“Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
In the medium of photography the work of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is rightly exalted, subject to the highest praise. “His work directly inspired photographers like Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.” Some of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
In the near 18 year history of Art Blart his importance can be gauged by the number of exhibition postings he has accumulated over the journey, this being the 8th posting on the artist, joining a select few at the top of the tree: Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol.
I have written extensively on Evans’s work in previous postings links to which can be found below. Suffice to say that, through awareness, his personal journey of conscious choice and deliberate self-creation has led to his photographs entering the American vernacular – through a direct pointing to a photographic reality that reflects the time in which they were taken. Which transcend the time in which they were taken.
Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty. He was a passionate photographer. You can feel that passion in his images. Today with a world full of AI images, fragmentation, and conceptual hoo-hah, it might do us all well to ponder the stare of this great artist so that we, in our own way, can die knowing something.
To transform your own destiny into awareness!
“When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?” ~ Robert Frank
Many thankx to Fundación Mapfre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I was a passionate photographer and, for a time, I carried a certain feeling of guilt. I thought photography was replacing something else: writing. I wanted to write. But I felt deeply committed to everything that could come out of a camera, and I became a compulsive photographer. I was responding to a genuine impulse.”
“Stare. It is the way to educate the eye, and something more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Walker Evans
“Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”
Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
”Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women – Walker took pleasure in being alive… He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits – these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.”
Michael Levy. Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories. New York: Blast Books, 2022
Walker Evans. Now and Then offers a renewed look at the career of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. In a broad anthology bringing together images made over more than fifty years, the exhibition invites viewers to rediscover the direct, restrained, and analytical gaze with which Evans documented everyday life in the United States. Far from the theatrical, the artist championed precise and honest photography, always attentive to the cultural and social context.
The exhibition is structured around several essential threads of his work: his interest in the signs of the city (shop signs, storefronts, billboards, etc.), through which Evans captured a compelling reflection of the collective identity of his era; anonymous individuals (pedestrians, subway riders, workers), whom he portrayed with a spontaneity that blends formal precision and deep respect for his subjects; and his fascination with modest environments and small towns, where he found an authenticity that large cities tended to obscure. Alongside these major axes of his oeuvre, the exhibition also presents his late experiments with the Polaroid camera, which reveal a more intimate shift without losing the clarity of his vision.
The photographer Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975) is an essential figure of modern photography and one of the great visual chroniclers of the United States during the twentieth‑century. His images, seemingly simple yet profoundly complex, lucidly portray everyday life, urban landscapes, and the anonymous faces of a country in transformation. Rooted in the documentary style, Evans combined a direct, austere gaze with an inexhaustible curiosity for the signs of popular culture, which led him to define an era even as he questioned it.
Walker Evans began his work in photography in the 1920s, after a stay in Paris; and over the course of his extensive career, which spanned more than fifty years, he produced some of the most recognized photographs in the medium. He explored a wide range of subjects, from street snapshots taken surreptitiously to meticulous and precise architectural studies, although his best‑known photographs remain those he made in the American South beginning in the 1930s. Evans also embraced new artistic and technical developments, and toward the end of his life he explored the possibilities offered by the Polaroid camera. What unified his entire body of work was a deep interest in and affection for the appearance and essence of everyday life in a society increasingly obsessed with the new and the immediate.
Evans remains, even today, one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. With a style that is both simple and analytical, his deeply careful way of photographing, resulting in elegant compositions that are free of rigidity, has attracted countless followers. In addition to being an extraordinary photographer, Evans was also an editor, writer, and designer, and he took great care in how his work reached the public through magazines, books, and exhibitions, personally involving himself in the process.
In 2009 Fundación Mapfre launched its photography program with a retrospective dedicated to Walker Evans. Seventeen years later, the institution is pleased to present a new exhibition curated by David Campany, creative director of the International Center of Photography in New York. The show offers an extensive review of his work and of his lasting influence on generations of artists. It brings together key photographs and projects spanning his entire career – from his self‑portraits of the 1920s to his Polaroid experiments in the 1970s – alongside books and publications that reflect his inexhaustible capacity for observation. Through these works, the exhibition reveals a creator who not only documented the world around him, but also invited viewers to question the role of photography.
Key Themes
Signs of the city
Walker Evans stood out for deliberately and systematically incorporating all kinds of urban signage into his photographs – from sophisticated commercial signs to handmade notices, billboards, and shop windows – unlike other photographers of his generation, who often excluded them in pursuit of a supposed aesthetic purity. Evans believed these signs were reflections of society and its values; in this sense, his work resonates with artistic movements such as Pop Art and Postmodernism. His images of signs not only explore the relationship between word and image, but also question the role of photography as art, document, and commercial tool, underscoring the need for dialogue between photography and popular culture.
Anonymous people, anonymous places
Walker Evans showed no interest in portraying celebrities; on the contrary, he was always drawn to the anonymous individuals he encountered on the street or in the subway. He created portraits with a lightweight camera, privileging the spontaneity of isolated figures, crowds, beach scenes, or laborers at work. In this way, the simplicity of what he believed photography should be was reflected in the subjects he chose: a detached, direct, and unadorned kind of photography with carefully composed images that were nonetheless profoundly lyrical.
Tradition and the urban
One of Walker Evans’s core convictions was that the true character of any society was revealed more clearly in small towns than in large cities, which tended to blur individual particularities and traits. This emphasis on the popular and the vernacular set against the standardisation produced by major industries in big cities and metropolitan centers lies at the heart of American culture. Some of Evans’s finest and most celebrated photographs emerged from this belief, resulting in images of small‑town train stations and railcars, wooden buildings, traditional grocery stores and gas stations, as well as quintessential objects such as old pliers, rocking chairs, and fire hydrants.
Walker Evans information and keys from Fundación Mapfre
Sometimes a great photograph is a gift of time and space. Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, was taken from the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1931. Had Evans asked for a room with a picture perfect view? Or did the view only look perfect in Evans’s picture taken on that day, at the moment? The scene has something of the proportioned urban vistas he would have seen on his European trip in 1926. There is something Parisian here.
Recent rain has presented a dreamy shimmer. The light is coming from the clearing weather in the distance. The slick road looks almost like a canal and blends into the sky. In neat rows the shiny automobiles are all black. The filigree of tree branches doodles across the frame.
Although this is one of Evans’s best known and cherished images, the vision of pictorial and social harmony is unusual. No screeching billboards or shop signs. No tension on the street. Sometimes the modern world does offer a rare moment of equanimity.
The town of Ossining, where Walker Evans lived for a short time, lies up the Hudson River from Manhattan. He made many photographs there. His views of its hillside communities and single building were shot with a large format camera, but he also made a number of snapshots on the street with a 35 mm Leica. He was experimenting, figuring out what could be done with such lightweight and versatile equipment. It was around this time that Henri Cartier-Bresson began to work with a Leica in Europe. Evans took two photographs of this couple in their parked car. In the other exposure the woman is smelling, but Evans preferred the more wary expression he caught here (the stern gaze of women recurs in his work). This photograph was included in his book American Photographs and because a source of inspiration for younger photographers such as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.
Of all the celebrated photographers of the last century, the one who remains the most relevant today, and the one with the widest influence, is Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975). His images, made in what he called the “documentary style”, are among the best known in the history of the medium. Direct and generous, analytical yet lyrical, carefully composed but unforced, his ways of photographing left the door open for countless others.
For a while, Evans’ reputation rested on the photographs he had made in the southern parts of the USA in the 1930s, but his achievement was wider than that. He worked with every camera format and photographed many subjects in different ways, from surreptitious street shots, to meticulous and exacting studies of architecture. He embraced new artistic and technical developments, and at the end of his life he explored what could be done with a Polaroid camera. What united it all was a deep interest in, and affection for, the look and feel of everyday life. In a culture increasingly obsessed with the new, Evans cherished things that were standing the test of time, be it a face or the facade of a warehouse.
Evans was also concerned with the ways photographic meaning is related to context, text, and relations between images, whether on the gallery wall, or on the pages of books and magazines. To be in control of one’s photographs means being in control how they are presented and circulated in the world. So, as well as being a remarkable image-maker, Evans was also an editor, writer and designer, shaping the way his work met its public. In this exhibition we see the range of Evans’ themes and approaches, and his understated resistance to the excesses and shallowness of so much American culture becomes clear.
A Young Modernist
Walker Evans spent most of 1926 in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne but struggling to become a writer. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were his models, while he paid attention to contemporaries such as James Joyce and Blaise Cendrars. He made a handful photographs with a pocket camera, notably a series of self-portraits.
Returning to New York, Evans began to take photography seriously. He knew the city photographs of Ralph Steiner, Charles Sheeler, and especially Paul Strand. Their bold compositions presented Manhattan as a quintessentially modern metropolis. Evans was also aware of the ‘New Vision’ in European photography, with its enthusiastic embrace of modernist form, especially in architecture. He published a portfolio in the journal Architectural Record, and supplied three photographs from around the Brooklyn Bridge for a deluxe publication of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930).
The economic crash of October 1929 and the ensuing cultural turmoil sharpened the creative and political minds of all the ambitious artists of Evans’ generation. He soon stepped back from the celebration of the city to look hard at the lives of those who inhabited it.
A Past Without Nostalgia: Nineteenth Century Architecture
In 1931 Evans was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy friend and supporter of the arts, to photograph Victorian houses in and around Boston. Two years later, the pictures were presented in the architecture room of the recently established Museum of Modern Art, New York. While Evans was credited, the context and display clearly put the emphasis on the architecture rather than Evans’ authorship. Nevertheless, in the press release for the exhibition, Kirstein noted:
Walker Evans’ photographs are perfect. They have been taken during the last four years and form the beginning of a photographic history of American domestic building during its most fantastic, imaginative, and impermanent period. Many of the houses, neglected and despised, have disappeared in the short period since these photographs were made. Evans worked in bright sunlight, forcing the details into utmost clarity. The focus was so sharpened that some of the houses seem to exist in an airless atmosphere such as Edward Hopper suggests in his painting of similar subjects. These houses were photographed in New England and New York.
Cultural artefacts endangered by contemporary tastes were already a key subject matter for Evans, one he would return to at various points.
Signs of Images, Images of Signs
Slick commercial signs, hand-made vernacular signs, street wayfinding signs, billboards, posters and shop fronts: if anything defines the time and place of an urban situation it is signage. While most photographers of Evans’ generation avoided or limited its presence in their images (searching for some kind of ‘purity’), he embraced it whole-heartedly. His fascination with signage, and his conviction that it has much to say about a society and its values, chimed with everything from the Pop Art that emerged at the end of the 1950s to the postmodern arts of quotation and appropriation that were emerging just as Evans was reaching the end of his life in 1975.
Evans’ photographs of signs seem highly reflexive, bringing photography itself into question as a medium of representation, while blurring the distinction between word and image. Photography may be a fine art, but it is also a means to make functional documents, and a vital tool of commerce. Whatever its aesthetic ambitions, Evans understood that serious photography would have to contend with its place in common culture.
Cuba
In 1933 Evans was on commission to photograph Havana and its environs for Carleton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a journalist committed to exposing the corruption of Gerardo Machado’s brutal rule and America’s complicity with it. Cuba had gained independence back in 1902 but America reserved the right to interfere in its affairs, overseeing its finances and foreign relations.
Evans was not politically naïve. His street shots are a counterpoint to Beals’ high rhetoric of abstract political force and faceless conspiracy. And yet, his wary self-consciousness makes his pictures of people difficult to assess. His Cuba work continues to challenge critics and historians. Should we read it as the snaps of a curious tourist with a great eye for composition and social detail? Or might they register the slight tremors, the “mood on the street” of a tense society watching its back? Evans rarely presented his Cuban pictures after their moment had passed.
Anonymous & Incognito
Evans came into photography just as anonymity was becoming a touchstone of the modern era. Laborers on production lines. Isolated figures in the street. The crowd through which a wanderer might move unnoticed, or subject to the suspicious gaze of others. His early street portraits had much in common with those made by Eugène Atget in France and August Sander in Germany in the 1920s. Lightweight cameras soon made more candid portraits possible and Evans began to experiment, making serial photographs of New York subway passengers, and people on streets in various cities.
Evans worked through a period marked by increasing surveillance, and increasing presence of photography and photographers in daily life. It made him wary of the idea that people could be judged quickly by their appearance. His texts for ‘Labor Anonymous’ (Fortune, October 1946), and ‘The Unposed Portrait’ (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1962) push the reader to think again about the limits of photography.
Car Culture
In 1903 (the year Walker Evans was born) there were 4,000 cars in America. By 1930 there were 26.7 million: one for every 4.5 people. The transformation was breathless. Roadsides were redefined by billboards, gas stations, and motels. Towns and cities were designed or adapted for car use.
Evans enjoyed driving, and much of his photography beyond New York required a car. However, the rapid changes that cars were bringing to the appearance and the functioning of society left him feeling ambivalent. In the mass media at least, cars were the embodiment of optimism and mobility. Waste and despoilment were kept out of site, on the stage wings of progress. Evans’ view of rusting cars in a field (Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1936) is a glimpse behind the scenes. This theme stayed with him for life. In 1962 he published a photo-essay in Fortune titled ‘The Auto Junkyard’, and in the 1970s, he also made many Polaroid photographs of cars and trucks rusting in fields.
Three Tenant Farmer Families
In the summer of 1936, the writer James Agee was commissioned to make a report on cotton farm tenancy in the American south. He chose Evans as his photographer. They committed to the project with great energy but while at work they barely overlapped. Evans recalled: “We lived with [the three families] for three weeks, as I remember it. We told them exactly what we were doing, and we worked intensely and separately. I didn’t see Agee. He was working all day interviewing and taking notes, and I was photographing.”
When Agee’s text was ten times longer than planned, Fortune dropped the project leaving him and Evans to pursue it as a book. Evans assembled a discrete sequence of thirty-one photos that would be set apart from the text, with no captions. Such radical separation of word and image stood against the tide of more conventional documentary practices. The resulting book, Let us now Praise Famous Men, finally appeared in 1941. Evans’ sequence shows him perfecting a way of seeing that was stoic and inscrutable, associative yet anti narrative, with images that eventually became some of the most famous of the era, and of his career.
Chicago
In late 1946, Evans opened a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In February 1947, Fortune published his ambitious photo-essay ‘Chicago: a camera exploration’. Across ten pages he avoided the city’s “prized and remarkable postcard colossi” to show “sights that meet a leisured and untethered eye,” as he put it in his text for the piece. The layout looked celebratory but its tone was not: “Chicago decays as it does everything else – spectacularly and speedily.” The fourth spread is the most remarkable, showing citizens at the corner of State and Randolph Streets. These are post-war consumers, Caucasian, Asian and African-American. Evans places himself directly in their path. Trapped anxiously in bright sunlight the faces hint at the unrest beneath middle-class decorum.
Beyond street portraits, Evans made a comprehensive study of Chicago’s remarkably mixed architecture, allowing him to resume his ongoing interest in buildings as a kind of indirect portrait of a society. The Chicago photo-essay for Fortune was by far his most significant magazine work to date, giving him the confidence to develop and refine what he wanted to do with the printed page in the coming years.
Small Towns & Neighbourhoods
Although Evans’ photography began in New York and he made a substantial photographic portrait of Chicago, he remained convinced that it was the smaller towns that offered a more accurate sense of the nation. The major cities of the USA are always exceptional, and tend to think of themselves as such. Evans concerned himself with the typical, and with the pragmatic ways small towns work and grow. Away from intense modern progress, artefacts of the past persist until they no longer function, rather than being replaced for the sake of it. Some of Evans’ most loved and complex photographs came out of this commitment to typical places.
Message from the Interior
Evans’ deep interest in rooms was long-lasting, and it suited his slow and careful pace of observation. With no people present, an interior scene can become a portrait of an individual, a family, or a community. Moreover, the way a camera records will allow everything that is present to become significant, as in a still life composition. Details of décor. Treasured objects. Casual objects. Furniture. Fabrics. Even the atmosphere of a room can be communicated.
African Sculpture: an Art of Documentation
In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Evans to document nearly five hundred sculptures gathered for an exhibition of African art. In the museum itself each object was shot separately (with a few objects documented in pairs) in long exposure, during which lights were sometimes moved around to produce an all-over, hyper-factual clarity. Prints were made for extensive teaching folios, and a travelling exhibition. The catalogue for MoMA’s exhibition African Negro Art (in which Evans is not credited) was a serious attempt to look at the origin and complexity of these objects beyond the crude reductions and exoticism of the attitudes of European surrealists and modernist artists of the time. Although it was a free-standing commission, we can view this work in the context of Evans’ earlier commission from the Museum of Modern Art to photograph Victorian architecture, as well commissions to document folk art at New York’s Downtown Gallery, and Diego Rivera’s political murals for the Workers’ School of New York.
Vernacular Designs, Common Objects
Evans took the forces of modernity and modernisation – economic, political, social, aesthetic – as a subject matter to be considered carefully. These forces could be sensed most acutely through objects that had somehow survived the onslaught of modernisation or were about to succumb to it. Even the titles of Evans’ Fortune magazine photo-essays signalled his suspicion of the new: ‘The Wreckers’, ‘These Dark Satanic Mills’, ‘Downtown: A Last Look Backward’, ‘Before they Disappear’, ‘The Last of Railroad Steam’, ‘The Auto-Junkyard’.
Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss this as nostalgia, or a sentimental looking back in the knowledge that the juggernaut of progress could not be stopped. In 1956 Evans observed: “[N]ostalgia has become debased to mean a kind of syrup savoured by self-pitying people conjuring better days, funny hats and an innocence nobody ever had.” In a caption for a series of photographs of antique store window displays he declared: “Nostalgia I disdain: pray keep me forever separated from an atmosphere of moist elderly eyes just about to spill over at the sight of grandmother’s tea set. Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.”
Walker Evans, ‘Before They Disappear’, Fortune, March 1957
The familiar insignia of the freight cars are like old ditties beating in the back of our heads. Once we knew them all by heart, they were with us like the weather, like the backs of books we collected, and like the streets we walked in.
Brought into focus by selection, you almost expect these brave and naïve emblems to emit the very sound of railroading – the iron whines, the Steely screechers, and the attenuated nocturnal moans of steam transportation.
They don’t quite do that. But they are worth examining, not only for the commemorative thoughts they carry, but because they are going to disappear from the US landscape one day you have only to notice the new, exceedingly distinguished lettering of the New Haven’s car sides, or the redesigned Boston & Maine signature, to see that the fell hand of the contemporary commercial designer is lurking near, T-square poised.
When we can no longer catch sight of the great Chinese red and black double tadpole of the Northern Pacific, or the simple old cross of the Santa Fe, then will a whole world of cherished association have been destroyed. Impiety could go no further.
Walker Evans, ‘The Auto Junkyard’, Fortune, April 1962
The nadir of landscape scenery is the great American auto-junk scrap pile. With the effect of some evil prank, these obscene perversities leer out of the countryside almost anywhere, often in the middle of idyllic rural spots … Pictorially speaking, the result is chaos abstracted, and this has considerable curious interest in itself. There is a secret imp in almost every civilized man that bids him delight in the surprises and in the mockery in the forms of destruction. At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances. Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.
Walker Evans, ‘The U.S. Depot’‚ Fortune, February 1953
He who travels by rail over the lesser lines of the USA clangs and shunts straight into his own childhood. Most of the smalltown railroad stations up and down the country are now about fifty years old. Looked at collectively they seem more and more toylike – as model railroad toys grow more and more like the real thing. With only a slight effort of the imagination, these encrusted little buildings turn into miniature stage sets, and the people in them correctly costumed dolls. You feel an old affection for the way a station agent throws the block-signal lever there in his coal-heated office. And what in that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 breaks to a stop? Does it say “Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,” or does it say “Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops?”
Walker Evans, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, Fortune, July 1955
Among the low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear “undesigned” forms. The Swedish steel pliers pictured above, with their somehow swanlike flow, and the objects on the following pages, in all their tough simplicity, illustrate this. Aside from their functions – though they are exclusively wedded to function – each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.
Who would sully the lines of the tin-cutting shears on page 105 with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench on page 107? To be sure, some design-happy manufacturers have tampered with certain tool classics; the beautiful plumb bob, which used to come naively and solemnly shaped like a child’s top, now looks suspiciously like a toy space ship, and is no longer brassy. But not much can be done to spoil a crate opener, that nobly ferocious statement in black steel as may be seen on page 104. In fact, almost all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candour and purity.
Labor Anonymous is a 1946 photo series by Walker Evans, commissioned by Fortune magazine, documenting 50+ candid, close-up street portraits of Detroit workers. Capturing diverse, unposed facial expressions and postures, the project created a “physiognomy of a nation,” exploring modern anonymity and the dignity of laborers.
Shot on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1946, this Walker Evans photograph of an unknown Detroit office worker is reproduced from Labor Anonymous, just out from D.A.P. Publishing and Walther König. “When I knew him, Evans was beset by troubles of all kinds,” Jerry L Thompson writes, “money troubles, tax troubles, marriage troubles (he divorced a second time in 1972), health troubles, advancing age, declining strength: the full catastrophe that flesh is heir to. As he approached 70, most onlookers would have taken him (even by the standards of that time) to be at least a decade older. Yet every time he walked out to start his day he was ready to be an artist. Every day had some work in it – for Evans, work meant being an artist – and the work got done even if every practical concern – what ordinary people call work – fell by the wayside.”
Evans was in poor health when he began to work with the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973; he was attracted to the camera’s small, elegant design and the instant color prints it generated that required no tedious lab or darkroom work. Like the developing Polaroid print itself, with its miraculous and immediate image, Evans came to life and worked feverishly with the new camera. At the age of seventy, he returned to many of his lifelong themes, including vernacular architecture, domestic interiors, portraiture, and roadside signage.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
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“Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2025 – 3rd May, 2026
Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV
After being introduced to Pablo Picasso in 1935, Dora Maar became his lover, model and muse until their tumultuous liaison ended in 1943. During their time together, Maar famously documented the creation of the monumental painting Guernica in Picasso’s Paris studio. This portrait captures the artist at ease, bathed in an endlessly echoing lineation of shadows from the above reed screen. The portrait Maar took of Picasso a year later, displayed nearby, shows him seated outside, his eyes glinting with intensity. Both images were taken in Mougins, near Cannes, an area that Picasso returned to every summer.
Wall text from the exhibition
The interface of light
For much of its running length this exhibition of cinematic scope at the National Gallery of Victoria curated by the dependable Maggie Finch is a stimulating ride.
The early galleries in particular are a joy to behold, mixing as they do international and Australian female photographers mainly from the period between the two world wars. This placement of Australian photography in an international context (or vice versa) is something I have desired to see for a very long time in an Australian photographic exhibition. One informing the other. And it works so well!
Aesthetically (both pictorially and in exhibition design) there is a wonderful frisson to the grouping of the photographs in these darker, enclosed, tightly curated gallery spaces that is so intoxicating to the senses. Ruth Hollick meets Madame d’Ora, Florence Henri meets Yamawaki Michiko, and Olive Cotton meets Dora Maar on the gallery walls, interwoven into an intertextual conversation on photography that spans identities, countries and continents. Perhaps not a legacy of light rather the interface of light, a shared connection, one nexus to another. I could have breathed in these photographs for hours!
That energy starts to dissipate as the gallery spaces open out in the second half of the exhibition, especially in the section ‘People and Place’ (see below). Poor Farm Security Administration prints of now famous photographs printed very flatly in the mid-1970s and purchased for the gallery in the same time period don’t help the cause – they need to be replaced in the collection with more appropriate prints of these images.
By the time of the final section, ‘New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation’ (see below), the international representation has disappeared altogether and all the intoxicating energy has gone. In this section we find strong, eloquent and important Australian photographs from the period – conceptual, feminist, and on liberation – but it would have been great to have seen them paired with photographs from international photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Mary Ellen Mark, and Valie Export for example.
On reflection I can say that this is a strong exhibition from the NGV coherently and intelligently curated by Maggie Finch. It is fantastic to see that the gallery has been “splashing the cash” in recent years – supported by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and the Bowness family – with over 170 new acquisitions for the photographic collection.
However for a public gallery, with most of the photographs already in the collection, to charge $25 entry price is really beyond the pale. I went twice to see the exhibition and $50 is a fair whack of money out of anyone’s budget.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below); Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below); Gisele Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975, below), Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975, below), Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975, below) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Featuring prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition explores the role of photographers as image-makers, and the ways in which women artists create an image of themselves, of others, of the times – from images of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond. From Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires, the exhibition showcases the works of trailblazing artists such as Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toyoko Tokiwa, Yamazawa Eiko and many more.
The exhibition reflects a recent collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography Collection. Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, photomontage, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light presents the diverse work of women photographers against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Lee Miller Nimet Eloui Bey (c. 1930, below) and Lee Miller Man Ray (1931, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
At her Paris studio, Lee Miller photographed this self-assured portrait of Egyptian model Nimet Eloui Bey. The model’s direct, inescapable gaze grips the viewer, perhaps foreshadowing the conflict to come. In the years after Miller took this portrait, she and her subject’s businessman husband, Aziz Eloui Bey, would pursue a passionate affair, resulting in divorce and the explosive end to Miller’s relationship with artist Man Ray. After leaving Paris, Miller set up a successful new studio in New York in 1932, before marrying Aziz and moving with him to Cairo.
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Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) Man Ray (installation view) 1931 Gelatin silver photograph 23.1 x 17.5cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds donated by Joy And
Following a successful modelling career, Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929. Intending to study under the Surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray, she soon became his assistant, model and lover. This portrait of Man Ray was taken in 1931, when Miller was working out of her small Montparnasse home studio. The artist appears to be lost in thought, his dilated pupils and furrowed brow suggesting an idea revealing itself. While the image shows reverence for the contemplative artist, it also hints at the couple’s domestic ease, with Man Ray appearing comfortable in the presence of Miller’s camera.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Simone de Beauvoir (1952 printed c. 1975) and Jean-Paul Satre (1939 printed c. 1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Gisèle Freund’s Vita Sackville-West (1938 printed c. 1975) and Virginia Woolfe (1939 printed c. 1975) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1933 Gisèle Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, where she studied photographic portraiture at the Sorbonne. Uniquely for the time, she used Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for her colour portraits of writers and artists in Paris – her portrait of James Joyce was selected as the first colour cover of Time magazine in 1939. That same year she photographed Virginia Woolf at her home in Tavistock Square, London. Freund later recalled of her encounter with Woolf, ‘frail, luminous, she was the very incarnation of her prose’.
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In Exchange: Social Milieu and Collaboration
The intertwined lives of avant-garde artists working in the interwar period often played out in works of art depicting friendship and love. Photographers captured these relationships, often revealing both the affection and the complex relations between themselves and their artistic collaborators, muses and subjects.
Paris in the interwar period was a hotbed for artistic exchange. Between 1935 and 1936, Dora Maar photographed her then partner Pablo Picasso in her Paris studio. She also created collaborative images with fellow Surrealists such as Léonor Fini, Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton. Lee Miller, also working in Paris during this period, photographed her lover and artistic partner Man Ray. Miller, in turn, was the subject of many of Man Ray’s own works.
In Mexico, Kati Horna frequently photographed her close friend, British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington. Lola Álvarez Bravo’s image of the Spanish Surrealist artist Remedios Varo is another example of the playful and experimental collaborations between artists at the time. Such photographs demonstrate the mutual influence between women artists.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Dora Maar including at second right, photographs of Picasso (1935-1936, below) and at right, Self-portrait at the window (c. 1935, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
(clockwise from bottom left)
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing right, holding a cigarette) No title (Profile of Pablo Picasso facing left) No title (Pablo Picasso facing left, with left hand to mouth) (installation view) 1935-1936 Gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Self-portrait at the window (installation view) c. 1935 Gelatin silver print Private collection, Melbourne Promised gift Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Dawn (installation view) 1935 Reproduced in Minotaure No. 8, 1936 Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw Research Library Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The framing of Dora Maar’s Self-portrait at the window, Paris, c. 1935, is mired in this portrait taken by Maar of her friend Jacqueline Lamba, published in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in June 1936. As art historian and theorist
Abigail Solomon-Godeau writes, ‘Lambda might be viewed as contained or imprisoned by the stone wall behind which she stands … Alternately, the photograph might be seen as the space of domesticity, overcome by time and brambles’. For Solomon-Godeau, it is also, importantly, an ‘exchange between two women artists’.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Dora Maar’s Pablo Picasso (1938, below); Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening. Mougins, summer, 1937 (1937, top of posting) and Aperitif in the garden of the Hotel Vaste Horizon with Andre Breton, Jacqueline lamb, Paul and Nusch Eluard. Mougins, 1936-1937 (1936-1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso (installation view) 1938 Gelatin silver print 11.9 x 17.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Pablo Picasso standing under reed screening, Mougins, summer, 1937 (Pablo Picasso debout sous les cannisses, Mougins, été, 1937) (installation view) 1937 22.0 x 17.2cm (image) 23.1 x 18.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Berenice Abbott Eugène Atget (1927, printed c. 1970-1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Janet Flanner 1927 Gelatin silver photograph Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
While living in Paris in the 1920s, Berenice Abbott produced an extraordinary body of images featuring the artists, writers and performers in her social circle, such as Eugène Atget, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. This portrait of American writer Janet Flanner was also captured by Abbott during this time. A journalist who wrote under the pen name ‘Genêt’, Flanner was a long-term contributor to The New Yorker and a prominent member of the expatriate community living in Paris during the interwar period. In this portrait, Flanner is photographed wearing a suit with striped pants and a top hat, upon which are stacked two masks, adding a Surrealist edge to the image.
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Kati Horna (Mexican born Hungary, 1912-2000) Leonora Carrington (installation view) 1957 Gelatin silver photograph 24.2 x 18.2cm (image) 25.3 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Kati Horna was forced to leave Europe following the rise of Nazism. She belonged to the circle of Surrealist expatriate artists in Mexico producing experimental images. In this photocollage, Horna has superimposed an image of British-born painter and writer Leonora Carrington – a close friend of hers – onto a reproduction of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1518 painting Portrait of an unknown young man. Created on the occasion of Carrington’s birthday, the humorous merging of the photograph with the painted reproduction, coupled with the clash of genders and time periods, gives the scene a Surrealist tone.
Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) No title (Remedios Varo) (installation view) c. 1950 Gelatin silver photograph 23.4 x 18.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lola Álvarez Bravo was one of the first artists to produce photomontages in Mexico. At the forefront of artistic experimentation, Álvarez Bravo created this image by layering multiple negatives. The subject is believed to be Remedios Varo, a Spanish Surrealist artist who arrived in Mexico in 1941. Alongside Álvarez Bravo, Kati Horna and Leonora Carrington, Varo was part of a community of expatriate artists and intellectuals active in Mexico during the mid twentieth century. Drawing inspiration from the Surrealist movement, Álvarez Bravo overlaid the portrait with an image of rippling water, creating a tranquil scene in which the subject appears to be floating.
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Unlike in many other countries, in Mexico artists had opportunities to work as long as they did not threaten the locals’ career prospects. Thus, many Spanish-speaking immigrants started teaching in universities, raising a new generation of Mexican creatives and academics. Apart from their jobs, the majority of Europeans did not interact closely with the locals, preferring to keep the company of their fellow refugees. The reason was not the rejection of local customs but the shared experience of war, tragedy, and dramatic flight across ravaged Europe.
The house of the artist Remedios Varo was the central meeting point for the whole community. Anyone in need could find company, shelter, and money raised by all group members. Varo hosted dinners and parties. She also sent party invitations to random addresses taken from a phone book.
Claude Cahun (French, 1894-1854) and Marcel Moore (French, 1892-1872) Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions (Aveux non avenus) (installation views) 1930 Published by Éditions du Carrefour, Paris Illustrated book: photogravure, letterpress text, 237 pages, 10 heliographs, paper cover, stitched binding Shaw Research Library, acquired through the Friends of the Gallery library Endowment, 2017 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Born Lucy Schwob, Claude Cahun was a celebrated French artist associated with the Surrealist movement. Aveux non avenus, loosely translated as Cancelled Confessions or Disavowals, is the second book Cajun created with her stepsister, lifelong partner and artistic collaborator, graphic artist Marcel Moore. This subversive semi-autobiographical work couples poems, recollections and aphorisms with dreamlike photomontages. The photomontages include many of Cahun’s performative self-portraits, images that challenge established notions of gender identity.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image, Francesca Woodman Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (c. 1975-1978 printed after 1981, below); Ellen Auerbach R. Schottelius in New York (1953 printed 1992, below); Barbara Morgan Martha Graham – Letter to the world (1940, below); Lotti Jacobi Dancer #16, Pauline Koner, New York (c. 1937, printed 1992); and two Photogenic drawing (c. 1940 and c. 1950) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981) Untitled (Providence, Rhode Island) (installation view) c. 1975-1978, printed after 1981 Gelatin silver photograph 13.7 x 13.8cm (image) 25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Francesca Woodman is known for her intimate black-and-white self-portraits and photographs featuring other women sitters. The bodies are often blurred, with faces hidden and appearing to blend into the background. In this self-portrait, Woodman crouches down in the corner of a decrepit room, her patterned gown somehow reflecting – or merging with – the floral wallpaper that peels down in rough remnants behind her. The photograph was created while Woodman was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where she studied from 1975 to 1978 and which produced the majority of her extant photographs following her untimely death in 1981.
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Ellen Auerbach (German 1906-2004) R. Schottelius in New York (installation view) 1953, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph 23.2 x 18.5cm (image) 25.0 x 27.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A constant innovator throughout her life, Ellen Auerbach received her first camera in 1928 as a tool to aid her studies in sculpture. The following year, she met her professional and romantic partner Grete Stern in Berlin, where they formed studio ringl+pit. After escaping fascist Germany, Auerbach eventually relocated to the United States and continued her photographic practice, settling among New York’s avant-garde. In this rooftop scene, she captures German dancer Renate Schottelius leaping into the air. In contrast with the surrounding static, imposing skyscrapers, the liberated body in joyous motion serves as a symbol for freedom.
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Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Martha Graham – Letter to the world (installation view) 1940 Gelatin silver photograph 38.9 x 48.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Barbara Morgan met the pioneering American choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1935, and their working relationship lasted over six decades. Graham later reflected in 1980: “It is rare that even an inspired photographer possesses the demonic eye which can capture the instant of dance and transform it into timeless gesture. In Barbara Morgan I found that person. In looking at these photographs today, I feel, as I felt when I first saw them, privileged to have been a part of this collaboration. For to me, Barbara Morgan through her art reveals the inner landscape that is a dancer’s world.”
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bodies, Rhythm and Movement
From the very beginnings of photography, the female nude genre remained primarily the domain of the male photographer. However, twentieth-century women artists, particularly those working within the avant-garde scene of the interwar period, reclaimed the male gaze, creatively experimenting with the representation of women’s bodies.
Artists such as Laure Albin Guillot and Germaine Krull produced nudes ranging from the intimate and sensual to the contained and stark. Such experimental compositions were also a vital aspect of the work of Florence Henri, whose images allowed for new readings of the body. In the 1970s artists such as Sue Ford continued this legacy of experimentation, combining depictions of women’s bodies with scenes from nature.
Representations of women’s bodies in motion were another means of artistic and physical liberation. The collaborations between dancers and artists, for example Barbara Morgan and Martha Graham, and Ellen Auerbach and Renate Schottelius, allowed for experimentation and dynamic image-making. These creative partnerships were shaped by movement and a shared response between artist and subject.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Germaine Krull Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (c. 1925, below); Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below); Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934); and Laure Albin Guillot Nude Study (1943) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) Daretha (Dorothea) Albu (installation view) c. 1925 Gelatin silver photograph 19.7 x 11.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2020 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This intimate portrait shows the German dancer Dorothea Albu elegantly draped in a feather boa – possibly a reference to her life in show business. The soft focus of the image, along with Albu’s gently closed eyes, creates a serene scene. The work is believed to be from a series of female nudes that Germaine Krull photographed in her Berlin studio between 1922 and 1925.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Florence Henri Nude composition (c. 1930, below) and Florence Henri Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (1934, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Nude composition (Nu composition) (installation view) c. 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.0cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Florence Henri (European born USA, 1893-1982) Line Viala (Nude study), Paris (installation view) 1934 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 17.2cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1930s Florence Henri made numerous photographs of female nudes. These works often feature modern women who appear bold, confident and at ease in their own skin and sexuality. In this photograph, Henri uses dramatic lighting to create deep shadows that contour and highlight the form of actress Line Viala’s body. Henri’s use of a blank canvas as a plain backdrop further accentuates the model as the sole focus of the image. Perhaps Henri’s choice of a blank canvas backdrop is also a subtle reference to the traditionally male-dominated realm of nude female painting.
Another vital aspect of her practice was her nude female compositions, such as Nude composition (Nu composition), 1930. Created in the year after establishing her studio in Paris, it employs her characteristically unique, elevated vantage point and raking lighting to disrupt a sense of visual order and perspective. Henri constructs a scene in which the upper half of a woman’s naked body (her chest, breasts, arms, head and hair) creates an asymmetrical focal point at the top of the photograph. Lying next to the woman, and, seemingly, the subject of her gaze, is a large shell, while plants at the base of the image echo the woman’s flowing hair. While appearing to be set on a bed of sand, on closer inspection the textured base is revealed as a coarse sheet.
The dreamlike image, confident and controlled, which merges the female body with the symbolic shell and forms from nature, creates a scene of sensuousness and self-empowerment that is erotic and modern. Henri’s nude compositions, along with those of peers working in France such as Dora Maar and Nora Dumas, claimed the female body as a subject of their own – a trend that emerged among a number of female photographers, in the interwar period.
Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Nude study (Étude de nu) (installation view) 1943 Gelatin silver photograph 29.5 x 17.9cm (image) 29.5 x 23.1cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Spanning fashion and portraiture to advertising and landscapes, Laure Albin Guillot’s images were published regularly in magazines and featured in the first independent Salon of Photography in Paris in 1928. Albin Guillot collaborated with French poet Paul Valéry in the 1930s to create male nude images to accompany his poem ‘La Cantate du Narcisse’ (‘The Song of Narcissus’). She continued to produce numerous nude studies of women throughout the 1930s–40s, such as this closely cropped portrait that enhances the angular lines and features of the sitter’s body.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Laure Albin Guillot Nude study (Étude de nu) (1943, above); Anne Brigman Quest (1931); Olive Cotton Max after surfing (1939, printed 1998); and Louise Dahl-Wolfe Nude in water (1941) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Germaine Krull Nude studies (Études de nu) (1930) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
One of the most experimental artists of the 1920s and 30s, Germaine Krull photographed a diverse range of subjects, and her images were published widely in magazines and journals. With publications such Nude Studies, created two years after Metal,she is recognised as a pioneer in the single-author photobook format. Nude Studies consists of twenty-four photogravures of female nudes, published with an accompanying introductory text by the artist Jean Cocteau. Created in Krull’s Paris studio, the intimate studies, in which the faces of the women are often obscured, emphasise the sculptural forms of their bodies.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (1975, below); Ilse Bing Self-portrait (1931 printed c. 1993, below); and two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher (German, 1931-2007/1934-2015) Coal tipple, Goodspring, Pennsylvania (installation view) 1975 From the Artists and photographs folio 1975 Gelatin silver photographs 24.0 x 33.9cm (image and sheet) 40.7 x 49.6cm (support) ed. 9/60 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1959 married artists Bernd and Hilla Becher started photographing industrial architecture, a practice that would continue for over four decades. While predominantly documenting structures throughout Germany’s Ruhr region, they occasionally worked overseas – this work was made on their first trip to the United States. The Bechers created a system for comparing structures: photographing them from a consistent angle, under virtually identical lighting conditions, printing images at the same size and often displaying them in grids. According to Hilla Becher, their archive allows for narratives to naturally emerge: “Structural patterns and their transformations … can be proved to exist in the case of such relatively exhaustive comparative series.”
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Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Self-portrait (Autoportrait) (installation view) 1931, printed 1993 Gelatin silver photograph 26.7 x 29.4cm (image) 27.9 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing began making photographs in the late 1920s, when she purchased one of the first 35 mm cameras produced by the German company Leica. She made use of the camera’s portability, capturing motion, dizzying angles and contrasts of light, shade and shadow – compositional elements that characterised the New Photography movement. Inspired by Florence Henri, Bing used her camera to disrupt the picture plane. In this famed self-portrait, Bing uses mirrors as a fracturing tool. The self-portrait shows Bing’s reflection holding a camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror. She controls the various gazes: her own, the viewer’s, the camera’s.
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Time and Mirrors
Photography has long been associated with mirrors and time – as a way of remembering, reflecting and retrieving information. As early as 1859, American writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr described photography, specifically the daguerreotype, as ‘the mirror with a memory’.
Many artists use the camera to explore identity through portraits and self-portraits. In Ilse Bing’s 1931 self-portrait, captured with her Leica camera, a mirror disrupts the image, disorienting the viewer. Four decades later, Joan Jonas extended this idea, using a video monitor as a mirror to explore reflection, perception and the self.
By the 1970s, repetition and seriality became central to photographic practice. Through sequences of images, artists such as Eve Sonneman, Sue Ford and Bernd and Hilla Becher explored how photography could record and interpret change – both immediate and long-term. Their images reveal the camera’s dual role as an objective instrument and a conceptual recorder of the world.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two Sue Ford photographs, No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (c. 1970, below) and No title (Nude montage) (1960s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Photogram of two hands and garden path) (installation view) c. 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 27.6 x 34.7cm irreg. (image and sheet) 38.5 x 44.8cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Sue Ford created several bodies of highly experimental work. These works involved complex montages, photograms and layered negatives, revealing hours of darkroom experimentation in her Eltham studio in Melbourne’s north-east. Such experiments coincided with Ford’s burgeoning interest in left-wing politics, and her exposure via the media to world events such as the NASA moon landings and the Vietnam War. Ford incorporated imagery and ideas relating to these events, as well as her interest in environmentalism, into these abstracted, Surrealism-inspired works.
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) No title (Nude montage) (installation view) 1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 19.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gerstl Bequest, 2000 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Real Time is composed of paired photographs taken seconds apart, separated by a black-line border. The ordered presentation allows the viewer to consider the relationship between the images, and the small changes and passing of time between them. Eve Sonneman first showed the photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before publishing them as a book. In 1976 she saw an advertisement in Artforum from newly established press Printed Matter, which was seeking artists’ books to publish. “So I sent [my photographs] in and that work became my first published book, Real Time,” Sonneman recalled. “I was as thrilled as could be!”
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Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Ross, 1964; Ross, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) Jim, 1964; Jim, 1974 (installation view) 1964-1974, printed 1974 From the Time series (1962-1974) Gelatin silver photograph 11.1 × 20.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with the assistance of the Visual Arts Board and the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund, 1974 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“For some time I have been thinking about the camera itself. Trying to explore its particular UNIQUENESS, coming to terms with the fact that I had been trying to ignore for some years, that the camera is actually a MACHINE. … In “Time Series” I tried to use the camera as objectively as possible. It was a time machine. For me it was an amazing experience. It wasn’t until I placed the photograph of the younger face beside the recent photograph that I could fully appreciate the change. The camera showed me with absolute clarity, something I could only just perceive with my naked eye.”
~ Sue Ford, Time Series: An Exhibition of Photographs, Melbourne, 1974
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image a video still of Imogen Cunningham Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image from left to right three photographs by Alice Mills, Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball (1912-1915, below); Hilaire Syme (c. 1910, below); and Joan Margaret Syme (c. 1918, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
People and Place
Depictions of children, mothers and acts of caregiving have traditionally been recurring subjects in photographs taken by women. According to art historian Naomi Rosenblum, in the early 1900s the photographing of children, particularly children with their mothers, was deemed by commentators at the time to be ‘an especially appropriate assignment for women’.
While stereotyping and gender bias remained significant obstacles for women photographers in the early twentieth century, many still innovated through their image-making, while studio work provided women artists with the opportunity for financial independence. Subjects were portrayed in intensely intimate portraits, making visible the people in domestic settings who were often overlooked in photographs and society more broadly.
In Australia, artists such as Olive Cotton produced landscape photography in the dominant Pictorialist style of nostalgic, softly focused images. Everyday, non-professional photography, or vernacular photography, was also widely produced by women photographers of the period. As shown by Inez McPhee’s photo albums depicting the outdoor adventures of the Melbourne Walking Club and Edna Walling’s albums filled with pictures of friends, animals and plants, photography became an increasingly popular way of documenting daily life.
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Hilaire Syme dressed for the Kismit Ball 1912-1915 gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 70.5 x 43.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Hilaire Syme c. 1910 Gelatin silver photograph, watercolour 185.5 x 74.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Dr Veronica Condon, Geoffrey Haggard and Jennifer Smyth, descendants of Sir Geoffrey Syme K.B.E., Managing Editor of the Age newspaper (1908-1942), 2004
An almost opaque layer of paint has been applied to this portrait. The paint obscures some of the details while enhancing others, such as the child’s shiny shoes and the satin sash of her dress. Alice Mills’s portrait of the subject’s younger sister, Joan, has a more conventional treatment in the application of translucent pigments. It remains unclear whether Mills did the hand-colouring. However, having trained in the studio of leading Melbourne photographer Johnstone O’Shaughnessy, she would almost certainly have known about the technique of applying oil-based pigments to photographs to create the illusion of naturalistic colour.
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Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme (installation view) c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Alice Mills (attributed to) (Australian, 1870-1929) Broothorn Studios, Melbourne Joan Margaret Syme c. 1918 Gelatin silver photograph, coloured dyes 243.85 x 91.45cm (approx) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the NGV Foundation by Michael Hayne, 2005 Public domain
Alice Mills, with help from her husband, Tom Humphreys, set up her first photography studio in 1900. Soon after that she was working under her own name in the Centreway Arcade at 259-263 Collins Street, Melbourne. Mills’s portraits were often published in magazines and newspapers, which brought her to the attention of a large audience of prospective clients. Around 1915 she produced a number of large-scale portraits of Hilaire and Joan Syme, the daughters of then managing editor and co-owner of The Age newspaper Geoffrey Syme. The photographs were made in conjunction with Broothorn Studios, which art historians suggest made the extreme enlargements.
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Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image two Imogen Cunningham photographs, My mother peeling apples (1910, printed 1979) and My father (1906, printed 1979) and six 1920s photographs by the Australian photographer Ruth Hollick (1883-1977): No title (Seated girl looking over shoulder) (c. 1926); No title (Little girl holding small book) (1920s); No title (Young girl holding a doll) (1920s); No title (Laughing child) (c. 1926); Miss Pamela Ann McKewan (c. 1929); and No title (Laughing girl in cap) (1920s) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing four photographs by Ruth Hollick: Bobby (1927); No title (Baby in striped dress) (1920s); No title (Three children seated on grass) (1920s); and No title (Mother and two children) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Bobby 1927 Gelatin silver photograph 18.8 x 21.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Mother and two children) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 19.0 x 23.9cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right three photographs by Ruth Hollick: No title (Young woman in plaid shawl) (1920s); No title (Mother and child) (c. 1926); and Janet Armstrong, Woodbury Estate, Deniliquin, New South Wales (c. 1939) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Young girl holding a doll) 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 23.9 x 14.6cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clippings, press releases, brochures, reviews, invitations and other ephemeral material relating to Ruth Hollick and the Ruth Hollick studio Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In 1928 Ruth Hollick and her partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, held an exhibition at their Collins Street studio of more than 150 portraits of children. Lady Eleanor Mary Latham, wife of then attorney-general Sir John Greig Latham, opened the exhibition, encouraging the audience to consider the possibility of career for women, with Hollick as a role model: ‘Everyone has a right to try and make a living for herself in any profession she likes to take up.’ The period in which Hollick and Izard operated the studio in Collins Street was extremely productive and successful. In 1929 Hollick was the only woman to participate in the Melbourne Exhibition of Pictorial Photography.
Ruth Hollick was widely recognised for her skill in photographing children. In an interview published in 1927, Hollick said: ‘I have always found the work well within a woman’s intellectual grasp, and not too hard a strain from the physical point of view. Although one does not, at this period of women’s freedom, talk of any particular work as being her sphere, there is no doubt but that feminine intuition with children may be particularly helpful … After all the big thing is to catch the real child – show him as he is – no wonderful massing of shadow, no illuminating light is worth a lot if it does not reveal the real Pat or Mollie.’ These materials were collected by Hollick and gifted to the NGV’s Shaw Research Library by her niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of ADA river trip) (installation view) 1936 28.1 x 22.4cm (page) 28.5 x 23.0 x 3.1cm (closed) 28.5 x 46.0 x 1.5cm (open) Album: gelatin silver photographs, newspaper, pencil and pen and ink, 62 pages, cardboard and leather cover, stitched binding Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee (Australian, 1908-1999) No title (Inez McPhee’s album of a trip to New Zealand) (installation view) 1953 Album: gelatin silver photographs, collage, pencil, 40 pages, cardboard cover, stitched binding 31.0 x 24.1cm (page) 31.1 x 24.8 x 1.4cm (closed) 31.1 x 49.0 x 1.0cm (open) Presented through the NGV Foundation by John McPhee, Member and Ann Luck, 2004 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Inez McPhee was an active member of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, founded in 1922. McPhee took her camera on bushwalks with the group and, typical of amateur photographers of the period, compiled albums of the prints. Her albums are filled with images of women engaging in outdoor activities.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left three photographs by Edna Walling: Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left to right, three photographs by Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Doris Oak-Rhind, Edna’s Walling’s sister (1920s); Estelle Thompson (1950s-1960s); and No title (Young woman preparing picnic) (1940s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) Estelle Thompson (installation view) 1950s-1960s Gelatin silver photograph 25.4 x 20.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Many-sided Indeed: Women In Business
“There is more, much more in the photo question than the mere ability to make a technically perfect photo or picture,” wrote New Zealand photographer May Moore in a 1916 essay. “And when it comes to successfully managing a studio of one’s own, one wants to be many-sided indeed … The woman who is to succeed … must make up her mind to equip on all points just as the men do.”
Women-run photography studios emerged as early as the 1850s in places such as England, Japan, Germany and the United States. However, women faced many barriers to operating their own studios well into the twentieth century, and many had to rely on family support. Photographers such as Ruth Hollick, Karimeh Abbud and Hedda Morrison persevered to successfully manage or independently run photography studios in the 1920s-40s. They produced a wide range of images, from those made for commercial and tourist purposes to documentary, artistic and personal photographs.
Edna Walling (Australian born England, 1895-1973) No title (Album) (installation view) 1950s-1960s Album: gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Landscape designer Edna Walling kept a personal photo album to capture the creative effervescence of the community at her property at Bickleigh Vale Village in Mooroolbark, Victoria. Nicknamed ‘Trouser Lane’, the property was designed by Walling to be a ‘community of connected gardens and cottages. Many people, including many women, shared in Walling’s unique vision for the space, visiting and residing at Trouser lane over the years. Walling’s album features, among others, images of writer Estelle Thompson, landscape designer Daphne Pearson, builder Esme Johnson, violinist Perry Hart and ballet dancers Harcourt Algernoff and Graham Smith. Also interspersed throughout the album are photographic flower studies.
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Edna Walling (Australian born United Kingdom, 1895-1973) No title (Album) 1950s-1960s Album; gelatin silver photographs, 48 pages, cardboard, leather and colour photo-lithograph cover, metal screw binding 24.6 x 32.0cm (page) 25.6 x 34.8 x 3.6cm (closed) 25.6 x 62.8cm (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Barbara Barnes, 1983
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the display cases in the lower two images, photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972): Ti-trees (1920s); No title (Dappled tree) (1920s); and No title (Tree in paddock) (1920s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothy Izard (Australian born England, 1882-1972) Ti-trees 1920s Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 × 18.4cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, 1992
Dorothy Izard met fellow photographer Ruth Hollick when they were students at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and they formed both a romantic and a professional partnership. They travelled extensively around regional Victoria in the 1920s and 1930s. Izard was a landscape photographer and, at Hollick’s home studio, was responsible for printing the orders for Hollick’s photographs.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Ruth Hollick’s artist book Australian flowers (1950s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Australian wildflowers 1950s Artist’s book: hand-coloured gelatin silver photographs on buff paper on brown paper mounts, pen and ink, pencil, (other materials), [5] leaves, brown paper cover, cotton cord binding 33.2 x 25.5cm (page) 34.3 x 26.3 x 1.0cm irreg. (closed) 34.3 x 53.1 x 1.1cm irreg. (open) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Pamela Jane Green, 2021 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, four photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991): No title (Hua Shan mountain face) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The Chessboard Pavilion) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Step ladder to the nothingness peak ) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (1935 printed 1970s, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Lone pine against sunlit cliff face) (installation view) 1935 Gelatin silver photograph 22.8 x 30.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
These photographs were taken in 1935, when Morrison journeyed by train to the Hua Shan mountains in eastern China. She photographed the deep chasms and textures of the mountain ranges, and the Taoist monasteries and monks who assisted the travellers on their journeys.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, six photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Morning clouds) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Fairy palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (The stone balustrade) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Three gnarled pines) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Two Taoist priests below the fiery palm cliff) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Hedda Morrison (Australian born Germany, 1908-1991) No title (Pine tree above the Yellow River plain) (installation view) 1935, printed 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 30.3 x 22.7cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1976 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, three photographs by Hedda Morrison: No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s); No title (Taoist novice) (1935, printed 1970s); and No title (Taoist priest) (1935, printed 1970s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896-1942) Girls in shawls 1924-1929 Gelatin silver photograph 13.2 x 16.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Tina Modotti is known for her socially and politically charged photographs documenting Mexican working life. For Modotti, art, life and politics were inextricably linked. Her photographs show the artist’s commitment to documenting the lives of women and working people. This image is believed to be from a project exploring the popular arts of Mexico, specifically the shawl-like rebozo, and exemplifies Modotti’s humanist style of documentary photography. It is one of the photographs anthropologist Frances Toor commissioned from Modotti and Edward Weston for the magazine Mexican Folkways, published between 1925 and 1937.
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Dora Maar (French 1907-1997) Vendors laughing behind their charcuterie stall, Barcelona (Vendeuses et vendeur riant derrière leur étal de charcuterie, Barcelone) 1933 Gelatin silver photograph 27.2 x 24.0cm (image) 30.3 x 24.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2021 Public domain
In 1933 Dora Maar travelled to Spain, where she documented the extreme poverty of the country’s cities through people she met on the streets. Aligning with her left-wing politics and opposition to fascism, her photographs honour working-class citizens rather than buildings or monuments. Maar was fascinated by the characters she encountered in La Boqueria, the market in the heart of Barcelona. In this image, she captures a joyful moment as the women vendors playfully turn away from her, hiding their gaze, while a man smiles directly into Maar’s lens.
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The Document
The primary aim of social documentary photography is to draw attention to social issues, often to promote social or political change. This style of photography blossomed during the tumultuous period of the 1930s, when photographers were commissioned by the United States government to document the effects of the Great Depression. The increased popularity of illustrated mass media such as newspapers and magazines also allowed for the broad dissemination of social documentary images and texts.
The ability of social documentary photography to present a purely objective representation of people or places continues to be fertile ground for debate today.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Farm Security Administration photographs by Dorothea Lange Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing clockwise from bottom left, four photographs by Dorothea Lange: Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma (1936 printed c. 1975, below); Drought refugees from Oklahoma, Blythe, California (1936, printed c. 1975); Real Estate sign along highway, Riverside County, California (1937, printed c. 1975); and Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Drought-stricken farmers on the shady side of town street while their crops burn up in the fields, Sallisaw, Oklahoma 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Child living in Oklahoma City, Shacktown 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.9 x 25.5cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
During the Great Depression, many migrants travelling in search of economic opportunity were forced to create temporary camps along roadsides. For Dorothea Lange, who photographed many such experiences over several years, images like this one were part of a greater project to spark public awareness of the difficulties people were facing. As Lange later said, ‘I had begun to talk to the people I photographed … In the migrant camps, there were always talkers. It gave us a chance to meet on common ground.’
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In Focus: Farm Security Administration Project
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was established in 1937 as part of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic reforms, which provided relief to farmers left impoverished by the hardships of the Great Depression. Led by Roy Stryker, the FSA’s photography program was to be one of the most influential social documentary projects ever developed. Many images were reproduced in newspapers and periodicals to show the harsh realities of life for those living in poverty, with the aim of encouraging public support for the government’s economic policies.
The program ran as part of several government agencies, including the Resettlement Administration (1935-37), then the Farm Security Administration (1937-42) and the Office of War Information (1942-44). Stryker hired a range of photographers for the project and, despite their being given comparable briefs, the unique eye of each photographer is apparent in the over 175,000 pictures produced by the project.
As well as forming a comprehensive pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1944, the FSA photography program generated some of the most recognisable documentary photographs of the twentieth century, including images by women such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Marjory Collins.
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Woman of the high plains, near Childress, Texas 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 49.4 x 39.3cm (image) 50.5 x 40.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
‘We’ve had no work since March. The worst thing we did was when we sold the car, but we had to sell it to eat, and now we can’t get away from here … This county’s a hard county. They won’t help bury you here. If you die, you’re dead, that’s all.’
~ The subject of this photograph, Nettie Featherston, to Dorothea Lange
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Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Towards Los Angeles, California 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
During the Great Depression, the Great Plains of North America became known as the Dust Bowl. A severe drought turned the soil to dust, leading to the migration of thousands of small-scale farmers who could no longer work the land. Dorothea Lange made many road trips to document the plight of migrants heading west in search of work and opportunities. Many of Lange’s photographs, such as this one, show workers travelling in difficult conditions, on foot and by car. This photograph was also used as the basis for a scene in the 1939 film Of Mice and Men, based on John Steinbeck’s story of two migrant ranch workers.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from top to bottom, two photographs by Dorothea Lange: Plantation Overseer, Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1936, printed c. 1975) and Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas (1936 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) Born a slave, resettled after the Civil War, Carrizo Springs, Texas 1936, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.5 x 25.4cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Dorothea Lange witnessed racial segregation in the Southern states and often photographed individuals affected by the resulting social and economic inequalities. This work is also known by an alternate title: ‘Bob Lemmons, Carrizo Springs, Texas. Born a slave about 1850, south of San Antonio. Came to Carrizo Springs during the Civil War with white cattlemen seeking new range. In 1865, with his master was one of the first settlers. Knew Billy the Kid, King Fisher, and other noted bad men of the border.’
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Shenandoah Valley, Virginia 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.6 x 34.1cm (image) 28.0 x 35.4cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) One of the judges at the horse races, Warrenton, Virginia (installation view) 1941, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 39.6 x 39.1cm (image) 40.8 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky (installation view) 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Transportation for hep cats Louisville, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 25.7 x 34.1cm (image) 36.1 x 44.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from third left to right, three photographs by Marion Post Wolcott: Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (1938 printed c. 1975, below); Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky (1940 printed c. 1975, below); and Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi (1939 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Near Wadesboro, North Carolina (installation view) 1938, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 × 26.5cm (image) 28.0 × 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975 Public domain Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The people in this photograph are the children of tenant farmers. The older child holds the hand of the younger, whose legs are bowed likely due to rickets, a medical condition caused by malnourishment. This is a vivid image that captures both the intimacy between children and the effects of environmental and economic devastation.
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Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta (installation view) 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Haircutting in front of plantation store after being paid off on Saturday, Mileston Plantation, Mississippi Delta 1939, printed c. 1939 Gelatin silver photograph 27.0 x 34.6cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Baptismal service, Morehead, Kentucky 1940, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 36.3 X 49.3cm (image) 40.7 X 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910-1990) Jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday night, Clarksdale, Mississippi 1939, printed c. 1975 gelatin silver photograph 36.7 x 49.3cm (image) 40.7 x 50.5cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1975
Marion Post Wolcott had a keen sense of social justice, having lived in Austria in the early 1930s, where she witnessed firsthand the rise of Nazism. On her return home to New York in 1933, she was determined to use her photography to raise awareness of social inequalities. While working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the segregated American South, Wolcott witnessed the bleak economic situation endured by African Americans, which was exacerbated by the Great Depression. With an ‘open eye’, Wolcott captured both the positive effects of the FSA and the difficult realities of daily life. Her candid images of African American communities in the South – such as this joyful shot of people dancing – countered the dominant images of Black lives as they were commonly represented in mainstream media.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing three photographs by Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983): Rawhide bed, Wave Hill Station (1952, printed 1978); Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978); and Stockyards, stockmen in distance. Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory (1952, printed 1978) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Heather George (Australia, 1907-1983) Stockyards, Wave Hill Station, Northern Territory 1952, printed 1978 From The Northern Territory series (1952) Gelatin silver photograph 24.0 x 28.8cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Public domain
In the 1950s and 1960s Heather George worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist. In 1952 Walkabout magazine published a series of photographs George made in the Northern Territory outback, including images of Wave Hill Station, a vast pastoral lease on the lands of the Gurindji people. Fourteen years later, it was to go down in history as the location of a turning point in the recognition of land rights for Australia’s First Nations peoples.
Consuelo Kanaga worked at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1915, later joining the California Camera Club, where she met photographers Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. Kanaga’s image-making was informed by her involvement in liberal politics and the nascent civil rights movement. In 1950 she stayed in an artists’ colony in Maitland, Florida, and documented the lives of Black field workers living there. This refined portrait of a mother with her children became well known around the world after its inclusion in the touring exhibition The Family of Man, curated by pioneering photographer Edward Steichen.
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Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985) American girl in Italy, Florence (installation view) 1951, printed 1980 Gelatin silver photograph 30.2 x 46.9cm (image) 40.3 x 50.6cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1950 freelance photographer Ruth Orkin was included in the Young Photographers exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1951 Life magazine sent her on assignment to Israel. Before returning to America, she spent time in Italy, where she met a young American painter, Jinx Allen. The women collaborated on a series of photographs commissioned from Orkin by Cosmopolitan magazine for an article titled ‘Don’t Be Afraid to Travel Alone’. Standing in a Florence intersection, Orkin captured her friend as she manoeuvred through a crowd of men. The resulting image is reminiscent of a movie still – Orkin would go on to co-direct two feature films with her husband in the 1950s.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Maggie Diaz 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (1960s printed 2014, below); Maggie Diaz Ladies at the bar, Tavern Club, Chicago (1957, printed 2014); three photographs by Diane Arbus: Girl with a cigar in Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. (1965, printed later); Blaze Starr in her living room, Baltimore, Md. (1964, printed later); A Couple at a Dance, N.Y.C. (1960, printed later); and Lisette Model Woman with veil, San Francisco (1949, printed c. 1960) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Maggie Diaz (American, 1925-2016, Australia 1961-2016) 3AW mobile studio, Elwood Beach (installation view) 1960s, printed 2014 Pigment print 27.9 x 30.0cm (image) 48.2 x 33.0cm (sheet) ed. 2/25 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2015 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Moving to Australia in 1961, American photographer Maggie Diaz established her Melbourne studio specialising in advertising, portraiture and social documentary photography. Among her commercial clients was the local radio station 3AW, which displayed her photographs in its new CBD studio. A 1964 article in Melbourne newspaper The Age described the headquarters, noting with apparent surprise that the commissioned photographs are ‘the work of a woman’.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
BOTH
Mikki Ferrill (American, b. 1937) Untitled (installation view) 1970s Gelatin silver photograph 20.7 x 13.6cm (image) 25.5 x 20.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Valeria ‘Mikki’ Ferrill is an African American photographer known for her documentation of the Black community in Chicago’s South Side during the 1960s and 70s. Ferrill studied advertising design and illustration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She eventually became a photojournalist, joining a group of Black photographers from the area who shot for local periodicals and newspapers. Ferrill worked on assignments in Mexico in the late 1960s, returning to Chicago in 1970.
Throughout
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Collaboration and Change
Many postwar street photographers captured their subjects in the ‘instant’. By embracing close-looking, artists relied on chance to create spontaneous compositions, capturing candid, everyday moments. Photographers such as Diane Arbus worked on the streets of New York City, creating vivid portraits of contemporary American life. Arbus often collaborated with her subjects, producing striking images in the moment or curating compositions for magazine commissions.
Fashion photography was on the rise in the period, with American publications such as Harper’s Bazaar playing a pivotal role in amplifying the art form. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lillian Bassman and Toni Frissell were regular contributors to the magazine. Their photographs depicted the idealistic and aspirational modern woman.
Yamazawa Eiko and Tokiwa Toyoko were trailblazing women photographers working in Japan at the same time. Their works reflect the social changes of postwar Japan, expressed through the medium of the photobook.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, three photographs by the photographer Lillian Bassman (American, 1917-2012): Black – with one white glove, Barbara Mullen, Christian Dior, Harper’s Bazaar, New York, 1958 (1958, printed (1994); Toreador and Barbara Mullen (for Harper’s Bazaar) (1950, printed 2006); and More fashion mileage per dress, Barbara Vaughn, Harper’s Bazaar, New York (1956, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lillian Bassman began her career as a painting assistant at the Works Progress Administration, and studied fashion illustration and textile design at Pratt Institute in the late 1930s. In 1940 the famed art director of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, Alexey Brodovitch, offered her a scholarship to study under him. This led to her role as art director of the magazine’s spinoff Junior Bazaar. There she worked with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Frank, and in 1947 began working as a freelance photographer in fashion and advertising.
Wall text from the exhibition
New Ways Of Seeing: Portraits, Intimacy, Liberation
The 1960s and 1970s saw extraordinary social change around the world. Political activism was on the rise, stemming from the anti-Vietnam War movement. There was an increased consciousness around racial equality, feminism and LGBTQ rights. Photographers also documented the popularisation of alternative ways of living, such as shared housing and collective lifestyles, with images that sometimes appeared in counterculture publications.
Australian women photographers working during this period were among the first to gain access to tertiary photography education. Among the key ideas that emerged through the work of these artists was a focus on community, personal relationships and everyday life.
This exhibition culminates in 1975, a watershed year. It marked the first International Women’s Year, inaugurated through the first UN World Conference on Women, and the height of second-wave feminism. That year the NGV staged the exhibition Six Australian Women Photographers, sometimes referenced as Wimmin, featuring work by Marion Marrison, Melanie Nunn, Fiona Hall, Melanie Le Guay, Ingeborg Tyssen and Jacqueline Mitelman. Fifty years on, many of the images from that exhibition are included here, presented alongside work from the artists’ peers.
Text from the NGV website
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, six photographs by Christine Godden (Australian, b. 1947) Untitled 1973/1974 (above); and four photographs by Marion Marrison (Australian, b. 1951) including at right No title (Lady) (1973) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Fiona Hall began focusing on photography in the mid 1970s, following her time as an assistant to British landscape photographer Fay Godwin. Taken with a large-format camera, Hall’s early photographs were influenced by late modernism and formalism, the study of art focusing on the visual aspects of a work. In this image, Hall plays with forms and lines, capturing the elements of the room as if they have been layered, and she positions herself so that her reflection appears as though it is hovering in space. Curator and art historian Helen Ennis writes that while we often expect self-portraiture to reveal the artist, Hall’s photograph seems to conceal her.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, four 1974 photographs by Fiona Hall (Australian, b. 1953); and at right, four photographs by Sue Ford (Australian, 1943-2009) (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Sue Ford Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) and Sue Ford Sue Pike (1963, printed 1988) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carmel and Trish (1962, printed 1988) was taken early in Sue Ford’s artistic career, and features her friends Carmel and Trish posing in a paddock. Although Ford approached her photography seriously, her sense of humour comes through in this image, which has been described as both an experiment and a playful critique of photography. Throughout her career, Ford often turned the camera on herself, as well as on her family, friends and acquaintances, using the medium to explore social and political issues. Her work is aligned with the important wave of Australian feminist photographers active during the 1970s
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing pages from Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Carol Jerrems (Australian, 1949-1980) and Virginia Fraser (Australian, 1947-2021) A book about Australian Women Melbourne, Outback Press, 1974 Shaw Research Library
This book features 131 photographs by the Melbourne-based photographer Carol Jerrems, interspersed with interviews and texts edited by Virginia Fraser. Published in 1974, the year before International Women’s Year, it captures a moment in time when many Australian women were deeply engaged in global feminist ideas. Described as a ‘collective portrait’, A Book About Australian Women has become an iconic reference in Australian feminist history. It highlights a diverse group of women involved in cultural life across Australia. Some of those featured include writer Anne Summers, painter Grace Cossington Smith, film director Jennie Boddington and the Wiradjuri tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley.
Carol Jerrems studied photography at Prahran College in Melbourne, winning several student awards before first exhibiting her work in the early 1970s. Jerrems collaborated with Australian artist Virginia Fraser on the 1974 publication A Book About Australian Women, a suite of portraits featuring a diverse range of subjects. This portrait was taken as part of that project, and an edition is included in the book. The work features Oodgeroo Noonuccal, previously known as Kath Walker, who was an Aboriginal rights activist, poet, WWII veteran, environmentalist and educator. Noonuccal is photographed with her pen poised at the learning centre she established on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland) to teach visitors to the island about Aboriginal culture and Country.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, two photographs by Ponch Hawkes (Australian, b. 1946): No title (Helen at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018); and No title (In the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes began to photograph while working as a journalist for the counterculture magazine The Digger in 1972. In 1973 she moved into a communal house in Melbourne with fellow Digger contributor Helen Garner. Together they produced stories for the broadsheet, documenting new ways of living emerging in inner-city Melbourne in the early 1970s.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at right, Ponch Hawkes No title (Summer night in the backyard at Falconer Street) (c. 1975 printed 2018, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image, top to bottom left to right, six photographs by Ponch Hawkes: No title (Women holding hands in front of graffiti, ‘Lesbians are lovely’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner in the City Square) (1975, printed 2018); No title (Two women embracing, ‘Glad to be gay’) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Fitzroy graffiti) (1973, printed 2018); No title (Graffiti, ‘Braddock… not mild, but sexist’) (1973, printed 2018) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ponch Hawkes captured powerful images of lesbian love and friendship during Melbourne’s early 1970s gay liberation movement. Hawkes worked for the counterculture magazine The Digger alongside Australian writer Helen Garner. The two often collaborated on projects, producing impassioned essays and imagery that platformed communities often excluded from mainstream media. The pride and solidarity shown in these images stand in stark contrast to the extreme discrimination queer people faced during the time.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975, below) and at second left, Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975, below) with at right, photographs by Ponch Hawkes Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Ann Newmarch We must risk unlearning (1975) and Ann Newmarch Two versions (1975) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Exhibition dates: 28th November, 2025 – 3rd May, 2026
Curator: Maggie Finch, Curator of Photography at the NGV
Mina Moore (New Zealand, 1882-1957) Nellie Stewart c. 1913-1916 Gelatin silver photograph 18.6 x 12.7cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992
Sisters May and Mina Moore operated their photography studio from 1913 in the newly completed Auditorium Building at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. This building also housed a concert hall, where recitals, operas and music performances were presented. The location was particularly advantageous for the photographers as it provided a steady stream of performers and productions in need of promotional portraits.
Wall text from the exhibition
Nellie Stewart, born Eleanor Stewart Towzey (1858-1931) was an Australian actress and singer, known as “Our Nell” and “Sweet Nell”. Born into a theatrical family, Stewart began acting as a child. As a young woman, she built a career playing in operetta and Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
It’s great to have a record of this extensive photography exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
In this first part of the exhibition, Part 1 of a huge two-part posting on Art Blart (posting proceeds as in a walk through of the exhibition), highlights for me included:
~ Two photographs by the under appreciated Bahaus artist and self taught photographer Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) whose portraits of friends, still-lifes, and performative self-portrait images are rarely seen
~ Six small, intense, jewel-like photographs by Bauhaus student Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) of “new women” and street corners in Ginza, Japan which were a revelation for their beauty, pictorial composition, tonality, spatiality and physical presence of the image
~ The groundbreaking portfolio Métal by Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) which was magnificently laid out so that you could “appreciate its unique design as an object” and the “vitality of the photography”, allowing the viewer to begin to understand the complex relationships between images one to another and the flow of the whole folio. A joy to behold!
Entrance to the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Mina and May Moore’s Murial Starr (c. 1913-1916, below); at second left, May Moore’s Janina Korolewicz-Wayda (c. 1910-1920); at at third right, Mina Moore’s Nellie Stewart (c. 1913-1916, above) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the wide-ranging photographic practices of more than eighty women artists working between 1900 and 1975. Featuring prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines, the exhibition explores the role of photographers as image-makers, and the ways in which women artists create an image of themselves, of others, of the times – from images of the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond. From Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires, the exhibition showcases the works of trailblazing artists such as Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toyoko Tokiwa, Yamazawa Eiko and many more.
The exhibition reflects a recent collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography Collection. Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, photomontage, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light presents the diverse work of women photographers against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events.
Text from the National Gallery of Victoria
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing May and Mina Moore’s Murial Starr (c. 1913-1916, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
May and Mina Moore (New Zealand, 1881-1931 and 1882-1957) Murial Starr c. 1913-1916 Gelatin silver photograph 19.6 x 12.5cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the Latrobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, 1992
Sisters May and Mina Moore established their Wellington studio-portraiture business in around 1907. May, originally trained as a painter, learned to operate the camera while Mina, a schoolteacher, gained skills in printing. Expanding their business to Australia, May established a Sydney studio in 1911 while, two years later, Mina set up a Melbourne studio, which was later taken over by photographer Ruth Hollick. The pair became known for their studio portraits of actors, artists and musicians. Using only natural light, they created dramatic images marked by a striking chiaroscuro effect (a technique involving strong contrasts of light and shade) on the faces of their subjects.
Wall text from the exhibition
Muriel Starr (1888-1950) was a Canadian stage actress. She was particularly popular in Australia in the 1910s and 1920s. She appeared in one film, Within the Law (1916), an adaptation of her stage success. She was also known for the plays East of Suez, Birds of Paradise and Madame X.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing May and Mina Moore’s No title (Woman) (c. 1914) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Isabel Seymour (England, 1882-1963) The Seymour Album (c. 1907-1911). Recent acquisition Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The suffragette Isabel Seymour was employed by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in London in 1906. Fluent in English and German, she facilitated international speaking tours for the organisation. Assembled by Seymour for the WSPU, this personal scrapbook includes photographs, postcards, advertisements and newspaper articles detailing suffragette activities. The album provides a historical snapshot of the activities and people involved in the suffragette movement, through one of its key organisations.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Woman’s Social and Political Union (distributor) Toye & Co. (manufacturer) Medal for Valour, awarded to Selina Martin, with original box (1909); Selina Martin (England, 1882-1972) No title (Photographic album containing images and handwritten text relating to Selina Martin) (c. 1910); Lizzie Casual Smith (England, 1870-1956) Miss Christabel Pankhurst (c. 1900s) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Woman’s Social and Political Union (distributor) Toye & Co. (manufacturer) Medal for Valour, awarded to Selina Martin, with original box (1909) and at right, Selina Martin (England, 1882-1972) No title (Photographic album containing images and handwritten text relating to Selina Martin) (c. 1910) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Woman’s Social and Political Union (distributor) Toye & Co. (manufacturer) Medal for Valour, awarded to Selina Martin, with original box (1909) and at right, Selina Martin (England, 1882-1972) No title (Photographic album containing images and handwritten text relating to Selina Martin) (c. 1910) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
The suffragette Selina Martin joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1908. She was imprisoned on several occasions due to her activism and was awarded a Hunger Strike Medal for valour by the WSPU. This album is Martin’s personal compilation of photographs, postcards and writings, many of which relate to the suffragette cause. It includes writing from notable acquaintances such as political activist and suffragette Mary Leigh, and human rights activist and feminist Ethel Snowden.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Selina Martin (English, 1882-1972) was a member of the suffragette movement in the early 20th century. She was arrested several times. Her Hunger Strike Medal given ‘for Valour’ by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was sold at auction in Nottingham in 2019.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Gertrude Kasebier The gargoyle (c. 1900, below); at third right, Ruth Hollick No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison) (c. 1920, below); at second right, Ruth Hollick Thought (1921, below); and at right, Madame d’Ora Untitled (1931, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Image-Makers: Women in Photography
By the start of the twentieth century, photography was becoming increasingly accessible to the public in many cities around the world. Previously, the medium was practised by an affluent minority of amateur artists and commercial studios. However, the production of lower-cost cameras gradually opened up photography to the broader public, particularly the expanding middle class. At the same time, women began to participate in photography as both creators and consumers. For many women, photography offered a means of income, a way to document daily life, and a powerful tool for communication and activism.
In England, suffragettes actively used photography to create and share images that were integral to their campaign for women’s right to vote. The suffragettes constructed their images in photographic studios and in the streets, merging style and fashionable dress with politics and self-assuredness. These photographs became crucial in shaping the public image of the suffrage movement.
In Australia, May and Mina Moore ran a successful photographic business. Known for their dramatically lit portraits of stage performers, they responded to the appetite for stylised portraiture as popularised by the suffragettes. At a time of shifting gender roles, May Moore also advocated publicly for women to work in photography.
Installation views of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing Gertrude Kasebier The gargoyle (c. 1900, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Gertrude Kasebier (American, 1852-1934) The gargoyle c. 1900 Platinum photograph 20.6 x 13.5 cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the Herald & Weekly Times Limited, Fellow, 1979
In the early twentieth century, leading Pictorialist photographer Gertrude Käsebier played a key role in establishing photography as a form of fine art. As a member of the Photo-Secession group alongside Alfred Stieglitz, Käsebier was dedicated to Pictorialism, a style that emphasised artistic expression over documentary accuracy. This photograph, taken in Paris, highlights the painterly, emotional qualities inherent in Pictorialism. Käsebier has created an evocative image using composition and light to transform the scene. After leaving the Photo-Secession group in 1912, Käsebier became a founder and active member of the Pictorial Photographers of America.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ruth Hollick No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison) (c. 1920, below); at second left, Ruth Hollick Thought (1921, below); and at right, Madame d’Ora Untitled (1931, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) No title (Young woman in hunting costume, model Lucy Crosbie Morrison) c. 1920 Gelatin silver photograph 20.0 x 14.6cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993 Public domain
Ruth Hollick attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1902 to 1906 and began to photograph commercially around 1908. In 1918, along with her life and professional partner, fellow photographer Dorothy Izard, she took over the studio of May and Mina Moore at 167 Collins Street, Melbourne. Eventually Hollick expanded her studio into the newly completed Chartres House building next door at 165 Collins Street. From 1920 her photographs were regularly included in magazines as well as Australian and British Pictorialist exhibitions and salons. Hollick closed her city studio in the early 1930s but continued working from her home in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds into the 1960s.
Wall text from the exhibition
Ruth Hollick (Australian, 1883-1977) Thought 1921 Gelatin silver photograph 37.4 x 25.3cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by Mrs Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Member, 1993 Public domain
This sensitive portrait depicts the artist’s niece Lucy Crosbie Morrison. The pose of the subject, combined with the title, reveals the photographer’s careful direction and artistic ambition. The subject’s outfit, adorned with appliqué gum leaves and a gumnut belt, references native Australian plants. The work aligns with the style of Pictorialism, a popular international photographic trend at the time. Thought was recognised at the 1921 Colonial Exhibition in London, highlighting both its local significance and broader artistic appeal.
Wall text from the exhibition
Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963) Untitled (installation view) 1931 Gelatin silver photograph 22.4 x 16.4cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Kallmus, known professionally as Madame d’Ora, photographed high-profile figures associated with art, fashion and politics, including Josephine Baker and Coco Chanel. In 1907 Madame d’Ora opened her first studio in Vienna, Atelier d’Ora, one of the first photography studios in Vienna to be operated by a woman. She later moved to Paris, where her career flourished well into the 1930s – Atelier d’Ora was renowned for its glamorous, softly focused portraits – until she was forced to close her studio due to Nazi occupation.
Wall text from the exhibition
Dora Kallmus (1881-1963), better known as Madame d’Ora, was an unusual woman for her time with a spectacular career as one of the leading photographic portraitists of the early twentieth century. This exhibition, the largest museum retrospective on the Austrian photographer to date in the United States, presents the different periods of her life, from her early upbringing as the daughter of Jewish intellectuals in Vienna, to her days as a premier society photographer, through her survival during the Holocaust. Forging a path in a field that was dominated by men, d’Ora enjoyed an illustrious 50-year career, from 1907 until 1957. The show includes more than 100 examples of her work, which is distinguished for its extreme elegance, and utter depth and darkness.
Born into a privileged background and coming of age amidst the creative and intellectual atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Kallmus was extremely well cultured. At age 23 while on a trip to the Côte d’Azur, she purchased her first camera, a Kodak box camera. She was the first woman photographer in Vienna to open her own studio and in May 1906, she was listed in the commercial register as a photographer for the first time. Self-styled simply as d’Ora, she initially took portraits of friends and members from her social circle. In the autumn of 1909, an exhibition of her work received a lively response from the press. Critics both praised the artistic style of her portraits and emphasized the prominent individuals who streamed in to view the show.
Over the course of her lifetime, d’Ora turned her lens on many artists, including Josephine Baker, Colette, Gustav Klimt, Tamara de Lempicka, and Pablo Picasso, among others. Alongside these commissions, she also photographed members of the Habsburg family and Viennese aristocracy, the Rothschild family, and other prominent cultural figures and politicians. D’Ora had close ties to avant-garde artistic circles and captured members of the Expressionist dance movement with her lens, including Anita Berber and Sebastian Droste. Fashion and glamor subjects were another important mainstay of her business. She regularly photographed Wiener Werkstätte fashion models and the designer Emilie Flöge of the Schwestern Flöge salon wearing artistic reform dresses. When d’Ora moved to Paris in 1925, she shifted her focus to fashion, covering the couture scene and leading lights of the period until 1940. She befriended key figures, such as the French milliner Madame Agnès and the Spanish designer Cristóbal Balenciaga, as well as the top fashion magazine editors of the day. She also helped create and sustain glamorous images for a variety of celebrities, including Cecil Beaton, Maurice Chevalier, and Colette.
When the Nazis seized control of Paris in 1940, she was forced to close her studio and flee. She spent the war years in a semi-underground existence living in Ardèche in the southeast of France. Her sister Anna Kallmus, along with other family and friends, died in the Chełmno concentration camp. After World War II, d’Ora returned to Paris, profoundly affected by personal losses. While she lacked an elegant studio in Paris, d’Ora’s lasting connections to wealthy clients remained and many of them returned to her. While she accepted portrait commissions, mostly for financial stability, she also pushed into new, sometimes darker directions. Around 1948, she embarked on an astonishing series of photographs in displaced persons or refugee camps, which was commissioned by the United Nations. From around 1949 to 1958, d’Ora worked on a project, which she called “my big final work.” She visited numerous slaughterhouses in Paris, and amid the pools of blood and deathly screams, she stood in an elegant suit and a hat photographing the butchered animals hundreds of times.
Anonymous. “Madame d’Ora,” on the Neue Galerie website Nd [Online] Cited 30/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Madame D’Ora The Dolly Sisters (c. 1928, below); at second right, Trude Fleischmann The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna (c. 1926, below); and at right, Trude Fleischmann View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna (1929, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Dora Kallmus (Madame d’Ora) (Austrian, 1881–1963) The Dolly sisters (installation views) c. 1928 Gelatin silver photograph 18.0 x 21.1cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Around 1928 Madame d’Ora photographed the Dolly Sisters, who were celebrated for their glamorous performances in the 1920s. Jenny and Rosie Dolly, Hungarian-American identical twins, were vaudeville and cabaret dancers adored in Britain, the United States and across Europe for their beauty and erotically charged performances. In d’Ora’s photograph they embody the ideal of the modern woman, with bobbed hair and short skirts, dressed in glittering couture costumes and adorned with pearls.
Wall text from the exhibition
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna c. 1926 Gelatin silver photograph 21.9 x 16.2cm (image) 22.9 x 17.1cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) The actress Sibylle Binder, Vienna c. 1926 Gelatin silver photograph 21.9 x 16.2cm (image) 22.9 x 17.1cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Public domain
Trude Fleischmann studied photography in Paris and, after graduating from the Viennese visual arts college die Graphische, apprenticed in the studio of photographer Madame d’Ora. In 1920 Fleischmann opened her own studio, specialising in female nudes, celebrity and socialite portraits, and glamorous photographs of actors. In 1938 she fled Austria, eventually settling in New York, where she re-established her studio and continued to focus on portraits of high-profile figures. This portrait depicts the Viennese actress Sibylle Binder, who performed throughout Germany and Austria in the 1920s. Binder is photographed in glamorous dress and with the classic short, androgynous hairstyle of the New Woman.
Wall text from the exhibition
Sybille Binder (Austrian, 1895-1962)
Sybille Binder (5 January 1895 – 30 June 1962) was an Austrian actress of Jewish descent whose career of over 40 years was based variously in her home country, Germany and Britain, where she found success in films during the 1940s.
Career
Binder began her stage career in Berlin in 1915, then in 1918 moved to Munich, where she enjoyed success in classical drama. Between 1916 and 1918 she also appeared in a handful of silent films. In 1922, she returned to Berlin and received acclaim for her performance in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit. Over the next few years she performed regularly in Germany and Austria then, in the mid-1930s as war approached and conditions in Germany became difficult, she made the decision to move to England.
Between 1942 and 1950 Binder featured in 13 British films, including several of superior quality. Her first screen appearance in Britain came auspiciously in the highly acclaimed supernatural drama Thunder Rock, playing opposite dramatic heavyweights including Michael Redgrave, James Mason and Frederick Valk. Other notable films in which Binder appeared were war drama Candlelight in Algeria (1944), hugely popular period melodrama Blanche Fury, espionage thriller Against the Wind and amnesia-themed romance Portrait from Life (all 1948).
Binder returned to Germany in 1950, settling in Düsseldorf, where she successfully picked up her stage career but did not attempt to break into the German film industry. She died on 30 June 1962, aged 67.
Trude Fleischmann (American born Austria, 1895-1990) View of Michaelerplatz, Vienna (Blick zum Michaelerplatz Wien) 1929 Gelatin silver photograph 18.4 x 16.6cm (image) 19.0 x 17.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image at third left, Kitty Hoffmann Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) (1930, below); at third right, Lotte Jacobi Head of a dancer (1929, below); at second right, Gertrud Arndt Mask self-portrait No. 11 (1930, below); and at right, Gertrud Arndt Wera Waldek (1930, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
New Women, New Visions
Photography studios flourished in the early twentieth century. In Vienna, Austria, numerous prominent women photographers ran successful businesses, including Madame d’Ora and later Trude Fleischmann and Kitty Hoffmann. While Madame d’Ora’s glamorous portraits retained the soft focus characteristic of turn-of-the-century photography, the women in Fleischmann’s and Hoffmann’s images of the 1920s and 1930s matched the mood of the modern city. With their chic dress and bobbed haircuts, they represented the famed ‘New Woman’, or Neue Frau, an archetype that came to symbolise female empowerment and the shift away from traditional gender roles.
Opening in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus art school experienced an influx of women students due to changes in the country’s constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote and study. Photography, while not officially taught at the Bauhaus for some years, flourished: it was seen to be an essential means of expression appropriate for the modern age. Lucia Moholy and her husband, Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, promoted the idea of ‘New Vision’ at the school. The camera was seen as the ultimate mirror of the everyday, while the camera-less images they produced allowed for great experimentation and abstraction.
Kitty Hoffmann (Austrian, 1900-1968) Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) (installation view) 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 15.9 x 19.8cm (image) 16.8 x 20.7cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Kitty Hoffmann (Austrian, 1900-1968) Posing dance group (Tanzgruppe Trude Goodwin) 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 15.9 x 19.8cm (image) 16.8 x 20.7cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024
Kitty Hoffmann worked and studied at Vienna’s die Graphische visual arts college from 1922 to 1924. Three years later, upon completing her studies, she opened a photographic studio in the city, specialising in fashion and society portraiture. Hoffmann’s photographs were regularly published in popular lifestyle and theatre magazines of the time, including Die Dame von Heute (The Lady of Today)and Die Bühne (The Stage). This photograph depicts dancers from the Trude Goodwin dance group. The dancers form a graphic shape that echoes the oval stage-set behind them, encapsulating the Ausdruckstanz, or ‘expressive dance’ movement, which reached peak popularity in Vienna during the 1920s.
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Lotte Jacobi (German-American, 1896-1990) Head of a dancer 1929, printed c. 1970 Gelatin silver photograph 26.4 x 33.2cm (image) 27.7 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021 Public domain
Lotte Jacobi’s father and grandfather were also photographers, and her great-grandfather studied with Louis Daguerre, inventor of the daguerreotype. This modernist portrait features Russian dancer Niuta Norskaya. The dancer’s pale, oval-shaped face is encompassed by her wide-brimmed black hat, resulting in a striking study of modern beauty.
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Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) Mask self-portrait no. 11 (Maskenselbstbildnis Nr. 11) (installation views) 1930 Gelatin silver photograph 22.9 x 14.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Gertrud Arndt (born Gertrud Hantschk in Upper Silicia) set out to become an architect, beginning a three-year apprenticeship in 1919 at the architecture firm of Karl Meinhardt in Erfurt, where her family lived at the time. While there, she began teaching herself photography by taking pictures of buildings in town. She also attended courses in typography, drawing, and art history at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of design). Encouraged by Meinhardt, a friend of Walter Gropius, Arndt was awarded a scholarship to continue her studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Enrolled from 1923 to 1927, Arndt took the Vorkurs (foundation course) from László Moholy-Nagy, who was a chief proponent of the value of experimentation with photography. After her Vorkurs, Georg Muche, leader of the weaving workshop, persuaded her to join his course, which then became the formal focus of her studies. Upon graduation, in March 1927, she married fellow Bauhaus graduate and architect Alfred Arndt. The couple moved to Probstzella in Eastern Germany, where Arndt photographed buildings for her husband’s architecture firm.
In 1929, Hannes Meyer invited Alfred Arndt to teach at the Bauhaus, where Arndt focused her energy on photography, entering her period of greatest activity, featuring portraits of friends, still-lifes, and a series of performative self-portraits, as well as At the Masters’ Houses, which shows the influence of her studies with Moholy-Nagy as well as her keen eye for architecture. After the Bauhaus closed, in 1932, the couple left Dessau and moved back to Probstzella. Three years after the end of World War II the family moved to Darmstadt; Arndt almost completely stopped making photographs.
Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography “Gertrud Arndt,” on the MoMA website 2014 [Online] Cited 31/03/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Gertrud Arndt (German, 1903-2000) Wera Waldek 1930, printed 1984 From the Bauhaus portfolio I (1919-1933) 1984 Gelatin silver photograph (19.0 x 22.5cm) irreg. (image) 27.0 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of Galerie Kicken Berlin in memory of Rudolf Kicken (1947-2014), 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Originally wanting to study architecture, Gertrud Arndt enrolled at the Bauhaus school in 1923-1924, ultimately specialising in weaving. A self-taught photographer, she informally developed her skills while apprenticing at an architect’s office in Erfurt prior to her studies, later photographing buildings for her husband’s architecture firm. Printing this picture in its negative state, rather than turning it into a positive image, Arndt creates a striking dreamlike effect. The portrait depicts fellow Bauhaus architecture student Wera Waldek, who made designs for children’s play furniture and housing interiors. The image forms part of the Bauhaus Portfolio I 1919-1933, published by Rudolf Kicken Galerie in 1984.
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Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right in the bottom image, Florence Henri Still life (Nature morte) (1931 printed 1975, below); Elsa Thiemann (German, 1910-1981) Design for wallpaper (1930-1931); 1930s photographs by Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) see below; and two 1920s photographs by Lucia Moholy of the Bauhaus, Dessau, see below Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Elsa Thiemann trained in painting, graphic design and photography at the Bauhaus school. While there, she responded to an advertisement from school director Hannes Meyer for wallpaper designs to be considered for the new Bauhaus collection, planned for production by the wallpaper manufacturer Gebrüder Rasch. Thiemann’s designs used photograms of flowers and hand-coloured swirling patterns, which were meticulously cut, organised and pasted into repetitious symmetrical layouts. While her designs were not manufactured, likely due to their contrast with the brighter patterns ultimately selected for production, they remain as standalone works indicative of the experimental design being practised at the Bauhaus.
After studying music and painting, Florence Henri was introduced to photography in 1927 while attending the Bauhaus school. There, she met László Moholy-Nagy and Lucia Moholy, whose influence (especially Moholy’s) led Henri to focus solely on photography. In 1929 she established a studio in Paris, where she became renowned for her avant-garde and experimental practice. In addition to portraits of women, her work often features still-life compositions that combine everyday objects like envelopes and sheets of paper with natural elements such as flowers and leaves. Henri also frequently used mirrors as a means of fragmenting the pictorial space.
Wall text from the exhibition. New acquisition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing photographs by Yamawaki Michiko, top to bottom, left to right: Ginza (Street corner) (1932, below); Ginza (Women in matching kimonos and white parasols) (1932); Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat) (1932, below); Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat) (1932, below); Ginza (Ginza Palace) (1932, below); Ginza (Pumps and sandals walking on sidewalk) (1932). New acquisitions Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Yamawaki Michiko and her husband spent two years studying at the Bauhaus art school in Dessau, Germany from 1930, returning to Japan in 1932. Taken in the summer of 1933, Yamawaki’s Tokyo street scenes show the influence of the Bauhaus vision, while highlighting the differing roles of women at a time of great social change. We see mothers carrying children, women in kimono holding parasols, and moga (modern girls) wearing knee-length dresses and Western-inspired clothes. Yamawaki used details from twenty-one of these photographs to create her bustling modernist photomontage Melted Tokyo, published in Asahi Camera magazine in 1933.
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Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) Ginza (Street corner) (installation view) 1932 Gelatin silver photograph 11.0 x 8.2 cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) Ginza (Woman walking with 1930s style dress, white, with white hat) (installation view) 1932 Gelatin silver photograph 11.2 x 8.3cm (image) 12.6 x 10.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) Ginza (Two women crossing street, one with white hat) (installation view) 1932 Gelatin silver photograph 11.2 x 8.2cm (image) 12.6 x 10.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Yamawaki Michiko (Japan, 1910-2000, worked in Germany 1930-1932) Ginza (Ginza Palace) (installation view) 1932 Gelatin silver photograph 11.2 x 8.3cm (image) 12.5 x 10.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at top, Lucia Moholy Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard (1926, below); and at bottom, Lucia Moholy Berlin Architecture Exhibition (1928, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) Bauhaus residences Dessau, kitchen – sideboard (Bauhaussiedlung Dessau, küche – anrichte) 1926 Gelatin silver photograph 11.9 x 16.8cm (image) 13.0 x 17.9cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Lucia Moholy is best known for documenting the architecture, people and creative outputs of the Bauhaus school. Her work was often incorrectly attributed to famous men of the school, such as its founder, Walter Gropius, and Moholy’s then husband, László Moholy-Nagy. In this photograph, Moholy captures Gropius’s kitchen in the Masters’ House. The building and the design schools nearby, built between 1925 and 1926, are exemplars of European modern architecture and design. Sharp lines and dynamic angles emphasise the modular design, displaying the modernist principles of photography that Moholy applied to her images of architectural spaces.
“I suggest that Walter Gropius was most likely not interested in the ‘design’ of kitchens. These function rooms he would have not visited often nor did he cook. Gropius had a maid while in the Bauhaus as well as in later life. The kitchen at the Bauhaus was functional according to the times and the needs as seen by the employers of the maids who worked in them. Whereas the Frankfurt Kitchens were a result of attention to design as well as function and efficiency. …
Lucia had not enjoyed small town Dessau and intense campus life at the Bauhaus. She worked in Berlin but at in 1933 Moholy had to flee in fear of arrest for her communist association, leaving all her possessions behind including her negatives.
After time on Prague and Paris, Lucia Moholy settled In England in 1934 where she worked as a portrait photographer and teacher. …
After seeing her images as uncredited illustrations in the catalogue of a 1938 exhibition on the Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and many later publications, Lucia Moholy became aware that her negatives had survived. She found they had come into the possession of Walter Gropius who took them to his new teaching post America in 1937. He could easily have found Lucia post war. For years Lucia Moholy asked Gropius to give the plates back but he would not until her lawyers were able to force the return about half the original number in 1957. She complained that Gropius enjoyed the use and income from the photographs while she lived in want.”
Gael Newton AM. “Lucia Moholy: The Kitchen,” on the Photo-web website, March 2026 [Online] Cited 02/04/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The question remains: what happened to the remaining negatives not returned by Walter Gropius to Lucia Moholy in the 1957 settlement? According to Moholy’s own card catalogue, which she used to keep track of her works, 330 negatives remained missing from her collection by the time of her death in 1989. Lost, damaged or stolen … the reputation of Gropius is forever sullied by his unseemly, grasping, patriarchal actions. MB
Lucia Moholy (British born Czech, 1894-1989) Berlin Architecture Exhibition (Exposition d’Architecture à Berlin en 1928) 1928 Gelatin silver photograph 16.3 x 22.4cm (image) 16.9 x 22.9 cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In 1928 Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy left Dessau for a new life in Berlin. This image documents an innovative housing exhibition showcasing modern living. The display, designed by architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school, featured new housing concepts in Zehlendorf, a Berlin neighbourhood. The graphic lettering on the building translates to ‘Live in a green environment, ideal case: Zehlendorf’. Moholy-Nagy designed the interiors, and Moholy’s images, with their signature focus on starkly contrasting vertical and horizontal lines, highlight their modernist design principles.
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Like many women of her time, Lucia Moholy often found herself in the shadow cast by her more conspicuous male peers – one of whom happened to be her husband, the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. After marrying in 1921, the couple moved to Weimar, Germany, so that he could begin a professorship at the Bauhaus, the influential German school of architecture, design, and applied arts. While László taught, Lucia undertook photography training, serving as an apprentice in Otto Eckner’s Bauhaus photography studio. By 1926 she had mastered a wide range of techniques, installed a darkroom in their home, and begun collaborating with her husband on experimental forms of cameraless photography.
As part of her photographic practice, Lucia began documenting the people and architectural spaces of the Bauhaus. Many of her images focus on the women who either supported or participated in the school’s activities. Edith Tschichold (1926), for instance, depicts the wife of German typographer and frequent Bauhaus collaborator Jan Tschichold. Meanwhile, Florence Henri (1927) portrays the notable Surrealist artist at the outset of her career, when she came to the Bauhaus in 1927 as a visiting photography student. Both portraits are tightly cropped around the women’s faces, revealing expressions of wistfulness or self-assurance that pull viewers into a shared emotional space.
One of Lucia’s more iconic portraits is an untitled photograph of her husband, who, sporting a machinist’s coveralls over his shirt and tie, humorously attempts to block the camera lens with his hand. The candid shot hints at the playful nature of the couple’s working relationship; once circulated, it also helped to shape László’s persona as an artist-constructor. Despite happy appearances, their relationship began to deteriorate as László declined to credit Lucia for many of their collaborations, including the celebrated 1925 book Malerei, Photografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film).
This was not the only – or even the most significant – erasure of Lucia’s career. Forced to flee Germany in 1933 due to the rise of the Nazi Party, she made the difficult decision to leave behind her collection of 560 glass-plate negatives, which she described as “my only tangible asset.”
Following World War II, in the midst of a revival of interest in the Bauhaus, she tried desperately to locate them with no success. It wasn’t until 1954 that Walter Gropius, founder and former head of the Bauhaus, acknowledged that the negatives were in his possession, that he had been reproducing them, and that he had no intention of returning them to her. Lucia Moholy’s precise visual records of the school’s architecture – such as Bauhaus Workshop Building from Below. Oblique View (1926) – had been circulated without attribution for years in order to promote Bauhaus aesthetics. In fact, 49 of her prints appeared uncredited in the catalogue accompanying MoMA’s exhibition Bauhaus, 1919–1928, which was mounted in 1938 with Gropius’s input.
As part of her legal efforts to reclaim the negatives, Lucia wrote, “Everybody, except myself, have used, and admit to having used my photographs […] and often also without mentioning my name. Everyone – except myself – have derived advantages from using my photographs, either directly, or indirectly, in a number of ways, be it in cash or prestige, or both.”
Her claim was ultimately successful, leading to the return of 230 extant negatives in 1957. However, the acknowledgement of her influence – both as a collaborator in László Moholy-Nagy’s photographic experiments, and as an agent in the construction of Bauhaus visual identity – remains an ongoing project.
Dana Ostrander, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography “Lucia Moholy,” on the MoMA website 2020 [Online] Cited 31/03/2026
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Olive Cotton Girl with mirror (1938, below); Teacup ballet (1935 printed 1992, below); Shasta daisies (1937 printed 1992, below); at second right, Dora Maar Fashion study (c. 1936, below); and at right, Untitled (Study of Beauty (1936, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing from left to right, Olive Cotton’s Girl with mirror (1938, below); Teacup ballet (1935 printed 1992, below); Shasta daisies (1937 printed 1992, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Girl with mirror (installation view) 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 31.8 x 29.9cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Olive Cotton created this image while assisting her colleague and then partner Max Dupain on location at beaches around Sydney. According to Cotton, when Dupain was shooting fashion photographs, she had the freedom to create her own images while the model was ‘waiting her turn to be photographed by Max’. Dupain’s camera tripod cast ‘long slanting lines of shadow’ against the sand. While its creation was incidental, this photograph demonstrates Cotton’s eye for composition and her mastery of light and shade, emphasising the graphic elements of the scene.
Olive Cotton (Australian, 1911-2003) Teacup ballet (installation view) 1935, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph 36.0 x 29.2cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Upon purchasing a set of inexpensive cups and saucers to replace the mugs in photographer Max Dupain’s Sydney studio, where she was a studio assistant, Olive Cotton recognised the potential for a dynamic composition. Later describing the handles of the cups as ‘arms akimbo’, Cotton, in her efforts ‘to express a dance theme’, used a spotlight to accentuate shadows, resulting in a ‘ballet-like composition’. Through her deft use of lighting and arrangement of objects, the teacups appear transformed, as if they are ballerinas performing onstage. The image was immediately successful both in Australia and abroad, being included in the London Salon of Photography from September 1935.
Olive Cotton (Australia 1911-2003) Shasta daisies 1937, printed 1992 Gelatin silver photograph 38.2 x 28.1cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased from Admission Funds, 1992 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
‘The camera can do more than merely record an unchanging picture of a subject … The lighting, the relation of the various objects to the shape of picture and many other factors can be changed by the individual, and this is where discernment and personality come into the picture as it were.’
Dora Maar (French, 1907-1997) Fashion study (installation view) c. 1936 Gelatin silver photograph Proposed acquisition
Dora Maar (French 1907-1997) Untitled (Study of beauty) (installation view) 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 33.0 x 24.1cm Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Dora Maar, a French photographer, poet and painter, established her commercial studio in Paris in 1932, quickly gaining recognition as a portrait and fashion photographer. While known as one of Pablo Picasso’s muses and the inspiration for his Weeping woman paintings, Maar was an influential artist in her own right, painting well into her eighties. As a photographer, Maar developed an elegant and experimental style, drawing on her knowledge of avant-garde photography and the ideas underpinning Surrealism. In this work, an advertising commission for the haircare brand Dolfar, Maar explores the ideal of beauty, creating an image in which the subject appears like a classical statue come to life.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Featuring some of the most iconic images from the twentieth century by the likes of Diane Arbus, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Dorothea Lange, Olive Cotton and many more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light celebrates the images, lives and stories of more than 70 influential artists working between 1900 to 1975. Opening 28 November 2025 at NGV International, the exhibition features more than 300 rare and innovative photographs, prints, postcards, photobooks and magazines from the NGV Collection – with 170+ recently acquired and 130+ on display for the very first time.
Featuring portraiture, photojournalism, landscape photography, fashion photography, experimental avant-garde imagery and more, Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light explores the work of the artists against the backdrop of significant social, political and cultural events – from Melbourne to Tokyo, Paris to Buenos Aires. From historic images of the suffrage movement at the turn of the twentieth century, through to the women’s liberation movement and beyond, the exhibition reveals how these artists have used key photographic styles to capture, reflect and challenge the world around them. This exhibition highlights the rich networks of exchange of information, ideas and support between many of these women across the world.
The exhibition showcases the work of prominent and leading figures of photography, as well as drawing attention to lesser-known artists. Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Imogen Cunningham, Mikki Ferrill, Sue Ford, Christine Godden, Ponch Hawkes, Annemarie Heinrich, Ruth Hollick, Florence Henri, Kati Horna, Germaine Krull, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Tokiwa Toyoko, Francesca Woodman, Yamazawa Eiko, among many others.
The exhibition reflects a recent strategic collecting focus on celebrating the contributions of women artists of the early twentieth century in the NGV Photography collection. Many of the new works on display – including by artists previously unrepresented in the NGV Collection – have been acquired with the generous support of the Bowness Family Foundation, who have been involved with the NGV for almost 25 years and who also generously contributed to the publication. There have also been significant works joining the NGV Collection with the generous support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, as well as Professor Wang Gungwu, and Joy Anderson.
Highlight works include an outstanding selection of photographs by Dora Maar, including fashion photographs, social documentary images and portraiture. Dora Maar was a sophisticated artist and image-maker and deeply connected within the avant-garde community. In 1935-36, she created these studio images of Pablo Picasso, with whom she was romantically involved. In these portraits, on display in the exhibition, Maar turns the gaze of her camera onto Picasso, offering the viewer a candid insight into their private domestic lives.
A further highlight is Dorothea Lange’s instantly recognisable work, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, commissioned as part of a campaign by the US government Farm Security Administration to bring recognition to the impacts of the Great Depression on working class families. Lange created several photographs of the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, and her children. This image, focussed on Thompson’s seemingly anxious face, became a poignant symbol of the times.
In the 1930s German-born Ilse Bing became known as the ‘Queen of Leica’ for her use of the small, hand-held camera which allowed her the flexibility to shoot from dizzying angles, create contrasts of light, shade and shadows, and dynamic perspectives. The exhibition will feature Bing’s iconic modernist image, Self-portrait 1931, showing the artist’s reflection, of herself and her camera, accompanied by her side profile in another angled mirror demonstrating the significance of the camera in her image-making.
Inner-city Melbourne of the 1970s is brought to life in the photographs of Ponch Hawkes, offering audiences a first-hand glimpse into the changing social dynamics and sense of activism of the period. Photographs on display include her documentation of life in communal houses, of urban graffiti calling for childcare and social housing, of celebrations for Gay Pride Week, and documentation of the Women’s Theatre Group, performing outdoors beneath a Women’s Liberation banner.
Also on display is Olive Cotton’s iconic Teacup ballet, 1935, a wonderful study of light, shadows and forms. Cotton had purchased an inexpensive set of cups and saucers to replace the mugs in the Sydney studio of photographer Max Dupain, where she was studio assistant. Realising their potential for a dynamic arrangement, she photographed the teacups with elongated shadows, creating a striking composition of shadow play that Cotton described as “ballet-like”.
American artist Lee Miller moved to Paris in 1929, where she became Man Ray’s photographic student, then colleague, model and lover – all the while creating her own extraordinary photographs. On display in the exhibition is Miller’s portrait of Man Ray, taken in 1931 in Miller’s Paris apartment depicting her subject framed tightly, his gaze diverted.
Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, better known by their adopted alliterative pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, were an artist duo who radically questioned the constraints of gender in their artwork and lives. The pair are represented in this exhibition with the artist’s book Aveux non Avenus, 1930. In this highly experimental book, featuring ‘essay-poems’ and collaborative photomontages, which feature self-portraits of Cahun with a shaved head and androgynous appearance and dress, Cahun and Moore raise powerful questions about identity, sexuality and self-expression.
Las Lavanderas (The Washerwomen) c. 1940, also on display, is one of several photographs created by Mexican artist Lolo Álvarez Bravo of women washing their clothes at a waterfront. The sun casts long shadows from a nearby structure, transforming the scene of everyday labour into one of dynamic angles and forms. Bravo is known for her passionate documentation of the peoples and cultures of Mexico, through such dynamic and vivid compositions.
Parliamentary Secretary for Creative Industries, Katie Hall, said: “This exhibition will celebrate the work of women photographers who documented the world around them from vastly different places and perspectives. The NGV continues to present exhibitions that show us life through different lenses and introduce us to creative trailblazers from around the world.”
Tony Ellwood AM, Director, NGV, said: “Like all collecting institutions globally, the NGV has been actively looking at historically underrepresented areas of our collection, including gender. Though this is a long and ongoing process, this exhibition offers an opportunity to celebrate and share the more than 300 works by women photographers, many of which we’ve collected since 2020. We hope this exhibition gives audiences the chance to discover the work of lesser-known photographers or deepen their appreciation of familiar ones.”
Professor Simon Tormey, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin, said: “This important exhibition foregrounds the often-overlooked contributions of women to the evolution of photography across the twentieth century. At Deakin, where we teach and research across Creative Arts and Photography, we are proud to support initiatives that celebrate artistic innovation and also challenge historical silences. This collaboration with the NGV exemplifies our commitment to the transformative power of the arts.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a beautifully illustrated publication exploring the images, lives and stories of women photographers from the pivotal period of 1900-1975. The publication will feature new essays from NGV Curators and international contributors including leading American art historian, critic and curator Abigail Solomon-Godeau; Emeritus Professor at the ANU School of Art & Design Helen Ennis; World Press Photo lead curator Amanda Maddox; photographer and writer Carla Williams, and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Yamada Yuri. Women Photographers 1900–1975 will be co-published with Hatje Cantz in Berlin.
This exhibition coincides with the fifty-year anniversary of the first International Women’s Year in 1975, as declared by the United Nations.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Ilse Bing Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Salut de Schiaparelli (installation view) 1934 Gelatin silver photograph 49.5 x 39.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Salut de Schiaparelli 1934 Gelatin silver photograph 49.5 x 39.7cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Upon moving from Frankfurt to Paris in 1930, Ilse Bing established a studio known for producing innovative portraits and fashion photography. This photograph was commissioned by fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli for a new perfume called Salut. Bing placed a scattered bouquet of lilies in the composition to represent the perfume’s scent. The image’s dreamlike quality is enhanced by Bing’s experimental use of the solarisation technique, which reverses the tones in a photograph.
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At Play: The Studio, Light and Shadows
In the 1920s, amid the aftermath of the First World War, many European avant-garde artists experimented with photography to actively ‘see’ the world anew. So-called New Photography emerged during this period, with images characterised by the play of light and shadow, extreme vantage points and the use of sharp focus. These techniques aimed to disorient the viewer – familiar scenes were made to feel unfamiliar.
Artists embracing these styles predominantly worked in studios, creating experimental images that explored the principles of New Photography. Some images were made purely as artistic exercises, while others demonstrate the use of experimental techniques for commercial purposes. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a great demand for modern photography in advertising, newspapers, catalogues and picture magazines. With the wide dissemination of these media, the influence of New Photography travelled far beyond Europe, and can be seen in works by Olive Cotton in Sydney, Lola Álvarez Bravo in Mexico City and Annemarie Heinrich in Buenos Aires.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at second left, Ilse Bing Salut de Schiaparelli (1934, above); at second right, Annemarie Heinrich (Argentinian born Germany, 1912-2005) Eva’s apple (La manzana de Eva) 1953; and at right, ringl+pit (German, active 1930-1933, Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern) Komol (1931 printed 1984, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
ringl+pit, Berlin Grete Stern (Argentine born Germany, 1904-1999) Ellen Auerbach (American born Germany, 1906-2004) Komol 1931, printed 1984 Gelatin silver photograph 34.4 x 23.3cm (image) 35.2 x 24.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Named after the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern (Ringl) and Ellen Auerbach (Pit), photography studio ringl+pit was sought after for its highly innovative and experimental work. The studio’s work broke free from feminine ideals and expectations. Komol, an unconventional advertisement for hair dye, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the shallow nature of commercialised femininity. ringl+pit’s playful productions speak to the safety of the artists’ shared space, described by art historian Elizabeth Otto as ‘a haven of humour and honesty for the photographers in contrast to the outside world that does not understand them’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left in the bottom image, Grace Lock The fly (c. 1960s); Ruth Bernhard Two Leaves (1952); and at right, Imogen Cunningham Agave design I (1920s, printed 1979) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Agave Design I 1920s, printed 1979 Gelatin silver photograph 32.6 x 25.6cm (image and sheet) 49.6 x 39.8cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1979
Image from the Art Blart archive
Following the birth of her three sons, Imogen Cunningham had to close her portrait studio in Seattle. However, she found a way to continue taking pictures at home. According to Cunningham, she would spend the afternoons while her children napped photographing her plants, ‘because I couldn’t get out anywhere, and I had a garden’. In this close-up image of an agave, Cunningham focuses on the plant’s sharp lines and the play of light. The image is recognised as one of the most iconic abstracted avant-garde images of the early twentieth century. Soon after its creation, the image was included in the 1929 contemporary exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing two photographs by Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) with at second right, Tribute to Salvador Toscano (1949 printed 1960s, below) New acquisition; and at right, The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) (c. 1950, below) New acquisition Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Lola Álvarez Bravo Tribute to Salvador Toscano (1949, printed 1960s) New acquisition; and at right, Lola Álvarez Bravo The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) (c. 1950, below) New acquisition Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisitions
Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexican, 1903-1993) The washerwomen (Las Lavanderas) c. 1950 Gelatin silver photograph on cardboard 18.9 × 22.3cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
Throughout her career, Lola Álvarez Bravo took several photographs of women washing their clothes at the waterfront. In this image, a large shadow from a nearby structure is cast over a group of women, children and dogs. The shadow appears to symbolise Mexico’s industrial growth and post-revolution transformation. Álvarez Bravo implemented modernist photography techniques such as high contrasts and extreme viewpoints to transform scenes of everyday labour into graphic compositions of dynamic angles and forms.
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image at left, Barbara Morgan (United States, 1900-1992) Hearst over the people (c. 1938-1939, below) New acquisition; at second left, Barbara Morgan City shell (1938, printed 1972); at second right, Margaret Bourke-White Campbell’s Soup No. 6 (1935, below) New acquisition; and at right, Margaret Bourke-White Beach accident, Coney Island (1952, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Barbara Morgan (American, 1900-1992) Hearst over the people (installation view) c. 1938-1939 Gelatin silver photograph 26.3 x 32.4cm (image) 26.8 x 33.0cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
After moving to New York in 1930 with her photojournalist husband, Barbara Morgan turned to photography after a decade devoted to painting and printmaking. While her children were sleeping, she would experiment with avant-garde photographic techniques. In this photomontage, the artist set out to ‘visually distort the consummate distorter’: media mogul William Randolph Hearst, notorious for his sensationalist news empire. Hearst’s grinning face is stretched into a sinister omniscient octopus, its tentacles writhing into crowds of workers on the street. First published in the influential left-wing magazine New Masses, this is a compelling depiction of psychological infiltration. It also, perhaps, proposes Hearst as an effigy of authority for agitators to protest.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Berenice Abbott New York at Night (1932); at second left, Berenice Abbott Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25 (1938, below); and at right, Berenice Abbott Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 (1936) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Cities, Industries, Technologies
The early decades of the twentieth century came to be known as the Machine Age due to rapidly increasing automation, technological change and mass production. As cities industrialised, photographers responded by capturing buildings, workers and crowds.
Germaine Krull’s photographs from the 1920s and 1930s exemplify her dynamic, modern vision. Reflecting on the inspiration she gained from photographing cranes and bridges in Europe, which eventually led to the production of her famed 1928 photobook Métal, she said: “These steel giants revealed something to me that made me love photography again. From this moment onward, I began to SEE things as the eye sees them, and it is at this moment that photography was born for me.”
Machine Age artists were also experimenting with photomontage, a method that offered radical new perspectives and challenged conventional ways of seeing. Photomontage emerged in direct response to industrial development, as cities expanded and everyday life transformed. Barbara Morgan’s images reflect on the tension between the natural and the constructed. In contrast, Varvara Stepanova and Aleksandr Rodchenko embraced the tools of mass production, combining design, image-making and progressive printing techniques to create graphic publications that promoted the Soviet Union’s industrial power to a wide audience.
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25 (installation view0 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 23.9 x 19.3cm (image) 25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Old Post Office, Broadway and Park Row, Manhattan, May 25 1938 Gelatin silver photograph 23.9 x 19.3cm (image) 25.3 x 20.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
New acquisition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, Manhattan, October 8 1936 Gelatin silver photograph 19.3 x 24.3cm (image) (irreg) 20.2 x 25.2cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2021
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Margaret Bourke-White Campbell’s Soup No. 6 (1935, below); Margaret Bourke-White Beach accident, Coney Island (1952, below); and at right, Berenice Abbott New York at night (1932 printed c. 1975, below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Campbell’s Soup #6 1935 Gelatin silver print 17.3 × 24.1cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2024 Public Domain
New acquisition
Margaret Bourke-White became widely known for her documentation of workers and scenes of modern industry. Her photography was used on the cover of the first issue of Fortune magazine in 1930, and on the first photographically illustrated cover of Life in 1936. Bourke-White often documented aspects of the Machine Age, contrasting machines and human labourers. Taken in a factory owned by Campbell’s, a major American canned-food company established in 1869, this photograph captures part of the canning process. Bourke-White’s framing, which does not show the worker’s face, amplifies the dominance of the machine. The image first featured as a commission for a local food magazine alongside the caption ‘tangled and tricky, spaghetti defeats the mechanic’.
Wall text from the exhibition
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Beach accident, Coney Island 1952 Gelatin silver photograph 35.2 x 27.9cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1973 Public domain
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) New York at night 1932, printed c. 1975 Gelatin silver photograph 34.1 x 26.1cm (image and sheet) 49.8 x 40.0cm (support) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of an anonymous donor in memory of Rosa Zerfas (1896-1983), 1985 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
This photograph of the illuminated buildings of New York is the result of a fifteen-minute exposure taken from high up in the Empire State Building. The idea of documenting a changing metropolis recalls the project of pioneering French photographer Eugène Atget, who recorded Paris as it transitioned from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Berenice Abbott had befriended Atget through fellow American émigré artist Man Ray, for whom she worked as a darkroom assistant after moving to Paris in 1921. Atget’s influence on Abbott was profound: on her return to New York in 1929 she focused on documenting the city’s civic spaces and architecture.
Wall text from the exhibition
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) New York at Night 1932 Gelatin silver print 12 7/8 x 10 9/16″ (32.7 x 26.9cm)
Photograph from the Art Blart archive
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Changing New York 1939 Artist’s book: half-tone and letterpress text, blue cloth cover, photographic dust jacket 1st edition Purchased NGV Foundation 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
In her funding proposal for the photobook Changing New York, Berenice Abbott described her desire to capture the ‘spirit’ of the city, driven by the realisation that ‘the tempo of the metropolis is not of eternity, or even time, but of the vanishing instant’. The images in the photobook are accompanied by texts written by Abbott’s partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. However, recent research has revealed that Abbott and McCausland’s original intentions for the book were significantly different to what was ultimately published, included alternate texts and a more innovative interplay between words and images.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936 Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936, ‘Salesman’s edition’ Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Reproduced on front cover, Life magazine, tenth anniversary issue, 25 November 1946 Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisitions
When the American publication Life was purchased by Henry Luce in 1936, it was transformed into a photographic news magazine. Its aim was to let its readers ‘see’ the world. Photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White had preciously worked with Luce at Fortune magazine, and a year later he sent Bourke-White to the Soviet Union as the first official foreign photographer allowed to create images of Soviet industry. Later, she was the first accredited woman photographer assigned to photograph the effects of the Second World War.
In 1936 Life magazine gave Margaret Bourke-White the brief of seeking out something ‘grand’ and aspirational at the chain of dams being built at the Columbia River basin. The dams were being built to stimulate the economy as the United States grappled with the devastating effects of the Great Depression. The resulting photograph was selected for the first cover of the relaunched Life magazine. An image of modern industry, the composition emphasises the graphic forms and patterns created by the bases of the elevated spillway. The pillars seem to repeat endlessly, overshadowing two workers dwarfed by the enormous construction. Bourke-White’s image is considered an iconic representation of the Machine Age.
Vitrine text from the exhibition
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936 Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936, ‘Salesman’s edition’ Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisitions
Margaret Bourke-White (American, 1904-1971) Fort Peck Dam, Montana Front cover, Life magazine, first issue, November 1936 Published by Time Inc. Magazine: offset lithographs and printed text Shaw research Library, Gift of Patrick Pound, 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing at left, Laure Albin Guillot (French, 1879-1962) Hammer in bloom 1940s New acquisition; at second left, Germaine Krull The Eiffel Tower (c. 1928, below); at third left, Germaine Krull At the Galeries Lafayette c. 1930 New acquisition; at centre, Bea Maddock Square (1972, below); at third right, Ilse Bing Champs de Mars (1931 printed 1994, below) New acquisition; at second right, Heather George The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross (c. 1966 printed 1978, below); and at right, Olive Cotton Radio telescope, Parkes (1964) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985) The Eiffel Tower (installation view) c. 1928 Gelatin silver photograph 17.0 x 24.3cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
New acquisition
Germaine Krull (Dutch born Germany, 1897-1985) The Eiffel Tower c. 1928 Gelatin silver photograph 17.0 x 24.3cm (image and sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
New acquisition
Germaine Krull photographed industrial forms, political upheaval and modern life. Trained in Munich, she opened a portrait studio in 1919, relocating to Paris in 1926. Three years later, Krull’s photographs were included in the renowned 1929 exhibition Film und Foto in Stuttgart, Germany, the first international exhibition of modernist photography. During the 1920s the Eiffel Tower became a symbol of modernity for many artists, including Krull. In this image, she reimagines the visual language of the man-made structure, highlighting both the beauty and functionality of the famous landmark. Krull led a peripatetic life across four continents, focusing on photojournalism in South-East Asia after the Second World War and later living among Tibetan monks.
Wall text from the exhibition
Bea Maddock (Australian, 1934-2016) Square 1972 Photo-etching and etching 46.2 × 36.7cm (image) 49.0 × 39.4cm (plate) 76.0 × 56.8cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1973 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
In the 1970s, Australian artist Bea Maddock embraced the photo-etching process, which incorporates pen and ink. She regularly used found images as the basis for these works. In Square, Maddock overlaid an image of people in a crowd, taken from ‘a book on movement of people in cities’, with a grid structure. As she said, “The actual grid comes from the windows in the National Gallery School, Victorian College of the Arts … the windows had little grills on them … and so they got drawn in because that’s how I saw the world – through those windows.”
Wall text from the exhibition
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Champs de Mars (installation view) 1931, printed 1994 Gelatin silver photograph 21.9 x 33.1cm (image) 27.6 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ilse Bing (German, 1899-1998) Champs de Mars 1931, printed 1994 Gelatin silver photograph 21.9 x 33.1cm (image) 27.6 x 35.3cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022
Taken atop the Eiffel Tower, this image sees Ilse Bing turn her lightweight 35 mm Leica camera downwards, photographing the people and bustling city below. The distance created by this dizzying viewpoint reduces the scene to a pattern of shapes and forms. Images such as these were characteristic of a ‘new way of seeing’ that was adopted by avant-garde photographers during the interwar period.
Wall text from the exhibition
Heather George (Australian, 1907-1983) The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross c. 1966, printed 1978 From the Melbourne, old buildings and new projects series (c. 1966) Gelatin silver photograph 24.0 × 29.1cm (image) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1980 Public domain
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing in the bottom image at left, Germaine Krull At the Galeries Lafayette c. 1930 New acquisition; at second left, Bea Maddock Square (1972, above); at third left, Ilse Bing Champs de Mars (1931 printed 1994, above) New acquisition; at second right, Heather George The last wall of Melbourne’s Old Eastern Markets comes down for the Southern Cross (c. 1966 printed 1978, above); and at right, Olive Cotton Radio telescope, Parkes (1964) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891-1956) and Varvara Stepanova (Russian, 1894-1958) USSR in construction, no.12 (Parachute issue) (installation views) 1935 Illustrated journal: colour rotogravure, 22 pages with fold-out inserts, lithographic cover 42.3 x 60.3 x 1.2cm (open) 42.3 x 30.3 x 0.4cm (closed) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, NGV Supporters of Prints and Drawings, 2019 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Varvara Stepanova and her husband, fellow artist and designer Aleksandr Rodchenko, were founder-members of the First Working Group of Constructivists. This is a French-language edition of USSR in Construction, a journal that aimed to reflect, through photography, the modernisation of the Soviet Union and to promote its industrial power. The journal employed cutting-edge artistic and printing developments, and this issue was designed by Stepanova and Rodchenko using original ideas around photomontage and page design. Dedicated to the ‘brave Soviet paratroopers’, the so-called ‘Parachute’ issue draws upon the circular form of the opened parachute.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Women Photographers 1900-1975: A Legacy of Light at NGV International, Melbourne, November 2025 – May 2026 showing collotypes from Germaine Krull’s portfolio Métal 1928 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
One of the most significant modernist photobooks of the 1920s, Germaine Krull’s Métal portfolio comprises sixty-four images printed on individual sheets, a title page and a three-page preface by the French writer and journalist Florent Fels. Krull photographed iron structures such as cranes and transport bridges in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo, as well as the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Krull showcases the beauty and innovation of the structures, conveying the sense of awe that accompanied the rapid industrialisation of the time. The presentation of the photographs – loose, to be arranged however the viewer chooses – is also radical, allowing for endless interpretations.
Wall text from the exhibition
Germaine Krull (European, 1897-1985) Métal 1928 64 black and white collotype plates, letterpress on paper, black cloth-backed paper-covered board portfolio with ribbons 30.5 x 23.5 x 2.5cm (overall) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2023
Photographs from the Art Blart posting Germaine Krull Métal 1928, December 2018. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Germaine Krull’s 1928 publication Métal is often described as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Métal is not a book in a conventional sense, of sequential pages bound together with a narrative to guide the structure. Rather, when looking through this new acquisition to the NGV Collection you can immediately appreciate its unique design as an object. This dynamic format which, along with the vitality of the photography, has continued to inspire graphic designers, book publishers and artists since its publication almost a century ago.
Métal consists of a folded board cover, with ribbons attached, that acts as a folder for the pages within. The cover, designed by artist Lou Tchimoukow, reproduces one of Krull’s photographs of a detail of machinery on Paris’s Eiffel Tower. This image is overlaid with bold, vertically arranged letters spelling out ‘KRULL’ in a staggered pattern that mimics the lines of the structure beneath. Within the folder are sixty-four unbound plates. Each plate reproduces a photograph by Germaine Krull of industrial forms (and on one occasion, two images to a page) printed as collotypes, as well as the words ‘Krull, Métal’ at the top left, the plate number at the top right, and the publisher’s information ‘A. Calavas, Paris’ at the base. There is also an insert of eight pages (two sheets folded) that includes texts by journalist Florent Fels, and words from Krull herself. …
For Métal, Krull brought together a selection of recent photographs which, as she wrote in the introductory text, were from sites that included the Eiffel Tower, as well as the cranes and transport bridges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo. Apart from the Eiffel Tower, they are emblematic of new industries and engineering emerging in these European cities in the decade after the end of the First World War and could, at first glance, be read as a tribute to modernity as seen through this rapid industrial development.
The presentation of the photographs, however, disrupts the opportunity for any clear narrative, or interpretation. While they are numbered, Krull’s images are printed without any captions (a radical technique in a photobook for the period). The audience is encouraged to actively engage: they are able to construct their own sequences and visual associations. And the composition of the images is highly varied – some close up and cropped, showing the cogs, bolts and mechanics; some reveal dizzying angles and perspectives; some show clear lines, some are abstracted; the majority are taken outside, some are within a factory; some are printed on the vertical, some on the horizontal; some are the result of multiple exposures, as if to emphasise a sense of movement or energy.
Art historian Professor Kim Sichel writes that Krull constructs an ‘activist narrative’ in Métal: ‘Through narrative techniques that are part taxonomy, part lyrical poem, part vertiginous montage, part Industrial-Age adulation, and by making the whole volume uncomfortable and strange to read, she brings her machine parts to life as they oscillate uneasily throughout the album’.2
The photographs in Métal can be linked to contemporary art movements circulating within Europe, such as the visual language of the ‘New Vision’ styles of photography emerging out of the Bauhaus in Germany, or the clean lines of the ‘New Objectivity’ as demonstrated by photographers, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch. Krull’s photographic vision, however, remains dynamic and unique – it does not follow one clear aesthetic or technical path. Métal is an innovative publication: it is open-ended and allows for endless interpretations.
2/ Kim Sichel, “Montage: Germaine Krull’s Métal,” in Sichel, Kim, Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France, Yale University Press, Connecticut, 2020, pp. 33–4.
Maggie Finch. “Germaine Krull Métal portfolio 1928,” on the NGV website 22 Oct 25 [Online] Cited 24/12/2025. This article first appeared in the January–February 2024 edition of NGV Magazine. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
In the 1970s and 1980s, Bremen professor Muhlis Kenter photographed Turkish workers, then known as guest workers.
Only a little text tonight as I’m battling chronic depression and the little grey cells are not firing on all cylinders.
Absence, longing, loneliness, hard work, isolation, family, home.
Social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile.
As noted by Annabelle Steffes-Halmer in her article “Migrants’ stories for a new home” (2021) on another exhibition on the same theme, In Situ: Photo Stories on Migration (Museum Ludwig, June – October 2021), photographs of this type are “a story of emancipation. [They] tell tales of people who came to a foreign country, which they discovered for themselves and which ultimately became their home. It is not only a (photo) history of migration, but also the history of Germany.”
Have a great Easter everyone.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“They Used To Call Us Guest Workers”: Extending the Photography and the New Media Collection
The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G) is expanding its collection with key works by the photographers Muhlis Kenter, Nuri Musluoğlu, Asimina Paradissa and Mehmet Ünal. After coming to Germany from Turkey and Greece in the 1960s and 70s, the four documented life, work and their political engagement there from a migrant perspective. The exhibition “They Used to Call Us Guest Workers” presents around 80 photographs and collages that depict the everyday lives of people with and without a migration background in the Federal Republic of Germany while addressing the themes of social inequality, sexism, racism and life in exile. Viewers have the opportunity to discover here an often-overlooked perspective on socio-political issues that are still highly topical today.
With a shared interest in society and politics, each of the four amateur photographers developed a unique approach and yet they all took up the tradition of the workers’ photography movement. Like its historical role model in the interwar period, this movement was dedicated to the battle against class barriers and social inequality. The aim was for workers to pick up a camera themselves to raise awareness of the realities of their lives and help shape the public debate with their images.
Workers’ Photography
John Heartfield and his contributions to the illustrated magazine “Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung” (AIZ) in the 1930s were an important source of inspiration for the workers’ photography movement. Founded in Hamburg in 1973, the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” saw itself as a successor to the AIZ. The main figures in the workers’ photography movement all engaged with developments in society and politics but each developed a different approach. Their common goal was to use their cameras in the battle against social inequality. Workers were encouraged to pick up a camera in order to raise their own awareness for the realities of their lives and enable them to intervene in the public debate.
Between 1975 and 1990, the theme of migration played a central role in workers’ photography. The reports provide an in-depth look at those living in exile, at living and working conditions and women’s work, and at the peace movement and unequal educational opportunities for immigrants. The articles in the magazine were often published anonymously. The images were supplied by the 30 or so local working groups, who often took the photos together.
Muhlis Kenter
Bremen-based amateur photographer Muhlis Kenter (b. 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey) depicts work and everyday life in Germany. He documents Turkish workers in mining, the metal industry and a textile factory, and accompanies educational projects for Turkish children and young people with a migration background. In his expressive portraits, Kenter spotlights personal stories. His photographs spotlight people navigating between the sense of being foreign in an unfamiliar country and finding their place in Germany. But Muhlis Kenter also observes German society with his camera, focusing on pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening, which he sees as typical German hobbies.
Muhlis Kenter provides behind-the-scenes glimpses of factory work. He for example photographed workers of Turkish origin in a textile factory where people from different backgrounds work side by side in production. The photos were taken as part of a photo story for the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie”. Kenter often focuses on individuals and personal histories, resulting in expressive portraits. For his reportages, he creates complex compositions that highlight in an arresting way the interplay between people and technology at the companies he visits. In one series, he turned the tables, looking not at the lives of immigrants of Turkish origin but rather at “white German” society and what he regards as typical hobbies: pigeon breeding, fishing and gardening.
Muhlis Kenter was born in 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey. In 1972 he took up mechanical engineering studies in Aachen, where he joined a “workers’ photography” group. Alongside his studies, he acted as a support teacher for Turkish-speaking classes. Kenter later worked as a professor of mechanical engineering at the City University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, and he continues to avidly pursue photography.
Nuri Musluoğlu
Nuri Musluoğlu (b. 1951 in Istanbul, Turkey) photographs public life. The images he produced between 1975 and 1988 show mainly demonstrations, peace marches, strikes and protest actions, especially those taking place in his hometown of Heilbronn. Supplemented by footage of sporting events, street festivals and celebrations, as well as photos of his own family, a dense panorama emerges of German-Turkish coexistence as a collective experience. Musluoğlu’s photos document particularly vividly the protest culture during the years in question – including the peace movement and European Peace Marches, the trade union struggles and the anti-nuclear movements, and the resistance of Turks living in Germany against the military dictatorship in Turkey. He also lifts the veil on xenophobia in public spaces and the living conditions in asylum shelters.
Nuri Musluoğlu is a photographer and political activist. His camera accompanies him to demonstrations, such as the strike for a 35-hour week and protests by the peace movement, or the blockade of the US missile base in Mutlangen in 1983. He not only captures protest posters and scenes but also documents moments of solidarity – such as workers with and without a migration background dancing. Musluoğlu’s photographs chronicle political struggles as well as everyday moments in German-Turkish life, such as family celebrations and trips home. He examines in detail protest posters that touch on migration issues and in another image shows a worker of Turkish origin playing the saz.
Born in Istanbul in 1951, Musluoğlu came to Germany in 1965, trained as a toolmaker, and later became a social worker for the “Arbeiterwohlfahrt” (Workers’ Welfare Association). He is active in trade unions (IG Metall, ver.di) and the peace movement. Since 1985, his photos have appeared under a pseudonym in the weekly newspaper “Türkiye Postası”, which is aimed at workers and people seeking political protection.
Asimina Paradissa
Asimina Paradissa (b. 1945 in Vrastama, Greece) occupies a special position in amateur photography as one of the few migrant women behind a camera. She documented her own life in Germany from 1968 onwards, showing everyday life in a hostel for unmarried female workers in Wilhelmshaven as well as scenes of factory work captured from the workers’ point of view. Paradissa’s many self-portraits deal with questions of self-image and what it feels like to live in a certain place. Although her photographs are private, they are at the same time significant testimonies to contemporary history: By giving the women portrayed names and voices, they draw attention to the stories of female migrants and thus add a rare female perspective to the way in which we view migrant labour.
Asimina Paradissa gazes directly out at us from her pictures. Perched on her bicycle, she laughs openly into the camera, while in another picture she looks us earnestly in the eye as she sits on her bunk bed in a dormitory for unwed workers run by the Olympia typewriter works and caringly embraces her friend Evangelia Manolakaki. Even though others usually press the shutter, these images can still be described as self-portraits. Starting in 1966, Paradissa took photos on a regular basis as a way of reassuring herself about her new life in Germany. Among the “guest workers” who came to West Germany in the 1960s, one in three were women who lead lives largely hidden from the public eye. Paradissa is one of the few women of this generation to document her self-determined life in Germany with her camera. Her pictures are at once private remembrances and documents of the times.
Asimina Paradissa was born in 1945 in Vrastama, Greece. She came to Wilhelmshaven with her brother in 1966 as part of the recruitment agreements concluded between West Germany and Greece, among other countries. In 1972 she settled in Wuppertal. Alongside her job, she began to make photography and write poetry.
Mehmet Ünal
Mehmet Ünal’s (b. 1951 in Çanakkale, Turkey) photographic practice includes political image-text collages that emerge from actions and protests. In addition to individual images and series, he also produces posters that incorporate writing and found objects – often from public authorities and agencies – and thus comment on the particular experiences of migrants when dealing with bureaucracy. With their thematic acuity and compositional density, these posters are independent artworks that relentlessly expose exclusion and marginalisation.
Mehmat Ünal’s collages combine written, photographic and found objects from the world of German bureaucracy that reflect experiences of racism. Ünal expresses himself through satire and exaggeration; for example, he created a fake Deutsche Bahn advertising campaign offering a “foreigner’s pass” promoting the return transport of people to Turkey. He compares the application for a work permit to a “TÜV certificate for humans”. In his text-image combinations (circa 1982), Ünal criticizes Germany’s official policies towards immigrants and the degrading treatment of those who were once invited to the country as “guests”. After the recruitment of foreign workers was discontinued in the wake of the economic crisis of the early 1980s, Ünal observed a growing atmosphere of hostility towards those regarded as “foreigners”. The first arson attack on a refugee shelter took place in 1980 in Hamburg-Billbrook. Works that Ünal produced against the backdrop of political street protests were published in the magazine “Arbeiterfotografie” in 1984. In several collages, he draws on the legacy of John Heartfield, whose political montages in the mid-1920s brought him recognition as the founder of this genre.
Mehmet Ünal was born in Çanakkale, Turkey, in 1951. In 1976, he moved to Mannheim, where the former actor works as a photographer and journalist.
Text from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MK&G)
Asimina Paradissa was 20 years old when she moved to Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany. In the photo, the Greek woman poses in front of the dormitory at the Olympia company. Back then, she took pictures of weddings, parties and visits to the zoo for her colleagues and friends. The 76-year-old is still a passionate photographer.
life alone and free like a tree and brotherly like a forest is our longing
Mehmed Nâzım Ran (17 January 1902 – 3 June 1963), commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet, was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the “lyrical flow of his statements”. Described as a “romantic communist” and a “romantic revolutionary”, he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than 50 languages.
I went for a new passport photograph yesterday and the nice person took the first photographs, looked at them, and then said “too much smile”, close your mouth more, and took them again with no teeth exposed and my mouth in a thin, rictus line.
How do our “photographic faces” differ from our everyday faces?
Does not smiling in a photograph prevent us from displaying our individual personality?
What different types of smile are there and what do they signify?
“Smiles are complex, with researchers identifying up to 19 types ranging from genuine joy to social masking, with only six occurring during positive emotions. Key types include the genuine Duchenne smile (involving eyes), polite social smiles, and non-enjoyment smiles like contempt or discomfort, signalling various emotional, social, or, in some cases, aggressive messages.”1
Smiling does not just depend on social norms but researchers have found it may actually be programmed into our DNA, creating in built reactions to certain situations.2 From the miserable smile, to the dampened smile, qualifier smile, contempt smile and fear smile, there are many ways we can interact with others and with the camera lens.
From this distance in Australia and having not see the exhibition in person I can’t tell you whether this exhibition addresses the issues of different smiles pictured in photography but it seems unlikely given the text and media images.
For more information on facial expressions please see my text Facile, Facies, Facticity (January 2014) which examines the facticity of the face, in which only through the “thrownness” of the individual rendered in the lines of the human face can we engage with the intractable conditions of human existence.
Many thankx to Museum Ludwig for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing at left, Hugo Erfurth’s Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (painter), (1929, below) Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber
Paul-Marie-Léon Regnard (French, 1850-1927) Passionate Ecstatic Position/Expression 1878 Part of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere (Service de M. Charcot) Photogravure Image: 10.3 × 7.1cm (4 1/16 × 2 13/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
NB. PHOTOGRAPH IS NOT IN THE EXHIBITION
Hugo Erfurth (German, 1874-1948) Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (painter) 1929 Oil pigment print on cardboard 38.3 x 26.6cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
When Hildegard Seemann-Wechler had her portrait taken in Hugo Erfurth’s studio in Dresden, she was studying painting with Otto Dix. The strict frontality of this picture, the neutral background, and the direct gaze into the camera are softened by the slight hint of a smile at the corners of the artist’s mouth. Hildegard Seemann-Wechler’s bob hairstyle identifies her as a New Woman who rejects conservative role models. Her portrait breaks with the tradition of serious facial expressions in the 19th century and marks the threshold between not smiling and smiling. Collection presentations like this help us to explore our own works. On the back of this picture, the name “Hilde Wächler” is written in pencil. It was only during the preparations for Smile! that we noticed the mistake and were able to assign the person portrayed to her real name. In 1940, Hilde Seemann-Wechler was murdered by the Nazis.
Hildegard Seemann-Wechler (German, 1903-1940)
Hildegard Wechler came from a bourgeois background. She began her studies at the Staatliche Akademie für Kunstgewerbe in Dresden and moved to the Dresdener Kunstakademie in 1921, where she studied with Richard Müller, Robert Sterl, Ludwig von Hofmann and from 1927 with Otto Dix, three semesters of which as an individual student. In particular, she was supported by Sterl and Dix. Since that time she was friends with Eva Schulze-Knabe and Fritz Schulze. Since Hans and Lea Grundig also studied at the academy, it can be assumed that she also had contact with them.
After her studies, Hildegard Wechler worked in Dresden as a freelance artist. In 1929 she married the painter Herbert Seemann (1900-1945). In 1931, she had the first symptoms of mental illness. The doctors diagnosed an incurable schizophrenia and referred her to the Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Arnsdorf. She spent eight and a half years there. She was forcibly sterilized at the State Women’s Hospital Dresden.
In 1940 she was transferred to the Landesheil- und Pflegeanstalt Leipzig-Dösen, on 18. June 1940 to the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Großschweidnitz. On the 3rd In September 1940, a transport commando brought her to the Pirna-Sonnenstein killing center. She was murdered there shortly afterwards as part of the euthanasia “Aktion T4” as one of at least 14,751 victims of this institution, including the Dresden painters Gertrud Fleck and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, in the gas chamber disguised as a bathroom.
Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing at right, Man Ray’s Lips, (Lee Miller), (1930, below) Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber
Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) Lips, (Lee Miller) 1930 Print 21 x 25.5cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem B
Lee Miller’s closed lips reveal hardly any emotion. And yet every facial expression communicates something about the time and circumstances in which a portrait was taken. Even today, we find fashions in lip positioning when a person is photographed – such as pursed lips in the “duckface” or the slight opening of the mouth in the “fish gape.” The development of dental care is certainly only one of the reasons why we statistically show more teeth when being photographed today than we did a hundred years ago, and why saying “cheese” is supposed to make our faces look their most photogenic.
Smizing, squinching, duck face, fish gape, cheese, or prunes: Beauty ideals and social media have given rise to increasingly mercurial trends in portrait photography. Until the late nineteenth century, having one’s photo taken required the sitter to remain absolutely motionless in order to produce a sharp image, which more often than not resulted in a fixed and lifeless expression.
Smile! How the Smile Came Into Photography, presented in the Museum Ludwig Photography Rooms, investigates how our “photographic faces” have evolved over time. The show assembles a range of anonymous and artistic portrait photographs from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century to recount a history of the smile.
Whether or not we smile when being photographed, or whether we show our teeth, depends on social norms and the photographic technology available. In 1878, the photographer Josef Janssen observed that “the awkward situation in which a person finds themselves at the moment of having their photo taken is in itself enough to prevent them from displaying their individual personality. Motionless and with a fixed gaze, their head leaning on that dreaded, detestable head rest, they are required for a set period of time to stare at a certain point in space that generally offers the eye nothing of interest. What else could this result in but stiffness and lifelessness?”
The fact that people in the nineteenth century rarely smiled when having their picture taken in a photographic studio also reflected contemporary norms regarding how one should appear in a portrait, norms based on conventional ideas of class, gender, and context. Emotions were considered a private matter that had no place in a portrait.
The emergence of silent film played a key role in the appearance of the smile in twentieth-century portraits. Facial expressions were used to convey emotions, filling the frame in tight close-up shots. Parallel to this, headshots increasingly replaced full-body portraits. Then came advertising, where the beaming smiles of actors served to embody the allure of products. The corners of the mouth began to rise ever upward. A 2015 study of student portraits in American yearbooks revealed that smiling in photographs has consistently increased since the start of the twentieth century, with results confirming that women smile more than men. A trend toward increased facial expressiveness can be observed the world over. A look at fashion photography, however, shows that status and coolness are conveyed with barely a smile. As early as 1927, the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer noted that the world – and thus the people in it – had taken on a “photographic face.” The presentation at the Museum Ludwig aims to show that this observation still holds true today and that the smile has a history.
The show is accompanied by a publication with a text by Katharina Sykora. #PhotographyFaces #MLxPhotography
Press release from Museum Ludwig
Installation view of the exhibition Smile! How the smile came into photography at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, November 15, 2025 – March 22, 2026 showing Afga Advertising tests (around 1965, below) Photo: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv/ Mark Weber
These two photographs can be found in the archives of Agfa’s advertising department, which are now kept at the Museum Ludwig. While the color chart in one picture reveals that it is an informal test shot for the photographer, the other picture shows the official version of the advertisement. Only in the official version is everyone smiling – even the man holding the camera in front of his face to take a snapshot of his family. Since advertising has to communicate people’s happiness with a particular product, it contributed enormously to the spread and normalisation of smiling, laughing people in pictures. This is particularly the case with the advertisement of the photo industry. As Christina Kotchemidova writes in her article “Why we say ‘Chesse’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography”: “Obviously, amateurs learned from advertisements (…). The visuals ensured that the advertising ideal was accurately replicated, thus making popular photography an extension of advertising culture.”
Unknown Photographer Agfa advertising test around 1965 Color photography Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Photo studio on the roof 1845 Illustration from Erich Stenger: Siegeszug der Photographie in Kultur, Wissenschaft, Technik, 1950 Archiv Museum Ludwig, Köln
The more light there is, the shorter the exposure time when taking photographs. That is why photo studios in the 19th century were often set up in attics with large windows. In good weather, photographs were sometimes taken directly on the roof. Nevertheless, we can still see the head support that kept the person being photographed motionless for the duration of the shot and helped to ensure that the image was sharp. Such head supports were part of the necessary equipment of a photo studio and certainly did not help the subject to relax. In 1878, photographer Josef Janssen observed: “[…] the predicament in which the person finds themselves at the moment of the shot is enough to prevent them from freely expressing their individuality. Leaning against the much-hated and feared, yet indispensable head support, they are supposed to remain motionless and stare intently for a while at a certain point that usually offers nothing for the eye to look at. What else can be the result of this but rigidity and lifelessness?”
Adolf Hengeler (German, 1863-1927) “At the photographer’s: ‘Now, young lady, please smile nicely and look friendly!…One, two, three!… That’s it, thank you! Now you can go back to your natural expression!'” Published in Fliegende Blätter, 1893 Print 47 x 36.4cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
“Now, young lady, please make a nice and friendly!… One, two, three!… That’s it, thank you! Now you can go back to your natural expression!” This was the caption accompanying the caricature when it was published in the magazine Fliegende Blätter in 1893. The fact that the subject is depicted wearing a clown mask shows, on the one hand, that people were already familiar with smiling “photography faces” at the end of the 19th century and, on the other hand, that the women portrayed were supposed to appear ‘nice’ and ‘friendly’ through their smiles. The fact that there are other types of smiles was already mentioned in Grimm’s dictionary from 1885, such as happy, cheerful, mischievous, furtive, shy, malicious, bitter, scornful, mocking, and forced. In 2020, Carolita Johnson described in her article “‘I don’t have to smile if I don’t feel like it!’: Covid freed me from politeness and unwanted touching” in The Guardian how wearing face masks during the coronavirus pandemic freed her from the pressure of having to wear the mask of the friendly smiling woman.
Julia Margaret Cameron (English born India, 1815-1879) Summer-days 1866 Albumen print on cardboard 34.0 x 27.6cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) (French, 1820-1910) Portrait of Marc de Montifaut around 1877 Woodburytype on cardboard 22.9 x 18.6 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne Repro: Historisches Archiv mit Rheinischem Bildarchiv
Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (French, 5 April 1820 – 20 March 1910), known by the pseudonym Nadar or Félix Nadar, was a French photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist and balloonist who was a proponent of heavier-than-air flight. In 1858, he became the first person to take aerial photographs. Photographic portraits by Nadar are held by many of the great national collections of photographs. His son, Paul Nadar, continued the studio after his death.
Smiling: A Photographic Balancing Act between Seriousness and Laughter
Katharina Sykora
Between spontaneity and strategy: smiling as an indicator of emotion
In everyday life, a smile immediately inspires feelings of happiness. While today we experience smiling as a spontaneous expression of affection, our understanding of smiling as a legible, socially acceptable facial gesture is the result of centuries of debate. It was oten viewed as an expression that sat midway between seriousness and laughter. Discussions around the nature of the smile gained in intensity in the nineteenth century with the invention of photography, which saw many in the aristocracy and the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie discovering themselves anew in portrait studios. Meyers Encyclopaedia (1865) describes smiling as a weaker version of laughing because “it lacks the intermittent exhalation,”1 while in his remarks on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin describes laughter as “the full development of a smile or … a gentle smile as the last trace of a habit, firmly fixed during many generations, of laughing.”2 In both cases, smiling is cast not as an emotion in its own right but as a relative form derived from a strong, joyful feeling. This contrasts with the expressive range of smiles allowed for by the Brothers Grimm: “Smiling,” they write in their German Dictionary (1885) “may be friendly, happy, cheerful, affectionate, gentle, mischievous, furtive, shy, even malevolent, biter, mocking, scornful, or forced.”3
This highlights the long-standing controversy that has historically accompanied discussions around smiling and that continues today. On the one hand, a smile is evaluated based on where it is perceived to sit on a spectrum between seriousness and laughter and – depending on its proximity to either extreme – subjected to positive or negative moral, societal, or aesthetic judgements. On the other hand, because the spectrum between seriousness and laughter contains many nuances, smiling is perceived as a versatile expression that can attest to a variety of different feelings and communicate a broad range of meanings in social interactions depending on the socio-historical context. The first perspective tends to view smiling within normative parameters, while the second situates it within a kaleidoscope of micro-sociological observations.
An important question running through historical and historiographical discussions of seriousness, smiling, and laughter asks whether these are expressions of inner emotion or learned facial gestures and behaviour patterns. In other words, whether laughing and smiling are anthropological constants common to all humans as immediate expressions of emotion, or whether they are a strategic means of communication used to one’s own advantage in specific situations.
In the mid-nineteenth century, photography played a prominent role in this debate. In his book The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, published in 1862 and containing a hundred photographs,4 the doctor and physiologist Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne presented an experiment in which he used targeted electric shocks to trigger a wide range of expressions on a test person whose facial nerves lacked sensation. One of these included a homogenous smile involving all of his features that resembled the kind of facial expression observed in everyday settngs. But Duchenne was also able to trigger paradoxical facial expressions that could only be induced by electric shocks, such as a smiling mouth combined with eyes and forehead contorted by pain. Through such experiments, Duchenne sought a systematic “orthography of a supposedly universal language”5 of human physiognomy in order to render it more legible. Paradoxically, he disconnected inner affects from their outer manifestations while connectng them all the more strongly in terms of their meaning, as when, by analogy with the laughing muscle, he describes the nasalis (nose) muscle as a “muscle of aggression” or the frontalis muscle (that moves the eyebrows) as a “muscle of suffering.”6
One far-reaching side effect of Duchenne’s test setup was the realization that manifestations of human emotion can be manufactured without necessarily corresponding to a felt equivalent. By twinning electro-physical and photographic procedures, Duchenne proved in the field of science what had long been commonplace in the world of the theater – where professional actors routinely simulate emotions – and everyday life – where individuals control their expressions when interacting with others. In this way, Duchenne contributed his “theater of science”7 to the list of “production sites” for the decoupling of facial expression from emotion, where it joined the theatrical stage and milieus of social interaction.
At the same time, Duchenne’s use of electric shocks to produce expressions revealed their dual social function: Anyone could use them as a systematic means of portraying emotion detached from any corresponding internal feeling, and they could be decoded just as systematically by others as “artificial” rather than “natural” displays of sentiment. This benefited another site invested in the social coding of emotions: the increasingly numerous photographic studios where the middle classes were now able to have portraits made of themselves, creating a specific repertoire of facial expressions as part of a class-specific pose. What these theatrical, scientific, and photographic settings all demonstrate is that seriousness, smiling, and laughter can be performed in a way that is legible. They are part of a social act that always involves two or more people.8 With Duchenne’s contribution to the visual ordering and classification of seriousness, smiling, and laughter, photography advanced over the course of the nineteenth century to become the primary medium for the representation, communication, and standardisation of emotions. It became a platform for self-portrayal, for the negotiation of social hierarchies and values, and for the establishment and reinforcement of universal forms of emotional expression.
Looking back: a brief discursive and visual history of smiling
The history of smiling, as traced through past discourses and visual representations, reflects the shifts in society’s acceptance of the portrayal of specific emotions and the influence this has had on photographic (self-) presentations of people since the nineteenth century. What immediately becomes clear is that smiling has not always been understood as the midpoint between seriousness and laughter but situated somewhere closer to the later. Even more surprisingly from today’s perspective, laughter and especially smiling historically occupied no place at all in social behaviours and visual representations, and when they did appear, their initial connotations were largely negative.
“Before the twelfth century,” writes the art historian Monika E. Müller, “one can expect to find almost no illustrations of emotion in the form of facial expressions.”9 The reason for this was the dominance of Christian morals, which opposed the portrayal of strong emotions in general. The Greek and Roman Church Fathers shared a negative view of laughter, considering it antithetical to the ideal of a God-fearing person leading a life of humility and atonement. As a result, books of monastic precepts banned laughter as sinful behaviour.10
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, grinning devils increasingly appeared in portrayals of the Apocalypse, there were chortling henchmen along Christ’s route to Calvary, and there were grotesque heads guffawing on the capitals of cathedrals or in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. These polarising counter-figures were depicted as bystanders, relegated to the edges of the sacred realm. Here, laughter was not an expression of cheerfulness but a sign of vice and evil.
In the thirteenth century, smiling made its first appearance as a positive trait in Christian iconography but was reserved for Mary, the Christ Child, angels, and those souls resurrected into a state of heavenly bliss. Here, too, exceptions gradually emerged: In the portal of the Last Judgement at Strasbourg Cathedral, for example, we find the Prince of this World (c. 1280) flashing a mischievous grin in the direction of a Foolish Virgin with a flirtatiously simpering smile. This erotically charged tête-à-tête takes on a negative tone, however, once one notices that the Prince’s back is being devoured by snakes and vermin. Moreover, the coquette is shown to be doubly foolish – distracted by her “sinful” fleshly desire for a figure whose true nature is hidden from her, unlike the lamenting Wise Virgins, she has unwittingly dropped the oil lamp that was meant to remain lit in anticipation of Christ’s arrival. In this way, depictions of smiling joined those of laughter in Christian iconography, where their differentiation into the beatific and the seductive supported theological morals.
Once smiling began to feature in secular imagery – as in the statue of Margravine Regelinda in the west choir at Naumburg Cathedral (c. 1250) – the binary Christian model underwent a fundamental reevaluation. In the thirteenth century, a tradition of courtly politeness emerged in which smiling carried positive connotations, signalling friendly attentiveness guided by self-restraint. Books on courtly etiquete established gestural moderation as the norm. Smiling was courtly in a double sense: It bound the nobility together through a shared code of conduct while also distinguishing them from the “uncouth” populous.
As the modern age progressed, further differentiation took place. Courtiers amused each other by engaging in witty repartee. Eliciting a subtle smile that acknowledged one’s skill while remaining shielded from ridicule behind a noncommittal smile of one’s own was the basis of an amicable but increasingly competitive court culture. Smiling became an instrument with which to perpetually renegotiate one’s position within the court hierarchy. As a result, the rules governing seriousness, laughter, and smiling became ever more rigid and complex, so that only a select few courtiers ever mastered the art of it. This in turn created gender and aesthetic norms: Young girls and high-ranking ladies were expected to wholly avoid displays of loud laughter, as they pointed to a lack of self-control in the “weaker sex,” and its distortion of the facial features was considered inappropriate for the “fairer sex.”
In the Renaissance, these norms were applied to portraits of the wealthy burghers of the urban centers. Here, the hint of a smile was considered acceptable, while open laughter was viewed as the hallmark of courtesans, marginal figures at court who, together with the fool or jester, broke with the rules of politeness through displays of untamed conduct while simultaneously affirming them.
A similarly paradoxical relationship emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the rise in popularity of genre paintings, which often depicted members of the lower classes boisterously laughing during exuberant scenes of eating and drinking and were often filled with erotic allusions. These paintings, mostly by Dutch artists, both challenged and affirmed the cultural conventions around laughter, often involving the viewer by establishing direct eye contact, creating a sense of complicity and shared amusement.
By contrast, in the eighteenth century, the aspiring bourgeoisie increasingly set itself apart, imposing stricter limits on exuberant laughter. With reference to the aristocratic norm of disciplined facial expressions, it adopted smiling as its hallmark. At the same time, it distanced itself from the courtly performance of smiling. Since those at court were all trying to functionalise their facial expressions and tame their emotions, it was no longer possible to trust their smiles.11 From the viewpoint of the bourgeoisie, courtly smiling was now considered unnatural. This reflected changes in affect theory, as Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s pathognomy now postulated congruency between facial expressions and inner emotions.12 The “forced” smiles of the aristocrats at court were contrasted with the “genuine,” “heartfelt” bourgeois laughter that did not hurt anyone or assume superiority. However, such amiable laughter among equals was not part of public displays of bourgeois identity. In public and in official portraits, the bourgeoisie presented themselves with a seriousness that matched their social aspirations. The network building, convivial laughter of bourgeois men and the smiles of bourgeois women were reserved for smaller, more intimate formats such as drawings or miniatures. In other words, such displays of emotion were privatised, confined to salons and the home.
Photography and the smile: a tense relationship
At the end of the 1830s, during this transitional phase when bourgeois culture was still navigating between seriousness and smiling, photography emerged as a new medium for recording and representation. Its specific qualities allowed facial expressions to be captured with great precision while also imposing limits on the expression of emotions such as smiling and laughter.
The indexicality of photography – namely, the fact that the subject must have been present while their likeness was being transferred onto the image – meant that photographs were like a second skin. Just as it was assumed that one’s facial expression was a direct translation of one’s emotion, it was also believed that this emotion was directly imprinted onto the photograph. The indexical promise of photography thus suggested that one was looking directly – through a kind of double, transparent membrane – into the soul of the sitter. For the bourgeoisie, with its imperative of natural, uncontrived expression of emotions, photography thus served as proof of the authenticity of the emotions on display. It is all the more surprising, then, that it was well into the twentieth century before smiles began to appear on the faces of the bourgeoisie in studio photographs. For bourgeois men in particular, the expression of seriousness that prevailed in this context was a strategy that allowed them to present themselves as level-headed, stabilising members of society. The resulting contradiction remained a blind spot in their self-image: Photography as an apparatus for capturing an indexical authentication of “genuine feelings” turned into its opposite as demonstrative seriousness became part of a bourgeois pose that was legitimated as “real” by the medium’s promise of truth.
Just as important as indexicality is another specific quality of the photographic medium: the way it cuts through space and time. Since laughing and smiling are “fleeting signs of an emotion as expressive movement,”13 the moment in which a photograph is taken, fixing a single instant in the flow of living time, is especially precarious. While it is easy to maintain a serious expression for a long exposure time, laughter is comparatively brief and consists of a sequence of different expressions. Capturing a laugh at the peak of its crescendo requires a short exposure time, as well as technical skill and psychological foresight on the part of the photographer; they must be able to quickly intuit when to press the shutter in order to capture the laugh on the sitter’s face, in turn underscoring the photographer’s ultimate control over the image compared to that of the subject. In temporal terms, photographs of laughter thus tend to be “stolen” images, a quality that can be compensated for by the consenting gaze of the sitter. The belated arrival of laughter as a viable photographic motif in the 1920s was, on the one hand, due to technical developments that allowed for shorter exposure times and, on the other, the result of a renegotiation of the power dynamics between the photographer and their subject.
Photographing a smile is different to capturing laughter. A smile can be maintained for considerably longer than a laugh, though not as long as a serious expression. Since smiling is a fluid movement of the mouth and the corners of the eyes, the way a photograph severs the sequence of a smile is both all the more obvious and all the more arbitrary. In the twentieth century, the request to “smile please” performed a function similar to that of “don’t move” in the studio photography of the previous century. It directed the subject to “freeze” their smile, thus detaching it from any emotion that might have prompted it and seeing it into a pose. As a stabilised facial expression, smiling complied with the technical parameters of photography at the time. On a cultural level, however, it was precisely this compatibility that led to the smiling photo face becoming the norm – as witnessed in the monotony of smiles from family photographs after World War II to the selfies of the 2000s.
How the smiling photo face came to be
“Why do we smile in photographs?” asks the art historian André Gunthert,14 who suggests that this phenomenon may be due to the coincidence of two important developments: the evolving concept of the individual and its self-portrayal in the Western world and the emergence of visual mass media – first illustrated newspapers, then photography, and finally film. These developments influenced each other and continue to do so today: Thanks to mass media, images are propagated at an increasingly rapid speed, reaching ever greater numbers of people, who model their behaviour on them. Photography, as a genuinely reproducible medium, has been foundational to these developments. As a result, the spread of the smile in photographs is closely linked to the medium’s technical developments and its growing accessibility. It wasn’t until the 1890s that cameras fell into the hands of amateur photographers, a transition made possible by the roll-film camera developed in 1888 by George Eastman. This was followed by ever more lightweight, user-friendly cameras, such as the first Leica made for small-format negatives, prototyped in 1913 and mass produced from 1925, or the Ermanox, designed in 1924, which played a crucial role in photojournalism, enabling images to be taken in low-light conditions. The studios, where the standards of bourgeois seriousness were still largely upheld, now found themselves in competition with amateur photographers.
This shift altered the relationship between photographers and their subjects. The intimacy of the family or circle of friends made it possible to capture forms of coexistence that were not bound to the strict rules of public image. In such familiar settings, private “snapshots” of laughing or smiling people no longer risked being viewed as “stolen images” that would be exposed to an unpredictable public response. Instead, the pictures remained private, with viewing sessions and the exchange of prints strengthening ties among friends and family members. As an agent of social cohesion, smiling demonstrated the sitter’s consent to being photographed and was just as important as the shared private enjoyment the resulting pictures generated. From this time, family albums began to contain more and more images of people smiling and laughing. Even in these private photographs, smiles often varied depending on the gender of the subject; bourgeois women and children of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were still confined primarily to the private sphere, with smiling the “natural,” morally acceptable, and aesthetically appropriate mode of expression in this domain. A broad smile while looking directly into the camera continued to be associated more with the lower classes and those on the fringes of society, such as demimondaines, sex workers, and stage performers.
For a long time, studio photography clung to the tradition of a public image based on serious expressions and rigid poses, but it was unable to entirely prevent the new tendency toward smiling from creeping in. The studios countered this with biting satires that ridiculed smiling as improper and “false.” Spontaneous, private expressions of emotion did not make the transition to the studios, where smiling remained a mask assumed only for the time it took to take a picture.
This changed over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, the photographer Gilbert de Chambertrand declared the old form of studio photography obsolete. It treated people like statues, he argued, whereas modern portrait photography focused on people influenced by outdoor pursuits, sports, and the cinema whose faces expressed lively emotions.15 Shifts in society, such as the rise of the urban middle classes (the “salaried masses”) and the emancipation of women (the “New Woman”), led to a greater variety of facial expressions in photographic portraits, and an aesthetic shaped by the motion pictures contributed to a greater expressivity.16 With its extreme close-ups, bold cropping, and shifts in perspective, the New Vision movement was characterised by a formal dynamism that amplified the dynamism of the facial expressions it captured. And the role models multiplied, too: In studio portraits of the 1920s and 1930s, elegant women gaze out at us bearing smiles copied from photographs of famous actresses and sporty young girls laugh warmly at the person behind the camera. In extreme cases, a smile may even appear without a face, in a close-up shot of a mouth with lipstick. As its range expanded, smiling became the norm, fostered by its dissemination via the mass media of magazines and movies through which it eventually conquered the public sphere and official portrait photography.
After World War II, this development intensified, especially in the West, beginning in the United States where the commercialisation of amateur photography had opened up a huge market. An analysis of high school yearbook photographs over several decades shows the gradual trend toward smiling.17 By the 1950s at the latest, “social smiles” that marked those photographed as friendly members of the community had become mandatory.
Spontaneous smiles, which engaged the eye muscles, increasingly gave way to a mere upward curve of the mouth. In public, this more restrained smile became a compulsory sign of polite distance when encountering strangers, as an overly serious expression risked being misconstrued as aggression.18 Pervasive advertising, movies, and later television increasingly blended private and public spheres, ultimately elevating the once-private smile to the status of an omnipresent social norm.
In the United States in particular, this was accompanied by an upgrading of the kind of smile required by photographers, as “please smile” was replaced by calls to “say cheese,” prompting the sitter to smile broadly, showing their teeth. Different reasons have been given for this “cheesy grin”: the need for non-confrontational interactions in times of increasing social insecurity or the desire to display one’s wealth and radiant state of good health. (In the past, possessing a perfect set of teeth could not be taken for granted and often involved considerable costs.) This time, the media role models were Hollywood stars,19 pin-up models, and the happy families depicted in advertisements.20 In this way, a flourishing post-war America spread its broad smile not only across its own country but across the whole of the Western world.
Since the 1990s, if not before, we have witnessed a strong counter-movement to the dominance of the smile. The concept of “coolness” categorically refuses the call to smile, demonstratively playing with the latent aggression associated with a serious expression, from which it derives the power of its image and gaze. The subject of a “cool” portrait is most often young, versed in street culture and involved in the worlds of music and fashion and their advertising campaigns. The straight face of cool has become the new photo face. Or has it turned back into the old one? What distinguishes the serious expression of the “cool guy” from that of the bourgeois man in nineteenth-century studio photography? The underlying model of masculinity is comparable, a display of self-confidence, self-control, and defensiveness. The difference lies in the casual pose, the informal clothing, and the overt display of a fit physique, all set against an urban setting or edgy studio backdrop. But it is above all its contrast to the typical cheesy grin that makes not smiling such a surefire fashion statement. A scene in the movie Triangle of Sadness (2022) offers a striking illustration of this: At a casting session, a number of young male models are asked to pose for the camera. To test their range of facial expressions, instead of asking for “cool” or “cheese,” the photographer alternately calls out “Balenciaga!” and “H&M!” Here, seriousness and smiling have undergone another shift in function and meaning: No longer manifestations of emotion or masks, they have become brands.
Footnotes
1/ Neues Konversations-Lexikon, ein Wörterbuch des allgemeinen Wissens, ed. Hermann J. Meyer, (Hildburgshausen: Bibliographisches Institut, 1865), 10: 474, under “Lachen,” quoted in Timm Starl, “Vom Lächeln: Erörterungen zu einer seltenen fotografischen Erscheinung des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Fotografische Leidenschaften, ed. Katharina Sykora et al. (Marburg: Jonas, 2006), 34. 2/ Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton, 1872), 209. 3/ Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885; rep., Munich: dtv, 1984), 14-15, quoted in Starl, “Vom Lächeln,” 33. 4/ Guillaume-Benjamin-Armand Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physiognomie humaine ou analyse électrophysiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: Asselin, 1862). 5/ Petra Löffler, Fabrikation der Affekte: Fotografien zwischen Wissenschaft und Ästhetik,” in Fotografische Leidenschaften, 43. 6/ Duchenne de Boulogne, quoted in Petra Löffler, Affektbilder: Eine Mediengeschichte der Mimik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004), 123. 7/ Gunnar Schmidt, Das Gesicht: Eine Mediengeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2003), 51-75. 8/ See Beatrix Müller-Kampel, “Komik und das Komische: Kriterien und Kategorien,” in Lithes, Zeitschrift für Literatur- und Theatersoziologie 7 (2012): 22. See also Werner Rocke and Hans Rudolf Velten, “Einleitung,” in Lachgemeinschaften: Kulturelle Inszenierungen und soziale Wirkungen von Gelächter im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005), 13: 22. 9/ Monika E. Müller, “Das Lachen ist dem Menschen eigen … Seine Darstellung in der Kunst des Mitelalters,” in Seliges Lächeln und höfisches Gelächter, exh. cat., Dom- und Diözesanmuseum Mainz (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012), 71. The way strong emotions and passions were portrayed in antiquity, as in the statue of the Laocoön Group or Aristotle’s remarks on the link between affect and physical-facial expressions of emotion, only gained importance later. 10/ Müller, “Das Lachen ist dem Menschen eigen,” 72. 11/ See Adolph Freiherr von Knigge, Über den Umgang mit Menschen, 5th ed. (Hanover: Schmidtsche Buchhandlung, 1796). 12/ See Johann Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, “On Physiognomy: Against the Physiognomists” (1778). 13/ Löffler, Affektbilder, 164. 14/ André Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie? (Lyon: 205, 2023). 15/ See Gilbert de Chambertrand, Le Portrait et l’Amateur (Paris: Paul Montel, 1937), 5, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 36. 16/ In the first half of the twentieth century, Expressionist and Soviet films in particular helped expand the vocabulary of facial expressions seen in modern individuals and their photographic portraits. See Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 36-39. 17/ See Shiry Ginosar et al., “A Century of Portraits: A Visual Historical Record of American Highschool Yearbooks,” in IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging 3, no.3 (2017): 421-31, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 15, fn. 7. 18/ Maria A. Arapova has shown that in the Soviet Union, in contrast to countries influenced by the United States, smiling in public was not customary, reserved instead for the private sphere. See Maria A. Arapova, “Cultural Differences in Russian and Western Smiling,” Russian Journal of Communication 9 (2017): 34-52, quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 47, fn. 30. 19/ See Angus Tumble, A Brief History of the Smile (New York: Basic Books, 2004), quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 12, fn. 2. 20/ See Christina Kotchemidova, “Why We Say ‘Cheese’: Producing the Smile in Snapshot Photography,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (March 2005), quoted in Gunthert, Pourquoi sourit-on en photographie?, 14, fn. 6.
Test images from the photo booth, Kaufhof, Cologne 1920s Gelatin silver paper Archiv Museum Ludwig, Köln
The introduction of photo booths in the 1920s meant that portraits could be taken cheaply and without being observed by photographers, which encouraged people to experiment, as we can see in this test strip taken in a Cologne department store.
Unknown photographer Class photo 1923 Archive Museum Ludwig
A comparative study of school photographs in the USA showed that the corners of the mouth have been rising steadily in portraits since 1900. A comparison of two class photos from the Museum Ludwig archive, taken forty years apart, confirms this: whereas in 1923 the expressions were still serious, in 1963 there are smiling faces. However, the US study also showed that girls and women smile significantly more than boys and men. “Photography faces,” whether they smile or not, are culturally formed faces.
Unknown photographer Class photo 1963 Archive Museum Ludwig
Andy Warhol experimented early on with the Polaroid instant camera. He photographed himself as well as visitors to his studio, The Factory, in New York in the 1970s. He collected the snapshots in several photo albums. Their spontaneity is evident in the fact that they often appear flawed, whether because only the forehead is visible in the picture or because the face of the person portrayed is not yet a standard “photography face.”
Since the 1980s, Thomas Struth has been photographing families from his circle in their familiar surroundings. While the people in his pictures choose their own clothing, gestures, and looks, he asks them not to smile for the camera. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the photographer explained this as follows: “It is often said that when everyone smiles, they all look the same. But they can’t all look different either. In my opinion, there are enough photos of people laughing.” Ann Katrin Harfensteller-Rufenach adds in her book Dazwischen-Sein. Familienporträts von Thomas Struth und jüngere Positionen in der Fotokunst in Deutschland (Being in Between: Family Portraits by Thomas Struth and Recent Positions in Photographic Art in Germany): “But the unusual size of the camera may also have been fascinating and encouraged an appealing facial expression.” In fact, Thomas Struth photographed this image with a large-format camera on a tripod, similar to the photographers of the 19th century.
Museum Ludwig Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln, Germany
Opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday: 10am – 6pm
An exhibition on an eclectic subject that I knew nothing about before assembling this posting: 19th century Belgian photography.
In order to give a better understanding of the life of the photographers I have added their dates and bibliographic information where possible.
My favourite photograph in the posting is the mysterious and atmos/pheric Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff by the artist Fernand Khnopff (c. 1900, below), where “atmos” are the “atoms” of energy and mood that surround the subject, the vapour that envelopes the body.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to FOMU for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The Early Gaze exhibition documents the birth of Belgian photography, from the very first mug shots to groundbreaking imagery in the arts, medical science and justice. It shows how an elite pastime grew out to become a powerful tool for capturing, controlling and constructing identity.
Early Gaze casts a fresh light on the rise and development of photography in 19th-century Belgium. The invention of photography did not only bring technological novelty, but also changed the way we see ourselves and the world. What began as a marvel of innovation quickly expanded into an instrument for control and image-building.
You will get a new perspective on the photographic pioneers who co-wrote the story of a young nation. You will discover forgotten portraits and unknown stories, and experience how the first photographic gaze still continues to influence our contemporary visual culture through phenomena such as agency, and consent.
Early Gaze illustrates that from the very start, photography was not a neutral registration of reality but a powerful instrument that helped shape the story of the ruling class.
The exhibition is accompanied by the book Early Gaze, published by Hannibal Books. With numerous unique photos by François Braga, Joseph Pelizarro, Guillaume Claine, Joseph Ernest Buschmann, Edmond Fierlants and others. Hardcover, Dutch/English, 304 pages, available for €55 in the FOMU shop.
Early Gaze casts a fresh light on the rise of photography in 19th-century Belgium.
In 1839 the world was changed forever by the invention of photography. For the first time it was possible to capture reality with the use of light. Whereas France and England introduced this revolutionary technique, Belgium quickly followed.
In the young nation of Belgium – independent since 1830 – photography soon came to play a key role in the shaping of a national identity. Embracing the new medium, Belgian pioneers captured people, cities, landscapes and historical events. But what they didn’t show is just as telling. Not everyone had access to photography, and that is why photos also expose 19th-century power relations.
Countless unknown images and stories have come to light over the past years. At the same time there was a change in mindset about photography and cultural heritage. Early Gaze considers the questions these photos invoke today. Who was depicted, and who was not? Who took the pictures, and why? Which photos were kept? For one thing very soon became clear: photography was more than a technical novelty. It is a way of seeing, capturing and remembering.
This exhibition shows rare and never-seen-before images, original cameras and the earliest photographic techniques. Themes such as art, science, reportage, propaganda and colonialist image-making showcase photography’s versatility and force.
Early Gaze invites you to discover the first sixty years of Belgian photography: not as a closed chapter, but rather as a story that continues to evolve.
1/ A Magic Moment
The invention of photography in 1839 was a magical event: for the first time you could truly capture a moment from real life!
Two different techniques arose in France and England in this period. Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre developed the daguerreotype: a unique image on a metal plate. In England, William Henry Fox Talbot invented the calotype: a negative- to-positive process using paper.
Not only did the techniques differ, so did the way in which these inventions were marketed. Daguerre, a clever businessman, immediately distributed a manual that made the technique gain popularity. Talbot decided on a patent: whoever wanted to use his method, would have to pay. This limited the popularity of the calotype.
In Belgium it was mainly the daguerreotype that found immediate success. Unfortunately, most early photographs were lost. Only a few examples were preserved, including two daguerreotypes of Saint Nicholas Church in Ghent, made by François Braga and Joseph Pelizzaro.
2/ From Experiment to Industry
Photography evolved at a rapid pace in the 19th century: from experiment to profession, from studio to industry.
In its pioneer years (1839-1842) photography was expensive, technically complex, and at times dangerous due to the use of chemical substances. Scientists, artists and optics professionals experimented, presented their results to academies, and applied for patents.
From 1842 a new profession arose: the portrait photographer. The high demand for portraits caused many engravers and miniature painters to switch to photography. Most of them did not yet have permanent photo studios, but travelled around. New techniques, such as wet collodion plates and the carte de visite, made the medium become more affordable and popular from around 1850. The number of photo studios – both small enterprises and larger ateliers – then grew quickly. The profession offered financial independence to many, as well as a chance at social advancement. Women were also active in the field, even if they often remained invisible or worked only under their initials.
Photography became a modern industry towards the end of the century. Belgian pioneers were internationally successful with their ready-made photographic materials. The introduction of simple devices by Kodak and Van Neck allowed even amateurs to document their lives. Photography became an everyday and personal medium.
Travelling photographers
In the early years of photography, many portrait photographers went from town to town. There were not enough customers yet to support a studio in a fixed location. Photographers advertised in newspapers, mentioning when they would be staying at a certain location or hotel. These pioneers often came from abroad. One Madame Guyard, for instance, was a travelling daguerreotypist. Her advertisement made her appear to be Parisian, though she was actually from Brussels and named Elisabeth Vandenplas. Were the French name and the reference to Paris meant to heighten her credibility as a photographer?
The democratising impact of the carte de visite
Photography underwent a major change in the second half of the 19th century. In 1854, Frenchman André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri introduced the carte de visite: a small-sized portrait (6 by 9 cm) on cardboard. He designed a multi-lens camera that allowed for multiple exposures to be registered on a single photographic plate. The photographs were then cut and separately glued onto cardboard: this way you could get multiple poses at the price of a single take. The photographer’s name and specialisation were listed on the back of the image. Cartes de visite made portrait photography quicker, cheaper and more accessible, especially to the middle class. Collecting these portraits of family, friends and acquaintances became all the rage. Countless commercial portrait studios appeared in Belgium, such as those of Adèle Daams, Ghémar Frères and François Deron.
Belgian camera manufacturers
In the 19th century’s final decades, Belgium saw a small scale, artisan production of cameras. Belgian manufacturers, often furniture makers by trade, built cameras locally as well as importing foreign models. France, England and Germany dominated the market, but Belgium as well had some well-known producers like Van Neck (Antwerp), the Drayé brothers (Merksem), Le Docte (Brussels) and Hofmans (Elsene). This era of camera production, however, was short-lived. Around 1900, increasing foreign competition put an end to this Belgian camera manufacturing.
Photo industry
Belgium initially was mostly a consumer of photographic technology. Between 1879 and 1900, small photochemical companies appeared in Ghent, Kortrijk and Brussels. Only some enterprises, such as that of Van Monckhoven and Beernaert Dry Plate from Ghent and that of Lieven Gevaert from Antwerp, truly achieved a breakthrough. They met the growing demand by professional and amateur photographers for faster and more user-friendly methods such as gelatin dry plates, optics, light-sensitive emulsions and photographic paper.
First female photo studio: Dorothée Detournay
In 1864 Dorothée J. Louise Detournay opened her own photo studio in Brussels, which was unusual for a woman. Specialising in ladies’ portraits, she herself stood behind the camera: a unique selling point that she accentuated in her advertising. After marrying Henri Dupont she worked at the Dupont studio, which was sometimes referred to as ‘Mr & Mme Henri Dupont’. After their divorce in 1877 she remained active in the field, together with her son Georges Dupont. She pioneered the use of electric lighting for her photographic work, displaying it at various exhibitions.
Gevaert Photo-Producten N.V.
In 1882, young Lieven Gevaert began working at the framing studio owned by his mother, Maria-Theresia Bruynseels. Together they opened a photo studio in Antwerp in 1890. Imported photo-paper was expensive and unreliable. That is why Gevaert began producing his own paper in 1894. His first product, Calcium Paper, was an instant success. Dozens of new varieties, such as Blue Star and Gevaluxe, would be added in the following decades – all with particular differences in sheen, texture and thickness. From a small studio, Gevaert Photo-Producten N.V. (later Agfa-Gevaert) grew into a major international player that could compete with companies such as Kodak and Ilford.
3/ Visualising Class
Due to the rise of photography, portraiture changed considerably in the 19th century. Initially it was an expensive and technically complex medium, only accessible to nobility and the rising bourgeoisie. Entrepreneurs, industrials and lawyers had their portraits taken or, for example, their castle domains photographed.
About halfway through the century, portrait studios offering a fixed selection of poses to a growing urban middle class came up everywhere. The carte de visite made photographic portraiture affordable. These small portrait pictures give a clear insight into the era’s dominant norms regarding class and gender: dignity, elegance and self- control were important. From 1870 onwards, ferrotype offered a first affordable chance for workers to be photographed.
Around 1890, snapshot photography and user-friendly cameras by companies such as Kodak and the Belgian Van Neck ushered in a new phase. Amateur photographers from the higher middle class would record their surroundings in informal situations.
Still, certain groups stayed largely invisible: people of colour or queer couples were rarely pictured. Photography, then, did not only capture memories, but also deepened social inequalities and notions of identity.
Stereo photography
Stereo photography is a technique in which a two-lens camera takes two photos of the same subject using slightly different angles. The camera simulates the distance between human eyes. When viewed through a stereoscope, the image appears to gain depth. Stereoscopes vary from portable models to large pieces of furniture.
Free time in the family album
Around 1890, a new era arrived with the advent of user-friendly cameras by companies like Kodak and the Belgian Van Neck. Amateur photographers from the higher middle class began photographing their daily lives: family trips, holidays and homely situations. See this album, for example: the image itself of a woman riding a bicycle even seems to have been taken from another bicycle in motion. These playful, spontaneous photos show how photography was coming within the reach of more people. That is how leisure time and personal memories became a fixed presence in a family’s visual memory.
Status in the portrait
In 19th-century photo studios the customers would pose sitting or standing, beautifully dressed and surrounded by prop objects to accentuate their status. Poses and props were often the same, and they were strongly determined by notions regarding social class, gender and current trends. Men and boys took serious poses with books, walking canes or rifles, while women and girls appeared in long dresses with parasols. Deviations, such as a smile, were inappropriate. You were allowed to show yourself, but within the boundaries of bourgeois expectation patterns. The result: stately portraits that resembled paintings and were supposed to radiate the portrayed person’s social status.
4/ From Document to Art
The value of photography as a versatile tool in art and science was recognised early on. In Belgium the medium soon came to play a key role in the systematic documentation of heritage and art objects: think of medieval sculpture, the Flemish primitives and baroque paintings. A small yet lucrative market arose for this type of art reproductions. Artists also turned to photography as a tool for sketches and preparatory drafts.
The end of the 19th century saw the rise of pictorialism. This movement considered photography to be a fully-fledged art form and sought inspiration in painting. Amateur photographers from the higher bourgeoisie in particular created poetic, dreamy images with a central focus on their personal expression. Photography thus became a means of presenting yourself artistically as well as socially. The Belgian state’s purchase of a large collection of photos by Pictorialists marked an important turning point in the recognition of photography as an art form. The medium, which up to then had been mostly connected to the industrial arts, now claimed its position amidst the visual arts.
Between art and eroticism
What is the difference between nude studies for artists and erotic nude photographs? Up to 1867, Belgian law forbade photos that violated ‘good morals’. It was unclear what exactly this meant, and the boundary between art and eroticism was a thin one. Whereas Belgium played an important role in the publication of erotic literature in the late 19th century, saucy photographs typically came from France. In addition there were photo magazines with nude models for artists. These were officially intended as a tool for painters, but attracted other audiences as well.
In the course of the 19th century, erotic imagery changed from being a luxury product to something that was affordable to a large group of people.
Pictorialism
Through the use of photography, the pictorialists sought a personal interpretation of reality. They strove for harmony in line, colour and atmosphere, using techniques such as gum, carbon and platinum printing to achieve a painterly effect. Photographers thus stayed fully in control: they could adjust tone values, add or remove details, and intervene in the printing process using brushes, pens or smudging tools. Pictorialists often printed on texture-rich paper or Japanese silk paper, making each photograph a unique work or art.
5/ National Identity
In the young nation of Belgium, photography played a key role in the representation of social status and the formation of a national entity. Photos of landscapes, monuments and historical figures supported the notion of Belgium as a nation state with a history and heritage of its own. King Leopold I soon understood photography’s potential for depicting the nation, just like other government entities and organisations.
Photographers themselves took initiatives of their own. They submitted project proposals, requested funding, and actively contributed to inventories of heritage. While the interest in the past grew, the lens was also aimed at the present: modernisation, industrial expansion and cities in transformation.
Industrial photography documented impressive infrastructure, such as railroads and factories. Such photographs accentuated Belgium’s image as a progressive industrial state. The easy reproducibility of photos caused photography to spread out quickly and to be used in education, promotional campaigns and propaganda. Thus photography was further shaped as a medium that balances between capturing, imaging and influencing.
Patrimony through the lens of Fierlants
In 1860, the Antwerp city government gave Edmond Fierlants the assignment of photographing city views and monuments just before the advent of drastic changes. Brussels and Louvain followed suit. Fierlants’ photographs, often in large formats, show medieval buildings, baroque churches and endangered urban areas. His monumental series of 165 images made Fierlants a leading figure in Belgian photography. This work aligns with the national ambition of preserving historical heritage in the Flanders and Brabant regions.
Patrimony through the lens of Radoux
As early as 1857, Gilbert Radoux photographed Belgian monuments using collodion negatives on glass. Recent analysis shows that he worked with a photographer from the French company of Bisson Frères in Ghent, Bruges, Louvain and Antwerp. Their images, featuring identical shooting positions and details, were also distributed in Paris. Radoux suddenly ended his practice in 1861. His photos long remained undervalued from a technical perspective, but today he is considered an early pioneer of Belgian architecture photography.
Britons in Belgium
Among the first photographers in Belgium (1840-1860) were a striking amount of Englishmen and Scots. They continued the tradition of travelling and capturing landscapes and monuments. Their images reflect a nostalgic, medieval Belgium. In 1846 William Henry Fox Talbot created one of Mechelen’s oldest calotypes of the city. Egbert Moxham established himself in Bruges in 1857, taking several photos there. His salted paper prints on decorative golden-edged cardboard appear to be intended for sale. Sir William Newton, too, took photographs in Bruges.
6/ Colonial Perspective and World’s Fairs
There was a downside to the splendour of young Belgium. In 1885 Leopold II, king of Belgium, also became the sole ruler and owner of the Congo Free State. Photography played a key role in the promotion of this colonial project. Belgian world’s fairs in 1885, 1894 and 1897 in particular made it painfully clear how deeply the ties ran between ambitions for progress and colonialism.
Without their consent, Congolese people were exhibited and photographed at these international exhibitions in Antwerp and Brussels. Such colonial photography was not neutral: it reflects the inequality and power relations of the colonial system. Mainly produced by white male photographers, the images confirmed the notion of European superiority and reduced the portrayed Congolese persons to objects: dehumanised and voiceless. In addition to photos of Congolese persons in a colonial context, other people of colour were also photographed from a colonial perspective. These images served as propaganda for the so-called ‘civilising mission’, reinforced racist stereotypes, and legitimised colonial domination.
7/ Photography as a Scientific Instrument
Driven by positivist thinking and belief in progress, photography became an essential tool for scientific disciplines in the 19th century. It was regarded as objective proof and used in observation, classification and documentation. In medical science, photography helped with the documentation of illness reports, surgery and anatomical anomalies. Patients are often recognisably pictured without consent or regard for their privacy.
Photographic micrography opened up a whole new world: bacteria, cells and tissue structures could now be studied visually. This marked the start of modern microbiology. In astronomy, photography replaced the eye of the observer, and the first photos of the moon were created. Within the legal domain, photography was used from 1860 onwards for identification purposes, and later also for the documentation of crime scenes.
In this manner the medium evolved into a powerful instrument of knowledge, control and power, but not without ethical consequences.
8/ Photoreporting On The Rise
Over the course of the 19th century, photography evolved into a technique that also allowed for the photographing of moving subjects. Photographers in Belgium documented a variety of subjects, such as processions, disasters, public celebrations and technological spectacles such as air balloon rides.
The options were initially limited by long exposure times and complicated methods such as the wet collodion process. Around 1870, new techniques brought more speed and flexibility. The introduction of the gelatin dry plate negative on glass in 1871, for example, was a turning point: the plate could be prepared in advance and developed afterwards. Thanks to this invention, photographers could work in a more dynamic manner.
Around 1900 photography became more mobile and faster, gaining it a regular presence in the illustrated press. From around 1885 photomechanical techniques such as halftone printing gradually replaced drawings. This allowed for image and text to be printed at the same time. It made photography a modern means of communication, an evolution with a lasting impact on both journalism and our visual culture.
Press release from FOMU
François Braga (Italian active Belgium, c. 1810 – after 1883) & Joseph Pelizzaro (Belgium, 1803- ) Ghent, view of Predikherenlei and Predikherenbrug 1839 Daguerreotype STAM Collection – Ghent City Museum
François Braga was an Italian-born photographer and optician, active in Belgium, who is noted for taking one of the earliest known photographs in Belgium in 1839. In October 1839, Braga and his partner Joseph Pelizzaro created daguerreotypes of the Predikherenbrug and Predikherenlei in Ghent, which are considered the earliest photographic views of the city.
Along with his friend, print and engraving seller Joseph Pelizzaro, Braga captured the scene from the second floor of Judge Philippe Van de Velde’s residence on the Ajuinlei. Out of the four original plates they created, two are preserved in the STAM – Ghent City Museum, while the other two have been lost.
Joseph Pelizzaro (also spelled Pellizzaro) was a Ghent-based print seller, engraver, and a pioneering photographer born on August 29, 1803. He was the first professional daguerreotypist with a fixed abode in Ghent, Belgium.
Louis Ghémar (Belgian, 1820-1873) Portrait of King Leopold I 1856 Salt print Janssens Collection, Antwerp
In 1855 Louis Ghémar (1820-1873) opened a photo studio in Brussels, next to the studio of Jules Géruzet. In the beginning Louis Ghémar worked together with Robert Sévérin. Sévérin took the photos and Ghémar made the retouches and eventually colours the photos. But Sévérin left Brussels and was replaced by Louis Ghémars half-brother, Léon Auverlaux. From then on the name of the studio was changed to Ghémar Frères.
Louis Ghémar died in 1873 but the studio kept the name Ghémar Frères until 1894 when Géruzet takes over the studio, including all the negatives of Ghémar.
Ghémar Frères (Belgian, active 1859-1894) Self portrait Louis Ghémar at a piano c. 1862 Albumen print Collection FOMU
The photo studio of the two brothers Ghémar was the most renowned Belgian photostudio in the period 1855-1870.
Louis Ghémar (Belgian, 1820-1873) The hot air balloon “Le Géant”, by Nadar shortly before takeoff at the Botanical Garden in Brussels 1864 Albumen print Collection Yper Museum
In the 19th century, hot air balloons embodied the promise of progress.
Balloon flights were spectacular events that drew large crowds, and the attention of photographers. Rising into the air symbolised technological ambition, curiosity and modernity. Capturing these moments via photography, however, proved challenging. Long exposure times made it difficult to photograph movement or unpredictable events.
In the exhibition Early Gaze you can see how photographers documented balloon ascents, such as the famous lift-off of Le Géant in Brussels in 1864. While the ascent could be photographed, unexpected moments, like the balloon’s emergency landing near Ypres, were still too fleeting for the camera and had to be represented through drawings instead.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Unknown photographer Hot air balloon 1899 Albumen print Collection Janssens
Adolphe Neyt (Belgian, 1830-1892) ‘View of the Moon’, from Atlas photographique de la lune 1869 Albumen print Collection University Library Ghent bieb
After some uninspired steps in politics, wealthy industrialist Adolphe Neyt decided to dedicate himself to his real interests: the sciences and fine arts. As part of this change in direction, he started to take photographs, convinced that the medium had a vital role to play in scientific research. In 1867, Neyt produced a series of stereoscopic photographs of micro-organisms, earning him international success and a silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris. After this recognition, he ventured into astronomical photography. Neyt had a private observatory built at his home in Ghent’s Coupure to take shots of the moon. The project led in 1869 to his most impressive publication, the Atlas photographique de la lune. …
Although Neyt was not the first photographer to make recordings of the lunar surface, his results were distinguished from previous examples by their unrivalled clarity and sharpness. They were among the highlights of the Belgian pavilion at the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna.
Text from the Dominique Somers website
Alexandre (Albert Edouard Drains) (Belgian, 1855-1925) Iguanodon de Bernissart, excavated in 1878 1883 Albumen print FOMU Collection
Born Edouard Albert Drains in Paris (1855-1925), the photographer known professionally as Alexandre moved to Brussels in 1875. His technical bravura, his willingness to try anything and his use of “instantaneous” flash photography attracted the attention of Khnopff. He was in close contact with Les XX, especially Jena Delville, Xavier Mellery and Mellery’s former pupil Khnopff. In 1896 Alexandre executed platinum plates of works by Khnopff, which Khnopff then enhanced with color, creating a series of unique new images. This work earned Alexandre an invitation to join the British Linked Ring Brotherhood (1893-1908), eventually becoming official photographer to the royal family. He died at Nice.
Text from the Anamorfose website
Alexandre (Albert-Édouard Drains) probably took his father’s Christian name as a pseudonym. He was a professional photographer, and member of the Association belge de photographie (ABP)as of 1886. In 1888 Alexandre already had a solo exhibition at the Cercle Artistique et Littéraire in Brussels. He was a prominent member of the Brussels bourgeoisie, and he had been running a professional photographer’s studio with his mother in the popular Marollesquarter since at least 1881. He opened a new studio in a posh uptown part of the city in 1897. He took photographs of a variety of subjects and in several photographic styles. This opened up very different opportunities for him.
An appointment as the official photographer of the Belgian royal family illustrates his prominence in the capital’s bourgeois circles. He was an accomplished portrait photographer but was also involved in the promotion of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State through photographic exhibitions and large-scale projections of photographs taken by the King’s colonial agents. One of these events was in honour of Henry Morton Stanley, the King’s chief agent, returning to Brussels in 1890. These activities may well have made Alexandre the ideal candidate to become the cinematographer of the International Exhibition of Brussels in 1897. His cooperation with L’Optique belge, the Brussels subsidiary of the French company L’Optique, may have made him the first Belgian cinematographer ever.
He produced a substantial number of photographs between 1880 and 1897, both professional commissions and artistic photographs with which he participated in exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. Alexandre was also connected to the Brussels artists association L’Essor and created works of art together with the symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921) in a mixed technique involving photography, pastels and chalk. As a notable professional member of the ABP Alexandre was favourably disposed to the emerging amateur pictorialist movement, and together with his fellow member, Hector Colard, he organised an exhibition of English Pictorialist photographers at the Cercle Artistique et littéraire in 1892. Next to his ABP membership as a professional photographer, Alexandre was a protector-member of the amateur pictorialist group L’Effort.
Alexandre is cited as a prominent pictorialist at the 1899 Berlin Exhibition of Art Photography, in which he participated with several photographs. The fifth issue of 1903 of Art in Photography, an authoritative German journal on Pictorialist photography, puts Alexandre in a category of his own, with nine of his photographs, and he is mentioned with his The Anatomy Lesson in the second issue of 1905. This is illustrative of the impasse Pictorialism was getting into. The photograph was already made before January 1888, at which time it was shown in the Cercle Artistique in Brussels. It could hardly be considered as a prime example of contemporary photography in 1905. In early pictorialist fashion, The Anatomy Lesson mimics painting. It clearly refers to Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). It also demonstrates his use of the magnesium lightning, an early nineteenth century flash device which could be ignited simultaneously with the opening of the camera’s shutter.
Most of his work after 1897 is inspired by the naturalist and impressionist tendencies of French Pictorialism. In 1907, two years after The Anatomy Lesson appeared in Art in Photography, Alexandre ceased to participate regularly in exhibitions. Although he used techniques which were innovative in his day, such as magnesium lighting and photographic enlargement, his artistic activity was limited in time, as he was increasingly focusing on commercial photography after he opened his studio in 1897. He continued in his capacity as royal photographer but closed his business in 1914.
Anonymous. “Alexandre,” on the Ghent University website Nd [Online] Cited 08/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
François Smeesters (Belgian, 1839-1922) Aid for people with reduced mobility 1888-1890 Albumen print FOMU Collection
From 1862 onwards, Smeesters was listed in the population registry as a journeyman photographer at various private addresses.
Ernest Huybrechts (Belgian, 1863- ) ‘L’Explosion’, in La Catastrophe d’Anvers 6 septembre, 1889 Album contenant 18 planches Au profit des victimes (Anvers: Section anversoises de L’Association belge de Photographie / Jos. Maes, 1889), 1889, Lichtdruk Collection FOMU
Disasters, especially their aftermath, were an important theme for early reportage photographers in Belgium. The images are some of the rare early attempts to visually document widely discussed incidents and then distribute them comercially. Some of the photographs were sold to raise funds for victims, reflecting an early fusion of photographic journalism and charitable action.
Images of the disaster at the Corvilain gunpowder factory workshop in Antwerp in 1889, which claimed 95 lives, were compiled in two publications edited by Joseph Maes. One was sold for the benefit of the victims, the others served as a visual record of the tragedy.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Charles E. Hofmans (Brussels) Hofmans Multiphoto camera 1890 Multi-lens camera for 12 exposures, format 2.5 × 3cm on 13 × 18cm plates, twelve meniscus lenses, fixed focus, fixed aperture, camera cover serves as shutter Collection FOMU
Charles Hofmans was a cabinet maker from Brussels, Belgium who became a well known camera manufacturer.
Hugo Piéron was known for photographing Antwerp, including scenes of the city’s gates and the frozen Scheldt River in 1891, and he operated a studio under the name Pieron-Loodts, having taken over a studio around 1867.
Victor Barras (Belgian, 1845-1916) Four women and two dogs, Liège 1894 Collodion printing-out paper 15.9 × 11.4 cm Collection FOMU
Little is known about this image, titled ‘Four women and two dogs’ that is part of the FOMU Collection and currently on show in the exhibition Early Gaze.
Within the FOMU collection, which contains millions of objects, we regularly encounter photographs whose origin or context is unknown. When information is scarce, we look closely at details within the image that might tell us more. In this case, handwritten notes on the back of the photograph (image 2) offer important clues.
The people portrayed are most likely members of the photographer’s personal circle. This can be deduced from a note on the reverse that reads: “… de la famille Duvivier Leys … de l’année 1894 et de ma fille chérie Louise Maes.”
The photograph is a daylight collodion silver print, an early photographic technique in which a collodion-coated glass plate had to be exposed and developed immediately after preparation – a process requiring speed and precision. The photograph was taken in 1894 by photographer Victor Barras in his studio in Liège.
Text from the FOMU Instagram web page
Henri Van Heurck (Belgian, 1838-1909) X-ray of chest deformed by corset 1896-1897 Daylight gelatin silver print Collection GUM – Ghent University Museum
Henri Ferdinand van Heurck (28 August 1838 – 13 March 1909) was a Belgian diatom specialist and microscopist. Born in an industrialist family, he taught himself microscopy and botany and wrote several pioneering works on diatoms, their study under the microscope and their preservation. He pioneered the use of electric lighting and its use in microphotography.
Henri Van Heurck (Belgian, 1838-1909) X-ray from a mummified Egyptian Ibis 1897 Collection FOMU
Fernand Khnopff (Belgian, 1858-1921) Portrait of Marguerite Khnopff c. 1900 Daylight gelatin silver print Collection FOMU
Khnopff’s use of photography highlighted, reflected on and contributed to the exploration of certain subjects and issues that defined European culture in the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries in general as well as the artist’s œuvre in particular. These include the representations of the city of Bruges and its symbolic meaning in fin-de-siècle literature and visual tradition, the documentation of, and reaction to, Belgian colonialism in the Congo Free State as well as the representation of the colony in the colonising metropolis, and the employment of photographs as a substitute for a preparatory sketch or study at preliminary stage.
Text from the abstract of Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921): art and photography in the nineteenth century 2020
Khnopff’s oeuvre includes a large body of nearly monochromatic works on paper. A somewhat limited palette and restrained way of handling his medium become important features of his art, even when he is working in oils. The tendency towards monochromy in his work becomes an essential element in creating the remote and silent atmosphere of the scene.
Another factor in this aspect of his art, however, is the growing need for the photograph as reference, especially in his depictions of the city of Bruges (a kind of Shangi-la to him, a place he had only visited as a child). If he didn’t visit Bruges as an adult, the only plausible explanation for the accuracy of his later renderings of the town is the use of photography.
In public Khnopff disparaged the artistic merits of this growing medium and throughout his life carefully concealed the role photography played in the creation of some of his paintings.
After his death around forty photographs of Marguerite, who was both his sister and his favourite model, were discovered to remain despite her clearance of his studio and the destruction of much of his work and his personal papers. In them, she adopts poses in décor and costumes often alluding to Antiquity and the Far East, but also in dreamy contemporary scenes. It is clear that he was the photographer. Khnopff often did no more than rework the photographed motif in pastel or oil. …
Khnopff’s works based on photographs produced an image removed one more step from reality; remote, dreamlike, rendered in the shades and shadows of near monochrome which are perfect for conveying the ethereal ideas and themes of his art. This theatrical aspect of his photography makes him heir to slightly earlier photographers who were quite close to the Pre-Raphaelites such as Oscar Reijlander, Julia Margaret Cameron, Lewis Carroll and Lady Harwarden.
Associate Professor James McArdle. “November 12: Artifice,” on the On This Date in Photography website 12/11/2017 [Online] Cited 08/02/2026. Used under fair use for the purposes of education and research
Léon Bovier (Belgian, 1865-1923) Portrait of Madeleine Bovier as a toddler c. 1900 Daylight collodion silver print FOMU Collection
Lambert Léon Bovier, born 6.3.1865. Photographic supplies. “Firm founded in 1889” (L’Echo de Courtrai, 22.8.1897). Already active as an amateur photographer in September 1886 when he was a member of the “Cercle des Touristes” and took views of the area between Spa and Stavelot. Recorded as a watchmaker domiciled in Liège, Rue Hocheporte at the occasion of his wedding in Liège on 6.7.1889.
1894-1914 > Bruxelles, Boulevard Anspach, 166<10-12> or 168<94-09; 14> Partnership with Alphonse Roland (see that name) at this address, 1895-1897. Pictorialist (private address: Rue des Visitandines, 38). First prize winner in the fifth photography competition organised by the “Journal des Voyages” in 1894. Photographs on canvas imitating genre paintings. Corresponding member of the “Société Photographique de Lille” in 1900. Secretary of the “Cercle d’art photographique l’Effort”. Camera manufacturing. “Plates and papers of all makes. Recommended for radiographic laboratories. Construction of plate-holders for radiology” (Journal belge de radiologie, 1909). Reportedly lived in London [GB] from 1914 to 1917 and in Paris [F] from 1917 to 1918. Returned to Brussels after World War I. Bovier published several literary works in the 1920s under the pseudonym Léon Lambert. After his death, Bovier’s widow Antoinette Joséphine Marie Louise Robert (born Spa, 26.6.1868) was listed at this address under photographic suppliers until at least the 1950s. Their daughter “Madeleine” Marie Julie Pauline Bovier (born Brussels, 20.5.1896) would also play an active role in her father’s succession.
Jean Philippe Léon Sneyers, born 23.7.1877; died 24.9.1948. Architect-decorator, designer, art dealer and publicity agent, active from 1894. Also supplies for photographers at this address, according to the Mertens directory. Initiated into photography as an adolescent, when only 17 years old he was the president of a camera club for students, the “Detectiv-Club Belge”. Pictorialist. Landscapes, portraits and nudes. Secretary and leading light of the “Cercle d’art photographique l’Effort” (see that name). Member of the “Club d’amateurs photographes de Belgique”, which published several of his photographs in its “Bulletin”.
Both pupil and emulator of Paul Hankar, he discovered Viennese Secession architecture at the Turin exhibition in 1902. His surviving art nouveau buildings in Brussels include a house-cum-studio for the painter Albert Cortvriendt, Rue de Nancy, 6-8 and a shop front for Majolaine, Rue de la Madeleine, 7 created in 1904.
Commissioned by the government to design and decorate the science installation at the International Exhibitions in Liège, 1905, Brussels, 1910, and Ghent, 1913, and to design the Belgian installation at the exhibitions in Turin, 1902, Milan, 1906 and Venice, 1906-1907. He became a propagator of Viennese art nouveau via “L’Intérieur”, his art studio in Brussels at Rue de Namur, 9 which opened in 1906 and closed in 1918; thereafter Galerie Sneyers, Boulevard de Waterloo, 9 from 1918 to 1926. Collections of drawings and photographs in the “Archives d’Architecture Moderne” (AAM), Brussels. These constitute the small proportion of Sneyers’ archives saved from destruction in 1969.
All the haughtiness of the upper-upper, lower-upper, socialites and high society in Promenade des Anglais, Nice (1934, below) versus all the “colour” and characters of Sammy’s Bar in New York, salt of the earth, dead beat party animals (1940-1944, below).
All the obsequious opulence of the women in Fashion Show, Hotel Pierre, New York (1940-1946, below) versus all the low angle, unbuttoned bulk of a New York bag lady in Lower East Side, New York (1940-1947, below)
Model sure doesn’t pull any punches and, perchance, you know which side of the fence she sits.
Combining social realism and emotional expression Model’s street-life scenes and portraits are shot with a razor sharp mind and eye, honed with emotional insight and social conviction, promoting “a fierce attack on the bourgeoisie of the time.” These images are shot from the gut, felt in the gut! Oooof! Kapow!
This philosophical, libertarian vision is grounded in the everydayness of working people, not in men “who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats…”
Her Promenade des Anglais photographs are incisive, cutting to the marrow, evidencing a piercing, core-level truth about the nature of power, money, humility, humanity. Knowing exactly the story she wanted to tell, Model cropped her negatives in the darkroom to get the desired, constructed photographs of the elite, this promenade of the privileged. That she passed on her wisdom to Diane Arbus is only to our benefit.
Model’s photographs in this series are more biting, satirical and oblique than those of Arbus. Direct in one way (in the placement of the camera in front of the subject) but oblique in another … in the asymmetrical placement of the figures within the picture plane, in the sly acknowledgement (or not) and resentment of the camera by the subject. Conversely, her photographs of people in nightclubs, jazz performers and the socially disadvantaged are humanist photographs of the highest order, unorthodox musical compositions that sing with light, movement, and life much more so than the square, formal attributes of the Arbus.
God bless Lisette Model for her glorious irreverence and musical lyricism.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to The Albertina Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“As long as man exploits man, as long as humanity is divided into masters and servants, there will be neither normality nor peace. The reason for all the evil of our time is here. Do you see these? Severe, double-breasted, elegant men who get on and off airplanes, who run in powerful cars, who sit at desks as large as thrones, who gather in solemn hemicycles, in splendid and severe seats: these men with the faces of dogs or of saints, of hyenas or eagles, these are the masters.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Model’s libertarian philosophy is not easy to classify… it is often stuck in the approximation of street photography… but photography, when it is great, is one! and one only!… Genres only serve to sink it into the language of commerce! The lopsided shots, the deep blacks, the stellar whites… beaded with emotional uniqueness… see the human being as an end and never as a means… they invite us to think that justice is inseparable from beauty, it is a way of doing things well, like a chair-setter, a coalman, or a bricklayer… to flee from the arrogance, imitation, and contempt that accompany social codifications… what is beautiful is naturally right… because photography is not just a linguistic quest, but precisely as a linguistic quest, it is a philosophical vision… that respects no barriers or emulates the gods… it is an original, archetypal desire, that takes precedence over everything and carries it as the absolute value of beauty and justice!
Pino Bertelli. “Lisette Model. Sulla fotografia del disinganno,” on the Phocus Magazine website Nd [Online] Cited 02/02/2026. Translated from the Italian by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
“Visiting her mother in Nice in 1934 Model took her camera out on the Promenade des Anglais and made a series of portraits which to this day are among her most widely reproduced and widely exhibited images. With them Model declared her trademark style: Close-up, biting, satirical – almost like photographic political cartoons. In a nice bit of art history sleuthing, Thomas discovered that this series was published in the communist periodical Regards, a publication led by Ehrenburg, Gide, Gorky and Malreaux in 1935. Model, she says, never denied having published her work in Europe, but neither did she ever precisely acknowledge having done so… Thomas also relates Model’s style to the style of images published in Regards and what was being shown in small galleries – that approach, almost mocking, surely exposing, with the photographer or artist clearly separate/different if not superior from the subject – was in the air. Model perfected it, but she didn’t invent it.”
Elsa Dorfman. “Ann Thomas on Lisette Model,” on the AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY website, June 14, 2010 [Online] Cited 03/02/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Lisette Model (1901-1983), born into a Viennese Jewish family, is regarded as one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers. This ALBERTINA exhibition presents a broad retrospective covering her most important groups of works created between 1933 and 1959. Alongside iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Café Metropole, the selection will also include seldom-seen works.
Model, following her emigration to New York in 1938, quickly rose to prominence with her pictures for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar showing facets of urban life: the poverty of the Lower East Side, the upper class at their leisure pursuits, and night life at bars and jazz clubs. Model went on to become an influential teacher during the McCarthy Era. The exhibition features the first-ever public presentation of the original draft of her 1979 monograph, a classic of photo book history.
Text from The Albertina Museum website
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) First Reflection, New York 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981 Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Window, Bonwit Teller, New York 1939-1940, printed 1976-1981 Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Born into a Viennese family with Jewish roots, Lisette Model (1901-1983) is considered one of the most internationally influential female photographers. The exhibition at the ALBERTINA Museum is the most comprehensive presentation of the artist in Austria to date and brings together her most important groups of works from 1933 to 1959. In addition to iconic photographs such as Coney Island Bather and Singer at the Metropole Café, the exhibition also includes lesser-known works that have never been shown before.
While Lisette Model initially pursued a musical education, it was only in France, where she lived from the mid-1920s, that she found her way to photography: in 1934, the self-taught photographer took her revealing series of portraits of rich idlers in Nice, which caused a sensation as a biting social critique in the heated political climate of the time. After Model emigrated to New York in 1938, she quickly made a name for herself in the vibrant art scene as a freelance photographer for style-setting magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the diverse and contradictory facets of urban life: Model showed the poor population of the Lower East Side district in unsparing shots, the upper class at their pleasures in confrontational portraits and the vibrant nightlife in bars and jazz clubs in dynamic series. In the late 1940s and 1950s, she created extensive groups of works outside New York.
The photos of the west coast of the USA or Venezuela are characterised by a melancholy and gloomy mood without Model losing sight of social conditions. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model began her second, enormously influential career as a teacher. After decades of effort, the publishing house Aperture published her first monograph in 1979. The exhibition Lisette Model presents the original design of this publication, which is now a classic among photo books, for the first time.
Lisette Model
Lisette Model (1901-1983) brought about a sudden change in photography with her spectacularly direct pictures. Her immediate, humorous, frequently confrontational, yet sometimes also empathetic style of representation revolutionised traditional documentary photography. Her pictures of street-life scenes and portraits combine social realism and emotional expression: “Shoot from the gut!” was her famous credo. This retrospective brings together Model’s most important groups of works from her nearly thirty-year career, from 1933 to 1959, including works that have never been on view before.
Lisette Model was born as Elise Amelie Felicie Stern (Seybert) into an upper class Viennese family with Jewish roots in 1901. She initially pursued a musical education and from 1919 to 1921 attended courses taught by composer Arnold Schönberg at the progressive Schwarzwald School, which had been founded by Eugenie Schwarzwald. Her contact with Schönberg proved formative for Model’s artistic work. After her father’s death, Lisette Model, together with her mother and sister, moved to France in 1926, where she discovered photography. In 1934 she shot her first extensive portrait series of wealthy idlers in Nice, which caused a furor for betraying social criticism in the heated political climate of the time.
Having emigrated to New York in 1938, Model quickly made a name for herself in the art scene as a freelance photographer for such influential magazines as Harper’s Bazaar. She photographed the contrasts of urban life: in unsparing images, Model presented the impoverished population of the Lower East Side; in scathing portraits, she depicted the upper classes indulging in their pleasures; and in a number of dynamic series, she captured the pulsating nightlife of the metropolis. In the late 1940s and 1950s she created her first series of works outside New York. Due to political reprisals during the McCarthy era, Model’s artistic work stagnated. She embarked on an influential career as a teacher, shaping an entire generation of photographers, including Larry Fink, Diane Arbus, and others.
France
In 1926, Lisette Model moved to France, where she continued her vocal training, which she was forced to discontinue abruptly due to voice problems. In 1933 she turned to photography instead. The threatening political situation in Europe made it necessary for her to learn a profession, and photography offered itself as a modern field of activity especially for women. Model’s sister Olga, a trained photographer, and the artist Rogi André provided important inspiration, including the momentous advice to photograph only what aroused her passionate interest.
The economic crisis and the rise of fascism went hand in hand with a debate among committed left-wing artists about documentary photography. The central question was to what extent photography could expose social injustices and serve as a weapon in social conflicts. It is unclear how closely Model followed these debates; in later years, she remained persistently silent on the subject. Her early photographs from Paris clearly reveal a socially critical approach. Going about her work with distinct directness, she photographed sleeping homeless people and blind beggars, whom she characterised as victims of social circumstances through their bent bodies.
In July 1934, Lisette Model used a Rolleiflex to photograph a series of portraits of wealthy idlers on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. It was synonymous with glamour and elite tourism and a popular motif at the time. Yet Model portrayed her subjects as caricatures through their facial expressions, postures, and gestures. The narrow cropping of the motifs suggests that the photographer was in close proximity to her subjects, who look condescendingly into the camera. In fact, however, Model achieved this effect in the darkroom, where she selected radically novel perspectives from the negatives.
Regards
Although Lisette Model was only at the beginning of her career, the respected communist magazine Regards published her photographs from the series Promenade des Anglais in 1935. The layout of the article juxtaposed Model’s portraits with an image of a female worker with a fishing net. The accompanying text also embeds the photographs in the ideological rhetoric of class struggle: “The Promenade des Anglais is a zoological garden where the most abominable specimens of the human species lounge in white armchairs. Their faces betray boredom, condescension, impertinent stupidity, and at times malice. These rich people, who spend most of their time dressing, adorning themselves, manicuring their nails, and applying makeup, fail to conceal the decadence and immeasurable emptiness of bourgeois thinking.”
Against the backdrop of the repressive climate of the McCarthy era in the 1950s, Lisette Model would later tone down the political content of her images from Nice. Instead, she emphasised the humour and her intuitive approach to portraiture in public spaces.
New York
In October 1938, Lisette Model emigrated to New York with her husband Evsa Model, a Jewish-Russian painter. Her first series shot there reveal her great fascination with the metropolis. The work Reflection, which makes use of reflections in shop windows, merges motifs and spaces to create an enigmatic collage. For the Running Legs photographs, Model did not point her camera upwards at the skyscrapers as usual, but looked at the feet of passersby at street level. Model experienced New York’s hectic and consumer-oriented culture as ambivalent: the dark shadows in the windows of the department stores seem threatening, and the dense crowds of legs have a claustrophobic effect. In portraits of people on Fifth Avenue and Wall Street photographed from below, Model highlights the arrogance of the pedestrians rushing by.
Shortly after her arrival in New York, Lisette Model attracted the attention of several key figures in the art and media world. Her contacts with Ralph Steiner, editor of the magazine PM’s Weekly, and Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar, proved momentous. In 1941, Steiner published Model’s biting photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice under the provocative title “Why France Fell” as an explanation for the country’s defeat in World War II. Model’s first commission for Harper’s Bazaar took her to the popular leisure destination of Coney Island, where she shot her iconic photographs of a bather with an empathetic eye. As early as 1940, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired one of Model’s pictures and continued to show her works in exhibitions in the following years.
Lower East Side
In one of her most extensive groups of works, Lisette Model focuses on the residents of the Lower East Side. Model’s attention to physical peculiarities and extremes becomes particularly apparent in it. Retrospectively defined cropping detaches the people from their spatial surroundings and emphasises the sitters’ statuesque monumentality.
Lisette Model shared her interest in the socially disadvantaged with photographers from the New York Photo League, an influential left-wing political association dedicated to socially committed photography. Becoming a member, Model actively participated in Photo League events and exhibited on its premises. And yet she distanced herself from her photography being categorised as political or social documentary. She also rejected accusations of portraying her models overly sarcastically, arguing instead for a humanist point-of-view that focuses on the strength and personality of her subjects. Emotional expression and social realism are inextricably linked in these photographs: the expressive bodies clearly display the burden of tough living conditions.
Entertainment
Similar to her photographs from France, Model also explored disparities in urban life in New York. The harsh images of the Lower East Side are juxtaposed with photographs of people indulging in leisure activities and amusing themselves at all kinds of shows. Model captured these scenes with a keen eye for human contradictions and bizarre moments: dressed-up ladies at a fashion show are just as much a part of this as participants in a dog show bearing a striking resemblance to their four-legged friends. Photographs taken in museums do not focus on the artworks intently viewed by visitors, but rather on the act of vision itself. With a few exceptions, the series Dog Show and Museum have only survived as negatives. They can now be presented here in digital form for the first time.
Nightlife
Lisette Model’s intuitive approach to photography reached its peak in her pictures of nightclubs. Using bright flashes, she snatched the celebrating guests and energetic performers from the darkness and in the subsequent post-editing of the images tilted the motifs to render the compositions more dynamic. The depiction of expressive gestures and people in moments of emotional tension recalls the body images of the early Viennese Expressionists, whom Model got to know through her contact with Arnold Schönberg. Model, who always vehemently denied the influence of other artists, acknowledged solely Schönberg’s impact on her work. His theory of the “emancipation of dissonance,” which expands on classical harmony, is echoed both in Model’s unorthodox compositions and in her caricatures.
The traumatic experience of exile left deep traces in Lisette Model’s work. Like the Lower East Side before, nightclubs were places populated by immigrants. They evoked a sense of social belonging and cultural familiarity in the artist.
West Coast
In 1946, Lisette Model accompanied her husband Evsa to San Francisco on an invitation from the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). She quickly established connections with the lively photography scene on the US West Coast, where famous photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were active. Model returned several times and in 1949 taught a course on documentary photography at the CSFA’s photography department; she continued with her teaching in New York from 1951 onward.
Model did her first major groups of works outside New York. The photographs of visitors to the opera of San Francisco rank among her most striking portraits and illustrate her strategy of bringing out individual characters by exaggerating physical peculiarities.
In 1949 an assignment for the Ladies Home Journal took Lisette Model to Reno, Nevada. She photographed women staying at so-called “divorce ranches,” waiting for their divorces to be finalised. Thanks to more liberal laws, divorce was possible in Nevada after a waiting period of just a few weeks – compared to the patriarchal rules of other states, this was an uncomplicated way for women in particular to separate from their spouses. Lisette Model’s sympathy for her sitters becomes palpable. Unlike the pictures taken in San Francisco, these portraits are less expressive, but more melancholic instead.
Venezuela
In the 1950s, in the wake of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquired into Lisette Model’s activities. Neighbours and even her grocer were questioned about the artist. In February 1954 two FBI agents finally interrogated Lisette Model and accused her of alleged membership in the communist party and of her actual affiliation with the Photo League, which had already disbanded in 1951 due to political pressure. The agents were unable to prove any wrongdoing on Model’s part, but classified her as uncooperative and recommended that she be placed on the security watch list. As a result of these accusations, Model lost some of her most important clients and was forced to supplement her income by working as a teacher.
Plagued by financial difficulties, she travelled to Caracas in 1954, accepting an invitation extended by the Venezuelan government. By then, Venezuela had been under the presidency of Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez for two years – a military officer and dictator who modernised Caracas and exploited the country’s rich oil reserves. In photographs that were unusual for her in terms of motif and style, Model captured the technical infrastructure for oil production around Lake Maracaibo. Because of their gloomy atmosphere, the images were unsuitable for use in advertising and propaganda. Unsettled by the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the photographer often found it difficult to relate to her surroundings.
Jazz
As a result of the reprisals during the McCarthy era, Lisette Model photographed significantly less in the 1950s than in the promising decades before. One exception were the photographs she took during a horserace in New York in 1956, where she directed her attention at the audience instead of the competition. Her preoccupation with the subject of jazz was most intense. It is Model’s largest body of work, which developed from her photographs of New York nightclubs in the 1940s. Model was one of the few women to photograph jazz events such as the Newport Jazz Festival or concerts of the Lenox School of Jazz at the Berkshire Music Barn in Massachusetts. Highly musical herself, Model knew how to use her straightforward approach to convey the passion and intensity of the musicians’ playing as an immediate experience. No musician was photographed by her as often as Billie Holiday. One of Lisette Model’s last pictures, taken in 1959, shows the singer lying in her coffin.
In the 1950s, Model planned to publish her jazz photographs. It would have been the first monographic jazz book in history, but the project failed when her former client at Harper’s Bazaar discredited Model as a “troublemaker” and, due to her “political unreliability,” dissuaded potential financial backers.
Starting in the 1970s, Lisette Model was rediscovered in exhibitions and interviews. After years of effort, the first monograph on her work, with an introduction by Berenice Abbott, came out in 1979 with the renowned publisher Aperture. It is now considered an incunabulum within the photo book genre. The Albertina owns the hitherto unpublished dummy with original prints. Originally, the book was to be printed with a comprehensive biography of the artist penned by author Phillip Lopate. Dissatisfied with the text, Model had the manuscript withdrawn and commented on it with scathing remarks: “I thought an introduction was to be written – not that I was to be put on trial,” she noted down on the title page.
Model’s behaviour was indicative of the protective shield she had built around her private life as a result of her threatening encounter with the paranoia of the McCarthy era. In her public statements and interviews she obscured facts and details of her biography. She resisted simplistic interpretations of her work, but also concealed and marginalised references to politically explosive works, such as the publication of her photographs from Nice in the communist publication Regards in the mid-1930s.
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Albert-Alberta, Hubert’s Forty-second Street Flea Circus, New York 1945, printed 1980s Gelatin silver print Estate of Gerd Sander, Julian Sander Gallery, Cologne
Lisette Model (American born Austria, 1901-1983) Female impersonator c. 1945 Gelatin silver print National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Lisette Model (Vienna, 1901 – New York, 1983) was one of the main practitioners of North American direct photography. Born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Vienna, she studied piano and singing with Arnold Schönberg. In 1926 she moved to Paris where she became interested in painting and photography. Due to the oncoming war in Europe and growing anti-Semitism spreading throughout the continent, Model moved to New York in 1938 and began to work as a photographer for the magazine Harper’s Bazaar under the guidance of Alexey Brodovitch. She became a member of the Photo League.
Free of any sort of indoctrination, Model’s work stands out for her use of direct portraiture and for focusing on the peculiarities of the people she portrayed. Her images are full of low-angle shots, radical framings, and powerful black and white contrasts, making them greatly expressive. Some of her most renowned series – Promenade des Anglais, Reflections, and Running Legs – were produced in the French Côte d’Azur and in New York.
At the end of her career Model worked with Gerhard Sander, grandson of the photographer August Sander, who became her art dealer and lab assistant. Her work as an instructor was also notable. She began teaching in 1949 at the California School of Fine Arts and continued to teach throughout her life at other institutions such as the New School for Social Research. Her role as a professor would leave a mark on some of the most important photographers of the following generation, such as Diane Arbus, Larry Fink, and Peter Hujar, to name a few.
Model’s photographs are close. Uncomfortably close. Faces, bodies, gestures fill the frame, often to the limit of what is bearable. The famous tight cropping, often decided only in the darkroom, frees the people from their surroundings and confronts the viewer with full presence. There is no escaping. No decorative surroundings.
And yet there is no voyeurism. No mockery. Despite all the harshness, these images carry a form of respect, often with a good dose of humor or, depending on the subject, social criticism. You sense that someone is looking here, not looking down. There is tension hanging in the air – between ruthlessness and empathy – and it keeps the work relevant to this day.
I profoundly admire the work of Polish social documentary photographer Zofia Rydet.
There are no ‘look at me I’m the photographer’ flourishes to her photographs, no egotistical excess, just a version of reality pictured through direct flash photography – rural Polish life, interiors and ancestors, families and marriages, portraits of younger self, older self and the transience of time.
Here lives religion, wallpaper, stencils pasted directly onto thick, rough hewn walls, patterned, fabrics, youth and old age. A boy in his flat with a racing helmet and a poster of Brazilian Formula 1 driver Carlos Reutemann on the wall, bottles of gin and brandy above the door; a young girl, wall plastered with posters of Sting and the band The Police; a woman sitting on a chair, bare feet, rickety bed to left, portraits of wedding day and husband and life behind her. Ancient and modern.
Like August Sander’s unfinished magnum opus People of the 20th Century in which the photographer attempted “to produce a definitive atlas of the German people over the course of his lifetime” (Getty), Zofia Rydet’s archive, record, document, is “an unfinished atlas of memory” of a Polish way of life that is fast disappearing. Her stories of Polish humanity with their huts and habitations speaks to the essential nature, the rootedness, of a people and culture.
The souls are not photogenic, but through Rydet’s direct, engaging process they become photo-gene(ic), archetypes and representatives of ancestors past, present and future which together form the genetic make-up of Polish society. Rydet tells their stories with empathy and compassion, the artist “captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits.”
These photographs hold the viewers attention because they mean something in this transient world of facile images. As Youssra Manlaykhaf cogently observes,
“Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.”1
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Many thankx to The Photographers’ Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I knock on the door, I say ‘hello’, and I shake hands.”
“Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.”
“For me, photography is not just a visual image, but above all, a language I’d like to speak to ordinary people, not great artists. Photography’s greatest value lies in its informative role, its content – not in its transient artistic endeavours. The more my “Record” grows, the more I believe it will have lasting value. I’m convinced I’m on the right track – I still have so many plans, just not enough life ahead of me…”
“I know some people think I’m hypocritical, self-serving, telling these people they’re beautiful. But I truly see something interesting, beautiful in every person, and I’m captivated by something worth preserving – especially the wonderful human stories I hear during these visits. Each person is a story in itself, some very interesting, some instructive, sometimes moving…”
Zofia Ryde
Interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation | The Photographers’ Gallery
Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet in an interview with the Zofia Rydet Foundation and Clare Grafik, Head of Exhibitions, The Photographers’ Gallery.
Sociological Record by Zofia Rydet is a sweepingly comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.
Head curator and art historian Karolina Ziębińska explorie the work and legacy of Zofia Rydet (1911-1997), one of Poland’s most significant post-war photographers.
Best known for her lifelong project The Sociological Record (1978-1990), Rydet sought to systematically document the interiors and inhabitants of Polish homes, creating a vast visual archive of everyday life during a time of profound social and political transformation.
In this talk, Ziębińska introduce Rydet’s distinctive approach to photography, situating her practice within the shifting cultural, historical and ideological contexts of 20th-century Poland. It also spotlights other areas of Rydet’s practice and is an opportunity to consider how Rydet’s work resonates within broader conversations about identity, memory and the role of the photograph as social document.
Installation view of the exhibition Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record at The Photographers’ Gallery, London
From 1978, when she was 67, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out to photograph the inside of every Polish household. She would approach a home unannounced, knock, and warmly introduce herself and ask the people living there if they would like to take part in her project.
Rydet was always on the road, with a camera in her hand. For nearly three decades, she photographed people in their homes, still lives, building exteriors and landscapes. She also returned to the same houses several years after she first visited to document the transformation of rural Poland. The result – Sociological Record – is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.
Rydet used photography to express everyday stories and capture the essence of what it meant to be human. Despite the project’s epic scope, the individual portraits often feel intimate and revealing. Her careful and considered practice spans decades and she worked on the project until her death in 1997.
Rydet is best known for The Sociological Record – an extraordinary lifelong project documenting thousands of domestic interiors and portraits across Poland from the late 1970s onwards. Her work captured the nuances of everyday life during a time of rapid social and political change, revealing how identity, class and belonging were expressed within the home. For me, Rydet’s photographs are a commentary on a particular period in time, a transition from communism to capitalism, a shift from rural to the urban and a way of seeing that span the personal and the collective. …
I discussed Sociological Record with my mum who also visited the exhibition. We were both deeply moved by the large vinyl image of a straw house surrounded by smaller photographs of other homes. It is heartwarming to see such intimate, everyday experiences documented and acknowledged in the Gallery – moments that resonate deeply with many Polish people living in the UK. …
The recurring presence of John Paul II in Rydet’s work also struck a familiar chord; his image continues to appear in Polish households both in the UK and in Poland, carrying with it layers of cultural memory, belonging, but also conflict. Some of Rydet’s portraits – with their lace curtains, tablecloths, patterned rugs and carefully arranged family photographs – reminded me of our own home in Poland. They share an aesthetic and emotional language that feels instantly recognisable: the way ancestors’ portraits watch quietly from the walls, the mix of pride and modesty in how people present their space. To see this visual culture acknowledged and valued within a major British art institution feels both affirming and long awaited – a recognition of a Polish history that has long existed yet has rarely been seen.
Delve into the life and work of the warmly remembered Polish social documentarian, Zofia Rydet
By the time Zofia Rydet began her greatest work, she was already in her sixties, an age when most photographers might be reflecting on what they’ve accomplished, not setting out to capture an entire nation. Yet that’s exactly what she did. From the late 1970s until a few years before the end of her life, Rydet roamed through towns and villages across Poland, camera in hand, knocking on doors and asking to come inside.
Her project, Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny), became one of the most extraordinary photographic archives of the twentieth century: over 20,000 black-and-white portraits, most taken inside a person’s home. The format rarely changed. Her subjects stand in their living rooms, surrounded by furniture, family photos, crucifixes, embroidery, clocks and wallpaper that tells as much of a story as their faces do. Every image is composed with the same direct flash, the same square frame, and the same feeling that time has briefly stood still.
At first glance, Rydet’s portraits might seem uniform, almost bureaucratic in their repetition. But look longer, and the sameness dissolves. You begin to notice the delicate individuality in each frame: the proud tilt of a chin, a mismatched chair, a child’s toy tucked behind an armchair. Each photograph becomes a world of its own.
Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, a city that no longer exists as it once did. Over her lifetime, Poland’s borders shifted, wars came and went, and entire ways of life vanished. Perhaps that’s why she photographed with such urgency. She once said she wanted to “save people from disappearing,” and in Sociological Record, that impulse becomes visible. Her archive reads like a collective portrait of Poland on the brink of transformation, the last breaths of a rural and domestic culture before modernity swept through. “I can already see the difference now, three or four years later – the huts are disappearing, being rebuilt… I miss the houses near Warsaw, but I’m afraid to go there…”
Before she began this monumental project, Rydet had already spent two decades photographing daily life: children playing in the streets, fishermen, women at markets. Her early images are tender and human, often filled with humour. But in the late 1970s, she found her true calling. Carrying her medium-format camera and a small flash, she entered the homes of strangers, sometimes by invitation, sometimes by bold insistence, and created what she saw as a kind of “photographic sociology.”
What’s remarkable is that Rydet’s approach, while systematic, never feels cold. Her use of flash flattens space so that every detail, faces, furniture, wallpaper and light becomes equally significant. It’s as if she believed that the soul of a person might just as easily reside in the pattern of a curtain as in their expression.
Her images speak not only of individuals but of collective identity: Polish Catholic iconography, working-class aspiration, domestic pride. And beneath it all, the quiet ache of time passing. In one photo, a couple stands shoulder to shoulder beneath their wedding portrait, two images separated by decades, yet bound by the same gaze. In another, a young boy stares directly at the camera, his future still unwritten.
Rydet continued photographing well into the 1980s, often assisted by younger artists who recognised the importance of what she was building. She never considered the project finished; how could she? The very premise, recording the human condition through its domestic spaces, was infinite by nature. When she died in 1997, she left behind a sprawling, incomplete monument to ordinary lives.
Today, in an age when we document ourselves endlessly but often forget what those images mean, Rydet’s work feels newly vital. Her archive is a reminder that photography can still be an act of devotion, a way of saying I see you, and you matter. Rydet didn’t just photograph people; she photographed the fragile dignity of being human. And in doing so, she built a record not just for Poland, but for all of us; an unfinished atlas of memory, tender and eternal.
Youssra Manlaykhaf. “The Unfinished Archive,” on The Photographers’ Gallery website Nd [Online] Cited 05/02/202. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Opening this October at The Photographers’ Gallery, as part of the UK/Poland Season 2025, Sociological Record is a landmark photographic project undertaken by Polish photographer Zofia Rydet. The series is a comprehensive documentary portrait of Polish domestic life which spans decades, eras, regions and cultures.
Starting in 1978, aged 67 years old, Zofia Rydet (1911-1997) set out on a mammoth task to photograph the inside of ‘every’ Polish household. Motivated by a desire to capture the ordinary, unsung populations, particularly of the countryside – but also covering towns and cities – Rydet would become increasingly obsessed with her mission to record the cultures and people that she sought out.
Rydet cut an unlikely figure on her field trips to different regions, a diminutive woman travelling by bus or with the help of friends who could drive her. Approaching households unannounced, she would knock and warmly introduce herself, asking those living there if they would like to take part in her project. Using a newly acquired wide angle lens and flash, Rydet was able to capture often darkened interiors of homes and their inhabitants in great detail. Asking her sitters not to smile and look straight ahead into the camera lens, her subjects are posed in their homes, rich in personal histories.
As the series progressed, Rydet would identify different categories within the Sociological Record such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’, ‘Professions’, ‘The Ill’, ‘Road Signs’, ‘Windows’, ‘Houses’ and ‘Televisions’. She would also come to identify more philosophical themes such as ‘Presence’ – noting the omniscience of the Polish Pope John Paul II’s image (inaugurated the same year Rydet started the Record in 1978) within Polish households. Others included ‘The Myth of Photography’ focusing on the central position and significance of family photographs within the home, such as traditional, hand-painted studio photographs of married couples in homes with little or no other decoration.
Through the cumulative interactions with her sitters, sometimes returning to households more than once over time, Rydet identified a change in her own personal and artistic journey and the role photography played within it. Creating over 20,000 images, many of which by the end of the project were never printed – Sociological Record is a monumental project and one of the most important achievements in 20th century Polish photography.
Rydet said of her hopes for the work: “Even if they don’t publish it… this will remain, not art perhaps, but a document of the times.” Rydet continued working on the Record until 1990, seven years before she died aged 86 years old.
This is the first substantial exhibition of Zofia Rydet’s Sociological Record in the UK. It focuses on the small proportion of rare prints she made from the series in her home darkroom, including the significant ‘People in Interiors’ works, and other sub-series such as ‘Women on Doorsteps’ and ‘Presence’. It will also feature ephemera from Rydet’s archives and original publications. Polish filmmaker Andrzej Różycki’s 1989 documentary film about Rydet, ‘Endlessly Distant Roads’, as well as Polish photographer Anna Beata Bohdziewicz’s documentary portraits of Rydet at work will also be on show.
Zofia Rydet: Sociological Record is part of the UK/Poland Season 2025. It is produced by The Photographers’’’ Gallery in partnership with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute (co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage), Poland, and the Zofia Rydet Foundation.
A new English catalogue will accompany the exhibition featuring texts by Zofia Rydet and 100 images from the Sociological Record series. Edited by co-curators of the exhibition, Clare Grafik and Karol Hordziej, image edit with the collaboration of Wojciech Nowicki. Produced by Lola Paprocki and designed by Brian Kanagaki / Kanagaki Studio. Co-published by The Photographers’ Gallery and Palm* Studios, with support from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
About Zofia Rydet
Zofia Rydet was born in 1911 in Stanisławów, Galicia – then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Poland, now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. The daughter of a Polish lawyer and judge who served the rural populations of the area, her first photographs were in the regions of south-eastern Polish borderlands.
Following the brutal and tumultuous occupation of Nazi Germany in World War II and the region’s absorption into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, her family fled into the newly defined borders of Poland at the end of the war to Rabka and then Bytom in Upper Silesia. There she would focus on her passion for photography, as one of the few women members of the Gliwice Photography Society, which she joined in 1954. She met other avant-garde photographers, became a photography teacher and began sending her photographs to international and national competitions.
Her artistic career developed through many distinct but overlapping phases which included the seminal series and photobook Little Man (Mały Człowiek), which drew on her many photographs of children taken during her national and international travels, highlighting humanist approaches to documentary photography and emphasising the complexities and challenges of childhood. Her long-standing surrealist collage series The World of Feelings and Imagination (Świat uczuć i wyobraźni) also marked an important expressive phase in her creative practice. Sociological Record (Zapis socjologiczny) would become her final and largest artistic project.
About Adam Mickiewicz Institute
The Adam Mickiewicz Institute (AMI) brings Polish culture to people around the world. Being a state institution, it creates lasting interest in Polish culture and art through strengthening the presence of Polish artists on the global stage. It initiates innovative projects, supports international cooperation and cultural exchanges. It promotes the work of both established and promising artists, showing the diversity and richness of our culture. The Adam Mickiewicz Institute is also responsible for the Culture.pl website, a comprehensive source of knowledge about Polish culture. For more information please visit: www.iam.pl.
Press release from The Photographers’ Gallery
Portrait of Zofia Rydet Nd
Zofia Rydet and photographer friends Nd
Zofia Rydet with camera and subjects Nd
The Photographers’ Gallery 16-18 Ramillies Street London W1F 7LW
This is one of those unheralded exhibitions on a photographer that you may never have heard of that Art Blart likes to promote.
Gabrielle Hébert as she became, married the painter Ernest Hébert in 1880. She was 28, he was 63. From 1888 until his death in 1908 at the age of 91, she documented her husband painting, their surroundings and their affluent, upper class social milieux. And then she stopped, she gave up photography, she lost the amour fou, that incredible passion that had driven her for so many years to take photographs.
While “her photographs provide an intimate look into the artistic life of the time, portraying artists, models, and domestic scenes” they also do something more – they represent the viewpoint of a female artist which challenges the masculine conventions of the day. “Overturning gender stereotypes, she watched him obsessively and was never tired of capturing him on film… Thanks to her images, which she shared and exchanged with her friends and family, she became recognised as an auteur and gained social status in a milieu where artistic creation was the preserve of men.” (Text from the Musée d’Orsay website)
Further, from my point of view, Gabrielle Hébert was not an amateur photographer taking snapshots for her “visual diary” but an artist fully conversant with current trends in photography. While there are the standard documentary photographs of sculptures and Ernest Hébert and friends painting … there is so much more!
Photographs such as the allegorical Peppino Scossa endormi dans les bras de sa mère, 11 août 1888 (Peppino Scossa asleep in his mother’s arms, August 11, 1888) (1888, above) and La duchesse de Mondragone et l’une de ses bellessoeurs posent pour une Annonciation, juin 1890(The Duchess of Mondragone and one of her sisters-in-law pose for an Annunciation, June 1890) (1890, below) are redolent of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (British born India, 1815-1879).
Other photographs such as Lys des parterres, juin 1890 (Flowerbed lilies, June 1890) (1890, below) evidence her consummate skill at capturing the perfume of a place whilst images such as Procession sur le port de Brindisi (Pouilles) (Procession in the port of Brindisi (Apulia)) (1893, below) show her ability to picture the informality of large groups of people and the atmosphere of the scene.
Then there are the joyous highs of a modern woman looking at the world with perceptive eyes. In the photograph Amalia Scossa et Ernest Hébert à sa peinture La Vierge au chardonneret sur la terrasse du campanile (around 1891, below), Gabrielle Hébert was not afraid to dissect the pictorial plane with strong verticals, horizontal and diagonal lines, providing the viewer with the feeling of an almost voyeuristic in-sight into the creative scene, each section of the photograph holding out attention – two chairs, one upturned on the other, supporting the umbrella shielding the painter from the sun; the Virgin and her child filling the distant space; the painting on the easel leading our eye down and then back up into the cloaked, wizened figure of the artist holding his easel; folding stool for him to rest and other accoutrements earthing the foreground; and the massive pillars slightly askew enclosing our furtive view. Magnificent!
My favourite photograph in the posting is Garçon au coin de la place Zocodover, Tolède, 31 octobre 1898 (Boy on the corner of Zocodover Square, Toledo, October 31, 1898) (1898, below), taken when Hébert had abandoned her large format camera for a more portable Kodak. A wonderful use of depth of field, movement, vanishing point, light, architecture and the ghostly presence of a boy, forever peering at us through eons of time, lend the image an enigmatic, allegorical mystery … as to the passage of time, the journey of life.
How I wish we could have seen more of these later photographs where Hébert proposed “daring viewpoints – notably from a speeding train – a camera in motion, glances towards the camera, the operator’s shadow cast on the ground, motion blur of people and things (smoke, clouds, and waves), truncated figures, and close-ups.” (Marie Robert)
And then there is the crux of the matter. As the text on the Musée d’Orsay website insightfully observes, “… above all, photography revealed her to herself: through capturing a particularly remarkable geography and era, she effectively invented her own mythology.”
Through love and life, through devotion to husband, through devotion to photography, and through devotion to herself, she revealed her to herself and to the world. What crazy, mad love!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. With photographs like Femmes à la fenêtre, Taormine (Sicile), mai 1893 (Women at the window, Taormina (Sicily), May 1893) (1893, below) it is likely Gabrielle Hébert would have met Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) who lived and worked there between 1878-1931.
Many thankx to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Active between 1888 and 1908, Gabrielle documented daily life at Villa Medici in Rome, where her husband served as director of the French Academy. Her photographs provide an intimate look into the artistic life of the time, portraying artists, models, and domestic scenes. The exhibition features original prints, albums, diaries, glass plate negatives, and her cameras, alongside works by Ernest Hébert and personal items that tell their love story. With over 3.500 prints, Gabrielle Hébert is considered a pioneer of female photography, having sensitively and precisely documented an artistic environment predominantly male.
When Gabriele von Uckermann and a friend discovered Ernest Hébert’s painting, La Mal’aria [below], at the Munich International Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1869, the two young women sent a telegram to the artist expressing their admiration. A few months later, the painter agreed to receive Gabriele in his Parisian studio, and their marriage in 1880 sealed their whirlwind romance. He was 63, she was 28. Five years later, Ernest Hébert’s reappointment as director of the French Academy in Rome allowed the young woman to have her own studio. Gabrielle Hébert, who had Gallicized her first name, dates her photographic debut to July 8, 1888. From that day forward, she never stopped photographing her husband. She also dedicated herself to visually documenting their stay at the Villa Medici, as well as their travels in Italy, Sicily, and Spain. …
The exhibition’s subtitle, “Mad Love at the Villa Medici,” while certainly catchy, is somewhat misleading, as the section strictly devoted to photographs related to her stay at the French Academy in Rome represents only a third of the exhibition. However, each period of this prolific output is contextualised using a variety of documents: diary entries, correspondence, camera footage, albums, contact sheets, and more.
Christine Coste. “Gabrielle Hébert, un itinéraire photographique singulier,” on the Le Journal des Arts website, 17th December, 2025 [Online] Cited 02/01/2026. Translated from the French by Google Translate. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Ernest Hébert (French, 1817-1908) The Mal’aria 1848-1849 Oil on canvas 1930 x 1350cm Musée d’Orsay, dist. RMN / Patrice Schmidt Bought 1851
Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
The photograph above shows a nude woman posing for the artist Alexis Axilette for his painting Summertime (c. 1891, below)
Alexis Axilette (French, 1860-1931) Summertime c. 1891
Only a black and white reproduction is available of this work
At the Salon exhibition of 1891, a picture which attracted a marked amount of attention was a vividly painted midsummer landscape, with the figures of three wood-nymphs, basking in the flood of golden sunshine. It was entitled “Summertime.” The painter was A. Axilette, a Parisian artist whose studio was already well known to collectors. The success of “Summertime” in Europe was enormous. It was successively exhibited at various continental exhibitions, and everywhere repeated the hit it had made in France. It was, in fact, one of those works of which it is said that they “make” their authors, and in the sense that it completely established the painter’s reputation, “Summertime” realised this figure of speech.
Mary S. Van Deusen. “Alexis Axilette,” on the Master Paintings of the World website 2007 [Online] Cited 02/01/2026. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
Alexis Axilette (French, 1860-1931)
Alexis Axilette was born in 1860 in Durtal, a small town in Maine-et-Loire. From a modest background – his father was a merchant – his future seemed predetermined, far removed from the world of art. His parents, who dreamed of a career as a notary’s clerk for him, were nonetheless surprised to discover his talent for drawing. After encouraging him to prove his abilities, they supported his choice to become an artist, a vocation he embraced with passion and determination. This ambition led him to become one of the most remarkable painters of his time.
A Promising Start
At the age of 16, Alexis Axilette began working as an apprentice in a photography studio, retouching photographs by hand, a modern activity for the time. At the same time, he attended evening classes at the Angers Municipal School of Fine Arts, where he distinguished himself with his talent and won several prizes. Supported by his teachers, he obtained a scholarship to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1878 and 1880, he learned Neoclassical principles there under the influence of the renowned painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, teachings that would profoundly shape his artistic approach.
The Rise to Recognition
At 24, Alexis Axilette reached a major turning point in his career by winning the prestigious Premier Grand Prix de Rome with his painting Themistocles Taking Refuge with Admetus (1885), a masterfully executed historical scene. This success, achieved at such a young age only by Fragonard, propelled his career, marked by gold medals, honorary distinctions, and the Legion of Honor. From that moment on, he became a central figure in the artistic and literary life of the Third Republic, frequenting high society and financial circles. An accomplished artist, he traveled throughout Europe and forged an international reputation, becoming a sought-after portraitist with prestigious commissions, notably from the Imperial Court of Russia.
In 1898, he received a major state commission: the creation of a monumental triptych for the ceiling of the Social Museum, entitled Humanity, Fatherland, and Muse. This work, both moral and balanced, perfectly embodies the republican ideals of the time.
Historical and Artistic Context
Under the Third Republic, the arts were seen as a privileged means of promoting national cohesion. Axilette’s academic style, rooted in moral and patriotic values, perfectly aligned with this objective. However, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the emergence of new artistic movements such as Impressionism, Symbolism, and Expressionism. Axilette’s attachment to classicism and a rigorous aesthetic set him apart from the avant-garde movements that favored experimentation and creative freedom. Thus, although he perfectly embodied his era, his art gradually came to be perceived as outdated and obsolete.
A Transition to Pastels
In the 1910s, as artistic tastes evolved, Alexis Axilette turned to the use of pastels. This more subtle and delicate medium allowed him to explore a new sensibility while remaining true to his academic style. His works from this period, primarily portraits and landscapes, testify to his desire to renew his approach while remaining rooted in classical tradition. These pastels reveal an undiminished technical mastery and a willingness to adapt to new artistic trends, although his style seems to have been less appreciated at this time.
Posthumous Oblivion
Like many academic artists, Alexis Axilette suffered from the evolution of tastes in the 20th century. Classical art, once revered, lost ground to the avant-garde, relegating its works to museum storage. Furthermore, his image as a society artist, associated with the establishment of the Third Republic, did not help his legacy. While artists like Gauguin symbolized rebellion and innovation, Axilette remains perceived as a representative of a bygone academicism.
A body of work to be rediscovered
Alexis Axilette died on July 3, 1931, in Durtal, his birthplace. Today, his legacy lives on through his works held in private and public collections: academic drawings, nude sketches, portrait studies, landscapes, and historical paintings. These paintings bear witness to his exceptional talent and his dedication to his art. Although he was a major figure of his time, he remains relatively unknown today. He embodies the fate of many artists: celebrated in their lifetime, but gradually forgotten by history.
Anonymous. “Alexis Axilette,” on the French Wikipedia website, translated by Google Translate
Designed in partnership with the Musée Départemental Ernest Hébert in La Tronche (Isère), where it will be hosted in spring 2026, the exhibition will also be presented at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici in autumn 2026, where the exhibition’s curator Marie Robert spent a year in the context of a Villa Medici/ Musée d’Orsay cross-residency.
The exhibition Who’s Afraid of Women Photographers? (1839-1945) presented at the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie in 2015 was a milestone for recognition of women artists in France. One of the many photographers featured was Gabrielle Hébert (1853, Dresden, Germany – 1934, La Tronche, France). Born Gabrielle von Uckermann, she was an amateur painter before marrying Ernest Hébert in 1880, an academic artist twice appointed Director of the French Academy in Rome. She went on to develop an intensive, extremely prolific photography practice, begun at Villa Medici in 1888 and ending twenty years later in La Tronche (near Grenoble) following the death of the man she had idolised, her elder by almost forty years, and whose place in history she largely ensured by supporting the creation of two monographic museums.
In the late 19th century, between France and Italy, like many artists and writers (including Henri Rivière, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Émile Zola) who equipped themselves with a camera to record their and their families’ daily lives, Gabrielle Hébert pursued a private, sentimental photography practice, helped along by the technical and aesthetic revolution brought about by the invention of snapshot photography. At Villa Medici, as the wife of its director, she organised receptions and received elite visitors. She was not long in escaping her assigned duties, however, and acquired a camera. She took a few lessons with a Roman professional and, along with a resident of her own age, set up a darkroom to develop and print her negatives and retouch the results. It was the beginning of an extremely voluminous output of photos, which she consigned to her diaries. Hardly a day passed without her taking a snapshot, interspersing them with remarks that tell us how she set about taking pictures: “Je photo…. Je photographie…”.
Although Gabrielle Hébert shared her taste for society portraits and tableaux vivants with Luigi and Giuseppe Primoli, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte’s nephews and pioneers of snapshot photography in Italy, she explored all photographic genres on her own at Villa Medici, including nudes, reproductions of artworks, landscapes, still lifes and “photographic recreations” … Providing us with the viewpoint of a permanent resident who is dazzled by the palace, the site and its inhabitants (artists in residence, employees, models, dogs and cats) as seen from the inside and in all seasons, her output reveals a completely unknown aspect of life in that artistic phalanstery. Her “diary in images” is the first photo-report on daily life in the institution, a centre for residencies, training and creation by winners of the Grand Prix de Rome (many of whose works are now conserved by the Musée d’Orsay) as well as a laboratory for the new political relationship between France and Italy, which had just been “unified” (1861) and of which Rome became the capital in 1871. It also constitutes a unique testimony on one of the first couples of creators at Villa Medici. Although Gabrielle assisted Ernest with his activities as an artist, posing for him, preparing his canvases, retouching his paintings and even copying them, it was Ernest himself who was the photographer’s real focus. Overturning gender stereotypes, she watched him obsessively and was never tired of capturing him on film. Posing sessions with sitters, progress made in his paintings, moments of conviviality with visitors and interactions with residents, along with walks in the Roman countryside, bathing in the sea and alone in his office: all these aspects of artist, director and husband Ernest Hébert’s life were scrutinised and documented. When she returned permanently to France with him, Gabrielle stopped cultivating her passion for photography, a passion born in Italy and in exile, but nevertheless continued to photograph Hébert until the very end of his life, determined to immortalise him through images. Before that, though, in 1898, she escaped the closed quarters formed by the Renaissance Palace and its eccentric occupants and performed her photographic swansong during a trip to Spain, which she photographed with a resolutely modern eye influenced by the early days of cinema.
This chrono-thematic exhibition, from Gabrielle Hébert’s photographic beginnings (1888) to her last images (1908), will seek to present what she made of photography and what photography made of her. Thanks to her images, which she shared and exchanged with her friends and family, she became recognised as an auteur and gained social status in a milieu where artistic creation was the preserve of men. But above all, photography revealed her to herself: through capturing a particularly remarkable geography and era, she effectively invented her own mythology. By doing so, she was Villa Medici’s first photographic chronicler and made a place for herself in the medium’s history.
Most of the works on exhibition are original prints (in 9 x 12 cm format), along with photograph albums created by Gabrielle Hébert, her diaries, boxes of glass plates and cameras she used. Enlargements created from negatives she never printed will add further life to the presentation. The itinerary will be rounded out by drawings and paintings by Ernest Hébert, as well as sentimental relics (palette, medallion and letters), testimony to a story of love for a man and a country.
“Ciociaria” refers to a historic, rustic region southeast of Rome in Italy, and “ciociara” (singular) or “ciociare” (plural/feminine) describes people, especially women, from that area, known for their traditional leather sandals (ciocie), embodying a simple, rural Italian identity, famously portrayed in the film La Ciociara (Two Women). The term evokes a strong connection to the land, traditional life, and the unique culture of this central Italian territory.
Adaptation of the texts from the exhibition in large print
Introduction
An amateur painter and wife of the artist Ernest Hébert, director of the French Academy in Rome, Gabrielle Hébert began photography intensively and passionately at the Villa Medici in 1888. She abruptly stopped twenty years later in La Tronche (near Grenoble), upon the death of the man she idolised and who was forty years her senior. She will ensure her legacy through the creation of two monographic museums.
Like Henri Rivière, Maurice Denis, or Émile Zola, who at the end of the 19th century seized upon a camera to record family life, Gabrielle developed a private and sentimental practice, fostered by the technical and aesthetic revolution of the snapshot. As the entries “I take photos” or “I photograph” in her diary show, not a day went by without her taking pictures. Securing her place as an author through these images in a milieu where artistic creation was reserved for men, she discovered herself.
Through the chronicle of her chosen land and happy days, she creates a work of memory and inscribes herself in History.
A Woman Under the Influence
On July 21, 1888, Gabrielle “went out to buy things necessary for photography.” This marked the beginning of an obsessive production of two thousand photographs, mostly taken at the Villa Medici where, as First Lady of a prestigious cultural institution, she organised receptions and received visiting high society. Gabrielle quickly escaped the constraints of her duties: she acquired a camera, took lessons from Cesare Vasari, a Roman professional, and, together with fellow resident Alexis Axilette, set up a darkroom to develop her negatives, print, and retouch her photographs.
She already had an eye for it thanks to her artistic background and her practice of painting and drawing. But it was with the Franco-Italian counts Giuseppe and Luigi Primoli that Gabrielle explored the potential of the instantaneous, becoming the subject of a creative and existential experience: photography.
An art of joy
Gabrielle chronicles the Villa Medici, at once an architectural masterpiece overlooking the Eternal City, a residence for the winners of the Grand Prix de Rome, and a laboratory for a new relationship between France and Italy, newly unified. She focuses her gaze on its inhabitants: artists and models, foreign visitors on holiday, Italian employees at work, flowers, and animals. She enjoys working alongside the “button-pushers” in her circle, as amateurs equipped with handheld cameras are known.
She also observes professionals capturing perspectives of the palace with their imposing camera. “Magnificent weather. I’m photographing the residents”: Gabrielle often associates the day’s weather with an urgent need to act. Present in the world, joyful in her being, she then presses the shutter. Taking the picture is an epiphany. “I photograph, therefore I exist,” she seems to be saying.
Mein Alles (My Everything)
Gabrielle focuses her attention on her husband, around whom she circles and whose activities she seems to observe when he is painting or showing guests around the premises. The tender and sensitive portrait she paints of him is that of a director, an artist entirely devoted to his work at his workplaces, or sketching en plein air on excursions. She also captures him in his nakedness, as an elderly man bathing in the sea. She is concerned about his state of health; she notes how he slept or the time he got up.
The couple’s asymmetry, commonplace at that time and in that social circle, is also expressed in their writings: while he uses the informal “tu” with her, she uses the formal “vous” and addresses him with the superlative phrase “Mein Alles”: My Everything.
Travels in Italy
During their eleven-year stay in Italy, Ernest and Gabrielle travelled all over the country.
The artist enjoys returning to favorite places painted during her youth. They take with them a boarder or student, Amelia Scossa, Ernest’s beloved model, or a few friends; the dogs are always present. In 1893, they travel to Sicily, to the Duke of Aumale’s estate, and then explore the ancient sites of Selinunte and Agrigento, and the Greek theaters of Syracuse and Taormina. By escaping the confines of the Villa Medici and its eccentric inhabitants, Gabrielle literally leaves her social milieu.
With an attention full of empathy for popular and regional culture, she manages to get groups of strangers, women and men, to pose in front of her lens, no doubt placed on a tripod, whom she brings together in an amusing jumble around a fountain or on the steps of a building, arousing in return a certain curiosity.
In Spain, a cinematic perspective
In 1896, the couple left Italy with great regret and sorrow, returning to Paris and La Tronche where they continued to lead an intense social life. Two years later, Gabrielle completed her photographic swan song during a final journey, this time to Spain, which took them both from Burgos to Granada via Madrid, El Escorial, Toledo, Granada, and Seville.
Abandoning her large-format camera for a Kodak, she amplified in nearly three hundred photographs what she had already experimented with: daring viewpoints – notably from a speeding train – a camera in motion, glances towards the camera, the operator’s shadow cast on the ground, motion blur of people and things (smoke, clouds, and waves), truncated figures, and close-ups.
The nascent cinematograph had passed by. She no longer poses her subjects; she captures them on the fly. She seizes fleeting gestures, radiant moments, the stroll of passersby, the burst of laughter. This journey is an enchanted interlude that allows the couple to get back on their feet, one last time.
The tomb of an artist
Upon returning from Spain, Gabrielle ceased to cultivate her passion, born under the Italian sky. Her output diminished significantly, ceasing altogether in 1908, with Ernest’s death.
During his final months, she recorded his last visits and outings in the sun, his walks, and setting up his easel outdoors. She portrayed him as a draftsman and painter to the very end, then staged his posthumous portrait, for eternity. Containing the seeds of anticipation of the end, the photographs of moments lived, places visited, and people met, were in reality intended to be viewed by others besides their sole author.
With her thousands of images, Gabrielle composed a tomb, in the poetic sense of the word, erected in memory of her husband and their love. In the museum she created in Isère, in La Tronche, in honour of Ernest, it would take until the beginning of the 21st century for her photographic work to be discovered by a happy accident.
Marie Robert, Chief Curator, Photography and Cinema at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, translated from the French by Google Translate
Prince Semyon Semyonovich Abamelek-Lazarev (also Abamelik-Lazaryan; Russian: Семён Семёнович Абамелек-Лазарев; 24 November 1857 in Moscow – 2 October 1916 in Kislovodsk) was a Russian millionaire of Armenian ethnicity noted for his contributions to archaeology and geology.
Count Giuseppe Napoleone Primoli (in French, Joseph Napoléon Primoli; 2 May 1851 in Rome – 13 June 1927 in Rome) was an Italian nobleman, collector and photographer. …
Giuseppe Primoli lived in Paris from 1853 to 1870. He befriended writers and artists both in Italy and France, and was host to Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, Alexandre Dumas fils, Sarah Bernhardt and others in Palazzo Primoli in Rome. In 1901 he became the sole owner of the palazzo, which he enlarged and modernised between 1904 and 1911.
Primoli was a bibliophile and collector, who assembled a large collection of books and prints. He amassed a collection of books by Stendhal as well as many from the writer’s library.
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Primoli, an avid photographer, produced over 10,000 photographs.
With photographs like the one above, taken at Taormina, it is likely Gabrielle Hébert would have met Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (German, 1856-1931) who lived and worked there between 1878-1931.
Around the world, 2025 hasn’t been a great year for photography exhibitions. As a friend of mine said on Facebook it has been a dreary year and I would tend to agree with him.
Curatorially, everything was pretty cut and dried, relying on the usual one artist show or group exhibition on a theme with nobody prepared to take a risk on anything creative, inventive even.
I found little to inspire me in terms of idiosyncratic but illuminating pairings of photographers or unusual insights into the conditions and conceptualisation of photographic production and presentation – other than a few of the exhibitions noted below: costume, gesture and expression – yes! the development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous American artists – yes! and the life in self-portraits of a photobooth operator in Melbourne, part magician, part artist – YES!
Out of the 60 postings on Art Blart in 2025 I’ve picked what I think are the 11 best exhibitions, plus a couple of honourable mentions.
I hope you enjoy the selection and a Happy New Year to you all!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Marcus Bunyan. “Past present,” on the exhibition Still Performing: Costume, Gesture, and Expression in 19th Century European Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, August 2024 – January 2025
Victor Plumier (Belgian, 1820-1878) Lady in Costume About 1850 Daguerreotype, half plate 5 1/2 × 4 1/2 inches The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Gift of the Hall Family Foundation
“The emotions and the sentiments, the gestures and the expressions. The actor and the stage, the photographer and the sitter. The staged photograph and the tableaux vivant. The Self and the Other.” ~ MB
2/ A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, October 2024 – January 2025
Andrew Joseph Russell (American, 1829-1902) Slave Pen, Alexandria, Virginia 1863 Albumen silver print High Museum of Art Purchased with funds Lucinda Weill Bunnen Fund and the Donald and Marilyn Keogh Family
“Photographs are containers of, fragments of, memories of, histories of, events – remembrances of events – brought from past into present, informing the future, showing only snippets of the stories of both past and present lives. Parallel to the usual thought that photographs are about death, they are also memory containers for (still) living people.” ~ MB
3/ Marcus Bunyan. “Out in the midday sun,” on the exhibition Martin Parr. Early Works at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt (FFF), September 2024 – February 2025
“I am always fascinated with the early work of an artist. In essence, the photographs tell you what are the primary concerns for the artist and these themes usually remain with them for the rest of their career. These early black and white photographs provide a window into that ongoing investigation, that golden path. They are more subtle in their modulation of British life than in the later colour work – it’s as though the artist had to change gears with the use of colour developing a more ironic way of seeing British life through a different spatial relationship to his subjects – but in these photographs there is still that deprecating humour that is often missing in the work of his contemporaries…” ~ MB
“There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden, and life has more to do, the real world has more to do with what is hidden.” ~ Saul Leiter
5/ True Colors: Color in Photography from 1849 to 1955 at Albertina Modern, Vienna, January – April, 2025
Léon Vidal (French, 1833-1906) Oriental Onyx Sardonyx Cup (16th century) 1876 Photomechanical proof (photochromy using the Léon Vidal process) mounted on cardboard H. 20.8 ; L. 26.2 cm. Don Fondation Kodak-Pathé, 1983
“What a wonderful exhibition. It’s so exciting to see the history and development of colour photography pre the ubiquitous, American artists William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, much as I like both artists.” ~ MB
6/ The basement: photography from Prahran College (1968-1981) at the Museum of Australian Photography, Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, March – May 2025
Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948) Mother and child from 46 Blanche Street, St Kilda 1977 Gelatin silver print 15.9 x 23.7cm Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection donated by Julie Millowick 2024
“Prahran College itself played a critical role in the legitimisation of photography as an art form within Australia. It spearheaded the integration of art photography into tertiary education curricula, fostering an environment where young artists … could experiment formally and conceptually.”
James McArdle. “Epoch,” on the On This Date in Photography website, 25th April, 2025 [Online] Cited 28/04/2025
“The wit, the humour (pigeons sitting outside the racing pigeon shop), the stiff upper lip, the carry on regardless, the working class pantomime of life and death – the public commission flats where people formed caring communities that were destroyed through redevelopment – the integrity of an existence that has largely come and gone pictured with warmth and empathy.” ~ MB
8/ Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August 2025
Installation view of the exhibition Auto-Photo: A Life in Portraits at RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, June – August, 2025 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“Through the strip self-portraits Adler took while servicing and then testing the photobooths that he operated in Melbourne, Australia we become immersed in an archive of his world, the exhibition becoming a joyous ode to a man who devoted his life to photography (not in the traditional sense): in turns humorous and historical, a travelogue, his travelogue, through time and space.’ ~ MB
“Rodríguez’s moody, high contrast photographs of humanity and street scenes pictured from behind the wheel of his taxi in New York proffer an intuitive, empathetic and subjective view of the city and its people at a time of great economic and social upheaval…
Uncertain times, uncertain angles and perspectives, uncertain light give rise to a powerful body of work made certain by the talent of an impressive photographer. Glorious work.” ~ MB
10/ Marcus Bunyan. “Myths of the American West,” on the exhibition Richard Avedon ‘In the American West’ 1979-1984 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, April – October 2025
“Avedon, while undercutting the myth of the American West through his storytelling, doesn’t seek to document, exploit or misrepresent his subjects, but to subjectively present them as on a theatrical set devoid of scenery – where their very appearance becomes scene / seen. As he himself said, “My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”” ~ MB
“The Bechers’ typologies and grids, their topographic state, their same same photographs and perspectives of industrial sculptures and landscapes are anything but objective. Their pictorial grammar, underlaid by a conceptual approach to subject matter, continuously reflected in the systematics of capture and display (the juxtaposition of works together), is constantly undermined by the ghost in the machine – those viral codes of mutation and difference which cannot be controlled.” ~ MB
“Weems blends the poetic and conceptual in photographs and bodies of work which investigate history, identity, racism, executive and patriarchal power from the perspectives of female / Black American.
What a fabulous artist, a guide into circumstances seldom seen, now revealed.” ~ MB
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-shadow-self-portrait-juan-les-pins-france.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
'[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3428-018-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-boarded-up-house-stonington-connecticut.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974")
![Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/wolcott-haircutting.jpg "Marion Post Wolcott (American, 1910–1990) '[Haircutting in Front of General Store and Post Office on Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi]' 1939")
![Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2-typologien_heinrich-riebesehl_siae_sm.jpg "Heinrich Riebesehl (German, 1938-2010) 'Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969' [People in the Elevator, 20.11.1969] 1969")
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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