968; at centre, Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963; at second right, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in a negligee, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; and at right, Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing at second left, Arbus’ Two friends at home, N.Y.C., 1965; at second right, Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, at home, Boston, Mass. 1966; and at right, Transvestite at her birthday party, N.Y.C., 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing Arbus’ photograph A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968
Installation view of the exhibition Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum at David Zwirner, London showing in the centre distance, Arbus’ Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970; at second right, Lucas Samaras, N.Y.C. 1966; and at right, Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal., 1964
Lucas Samaras (Greek: Λουκάς Σαμαράς; September 14, 1936 – March 7, 2024) was a Greek-born American photographer, sculptor, and painter. …
His “Auto-Interviews” were a series of text works that were “self-investigatory” interviews. The primary subject of his photographic work is his own self-image, generally distorted and mutilated. He worked with multi-media collages, and by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid photographic film to create what he calls “Photo-Transformations”.
~ Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy
Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is on view at David Zwirner, London, from 6 November to 17 January 2025, and travels to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition, jointly published by both galleries.
Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.
Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.
The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968.
While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.
Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).
Exhibition Catalogue
This new title ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ illuminates Diane Arbus’s singular ability to enter private worlds.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
One of Arbus’s lesser known pictures, this photograph is of the bedroom of Nancy Bellamy, the wife of Richard Bellamy, a leading gallerist in 1960s New York who influentially championed Pop Art and Minimalism. Before she began her personal projects, Arbus worked in fashion photography with her husband, Allan, and she first met Nancy when she modelled for the Arbuses on a fashion shoot. As well as modelling, Bellamy also worked as a dancer, painter and costume designer, and had a keen interest in spiritualism. Like ‘Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963’, Arbus uses an empty room to create a portrait of the person – the dressmaker’s dummy, the canvas on the wall, the photographs by the mirror and the simple, yet elegant furnishings together create an impression of Arbus’s friend’s personality.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
The bishop in Diane Arbus’s photograph “Bishop on her bed, Santa Barbara, Cal.” (1964, above) was Bishop Ethel Predonzan, a unique figure who believed she was in Santa Barbara to await the Second Coming of Christ and wore elaborate robes, described by Arbus as a “small lady in damask robes with hair of phosphorescent pink”.
Predonzan was a key subject in Arbus’s exploration of individuals on the fringes, showcasing the artist’s ability to find deep personal connection and reveal inner strangeness.
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research.
Mrs T. Charlton Henry was a Philadelphia socialite, a philanthropist, and a fashion icon – often top of the ‘best-dressed’ lists. She was the kind of wealthy upper-class woman that Arbus’s father would have hoped to see in his Fifth Avenue department store buying the latest furs.
“Mrs. Henry, born Julia Rush Biddle of Philadelphia’s Main Line, weighs approximately 88 pounds. She will be 82 years old this month. She has been on the best-dressed list so often that she is now a member of fashion’s Hall of Fame. She still lives in Philadelphia, but commutes to New York for luncheon, shopping, theater. She sits, with the posture of another era, on a bound-to-be-seen banquette at La Caravelle restaurant and delves into a curry (“I’ll have jellied soup for dinner tonight”). Her silver and gold “57 varieties” hair is meticulously coifed; the fingernails that blow delicate little kisses of greeting to friends are tinted a deep pink. Her brown and white gingham Mainbocher is perked up with her favorite day jewels. There are marble-size pearls around the neck and one wrist, and massive yellow sapphires at the other wrist, the ears, and flashing away on a ring and a brooch.”
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Seated man in a bra and stockings, N.Y.C. 1967 Gelatin silver print
Since the demise of my old website, my PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male (RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001) has no longer been available online.
I have now republished the third of twelve chapters, “In Press”, so that it is available to read. More chapters will be added as I get time. I hope the text is of some interest. Other chapters include Historical Pressings which examines the history of photographic images of the male body; Bench Press which investigates the development of gym culture, its ‘masculinity’, ‘lifestyle’, and the images used to represent it; and Re-pressentation which alternative investigates ways of imag(in)ing the male body and the issues surrounding the re-pressentation of different body images for gay men.
Dr Marcus Bunyan March 2023
“In Press” chapter from Marcus Bunyan’s PhD research Pressing the Flesh: Sex, Body Image and the Gay Male RMIT University, Melbourne, 2001
Through plain language English (not academic speak) the text of this chapter investigates the photographic representation of the muscular male body in the (sometimes gay) media and gay male pornography. In the title of the chapter I use the word ‘press’ to infer a link to the media.
Keywords
photography, muscular male body, muscular male body in the media, appearance, lifestyle, narcissism, advertising, media, appearance, consumer capitalism, visible bodies, gay male, gay male pornography
Sections
1/ Consuming the Appearance 2/ Consumer Capitalism and Narcissism 3/ Visible Bodies 4/ Gay Male Pornography 5/ Alternatives to American gay male pornography 6/ Alternative bodies
Word count: 6,884
In Press
“Not only do the media shape our vision of the contemporary world, determining what most people can and cannot see and hear, but the very images of our own body, our own selves, our own personal self worth (or lack of it) is mediated by the omnipresent images of mass culture…”
Douglas Kellner1
From the fervent explosion that saw the birth of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s there emerged a period of amazing freedom and growth for many gay people. Sexualities that were previously hidden behind a veil of secrecy were now being expressed and fought for out on the streets. Sex, especially the desire of gay men for casual sex, was now out in the open. A new body image emerged from this revolution, one that was neither male nor female, but androgynous. This new androgynous body image can be seen as a reflection of societal changes that were happening during the swinging Sixties, the era of “free love.” You could swing, i.e., move both ways sexually. The joining together of male and female, gay men and lesbians was a very positive force in the formation and acceptance of new identities.
But the honeymoon was soon over.
The idealism of the early gay liberation movement did not last long. Gay men, long persecuted for their camp and feminine ways sought images to combat the long held stereotype of the limp-wristed pansy who had abdicated his male power to others through his effeminacy. Manliness came out of the closet of the physique magazines to express the longed for power of patriarchy that gay men sought. There was an enormous surge in the production of homoerotic imagery and gay men responded by imitating heterosexual masculinity in an ironic way; the ‘clone’ image was born: boots, tight fitting jeans, check shirts, short hair and usually a moustache to top off the image. Anybody could go out and purchase such an outfit. It did not discriminate along class or social boundary lines and the ‘look’ was relatively ageless. This clone image extended to other identities that included the leather man, the sailor, the construction worker & the cowboy. But the image was still ‘butch’; skinny or fat guys really need not apply.
The pop group ‘The Village People’ are a perfect example of the camp irony that infused the gay scene at this time. Their song “Macho Man” echoes the desire for gay men to be seen as butch: “I wanna be a macho, macho man – I wanna be, a macho man,” they sing parading around in their tight fitting and revealing outfits. By making their stereotypical cloned images of the cowboy, construction worker, cop, etc., … incredibly camp they undermined the credibility of traditional masculinity. But soon this camp ironic comment was devoured by the dichotomy of existing sex and gender differences. As Dennis Altman has said,
“In the early days of the movement, both women and men saw the process of gay liberation as intimately related to the blurring of sexual and gender boundaries, a move toward androgyny … Our biggest failure was an inability to foresee the extent to which the opposite would happen and a new gay culture / identity would emerge that would build on existing male / female differences.”2
The body and its visibility became increasingly important as a site of construction that was and is crucial to a persons identity and self-esteem. Appearance is critical to this construction.
I suggest that in contemporary gay culture the muscular body of the gay male has stopped being a ‘camp’ ironic comment on ‘normal’ masculinity and instead the body and photographic images of it have become a marketable asset, a commodity3 in a selling and surveillance exercise. Men advertise for sex by displaying their muscular body for admiration and desire by others and observe themselves and others reactions to it. Identity is now mediated by acceptance of their image and by ‘measuring up’ to a perceived image ideal. Media started to make use of this new availability of the male body as an objectified image of desire as it opened up new markets to companies. It encouraged men to undertake face lifts, tummy tucks, pectoral implants and hair removal, to purchase underwear, toiletries, clothes and all manner of goods so that they too could approach the archetypal ‘ideal’ of the masculine male.
David Lloyd Untitled Nd Cover of Naked Men of San Diego calendar Santa Monica: The Phenomenon Factory, 1998
Today images of the smooth, muscular, white male body are everywhere in advertising, encouraging us to purchase more, to help us get closer to the ideal. As David Kellner has said in the quotation at the beginning of the chapter, the images of mass culture have become omnipresent. Naked men now adorn calendars containing full frontal nudity of smooth muscular white bodies all sporting the latest in designer erections! You can have your man any time of the day, any time of the year, when you get poked in the eye with this calendar.
The muscular Billy Doll, complete with huge anatomically correct penis, (read ‘scientifically’ or how big a gay man’s penis should be) is the contemporary idealisation of earlier stereotypical gay fantasy images, a kind of male Barbie doll on steroids for gay men. I believe that in today’s incarnation of the gay male body the camp ironic comment present in the fantasy images of an earlier generation has disappeared.
Behavior Saviour Untitled ‘Billy postcard’ 1998
“Born to love you!! Billy is an anatomically correct adult doll standing 32 cm tall, weighing 320g. Choose from – Master Billy, Sailor Billy, Cowboy Billy and San Francisco Billy! Billy, the world’s first out and proud gay doll, comes beautifully packaged in a high quality presentation case with photographic backdrop.”
Billy Doll c. 1997
It has been replaced by a desiring consumerism, in this case the desire for a muscular form complete with jaw dropping penis, the envy of every gay man. And after all, consumerism is a form of self-obsession. Makes you feel a little insecure, eh? Billy doesn’t have an inch of fat or any body hair, is perfectly proportioned (particularly his huge endowment) and is made of plastic. No fear of infection here! Women have been fighting this kind of body stereotyping with the Barbie Doll for years and now the gay male has his own equivalent.
Oh but Billy – he’s born to love you!!
Consuming the Appearance
Sex sells. The appearance and image of hard bodies sells. They are consumed by individuals and societies eager to attain what they offer; individuality, success, popularity and ‘lifestyle’. But these images are not individual, they are ‘the same’, to be consumed by every-body. Below are three examples of the current genre of male body photography; all bodies are of the same homogenised type. Only the photographers are different, but they might as well have been the same.
Michael Childers Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 68
Jason Lee Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, April 1997, p. 108
Rob Lang Untitled Nd Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 93
Apparently, “Jason Lee’s brooding male nudes plumb the shadowy depths of Mystery, Sensuality and Despair … Figures possess an aura of subdued eroticism … Faces and identities are almost inconsequential, the subject reduced to a study of line and texture.”4 He says that he doesn’t want to use clichés that tend to occur when photographing women and to establish an identity and style all of his own. Michael Childers images are supposedly, “Dynamic, sensual and glamorous,”5 while Rob Lang’s desert studies of the male nude, “Document his search for the man within … and [are] essentially about unearthing an emotional bond.”6
These “types” of photographer (ie. ones who take generic photographs of the muscular male body) and many more like them feature heavily in Blue Magazine, a glossy publication aimed at the gay ‘lifestyle’ demographic. Of course most photographers would like to think that their work contains a deep revealing: mystery, sensuality, emotional bonds, etc., … but speaking as a photographer myself, I believe that this type of body photography (with its self-absorption and narcissism), isolates the body from communication with others. The bodies are complete(d) within their own sensual gratification. The construction of these images is formulaic, the body forming a masturbatory landscape endlessly repeated by different photographers in slightly different poses that appeal to a gay erotic consumerism. There is no individual identity present in photographer or subject contrary to what Jason Lee would like to think.
Identities of the models and photographers are inconsequential. These images are used by advertisers, fashion photographers, media and “artists” alike to sell product and fall into clichés that have developed in the photography of the male body over the last 60 years.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Yves Saint Laurent advertisement Blue Magazine Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 9 1999
I suggest that these images are no longer just a fashion, but that they are here to stay. I believe that the problems associated with the idealisation of these male images (for example steroid abuse, low self-esteem, body dysmorphia), can be compared to the eating disorders that women have succumbed to in their attempts to attain the waif like super-model look of many contemporary women fashion models.
Some social commentators have argued that the multiplicity of images available to the public (in consumer culture) open up new identities and new areas of becoming, deconstructing the hierarchy of what is seen as valuable in body image types. Central to this hierarchy is the ability of dominant groups (such as supermodels or muscular mesomorphs) to prove that their lifestyle7 and body type are desirable, are superior and worthy of emulation. Chris Schilling has observed that,
“The rapid internationalization and circulation of consumer and ‘lifestyle’ goods threatens the readability of those signs used by the dominant to signify their elite physical capital. These issues raise doubts about the continuing management and control by the dominant class of those fields in which physical capital is recognized and valorized. If fields become saturated with increasing body images and social practices which are presented as constituting valuable forms of physical capital, then their structure may change. Unless dominant sections of society are able to classify these styles into existing hierarchies, and have these classifications recognized as valid, then the logic of differences in which taste in cultural and consumer goods and lifestyle activities are held to be oppositionally structured is threatened. In contemporary consumer society, then, we may be witnessing processes which will make it extremely difficult for any one group to impose as hegemonic, as worthy of respect and deference across society, a single classificatory scheme of ‘valuable bodies’.”8
I disagree with this argument.
It is still all too easy for the dominant group within a subculture or society to impose and identify a ‘valuable’ body. This can be seen in any of the above images and the way they are used by all types of artists, media & advertisers to attract ‘value’ status. The body of the muscular mesomorph attracts a projected desire that media and advertisers rely on. It is still very difficult to put forward alternate body images that can be seen as fantasies, both desirable & ‘valuable’. Since most males would like to have a muscular mesomorphic body shape this body type does have social status. Covers of gay magazines such as Outrage (below) sell far more copies when they have an attractive, muscular smooth young man on the front of them.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd 2(x)ist underwear advertisement in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p.15
Darren Tieste Geoff Nd Outrage Magazine cover, “Making Porn” play and underwear feature in Outrage Magazine No. 189. Melbourne: Bluestone Press, February 1999. Front cover / p. 63
Here Outrage kills three birds with one stone. Firstly, they have their attractive semi-naked cover model to help sell the mag. Secondly, there is an article on the play in which the model / actor is acting (different photographs). This promotes both the play and fills the magazine. Thirdly, the image is repeated inside the magazine with other models / actors in designer underwear as part of a photographic feature. Nice one Outrage!
This and other contemporary images of muscular male bodies are unlike the clone image of an earlier generation because the ‘look’ is now ageist, elitist and requires great sacrifices in order to come close to possessing the ‘ideal’. Great value is put on appearance, youth, beauty, and lifestyle to the possible detriment of everything else.
Consumer Capitalism and Narcissism
Consumer capitalism encourages the consumption of items that promote a socially valued model. This encourages narcissism9 in the individual as each seeks to tailor their appearance through the consumption of such items. The individual reflexively watches how they ‘measure up’ to the model of a socially valued self and modulates what they consume so that they can be seen as popular, attractive & possessing a good ‘lifestyle’. Anthony Giddens notes,
“Consumption addresses the alienated qualities of modern social life and claims to be their solution: it promises the very things the narcissist desires – attractiveness, beauty and personal popularity – through the consumption of the ‘right’ kinds of goods and services. Hence all of us, in modern social conditions, live as though surrounded by mirrors; in these we search for the appearance of an unblemished, socially valued self.”10
I suggest that looking at the self in a mirror may not be the same as seeking the truth of the Self in reality; after all, a mirror image is only a reflected surface, seen in reverse. This reflection, this appearance, dominates your social ‘value’ in contemporary society. Appearances are marketable, and the more unblemished a product you have the better. Across the many spectrums of life it is a buyers and sellers market, whether it is the body, the underwear or the aftershave. They have what you want; you might have what they want. What price a sale? Maybe it’s all an illusion with mirrors?
(Please see the Eye-Pressure chapter for more information on the gaze).
Anonymous photographer Fresh, Pure, Cool – It’s milk Nd Style Council milk advertisement in Large Magazine Issue No.8. Melbourne: Large Publications Pty Ltd., 21st March 1997, back cover
Anonymous photographer Fresh, Pure, Cool – It’s milk Nd Style Council milk advertisement in Large Magazine Issue No.8. Melbourne: Large Publications Pty Ltd., 21st March 1997, pp. 1-2
The surface of such an identity construction hides the cost of its production. Seemingly, no effort is required to possess such a socially valuable body and ‘lifestyle’. Advertising promotes these socially valued bodies and lifestyles; this can be seen in the imagery and advertising message of the two milk advertisements. In the above advert the (phallic) glass of milk is linked to the smooth muscular body of the man holding it, who is the only person dressed in white. The milk and the man who is about to drink it are both, by association, fresh, pure, cool. The surrounding crowd is not staring at the milk, they are staring at, and desiring, him. On the left well-heeled matrons eye him with open desire and behind a group of (gay) men, all of a similar smooth, muscular body-type stare with open mouths and obviously lust after his sculptured torso. This tableaux reinforces the message that such a body is fresh, pure and cool, and is seen as a ‘valuable’ status symbol by society. It’s possible that by drinking milk you too can acquire such a possession!.
In the second advert a women and two men are again surrounded by ‘others’, people that could be regarded as freaks, with most of them having strange hair, over the top make-up and wearing dark clothes. They are not ‘normal’. When the advertising agency was casting for this campaign in Melbourne I went along – they wanted the weirdest looking people they could find. In contrast the male model at right reveals his smooth sculptured torso to the desiring gaze of an admiring viewer, much as in the first advertisement above.
This is the desirable body and the desirable ‘lifestyle’ to which we should all aspire!
Visible Bodies
“Visible bodies are caught in webs of communication irrespective of individual intentions and these systems can exert a considerable influence on the behaviour of those involved.”
Tom Burns11
Media advertising makes use of these webs of communication to reinforce it’s system of consumer control. Sometimes advertisers do not openly deploy these lines of communication. In the example below Sheridan sheets has, perhaps subconsciously perhaps deliberately, targeted the gay ‘lifestyle’ demographic without making it too obvious. In the first photograph a beautiful, smooth, tanned young man lies in bed happily smiling at the camera …
Anonymous photographer ‘Sheer Poetry’ by Sheridan Nd in Sheridan Australia brochure. Mordialloc: DDI Adworks, 1998, pp. 17-20
On turning the page we find that this image is followed by a double page spread of towels in assorted colours. On the next page we find another gorgeous smooth, tanned young man reclining in bed smiling at the camera. Funny isn’t it that the sheets on both beds are identical, that one boy is photographed from one side of the bed and the other boy from the opposite side. They couldn’t be in the same bed could they, heaven forbid!
Instead of showing the boys in bed together which would not appeal to the wider heterosexual male or female purchaser, the designer of the brochure has cleverly suggested the possibility of homosexuality through the use of visible bodies in a disguised web of communication. The symbolic representation of such photographs (with their implicit language of sexual contact) can be recognised by gay men without the overt nature of homosexuality being thrust in the face of the general public. It took me some time to realise what the designers had done. I wonder how many gay men have consciously realised this association? I think most would only perceive and understand this message projection, this web of communication on a subconscious level. Still this subconscious recognition only serves to reinforce societal values of what is seen as worthy of esteem, what is desirable in a lifestyle, through visible bodies, possessions and in this case, sheets. It is the insidious nature of media advertising that it evens out the bumps of difference, that is, it standardises and shapes levels of diversity, style and taste into what is socially acceptable and desirable.
The advertising media that targets consumers are not the only one’s guilty of promoting a limiting desirability of ‘ideals’ through photographic imagery, the representation of valuable male bodies. Equally to blame are some well known health organisations, both gay and straight, that use ‘the same’ stereotypical muscular mesomorphic bodies to illustrate their health campaigns.
Stephen Paul Are Men from Mars? c. 1998 ‘Momentum’ Postcard Bristow and Prentice Response Advertising Melbourne: Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Mens Health Centre Inc. c. 1998
Stephen Paul Loves me, Loves me not c. 1998 ‘Momentum’ Postcard Bristow and Prentice Response Advertising Melbourne: Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Mens Health Centre Inc. c. 1998
Anonymous photographer Now I’m immune! Nd ‘Get Vaccinated’ Postcard Australian College of Sexual Health Physicians 1997
To be fair, there is an awareness amongst quite a few people at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre in Melbourne, Australia, of the need for the imaging of a broader cross section of body-types in health promotions. Still, this does not stop the images on postcards such as the two above (designed by an advertising company), appearing with regular monotony. The back of “Are Men from Mars?” asks you to discover for your yourself what makes men tick by joining one of the many VAC courses. From the card image it would seem that what makes men tick is a muscular well defined body, clenched hands (symbol of phallic masculinity)12 and beer!
Once introduced to the VAC young gay men may attend the ‘Young and Gay’, ‘Boyant’ or ’18 and under’ courses. In an interview with Jim Sotiropolous13 I asked him about the courses, media advertising and body image commodification:
MAB: OK, so one example I heard about as that you looked at people’s underwear to see whether they were wearing Calvin Klein.
JS: The only thing I can relate that too is that in the first week we use autograph sheets as an icebreaker. A sheet has 6 questions on it and one of these questions is who owns a pair of CK underwear.
MAB: Why is that there? This is interesting to me because of the commodification of the body and consumer culture – if you can’t have the body you can buy the underwear!
JS: Because people talk about it. It is something that we know will get people saying “Well, yeah I do.” So they will sign it. Its no use asking very vague questions and you won’t get a response, so you have to ask very specific questions because we just know they will respond. They know about it. I think it is stronger than a gay focused strategy. You can’t miss the billboards and the advertising.
MAB: So they have been attracted by those images of men and gone out and bought this underwear pre-knowing about the gay community and what’s expected of a gay image?
JS: Yes – the images are very erotic in the CK ads. I was in New York recently and there is a billboard that stretches 2 blocks with the range of CK underwear, its amazing!
MAB: Is this self-reflective narcissism good for how people feel about their own bodies?
JS: No – I think that there a lot of people who know they will never achieve that ideal but I’m not sure …
MAB: … whether that’s a bad thing
JS: Up to a point, yeah.
MAB: I’m not positing it as a totally bad thing.”
I suggest that the very presence of this kind of question (whether it elicits a response or not), still smacks of a certain elitism and the promotion of a particular ‘lifestyle’ as desirable. Calvin Klein models are, after all, the epitome of the clean cut, well groomed, tanned, successful visible male body promoted by an advertising web of communication. This is how bodies unintentionally get caught up in webs of communication which affects the behaviour of all bodies, in this case through the proposition of such a question. This enmeshment causes problems not only for the gay male but also for the heterosexual male; increased levels of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and steroid abuse have been noted by researchers.14 This may be due in part to the desirability and valued social status of muscular mesomorphic body images such as those used in the Calvin Klein advertisements.
I believe that the search for self-identity through consumption is, in the end, a self defeating exercise. It is like looking into a thousand mirrors at an image of infinite regress never able to find the original image, that essence of inner Self that is ours only in the most insightful of moments. WE are the ones that create the images in the media, the mirror images of how we would like to be. As Lakoff and Scherr have said,
“Who, in the first place, are these faceless hordes? Who is ‘society’ but you and me? And the ‘media’ are not active, it is well known, but reactive; what they discern that their viewers / hearers / readers want, they provide. If we, the viewing public, are not stimulated to buy by the blandishments dangled before us, the media will be instantly responsive – there will be a whole new set of blandishments dangled faster than the eye can blink. So if the same tired messages, the same recycled pictures, pass across our weary retinas year after year, we cannot in all honesty blame the media.”15
We can only blame ourselves.
Gay Male Pornography
“If one were to write the ultimate cliched Australian coming out story, it would be about a boy born in a hick town who has the lithe body of a ballet dancer. Engaged to be married, he instead becomes a flight steward. The scales of heterosexuality drop from his eyes and he moves to Sydney to reinvent himself via the Yellow Brick Road of pumping at the City Gym, over-tanning at Tamarama, pulling beers at the Albury, and joining that bare-chested Roman garrison who shoulder their way across dance party floors. There is only one thing for him left to do: preserve the dream forever by becoming an American (which means the world) video sex icon.”
Peter Jordaan16
Following on from the previous text we might be able to say that we have only ourselves to blame if the media reinforce images of traditional ‘virile’ masculinity in a consumer society. It is we who have created these erotic male fantasy images, images that express our desires, not the media. But it is also true that capitalism and consumerism rely on the sale of product and constantly enlarge and amplify product appeal by advertising, thrusting these fantasy images into our faces until they become an overpowering omnipotent archetype. The male body in the contemporary gay porn industry is a prime example of such an archetype, the (re)enforcement of masculine power in the desirable image of the muscular mesomorphic body. How did this (re)enforcement of masculine power in the body image of gay porn stars come about?
Anonymous photographers Solo Man Nd Super 8mm pornography films advertisement in Super Star Studs No. 2. New York: No publisher, Nd (early 1970s) Back cover Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
During my research at The One Institute in Los Angeles I investigated the type of body images that appeared in the transitional phase from physique magazines of the mid-late 1960s into the early gay pornography magazines of 1969-1970 in America which occurred after the Supreme Court ruling on obscenity. I wanted to find whether there had been a crossover, a continuation of the muscular mesomorphic body image that was a favourite of the physique photographers into the early pornography magazines. From the evidence of the images in the magazines I would have to say that there was a limited crossover of the bigger muscular bodies but most bodies that appeared in the early gay porn mags were of the youthful, smooth, muscular ephebe-type body image.
As can be seen from the images (above) most of the men featured in the early gay pornography magazines and films have bodies that appear to be quite ‘natural’ in their form. Models are mostly young, smooth, quite solid with toned physiques, not as ‘built’ as in the earlier physique magazines but still well put together. Examining the magazines at the One Institute I found that the bodies of older muscular/hairy men were not well represented. Perhaps this was due to the unavailability of the bigger and older bodybuilders to participate in such activity? In the male bodies of the c. early-1970s Super 8 mm pornography films (above) we can observe the desirable image of the smooth youthful ephebe (males between boy and man) being presented for our erotic pleasure.
We can also observe in the bodies of Mark Hammer, Mike Powers and Bob Noll the presence of a bigger more muscular body. These bodies are an early indication of the later development that was to take place in the body images of men in gay pornography – a shift to older more ‘masculine’ bodies, probably as a reaction to the stereotype of the effeminate limp-wristed pansy and also the fear of being seen as a pederast, that is a person who has sex with underage boys.
In the late 1970s another revolution started to take place; towards the end of the decade porn films became more widely available on videocassette. This made porn much more accessible to the gay consumer and allowed the expansion of the gay pornography industry. Instead of having to buy Super 8 movies and use home projectors that took an age to set up gay men could now have their ‘hit’ of pornography in a quick, convenient package.
Anonymous photographer Perfect Room Service c. 1976 Homo Action 14 Color-Climax Corporation Copenhagen: Peter Theander, 1976 Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Not all male bodies (especially those that appeared in the early European pornography films and magazines), conformed to the ‘ideal’ of the hairless muscular ephebe, as can be seen in this magazine ‘still’ photograph taken from a Danish Super 8 mm gay pornography film. Curiously the magazine is printed in Australia.
Early gay male pornographic films have a distinctly ‘underground’ flavour but some managed to capture the frenzied passion that drives such erotic encounters where the people really want to have sex with each other. In the early 1980s the amateurism of the early films was replaced by the professionalism (and money making power) of such directors as Steve Scott, Matt Sterling, John Travis and William Higgins who still managed to capture this sexual frenzy. Gone are the really youthful body types of the earlier magazines and films – smooth, white, older muscular bodies now dominate.
William Higgins is one of my favourite directors for his unique shooting style. He makes use of oblique angles, incredible distorted close-ups of blood engorged penises (Sailor in the Wild, 1983), slow motion repeats of cum shots from many angles, and jump cuts from one carnal scene to another without a break (Class Reunion, 1982). This surreal celluloid confusion adds to the mystery and excitement of the scenes and the participants really seem to enjoy their sex; they wince as the cock goes up their arse and there is a certain ‘reality’ about the whole sex thing.
Even in these early 1980s films the star has numerous sexual partners and fucks his way through the whole video having multiple ejaculations within the space of a few minutes running time. At the drop of a hat muscular men drop their pants and their loads all over the place and some of the scenes are really horny!
As with any pornography though, you have to trawl through heaps of dross before you find the gems that get you going. Multiple orgasms by the stars of pornographic videos help reinforce compulsive sexual behaviour17 that is learnt by gay men to be a societal performance ‘norm’.18 Withdrawing before cumming enabled the director to capture the ‘money shot’ (ejaculation) for the viewer; gay male sex on video became not a passionate intimate union between two men but a performance, a display of shooting skills (both physical and pictorial) which presents the body to best advantage. Later in his career William Higgins also pioneered the shaved bum which epitomises the pumped up, perfectly groomed young white male available for plumbing lessons.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Cover image from The Devil and Danny Webster pornography video Champions Video of Australia catalogue Issue 31. Canberra: No publisher, 1997, p. 12
“Unable to compete with the ‘sun-bronzed gym gods’, Danny spends his nights alone watching old movies – hoping for a miracle … “
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in Take it All! They Ate the Whole Thing! Vol. 1 No. 1. American: No place or publisher, Nd Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Rare image of thin bodies in gay male pornography.
Gay men wanted to be seen as virile ‘real’ men in reaction to the stereotype of the effeminate pansy. This emphasis on the possession and display of a muscular body became even more prevalent in pornography with the onset of the HIV / AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s.
Driven by the fear of disease and the anxiety, insecurity and dis-ease of being thin and being seen as possibly infected gay men started going to the gym and ‘pumping’ up in ever increasing numbers. A big, healthy, muscular body couldn’t possibly be infected with the virus! Body hair was out as it was a sign of experience and maturity and therefore of disease according to Michelangelo Signorile.19
Healthiness was in. Gay men with thin bodies (such as those above) or bodies like that of Danny Webster (above), hoped for a miracle otherwise they would be left on the shelf, never having any sex! Either that or they went to the gym and capitulated to the emerging stereotype. There was apparently no hope if you didn’t ‘fit’ the ideal. But this is not the real world, this is a fantasy! Many gay men gave in to this fantasy becoming ‘simulations’, carbon copies if you like, of their porn star heroes. Lots take illegal steroids to get close to their ‘ideal’.
Other gay men have carried on as they have always done; living their lives as positively as they can; incorporating their sexuality as part of their identity; coping with feelings of inadequacy that such bodily facades can generate. Perhaps if these bodies were seen as ‘unnatural’ gay men would get over some of their attraction towards them. Perhaps if they accepted them as an artifice, a deception; that the material (steroid abuse20 and possible HIV virus contraction to name two) and psychological (high / low self-esteem leading to depression and anxiety) cost of their production is hidden behind the rose coloured lens of the camera or the surface of the body, then their erotic power would be lessened. I suggest that gay men DO realise that these images are fantasies but still strive to attain the fantasy in themselves and in the bodies of their partners.
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Image from The Big Thrill pornography video Nd Cover of Champions Video of Australia catalogue Issue 46, 1998
“… when a dozen handsome young college guys arrive at the Kingsley Institute, the first thing they do is have a big pillow-fight, get incredibly horny, take their clothes off and have an all-in jerk off. After that, things get increasingly out of hand. All the young men are exceedingly cute and built like young gods, so they can link up in any combination they care to and make a very handsome couple. And they do care to. The viewer soon loses track of who’s doing what with who, or indeed of who is who, but it doesn’t really matter. These boys fit together like parts of a well-lubricated machine. They appear to have been selected for something more than their writing skills, then waxed and polished till they glow.” (My italics)
~ Rod Pounder21
In the above quotation we can see how the bodies in contemporary male pornography have become interchangeable, replaceable one with another. The image above is also a good example of the phenomenon of the homogenised body stamped out of the same mould. I believe that in contemporary gay male erotica it is not so much the sex that matters but the display of the body for admiration. There is a certain stiffness (pardon the pun) of performance now. The frenzied passion of sex has gone replaced by the surface, the positioning of the body for the benefit of the camera. It’s all to a formula. Big pricks have become even more important and stars have their dicks cast in rubber so the viewer at home can purchase and enjoy the satisfaction of taking their heroes prick (or a ‘simulation’ of it) up his own arse whilst watching the video at the same time.
Gay pornography depicts gay sex as ‘manly’ because gay men want to see themselves that way even though one man is fucking another man, supposedly queering ‘normal’ heterosexual masculinity. I believe this is not gay men ironically challenging traditional masculinity but the confirmation it’s power over them. As noted earlier, the body becomes a phallus – hard as granite and as tough as steel – signifying and embodying a mythological power. These bodies are built ‘tough’ despite the fact that you could probably drive a semi-trailer up their rear end and they probably wouldn’t feel a thing! Now, in contemporary male pornography, the range of body types is much narrower. Of course there are still specialist videos catering to the leather subculture, shaving fetishists, young men fantasies (mainly videos from Germany), wrestling, hairy men, toys, black men, etc., … but these form a small specialist minority group of the video market. In the main the videos that fill the Champions catalogue, for example, feature models that are constructed of smooth, prime white beef.
John Travis Untitled Nd Cover image from Billy 2000: Billy Goes to Hollywood pornography video Studio 2000, 1999
Recently I watched a video called Billy 2000: Billy Goes to Hollywood, directed by John Travis. The video features 4 couples and one solo performance. The story, as far as it goes, is that gay men go into a shop and sees the Billy doll (discussed earlier) and starts fantasising about meeting a man who looks exactly like the doll, including having his large ‘anatomically correct penis’. Low and behold we fade out into dream sex scenes between different men and different versions of the doll which has now come to life, wearing exactly the same clothes as the doll does. What follows are, I think, four of the most boring gay sex scenes I have ever seen. There is no passion in the sex and all four couples copy exactly (deliberately?) the same positions by rote: man sucks dolls dick, man sits on dolls dick, man gets fucked from behind by dolls dick, doll ejaculates all over mans back. This is formulaic sex. As we can see in the above image the muscular male body is now simulating the ‘ideal’ embodied in a doll! Great marketing ploy to link the sale of the doll and the video together…
As Peter Jordaan has observed,
“There is a desperate need for more gay romance. A video like 1992’s Matt Sterling effort ‘Scorcher’ stands out simply because one of the couples in it actually look with pleasure into each other’s eyes while they are fucking … dick-tugging videos which also tug at the heart remain rare delights indeed.”22
I most certainly agree.
Alternatives to American gay male pornography
As an alternative to American videos three names stand out in the pantheon of porn directors. The first is Kristen Bjorn was has made a reputation for himself and his videos by photographing men from all over the world in apparently natural, spontaneous sexual situations. His videos feature large casts of men from different ethnic backgrounds but all his actors are power- fully built, masculine men. The second is Jean-Paul Cadinot. His videos, usually set in reform schools, school dormitories, scout troops and army barracks feature young ephebes having their way with each other with a lusty abandon not usually present in American videos. Lastly there is George Duroy, pioneer of EuroAmerican videos such as Accidental Lovers (1993) and Sauna Paradiso (1994) that have been shot (using American money) in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain using East European men.
His videos include a combination of athletic, young performers who are all smooth; from the slim and toned ephebe to the more muscular built lad. And well built they are. The images below are a good examples of both body types. The boys, for they are not men in the American sense of the porn video word, really do seem to enjoy having sex and ‘making it’ with each other in a loving and intimate way. Which is great!
George Duroy Untitled Nd Image from Sauna Paradiso pornography video Falcon International Collection 1994 in Douglas, Jerry (ed.,). Manshots: The Firsthand Video Guide Vol. 7 No. 2. Teaneck, N.J.: FirstHand Ltd., December, 1994, p. 46.
Milan Demko, Victor Gravek, Pavol Zurek and Thomas Novak compare stiff dicks
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd Image from Lucky Lukas pornography video Blue Diamond Video Services advertisement in ‘Meetmarket’ section in Outrage Magazine No. 189. Melbourne: Bluestone Press, February 1999, p. 1
Dean Durber, in an article for Blue Magazine called “New Wood” observes,
“Even if the innocence of much cuter and younger faces is forced off the shelves, the recent interest in intimacy and tenderness cannot be ignored. We might yet see older men on screen who actually appear to enjoy what they do. Especially if there’s money to be made and pleasure to be had.”
Why forced off the shelves? Apparently because of concerns over pederasty (love of young boys) and the perceived age of the ephebes involved. But here’s the rub – it’s all in the name of money in the end. It’s all about selling product even if you do have a good time. The fantasy scenarios are just that – idealised fantasies. They are set up to sell product and use body image to do so. These EuroAmerican videos just use the fresh new faces and bodies of muscular young men to appeal to a different market demographic.
Let me comment on just one more thing that happens in a lot of porn videos. I have noticed that it is usually the bigger guy (either dick or body size) that fucks the smaller guy therefore marking him as the man – no matter who is making the video. Commenting, unwittingly, on this disparity in body size Stan Ward in his review of Sauna Paradiso says that when the boys in the above photograph have a fourway, “Soon enough the boys are separated from the men. Novak and Demko continue the oral action while Gravec gives Zurek a royal screw up the arse … For the money shots, the boys and men come together …”23
Does that mean that if you have a smaller body that you are not a man? Does it mean that to be a gay man you have to partake in anal sex? It would seem that a big cock or its substitute, a big body, will always classify you as a man and not a boy and to participate in anal sex will make you a man not a boy. But whether its boys or men, gay pornography is there for one major reason – to make money within a media driven, image conscious consumer society.
Alternative bodies
There are, however, one group of photographs that have appeared in some porn mags that do not represent the ideal of the perfect muscular mesomorph or the smooth, young ephebe. These are photographs that accompany the messages of ordinary gay men wanting to meet other men for sex and companionship. These are the images of themselves they want to show to the general public. How they perceive themselves. How they are posed reveals small contexts of identity, even though their actual identity is hidden because of the masking of the face (No. 3 is ingenious in this regard; it uses the flash of the camera in the mirror to obliterate the facial features). The backgrounds and attire (when present) can tell a lot about a person.
(left to right)
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 104. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 48. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No.100. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 46. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No.121. Enmore: No publisher, 1985, p. 48. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 101. Enmore: No publisher, 1984, p. 47. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Anonymous photographer Untitled Nd in ‘Get In Touch’ section in Gay No. 118. Enmore: No publisher, 1985, p. 47. Courtesy: Marcus Bunyan
Numbers 1 and 3 remind me of the photographs of Diane Arbus, shot in that person’s lounge room and bedroom respectively (see the photograph at the beginning of the chapter and below). In the background of No.3 we can see an ironing board, a wooden bed head and the bed itself. In the foreground we can see a full cup of tea or coffee sitting on the dressing table to which the mirror is attached.
No.’s 2, 4, and 5 feature men who are obviously into leather, cock rings, boots and whips; a poster of a man stares over the shoulder of the figure in No. 2 adding to the menacing air – I’m watching you! Note in all the images the bodies are of an everyday, ‘natural’ type. Types that we can see down the beach or at the sauna that are not toned and tanned but older, plumper, taller or skinnier, and for this reason they have an attractiveness which is solely their own.
These bodies have been lived in, they have earnt every wrinkle and crease, have survived their life experiences and are still sexually valuable in their own individuality and difference. These bodies are not fantasy material in the ‘normal’ understanding of what a contemporary male fantasy body should look like. This is because in the buyers and sellers market of contemporary gay society big, buff, and beautiful is the perfect dish of the last two decades and will continue to be so as long as gay men continue to desire this ‘ideal’.
Dr Marcus Bunyan 2001
Bodies are unstable … and how frightening, that can be, and how those two emotions comprise desire.”
Jesse Dorris. “Jimmy DeSana’s Transgressive Vision of Life and Desire,” on the Aperture website December 14, 2022 [Online] Cited 19/12/2022
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968 Gelatin silver print
Footnotes
1/ Kellner, D. “Critical Theory, Commodities and the Consumer Society,” in Theory, Culture and Society 1, 3: 1983, p. 66, quoted in Evans, David. Sexual Citizenship: The Material Construction of Sexualities. London: Routledge, 1993, p. 48.
2/ Altman, Denis. The Homosexualisation of America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, p. 211, quoted in Chapkis, Wendy. Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance. Boston: South End Press, 1986, p. 136.
3/ This is not a new concept and the lament that the gay body is used as a commodity and marketable sexual tool and not exclusively joined in affection and love has been around since well before Stonewall within the gay community. Of course sex and love are NOT mutually exclusive but some people seem to think that they are:
“Not too many years ago it was unheard of to dress in a “gay” manner or to act in any way which might lead others to suspect that you were a homosexual. Now, almost overnight, we have “gay” bars “gay” dance clubs, “gay” books, even business firms openly soliciting the business of homosexuals.
While this is good in the sense that it gives the homosexual a right to live like the rest of humanity, it has led to problems which were heard of in the past. Perhaps a slave needs his chains let loose slowly if he worn them for many years. Perhaps the “gay” world was not ready for this freedom or maybe it came to quickly. However, the homosexual now finds himself in a position where his “public image” is not that it should be. The blame for this lies mainly with those who flaunt their homosexuality in the faces of the general public.
A homosexual, as defined by most medical authorities, is one who seeks love and sexual satisfaction from his or her own sex. The majority of today’s homosexuals (or so it seems to the general public) could best be described as persons who look for as much sexual satisfaction from as many of their own sex as they can, without giving their love to any of them. This has come about because of the so-called “emancipation” mentioned previously. A homosexual can gratify his passions so easily now that the finer things in life seem to be cast aside … Inside the “gay” bars, the tourist or outsider can walk in, and with no effort, behold the spectacle of people openly trying to make a one-night stand with each other. Outside the bar, the same tourist or outsider can hear those who failed in their mission inside the bar bargaining with someone on the street for the use of his body for the night … This is the image today’s homosexual is giving to the general public …
Why not get back to caring for one another? Hurt each other if you have to – you can start over again and learn from your mistake. Stop chalking up your conquests as if sex were a commodity.
Why not see how long you can stay with one person? Put love back into homosexual life.
Stop poking fun at the person who seeks love and friendship instead of one-night stands.
Let the love that is locked away and going to waste inside yourself be let loose and given to someone who will return it with interest. Don’t be afraid of your emotions. Get back to making the “gay” life what it should be – two people living together who need love of their own kind.”
Lady Beesborough. “The Public is Watching,” in The Greyhuff Review. 1st Edition. Minneapolis, Minn: Directory Services Inc., 1965, pp. 24-25. Sourced at The Kinsey Institute, University of Indiana, USA.
Even at this date (1965, which is pre-Stonewall), some people obviously saw gay male sex (and inherently the gay male body) as being a promiscuous commodity, which is quite amazing because nothing much has changed today. It is still a sellers market and gay men still go for it! The advice not to be afraid of your emotions is a good one – but that will naturally open gay men up to experiences, including many sexual interactions and not just love! As I comment elsewhere in the Re-Pressentation chapter, gay men are paradoxically both seeking sexual release and intimate connection whilst at the same time being afraid of that connection and revealing themselves to others.
4/ Swift, Michael. “Darkside,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, April 1997, p. 106.
5/ Parry, Tracey. “Access All Areas,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 66.
6/ Massengill, Reed. “Sand Man,” in Blue Magazine. Sydney: Studio Magazines, February 1999, p. 90.
7/ “Lifestyle refers to a relatively integrated set of practices chosen by an individual in order to give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity. The more tradition loses its ability to provide people with a secure and stable sense of self, the more individuals have to negotiate lifestyle choices, and attach importance to these choices.”
Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, pp. 181-183. See also Giddens, A. Modernity and Self-Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 2, 5, pp. 80-81.
8/ Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 143. See also Featherstone, Mike. “Perspectives on Consumer Culture,” in Sociology 24(1). 1990, pp. 5-22.
9/ Below are four quotations about the definition and effects of narcissism. “Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints [especially gay men] does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power and charisma. For the narcissist the world is a mirror…” (My italics)
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978, p. 10.
“Central to the narcissistic personality is an orientation to the body as youthful, enduring and constitutive of the self. The narcissistic body is open to new experiences, but only as long as they can be easily appropriated and consumed to reinforce its own sense of self as sacred and immortal.” (My italics)
Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 194.
“Narcissism presumes a constant search for self-identity, but this is a search that remains frustrated, because the restless pursuit of ‘who I am’ is an expression of narcissistic absorption rather than a realisable quest … Narcissism treats the body as an object of sensual gratification, rather than relating sensuality to communication with others.”
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 170.
“According to what I said about the nature of love, the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears.”
Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, p. 118.
10/ Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. California: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 172.
11/ Burns, Tom. Erving Goffman. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 38, quoted in Schilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993, p. 85.
12/ “The penis can never live up to the mystique implied by the phallus. Hence the excessive, even hysterical quality of so much male imagery. The clenched fists, the bulging muscles, the hardened jaws, the proliferation of phallic symbols – they are all straining after what can hardly ever be achieved, the embodiment of the phallic physique.” (My italics)
Dyer, R. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 1992, p. 116, quoted in Stratton, Jon. The Desirable Body. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996, p. 195.
13/ Interview with Jim Sotiropolous, Melbourne. 23/09/1997. Co-ordinator of 3 different programmes at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre, Melbourne, Victoria.
14/ For a discussion of these issues please see Mishkind, Marc, Rodin, Linda, Silberstein, Lisa and Striegel-Moore, Ruth. “The Embodiment of Masculinity: Cultural, Psychological and Behavioural Dimensions,” in Kimmel, M. (ed.,). Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1987, pp. 37-47. An extract from this paper can be found in Appendix A of the Bench Press chapter.
15/ Lakoff, Robin and Scherr, Raquel. Face Value: The Politics of Beauty. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 292-293.
16/ Jordaan, Peter. “The Naked VCR,” in Outrage Magazine No. 131. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 1994, p. 45.
17/ “Some people are so horny and desperate to have a connection that they will do anything to have sex, especially with someone who they find attractive. Sometimes sexually they even step over the line of physical attraction … and this can indicate compulsive sexual behaviour. I’M SO HORNY I JUST HAVE TO HAVE SEX!”
Interview with Greg Adkins. Melbourne. 02/10/1997. Outreach Beats Education Officer at The Victorian AIDS Council / Gay Mens Health Centre, Melbourne, Victoria.
18/ “We find it more important to preserve and foster the myth of sexuality as mechanical process than we do to develop any kind of detailed or sensitive phenomenology of sexual experience (ie., establishing how in fact people experience their sexual needs and feelings). I suspect that a vast proportion of people live in secret unhappiness about their sexuality because they are unable to meet what are in truth entirely mythical ‘norms’ of ‘performance’.”
Smail, David. Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1984, p. 113.
19/ Signorile, Michelangelo. Life Outside: The Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, Muscles, and the Passages of Life. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997, p. 68.
20/ “Big Ears has heard of at least two cases of ‘roid rage in Sydney this week as the countdown to Mardi Gras and bodily perfection reaches its climax. One Big Ears associate minding his own business in a well known Oxford St. venue this week was set upon by an incredible hulk wielding a broken bottle after he tried to help up the hulk’s substance affected, brick shit-house of a friend who had toppled over and landed on top of him, all but crushing him to death. Meanwhile, in an inner Sydney gym, another Big Ears associate witnessed a similar savage and unprovoked attack this week. Enraged that someone was using a machine he wanted to use, brick shit-house #3 dragged off the poor girl in question, threw her against the wall and all but choked her until gym staff managed to pull him off. Hello? Mardi Gras is supposed to be a party not a battle to the death. Gone, it seems, are the days when all you needed to get yourself through an all night party were a jazzy pair of shorts and a bubbly personality…”
Big Ears. Melbourne Star Observer. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 26th February, 1999, p. 15.
21/ Rod Pounder. “Video Review: One Hot Summer,” in Brother Sister Magazine. Melbourne, 9th May, 1997, p. 29.
22/ Jordaan, Peter. “The Naked VCR,” in Outrage Magazine No. 131. Melbourne: Bluestone Media, 1994, p. 50.
23/ Ward, Stan. “‘Sauna Paradiso’ review,” in Douglas, Jerry (ed.,). Manshots: The Firsthand Video Guide Vol. 7 No. 2. Teaneck, N.J.: FirstHand Ltd., December 1994, p. 46.
“Sometimes theory leads to an over determination. Something is gained but at a price. Finding images that evoke a sound can only be saved by paying the higher price of remembering how images look when their sound is removed.”
~ Ian Lobb
From my knowledge of photography, I have added further images that I can hear … but not in the exhibition that I know of. You may like to recall other photographs that you could include in the exhibition.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Though photographs are silent, photographers have long conjured sound in their images. Whether depicting crowded urban spaces, musicians performing, people engaged in conversations, or even more abstract depictions of sound, the pictures in this exhibition show photography’s power to communicate beyond the visual. The images date from the 19th century to the recent past, and in each, the audible plays as much of a role as the visual. As you look at these photographs, you are invited to imagine what you might “hear” as well.
Photographs may be silent, but photographers have long conjured sound in their images.
Whether depicting crowded urban spaces, musicians performing, or people engaged in conversation, the pictures in this exhibition prove photography’s power to communicate beyond the visual.
Drawn from Getty’s permanent collection, In Focus: Sound, on view June 28 through September 2, 2022, unites two sensory perceptions – sight and sound – in photographs that record the visual while also imitating the audible.
“Photography and sound have more in common than one might expect,” says Karen Hellman, curator of the exhibition. “Photographs can evoke a sensory perception that they cannot actually depict. Looking at photographs while thinking about sound could provide a new way of viewing and appreciating photography.”
The 19th century saw a keen scientific and philosophical interest in reproducing ephemeral phenomena. This led to the development of the photograph as well as the phonograph. This interlinked history perhaps explains photography’s connection to sound and why photographers, even subconsciously, have endeavoured to picture it. In each image in this exhibition, which date from the 19th century to the recent past, the audible plays as much of a role as the visual.
This exhibition includes works by known and lesser-known makers from the 19th century to the recent past, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, Man Ray, Graciela Iturbide, Marco Breuer, Naoya Hatakeyama, and Christian Marclay.
In Focus: Sound will be on view June 28 through September 2, 2022, at the Getty Center.
“Bowery old-timers claim her voice has had no match for power and ferocity since Maggie Cline used to stun with “Knock ‘Em Down McCloskey”.”
The uncredited text, referring to this photograph of the bar singer known as “Tillie,” accompanied a group of Lisette Model’s photographs made at Sammy’s Bar that were reproduced in the September 1994 Harper’s Bazaar magazine. Taken from below and at a slight diagonal angle, the image captures the vitality and vibrancy of the performer belting it out on the stage at Sammy’s, a local favourite in the Bowery district of New York, also visited by photographers Weegee and Diane Arbus. The angle from which the photograph was made also emphasises the gleaming microphone, which seem to rise up to meet the challenge of projecting Tillie’s already powerful voice.
Larry Fink (American, 1941-2023) Studio 54, New York City May 1977 Silver gelatin print
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Songs of the Sky 1924 Gelatin silver print
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Songs of the Sky 1924 Gelatin silver print
Eva Besnyö (Dutch, 1910-2003) Boy With Cello, Balaton, Hungary 1931 Gelatin silver print 42.5 x 39.2cm (16.7 x 15.4 in)
Arnold Newman (American, 1918-2006) Igor Stravinsky 1945 Gelatin silver contact sheet
Santu Mofokeng (South African, b. 1956) Opening Song, Hand Clapping and Bells 1986 From the series Train Church Gelatin silver print Image: 19 x 28.5cm
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) Niagara Falls from the American side c. 1855 Whole plate daguerreotype
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) [Scene at Niagara Falls] c. 1855 Daguerreotype
Platt D Babbitt (American, 1822-1879) Niagara Falls c. 1860 Daguerreotype
Henri Huet (French, 1927-1971)/AP ‘Life’ magazine photographer Larry Burrows (far left) struggles through elephant grass and the rotor wash of an American evacuation helicopter as he helps GIs carry a wounded soldier on a stretcher from the jungle to the chopper in Mimot, Cambodia 4 May 1970 Gelatin silver print
Henri Huet (French, 1927-1971) The body of an American paratrooper killed in action in the jungle near the Cambodian border is raised up to an evacuation helicopter, Vietnam 1966 Gelatin silver print
James Barnor (Ghanian, b. 1929) E. K. Nyame, the legendary Ghanaian musician, photographed for a record cover, Accra c. 1975 Gelatin silver print
Roger Scott (Australian, b. 1944) Ghost train 1972 Gelatin silver print
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) The House of Horrors 1961 Gelatin silver print
Robert H. Jackson (American, b. 1934) FATAL BULLET HITS OSWALD. Jack Ruby fires bullet point blank into the body of Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas Police Station. Oswald grimaces in agony November 24, 1963
Robert H. Jackson (American, b. 1934) Jack Ruby (52) shoots Lee Harvey Oswald (24) 24 November 1963
Originally published in the Dallas Times Herald, November 25, 1963. Cropped from the source image to the portion that was published in 1963. Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Photography.
Unknown photographer Survivors of the atomic bomb attack of Nagasaki walk through the destruction as fire rages in the background Aug. 9 1945 1945
John Williams (Australian, 1933-2016) Open Air Shower, Bronte Beach 1964 Gelatin silver print
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Man Stepping from Cable Car, San Francisco 1956 Gelatin silver print
Kaho Yu (Australian) Untitled from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
Kaho Yu (Australian) Untitled from the series Infinitesimal Residual Vibration of An Unknown Sound 2009-2011
The photographs in this series were taken during a period when I was feeling existentially bored. Instead of distracting myself with activities and accumulating new sensations, I decided to “look” at boredom, to study, and perhaps to understand it. The most natural strategy was to observe the immediate environments where my daily activities take place – train stations, cubicles, copy machines room, etc. I carried a medium format camera on a tripod and spent the odd hours wandering alone through those familiar spaces.
My “study” did not lead me to any revelation or answer. Instead, I found myself spending a lot of time waiting in a long silence, between the opening and the closing of the camera shutter.
Charles Babbage, a scientist in 1837, postulated that every voice and sound, once imparted on the air particles, does not dissipate but remains in the diffused movements of all the particles in the atmosphere. Thus, there might one day come a person equipped with the right mathematical knowledge of these motions who will be able to capture the infinitesimal vibrations and to trace back to their ultimate source.
Taking a long exposure, letting the light slowly accumulate an image on the celluloid surface, to me, is not unlike a sound seeker searching in the air particles, for the tiny residual movements that have been conveyed through the history of mankind, from the beginning of time.
Kaho Yu artist statement
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces brings together a collection of early photographs related to music, a group of 78rpm recordings, and short excerpts from various literary sources that are contemporary with the sound and images. It is a somewhat intuitive gathering, culled from artist Steve Roden’s collection of thousands of vernacular photographs related to music, sound, and listening. The subjects range from the PT Barnum-esque Professor McRea – “Ontario’s Musical Wonder” (pictured with his complex sculptural one man band contraption) – to anonymous African-American guitar players and images of early phonographs. The images range from professional portraits to ethereal, accidental, double exposures – and include a range of photographic print processes, such as tintypes, ambrotypes, cdvs, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots.
The two CDs display a variety of recordings, including one-off amateur recordings, regular commercial releases, and early sound effects records. there is no narrative structure to the book, but the collision of literary quotes (Hamsun, Lagarkvist, Wordsworth, Nabokov, etc.). Recordings and images conspire towards a consistent mood that is anchored by the book’s title, which binds such disparate things as an early recording of an American cowboy ballad, a poem by a Swedish Nobel laureate, a recording of crickets created artificially, and an image of an itinerant anonymous woman sitting in a field, playing a guitar. The book also contains an essay by Roden.
Text from the Dust to Digital website Nd [Online] Cited 23/07/2022. Published by Dust-to-Digital, 2011. The book is out of stock but available on Abe.com website.
… i listen to the wind that obliterates my traces book cover (2011)
The J. Paul Getty Museum 1200 Getty Center Drive Los Angeles, California 90049
If I had to nominate one photographer who is my favourite of all time, it would be Diane Arbus. There is just something about her photographs that impinge on my consciousness, my love of difference in human beings, their subversiveness and diversity. She pictures it all, some with irony, some with love, some with outright contempt, but always with interest. In photographs of dwarfs you don’t get the majesty and beauty that Susan Sontag desired, you get something else instead: the closeness of intention and effect – this is who this person was at that particular moment represented in a photograph, the essence of their being at that particular time.
Arbus was fascinated by the relationships between the psychological and the physical, probing her subjects with the camera to elicit a physical response. Her sensory, emotional, intellectual and aesthetic intelligence creates a single experience in relation to subject, stimulating her to respond to the world in her own unique way. While Arbus may well have hated aspects of American culture – “Its hypocrisy, this ‘happy happy’ story after the war, the consumerism, the racism, she feels deeply about that,” as Anne O’Hehir, curator of the National Gallery of Australia’s American Portraits observes – she photographed everything that makes us human in profound and powerful photographs. To me, her subjects were not ‘caught off guard’ nor did they unintentionally reveal aspects of themselves – they revealed themselves to Arbus just as they are, because she gained their trust, she had empathy for who they were… an empathy that probably flowed both ways, enhanced by the subjects sense of Arbus’ own personal travails.
It is unfortunate then, that this exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art is such a disappointment. This has nothing to do with the wonderful installation by the Heide curatorial team in the beautiful gallery spaces, but in the prints themselves and the artists that accompany Arbus’ work. Let’s look at the prints first.
According to the article “Diane Arbus: Iconic photographs on show together for first time at National Gallery of Australia” by Louise Maher on the ABC News website in June 2016, “The collection is one of the largest public holdings of her work outside New York and, according to NGA curator of photography Anne O’Hehir, one of the most impressive in the world. “The gallery was buying a huge amount of work in 1980 and ’81 leading up to the opening of the gallery in 1982,” Ms O’Hehir said. “We were offered in two lots these extraordinary photographs – they were the first release of prints from the Arbus estate and they were expensive at the time.”
These vintage prints are by the hand of Arbus, not later printings by other people, and as such should be as close a rendition to what Arbus intended the work to look like as can be found. The exhibition text notes that, “All the same, she was very clear about how she wanted her images to look; she worked hard to achieve a particular quality in her prints, which have a distinct feel and appearance that are quite different from other photographs of the 1960s … She reminds us consistently through a number of careful and deliberate strategies that we are looking at a photograph that has been made by a particular person.”
Through these strategies Arbus sought to differentiate her prints from the West Coast Ansel Adams Zone system of printing which was prevalent at the time. The Zone System would have been the antithesis of what Arbus wanted from her photographs. Every popular magazine at that time would have had Zone System stuff… so Arbus didn’t dare align herself with that school. But truth be told, if these prints are the best that she could do as a printer, then they are not very good. As can be seen from the installation photographs in this posting (not the media photographs), some of the prints are so dark as to be beyond comparison to the clarity of the prints that were later produced by her daughter Doon Arbus for the Arbus estate and for reproduction in books.
You only have to look at the installation photograph of Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1963 (above) and another reproduction of this image to see how dark the National Gallery of Australia’s prints are. If you take time to actually look at the photographs one of the prints, Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1966 (1966, below) was barely in focus under the enlarger when developed, and several others have not been fixed properly. They may have been first release, but how far down the release were they? We don’t know whether these were the top shelf prints, or tenth in the stack. I know from personal experience that I have a numbering system from one to ten. You sell the best print and so number two then becomes number one, and so on.
The poorness of these prints again becomes a sign of intention. The print is the final, luminous rendition of a photographers previsualisation, the ultimate expression of their creativity. This is how I want to show you the world, through this photograph. It is the end point of a long process. I believe strongly that Arbus wanted to show things as clearly as possible, as clearly as the best possible use that photography could provide. She is like a razor the way she cuts through. But in these particular final renditions, she lets herself down. And the people who bought these photographs, should have realised what poor prints they were.
Turning to the artists that accompany the work of Arbus… was it really necessary to surround such a powerful artist’s work with such noise? While it is always a delight to see the work of Mary Ellen Mark, William Eggleston, Milton Rogovin, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Lisette Model, Walker Evans, Weegee and William Klein, to try and embed the work of Arbus within a photographic milieu, within a cacophony of imagery that stretches from the 1930s to the 1980s, simply does not work. While Arbus emerges out of the concerns of her era, she is such a powerful presence and force that simply no one compares. She is so different from the organised Evans and or the macabre Weegee, more closely aligned to Model, and certainly by no stretch of the imagination does she influence Eggleston, Friedlander, Winogrand or Rogovin in any significant way… so that these artists works just become filler for this exhibition. If the intention was to situate Arbus’ work in the chronological “flow” of photography then the concept falls between intention and effect. While no artist’s work appears without regard to historical precedent, their work is simply their own and needs its own space to breathe.
What would have been more interesting would have been to position Arbus’ work within an Australian context. Now there’s an idea, since we live in Australia!
Here we go: exhibit Arbus’ prints with 15 prints by Carol Jerrems (Vale Street, Mark and Flappers), 15 prints of the early work of Polixeni Papapetrou (drag queens, Elvis fans, circus performers and wrestlers) and 15 prints of the work of Sue Ford. Four strong women who deal with issues of gender and identity in a forthright manner – not a cacophony of noise (9 artists, 6 of them men) to accompany the work of a genius. Analyse the influence of Arbus on this generation of Australian photographers. Pretty simple. Clean, concise, accessible, relevant to Australia audiences. Then intention would have possibly met effect.
There are highlights to be had within this exhibition, two in particular.
It was a pleasure to see the work of Milton Rogovin. I have always admired his work, and the small, intimate prints from his Lower West Side series (1973-2002) did not disappoint. While Arbus’ portraits are powerful visualisations, front and centre, Rogovin’s working class families are just… present. His social documentary photographs of working class families are almost reticent in their rendition. “His classical portraits, often grouped in diptychs and triptychs, expound narrative in a single image and over time. They compress time intimately… and by that I mean the viewer is engaged in a conversation with the subject, where we can imagine that we live those lives as they do (transcending time), the lives of what Rogovin called “the forgotten ones.” He makes their countenance, their physicality, the hardships they endure, and their narrative, directly and intimately compelling. We are made to feel their plight in the now and the forever. For these photographs are as relevant, if not more so, now as then.”
The other highlight is to see three Arbus photographs that I have never seen before: Old black woman with gnarled hand; Large black family in small shack; and Addie Taylor in her shack, Beaufort, South Carolina (all 1968, installation views below), all three taken with flash. These works were a revelation for their observational intimacy and evocation of a dark place in the existence of the poorest of human beings. The gnarled hand of the old woman lying in a filthy bed with cardboard walls is particularly distressing to say the least. To compare these photographs with Walker Evans’ flash photograph Hudson Street boarding house detail, New York (1931, below) and his naturally aspirated Bedroom, shrimp fisherman’s house, Biloxi, Mississippi (1945, below) in their pristine emptiness is instructive. This ideation, together with Arbus’ photographs relationship to the work of her sometime teacher Lisette Model (particularly her Lower East Side photographs (1939-1942); Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s 42nd St Flea Circus, New York (c. 1945) and Woman with Veil, San Francisco (1949) all below) are the zenith of this exhibition, where the intention of embedding Arbus’ photographs in the history of the medium comes best to fruition, in effect.
Finally, I must say a big thank you to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to come out to the gallery to take the installation photographs. Many thanks indeed.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Heide Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish some of the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“People who met Arbus often said she was incredibly seductive. Immensely curious, she was softly spoken and her ability to connect with and gain the trust of people was legendary. She talked about “the gap between intention and effect”, explaining “it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it.””
Diane Arbus quoted in Kerrie O’Brien (curator of the National Gallery of Australia’s Diane Arbus: American Portraits)“Intimate, dark and compelling: the photographs of Diane Arbus,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website March 14, 2018 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022
“The people in an Arbus photograph are never trivialised; they have certainly a larger-than-life intensity that few other photographers can achieve. While they seem like figures from fairy tales or myth, they are also invested with powerful agency.”
Gillian Wearing quoted in Kerrie O’Brien (curator of the National Gallery of Australia’s Diane Arbus: American Portraits)“Intimate, dark and compelling: the photographs of Diane Arbus,” on The Sydney Morning Herald website March 14, 2018 [Online] Cited 16/02/2022
“When you’re awake enough to question your purpose and ask how to connect to it, you’re being prodded by the power of intention. The very act of questioning why you’re here is an indication that your thoughts are nudging you to reconnect to the field of intention. What’s the source of your thoughts about your purpose? Why do you want to feel purposeful? Why is a sense of purpose considered the highest attribute of a fully functioning person? The source of thought is an infinite reservoir of energy and intelligence.
In a sense, thoughts about your purpose are really your purpose trying to reconnect to you. This infinite reservoir of loving, kind, creative, abundant energy grew out of the originating intelligence, and is stimulating you to express this universal mind in your own unique way.”
Heide is delighted to host the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition, Diane Arbus: American Portraits.
The photographs of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) are among the most widely recognised in the history of photography. Her images stand as powerful allegories of post-war America, and once seen are rarely forgotten. Works such as Identical twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967 and Child with toy hand grenade, in Central Park, New York City have been described as two of ‘the most celebrated images in the history of the medium’.
Featuring 35 of Arbus’s most iconic and confrontational images from 1961-1971, this exhibition examines the last decade of Arbus’s life,the period in which her style is in full flight. Her work has polarised viewers who question whether she exploited or empowered her subjects, who were often drawn from society’s margins. ‘The National Gallery of Australia is privileged to hold such an extraordinary collection of work by a photographer of Arbus’s significance,’ said Anne O’Hehir, curator. ‘This collection covers Arbus’s best-known pictures, and also includes images which are rarely seen. This exhibition is a testament to the power of Arbus’s extraordinary vision.’
Arbus’s photographs are exhibited alongside a selection of works by other leading American photographers whose work influenced Arbus, was shown alongside hers in the ’60s, or has been influenced by her. These include famous images by Lisette Model, Walker Evans and Weegee, her contemporaries William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Milton Rogovin as well as a slightly younger generation, work by Mary Ellen Mark and William Eggleston.
Heide Director and CEO Dr Natasha Cica said: ‘Heide is delighted to present this exhibition of the renowned photographer Diane Arbus. Her uncompromising view challenged existing photography conventions in a surprising and enchanting way.’
William Klein (American, 1928-2022) Christmas shoppers, near Macy’s, New York 1954 Gelatin silver photograph
Klein sandwiched his relatively short photographic career, working as a fashion photographer for Vogue, between being a painter and a filmmaker. Self-taught, he experimented with flash, wide-angle lenses, blurring, abstraction and accidents, and produced grainy, high contrast prints. He is deliberately at the other end of the spectrum from the invisible, disinterested photographer. Klein deliberately got really close to his subjects, in their faces, and caught them reacting to being photographed on the street. ‘To be visible, intervene and show it’ was his mantra.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Boy with a straw hat waiting to march in a pro-war parade, N.Y.C., 1967 1967 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Woman with a beehive hairdo 1965 Gelatin silver photograph
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Girl in a watch cap, N.Y.C. 1965 1965 Gelatin silver photograph
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Child with toy hand grenade, in Central Park, New York City 1962 1962 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
The photographs of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) are powerful allegories of postwar America. Once seen they are rarely forgotten. Contemporary audiences found the way that Arbus approached the genre of portraiture confronting and her work continues to polarise opinion. The images raise difficult, uncomfortable questions concerning the intent of the photographer.
Arbus had a huge curiosity about the society around her; her favourite thing was ‘to go where I’ve never been’. As she was a photographer, this manifested as an obsessive exploration into what it means to photograph and be photographed, and what can happen at that moment of exchange – something elusive and a little bit magical. Whether Arbus is an empathetic champion of the outsider, or an exploitative voyeur, is something that each viewer alone must decide.
The National Gallery of Australia’s collection of Arbus photographs is among the most impressive in the world. The NGA is extremely fortunate to have bought 36 rare, vintage prints in 1980 and 1981, from the earliest releases of prints from the Arbus Estate. These works are from the last decade of the artist’s life, the period in which her recognisable style is in full flight and she was in total control of her medium.
These rare prints are shown alongside photographs by others who also sought to redefine the tradition of portraiture, and whose vision of America is also both challenging and moving. The work of these photographers relates to Arbus in a variety of ways: they are influencers, contemporaries or heirs to aspects of her worldview. Like Arbus, they are keen, singular observers of their worlds, transforming the sometimes banal and ugly into images of unexpected beauty.
An uncompromising view of the world
Diane Arbus was born Diane Nemerov, the daughter of wealthy Jewish New Yorkers; her father ran Russek’s, a department store on Fifth Avenue selling furs and women’s clothing. Growing up in an apartment in a towering building on Central Park West, her world was highly protected, one in which she never felt adversity. This was something Arbus resented both at the time and later; it seemed to her to be an unreal experience of the world. At 18 she married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, and for a decade from the mid 1940s, they ran a successful photography studio doing fashion shots for leading picture magazines.
In 1956 Arbus ceased working with Allan in the studio and began instead to explore subjects of her own choice. She was, apart from the occasional class, essentially self-taught and as she struck out on her own, she undertook a detailed study of the work of other photographers. Compelled to confront that which had been off-limits in her own privileged childhood, she looked to other photographers who had confronted the world head-on, including Weegee, William Klein, Walker Evans and Lisette Model. They recorded, each in their own way, their surroundings with an at-times frightening candour. In their images, Arbus found an uncompromising view of the world, stripped of sentimentality.
Weegee
Weegee turns the banal and seedy underbelly of New York city streets after hours into moments of great psychological drama. A freelance news photographer, he supplied images to the popular press but was also well regarded in art circles. The Museum of Modern Art collected his work and exhibited it in 1943. Arbus owned a number of Weegee’s books and greatly admired his Runyonesque view of the world. She closely studied aspects of his working method as she formulated her own, especially his use of flash. His ‘wild dynamics’ made everyone else ‘look like an academician’, she wrote.
William Klein
Returning to New York in 1954 from his émigré life in Paris, Klein was at once taken aback by what he perceived to be a society pursuing purely materialistic goals, but also excited by the energy he found on the streets. Self-taught, he experimented with flash, wide-angle lenses, blurring and close-ups, abstraction and accidents, and produced grainy, high contrast prints. Klein’s 1956 book, Life is Good & Good for You in New York: Trance Witness Revels, a copy of which Arbus owned, gave impetus to the emerging genre of street photography through his harsh, uncompromising vision of the city. His work was met, particularly in the United States, with misunderstanding and hostility.
Walker Evans
The writer James Agee travelled to Alabama in America’s South in 1936 to research an article on the plight of tenant farmers for Fortune magazine. He chose photographer Walker Evans to accompany him. The article did not eventuate but a book did, Let us now praise famous men. Both men were unnerved by what they saw: Agee wrote of ‘the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of … an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings’. And yet in the face of this, Evans made images of insistent frontality and careful symmetrical framing; devoid of cliché or pretention, and suggesting an impartiality. This gave the images a great authenticity and power.
Evans’ oeuvre is essentially concerned with how photography represents the world. His significance in the development of twentieth-century photography was reappraised during the 1960s, largely through the largesse of John Szarkowski, the head of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department at the time. Szarkowski argued that the foundations for many of the key aesthetic and formal tendencies of 1960s photography rested in Evans’ work. The catalogue that accompanied his 1938 exhibition American photographs, in particular, had a huge impact on the new generation of photographers, and on Arbus in particular. She met Evans in 1961 and visited him regularly at his New York home throughout the decade. He wrote in support of her 1963 Guggenheim Grant application.
Lisette Model
Lisette Model’s satirical portraits of the rich on the French Riviera and the photographs she made in the 1940s of the Lower East Side’s poor and marginalised bear out the fact that she took her own advice: ‘Don’t shoot ’till the subject hits you in the pit of your stomach’. By the 1950s she had largely turned to teaching and her influence on Arbus, who took a number of her classes at the New School in 1956 and again in 1957-1958, was profound. Model encouraged Arbus to pursue her own distinctive voice. Model recalled, ‘One day I said to her, and I think this was very crucial, “originality means coming from the source…” And from then on, Diane was sitting there and – I’ve never in my life seen anybody – not listening to me but suddenly listening to herself through what was said.’
The gap between intention and effect
Prior to 1962 Arbus worked primarily with a 35mm Nikon camera. Her images at this time were often about gesture, with grainy images and subjects frequently shown in movement. In 1962 Arbus switched to a 2 ¼ inch medium-format, twin-lens Rolleiflex (later a Mamiyaflex), which she used with a flash and which when printed full-frame, gave the photographs a square format. The pictures she took with these cameras are deceptively, deliberately simple. Compositionally they are often masterful with repetitions of shapes and minutely observed, subtly presented details. Despite the confronting subject matter, her images have a classical stillness, an insistent frontality that she borrowed from classic documentary photography. To this Arbus adds a very deliberate use of the snap-shot aesthetic, with slightly tilted picture planes and people caught unawares, to signal the authenticity of her connection with the subject.
Arbus developed a working method and style that offered what amounts to a critique of the photographic portrait. There is a palpable tension in the way she presents her subjects, a complicity in the image-making process which rubs up against the fact that her subjects seem caught off-guard, unintentionally revealing aspects of themselves. Arbus identified this as ‘the gap between intention and effect’, explaining that ‘it really is totally fantastic that we look like this and you sometimes see that very clearly in a photograph. Something is ironic in the world and it has to do with the fact that what you intend never comes out like you intend it’. Arbus’s ability to connect with and gain the trust of people is legendary. Fellow photographer Joel Meyerowitz felt that she was ‘an emissary from the world of feeling. She cared about these people. They felt that and gave her their secret’.
The aristocrats
As a student at the alternative Fieldston Ethical Culture School in the Bronx, Arbus developed a fascination with myths, ritual and public spectacle. This preoccupation remained steadfast throughout her life. For example, in 1963 she was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to document ‘American rites, manners and customs’. Arbus had an almost insatiable curiosity and fascination with the world and she sought to make photographs that addressed fundamental aspects of our humanity in the broadest terms. It was the photographer Lisette Model, with whom she studied in the late 1950s, who made her realise that, in a seemingly contradictory way, the more specific a photograph of something was, the more general its message became.
To this extent, it is notable that Arbus’s photographs rarely address the issues of the day in any overt and obvious way. While there are exceptions – for example, her work for magazines from the sixties, including portraits of celebrities and documentary work examining the plight of the poor in South Carolina – for the most part Arbus used the camera as a licence to enter the specifics of other people’s lives.
She was particularly drawn to marginalised people, who for whatever reason had fallen out of a conventional place in society and were forced (those born into disability) or chose (the nudists, for example) to construct their own identity. To find them, she frequented sideshow alleys and Hubert’s Freak Museum at Broadway and 42nd Street, joined nudist camps in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and visited seedy hotels; she also found them in public spaces, in streets and parks where social rules were often arbitrarily imposed and discarded.
Arbus’s subjects are often seen to play with society’s roles and restrictions. She classified these people as ‘aristocrats’, having achieved a certain freedom from social constraints, and they made her feel a mix of shame and awe.
The prints
Arbus stated that, for her, ‘the subject of the picture is more important than the picture’. There is no doubt that the emotional authenticity of what she photographed was of upmost importance. In keeping with this, she often undersold her skill as a photographer; she often complained of technical difficulties, and others frequently observed that she seemed weighed down by her equipment. In downplaying her relationship to the technical aspects of her work, Arbus sought to emphasise instead her rapport with her subjects. All the same, she was very clear about how she wanted her images to look; she worked hard to achieve a particular quality in her prints, which have a distinct feel and appearance that are quite different from other photographs of the 1960s.
From the mid 1960s, Arbus worked hard to emphasise the photographic-ness of her pictures. She modified the negative tray on her Omega ‘D’ enlarger, which produced the distinctive black border around her images; later again, she used strips of cardboard down the sides of the negatives to blur the edges of her images. Both of these techniques meant that each of her prints is slightly, wonderfully unique. And there is often, as in the cases of Woman with a beehive hairdo and Girl in a watch cap, both made in 1965, damage (tears and marks) on the negative that Arbus has made no effort to minimise or disguise. Close viewing of the collection of photographs held at the NGA reveal ghostly traces of the hand of Arbus. She reminds us consistently through a number of careful and deliberate strategies that we are looking at a photograph that has been made by a particular person.
To know life
Arbus was not alone in photographing the social landscape of America in the 1960s. Others, including Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Milton Rogovin, similarly took to the country’s streets. Rogovin’s life work was to photograph people from poor minority groups, much of his work being made in Buffalo, New York, where he himself lived. Like Arbus, he often knew and befriended his subjects, returning to photograph them over many years, collaborating with them to create images of great dignity and integrity.
Like Arbus, Winogrand and Friedlander were included in the landmark 1967 exhibition New documents, curated by John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the only major showing of Arbus’s work during her lifetime. While acknowledging that each of the artists in the exhibition had their own distinct styles, Szarkowski characterised them as part of a generation that used the documentary tradition ‘to more personal ends.’ As he wrote: ‘Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy – almost an affection – for the imperfections and frailties of society’.
An essential aspect of their innovation was the way they positioned photography and the acts of taking and viewing a photograph as an essential aspect of the work. Their photographs were not intended simply as windows to the world. As Winogrand noted when asked how he felt about missing photographs while he reloaded his camera, ‘there are no photographs while I’m reloading’. Winogrand, Friedlander and Arbus were fascinated by how the real was translated into the language of photography, and how the experience of the photograph involves a fascinating, multilayered three-way interaction between the photographer, the subject and the viewer.
Garry Winogrand
Winogrand restlessly prowled the same streets of New York as Arbus in the 1960s, working stealthily, capturing people without their knowledge. His viewpoint, one he asks the viewer to join, is unashamedly, unapologetically voyeuristic. He used a Leica M4 with a wide-angle lens and tipped the picture plane, giving his compositions a particular feel. Traumatised by the fraught political tensions of the cold war period, anxiety found its way into the imagery – lending his work an edge that makes for a compelling reading of an alienated and fearful society in the throes of change. His city is a site of unexpected confrontations and strange, witty juxtapositions. Fellow photographer Joel Meyerowitz remarked that Winogrand ‘set a tempo on the street so strong that it was impossible not to follow it. It was like jazz. You just had to get in the same groove’.
Lee Friedlander
Friedlander’s images are invariably about looking and this includes turning the camera on himself. He often intrudes into his hastily grabbed, ironic studies of the city, through reflection or shadow or a pair of shoes. Thus, the viewer of his photographs is constantly reminded that this is an image of the world that is made by someone, in this case, the photographer Lee Friedlander. The works are laconic, witty and intensely personal: and certainly the self-portraits are rarely flattering. Coming at the end of a decade in which a particular, new brand of art photographer had begun to achieve celebrity status, through the efforts of curators like John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, Friedlander’s self-portraits can also be seen as a shrewd send-up of fame.
Milton Rogovin
Originally trained as an optometrist, Rogovin began his career as a social documentary photographer in 1958, recording gospel services held in ‘store-front’ churches in the African-American neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York. Profoundly influenced as a young man by the impact of the Great Depression, Rogovin reflected that, ‘I could no longer be indifferent to the problems of the people, especially the poor, the forgotten ones’. He worked in collaboration with his subjects, who were always allowed to determine how they should be photographed. His photographs focus on family life, the celebrations and events that bind a community together, and the particulars of an individual’s existence.
The Arbus legacy
Arbus occupies an important place in the development of American photography. Her work has indelibly influenced the way that the documentary tradition has continued to evolve over the last 50 years, with many of the leading contemporary photographers, such as William Eggleston and Mary Ellen Mark, continuing to rethink the tradition, looking back to Arbus just as she looked back to her predecessors. Although it has often infuriated, and continues to do so, those who take issue with the way Arbus photographed the world, her impact on audiences and photographers alike is incontestable.
William Eggleston
While Arbus used the snap-shot aesthetic in her work to increase its aura of authenticity and immediacy, when Eggleston employed the same technique in colour without the abstraction and artistic mediation of black-and-white, contemporary audiences reacted with confusion. Careful observation of the images though reveals a masterful eye, and a sophisticated understanding of the way photography transforms the world. Eggleston’s images are at once monumental and mundane, ordinary and strange, prosaic and poetic. The result is luminous, breathtaking and perfectly banal.
Mary Ellen Mark
The photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark built a career photographing those on the fringes of society, seeking out those who she felt displayed what she described as attitude and often working on projects over many years, slowly earning trust. Her commitment was to give the people she photographed a unique voice, an individuality. Commenting on a body of work, Mark spoke of her desire to let her subjects ‘make contact with the outside world by letting them reach out and present themselves. I didn’t want to use them. I wanted them to use me’.
Mark spent months photographing the New York bar scene at night. This work formed the basis of her first one person exhibition, at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. She reflected at the time, ‘I would like to have the means to travel the whole country and show what America is through its bars. Millions of people who do not want or can not stay at home. The majority of clients are loners, which is why it is extremely difficult to work in these places. I had to make myself accepted’.
Anonymous text from the National Gallery of Australia website [Online] Cited 01/06/2018. No longer available online
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Coney Island Bather, New York [Baigneuse, Coney Island] c. 1939-1941 Silver gelatin print National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Woman with Veil, San Francisco 1949 Silver gelatin print National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Lower East Side, New York 1942 Gelatin silver photograph 49.2 h x 39.5 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Lower East Side, New York 1939-1942 Gelatin silver photograph 48.9 h x 38.9 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Fashion show, Hotel Pierre, New York City 1940-1946 Gelatin silver photograph 40.0 h x 49.6 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Cafe Metropole, New York City c. 1946 Gelatin silver photograph 49.5 h x 40.0 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
While training as a musician in Vienna, Lisette Model studied under the avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg, who introduced her to the Expressionist painters of the early 20th century. Influenced by European modernist philosophy and aesthetics, Model abandoned music in Paris in 1933, taking up painting and then photography. She gained initial renown for a series of photographs of men and women lounging in deck chairs along the Promenade des Anglais in the south of France. In 1938, she relocated to New York with her husband (the artist Evsa Model), where she took photographs of exuberant characters on the streets of New York – catching reflections of individuals in store windows and images of feet in motion and holidaymakers around Coney Island. Model taught at the New School where one of her most famous students was Diane Arbus, and was published by Harper’s Bazaar and other magazines.
Anonymous text. “Lisette Model,” on the Artsy website [Online] Cited 16/02/2022. No longer available online
Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s 42nd St Flea Circus, New York [Albert/Alberta] c. 1945 Gelatin silver photograph 49.5 h x 39.7 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981
Mary Ellen Mark (American, 1940-2015) Untitled from The bar series 1977 Gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Huntsville, Alabama c. 1971 Dye transfer colour photograph 46.6 h x 32.4 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Memphis c. 1970 printed 1980 Dye transfer colour photograph 30.2 h x 44.2 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) Greenwood, Mississippi [“The Red Ceiling”] 1973, printed 1979 Dye transfer colour photograph 29.5 h x 45.4 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
With its intense red, Eggleston’s picture of the spare room in a friend’s home is one of the most iconic of all colour photographs. Often called The red room, this photograph was intended to be shocking: Eggleston described the effect of the colour as like ‘red blood that is wet on the wall’. But the radicalness of the picture is not just in its juicy (and impossible to reproduce) redness; it is also found in the strange view it provides of a domestic interior, one that Eggleston has described as a ‘fly’s eye view’.
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) No title [Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York] 1969 Gelatin silver photograph 27.2 h x 42.0 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) New York City, New York. From “Garry Winogrand” 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 21.6 h x 32.6 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
Winogrand was asked how he felt about missing photographs while he reloaded his camera. He replied ‘There are no photographs while I’m reloading’: There is no possibility in the Winograndian world view of regarding the camera as a window onto the world; it becomes a mirror reflecting back the photographer’s concerns. Winogrand was fascinated by how the real was translated into the photographic. In the end this fascination became an obsession from which he could not escape or find solace – or meaning. At the time of his death there were a third of a million exposures that he had never looked at including 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film.
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Rt. 9w, N.Y. 1969 Gelatin silver photograph 18.8 h x 28.2 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981
Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) Mount Rushmore 1969 Gelatin silver photograph 18.8 h x 28.0 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981
“I always wanted to be a photographer. I was fascinated with the materials. But I never dreamed I would be having this much fun. I imagined something much less elusive, much more mundane.”
~ Lee Friedlander
Friedlander is known for his complex, layered images, exploring the way that the urban landscape fragments our vision. Throughout his career he has found endless fascination in photographing reflections in windows – merging what lies behind the glass with what is reflected in it – out of which he has created juxtapositions which are witty and insightful. He often inserts himself into the image, either overtly or more frequently as a shadow or partially concealed form – part of his face, for instance, hidden behind the camera.
In the 1960s he moved away from a recognisably documentary style toward one in which the subject is more elusive, reflecting a society which had itself become more fragmented and complex. By cropping and cutting up city and natural landscapes he changes our perception of them. In creating compositions that are dynamic, unexpected and often confusing, Friedlander asks us to look freshly at our everyday environments.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Hudson Street boarding house detail, New York 1931 Gelatin silver photograph 15.7 h x 20.6 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Bedroom, shrimp fisherman’s house, Biloxi, Mississippi 1945 Gelatin silver photograph 23.4 h x 18.3 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Tenant Farmer’s Wife, Alabama [Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of a cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama] 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 23.6 h x 18.0 w cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978
“Written with her trademark flair and force, Sontag’s book [On Photography] inaugurated a wave of criticism, much of it influenced by Foucaultian theory, that underscored the instrumentality and implicit violence of photography, its ability to police and regulate it subjects, especially those lacking social and political power: the poor, presumed “deviants” or “criminals,” and workers. As Sontag herself acknowledged, however, photography is not only a predatory means of taking possession, but also a mode of conferring value; it can potentially be put to counter-hegemonic uses, used to see and frame in ways that affirm and legitimate, rather than strictly contain and control, the presence of culturally disenfranchised persons.”
“The power of his art stems from the particular manner in which Rogovin transforms traditional portrait photography and documentary practice, opening up potentially instrumentalist, one-sided visual forms to dynamics of reciprocity and mutuality…”
“Rogovin’s photography thus balances the documentary desire to grasp and present, to “capture” an image of the”Other,” with a commitment to holding back in order to allow his subjects space to shape the photographic process. His practice is a form of”approach,” to borrow a term from Carol Shloss, that resists even as it engages. We might call this an aesthetic of “making space”: a photographic method that creates room for subjects to actively participate in the production of their own images rather than stand as passive objects before a colonizing gaze.”
“The fact that Rogovin’s work at once invokes and questions the camera’s capacity to classify – to embed individuals in a larger archive – echoes his challenge to documentary business as usual. Certainly, Rogovin’s images of working people perform a classic documentary task: to lend public visibility to those who have been overlooked and exploited, to give aggrieved people the social recognition they are otherwise denied in our society. However, his images do not enforce the power and prerogatives of middle-class reformers or governmental institutions, as did so much early twentieth-century documentary photography, which, as Maren Stange has argued, tended to reassure “a 11 liberal middle-class that social oversight was both its duty and its right.” By refusing to provide pity-inducing images of working people that present them as weak and vulnerable, Rogovin’s photographs undercut the sense of privilege viewers often feel when looking at pictures of what Jacob Riis called “the other half.””
Curators:Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 is made up of Otto Dix: The Evil Eye, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander, an exhibition of works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art. Otto Dix: The Evil Eye is curated by Dr Susanne Meyer-Büser, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Francesco Manacorda, Artistic Director and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool. ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander is curated by Francesco Manacorda, and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, with the cooperation of ARTIST ROOMS and the German Historical Institute.
Writing sociology: picturing an uncertain cultural landscape
There is something completely unexpected in the strange correlation and synergy between the work of these two artists.
While it is inadvisable to compare and contrast (why pick those particular images out of thousands!), I have paired several images from the exhibition together in this posting. Let’s look at the pairing above.
Technically, Sander’s photograph of The Painter Otto Dix and his Wife Martha (1925-1926) evidences a slightly flattened perspective especially in the “face on” aspect of the androgynous woman – but the photograph also possesses a surreal air, the silhouette of the woman’s hair contrasting with the swept back slickness of the man and his jutting, three-quarter profile. The unusual space between them adds admirably to the overall frisson of the photograph, it’s non/objectivity and performativity. In Dix’s painting Hugo Erfurth with Dog (1926) a greater distortion of perspective is in evidence. The mythic dog is painted as if photographed using a telephoto lens, while the man’s face is all over the place… the jaw elongated as if by using a wide angle lens, the front of the face flattened in an earnest manner. This is what painting can do, and is allowed to do, that photography can never match. But it doesn’t have to. It does it in a different way.
Here we need to excavate – that’s a good word for this investigation – we need to excavate the ethos in the zeitgeist. We need to understand the attitudes and aspirations of the cultural era in which these artists lived in order to comprehend the defining spirit of the period, as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time. These artists emerge out of the same society, they inhabit the spirit of the age – those interwar years of the avant-garde, speed, and change; of poverty, postwar realities and politics; of The Great Depression, disfiguration and disenfranchisement.
I look at the obscurity of faces in Dix’s Assault Troops Advance under Gas (1924) and then adjust to the pensiveness of hand, pose and gaze in Sander’s Working Students (1926) … and then mentally add in Avedon’s later portraiture. Interesting. I look at Sander’s National Socialist, Head of Department of Culture (c. 1938) and note the “exemplary mastery of illumination”, but just as distinctively the averted gaze, the line on head where the unnamed man (who is he? what was his name?) had just taken his cap off. Just below is Dix’s Self-Portrait with Easel (1926) with three-quarter profile, piercing stare, bent finger. Who is capturing reality here? No body.
In his own way, Sander plays with the reality of time and space just as much as Dix. In my mind, Sander’s “staged performativity and the artifice of construction [which] is paramount to the surreal effects created,” are no less un/real than the paintings of Dix. There are things that just don’t fit. The strangeness of the era, the creation of these non/objective environments, cause an alignment of the stars between both artists. This is inspired curating, to bring these two extra-ordinary talents together.
These artists walked the same streets, they breathed the same air. They excavated the spirit of the age. And in so doing, their art becomes impervious to time.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Tate Liverpool for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We want to see things completely naked, clear, almost without art. I invented the New Objectivity.”
Otto Dix, 1965
German artist Otto Dix was a committed painter of portraits. At a time when photography had diminished portraiture’s importance and the genre was seen as a deeply unfashionable pursuit for so-called serious artists, he was making a living – and cementing his reputation – out of exactly that. He commented:
“Painting portraits is regarded by modernist artists as a lower artistic occupation; and yet it is one of the most exciting and difficult tasks for a painter.”
Dix was a key supporter of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement, a name coined after an exhibition held in Mannheim, Germany in 1925. Described by art historian G.F. Hartlaub, as ‘new realism bearing a socialist flavour’, the movement sought to depict the social and political realities of the Weimar Republic.
Tate Liverpool presents the faces of Germany between the two World Wars seen through the eyes of painter Otto Dix (1891-1969) and photographer August Sander (1876-1964). Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 brings together two artists whose works document the glamour and misery of the Weimar Republic, a time of radical extremes and political and economic upheaval.
Portraying a Nation, which exhibits Dix and Sander as a pair for the first time, reflects a pivotal point in Germany’s history, as it introduced democratic rule in the aftermath of the First World War. The period was one of experimentation and innovation across the visual arts, during which both artists were concerned with representing the extremes of society, from the flourishing cabaret culture to intense poverty and civilian rebellions.
Featuring more than 300 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, Portraying a Nation unites two complementary exhibitions. Otto Dix: The Evil Eye explores Dix’s harshly realistic depictions of German society and the brutality of war, while ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander presents photographs from Sander’s best known series People of the Twentieth Century, from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art.
The exhibition focusses on the evolution of Dix’s work during his years in Düsseldorf, from 1922 to 1925, when he became one of the foremost New Objectivity painters, a movement exploring a new style of artistic representation following the First World War. Dix’s paintings are vitriolic reflections on German society, commenting on the country’s stark divisions. His work represents the people who made up these contradictions in society with highlights including Portrait of the Photographer Hugo Erfurth with Dog 1923, Self-Portrait with Easel 1926, as well as a large group of lesser known watercolours. Dix’s The War 1924 will also form a key element of the exhibition, a series of 50 etchings made as a reaction to and representation of the profound effect of his personal experiences of fighting in the First World War.
Sander’s photographs also observe a cross-section of society to present a collective portrait of a nation. Sander commenced his major photographic project People of the Twentieth Century in 1910, an ambitious task that occupied him until the 1950s. The project resulted in more than 600 images in which people were categorised into what he described as ‘types’, including artists, musicians, circus workers, farmers and, in the late 1930s, images of Nazi officers. More than 140 photographs from the ARTIST ROOMS collection will be displayed to create a large-scale timeline of Weimar Germany, placing individual subjects against a backdrop of the era’s tumultuous cultural and political history.
Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-1933 is made up of Otto Dix: The Evil Eye, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander, an exhibition of works from the ARTIST ROOMS collection of international modern and contemporary art.
The ARTIST ROOMS collection is jointly owned by National Galleries of Scotland and Tate on behalf of the public, and was established through The d’Offay donation in 2008 with the assistance of the Heritage Memorial Fund, Art Fund and the Scottish and British governments. It is shared with UK museums and galleries including Tate, National Galleries of Scotland and a network of Associate venues through ARTIST ROOMS On Tour, which is a partnership until 2019 with lead Associate Ferens Art Gallery, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Art Fund and the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Otto Dix: The Evil Eye is curated by Dr Susanne Meyer-Büser, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Francesco Manacorda, Artistic Director and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, Tate Liverpool. ARTIST ROOMS: August Sander is curated by Francesco Manacorda, and Lauren Barnes, Assistant Curator, with the cooperation of ARTIST ROOMS and the German Historical Institute.
Seen together, Sander’s images form a pictorial mosaic of inter-war Germany. Rapid social change and newfound freedom were accompanied by financial insecurity and social and political unrest. By photographing the citizens of the Weimar Republic – from the artistic, bohemian elite to the Nazis and those they persecuted – Sander’s photographs tell of an uncertain cultural landscape. It is a world characterised by explosions of creativity, hyperinflation and political turmoil. The faces of those he photographed show traces of this collective historical experience. Alfred Döblin, author of the 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz said:
“Sander has succeeded in writing sociology not by writing, but by producing photographs – photographs of faces and not mere costumes.”
Dix served in the First World War from 1915, fighting on the Western front in the Battle of the Somme. Although an enthusiastic soldier – his service earned him the Iron Cross (Second Class) – Dix’s experiences affected him deeply. He marked the war’s 10th anniversary with a group of etchings entitled Der Krieg (The War), leaving few of the horrors of the front line to the imagination. Commenting later, he said:
“For years, [I] constantly had these dreams in which I was forced to crawl through destroyed buildings, through corridors through which I couldn’t pass. The rubble was always there in my dreams.”
From the early 1920s, he devoted himself to the study of old master painting techniques, using a layering effect, produced first with egg tempera and, later, finished with oils. This moved his contemporary George Grosz to jokingly call him ‘Otto Hans Baldung Dix’ (after the German old master Hans Baldung Grien). Later, Grosz would write:
“Dix did all the drawing in a thin tempera, then went over it with thin mastic glazes in various cold and warm tones. He was the only Old Master I ever watched using this technique.”
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Dix was dismissed from his professorship teaching art at the Dresden Academy, where he had worked since 1927. The reason given was that, through his painting, he had committed a ‘violation of the moral sensibilities and subversion of the militant spirit of the German people’.
In the years following, some 260 of his works were confiscated by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry. Several of these works, including The Jeweller Karl Krall 1923 (which features in the Tate Liverpool exhibition Portraying a Nation), appeared in the Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibition of 1937-1938. The exhibition was staged by the Nazis to destroy the careers of those artists they considered mentally ill, inappropriate or unpatriotic.
In the mid-1920s, Sander began his highly ambitious project People of the 20th Century. In it, Sander aimed to document Germany by taking portraits of people from all segments of society. The project adapted and evolved continuously, falling into seven distinct groups: ‘The Farmer’, ‘The Skilled Tradesman’, ‘The Woman’, ‘Classes and Professions’, ‘The Artists’, ‘The City’ and ‘The Last People’. Sander once said ‘The portrait is your mirror. It’s you’. He believed that, through photography, he could reveal the characteristic traits of people. He used these images to tell each person’s story; their profession, politics, social situation and background.
Sander did not use the newly invented Leica camera. Instead he remained devoted to an old-fashioned large-format camera, glass negatives and long exposure times. This allowed him to capture minute details of individual faces. Sander prized the daguerreotype, a photographic process introduced in the previous century, of which he said: ‘it cannot be surpassed in the delicacy of the delineation, it is objectivity in the best sense of the word’. Allied to this, his portraits were anonymous. Shot against neutral backgrounds and titled more often than not by profession alone, he let the images – and the faces in them – speak for themselves.
The ambition and reach of People of the 20th Century (both in terms of the quality of his photography and in his representation of a cross-section of society) made him a monumental figure of twentieth century photography. The likes of American social realist photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange (whose works became iconic symbols of the depression), and later photographers such as Diane Arbus, each owe a debt to the trailblazing Sander. More recently, the work of conceptual artists such as Bernd and Hilla Becher (known for their typologies of industrial buildings and structures) and Rineke Dijkstra, whose photography is infused with psychological depth and social awareness, resonates with the influence of August Sander’s career-long project.
Exhibition dates: 29th May, 2016 – 2nd January, 2017
Curators: Sarah Greenough, senior curator, department of photographs, and Philip Brookman, consulting curator, department of photographs, both National Gallery of Art, are the exhibition curators.
Louis Stettner (American, 1922-2016) Times Square, New York City 1952-1954 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 42.1 x 27.5cm (16 9/16 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
The last posting of a fruitful year for Art Blart. I wish all the readers of Art Blart a happy and safe New Year!
The exhibition is organised around five themes – movement, sequence, narrative, studio, and identity – found in the work of Muybridge and Stieglitz, themes then developed in the work of other artists. While there is some interesting work in the posting, the conceptual rationale and stand alone nature of the themes and the work within them is a curatorial ordering of ideas that, in reality, cannot be contained within any one boundary, the single point of view.
Movement can be contained in sequences; narrative can be unfolded in a sequence (as in the work of Duane Michals); narrative and identity have a complex association which can also be told through studio work (eg. Gregory Crewdson), etc… What does Roger Mayne’s Goalie, Street Football, Brindley Road (1956, below) not have to do with identity, the young lad with his dirty hands, playing in his socks, in a poverty stricken area of London; why has Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Oscar Wilde (1999, below) been included in the studio section when it has much more to do with the construction of identity through photography – “Triply removing his portrait from reality – from Oscar Wilde himself to a portrait photograph to a wax sculpture and back to a photograph” – which confounds our expectations of the nature of photography. Photography is nefariously unstable in its depiction of an always, constructed reality, through representation(s) which reject simple causality.
To isolate and embolden the centre is to disclaim and disavow the periphery, work which crosses boundaries, is multifaceted and multitudinous; work which forms a nexus for networks of association beyond borders, beyond de/lineation – the line from here to there. The self-contained themes within this exhibition are purely illusory.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“We can no longer accept that the identity of a man can be adequately established by preserving and fixing what he looks like from a single viewpoint in one place.”
John Berger. “No More Portraits,” in New Society August 1967
“Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art explores the connections between the two newly joined photography collections. On view from May 29, 2016, through January 2, 2017, the exhibition is organised around themes found in the work of the two pioneers of each collection: Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). Inspired by these two seminal artists, Intersections brings together more than 100 highlights of the recently merged collections by a range of artists from the 1840s to today.
Just as the nearly 700 photographs from Muybridge’s groundbreaking publication Animal Locomotion, acquired by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1887, became the foundation for the institution’s early interest in photography, the Key Set of more than 1,600 works by Stieglitz, donated by Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Estate, launched the photography collection at the National Gallery of Art in 1949.”
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Exhibition highlights
The exhibition is organised around five themes – movement, sequence, narrative, studio, and identity – found in the work of Muybridge and Stieglitz.
Movement
Works by Muybridge, who is best known for creating photographic technologies to stop and record motion, anchor the opening section devoted to movement. Photographs by Berenice Abbott and Harold Eugene Edgerton, which study how objects move through space, are included, as are works by Roger Mayne, Alexey Brodovitch, and other who employed the camera to isolate an instant from the flux of time.
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Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Horses. Running. Phyrne L. No. 40, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1879 Albumen print Image: 16 x 22.4cm (6 5/16 x 8 13/16 in.) Sheet: 25.7 x 32.4cm (10 1/8 x 12 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon
In order to analyse the movement of racehorses, farm animals, and acrobats, Muybridge pioneered new and innovative ways to stop motion with photography. In 1878, he started making pictures at railroad magnate Leland Stanford’s horse farm in Palo Alto, California, where he developed an electronic shutter that enabled exposures as fast as one-thousandth of a second. In this print from Muybridge’s 1881 album The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, Stanford’s prized racehorse Phryne L is shown running in a sequential grid of pictures made by 24 different cameras with electromagnetic shutters tripped by wires as the animal ran across the track. These pictures are now considered a critical step in the development of cinema.
Eadweard Muybridge (English, 1830-1904) Internegative for Horses. Trotting. Abe Edgington. No. 28, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion 1878 Collodion negative Overall (glass plate): 15.3 x 25.4cm (6 x 10 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and Patrons’ Permanent Fund
This glass negative shows the sequence of Leland Stanford’s horse Abe Edgington trotting across a racetrack in Palo Alto, California – a revolutionary record of the changes in the horse’s gait in about one second. Muybridge composed the negative from photographs made by eight different cameras lined up to capture the horse’s movements. Used to print the whole sequence together onto albumen paper, this internegative served as an intermediary step in the production of Muybridge’s 1881 album The Attitudes of Animals in Motion.
Étienne Jules Marey (French, 1830-1904) Chronophotograph of a Man on a Bicycle c. 1885-1890 Glass lantern slide Image: 4 x 7.5cm (1 9/16 x 2 15/16 in.) Plate: 8.8 x 10.2cm (3 7/16 x 4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mary and David Robinson
A scientist and physiologist, Marey became fascinated with movement in the 1870s. Unlike Muybridge, who had already made separate pictures of animals in motion, Marey developed in 1882 a means to record several phases of movement onto one photographic plate using a rotating shutter with slots cut into it. He called this process “chronophotography,” meaning photography of time. His photographs, which he published in books and showed in lantern slide presentations, influenced 20th-century cubist, futurist, and Dada artists who examined the interdependence of time and space.
William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) The Boulevards of Paris 1843 Salted paper print Image: 16.6 × 17.1cm (6 9/16 × 6 3/4 in.) Sheet: 19 × 23.2cm (7 1/2 × 9 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, New Century Fund
As soon as Talbot announced his invention of photography in 1839, he realised that its ability to freeze time enabled him to present the visual spectacle of the world in an entirely new way. By capturing something as mundane as a fleeting moment on a busy street, he could transform life into art, creating a picture that could be savoured long after the event had transpired.
David Octavius Hill (Scottish, 1802-1870) and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821-1848) Colinton Manse and weir, with part of the old mill on the right 1843-1847 Salted paper print Image: 20.7 x 14.6cm (8 1/8 x 5 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Paul Mellon Fund
In 1843, only four years after Talbot announced his negative / positive process of photography, painter David Octavius Hill teamed up with engineer Robert Adamson. Working in Scotland, they created important early portraits of the local populace and photographed Scottish architecture, rustic landscapes, and city scenes. Today a suburb southwest of Edinburgh, 19th-century Colinton was a mill town beside a river known as the Water of Leith. Because of the long exposure time required to make this photograph, the water rushing over a small dam appears as a glassy blur.
Thomas Annan (Scottish, 1829-1887) Old Vennel, Off High Street 1868-1871 Carbon print Image: 26.9 x 22.3cm (10 9/16 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 50.8 x 37.9cm (20 x 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
In 1868, Glasgow’s City Improvements Trust hired Annan to photograph the “old closes and streets of Glasgow” before the city’s tenements were demolished. Annan’s pictures constitute one of the first commissioned photographic records of living conditions in urban slums. The collodion process Annan used to make his large, glass negatives required a long exposure time. In the dim light of this narrow passage, it was impossible for the photographer to stop the motion of the restless children, who appear as ghostly blurs moving barefoot across the cobblestones.
Thomas Annan (Scottish, 1829-1887) Old Vennel, Off High Street (detail) 1868-1871 Carbon print Image: 26.9 x 22.3cm (10 9/16 x 8 3/4 in.) Sheet: 50.8 x 37.9cm (20 x 14 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Going to the Post, Morris Park 1904 Photogravure Image: 30.8 x 26.4cm (12 1/8 x 10 3/8 in.) Sheet: 38.5 x 30.3cm (15 3/16 x 11 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
In the 1880s and 1890s, improvements in photographic processes enabled manufacturers to produce small, handheld cameras that did not need to be mounted on tripods. Faster film and shutter speeds also allowed practitioners to capture rapidly moving objects. Stieglitz was one of the first fine art photographers to exploit the aesthetic potential of these new cameras and films. Around the turn of the century, he made many photographs of rapidly moving trains, horse-drawn carriages, and racetracks that capture the pace of the increasingly modern city.
Harold Eugene Edgerton (American, 1903-1990) Wes Fesler Kicking a Football 1934 Gelatin silver print Image: 11 1/2 x 9 5/8 in. Sheet: 13 15/16 x 11 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a Federal Agency, and The Polaroid Corporation)
A professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Edgerton in the early 1930s invited the stroboscope, a tube filled with gas that produced high-intensity bursts of light at regular and very brief intervals. He used it to illuminate objects in motion so that they could be captured by a camera. At first he was hired by industrial clients to reveal flaws in their production of materials, but by the mid-1930s he began to photography everyday events… Edgerton captured phenomena moving too fast for the naked eye to see, and revealed the beauty of people and objects in motion.
Alexey Brodovitch (American born Russia, 1898-1971) Untitled from “Ballet” series 1938 Gelatin silver print Overall: 20.4 x 27.5cm (8 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Diana and Mallory Walker Fund
A graphic artist, Russian-born Brodovitch moved to the United States from Paris in 1930. Known for his innovative use of photographs, illustrations, and type on the printed page, he became art director for Harper’s Bazaar in 1934, and photographed the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo during their American tours from 1935 to 1939. Using a small-format, 35 mm camera, Brodovitch worked in the backstage shadows and glaring light of the theatre to produce a series of rough, grainy pictures that convey the drama and action of the performance. This photograph employs figures in motion, a narrow field of focus, and high-contrast effects to express the stylised movements of Léonide Massine’s 1938 choreography for Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Detroit c. 1943 Dye imbibition print, printed c. 1980 Overall (image): 18 x 26.7cm (7 1/16 x 10 1/2 in.) Sheet: 27.31 x 36.83cm (10 3/4 x 14 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Callahan Family
Harry Callahan (American, 1912-1999) Camera Movement on Neon Lights at Night 1946 Dye imbibition print, printed 1979 Image: 8 3/4 x 13 5/8 in. Sheet: 10 3/8 x 13 15/16 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Richard W. and Susan R. Gessner)
Frank Horvat (Italian, 1928-2020) Paris, Gare Saint-Lazare 1959 Gelatin silver print Overall: 39.3 x 26.2cm (15 1/2 x 10 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
Gare Saint-Lazare is one of the principal railway stations in Paris. Because of its industrial appearance, steaming locomotives, and teeming crowds, it was a frequent subject for 19th-century French painters – including Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, and Gustave Caillebotte – who used it to express the vitality of modern life. 20th-century artists such as Horvat also depicted it to address the pace and anonymity that defined their time. Using a telephoto lens and long exposure, he captured the rushing movement of travellers scattered beneath giant destination signs.
Roger Mayne (English, 1929-2014) Goalie, Street Football, Brindley Road 1956 Gelatin silver print Image: 34.7 × 29.1cm (13 11/16 × 11 7/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Patrons’ Permanent Fund
From 1956 to 1961, Mayne photographed London’s North Kensington neighbourhood to record its emergence from the devastation and poverty caused by World War II. This dramatic photograph of a young goalie lunging for the ball during an after-school soccer game relies on the camera’s ability to freeze the fast-paced and unpredictable action. Because the boy’s daring lunge is forever suspended in time, we will never know its outcome.
Shōmei Tōmatsu (Japanese, 1930-2012) Rush Hour, Tokyo (detail) 1981 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 11 5/16 x 9 7/16 in. (28.73 x 23.97 cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Michael D. Abrams)
Best known for his expressive documentation of World War II’s impact on Japanese culture, Tomatsu was one of Japan’s most creative and influential photographers. Starting in the early 1960s, he documented the country’s dramatic economic, political, and cultural transformation. This photograph – a long exposure made with his camera mounted on a tripod – conveys the chaotic rush of commuters on their way through downtown Tokyo. Tomatsu used this graphic description of movement, which distorts the faceless bodies of commuters dashing down a flight of stairs, to symbolise the dehumanising nature of work in the fast-paced city of the early 1980s.
Sequence
Muybridge set up banks of cameras and used electronic shutters triggered in sequence to analyse the motion of people and animals. Like a storyteller, he sometimes adjusted the order of images for visual and sequential impact. Other photographers have also investigated the medium’s capacity to record change over time, express variations on a theme, or connect seemingly disparate pictures. In the early 1920s, Stieglitz began to create poetic sequences of cloud photographs meant to evoke distinct emotional experiences. These works (later known as Equivalents) influenced Ansel Adams and Minor White – both artists created specific sequences to evoke the rhythms of nature or the poetry of time passing.
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Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From My Window at An American Place, Southwest March 1932 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 23.8 x 18.4cm (9 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) From My Window at An American Place, Southwest April 1932 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 23.8 x 18.8cm (9 3/8 x 7 3/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Water Tower and Radio City, New York 1933 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 23.7 x 18.6cm (9 5/16 x 7 5/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Whenever Stieglitz exhibited his photographs of New York City made in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he grouped them into series that record views from the windows of his gallery, An American Place, or his apartment at the Shelton Hotel, showing the gradual growth of the buildings under construction in the background. Although he delighted in the formal beauty of the visual spectacle, he lamented that these buildings, planned in the exuberance of the late 1920s, continued to be built in the depths of the Depression, while “artists starved,” as he said at the time, and museums were “threatened with closure.”
Ed Ruscha (American, b. 1937) Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966 Offset lithography book: 7 x 5 3/4 in. (17.78 x 14.61cm) Unfolded (open flat): 7 x 276 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Philip Brookman and Amy Brookman)
Vito Acconci (American, 1940-2017) Step Piece 1970 Five gelatin silver prints and four sheets of type-written paper, mounted on board with annotations in black ink Sheet: 76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
Acconci’s Step Piece is made up of equal parts photography, drawing, performance, and quantitative analysis. It documents a test of endurance: stepping on and off a stool for as long as possible every day. This performance-based conceptual work is rooted in the idea that the body itself can be a medium for making art. To record his activity, Acconci made a series of five photographs spanning one complete action. Like the background grid in many of Muybridge’s motion studies, vertical panels in Acconci’s studio help delineate the space. His handwritten notes and sketches suggest the patterns of order and chaos associated with the performance, while typewritten sheets, which record his daily progress, were given to people who were invited to observe.
Narrative
The exhibition also explores the narrative possibilities of photography found in the interplay of image and text in the work of Robert Frank, Larry Sultan, and Jim Goldberg; the emotional drama of personal crisis in Nan Goldin’s image grids; or the expansion of photographic description into experimental video and film by Victor Burgin and Judy Fiskin.
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Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Judith Being Carted from Oaklawn to the Hill. The Way Art Moves 1920 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 18.8cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in.) Sheet: 25.2 x 20.1cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
In 1920, Stieglitz’s family sold their Victorian summerhouse on the shore of Lake George, New York, and moved to a farmhouse on a hill above it. This photograph shows three sculptures his father had collected – two 19th-century replicas of ancient statues and a circa 1880 bust by Moses Ezekiel depicting the Old Testament heroine Judith – as they were being moved in a wooden cart from one house to another. Stieglitz titled it The Way Art Moves, wryly commenting on the low status of art in American society. With her masculine face and bared breast, Judith was much maligned by Georgia O’Keeffe and other younger family members. In a playful summer prank, they later buried her somewhere near the farmhouse, where she remained lost, despite many subsequent efforts by the perpetrators themselves to find her.
Dan Graham (American, 1942-2022) Homes for America 1966-1967 Two chromogenic prints Image (top): 23 x 34cm (9 1/16 x 13 3/8 in.) Image (bottom): 27.8 x 34cm (10 15/16 x 13 3/8 in.) Mount: 101 x 75cm (39 3/4 x 29 1/2 in.) Framed: 102 x 76.2 x 2.8cm (40 3/16 x 30 x 1 1/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Glenstone in honour of Eileen and Michael Cohen
Beginning in the mid-1960s, conceptual artist Dan Graham created several works of art for magazine pages and slide shows. When Homes for America was designed for Arts magazine in 1966, his accompanying text critiqued the mass production of cookie-cutter homes, while his photographs – made with an inexpensive Kodak Instamatic camera – described a suburban world of offices, houses, restaurants, highways, and truck stops. With their haphazard composition and amateur technique, Graham’s pictures ironically scrutinised the aesthetics of America’s postwar housing and inspired other conceptual artists to incorporate photographs into their work. Together, these two photographs link a middle-class family at the opening of a Jersey City highway restaurant with the soulless industrial landscape seen through the window.
Larry Sultan (American, 1946-2009) Thanksgiving Turkey/Newspaper (detail) 1985-1992 Two plexiglass panels with screen printing Framed (Thanksgiving Turkey): 76 × 91cm (29 15/16 × 35 13/16 in.) Framed (Newspaper): 76 × 91cm (29 15/16 × 35 13/16 in.) Other (2 text panels): 50.8 × 76.2cm (20 × 30 in.) Overall: 30 x 117 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
From 1983 to 1992, Sultan photographed his parents in retirement at their Southern California house. His innovative book, Pictures from Home, combines his photographs and text with family album snapshots and stills from home movies, mining the family’s memories and archives to create a universal narrative about the American dream of work, home, and family. Thanksgiving Turkey/Newspaper juxtaposes photographs of his mother and father, each with their face hidden and with adjacent texts where they complain about each other’s shortcomings. “I realise that beyond the rolls of film and the few good pictures … is the wish to take photography literally,” Sultan wrote. “To stop time. I want my parents to live forever.”
Shimon Attie (American, b. 1957) Mulackstrasse 32: Slide Projections of Former Jewish Residents and Hebrew Reading Room, 1932, Berlin 1992 Chromogenic print Unframed: 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 60.96cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Julia J. Norrell in honor of Hilary Allard and Lauren Harry)
Attie projected historical photographs made in 1932 onto the sides of a building at Mulackstrasse 32, the site of a Hebrew reading room in a Jewish neighbourhood in Berlin during the 1930s. Fusing pictures made before Jews were removed from their homes and killed during World War II with photographs of the same dark, empty street made in 1992, Attie has created a haunting picture of wartime loss.
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Relapse/Detox Grid 1998-2000 Nine silver dye bleach prints Overall: 42 1/2 x 62 1/8 in. (107.95 x 157.8cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds donated by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Goldin has unsparingly chronicled her own community of friends by photographing their struggles, hopes, and dreams through years of camaraderie, abuse, addiction, illness, loss, and redemption. Relapse/Detox Grid presents nine colourful yet plaintive pictures in a slide show-like narrative, offering glimpses of a life rooted in struggle, along with Goldin’s own recovery at a detox center, seen in the bottom row.
Nan Goldin (American, b. 1953) Relapse/Detox Grid (detail) 1998-2000 Nine silver dye bleach prints Overall: 42 1/2 x 62 1/8 in. (107.95 x 157.8cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds donated by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Victor Burgin (British, b. 1941) Watergate 2000 Video with sound, 9:58 minutes National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, with funds from the bequest of Betty Battle to the Women’s Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
An early advocate of conceptual art, Burgin is an artist and writer whose work spans photographs, text, and video. Watergate shows how the meaning of art can change depending on the context in which it is seen. Burgin animated digital, 160-degree panoramic photographs of nineteenth-century American art hanging in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and in a hotel room. While the camera circles the gallery, an actor reads from Jean-Paul Satre’s Being and Nothingness, which questions the relationship between presence and absence. Then a dreamlike pan around a hotel room overlooking the nearby Watergate complex mysteriously reveals Niagara, the Corcoran’s 1859 landscape by Frederic Church, having on the wall. In 1859, Niagara Falls was seen as a symbol of the glory and promise of the American nation, yet when Church’s painting is placed in the context of the Watergate, an icon of the scandal that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, it assumes a different meaning and suggests an ominous sense of disillusionment.
Studio
Intersections also examines the studio as a locus of creativity, from Stieglitz’s photographs of his gallery, 291, and James Van Der Zee’s commercial studio portraits, to the manipulated images of Wallace Berman, Robert Heinecken, and Martha Rosler. Works by Laurie Simmons, David Levinthal, and Vik Muniz also highlight the postmodern strategy of staging images created in the studio.
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Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Self-Portrait with Wife Ernestine in a Balloon Gondola c. 1865 Gelatin silver print, printed c. 1890 8.6 × 7.7cm (3 3/8 × 3 1/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
Nadar (a pseudonym for Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) was not only a celebrated portrait photographer, but also a journalist, caricaturist, and early proponent of manned flight. In 1863, he commissioned a prominent balloonist to build an enormous balloon 196 feet high, which he named The Giant. The ascents he made from 1863 to 1867 were widely covered in the press and celebrated by the cartoonist Honoré Daumier, who depicted Nadar soaring above Paris, its buildings festooned with signs for photography studios. Nadar made and sold small prints like this self-portrait to promote his ballooning ventures. The obviously artificial construction of this picture – Nadar and his wife sit in a basket far too small for a real ascent and are posed in front of a painted backdrop – and its untrimmed edges showing assistants at either side make it less of the self-aggrandising statement that Nadar wished and more of an amusing behind-the-scenes look at studio practice.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) Self-Portrait probably 1911 Platinum print Image: 24.2 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) Sheet: 25.3 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Unlike many other photographers, Stieglitz made few self-portraits. He created this one shortly before he embarked on a series of portraits of the artists who frequented his New York gallery, 291. Focusing only on his face and leaving all else in shadow, he presents himself not as an artist at work or play, but as a charismatic leader who would guide American art and culture into the 20th century.
Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864-1946) 291 – Picasso-Braque Exhibition 1915 Platinum print Image: 18.5 x 23.6 cm (7 5/16 x 9 5/16 in.) Sheet: 20.1 x 25.3 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection
291 was Stieglitz’s legendary gallery in New York City (its name derived from its address on Fifth Avenue), where he introduced modern European and American art and photography to the American public. He also used 291 as a studio, frequently photographing friends and colleagues there, as well as the views from its windows. This picture records what Stieglitz called a “demonstration” – a short display of no more than a few days designed to prompt a focused discussion. Including two works by Picasso, an African mask from the Kota people, a wasps’ nest, and 291’s signature brass bowl, the photograph calls into question the relationship between nature and culture, Western and African art.
James Van Der Zee (American, 1886-1983) Sisters 1926 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 17.6 x 12.5cm (6 15/16 x 4 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation through Robert and Joyce Menschel
James Van Der Zee was a prolific studio photographer in Harlem during a period known as the Harlem Renaissance, from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. He photographed many of Harlem’s celebrities, middle-class residents, and community organisations, establishing a visual archive that remains one of the best records of the era. He stands out for his playful use of props and retouching, thereby personalising each picture and enhancing the sitter’s appearance. In this portrait of three sisters, clasped hands show the tender bond of the two youngest, one of whom holds a celebrity portrait, revealing her enthusiasm for popular culture.
Wallace Berman (American, 1926-1976) Silence Series #7 1965-1968 Verifax (wet process photocopy) collage Actual: 24 1/2 x 26 1/2 in. (62.23 x 67.31cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund)
An influential artist of California’s Beat Generation during the 1950s and 1960s, Berman was a visionary thinker and publisher of the underground magazine Semina. His mysterious and playful juxtapositions of divers objects, images, and texts were often inspired by Dada and surrealist art. Silence Series #7 presents a cinematic sequence of his trademark transistor radios, each displaying military, religious, or mechanical images along with those of athletes and cultural icons, such as Andy Warhol. Appropriated from mass media, reversed in tone, and printed backward using an early version of a photocopy machine, these found images, pieced together and recopied as photomontages, replace then ew transmitted through the radios. Beat poet Robert Duncan once called Berman’s Verify collages a “series of magic ‘TV’ lantern shows.”
Doug and Mike Starn (American) Double Rembrandt (with steps) 1987-1991 Gelatin silver prints, ortho film, tape, wood, plexiglass, glue and silicone 2 interlocking parts: Part 1 overall: 26 1/2 x 13 7/8 in. Part 2 overall: 26 3/8 x 13 3/4 in. Overall: 26 1/2 x 27 3/4 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Susan and Peter MacGill
Doug and Mike Starn, identical twins who have worked collaboratively since they were thirteen, have a reputation for creating unorthodox works. Using take, wood, and glue, the brothers assembles sheets of photographic film and paper to create a dynamic composition that includes an appropriated image of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Old Man with a Gold Chain (1631). Double Rembrandt (with steps) challenges the authority of the austere fine art print, as well as the aura of the original painting, while playfully invoking the twins’ own double identity.
Martha Rosler (American, b. 1943) Cleaning the Drapes, from the series, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home 1967-1972 Inkjet print, printed 2007 Framed: 53.5 × 63.3cm (21 1/16 × 24 15/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Pepita Milmore Memorial Fund
A painter, photographer, video artist, feminist, activist writer, and teacher, Martha Rosler made this photomontage while she was a graduate student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frustrated by the portrayal of the Vietnam War on television and in other media, she wrote: “The images were always very far away and of a place we couldn’t imagine.” To bring “the war home,” as she announced in her title, she cut out images from Life magazine and House Beautiful to make powerfully layered collages that contrast American middle-class life with the realities of the war. She selected colour pictures of the idealised American life rich in the trappings of consumer society, and used black-and-white pictures of troops in Vietnam to heighten the contrast between here and there, while also calling attention to stereotypical views of men and women.
Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) Self-Portrait 1974 Gelatin silver print Image: 17 × 14.9cm (6 11/16 × 5 7/8 in.) Sheet: 35 × 27.2cm (13 3/4 × 10 11/16 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Olga Hirshhorn)
Sally Mann, who is best known for the pictures of her children she made in the 1980s and 1990s, began to photograph when she was a teenager. In this rare, early, and intimate self-portrait, the artist is reflected in a mirror, clasping her loose shirt as she stands in a friend’s bathroom. Her thoughtful, expectant expression, coupled with her finger pointing directly at the lens of the large view camera that towers above her, foreshadows the commanding presence photography would have in her life.
David Levinthal (American, b. 1949) Untitled (from the series Hitler Moves East) 1975 Gelatin silver print Sheet: 15 15/16 x 20 in. (40.48 x 50.8cm) Image: 10 9/16 x 13 7/16 in. (26.83 x 34.13cm) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist)
Levinthal’s series of photographs Hitler Moves East was made not during World War II, but in 1975, when the news media was saturated with images of the end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In this series, he appropriates the grainy look of photojournalism and uses toy soldiers and fabricated environments to stage scenes from Germany’s brutal campaign on the Eastern Front during World War II. His pictures are often based on scenes found in television and movies, further distancing them from the actual events. A small stick was used to prop up the falling soldier and the explosion was made with puffs of flour. Hitler Moves East casts doubt on the implied authenticity of photojournalism and calls attention to the power of the media to define public understanding of events.
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) Oscar Wilde 1999 Gelatin silver print Image: 148.59 × 119.6cm (58 1/2 × 47 1/16 in.) Framed: 182.25 × 152.4cm (71 3/4 × 60 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection)
Hiroshi Sugimoto (Japanese, b. 1948) Oscar Wilde (detail) 1999 Gelatin silver print Image: 148.59 × 119.6cm (58 1/2 × 47 1/16 in.) Framed: 182.25 × 152.4cm (71 3/4 × 60 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of The Heather and Tony Podesta Collection)
While most traditional portrait photographers worked in studios, Sugimoto upended this practice in a series of pictures he made at Madame Tussaud’s wax museums in London and Amsterdam, where lifelike wax figures, based on paintings or photographs, as is the case with Oscar Wilde, are displayed in staged vignettes. By isolating the figure from its setting, posing it in a three-quarter-length view, illuminating it to convey the impression of a carefully lit studio portrait, and making his final print almost six feet tall, Sugimoto renders the artificial as real. Triply removing his portrait from reality – from Oscar Wilde himself to a portrait photograph to a wax sculpture and back to a photograph – Sugimoto collapses time and confounds our expectations of the nature of photography.
Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) Alfred Stieglitz (from the series Pictures of Ink) 2000 Silver dye bleach print Image: 152.4 × 121.92cm (60 × 48 in.) Framed: 161.29 × 130.81 × 5.08cm (63 1/2 × 51 1/2 × 2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art)
Muniz has spent his career remaking works of art by artists as varied as Botticelli and Warhol using unusual materials – sugar, diamonds, and even junk. He has been especially interested in Stieglitz and has re-created his photographs using chocolate syrup and cotton. Here, he refashioned Stieglitz’s celebrated self-portrait using wet ink and mimicking the dot matrix of a halftone reproduction. He then photographed his drawing and greatly enlarged it so that the dot matrix itself becomes as important as the picture it replicates.
Identity
Historic and contemporary works by August Sander, Diane Arbus, Lorna Simpson, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others, make up the final section, which explores the role of photography in the construction of identity.”
Wall text
Witkacy (Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz) (Polish, 1885-1939) Self-Portrait (Collapse by the Lamp/Kolaps przy lampie) c. 1913 Gelatin silver print 12.86 x 17.78cm (5 1/16 x 7 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Foto Fund and Robert Menschel and the Vital Projects Fund
A writer, painter, and philosopher, Witkiewicz began to photograph while he was a teenager. From 1911 to 1914, while undergoing psychoanalysis and involved in two tumultuous relationships (one ending when his pregnant fiancée killed herself in 1914), he made a series of startling self-portraits. Close-up, confrontational, and searching, they are pictures in which the artist seems to seek understanding of himself by scrutinising his visage.
August Sander (German, 1876-1964) The Bricklayer 1929, printed c. 1950 Gelatin silver print Sheet (trimmed to image): 50.4 x 37.5cm (19 13/16 x 14 3/4 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Gerhard and Christine Sander, in honour of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
In 1911, Sander began a massive project to document “people of the twentieth century.” Identifying them by their professions, not their names, he aimed to create a typological record of citizens of the Weimar Republic. He photographed people from all walks of life – from bakers, bankers, and businessmen to soldiers, students, and tradesmen, as well as gypsies, the unemployed, and the homeless. The Nazis banned his project in the 1930s because his pictures did not conform to the ideal Aryan type. Although he stopped working after World War II, he made this rare enlargement of a bricklayer for an exhibition of his photographs in the early 1950s.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Photographer’s Display Window, Birmingham, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.1 x 19.3cm (9 1/2 x 7 5/8 in.) Sheet: 25.2 x 20.3cm (9 15/16 x 8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry H. Lunn, Jr. in honor of Jacob Kainen and in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Triplets in their Bedroom, N.J., 1963 Gelatin silver print Image: 37.7 x 37.8cm (14 13/16 x 14 7/8 in.) Sheet: 50.4 x 40.4cm (19 13/16 x 15 7/8 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, R. K. Mellon Family Foundation
Celebrated for her portraits of people traditionally on the margins of society – dwarfs and giants – as well as those on the inside – society matrons and crying babies – Arbus was fascinated with the relationship between appearance and identity. Many of her subjects, such as these triplets, face the camera, tacitly aware of their collaboration in her art. Rendering the familiar strange and the strange familiar, her carefully composed pictures compel us to look at the world in new ways. “We’ve all got an identity,” she said. “You can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take away everything else.”
Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960) Untitled (Two Necklines) 1989 Two gelatin silver prints with 11 plastic plaques Overall: 101.6 x 254 cm (40 x 100 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee
From the mid-1980s to the present, Simpson has created provocative works that question stereotypes of gender, identity, history, and culture, often by combining photographs and words. Two Necklines shows two circular and identical photographs of an African American woman’s mouth, chin, neck, and collarbone, as well as the bodice of her simple shift. Set in between are black plaques, each inscribed with a single word: “ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop.” The words connote things that bind and conjure a sense of menace, yet when placed between the two calm, elegant photographs, their meaning is at first uncertain. But when we read the red plaque inscribed “feel the ground sliding from under you” and note the location of the word “noose” adjacent to the two necklines, we realise that Simpson is quietly but chillingly referring to the act of lynching.
Hank Willis Thomas (American, b. 1976) And One 2011 Digital chromogenic print Framed: 248.29 × 125.73 × 6.35cm (97 3/4 × 49 1/2 × 2 1/2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)
And One is from Thomas’s Strange Fruit series, which explores the concepts of spectacle and display as they relate to modern African American identity. Popularised by singer Billie Holiday, the series title Strange Fruit comes from a poem by Abel Meeropol, who wrote the infamous words “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze; Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees” after seeing a photograph of a lynching in 1936. In And One, a contemporary African American artist reflects on how black bodies have been represented in two different contexts: lynching and professional sports. Thomas ponders the connections between these disparate forms through his dramatic photograph of two basketball players frozen in midair, one dunking a ball through a hanging noose.
National Gallery of Art National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets Constitution Avenue NW, Washington
This looks to be a fascinating exhibition, presenting as it does images from the first seven years of Arbus’ career as an independent artist. I wish I could see it.
What strikes one when viewing the 35mm photographs is how loose they are in terms of the framing and composition. Most of them could do with a good crop to tighten the image frame. Stripper with Bare Breasts Sitting in Her Dressing Room, Atlantic City, N.J. 1961 would have worked better if the focus had been tightened on the central figure. Similarly, Lady on a Bus, N.Y.C. 1957 works much better as a square image as seen in the feature image for the exhibition (below). Gone is the extraneous frontal detritus which adds nothing to the image. But just feel the intensity of the withering look of the women being projected out of the photograph – it’s as if she could bit your head off at any moment. She’s not a happy camper at being photographed.
This is Arbus experimenting, feeling out the medium and trying to find her signature voice as an artist. All the later, well known elements are there: keen observation; wonderful timing; a love of intimacy and a formal, visual relationship with the subject; strong central characters; a respect for outsiders; an understanding of the pain of others; and “the poignancy of a direct personal encounter … [and] a passionate interest in the individual.”
My favourite photographs in this posting are the two images Boy stepping off the curb, N.Y.C. 1957-58 and Girl with schoolbooks stepping onto the curb, N.Y.C., 1957. There is a marvellous insouciance about these photographs, “the divineness in ordinary things” embedded in the innocence of youth. We could be these people caught half-stride in their young lives, lightly stepping onto the pavement of the future. The reciprocal gaze makes us stare, and stare again… for even as those photographs are glimpses, glances of a life they become so much more, long lasting archetypes to which we can all relate. As Arthur Lubow observes citing John Szarkowski, a longtime director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, “The reciprocal gaze that marks her early photographs would be furthered and intensified in the collaborative form of portraiture in her mature work, done with a medium-format camera. Szarkowski, for one, believed that the sharpness that larger film offered was in keeping with her aim to be both particular and mythic.”
Particular and mythic. How magical.
Not only did her work need the sharpness that medium format film offered, what a lot of people forget is that using a medium format camera like a Rollei is a totally different way of seeing the world. This is something that hardly anybody mentions. With a 35mm camera you bring the camera to your face and look through the viewfinder; with a medium format camera such as Arbus’ Rolleiflex or her Mamiya C330 (seen around her neck in a portrait of her in Central Park, below), the camera is held at waist level and you look down into the viewing prism of the camera… and everything is seen in reverse. I remember travelling around the world in 2000 and using a Mamiya C220 and thinking to myself, this is the most amazing experience staring down at the world, moving the camera left and right and the image moving the opposite way to what you think it will move, and then having to account for for parallax in the framing (where the image seen in the viewfinder is not framed the same as the image seen through the lens, because the viewfinder is in a slightly different position to the lens). Even with the one medium format image featured in this posting, I can just feel the different relationship of the camera and photographer to the world – in the format, in the cropping and in the previsualisation of the image. Looking down, back up to the subject, back down into the camera – instead of a horizontal perspective, both a horizontal, vertical and square perspective on the world. It’s all about feeling (in) her work. And you couldn’t really miss her if she wanted to take your photograph… look at all the equipment slung around her neck in her portrait in Central Park: twin lens hoods to stop glare, boom and large flash. She wanted you to know that she was there, to acknowledge her presence.
Arbus intuitively knew what she wanted – the presence of the person and the presence of the photographer acknowledged through a circular, two-way relationship. And we, the viewer, understand that process and acknowledge it. Hence, these photographs are not “apparently artless”, they are the very antithesis of that. They are both a thinking and feeling person’s photography. All of her photographs are intelligent investigations of the human condition which produce an empathic response in the viewer. They are a form of empathic vision in which the viewer is drawn into that magical and transcendent relationship. In my opinion, there has never been anyone like her, before or since: no devotees, followers or disciples (except, perhaps, Mary Ellen Mark). Arbus is one of a kind. She will always be my #1.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The photographs from her early career reveal that the salient characteristics of her work – its centrality, boldness, intimacy and apparent artlessness – were present in her pictures since the very beginning. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.
“The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.”
“I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”
“One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.”
“…I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.”
Diane Arbus
“I think Arbus was suggesting that just as people are looking at us and we’re looking at them every day, the pictures made us introspective as viewers. They forced us to confront our own identity. And that’s a really beautiful switch, that switcheroo. We’re looking at somebody else but we’re mindful of our voyeurism, and we’re mindful of how we ourselves are presenting. ‘How am I different? How did I become the person I am?’ That’s one of the qualifying elements of an Arbus photograph: that you feel something about you, often something that might not be comfortable.”
“Arbus’s early photographs are wonderfully rich in achievement and perhaps as quietly riveting and ultimately controversial as the iconic images for which she is so widely known. She brings us face-to-face with what she had first glimpsed at the age of 16 – “the divineness in ordinary things” – and through her photographs we begin to see it too.”
Exhibition curator Jeff L. Rosenheim
Installation views of the exhibition diane arbus: in the beginning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This landmark exhibition features more than 100 photographs that together redefine Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971), one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. It focuses on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962, the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognised praised, criticised, and copied the world over.
Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she lived and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side, and Coney Island. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era.
The majority of the photographs in the exhibition have never before been seen and are part of the Museum’s Diane Arbus Archive, acquired in 2007 by gift and promised gift from the artist’s daughters, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus. It was only when the archive came to The Met that this remarkable early work came to be fully explored. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.
“This is a shot inside a theater, of a movie called ‘Horrors of the Black Museum.’ The woman is using binoculars and when she focuses, daggers come out and blind her.”
As part of the inaugural season at The Met Breuer, diane arbus: in the beginning will open on July 12, featuring more than 100 photographs that together will redefine one of the most influential and provocative artists of the 20th century. This landmark exhibition will highlight never-before-seen early work of Diane Arbus (1923-1971), focusing on the first seven years of her career, from 1956 to 1962 – the period in which she developed the idiosyncratic style and approach for which she has been recognised, praised, criticised, and copied the world over. The exhibition is made possible by the Alfred Stieglitz Society. Additional support is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne.
“It is a rare privilege to present an exhibition this revelatory, on an artist of Arbus’s stature. More than two-thirds of these works have never before been exhibited or published,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Met. “We sincerely thank the Estate of Diane Arbus for entrusting us to show an unknown aspect of this remarkable artist’s legacy with the camera.”
Jeff Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “Arbus’s early photographs are wonderfully rich in achievement and perhaps as quietly riveting and ultimately controversial as the iconic images for which she is so widely known. She brings us face-to-face with what she had first glimpsed at the age of 16 – ‘the divineness in ordinary things’ – and through her photographs we begin to see it too.”
diane arbus: in the beginning focuses on seven key years that represent a crucial period of the artist’s genesis, showing Arbus as she developed her style and honed her practice. Arbus was fascinated by photography even before she received a camera in 1941 at the age of 18 as a present from her husband, Allan, and made photographs intermittently for the next 15 years while working with him as a stylist in their fashion photography business. But in 1956 she numbered a roll of 35mm film #1, as if to claim to herself that this moment would be her definitive beginning. Through the course of the next seven years (the period in which she primarily used a 35mm camera), an evolution took place – from pictures of individuals that sprang out of fortuitous chance encounters to portraits in which the chosen subjects became engaged participants, with as much stake in the outcome as the photographer. This greatly distinguishes Arbus’s practice from that of her peers, from Walker Evans and Helen Levitt to Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who believed that the only legitimate record was one in which they, themselves, appear to play little or no role. In almost complete opposition, Arbus sought the poignancy of a direct personal encounter.
Arbus made most of her photographs in New York City, where she was born and died, and where she worked in locations such as Times Square, the Lower East Side, Coney Island, and other areas. Her photographs of children and eccentrics, couples and circus performers, female impersonators and Fifth Avenue pedestrians are among the most intimate and surprising images of the era. From the beginning, Arbus believed fully that she had something special to offer the world, a glimpse of its many secrets: “I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.”
Nearly half of the photographs that Arbus printed during her lifetime were made between 1956 and 1962, the period covered by this exhibition. At the time of her death in 1971, much of this work was stored in boxes in an inaccessible corner of her basement darkroom at 29 Charles Street in Greenwich Village. These prints remained undiscovered for several years thereafter and were not even inventoried until a decade after her death. The majority of the photographs included in the exhibition are part of the Museum’s vast Diane Arbus Archive, acquired in 2007 by gift and promised gift from the artist’s daughters, Doon Arbus and Amy Arbus. It was only when the archive – a treasury of photographs, negatives, notebooks, appointment books, correspondence, and collections – came to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 that this seminal early work began to be fully explored.
Among the highlights in the exhibition are lesser-known published works such as Lady on a bus, N.Y.C. 1957, Boy stepping off the curb, N.Y.C. 1957-58, The Backwards Man in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1961, and Jack Dracula at a bar, New London, Conn. 1961, as well as completely unknown additions to her oeuvre, such as Taxicab driver at the wheel with two passengers, N.Y.C. 1956,Woman with white gloves and a pocket book, N.Y.C. 1956,Female impersonator holding long gloves, Hempstead, L.I. 1959, and Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, N.Y. 1960. Included among the selection of six square-format photographs from 1962 is the iconic Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962, a photograph that signals the moment when Arbus turned away from the 35mm camera and started working with the 2 1/4 inch square format Rolleiflex camera, a format that remained a distinctive attribute of her work for the rest of her life. The photographs from her early career reveal that the salient characteristics of her work – its centrality, boldness, intimacy, and apparent artlessness – were present in her pictures since the very beginning. Arbus’s creative life in photography after 1962 is well documented and already the stuff of legend; now, for the first time, we can properly examine its origins.
diane arbus: in the beginning is curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs at The Met.
“We’re in the isolationist ’50s, and here’s a glamorous woman on Fifth Avenue, wearing gloves, with her pocketbook, but with this anxiety on her face.”
Jeff L. Rosenheim curator: There are many pictures from her first 50 rolls of film in the show. And you can see for yourself that she is already isolating individuals, pedestrians on Fifth Avenue. She is approaching people, and in almost every instance, it’s one image and the subject is addressing the camera. Arbus did not want to do what almost every one of her peers was doing, which she was highly aware of – she was well versed in the history of the medium; she was taking classes from Lisette Model and she had studied with Berenice Abbott and Alexey Brodovitch. What she took away from that training was this feeling that she could find her subject and they could find her in equal measure. She allowed herself to be vulnerable enough. Helen Levitt used a right-angle viewfinder so her subjects couldn’t see what she was doing. Walker Evans used the folds of his coat to hide his camera on the subway. The style of documentary photography was that you wanted to see but you didn’t want to be seen, and Arbus had a completely different method. It was to use the camera as an expressive device that allows the viewer of the photograph to be implicated by the subject looking directly at the artist.
“Arbus is not without her critics and, where some people praise her ability to celebrate the marginalized and glorify the unusual, others see her work as cruel and exploitative. Lubow, however, claims that both stances oversimplify the real complexity of her work, which is perhaps where both he and Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of photography at the Met, take a stab at redefining Arbus, because if we define her solely by the people she photographed, we’re missing the point.
“I think both Jeff and I realized that from the beginning she wanted to capture a moment where she was seeing and being seen, she wanted a reciprocal look,” Lubow says. “Jeff is doing that formally, and showing you that she needed it as an artist, and I’ve tried to show that she needed it as a person. She was motivated to feel and to record the response of her subject to her. That was how she felt real, this was how she felt alive.””
“From the very beginning of her career, she was taking photographs to obtain a vital proof – a corroboration of her own existence. The pattern was set early. When she was 15, she described to a friend how she would undress at night in her lit bathroom and watch an old man across the courtyard watch her (until his wife complained). She not only wanted to see, she needed to be seen. As a street photographer, she dressed at times in something attention-grabbing, like a fake leopard-skin coat. She didn’t blend into the background, she jumped out of it. And she fascinated her subjects. “People were interested in Diane, just as interested in her as she was in them,” John Szarkowski, a longtime director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, once told me…
Diane had a talent for friendship, and she maintained long-term connections with all sorts of people – eccentrics in rooming houses, freaks in sideshows, socialites on Park Avenue. She needed those relationships. But she also relied on filmed verification of her impact on others. The reciprocal gaze that marks her early photographs would be furthered and intensified in the collaborative form of portraiture in her mature work, done with a medium-format camera. Szarkowski, for one, believed that the sharpness that larger film offered was in keeping with her aim to be both particular and mythic.”
I think Arbus was suggesting that just as people are looking at us and we’re looking at them every day, the pictures made us introspective as viewers. They forced us to confront our own identity. And that’s a really beautiful switch, that switcheroo. We’re looking at somebody else but we’re mindful of our voyeurism, and we’re mindful of how we ourselves are presenting. ‘How am I different? How did I become the person I am?’ That’s one of the qualifying elements of an Arbus photograph: that you feel something about you, often something that might not be comfortable.
“This is the transition year, when she changed to square format. The receptionist is in a kind of diorama, not one made by the woman but by the culture.”
Diane Arbus in Central Park with her Mamiya Camera (330?) in 1967
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 1962 Silver gelatin print
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street New York, New York 10028-0198 Phone: 212-535-7710
Opening hours: Sunday – Tuesday and Thursday: 10am – 5pm Friday and Saturday: 10am – 9pm Closed Wednesday
Curator of Coney Island exhibition: Dr Robin Jaffee Frank
Samuel S. Carr (American, 1837-1908) Beach Scene c. 1879 Oil on canvas 12 x 20 in. (30.5 x 50.8cm) Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Bequest of Annie Swan Coburn (Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn)
The first posting of 2016, and it is a doozy – a multimedia extravaganza of sight and sound showcasing exhibitions that focus on that eclectic playground, Coney Island.
Featuring images supplied by the gallery – plus videos, other art work featured in the exhibitions and texts that I sourced myself – this posting documents “the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.” I spent many hours scouring the internet, undertaking research and cleaning poor quality images to bring this selection to you.
The exhibition is divided into five sections, and I have attempted to keep the posting in this chronological order.
~ Down at Coney Isle, 1861-1894 ~ The World’s Greatest Playground, 1895-1929 ~ The Nickel Empire, 1930-1939 ~ A Coney Island of the Mind, 1940-1961 ~ Requiem for a Dream, 1962-2008
There are some interesting art works in both exhibitions. The correspondence between elephant / handler and mural is delightful in Edgar S. Thomson’s Coney Island (1897, below), while Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914, below) is a revelation to me, considering the date of production and the portrayal of contemporary life which is akin to our own. Walker Evans’ Couple at Coney Island, New York (1928, below) seems staged and confused in its pictorial construction, not one of his better photographs, while Edward J. Kelty’s photographs of sideshow revues including a “coloured revue” are interesting for their social context and formalism.
Paul Cadmus’ satirical view of American vacationers Coney Island (1934, below) is a riot of colour, movement and social commentary, including references to homosexuality and Hitler, while his friend Reginald Marsh’s effusive Coney Island paintings play with “reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens” packed into compressed, collage like spaces. Particular favourites are photographs by Garry Winograd, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank. Surprise of the posting are the black and white photographs of Morris Engel.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Brooklyn Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Strobridge Lithographing Company The great Forepaugh & Sells Brothers shows combined. Terrific flights over ponderous elephants by a company of twenty five splendid artists in a great contest for valuable prizes, introducing high, long distance, layout, twisting, single and double somersault leapers, enlivened by mirth provoking comedy surprises. c. 1899 Promotional poster for Forepaugh & Sells Brothers circus Colour lithograph poster
“The mixed-media exhibit captures Coney Island’s campy, trippy aesthetic with a hodgepodge of photographs by the likes of Walker Evans, Weegee, Bruce Davidson, and Diane Arbus (since Coney Island was basically tailor-made for a Diane Arbus photo shoot). Also on view are pastoral seascapes from the 1800s; sideshow posters galore; a turn-of-the-century gambling wheel and carousel animals presented like sculpture; film stills from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream; and a modernist abstract composition by Frank Stella. With red and yellow stripes around a blue square, Stella distills the sand and sea and sun into a primary-colored flag for Brooklyn’s most famous destination.
In these pictures, Coney Island serves as a microcosm of American mass culture as a whole, and the chronology of 140 art objects here chart major societal shifts, from the dawn of the Great Depression to desegregation. “The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, curator of the exhibit, which Wadsworth Athenaeum helped organize, said in a statement. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”
Strobridge Lithographing Company The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth /The Great Coney Island Water Carnival /Remarkable Head-Foremost Dives from Enormous Heights into Shallow Depths of Water 1898 Colour lithograph poster 30 1/6 x 38 3/4 in. (76.6 x 98.4 cm) Cincinnati Art Museum; Gift of the Strobridge Lithographing Company
Strobridge Lithographing Company Beach and boardwalk scenes, Coney Island c. 1898 Colour lithograph foldout poster approx. 21 feet long
George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887) Bathers, Steel Pier, Coney Island c. 1880-1885, printed 1940s Gelatin silver photograph 7 5/8 x 12 in. (19.4 x 30.5cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Sarah DeSantis, Brooklyn Museum
Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s) Coney Island 1897 Gelatin dry glass plate negative 4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Edgar S. Thomson (American, active 1890s-1900s) Coney Island (detail) 1897 Gelatin dry glass plate negative 4 x 5 in. (10.2 x 12.7cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
William Merritt Chase (American, 1849-1916) Landscape, near Coney Island c. 1886 Oil on panel 8 1/8 x 12 5/8 in. (20.6 x 32cm) The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, New York; Gift of Mary H. Beeman to the Pruyn Family Collection
Joseph Stella (American born Italy, 1877-1946) Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras 1913-1914 Oil on canvas 77 by 84 3/4 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.
“In 1913, to celebrate Mardi Gras, Joseph Stella took a bus ride to Coney Island that changed his life. The Italian immigrant painter remembered that up until this point he had been “struggling … working along the lines of the old masters, seeking to portray a civilization long since dead.” He continued:
“Arriving at the Island I was instantly struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict. I was struck with the thought that here was what I had been unconsciously seeking for so many years… On the spot was born the idea for my first truly great picture.” (Joseph Stella, “I Knew Him When (1924),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1994, p. 206)
The result of Stella’s revelation, the enormous oil painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913-1914), was the inspiration for the traveling exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008…
If the broken planes and neon coloring of Stella’s painting suggest the exhilaration of contemporary life, they also express dislocation and alienation. Stella himself spoke of the “dangerous pleasures” of Coney Island, implying that its unleashing of desires could provoke anxiety (Joseph Stella, “Autobiographical Notes (1946),” in Barbara Haskell, ed., Joseph Stella, p. 213). And yet for all of the dynamism of Stella’s aesthetic, his painting’s sweeping arabesques are checked by the rectangle of the picture plane, and its decorative unity distances the disruptive power of its discordant subjects. The contained anarchy of Stella’s painting is the perfect metaphor for Coney Island’s manipulation and control of the unruly masses, who, at the end of the day, go back to their homes and their ordered existence.
Looking closely at Battle of Lights we might be able to make out fragments of actual rides and even shapes that suggest people, but Stella’s abstraction obscures the luridness of the sideshow acts, the drunk sailors, the amorous couples and the scantily dressed bathers who were so much a part of the allure and menace of Coney Island.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960) Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island 1912 Gelatin dry glass plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Irving Underhill (American, 1872-1960) Luna Park and Surf Avenue, Coney Island (detail) 1912 Gelatin dry glass plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection Photo: Althea Morin, Brooklyn Museum
Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle (director) Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton (actors) Coney Island 1917 25 mins – short, comedy
The 5th film starring the duo of Buster Keaton & Fatty Arbuckle, who also directed. Taking place at the Coney Island amusement park of New York City, it’s notable as the only film where Buster Keaton is seen laughing as this is before he developed his “Great Stoneface” persona.
Gambling Wheel 1900-1920 Wood, glass, metal 65 x 14 in. (165.1 x 35.6cm) Collection of The New-York Historical Society; Purchase
Charles Carmel (American born Russia, 1865-1931) Carousel Horse with Raised Head, Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York c. 1914 Paint on wood, jewels, glass eyes, horsehair tail 62 x 58 x 14 in. (157.5 x 147.3 x 36.6cm) Collection of American Folk Art Museum, New York; Gift of Laura Harding
Born in Russia in 1865, Charles Carmel and his young bride immigrated to the U.S. in 1883 and lived in Brooklyn for most of their lives. Charles was a perfectionist in his work and a disciplinarian with his family. Their home was located close to Prospect Park and its stable of riding horses, which served as a source of inspiration for Charles’ carousel horse carving work. It is generally accepted that Charles Carmel carved carousel horses from 1905 to 1920, and sold his work to all of the major carousel manufacturers of the time including Dolle, Borelli, Murphy, and Mangels.
In 1911 Charles invested most of his money in a newly constructed carousel that he intended to operate on Coney Island. The day before the park was to open, a fire totally destroyed the amusement park along with the uninsured carousel. This was a devastating financial blow to the Carmel family. Later his health deteriorated due to diabetes and arthritis until Charles closed his shop and carved a few hours a day at home, filling orders. Charles died in 1933 of cancer, but his legacy lives on with the exquisite carousel animals that he produced throughout his life.
Text from the Gesa Carousel of Dreams website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016. No longer available online
Anonymous artist Looping the Loop, Coney Island 1901-1910 Postcard Private Collection
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Couple at Coney Island, New York 1928 Gelatin silver print 8 x 5 13/16 inches The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection. Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Edward J. Kelty (American, 1888-1967) X-ray of Ajax, “The Sword Swallower” 1928 20 x 20 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Paul Cadmus (American, 1904-1999) Coney Island 1934 Oil on canvas 32 7/16 x 36 5/16 inches Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Peter Paanakker
Paul Cadmus’s “Coney Island” takes a satirical view of American vacationers. The fleshy members of the human pyramid seem carefree and frivolous in light of the ominous rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany (Hitler’s face can be seen printed on the magazine resting on the sleeping man’s chest at the bottom of the painting).
“… Paul Cadmus, who shared Marsh’s use of old-master forms and techniques but not his heterosexuality, filled his beach painting with purposely ugly women and mostly beautiful men. The main action in Cadmus’s Coney Island (1934) is the human pyramid of men and women at its center. And yet the Adonis who lies on his stomach in the foreground has no interest in this heterosexual game. Instead, he looks off at another muscular youth farther down the beach. For Marsh, Cadmus and their fellow Coney Island artists, the chance to gaze unabashedly at the body of a stranger was one of the great pleasures of the milieu.
… traditional figuration, like that of Cadmus and Marsh, is so dominant that the exhibition arguably offers an alternate history of American art – one in which the modernist painting of Milton Avery or Frank Stella seems like a sideshow. Breaking out of the canon of modernism, “Coney Island” puts new focus on neglected realist painters like Harry Roseland, Robert Riggs, George Tooker and a particular favorite of mine, Henry Koerner.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Curator notes
Coney Island was the first painting Cadmus made after he ceased working for the federally sponsored Public Works of Art Project. It is typical of his paintings of the period in both theme and form. Cadmus viewed the prosaic activity of bathing on a beach in devastatingly satirical terms. Poking fun at the bathers’ carefree pleasures, Cadmus accumulated an odd assortment of bulging, burnt bodies. The bathers are oblivious to their ridiculous appearance and uncouth behaviour. Swarming the beach, their bodies are strangely intertwined, their faces smiling inanely. Everything is exaggerated, the color verging on the garish to intensify their grossness. In the 1930s Cadmus used oil paint almost as if it were a graphic medium, consequently Coney Island looks more like a tinted drawing than a painting. His small, exacting brushstrokes impart a flickering quality to the surface, which intensifies the impression that the figures are in constant motion. Cadmus actually began to sketch the scene on Martha’s Vineyard, before he visited Coney Island. He was attracted to the Brooklyn beach because it offered him the opportunity to delineate the human figure with as little clothing as possible. Moreover, he considered the beach scene to be a classical subject. His treatment, however, is rather baroque.
As was his friend Reginald Marsh, Cadmus was attracted to the elaborate compositions of old master paintings. Coney Island, with its seminude figures arranged in complex groupings, their bodies twisted and in constant motion, was for Cadmus the twentieth-century version of a baroque allegorical composition. Cadmus claimed that his intent was not to be sensational, but when the painting was exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s second biennial, it suffered the same hostile reception as did his earlier The Fleet’s In!. The Coney Island Showmen’s League, a local trade group, denounced the painting as offensive and inaccurate and threatened a libel suit if the painting was not removed from the exhibition. According to the artist’s incomplete records, it seems that the painting was rejected from several annual exhibitions to which it was submitted soon after it was shown at the Whitney biennial, probably because of the controversy it stirred. In 1935 Cadmus produced an etching from a photograph of the painting in the hope that it would reach a larger public. In the etching the image is reversed but otherwise differs only in a few minor details.
Exhibition Label, 1997
Cadmus was one of the most controversial American artists of the 1930s. His satirical perspective made people uncomfortable, and consequently reviewers sometimes questioned the decency of his rollicking scenes of New York City life. Coney Island, with its amusement park and beach on the south shore of Brooklyn, was a favourite destination of working-class people. Rather than glamorise labourers enjoying their day off, Cadmus poked fun at these beachgoers and their bulging, entangled bodies. They seem oblivious to their sunburnt flesh and the silliness of their activities. Coney Island met a particularly hostile reception when it was first exhibited. A businessman organisation associated with the amusement park denounced the painting as offensive, resulting in its rejection from subsequent exhibitions. Cadmus’s meticulous painting technique – pigments applied with thin, pencil like strokes – enabled him to delineate minute detail. For example, the viewer can read the headline about Hitler in the newspaper held by the reclining man in the foreground. This subtle reference to the horrifying political developments abroad underscores the inanities of the beachgoers. Carved in wood, this simple frame was rubbed with pigment rather than gilded, a treatment that came into fashion during World War I, as gold became scarce.
Text from the LACMA website [Online] Cited 01/01/2016.
Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954) Pip and Flip 1932 Tempera on paper mounted on canvas 48 1/4 x 48 1/4 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago Daniel J. Terra Collection
“Such bodies were the great subjects of Reginald Marsh. Instead of Stella’s spirals of lights abstracted and seen from a distance, Marsh’s George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936) gives us a close-up view of the Human Roulette Wheel where young women are spun into all kinds of unladylike postures. For the Yale-educated Marsh, Coney Island was a chance to go “slumming,” to mingle with the lower classes on the beach and in the amusement parks. Hostile to modernism and abstract art, he reimagined bathers and sideshow audiences in poses derived from Michelangelo and Rubens. And yet, like Stella, Marsh overpacked his Coney Island paintings so that every inch is activated and in motion like a carnival ride. The highly compressed space of a Marsh painting like Pip and Flip (1932, above), with its collage-like play of rectangular billboards advertising human-oddity sideshows, would be unthinkable without the precedent of Cubism that he supposedly detested.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Human Roulette Wheel at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s
Reginald Marsh (American, 1898-1954) George Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park 1936 Oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard 30 1/8 x 40 1/8 in. (76.5 x 101.8cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation
Steeplechase Mechanical Horse Ride at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, early 1900s
The spirit of Coney Island comes alive with Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 on view at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition traces the evolution of the Coney Island phenomenon from tourist destination during the Civil War to the World’s Greatest Playground to a site of nostalgia. Covering a period of 150 years, the exhibition features 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, posters, artefacts, carousel animals, ephemera, and film clips. Also on view is Forever Coney, 42 photographs from the Brooklyn Museum collection.
An extraordinary array of artists have viewed Coney Island as a microcosm of the American experience and used their works to investigate the area as both a place and an idea. Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland offers up early depictions of “the people’s beach” by Impressionists William Merritt Chase and John Henry Twachtman; modernist depictions of the amusement park by Joseph Stella; Depression-era scenes of cheap thrills by Reginald Marsh; photographs by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Weegee, and Bruce Davidson; and contemporary works by Daze and Swoon.
“The modern American mass-culture industry was born at Coney Island, and the constant novelty of the resort made it a seductively liberating subject for artists,” said Dr Robin Jaffee Frank, exhibition curator. “What these artists saw from 1861 to 2008 at Coney Island, and the varied ways in which they chose to portray it, mirrored the aspirations and disappointments of the era and the country. Taken together, these tableaux of wonder and menace, hope and despair, dreams and nightmares become metaphors for the collective soul of a nation.”
Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 is organised by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Brooklyn presentation is organised by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator, Arts of the Americas and Europe, Brooklyn Museum. A fully illustrated 304-page catalogue, co-published by Yale University Press and the Wadsworth Athenaeum, incorporates the first continuous visual analysis of great works of art about Coney Island by Dr Frank as well as essays by distinguished cultural historians.
Forever Coney
As one of America’s first seaside resorts, Coney Island has attracted adventurous visitors and undergone multiple transformations, inspiring photographers since the mid-nineteenth century. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection features forty-two images that celebrate the people and places that make up Coney Island. The earliest works, taken by photographers such as George Bradford Brainerd and Irving Underhill, document the resort from the post-Civil War period through the turn of the twentieth century. Later artists such as Harry Lapow and Stephen Salmieri have photographed the many personalities that have passed through the site.
The photographers included in this exhibition are George Bradford Brainerd, Lynn Hyman Butler, Anita Chernewski, Victor Friedman, Kim Iacono, Sidney Kerner, Harry Lapow, Nathan Lerner, Jack Lessinger, H.S. Lewis, John L. Murphy, Ben Ross, Stephen Salmieri, Edgar S. Thomson, Arthur Tress, Irving Underhill, Breading G. Way, Eugene Wemlinger, and Harvey R. Zipkin. Forever Coney: Photographs from the Brooklyn Museum Collection is organized by Connie H. Choi, Assistant Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008.
Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005) Mother with Children 1938 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York
Nieman Studios, Inc., Chicago Shackles the Great 1940 Sideshow banner 118 x 108 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Quito, Human Octopus 1940 Sideshow banner 140 x 117 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Steeplechase Funny Face Nd Painted metal 23 inches Collection of Ken Harck
Henry Koerner (American born Austria, 1915-1991) The Barker’s Booth 1948-1949 Oil on Masonite 26 x 40 1/2 in. (66 x 102.9cm) Collection of Alice A. Grossman
George Tooker (American, 1920-2011) Coney Island 1948 Egg tempera on gesso panel 19 1/4 x 26 1/4 inches Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis
George Tooker’s thought-provoking “Coney Island” places traditional beach goers in a Pietà tableau.
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American, 1899-1968) Coney Island Beach 1940 Gelatin silver print 8 1/8 x 10 inches The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987
Looking at Weegee’s photograph, it is easy to be carried away with longing for what seems like a simpler and happier time. Undoubtedly, the picture’s sense of naïve jubilation was part of its appeal for Red Grooms, who essentially copied the image in paint for Weegee 1940 (1998-1999). And yet, like much at Coney Island, Weegee’s photograph is an illusion. Taken when Europe was already at war and the Depression had not yet ended, its merriment was only a momentary respite.
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Unknown artist Modern Venus of 1947 Coney Island, 1947 Gelatin silver photograph 10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum
Unknown artist Modern Venus of 1947 (detail) Coney Island, 1947 Gelatin silver photograph 10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2cm) Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum Collection Photo: Christine Gant, Brooklyn Museum
Morris Engel (American, 1918-2005) Under the Boardwalk, Coney Island [Production still from Little Fugitive] 1953 Gelatin silver print 8 x 10 inches Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive, New York
Raymond Abrashkin (as “Ray Ashley”), Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin (directors) Little Fugitive 1953
Joey, a young boy, runs away to Coney Island after he is tricked into believing he has killed his older brother. Joey collects glass bottles and turns them into money, which he uses to ride the rides.
“Little Fugitive (1953), one of the most beautiful films featured in the exhibition, conveys the feeling of moving through the enormous crowds in Weegee’s photograph. The creation of two master still photographers, Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin, and writer Ray Ashley, the film tells the story of Joey, a seven-year-old boy who runs away to Coney Island. But if Joey initially exalts in the freedom of being lost in the crowd, he feels abandoned when the amusement park closes down. Robert Frank’s photograph from the same year of a man asleep on a deserted beach with the Parachute Tower at his back [see below] echoes the film’s invocation of the resort’s fleeting joys. When Coney Island empties out it reveals the superficiality and pathos of the fantasies it evokes. In 1894, even before the big amusement parks were built, Stephen Crane mused about how in winter the “mammoth” hotels became “gaunt and hollow, impassively and stolidly suffering from an enormous hunger for the public.” (Stephen Crane, “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” in A Coney Island Reader, p. 69).”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Installation of views of the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York
Cyclops Head from Spook-A-Rama c. 1955 Mixed media 60 x 47 x 42 inches The Vourderis Family. Deno’s Wonder Wheel
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) Coney Island, New York City, N.Y., 1952 Silver bromide 8 1/2 x 13 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Barbara and James L. Melcher
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled (Cathy and Cigarette Machine), from the series Brooklyn Gang 1959, printed later Gelatin silver print Image: 8 3/8 x 12 5/8 Sheet: 11 x 14 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. The Heinz Family Fund
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) The House of Horrors 1961 Gelatin silver print 14 1/2 x 14 inches Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
“As its carnival rides and sideshows became increasingly dated in the 1960s, Coney Island was unable to maintain even the phony thrills that Miller derided in the 1930s. In Diane Arbus’s The House of Horrors (1961), the fake skeleton and the cartoon ape mask aren’t as scary as the ride’s sorry state and the impression that something terrible has driven all the people away. (The 1970 low-budget slasher film Carnival of Blood, not included in the exhibition, brilliantly uses this seediness to create a sense of uncanny doom.) In Arnold Mesches’s painting Anomie 1991: Winged Victory (1991), the creaky rides mingle with images of war, turning dreamland into an apocalyptic nightmare.”
Text from Jonathan Weinberg “Coney Island Forever,” on the Art in America website, October 1st 2015 [Online] Cited 14/12/2015.
Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) Couple Arguing, Coney Island, N.Y., 1960 Vintage gelatin silver print Image: 8 1/2 x 6 5/8 inches Sheet: 14 x 11 inches Collection Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Coney Island July 4, 1958 15 5/8 x 11 9/16 inches Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Robert Frank Collection. Gift of the Richard Florsheim Art Fund and an Anonymous Donor
Frank Stella (American, b. 1936) Coney Island 1958 Oil on canvas 85 1/4 x 78 3/4 inches Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. Gift of Larom B. Munson, B.A. 1951
Harry Lapow began frequenting Coney Island to capture quirks of the beach and boardwalk after receiving a Ciroflex camera on his forty-third birthday. He was intrigued by the camera’s ability to isolate details and fleeting moments of everyday life. Here, a toddler’s crossed legs appear above the head of a buried woman whose eyes are covered by a floral towel. In cropping this beach sighting, Lapow crafts a surprising juxtaposition, forming an unlikely dynamic between the lively child and the masked adult.
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled July 4, 1962 Gelatin silver print 11 x 14 inches Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Daze (American, b. 1962) Coney Island Pier 1995 Oil on canvas 60 x 80 in. (152.4 x 203.2cm) Collection of the artist
Daze (American, b. 1962) Kiddyland Spirits 1995 Oil on canvas 42 x 71 inches Collection of the artist
Requiem for a Dream, production still, directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2000
Marie Roberts (American, b. 1954) A Congress of Curious Peoples 2005 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 84 x 120 in. (213.4 x 304.8cm) Collection of Liz and Marc Hartzman
Swoon Coney, Early Evening 2005 Linoleum print on Mylar Variable; overall: 213 x 39 x 113 inches Brooklyn Museum. Healy Purchase Fund B, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, and Designated Purchase Fund
Swoon’s “Coney, Early Evening” suspends youthful figures intertwined throughout the iconic tracks of a Coney Island roller coaster.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Drag queen wearing cut out dress 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 28.5 x 28.5cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Two solid if not overly memorable exhibitions are presented at the Centre for Contemporary Photography.
Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. While it is wonderful to see early work by this artist – work that features Marilyn and Elvis impersonators, circus people, body builders and drag queens – too many bodies of work are crammed into too small a space with too few images. Some of the later series are represented by just one image giving a hotch potch feel to the whole exhibition ensemble. Perhaps it would have been better to concentrate solely on the early black-and-white images and colour images, work that is rarely seen and informs the staged work that followed. Having said that the black-and-white photographs are a joy to behold, documenting as they do performative identities. The photographs have an intangible presence. There are strong elements of the frontality of Diane Arbus in the photographs of circus performers and drag queens, coupled with a intrinsic understanding of light and texture. The photographs of drag queens are the highlight of both exhibitions and Drag queen wearing cut out dress (1993, below) reminded me of an early black-and-white photograph by Fiona Hall (Leura, New South Wales, 1974) in its use of patterned wallpaper. Let us hope there is a large retrospective of Polixeni’s work (at NGV or Heide for example) in the future, one that can do justice to the depth and complexity of her vision as an artist.
Daniel von Sturmer After Images is an interesting conceptual experiment, one that investigates the splitting of the image (shadow) from its referent (object). “The images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.” In their black-and-white fuzziness the work looks impressive when viewed in the gallery space (see installation views below) but upon close inspection the individual photographs fail to hold the viewers attention. Personally, I found it difficult to impart any great meaning to any of these works and the investigation certainly does not produce memorable images, ones that will stay with the viewer months and years later. For me the exhibition became an exercise in guessing what shadows were which objects, a game that grew quickly tiresome. The work then became an exercise in the importance of captioning an image, as I constantly looked around the room trying to match the titles of the works with the images themselves. As abstract images they imparted little metaphysical poetry as ghost images (an afterimage or ghost image is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased). As images that investigate the link between text, object, shadow and language they started to become what the artist sought to enunciate: shadow objects bound to the realm of signification in some amorphous play, shadows that have the potential to become ‘Other’.
PS. As an analogy you could see these images as the equivalent of Jung’s human “shadow aspect” where, according to Jung, the shadow, in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection (as these shadows are projected by their objects). The shadow represents the entirety of the unconscious, ie. everything of which a person is not fully conscious, and is the seat of creativity. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” (Jung, C.G. (1938). “Psychology and Religion.” In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. p. 131). Hence the potential halo/cination of these images.
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Suzie, Elvis fan at home, Melbourne 1989 Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph 40.7 x 40.7cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Indian Brave 2002 Pigment ink print 85 x 85cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Three young men paying homage to Elvis on the 13th anniversary of Elvis’ death, Elvis Memorial Melbourne 1990 Selenium toned gelatin silver photograph 40.7 x 40.7cm Courtesy the artist and Nellie Castan Gallery, Melbourne and Stills Gallery, Sydney
This exhibition focuses on the performative in the work of Polixeni Papapetrou, from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children since 2002, regarded internationally as some of the most powerful and provocative works in the field of perfomative photography. Papapetrou’s enduring interest is in how the ‘other’ is represented and how the ‘other’ performs in reinforcing our own identity.
Polixeni Papapetrou is one of Australia’s leading contemporary photomedia artists. She has been exploring relationships between history, contemporary culture, landscape, identity and childhood through her photographic practice since the mid-eighties. In this exhibition, selected by Professor Anne Marsh in consultation with the artist, a particular thread has been selected across Papapetrou’s practice – that of the performative – from her early documentary work through to her directorial work with her children from 2002 to the present.
Her images are informed by her own experience as ‘other’, growing up as a Greek immigrant in a white, Anglo-Saxon, male-dominated culture in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. Marilyn Monroe impersonators, Elvis Presley fans, body builders, circus performers and drag queens have all taken their turn in front of Papapetrou’s camera. All of these people are, one way or another, performing identities.
In 2002 Papapetrou turned her focus to the experience of childhood, using her children as the performers in her pictures. There is a challenging confusion between fantasy, mythology, archetype, animism and theatricality present in these works, ranging from the playful to the transgressive, wrangling with the question of identity and stressing the embodied nature of experience.
Text from the CCP website
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Fortune teller (detail) 1989 From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Levitation, Silvers Circus (detail) 1989 From the series Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus 1989-1990
Polixeni Papapetrou (Australian, 1960-2018) Ashton Circus, Silvers Circus series (installation view) 1989-1990 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of Polixeni Papapetrou A Performative Paradox at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Daniel von Sturmer (New Zealand, b. 1972) Production Still for After Images Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney
In After Images the shadows of a set of subjectively ‘important artefacts’ (a business card, a phone, a letter…) are presented alongside generic objects from the studio, for example: a bin, some tape, a ruler… Presented at 1:1 scale, the images propose a kind of transference; the object itself may be insignificant but its subjective meaning carries weight, and its shadow leaves a space the viewer fills with their own reading.
Photographed using a specially constructed ‘set’ to enable the separation of an object from its shadow, the resulting image stands alone, separated from its object yet inextricably bound to the realm of signification from which it has been cast.
Text from the CCP website
Installation views of Daniel von Sturmer After Images at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
![Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/dennis-mcguire-diane-arbus.jpg "Dennis McGuire (American) 'Untitled [Diane Arbus using her medium format Mamiya camera]' Nd")
![Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) '[Singer, Sammy's Bar, New York]' about 1940-1944](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/model-singer-sammys-bar-new-york.jpg "Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) '[Singer, Sammy's Bar, New York]' about 1940-1944")
![Platt D. Babbitt. '[Scene at Niagara Falls]' c. 1855](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/platt_d_babbitt_scene_at_niagara_falls-web.jpg "Platt D. Babbitt. '[Scene at Niagara Falls]' c. 1855")
![Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) 'Large black family in small shack [Robert Evans and his family, 1968]' 1968 (installation view)](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/installation-af.jpg "Diane Arbus (American, 1923-1971) 'Large black family in small shack [Robert Evans and his family, 1968]' 1968 (installation view)")
![Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) 'Coney Island Bather, New York' [Baigneuse, Coney Island] c. 1939-1941](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/model-coney-island-bather-web.jpg "Lisette Model (Austrian, 1901-1983) 'Coney Island Bather, New York' [Baigneuse, Coney Island] c. 1939-1941")
![Installation view of the exhibition 'Diane Arbus: American Portraits' at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne showing from left to right, Lisette Model's 'Fashion show, Hotel Pierre, New York City' 1940-1946; Lisette Model's 'Cafe Metropole, New York City' c. 1946; and Lisette Model's 'Albert-Alberta, Hubert's 42nd St Flea Circus, New York [Albert/Alberta]' c. 1945](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/installation-w1.jpg "Installation view of the exhibition 'Diane Arbus: American Portraits' at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne showing from left to right, Lisette Model's 'Fashion show, Hotel Pierre, New York City' 1940-1946; Lisette Model's 'Cafe Metropole, New York City' c. 1946; and Lisette Model's 'Albert-Alberta, Hubert's 42nd St Flea Circus, New York [Albert/Alberta]' c. 1945")
![William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Greenwood, Mississippi' ["The Red Ceiling"] 1973, printed 1979](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/eggleston-the-red-ceiling-web.jpg "William Eggleston (American, b. 1939) 'Greenwood, Mississippi' [\"The Red Ceiling\"] 1973, printed 1979")
![Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) 'No title [Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York]' 1969](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/winogrand-centennial-ball-web.jpg "Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) 'No title [Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York]' 1969")
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Bohemians [Willi Bongard, Gottfried Brockmann]' c. 1922-1925, printed 1990](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/august-sander-bohemians-willi-bongard-gottfried-brockmann-c-1922e280935-web.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Bohemians [Willi Bongard, Gottfried Brockmann]' c. 1922-1925, printed 1990")
![August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Photographer [August Sander]' 1925, printed 1990](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/august_sander_august_sander_1925-web.jpg "August Sander (German, 1876-1964) 'Photographer [August Sander]' 1925, printed 1990")
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