Exhibition dates: 13th September – 30th November, 2019 Visited September 2019 posted January 2020
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Utopian dreaming / dystopian dreams
Synchronicity… when I visited this exhibition on the 16th September 2019, the grand man had only died the previous week on the 9th September 2019.
This was a fabulous exhibition of mainly VINTAGE prints (see labels) at C/O Berlin, with the added bonus of seeing many Robert Frank photographs I had never seen before.
Thoughts
1/ The vintage prints were much larger than I had thought they would be
2/ The English photographs were very impressive. A similar tonal range to Josef Sudek’s prints in these works i.e. no hard blacks or whites zones 2.5-8
3/ The Americans – to actually see a large vintage print of the Trolley Car was incredible. The Black American man’s face was only his mouth, nose and eyes, the rest was completely dark
4/ The vintage prints seemed more whimsical than the later prints: not so much contrast. Sometimes edges bleed off, grain was large, depth of field low, skylines askew. Frank loved his silhouettes and chiaroscuro
It was a great pleasure to see these iconic photographs together in one place. Several times I had to catch my breath as one famous image followed another. But then there were images I had never seen before. Mostly vintage prints as well… as close to Frank’s original vision as you can get. More poetic, more spontaneous, than the later prints. The United States photographs form a road trip of impressions, a reflective and elegiac poem to the American dream.
It’s not often that you can say that an artist changed how we see and interpret the world but that is the case. Through his seminal work The Americans, Frank’s importance to the history of photography and visual culture cannot be denied. Americans didn’t like the mirror that was held up to their society by an outsider, a European Jew. Frank certainly wasn’t afraid to picture the underbelly of America – a phlegmatic portrait of a disaffected and divided country that still has great relevance today.
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing photographs titled Landsgemeinde / Cantonal Assembly Hundwil, Schweiz (1949). Later silver gelatin prints. No individual titles. Donation of the artist. Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Landsgemeinde / Cantonal Assembly Hundwil, Schweiz (installation views) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Peru (installation view) 1948 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur Permanent loan of the Volkart Stiftung Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1945 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1945 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Geneva (installation view) 1944-1945 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York c. 1949 Vintage silver gelatin print Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Times Square, New York (installation view) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Portfolio. 40 Photos (installation views) 1941-1946 First Edition Steidl, Göttingen, 2000 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mississippi, St Louis (installation view) 1948 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Mary and Pablo, New York (installation views) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (b. 1924 in Zurich, d. 2019 in Nova Scotia, Canada) traveled thousands of kilometres between America’s East and West coasts, taking almost 30,000 photographs. Just 83 black-and-white pictures from this mixture of diary, social portrait, and photographic road movie have influenced generations of photographers after him. Frank’s book The Americans was first published in Paris before it was released in the United States in 1959 with an introduction by the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac. Oblique angles, cropped figures, and blurred movement became the hallmarks of a new photographic style that would change the course of postwar photography. In 1985, Franks photographs have been displayed in Germany for the first time – in the Amerika Haus in Berlin. Now, C/O Berlin presents contact sheets, first editions, and vintage material from the photographer’s early work at the same place. His time in Switzerland, travels through Europe and South America, and unpublished pictures from the United States in the 1950s will be shown together with famous classic photos from The Americans.
Robert Frank. Unseen reveals the narrative power of a visual language that Frank developed long before it earned him international recognition.
The exhibition was organised in cooperation with the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur.
Robert Frank was born in Zurich in 1924. A trained photographer, he traveled to New York for the first time in 1947, where he found a position at the Harper’s Bazaar photo studio. He worked between Europe and the US for several years and in 1950, Edward Steichen invited him to participate in the 51 American Photographers exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, New York. Frank freelanced for Life, McCall’s, Look, Vogue and other magazines. In 1955, he was the first European to receive a prestigious Guggenheim fellowship that funded a comprehensive photo series for which he traveled across America. The result was the seminal photobook The Americans (1959). Following the volume’s unexpected success, the photographer turned to film. His later work juxtaposed Polaroids and autobiographical text fragments. This year Frank published his most recent book, Good Days Quiet, at the age of 95. Frank’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently at Les Rencontres d’Arles (2018); Albertina, Vienna (2018); Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Museum Folkwang, Essen (2014); and at Tate Modern, London (2004). His films were shown at C/O Berlin in 2009. Robert Frank lived in New York and in Nova Scotia, Canada, where he died on September 9, 2019.
Text from the C/O Berlin [Online] Cited 28/12/2019
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at bottom, photographs of London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation view) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris (installation view) 1949 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at right a photograph of London Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation view) 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Arnold Kübler Archive Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London 1951 Vintage gelatin silver print Arnold Kübler Archive
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London (installation views) 1951 Gelatin silver photographs, later prints Permanent loan of the Friends of the Fotostiftung Schweiz Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) London 1951 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Permanent loan of the Friends of the Fotostiftung Schweiz
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Paris 1952 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
America
Robert Frank. Unseen wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Nevada (1956); at second left, Los Angeles (1956); and at right, On the road to Carolina (1955) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Nevada (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) On the road to Carolina (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Route US 91, leaving Blackfoot, Idaho (installation views) 1956 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Route US 91, leaving Blackfoot, Idaho 1956 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Florida(1956); at third left, New York City (early 1950s); and at right, Ranch Market, Hollywood (1955-1956) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) New York City (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Florida (installation view) 1956 Gelatin silver print Swiss Foundation for Photography Collection, Winterthur Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) New York City (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Bar – Gallup, New Mexico (1955) and at right, Rodeo – New York City (1954) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Rodeo – New York City (installation views) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Rodeo – New York City 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at right, Charity Ball, New York 1954 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (American, 1924-2019) Charity Ball, New York (installation views) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Charity Ball, New York 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left in the bottom photograph, Bar – New York (1955) followed by, Yom Kippur – East River, New York City (1954) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Los Angeles 1955 Vintage gelatin silver photograph Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Wanamaker Fire, 10th Street East, New York (installation view) 1956 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bar – New York (installation view) 1955 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bar – New York 1955 Gelatin silver photograph, later print Donation of the artist
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Yom Kippur – East River, New York City (installation view) 1954 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) USA (installation view) 1950s Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 62 / Factory, Detroit (installation views) 1955 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 31 / U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho (installation views) 1956 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Contact Sheet 18 / Trolley, New Orleans (installation views) 1955 From The Americans. 81 Contact Sheets. Yugensha, Tokyo/Motomura Kazuhiko, 2009 Private Collection Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing wall text Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Bryant Park, New York (installation view) around 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 42nd Street, New York (installation view) early 1950s Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) 41st Street and 7th Avenue (installation view) 1953 Vintage gelatin silver print Donation of the artist Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Les Américans book cover and pages (installation views) 1958 Delpire. Paris
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Gli Americani book cover (installation view) 1959
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) The Americans book cover and pages (installation views) 1959 Grove Press, New York
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Trolley – New Orleans 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin showing at left, Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) and at right, City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey (1955) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) Parade – Hoboken, New Jersey (installation view) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey (installation views) 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Frank (Swiss-American, 1924-2019) City Fathers – Hoboken, New Jersey 1955 Vintage gelatin silver print Property of the Confédération Suisse, Federal Office of Culture, Bern
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition Robert Frank. Unseen at C/O Berlin Photos: Marcus Bunyan
C/O Berlin Foundation, Amerika Haus, Hardenbergstraße 22–24, 10623 Berlin Phone: +49 30 2844416 62
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Hujar: Speed of Life at Jeu de Paume, Paris
“I photograph those who push themselves to any extreme, and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.”
Peter Hujar
Free your mind
A huge posting to finish what has been a bumper year on Art Blart: two book chapters published, a photographic research trip to Europe in which I saw some incredible exhibitions and took over 7000 photographs for my art work, lots of postings and writing and, sadly, the loss of two friends – my mother in Australia, the bohemian photographer and poet Joyce Evans and vision impaired photographer Andrew Follows.
I couldn’t think of a better posting to finish the year than with a photographer who put it all on the line: Peter Hujar. Not for him the world of Apollonian perfection, wishing for fortune and fame, relying on some big time backer to promote him. Hujar stuck to his craft, carving images, performances if you like, from dystopian contexts and Dionysian revellers. “Hujar was the instigator of the performances captured in his portraits, as much as a director as a photographer.”
Paraphrasing Mark Durant, we might say that Hujar was a poet of the urban nocturne, a photographer of subjective desire known for his gritty, erotic, sentimental yet (im)personal images. Philip Gefter observes that, “A hallmark of Hujar’s portraiture is the invisibility of technique – a kind of visual innocence – as if the camera were not present and the subject had been happened upon.” Richard Woodward says that Hujar, “observed his companions in this outlaw life with what might be called warm objectivity.” Photographer Duane Michals says that, “Hujar was a pioneer, years ahead of Mapplethorpe in his sexual candor, as well as an artist whose photographs are less swank and less affected.”
Ah! what a time it was to be an artist and to be gay in New York, with the likes of Hujar, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Wojnarowicz, Haring, Arthur Tress, and Duane Michals, to name but a few. A time of sexual liberation, followed by a period of disease and death. Hujar pictures this “scene” – the flowering of gay life and then the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. He pictures the constellations as they swirl around him. He allows the viewer to enter his world without judgement, just showing it how it was – a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance; “glowing skyscrapers, assorted rubble, discarded rugs, boys in drag, and girls passed out in his doorway.” This is it he is saying, this is how I live, this is who surrounds me, suck it up and breathe it in. He allows the viewer to enter his world of ideas and possible metaphors. No judgement is offered nor accepted.
As my appreciation of his photographs grows, I reflect on the skill that it takes to make these photographs look effortless. Hujar, “a student of Lisette Model, admirer of August Sander, and friend of Diane Arbus, made his photographs distinctly his own: a perfect and unmistakable mirror of his own body and milieu.” A mirror of strength and determination / of friendship / of love – his pictures gather, together, a feeling for – the freedom of people, and places, to be themselves. Do places have feelings? yes they do! (I remember visiting the Coliseum in Rome and having to leave after 20 minutes the energy of the place was so bad; and then visiting the Loretta Sanctuary in Prague and feeling, such calm and peace in that place, that I have rarely felt before).
Hujar’s photographs are memorable. Nan Goldin and Vince Aletti said that his work, “like that of so few photographers, can’t be forgotten and becomes even deeper and more compelling over time.” His work is so compelling it’s like you can’t take tear your eyes away from the photographs. They demand repeat viewing. They seem possessed of an awareness of their own making. That is Hujar’s music, his signature.
Like any great artist, his images reveal themselves over time, expounding his love of life and his intimate and free engagement with the world. Hujar was, is, and always will be… a watcher, a dreamer, a cosmic spirit.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to Jeu de Paume for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Many thankx to David for the iPhone installation images. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) were rooted in downtown New York. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance. His mature career paralleled the public unfolding of gay life between the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
In his loft studio in the East Village, Hujar focused on those who followed their creative instincts and shunned mainstream success. He made, in his words, “uncomplicated, direct photographs of complicated and difficult subjects,” immortalising moments, individuals, and subcultures passing at the speed of life.
What was Hujar’s truth, his photographic truth? Hujar understood and utilized photography’s tension between document and theatricality. In the act of photographing there is a performance, not only on the part of the subject, but for the photographer as well. For Hujar, to photograph was a balancing act between fierce observation and manifesting his devotion. As Jennifer Quick observes in her essay for the catalogue, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, “While Arbus and Mapplethorpe are known for their detached postures, Hujar’s silent, tacit presence pervades his work. Like Avedon, Hujar was the instigator of the performances captured in his portraits, as much as a director as a photographer.” That Hujar is considered in the same company of Avedon, Arbus, and Mapplethorpe, reminds us that the retrospective Speed of Life is long overdue.
Hujar’s restlessness led him to wander beyond the confines of the studio. Like Brassai, Hujar was a poet of the urban nocturne, prowling the streets with his camera as the day unraveled. Brassai’s Paris is gritty, erotic, sentimental, yet impersonal. Hujar’s photographs of New York’s streets at night embrace emptiness and furtive gestures, glowing skyscrapers, assorted rubble, discarded rugs, boys in drag, and girls passed out in his doorway. His nighttime images of the Hudson river are disquieting, suggesting powerful currents not fully understood by the dappled surfaces. The thrill and danger of an anonymous sexual encounter is manifested in the 1981 image, Man Leaning Against Tree. It is the moment for Hujar to surveille and assess, when the object of desire is seen but has not yet turned his head to return the gaze. There is a little bit of softness in the image, due, perhaps, to the dim light or the camera moving while the shutter remained open. This image is as much a document of Hujar’s habits of looking as it is about the man leaning against the tree. Despite claims of photography’s objectivity or passive observation, the photographer, consciously or not, visually manifests subjective desire, and Hujar was masterful in this regard. …
While all photographs are tethered to mortality, there is something exemplary in Hujar’s cool acceptance of our temporality. He was fully engaged with his moment yet unsentimental in his attachment. Whether he was photographing a lover or an abandoned dog as elegant as it is scruffy, we can sense that Hujar’s interest was intellectual and physical in equal measure. He may not have been comfortable with the world as it was, but he embraced and even loved what was in front of his camera. “My work comes out of my life, the people I photograph are not freaks or curiosities to me,” he said. “I like people who dare.”
Hujar put his art to political use in 1969. In late June, a police raid inspired fierce resistance from the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, in the West Village. Hujar’s boyfriend at the time, Jim Fouratt, arrived on the scene to organise for the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the first political group to cite homosexuality in its name. Hujar agreed to make a photograph for a GLF poster. Early one Sunday morning that fall, members of the group assembled and ran back and forth past the photographer on Nineteenth Street, west of Broadway. The poster, bearing the slogan COME OUT!!, appeared in late spring 1970 in advance of the gay liberation march that marked the first anniversary of Stonewall.
In September 1973, transgender Warhol Superstar Candy Darling (born James Lawrence Slattery) was hospitalised for lymphoma. She asked Hujar to make a portrait of her “as a farewell to my fans.” Out of several dozen exposures, Hujar chose to print this languorous pose. As rendered in the print, Candy’s banal, fluorescent-lit hospital room looks as elegant as the studio props in a Hollywood starlet’s portrait. Hujar later wrote that his style cues came from Candy, who was “playing every death scene from every movie.” The image, first seen in print in the New York Post after Candy’s death six months later, became the most widely reproduced of Hujar’s works during his lifetime.
Jeu de Paume presents a selection of 150 photographs of this singular artist from October 15th, 2019 to January 19th, 2020. The exhibition follows Hujar’s work from the beginnings mid 1950 until the 1980s, shaping a portrait of the underground New York City.
The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) were rooted in downtown New York. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of avant-garde dance, music, art, and drag performance. His mature career paralleled the public unfolding of gay life between the Stonewall uprising* in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
After graduating from high school in 1953, Hujar worked as an assistant to commercial photographers until 1968. Five years of contributing features to mass-market magazines convinced him that a fashion career “wasn’t right for me” and in 1973 he opted for an autonomous, near-penniless life as an artist. In his loft studio above a theater in the East Village, Hujar focused on those who obeyed their creative instincts and shunned mainstream success.
At age forty-two, he published his only monograph, Portraits in Life and Death, and opened his first solo gallery show. The searching intimacy he achieved as a portraitist carried over into unsentimental photographs of animals and plants, landscapes, buildings, and the unique features of nude bodies.
Hujar’s brief affair in 1981 with the young artist David Wojnarowicz evolved into a mentoring bond that changed both their lives. On their excursions to blighted areas around New York, Hujar crafted the portrait of a city in free fall, complementing Wojnarowicz’s dark vision of Reagan-era America.
Peter Hujar died of AIDS-related pneumonia in November 1987.
Press release from Jeu de Paume
Early years
In 1953, Peter Hujar finished high school in Manhattan, where he had studied photography. He then worked for some fifteen years as an assistant to commercial photographers. Punctuating those years were two long periods in Italy, buoyed by scholarships – a first one that was obtained by a boyfriend (1958-1959) and then his own (1962-1963). From 1968 to 1972, he tried to make it as a freelancer in the mass-market world of fashion, music, and advertising photography. The hustle “wasn’t right for me,” and he turned his back on the commercial mainstream. From this time on he lived on almost nothing, squeaking by on small jobs, taking paying jobs only when necessary and focusing on the subjects he found compelling. In 1973, he moved to the crumbling East Village, into a loft that would become the setting for his mature studio work, most notably the vast majority of his portraits.
Portraits
Portraiture was central to Hujar’s practice. The subjects of his art, Hujar wrote, were “those who push themselves to any extreme” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” “In a sense, I am still a fashion photographer. These people are chic but in a dark kind of way. Most of them are unknown or maybe known to just a few, but they have all been creative adventurers and possess a certain spirit.”
Most of his portraits were posed, but Hujar often expected his models to perform in front of the camera, which made many of the shoots truly collaborative ventures. Disguises and props were often incorporated, and his subjects were sometimes veiled, simultaneously revealing and masking themselves.
The reclining portrait is a photographic genre Hujar made his own. The pose features extensively in his 1976 monograph Portraits in Life and Death, and he continued to rely on it as a means of capturing something unique in his sitter: to face a camera lens from a reclining position is an unfamiliar and provoking experience.
New York
“The happiest times with Peter, when he wasn’t photographing, were walking around Manhattan, looking at the crowns of buildings, and the fantasies about ‘living there,'” remembers Gary Schneider, one of his close friends.
Born in New Jersey, Hujar spent all his life in New York, and more specifically in Manhattan, whose buildings, streets, and piers he started photographing more extensively in the second half of the 1970s. Divided between Downtown’s derelict areas and Midtown’s skyscrapers, Hujar’s New York is often a nocturnal city: a place of abandoned structures, night-time cruising, and early-dawn vistas. A few journeys outside New York, during the summer months, to the beaches of Fire Island in the Hamptons, and, in the early 1980s, to the countryside around Germantown, forty miles north of New York, along the Hudson River, offer other glimpses of Peter Hujar’s personal geography, testifying to the variety of subjects that he found worth photographing.
Bodies
Portraiture of bodies was another focal point of Hujar’s last decade of work. In 1978, some of his works were included in The Male Nude: A photographic Survey at the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery in New York.
Bodies, he suggested, could be read as freely as faces for character, emotion, or life story.
He photographed bodies in the extremes of youth and old age, bodies displaying unique features, and bodies in transient states, notably pregnancy and arousal.
Whether photographing faces or bodies, Hujar was attentive to the characteristics conferred by time and experience, such as Manny Vasquez’s spinal tap scar and the imprint left by socks on Randy Gilberti’s ankles. “I want people to feel the picture and smell it,” he said of his nudes, which he contrasted to the idealised bodies in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work.
Gracie Mansion Gallery, 1986
When exhibiting his work, Hujar employed two distinct methods. He displayed prints either in isolation (notably in his loft, where just one photograph at a time was on view) or in large groupings, two images high, as on this wall. For the last exhibition during his lifetime, in January 1986 in New York, Hujar covered the walls of the Gracie Mansion Gallery with a frieze of seventy photographs in no apparent order. He fine-tuned the layout for days until no one type of image (portrait, nude, animal, still life, landscape, cityscape) appeared twice consecutively. Each of his subjects thus preserved its own identity and singularity rather than serving as a variation on an imposed theme.
The arrangement highlighted his inventive range, created echoes among seemingly unrelated images, and drew attention to preoccupations that had recurred throughout his career. The display in this room centres on images taken in the 1980s and is freely inspired by that 1986 exhibition.
Andy Warhol
In 1964 Peter Hujar was a regular visitor to The Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio at 231 East 47th Street in New York. He posed four times for Screen Tests, brief portraits filmed by Warhol and screened in slow motion. Together with his friend Paul Thek, Hujar was chosen as one of the “Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys”, whose film portraits were regularly shown at the Factory and at parties and events elsewhere. Among the other personalities figuring in the Screen Tests in 1964-1965 were the actor-directors Dennis Hopper and Jack Smith, together with writer-critic Susan Sontag and poet John Ashbery – both of whom would later pose for Hujar.
A hallmark of Hujar’s portraiture is the invisibility of technique – a kind of visual innocence – as if the camera were not present and the subject had been happened upon, discovered there, as Ludlam appears to be, in medias res.
“Hermetic appeal and an identification with psychic damage came together in Hujar’s last important relationship, with the meteoric younger artist David Wojnarowicz, who was a ravaged hustler when they met at a bar in late 1980 and who died from AIDS in 1992. They were lovers briefly, then buddies and soul mates. Wojnarowicz said that Hujar “was like the parent I never had, like the brother I never had.” In return, he inspired fresh energies in Hujar’s life and late work. In a breathtakingly intimate portrait of Wojnarowicz with a cigarette and tired eyes, from 1981, the young man’s gaze meets that of the camera, with slightly wary – but willing and plainly reciprocated – devotion: love, in a way. Their story could make for a good novel or movie – as it well may, in sketched outline in your mind, while you navigate this aesthetically fierce, historically informative, strangely tender show.”
Hujar observed his companions in this outlaw life with what might be called warm objectivity. Whatever the portrait subject – doll maker and transgender pioneer Greer Lankton, model Bruce St. Croix sitting naked on a chair and handling his huge erection, Warhol superstar Candy Darling on her death bed, or a pair of cows in a muddy field – he photographed them directly with his 2 1/4, often at close range, without props or gauzy lighting.
He began as a street photographer, on the prowl for unrehearsed gestures, as can be seen in a 1958 picture in Italy of a well-dressed young man touching his thick coif of dark hair and standing next to a pudgy boy in a cap who has his hands in his pockets.
Hujar’s indelible portraits of famous avant-garde artists and drag queens, and his curiously gothic landscapes and animal pictures, are so fastidiously exquisite, so fussily exact, so representative of a period past (“Speed of Life” is a very odd title) that they immediately summon the ratty hauteur, the necessary obsessions, and the cold-eyed dignity that helped most gay men survive, and not survive, in the early gay lib and AIDS years. …
… His portraits often combine the freakish curiosity of Arbus and the monumental candidness of his mentor Richard Avedon into something resembling momento mori portraits suitable for displaying atop a casket. They are unmistakably contemporary but they feel historic, as if burned to silver plates. (Not for nothing did Hujar make his own display prints.) That doesn’t mean there’s no life in those portraits; far from it, these are the essences of his subjects so well-distilled that there’s really no need to go on. We see nostalgia washing over the present.
Apologies. A filler posting from me as I am sick at the moment. Although I love the design of the old cameras – when viewed from the outside, through the media images, the exhibition seems to also be a bit of a filler from the Getty.
Where are the interesting questions?
How can a box of metal and glass, a machine, capture onto film and pixels, something that so transcends time and space that, at its best, it preserves the spirit of our existence, the condition of our becoming?
How does the camera impart its own reality, and how, through looking, do photographers understand how different cameras impart different realities? How do we intimately see what the camera sees, without looking through the machine?
How have digital cameras altered how we use the camera and how we see the world, moving us from a viewfinder and vanishing point, to looking at a flat screen on the back of the camera?
How does the physicality of the camera, from large format to iPhone, affect how we hold the machine, how we interact with it’s ontology and enact its rationale – in particular perspectives of abstraction, becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations: Substance, Relation, Quantity and Quality; Place, Time, Situation, Condition, Action, Passion?
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Once a simple wooden box with a primitive lens and cap for controlling light, the modern camera has undergone enormous change since its invention in the early nineteenth-century. Flexible film stocks, built-in light meters, motor drives, and megapixels are a few of the advancements that have transformed the way this ingenious device captures and preserves a moment in time. This display explores the evolution of the camera through the Museum’s collection of historic cameras and photographs.
Unknown maker (European) Camera Obscura c. 1750-1800 Wood, brass, and glass Object: H: 7.9 × W: 10.8 × D: 23.5cm (3 1/8 × 4 1/4 × 9 1/4 in.) Object (Extended): H: 31.1cm (12 1/4 in.) Lid extended: H: 15.9cm (6 1/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Unknown maker (French) Daguerreotype/Wet-plate Camera c. 1851 Wood, brass, and glass Object: H: 18.1 × W: 21.6 × D: 31.1cm (7 1/8 × 8 1/2 × 12 1/4 in.) Lens: H: 9.2 × Diam: 7.3cm (3 5/8 × 2 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Unknown maker (British) Camera box 1860 Wood, glass, metal The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
August Semmendinger (American, 1820-1885) Mammoth Plate Wet-Collodion Camera 1874-1885 wood, metal, fabric, and glass The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift in memory of Beaumont Newhall
August Semmendinger (1820 – August 6, 1885) was a manufacturer of photographic apparatuses and the inventor of the Excelsior Wet Plate Camera. Semmendinger first made his cameras in New York City. The second factory where he built his cameras was located in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Kodak (American, founded 1888) The Kodak 1888 Wood, leather, brass, and glass Object: H: 9.5 × W: 8.3 × D: 17.1cm (3 3/4 × 3 1/4 × 6 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
The very first Kodak camera.
John F. Collins (American, 1888-1990, active 1904-1974) [Kodak Ektra Camera] c. 1930 Gelatin silver print 38.4 × 48.1cm (15 1/8 × 18 15/16 in.) Gift of Nina and Leo Pircher
Eastman Kodak Company (American, founded 1888) Kodak Bantam Special 1936 Metal, enamel, and glass The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Eastman Kodak Company (American, founded 1888) World War II “Matchbox” Spy Camera 1944 Metal and glass The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Polaroid Corporation (American, founded 1937) Polaroid Land Camera Model 95 c. 1948-1949 Leather and steel Object (Closed): L: 24.1 × W: 11.4 × D: 5.7cm (9 1/2 × 4 1/2 × 2 1/4 in.) Case: H: 19.1 × W: 26.7 × D: 7cm (7 1/2 × 10 1/2 × 2 3/4 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Steineck Kamerawerk (Tutzing, West Germany) Steineck ABC Wristwatch Camera 1949 Metal, enamel, leather, and glass
Made in Germany by Steineck Kamerawerk. Subminiature camera for discs of film 25mm diameter, 8 exposures 7mm diameter. Steinhetl VI lens F:12.5mm f/2.8 fixed aperture, coated cobir enamel. Two-speed rotary shutter. Refelcting finder – concave mirror and ball and pin sight. Wristwatch shaped. Designed in Germany by Dr R Steineck.
Looks like a large wristwatch. Came with a 12.5mm (f2.5) fixed-focus lens. Single shutter speed. Eight round exposures with a 5.5 mm diameter are produced on a round disk of film 24mm in diameter. Disks can be cut from standard 35mm film. A cassette, with its own exposure counter, is used to hold the film. To load the camera, the cassette is pressed lightly into place in the opening in the back of the camera, and the knurled rim of the cassette is turned firmly to the right until it stops and the red dots on the camera body and cassette are aligned. Film advance is automatic – the film is readied for the next frame immediately after an exposure is made. The lens is a 12.5m f/2.5, made by Steinheil. It is fixed-focus so that everything from 4.25 ft. to infinity is sharp. The lens has a two-point aperture setting: one for bright light (red dot), the other for dim light (blue dot), set by a control knob on the face of the camera. The metal focal-plane shutter has only one speed, 1/125 sec. In making an exposure, the camera is held between the index finger and thumb, the shutter release being depressed by the thumb while the index finger serves to steady the camera by exerting a counter pressure. No separate action is required to advance the film or cock the shutter; as soon as the exposure has been made, the camera is ready to take the next picture. The A-B-C has two parallax-corrected finders: an optical hollow mirror viewfinder, which permits sighting from above when the camera, worn on the wrist, is held in picture-taking position. The other, a direct-vision viewfinder, is used at eye level, requiring that the camera be removed from the wrist. When the direct-vision finder is used, you sight through the hole in the back (cassette) with the camera close to the eye; the camera is held by the straps, both thumbs steadying the body, and the shutter release is operated by the index finger. The original accessories included filters, close-up lenses, and even a special enlarger. Steineck planned an M-sync flash for a future A-B-C, as well as a built-in filter carousel (to be put in front of the aperture control), and even a tripod-mount accessory that fits through the eye-level finder!
Text from Ebay website
Hasselblad AB (Swedish, founded 1841) Hasselblad wide angle camera 1954-1959 Metal, artificial leather, glass Object: 13 × 11 × 15cm (5 1/8 × 4 5/16 × 5 7/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Nippon Kogaku K.K. (Japanese, founded 1917) Nikon “Reporter” large load 35mm camera after 1959 Plastic, metal, and imitation leather-covered body The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Canon Inc. (Japanese, founded 1937) Canon S 35mm camera with rare F2 lens 1946 Metal, glass Object: 8 × 14.5 × 10cm (3 1/8 × 5 11/16 × 3 15/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Gloria and Stanley Fishfader
Introduced in 1938, the Canon S is the younger sibling of the Hansa Canon. It was developed to compete in quality with the German Leica II, but at a price more accessible to the Japanese public.
Polaroid Corporation (American, founded 1937) Polaroid SX-70 1972 Metal, plastic, leather, and glass Private collection
Exhibition includes a selection of rare cameras from the 19th century to present
The camera, once a simple wooden box with a primitive lens and cap for controlling light, has undergone enormous changes since its invention, eventually becoming a tool that is in most people’s back pockets. In Focus: The Camera, on view July 30, 2019 – January 5, 2020 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, explores the evolution of this ingenious device through a selection of historic cameras and photographs.
During the early 19th, the three essential components of photography – a dark chamber, a light-sensitive substrate, and a method of fixing the image – were used in different ways in the experiments of Nicéphore Niépce (French, 1765-1833), Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (French, 1787-1851), and William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877). In subsequent decades, advancements such as flexible film stocks, built-in light meters, motor drives, and megapixels transformed the way the camera captures and preserves a moment in time.
On view in the exhibition will be a number of cameras manufactured in the 19th century to present day, including the simple camera obscura, a daguerreotype camera, a stereo camera, an early roll-film camera, a large portable camera, a miniature spy camera, an early colour camera, and the first digital camera marketed to the general public. The exhibition will include text that explains how photographs are created using each of these cameras and techniques. Cameras produced by well-known brands such as Kodak, Leica, Nikon, Hasselblad, and Canon will be displayed.
The gallery will also include a number of portraits, self-portraits, and images of artists at work by famed photographers such as Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976), Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965), Lisette Model (American, born Austria, 1901-1983), Helmut Newton (German-Australian, 1920-2004), Edward Steichen (American, born Luxembourg, 1879-1973), Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), and Edward Weston (American, 1886-1958). These images remind the viewer of the inextricable relationship between the camera and the artist.
In Focus: The Camera is curated by Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs for the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website [Online] Cited 21/12/2019
Capt. Horatio Ross (British, 1801-1886) [Self-portrait preparing a Collodion plate] 1856-1859 Albumen silver print Image: 20 × 16.2cm (7 7/8 × 6 3/8 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Underwood & Underwood (American, 1881-1940s) Photographing New York City – on a slender support 18 stories above pavement of Fifth Avenue 1905 Gelatin silver print Image (left): 8 × 7.6cm (3 1/8 × 3 in.) Image (right): 8 × 7.6cm (3 1/8 × 3 in.) Mount: 8.9 × 17.8cm (3 1/2 × 7 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Man Ray showed himself in profile in this self-portrait, intently adjusting the focal range on his view camera as if for a portrait session. He directs the camera in the photograph at the audience, while the camera taking his picture remains invisible. The touch of Man Ray’s hand on the focusing ring serves as a reminder of the human artistry required to make photographs, a departure from his more accidental approach to creating works in other media. Man Ray solarised the print, using a process indelibly associated with him.
Employing the sharp focus and close vantage point that were the hallmarks of Group f/64, with which she was associated, Alma R. Lavenson presented her camera as a vital extension of herself as a photographic artist. Her hands delicately and reverently frame the lens, positioning it as her centre and source of inspiration.
Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website
Unknown photographer (American) [Portrait of Dorothea Lange] 1937 Gelatin silver print 13.7 × 16.7cm (5 3/8 × 6 9/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Gift of the Dixon Family
Walker Evans (1903-1975) Resort Photographer at Work Negative 1941; print later Gelatin silver print 15.9 × 22.4cm (6 1/4 × 8 13/16 in.) The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
A couple of years ago I was in Paris, searching for French peasant work clothes of the 1950s in the trendy secondhand shops of the Marais. It took me forever but I eventually found one blue shirt that fitted me… only one. Battered, patched up, but still present after all these years – hard wearing, practical, and tough. But also soft and pliable like a second skin, with its own look and feel, its own distinctive aesthetic. I knew what I wanted, I found it… or it found me. A treasure.
The same could be said of the photographs of Helga Paris. Her photographs picture the tough, hard existence of life in postwar East Germany but there is a fond affection for subject matter in the cameras engagement. Paris approaches her subjects, whether city or people, with directness but it is also a dialogue between the artist and her subjects which “give the viewer an insight into a moment of the everyday lives of an East German resident.”
“Paris opened herself to the worker’s world she found in Prenzlauer Berg, and often took photographs in the immediate surroundings – of friends and neighbours, the area’s old and run-down streets, and the melancholic vitality of the regulars in Berlin’s bars and cafés. The people in her photographs look deeply rooted, as if they had moved to the area with the intention of never going away.”
Misty cobbled corners, people in bars, in clubs, at work, on the street. Much as Ara Güler did for Istanbul (in a more romantic way), Paris captures the essence of an ecosystem, the culture and survival that was the living, behind the Iron Curtain. There is melancholy aplenty, the brooding streets with swooping pigeons and ubiquitous Trabant, all dark in their small sulkiness. There are beautiful boys with Anarchy stencilled on their jumper desiring liberated life, and reflective women deep in their own thoughts. Naira! Naira! Smoking a fag, with drunk-eyed pictures of a child on dirty wall, behind. Oh Naira, of what were you thinking! What brought you to this place?
There is sullenness, compassion, bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals all pictured with her probing mind. If you could say that a subject finds an artist then this is that aphorism in full technicolor. Engaged and engaging, these essential images stand the test of time – as relevant now in an era of neo-liberal fascism as they ever were in the past.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Akademie der Künste for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Helga Paris (born in 1938 in Goleniów, Poland) occupies an outstanding position in German photography. Her oeuvre exhibits the poetry of a Henri Cartier-Bresson as well as the austerity of an August Sander or Renger-Patzsch. Paris, who has lived in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin since 1966, has chronicled the long history of postwar East Germany. For more than three decades she has directed her gentle yet precise gaze toward the people who live it. Her photographs tell of the melancholy vitality of East Berlin corner pubs and the poetic tristesse of the old streetcars of the seventies. We encounter garbage truck drivers, stubbornly furious or calm teenagers, and proud female textile mill workers. We travel through Georgia and Siebenbürgen, and meander through the central German industrial city of Halle, a “diva in gray.” But these photographs also tell of the end of the postwar era, of the search for images of childhood and their retrieval.
Fotografie is a retrospective look at the work of German photographer, Helga Paris. Exhibiting a collection of photos taken in East Germany in the postwar period, Paris’s work is considered to be one of the most revealing and compassionate bodies of work reflecting life in Germany at that time. Going beyond a simple ‘social study’, Paris’s technique was simply to engage with her subjects, rather than take on the role of the distant street photographer. In making this connection, the result has been a collection of photos that give the viewer an insight into a moment of the everyday lives of an East German resident.
Starting in the 60s, Helga Paris took an interest in photography and began teaching herself the basics. Paris came from a fashion and art background, but it was her interest in the everyday lives of the East Berlin people, during the postwar period that made her want to capture that on film.
Since 1966 Helga Paris has lived in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, a traditionally working class district that in the DDR days had become a refuge for bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals, condoned by the authorities. Here she became a chronicler of post-war East Germany. Paris opened herself to the worker’s world she found in Prenzlauer Berg, and often took photographs in the immediate surroundings – of friends and neighbours, the area’s old and run-down streets, and the melancholic vitality of the regulars in Berlin’s bars and cafés. The people in her photographs look deeply rooted, as if they had moved to the area with the intention of never going away. Their faces express both their exhaustion and their lust for life.
From 8 November 2019 to 12 January 2020 at its exhibition halls at Pariser Platz, the Akademie der Künste will present the photographic work of Helga Paris from 1968 to 2011. Featuring 275 works, including many individual images and series that are to be shown for the first time, this will be her most comprehensive exhibition to date and the first retrospective of the artist in her home city of Berlin in 25 years. Excerpts from the extensive Leipzig, Hauptbahnhof (1981), Moskau (1991/1992) and Mein Alex (2011) series will be seen for the first time, among others.
In addition to the photographer’s special ability to make ever-changing compressed contemporary history tangible in her images and series over the course of decades, it is her tender, graceful and heavily nuanced black-and-white modulations expressing social empathy that make her work unmistakable.
Helga Paris was born in 1938 in Gollnow, Pomerania (today Polish town of Goleniów), and grew up in Zossen near Berlin. She began her work as a self-taught photographer in the 1960s. She became one of the key chroniclers of life in East Berlin with images of her neighbourhood in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, pictures of pub-goers, sanitation workers, the women from the VEB Treffmodelle clothing factory, artists, punks, children from Hellersdorf and passers-by from Alexanderplatz. Helga Paris also took photographs in Transylvania (1980), Georgia (1982) and the city of Halle (1983-1985), where she produced her Diva in Grau series that was banned from being shown until 1989/1990, as well as in Volgograd (1990), New York (1995) and Poland (1996/1997), among others. Helga Paris has been a member of the Film and Media Art Section of the Akademie der Künste since 1996.
The curator of the exhibition is art historian Inka Schube, who has worked with Helga Paris on numerous occasions. Filmmaker Helke Misselwitz will present an installation involving interviews with Helga Paris on the topics of origin, the changing city and her work as a photographer in East Germany and up into the early 21st century.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the Spector Books publishing house, Leipzig has released the photography book Helga Paris. Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, 1981.
An exhibition by the Akademie der Künste in cooperation with the ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), with the kind support of the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung that allowed the living legacy to be indexed and new prints of three previously unpublished series to be made, as well as the DEFA-Foundation.
Press release from the Akademie der Künste website [Online] Cited 11/11/2019
In the early 1980s the DDR’s Gesellschaft für Fotografie im Kulturbund gave professional photographers commissions that allowed them to work on projects of their own choosing. These commissions not only gave photographers financial security, but also opened doors to places where, under normal circumstances, only media loyal to the regime had been allowed to work. Helga Paris chose to photograph a clothing factory, Treff-Modelle VEB in Berlin, where she herself had had some work experience during her fashion design studies. There she portrayed the factory’s female workers, eliciting a wide variety of subtle reactions from them: from self-confident and open to confrontational and defensive.
With around 275 photographs from the period of 1968 till 2011 – including numerous single frames and series shown for the first time – the exhibition of Helga Paris at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz is the photographer’s most comprehensive to date. It is the first retrospective of Paris’ work in her home city of Berlin in 25 years.
Having lived in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district since 1966, Helga Paris (born 1938) began taking photos of people in her neighbourhood in the early 1970s. She found her photographic motifs in flats, pubs, break rooms and factory halls, or on the streets and in train stations. With a background in modernist painting, theatre and poetry as well as early Soviet, Italian and French cinema, the autodidact photographer has spent the last four and a half decades developing an extensive oeuvre of delicate, nuanced black-and-white photography.
But she is not only a chronicler of Prenzlauer Berg. Helga Paris also has taken photos in Halle, Leipzig, Transylvania, Georgia, Moscow, Volgograd and New York. There, as in her local neighbourhood, she constantly explores how it feels “to be in history”, and how the respective circumstances are reflected at the most private level. Helga Paris’s imagery has a particular poetic approachability, in part because it forgoes all ideological interpretations; her gaze suggests profound solidarity.
For the exhibition, the director Helke Misselwitz has designed a documentary film triptych, in which she makes it possible to experience how the life and work of Helga Paris are both interwoven and interdependent. Misselwitz traces a wide arc from the photographer’s childhood to the present; from Prenzlauer Berg to sites around the world; and from Paris’ close-ups to her farsighted vision.
Text from the Akademie der Künste website [Online] Cited 11/11/2019
As a result of the Cold War, the remarkable oeuvre of the German photographer Helga Paris (1938) was long almost unknown west of the Iron Curtain. While Paris enjoyed widespread popularity in East Germany, her photographs rarely reached a public in the West. Although her work, with its quite intimate glimpses of daily life in East Germany, is strongly linked to the course of her own life, its expressiveness is universal. The empathy of her gaze makes it easy for us to imagine ourselves in the people and places she photographed.
Resilience
On one hand Helga Paris’ photographs are about life in the German Democratic Republic (DDR), where the Second World War and the country’s communist regime brought restriction, loss, destruction and decline in their wake. On the other they show the gaze of a photographer who had been born in Pommeren (now in Poland), who grew up close to postwar Berlin, and who faced the world with resilience, curiosity and compassion. In 1966 Paris moved for good to Prenzlauer Berg in East Berlin, a traditionally working-class district that had become a refuge for bohemians, students and countercultural intellectuals, closely watched but condoned by the authorities. Here she became a chronicler of postwar East Germany. She often worked in the immediate surroundings – taking photographs of friends and neighbours, on the street, and in bars and cafés.
Hidden tensions
Although in the 1970s and 1980s Helga Paris also photographed in Romania, Poland and Georgia, the accent in the Huis Marseille exhibition is on East Germany before and after the Wende (1989-1990). She created the series Berliner Jugendliche (Berlin Youth) in 1980-1981, when her own children were teenagers, portraying youngsters who believed in an alternative way of life and who went to the concerts given by independent bands – a sort of East German variant of the Western punk scene. Their anarchic lifestyle did not go unnoticed by the regime, and many of those she portrayed also spent some time in prison. Paris subtly but revealingly captures the hidden tensions of the time in the teenagers’ postures, gestures, and facial expressions. She elicited a similar scale of reactions in the workers she photographed for the series Frauen im Bekleidungswerk VEB Treffmodelle Berlin (Women at the textile factory VEB Models, 1984): from self-confident and open to confrontational and defensive.
Run-down
In the same period Helga Paris documented the decline of the old city centre of Halle, interspersing photos of the city’s long-neglected buildings and streets with portraits of its residents – who only allowed themselves to be photographed if they had a say in how their portraits were taken. The impoverishment of Halle was only partly the result of the faltering East German economy; the government was also deliberately allowing the historic centre of Halle and other East German cities to become rundown in order to compel their populations to move into modern flats on urban peripheries. The exhibition Häuser und Gesichter: Halle 1983-85 was banned by the regime in 1987; it was 1990 before the people of Halle could see the photographs for themselves.
Helga Paris was born Helga Steffens in 1938 in Gollnow, Pommeren, now known as Goleniów in Poland. At the end of the war she fled with her family to Zossen, her father’s native city. She first came into contact with photography through an aunt who worked in a photographic laboratory. Between 1956 and 1960 she studied fashion design at the Fachschule für Bekleidung in Berlin. There she met the artist Ronald Paris, to whom she was married between 1961 and 1974, and with whom she had two children.
Via the Arbeiter- und Studententheater in Berlin, for which she made costumes, Paris came into contact with the later documentary maker Peter Voigt, who encouraged her to take more photographs. To improve her techniques, from 1967 to 1968 she worked in the Deutsche Werbeund Anzeigengesellschaft DEWAG photographic laboratory. She took many photographs in the theatre, such as productions of the Volksbühne, as her husband was also its set designer. In later years she would say that this experience had given her a solid foundation for her attitude to space as a street photographer.
Paris’s work was first exhibited in 1978, in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden. In 1996 she became a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Her self-portraits were a great success at the Kunst in der DDR exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (2003), and in 2004 Helga Paris was awarded the prestigious Hannah-Höch-Preis for a lifetime of achievement in the arts.
Press release from Huis Marseille for the exhibition Helga Paris / East Germany 1974-1998 Cited 26/11/2019
Just putting this out there in the ether of the cosmos because you never know, its spirit might hear you.
I am looking for a research fellowship or postdoc work in photography anywhere in the world.
I have been working at Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for years, 4 days a week making websites. This is because of my bipolar and anxiety disorder. It has been a job to get me through the tough times. But after my recent photographic research trip to Europe, I realise that I need more stimulus – to fully concentrate on photography at an elite level. To research and write a book on photography.
In 2021 I will have been an artist for 30 years and my first writings date from 1998. I have been writing Art Blart now for 10 years… a lot of research and writing for this cultural memory archive, perhaps used as the basis for a book on the spirit of photography in the 21st century. But I am open to any research project. I have to do something to be able to immerse myself fully in photography.
If you have any ideas or knowledge of friends with connections please let me know at bunyanth@netspace.net.au.
Thank you!
Marcus
New work
All photographs are from a new body of art work I am working on for 2020, provisionally titled ‘(How I) Wish You Were Here’, taken during my recent European research trip. These are difficult photographs to understand but please take the time (critical in looking at photographs) to feel them.
My mentor and friend Ian Lobb said: “This is the most difficult work to organise yet. There is something to see in every picture – but it is so subtle – not everyone will see it, but it is for people who look at pictures a lot. MG0028 (the yellow entrance with stone pillars) is lovely – the entrance painted a warm sickish colour, a sort of terrible colour aesthetically – and the cropping is just a little brutal: what is it really showing at this camera to subject distance?
But it all works brilliantly, and they are all like that – there are subtle things that can’t be traced: i.e. are they the photographer: or are they the camera or are they just inevitable in this world? It is a type of anti-spirituality meets spirituality… and any number of other meeting points.”
And my friend Elizabeth Gertsakis said: “Spatial as well as surface tactile. Fascinated randomness. The human figure appears as a singular frozen device. Post-apocalyptic as well.”
I said: the spirit has left the earth, the body; something NQR. Eventually, the whole purpose of the series is not to tell the viewer where they are in the world, just give little clues as the viewer moves through time and space… something that photography is very good at: disrupting time and space.
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Permanet exhibition Visited September 2019 posted November 2019
First gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
I didn’t have time on my European photographic research tour to post about this exhibition at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest.
Let me say right off bat, that I’m not a great fan of Capa’s work and the larger, 1990s non-vintage prints presented in this exhibition were unimpressive.
I admire Capa’s courage in order to get the shot (“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”), but his photographs leave me cold. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but his objectivity, his reportage, is just that. Looking back 80 years later, we must remember how raw, how radical and confronting these photographs would have been when viewed in Life magazine and Picture Post at the time: authentic representations of war and death straight from the front. But in terms of the image, what you see is what you get. The framing is not particularly good, the angles are pretty conventional and front on, the occurrences direct and focused. The immediacy of the image, that is their strength.
For me they don’t leave a lasting impression, never have done. Yes, the D-Day landings because he was there; The death of a Loyalist militiaman because it is so famous; the shaving of the women collaborators heads because they are so vile … but you wonder, does his greatness come from the fact that, time and time again, he got the job done and produced the goods (as in a saleable image). That and the reality that he was a great self promoter: labelled the ‘Greatest War Photographer in the World’ by Picture Post in 1938. But was he a good image maker?
They are what they are. That’s really all you can say.
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
“La Guerre Civile en Espagne,’ in Vu Magazine No. 445 September 23, 1936
Caption: “Le jarret vif, la poitrine au vent, fusil au poing, il dévalaient la pente couverte d’un chaume raide… Soudain l’essor est brisé, une balle a siffle – une balle fratricide – et leur sang est bu par la terre natale … “
“His step quick, his chest to the wind, his rifle in his hand, he hurtled down the steep slope. Suddenly the boom was broken, a bullet whistled – a fratricidal bullet – and their blood is drunk by the homeland … “
The caption as published in LIFE magazine: “Robert Capa’s camera catches a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head in front of Cordoba.”
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) September 5, 1936. The death of a Loyalist militaman 1936 Gelatin silver print
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Gerda Taro (1910-1937)
Gerta Pohorylle (1 August 1910 – 26 July 1937), known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German Jewish war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
Taro was the companion and professional partner of photographer Robert Capa. The name “Robert Capa” was originally an alias that Taro and Capa (born Endre Friedmann) shared, an invention meant to mitigate the increasing political intolerance in Europe and to attract the lucrative American market. A significant amount of what is credited as Robert Capa’s early work was actually made by Taro.
Coverage of the Spanish Civil War
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Taro travelled to Barcelona, Spain, to cover the events with Capa and David “Chim” Seymour. Taro acquired the nickname of La pequeña rubia (“The little blonde”). They covered the war together in northeastern Aragon and in the southern Córdoba province. Always together under the common and using the bogus signature of Robert Capa, they succeeded in publishing through important publications (the Swiss Zürcher Illustrierte, the French Vu). Their early war photographs are distinguishable since Taro used a Rollei camera which rendered squared photographs while Capa produced rectangular pictures using a Contax camera[citation needed] or a Leica camera. However, for some time in 1937 they each produced similar 35 mm pictures under the label of Capa&Taro.
Subsequently, Taro attained some independence. She refused Capa’s marriage proposal. Also, she became publicly related to the circle of anti-fascist European and intellectuals (such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell) who crusaded particularly for the Spanish Republic. fr:Ce Soir, a communist newspaper of France, signed her for publishing Taro’s works only. Then, she began to commercialise her production under the Photo Taro label. Regards, Life, Illustrated London News and Volks-Illustrierte (the exile edition of Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung) were amongst the publications that used her work.
Reporting the Valencia bombing alone, Taro obtained the photographs which are her most celebrated. Also, in July 1937, Taro’s photographs were in demand by the international press when, alone, she was covering the Brunete region near Madrid for Ce Soir. Although the Nationalist propaganda claimed that the region was under its control, the Republican forces had in fact forced that faction out. Taro’s photographs were the only testimony of the actual situation.
“So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world” (epitaph in French and Catalan on her tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris)
“The Spanish War Kills Its First Woman Photographer,” in LIFE Magazine (Gerda Taro, July 1937) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa
(Endre Ernő Friedmann) 22 October 1913, Budapest, Hungary – 25 May 1954, Thái Bình, Vietnam
He never avoided challenges – he brought his restless, adventurous spirit and toughness from Hungary. He hardly had anything else in his luggage when he left his native country in 1931. He made photo-history with his war reportage on the Spanish Civil War, WWII, China, and Vietnam. His stories and, in particular, his slogan – “if your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” – made him a legendary person. But he made a mistake in Thái Bình. He went too close.
His brother wrote about him: “He lived a lot and suffered a lot during his short life. He was born poor and died poor. He bequeathed us the chronicle of his unique career along with the visual proof of his conviction: not only can mankind endure a lot but it is able to win every now and then.”
His parents – Júlia Berkovits and Dezső Friedmann – were tailors, who ran a prosperous show-room in Budapest. Their first child was László, followed by Endre and five years later by Kornél. After a Lutheran elementary school, Robert Capa went to study at Madách Secondary School. Inspierd by Lajos Kassák, he became interested in journalism in 1929, one year before his matriculation. After 1930, he was a photographer.
He was a good friend of Suzanne Szász, i.e. Székely Zsuzsa, already in Budapest. He lived at the same house as Éva Besnyő, who was his first childhood love.
He was shortly imprisoned because of his leftist connections and his participation in a leftist demonstration on 1 September 1930. In prison, he learnt the methods of the infamous investigator Péter Hain, who beat him so hard that he lost consciousness. He was released through his parents’ connections and he almost immediately left the country.
According to one of the legends, he only had a stick of salami in his luggage when he left. His train ticket to Vienna was paid by the Jewish Community of Pest, from there he went on to Prague through Brno and somehow he eventually arrived in Berlin. He left in July 1931 and it took him two or three weeks to get to the German capital. He studied journalism at the German Political College (Deutsche Hochschule für Politik). Since his parents were becoming poor and were not able to support him, he went to work as a photo lab assistant at the photo agency Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst). In the beginning, almost everybody spoke Hungarian at Dephot. No wonder since it was founded by Simon Guttmann and its financial manager was László Fekete, known as Ladislaus Glück at that time.
There were László Czigány (Taci) and György Markos among his fellow-workers and friends. He received his first camera at this time, a Voigtländer 6×9 from György Kepes. Later he got a Leica from Guttmann to carry out smaller assignments.
In 1932, he was sent by Guttmann to make the report which made him famous: he took the photo of Leon Trotsky at the Socialist Congress in Copenhagen. He was the only one to succeed in taking a photo of Trotsky, since photography was strictly forbidden at the meeting. The photo was published by Weltspiegel on a full page.
He was assisted in adapting himself to the foreign city and culture by his friends from Budapest, György Kepes and Éva Besnyő. They often invited him for dinner at their home, actively contributing to his subsistence besides his spiritual development. (At this time he stealthily ate the everyday roast-meat chop of his landlady’s dachshund.) He had to leave Berlin in 1933, which became more and more dangerous for left-wing Jewish intellectual immigrants. He went to Vienna and from there to Budapest by boat. He went to court schoolgirls at Lajos Pécsi’s studio in Dorottya Street almost everyday with his friends from the Munka-kör (Work Circle), among them Lajos Kassák. He worked for photographer Ferenc Veres in Budapest, taking photos of Budapest for touristic leaflets and publications. But he did not do it just howsoever! He did it by the metre. The photographer bought the exposed and developed Leica-films by 26 frames, i.e. by the metre from Endre Friedmann. We do not know what happened to these pictures or those he made in 1933 at the World Scout Jamboree in Gödöllő. Some of them were certainly taken to Paris, where a photographer friend of his tried to sell them to French photo agencies – without any success.
He moved to Paris in September 1933, still not as Capa, but neither as Bandi Friedmann any more; he tried to sell his photos under his new name André Friedman – with little success. He was starving more often than eating well. The young Hungarian with many names yet being actually an unknown photographer was helped by André Kertész with work, connections, his friendship and – knowing Capa – certainly with some money, too. (Later – already in America – he designed Capa’s book titled Death in the Making (Így készül a halál) from Gerda Taro’s and Capa’s photos taken in Spain.) He came into contact with Gisèle Freund, Hans Namuth and Chim at this time. Soon after he made friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson.
His first photo report was published in 1934 in Vu Magazine. He changed his name to Capa around this time almost together with his girlfriend Gerda Pohorylle, whose name became Gerda Taro. Foreign literature wrongly put together the name of Robert Capa from those of Robert Taylor and Frank Capra, but, to our knowledge, he was called Cápa (shark) because of his big mouth and pushy behaviour already at secondary school in Budapest. All he did abroad was to make it sound English by dropping the accent. The change of his name was also motivated by financial interests, since Gerda was able to sell the photos of a successful American photographer at a price three times higher than those of André. His appearance was also significantly transformed together with the change of his name. He had his long hair cut and he began to wear well-ironed suits, believing that it would be the seal of his success. However, it was difficult for him to work up the change of his name and the radical transformation of his appearance mentally.
He went to record the Spanish Civil War in 1936/37 together with Gerda Taro (whom he taught photography), assigned by Regards, a leftist French weekly magazine. And why should he not have received accreditation when his commissioner, Regards had a Hungarian editor, Pál Aranyossy writing under the name of Falus? Dezső Hoffmann was also working here at this time. Gerda died during an air-raid, but Spain became the springboard to world-wide fame for Capa since his photo titled “The Falling Soldier” irrevocably became a classic.
He worked in London, Paris and returned to Spain to take photos at the fall of Barcelona. He was everywhere where the sky was resounding. Besides the weekly magazine Regards, his photos were also published in LIFE. A countless number of his photos were published by Stefan Lorant in his journals, in Weekly Illustrated and in Picture Post. Lorant coined the slogan “The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa,” which accompanied him all through his life.
He spent six months in China with film director Joris Ivens and cameraman John Fernhout during the Japanese occupation. He learnt English from the Dutch in the middle of China and he taught them songs of Hungarian highwaymen in exchange. By the way, Fernhout was Éva Besnyő’s first husband, whom she met earlier in the Spanish Civil War.
Capa returned to Paris, then went back to Spain again to take the series of photos published on 11 pages in Picture Post, two pages in LIFE and five pages in Regards.
After his father died in Budapest, he had nothing else binding him to Europe, so he moved to the United States in 1939 following his mother and his younger brother. Not only his photography, but also the typical Hungarian “lecho” (lecsó) dish cooked by Júlia Friedmann became a legend in the larger group of their friends. He preserved his Hungarian bonds: in his writing “Why have I left home?” he wrote about the conspiracy with his secondary schoolmates under the pillars of the Chain Bridge in Budapest. At the time, he mostly made reportage for LIFE, for example about the presidential elections in Mexico, where he met Kati Deutsch again, a former pupil of Hungarian photographer Lajos Pécsi.
He authored a book in 1941 together with writer Diana Forbes-Robertson about the air battle of London, entitled The Battle of Waterloo Road. After Hungary’s declaration of war, for being a citizen of an enemy state, he was not allowed to leave a ten-mile range of New York and he was also forbidden to take photos. However, in a rather short time, as perhaps the only alien enemy, he achieved to be accredited by the U. S. Army. He only had these personal documents at that time: U. S. residence permit, a Hungarian passport and letters of assignment from various journals. It did not pose an unsolvable problem to him, since he already succeeded in crossing international borders with an expired passport and a nicely decorated Hungarian restaurant menu – and with his big talk – already ten years earlier.
He took photos in England, North Africa, Sicily and in other parts of Italy. He landed with the first American troops on D-Day. He covered the last German offensive in Belgium and took photos about the fall of Leipzig. In the last day of the war he was asked by the Paris correspondent of the American Army’s radio to read an appeal in Hungarian on the air to persuade the population of besieged Budapest to turn against the Germans. Capa accepted to do it; however, by this time his Hungarian had become so rusty that he had to give it up in disgrace. After this incident, his friends were teasing him unmercifully about being a fake Hungarian. At this time Hemingway’s saying became a classic: “Capa speaks seven languages, but all of them poorly.”
At the end of the war, he was about to have a business-card printed with the title “Robert Capa, war photographer, unemployed.” Being aware of the course of world history since that time and Capa’s life story, he could hardly have distributed a lot of these cards. He received U. S. citizenship after the war, officially under the name of Robert Capa.
He went to the Soviet Union in 1947 with John Steinbeck, who wrote about him: “Capa was able to see and use what he had discovered. He was able to show the whole population’s hatred on a child’s face… Capa’s work is the proof of his great heart and his exuberant compassion… I frequently travelled and worked with Capa. He may have had much closer friends but nobody liked him as much as I did. He liked to seem to be easy and carefree in his work. But he was not. His photos are not accidental.”
In the same year, he founded Magnum in New York with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, Maria Eisner, William Vandivert and his wife. Organising the agency, getting clients and making money took much of his time. He wrote to Maria Eisner around 1950: “I enjoy so much to be able to take photos again that I think I will get into to the habit.” After his death, Magnum was taken on and managed by his younger brother, Kornél Friedmann – or as he is better known: Cornell Capa.
In 1947, Robert Capa went to Turkey with a 16 mm film camera. A little bit later he covered the birth of the State of Israel. In Tel Aviv he met a lot of Hungarian acquaintances and then, guided by Paul Goldmann, a photographer of Hungarian origins, he took pictures of the heroic defence at the Kibbutz Negba in the Negev Desert. He also recorded the immigrant Hungarian battalion fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem.
In 1948, he spent six weeks in Hungary, taking photos of the war-torn country with the more and more evident signs of communist influence. At this time reconstruction works were implemented under the first three-year plan. He was accompanied by György Markos, his friend in Berlin and then in Paris. He took photos at the Ganz Shipyard, he recorded the first rice harvest in Békés County and the city of Budapest reviving from the ruins. “The day before I left, I went to get my exit visa. The sergeant who handled foreigners studied my passport very thoroughly. After stamping my exit visa, he asked me which school I went to. I told him the name of my secondary school in Budapest and he promptly listed my teachers and found out the year of my matriculation. He attended the same school, which he finished two years later than me. He gave back my passport and said: “If you had been born two years later with your talent, you either would not be alive today or you would be a secretary of a minister. This way, however, you are only a troubled Western liberal. This is historical materialism.”” This story, entitled “Conversation in Budapest” was published a year later in Holiday Magazine.
Until 1952, he mostly reported about his travels on assignment by Holiday Magazine, often writing the articles as well. Although he never grew rich, he was always full of ideas hiding opportunities to make a lot of money. Once he said: “I will never make millions. You make millions if you have one good idea. When you have twenty a day, you have to share them.” He was proud of his shrewdness that he attributed to being Hungarian. He reversed the well-known slogan from Hollywood, quoted earlier. In his version he said: “It is not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.”
In 1954, he was sent to Indochina by LIFE to cover the French colonies. On 25 May, he stepped on a land-mine and died. He was honoured with a posthumous Croix de Guerre by General René Cogny.
Capa’s memory has not faded – neither in Hungary, nor abroad. This is, not the least, due to his younger brother who, after the deaths of Capa, Bischof and Chim, felt that he did not have a more important task in his life than ensuring eternal life for these geniuses of photography. His zeal is attested by several exhibitions and books. His work was not without success: almost thirty years after Capa’s death, one of the best Hungarian writers, Ferenc Karinthy wrote about the photographer in his book The End of the World (Vége a világnak). Also András Simor wrote a poem as an homage to the photographer and to the soldier he made immortal. Film director Miklós Jancsó wrote an essay for the fortieth anniversary of Thái Bình. And above all: there is no photographic history or textbook without mentioning both of their names with Robert Capa on the top.
Károly Kincses (2005) “Robert Capa,” on the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center website [Online] Cited 03/11/2019
Please note: according to Capa’s birth entry his fathers name was Dávid Friedman (one n) and he was named Endre Ernő Friedman (one n). According to my friend György Németh whom this information came from, he later used his name with two N. As György says, it’s a bit of a mess as he used all kind of spelling throughout his life. Thank you György!
Robert Capa’s birth entry
Second gallery
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Fountain rubble in city square, Stalingrad, USSR (installation view) August 1-31, 1947 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Student civil-defense volunteers assisting the wounded, Guangzhou, China (installation view) July-September 1938 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Funeral procession for victim killed on the day of the presidential elections, Mexico City, Mexico (installation view) July 9, 1940 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Man and cat outside an air-raid shelter, London, UK June-July 1941 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Installation views of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Medical transport craft for men wounded in the first wave of American troops landing on D-Day, off Omaha Beach, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France (installation view) June 6, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces burying some of the men killed during the D-Day landings, near Colelville-sur-Mer, Omaha Beach, Normandy, France June 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) American soldiers guard a group of captured Germans, southwest of Saint-Lð, Normandy, France July 26-30, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Cow in the middle of a street lined with ruined buildings, Normandy, France (installation view) June-July 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) Soldiers leading a French woman who had collaborated with the Germans to the Préfecture de Police to have her head shaved, Chartres, France (installation view) August 18, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 40 x 50cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition The Photojournalist Robert Capa II at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa (American-Hungarian, 1913-1954) German soldiers captured by American forces during the Battle of the Bulge, south of Bastogne, Belgium (installation view) December 23-26, 1944 Gelatin silver print, printed 1990s 50 x 40cm Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center, Budapest 8 Nagymező Street, 1065 Budapest, Hungary Phone: +36 1 413 1310
Exhibition dates: 29th May – 17th November, 2019 Visited August 2019 posted November 2019
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
“A moment of experience”
This is the first of my catch up postings on exhibitions and art I saw during my European art and photographic research tour.
I know very little about the history of Turkish photography, and knew nothing of the work of “The eye of Istanbul”, Ara Güler, before I saw this exhibition.
Visually, Güler’s images are atmospheric renditions of people and place, grounding the representation of a city in the people who live and work there. They share a mainly male gaze, a patriarchal perspective on the treasured secrets of Istanbul, for this perspective is how the culture at that time (and possibly now?) was structured.
Güler’s visual histories of rare and subtle perception, “make visible the unseen, the unknown, and the forgotten.”1 They implicate “the urban discourse as a system in which culture enlists the medium (of photography) for representational tasks – nation building, identity construction, city scapes2,” highlighting photography’s ineradicable role for interpretation in the construction of knowledge and memory.3
As the press release states, Güler’s photographs have made a very significant contribution to the formation of the public’s collective imagination and memories of the city, but these memories of the city can only ever be reflections of concepts of identity that have developed across the social spectrum from within the self, within the culture, and within the political arena. One informs the other.
Güler’s cityscapes can only be a partial representation of what a city was and what it was moving to become. Paraprashing Eyelet Carmi when she talks of Sally Mann’s landscape photographs of the Deep South of America, we might say that the urban landscape, the photograph shows us, is never a neutral space. It is always historically constructed, politically used and emotionally complex.4 It is where national history is mediated by and intertwines with patriarchal assumptions, emotions, memories and personal experiences of everyday life. The personal is national and vice versa, for “the notion of home and place (national and personal alike) is inevitably unfixed, unstable and partial.”5
In an erudite and instructive piece of writing by Zeynep Uğur, “After Ara Güler: Capturing the Feeling of Loss in Modernizing Istanbul”, an extract of which is presented below, Uğur expertly places Güler’s photographs in the era of their composition, filling in the cultural background that surrounds their creation… depictions of the urban poor and their small routines – smoking, having a cup of tea, coffee, or an alcoholic drink – mainly men in their coffee shops and old fashioned bars, enacting traditions that have not changed for centuries, swept up in the modernisation of the city. “An emotional relation is established between people and the space they inhabit by enacting the space in the body and the body in the public sphere, hence humanising the city and spatially contextualising the people. As Jacques Lecoq announces in his pedagogy of movement in theater, only the body engaged in the work can feel, and thus reflect the evidence of the space. Güler’s urban poor portrayed in their work express the social reality with their bodies.”6
Where I disagree with Uğur is in her proposal that that these men, who are “waiting” instead of actively circulating or producing, proffer “a sense of disbelonging, being removed from the context, being out of place, a sense of invisibility, immobility and arbitrariness.”7 In other words, a sense of alienation from the existence and surroundings in which they find themselves (alienation of the individual in modernity is a trope that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism). Uğur proposes that Güler’s photographs possess hüzün, “a feeling of melancholia, nostalgia and loss in a multilayered city where multiple spatialities and temporalities are superposed. Guler’s photography reflects this singularity of Istanbul, its vibe and the ambiance experienced when wandering in the city.”8
This idea of a singularity is a very modernist way of perceiving the world. In this singular world a unified self can be easily alienated from itself (through concepts such as social alienation, the alienated body (Sartre), the phenomenologists’ ‘body for others’, the objectified body, the social body), and objectified by the gaze and discourse of others.9 “… Marx expresses his conceptualization of the state of alienation as a loss of sensuous fulfilment, poorly replaced by a pride of possession, and a lack of self-consciousness and hence actualization of one’s own real desires and abilities.”10 Leading to the feelings of melancholia, nostalgia and loss allegedly seen in the work of Ara Güler.
Postmodernism on the other hand sees no decentering of the self from the centre to the periphery for there is no centre, no periphery, only fragmentation. Fredric Jameson wrote that, “in the postmodern world, the subject is not alienated but fragmented. He explained that the notion of alienation presumes a centralized, unitary self who could become lost to himself or herself. But if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentred and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is an anxiety of identity.”11 Through the fragmentation of the subject the “existential model of “authenticity” and “inauthenticity” is thus challenged.”12 When there is no centre, no periphery – where one cannot move to the centre because there is no unified centre – there can be no unified self and therefore no alienation or, alien nation. There is no unified self, no appeal to nostalgia and melancholy, for the people in the photographs just are: and this is my point here, Güler was a visual archivist who documented life as it exists, not how we now look back on those times through the misty eyes of loss.
All we are left with, then, is the fact that Güler’s photographs are “a moment of experience” which document change not loss. His photographs document people and places that are not being lost (for that proposes a unified perspective), but images which picture an anxiety (and presence) in their radical potential, in their political context, which is both then and now – the receiver (the subject) and the viewer recognising the categories of perception and appreciation as it applies to him or her.13 An experience, existence and anxiety that is both then and now. As Garry Winogrand has observed, “The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.” Time after time, again and again.
1/ Marianne Fulton, Eyes of Time: Photojournalism in America, Boston: Little, Brown, 1988, p. 107
2/ -scape. a combining form extracted from landscape, with the meaning “an extensive view, scenery,” or “a picture or representation” of such a view, as specified by the initial element: cityscape; moonscape
3/ Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 5
4/ Ayelet Carmi, “Sally Mann’s American vision of the land,” in Journal of Art Historiography Number 17 December 2017, p. 25
9/ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen, 1969, pp. 339-351
10/ Harry Brod, “Pornography and the Alienation of Male Sexuality,” in Kimmel, Michael and Messner, Michael. Men’s Lives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1989, p. 397
11/ Sherry Turkle, Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995, p. 49
12/ Katarzyna Marciniak, “Introduction,” in Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991
13/ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. (trans. Richard Nice). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986, p. 207
‘I believe that photography is a form of magic by which a moment of experience is seized for transmission to future generations,’ Güler once said when asked to explain his art
Anonymous photographer Ara Güler Nd Gelatin silver print Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Installation views of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photos: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Installation views of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Istanbul Modern, in collaboration with the Ara Güler Museum, presents an exhibition of works by Ara Güler, “the man who writes history with his camera.” Titled “Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul” the exhibition follows the changes that have taken place in the city since the 1950s, and is open to public between May 29 – November 17, 2019.
A collaboration between Istanbul Modern and the Ara Güler Museum, the exhibition draws on the archives of both institutions to portray the changes that have taken place in the city from the mid-20th century to the present.
It also shows the influential role of Ara Güler’s photographs in the development of the public’s collective memory of Istanbul following these changes.
All signed by him
The exhibition brings together photographs from different periods that were signed by him, as well as various dark room prints, objects and ephemera from the archives of the Istanbul Modern Photography Collection and the Ara Güler Museum, and maps that situate the works in different neighbourhoods and angles. As a whole, the exhibition aims to address the relationship between photography and a photographer’s subjectivity through the works of Güler, who defines himself as a photojournalist and photojournalists as “people who write history with their cameras.”
When it comes to Istanbul, Ara Güler’s photographs have made a very significant contribution to the formation of the public’s collective imagination and memories of the city. The exhibition combines Ara Güler’s photographs, which invite viewers to look at them again and again, with archival materials in order to highlight Güler’s practice as well as his role in the creation of our perception of Istanbul.
Curated by Demet Yıldız, Photography Department Manager at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, with Umut Sülün, Manager of the Ara Güler Museum and Research Center, acting as consultant, the exhibition can be visited until November 17. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, there will be talks and various programs that focus on the city and collective memory.
About Ara Güler
As a youth he was greatly influenced by the cinema, and while in high school he worked at film studios in every branch of the industry. In 1951 Güler graduated from the Getronagan Armenian High School and began training in theatre and acting under Muhsin Ertugrul, aspiring to be either a director or a scriptwriter. At that time, some of his stories were published in literary magazines and Armenian newspapers. He continued his education in the Faculty of Economics at Istanbul University. However, on deciding to become a photojournalist, he left the university and completed his military service.
He began his journalism career with the newspaper Yeni İstanbul in 1950. He became a photojournalist for Time Life in 1956, and for Paris Match and Stern in 1958. Around the same time, the Magnum Agency started distributing his photographs internationally. One of his first features was on the ruins of Noah’s Ark, and more than one hundred of those photographs were distributed by Magnum. Also during these years he reported on Mount Nemrut, introducing it to the world. Another of his important features was on the rediscovery of the forgotten city of Aphrodisias, through which it likewise was revealed to the world.
From 1956 until 1961 Güler headed the photography section of Hayat magazine. In the 1961 edition of the British Journal of Photography Year Book, he was named one of the seven best photographers in the world. That same year he was accepted as a member of the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) and was its only Turkish member. In 1962 he received the Master of Leica award in Germany and was the subject of a special issue of the journal Camera, then the most important photography publication in the world. His works were exhibited at the “Man and His World” show in Canada in 1967; and at the Photokina Fair in Cologne in 1968. He took the photographs for Lord Kinross’s book about Hagia Sophia, published in 1971.
His photograph was on the cover of the English, French, and German editions of the book Picasso: Métamorphose et Unité, published by Skira on the occasion of Picasso’s ninetieth birthday. In 1974 Güler was invited to the United States, where he photographed many famous personalities; the images were later exhibited under the title Creative Americans in many cities around the world. Also in 1974 he made a documentary film called End of a Hero about the scrapping of the battle cruiser Yavuz. His photographs on art and art history were used in articles in Time-Life, Horizon, and Newsweek, and published around the world by Skira. Starting in 1989 Güler joined the project A Day in the Life of… and collaborated with some the world’s most famous photographers in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei.
In 1992 his photographs of the great architect Mimar Sinan’s works, which he had been working on for many years, were published under the title Sinan, Architect of Süleyman the Magnificent in France by Editions Arthaud, and in the United States and the UK by Thames & Hudson. In the same year his book Living in Turkey was published by Thames & Hudson in the United States and the UK, in Singapore by Archipelago under the title Turkish Style, and as Demeures Ottomanes de Turquie by Albin Michel in France.
In 2002, France decorated Güler with the Legion d’Honneur Officier des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2009 he received La Médaille de la Ville Paris from the city of Paris. He was awarded honorary doctorates by Yıldız Technical University in 2004, Mimar Sinan Fine Art University in 2013, and Boğaziçi University in 2014; the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award in 2005; the Award for Service to Culture and the Arts of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in 2008; and the Outstanding Service Award of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 2009. Also in 2009 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Lucie Foundation in the United States.
Hundreds of exhibitions all over the world have featured Güler’s work, and his images have been published in dozens of books. Güler interviewed and photographed numerous celebrities, from Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill to Arnold Toynbee, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. As an outcome of the partnership created between Güler and Doğuş Group, two art institutions, Ara Güler Museum and Ara Güler Archives and Research Center, have opened their doors to visitors in Istanbul.
Ara Güler passed away on October 17, 2018, at the age of ninety.
Text from the Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery website
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Taşlıtarla, Gaziosmanpaşa 1959 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Feriköy (installation view) 1985 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Galata (installation view) 1950 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Hallç, Vapuru’nda (In the Golden Horn Ferry) (installation view) 1969 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text from the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Persembe Pazan, Karaköy (Thursday Market, Karaköy) (installation view) 1957 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Persembe Pazan, Karaköy (Thursday Market, Karaköy) 1957 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Wall text from the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Hazzopulo Pasajl, Beyoglu (Hazzopulo Passage, Beyoglu) (installation view) 1958 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Hazzopulo Pasajl, Beyoglu (Hazzopulo Passage, Beyoglu) 1958 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Eyüp Sultan Camii (Eyüp Sultan Mosque) (installation view) 1965 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Eyüp Sultan Camii (Eyüp Sultan Mosque) 1965 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Tarlabaşi (installation view) 1965 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Wall text from the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Sirkeci (installation view) 1956 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Sirkeci 1956 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Cagaloglu Hamami (installation view) 1965 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Sokollu Mehmet Paşa Camii, Kadirga (Sokollu Mehmet Pasha Mosque, Kadirga) (installation view) 1988 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Kandilli (A Bosphorus passenger boat leaving the European shores of Istanbul for the Asian shore) 1965 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Büyükdere (installation view) 1972 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Büyükdere (installation view) 1972 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Kandilli (installation view) 1985 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Kapaliçarsi (The Grand Bazaar) (installation view) 1972 Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Eminönü (installation view) 1954 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Eminönü 1954 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Sehzadebaşı 1958 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Istanbul Museum of Modern Art
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Tahtakale (installation view) 1966 Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Zeyrek (installation view) 1974 Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Zeyrek (installation view) 1960 Gelatin silver print Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Nightfall in the district of Zeyrek, Istanbul 1960 Gelatin silver print
Wall text from the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Tophane (installation view) 1959 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) A drunk man at a bar in Tophane 1959 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Tophane (Atrium of a house) (installation view) 1954 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Tophane (Atrium of a house) 1954 Gelatin silver print Ara Güler Archive and Research Center Collection
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Galata (installation view) 1955 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Extract from “After Ara Güler: Capturing the Feeling of Loss in Modernizing Istanbul”
…
Our focus is Güler’s portrayal of Istanbul in black and white in 1950s and 1960s, where Istanbul appears as a metropole “in progress”, or under construction. As described by the sociologist Nilüfer Göle, in the context of non-Western countries modernisation, involves a cultural shift, a process of changing habitus, aesthetic norms, values, and lifestyles in the public sphere. The economic development of the country goes along with this social and cultural transformation. In 1950s and 60s Turkey, the construction of highways and railways connected the national periphery to the centre. Istanbul received a mass wave of migration and expanded with slums during this improvised, unplanned urbanisation process. The city became the scene where centre and periphery, modern and traditional lifestyles encountered, confronted, and transformed one another and found ways to coexist. Urban poverty became an issue with this contrast becoming more and more visible in the city. …
Güler starts from the micro level, photographing people in their small routines: working, smoking, having a cup of tea, coffee, or an alcoholic drink. These people can be defined as the urban poor, not synchronised with the rapid urban growth and the modern ideal of progress. They are portrayed in the public sphere rather than in the intimacy of their private sphere. Their eyes, facial expressions, hands, and postures incarnates their poverty, highlighting modes of being that contrast sharply with the Westernising public sphere they have entered. An emotional relation is established between people and the space they inhabit by enacting the space in the body and the body in the public sphere, hence humanising the city and spatially contextualising the people. As Jacques Lecoq announces in his pedagogy of movement in theatre, only the body engaged in the work can feel, and thus reflect the evidence of the space. Güler’s urban poor portrayed in their work express the social reality with their bodies. …
People are also photographed in coffee shops and old fashioned bars where they socialise. Coffee shops have a particular significance in Istanbul’s urban culture, as they emerged as alternative public spheres to mosques in the 16th century. Coffee houses became popular by offering a venue for social occasions including leisure and political dialogue between men in the Ottoman world, thus creating a public culture, as noted by the historian Cemal Kafadar. As gender-mixed modern coffee houses gained popularity, traditional kahvehane became considered places of unproductive time pass activity. These alternative spaces, in turn, become a shelter for men alienated from the emerging modern public sphere and lifestyles. Güler’s men in coffee houses are “waiting”, as the opposite of circulating or producing that increasingly characterised the fast rhythm of the modern city.
In the absence of plans in the present and for the deferred future, a temporal slowing manifests itself. Hence, it points out to a suspension referring to the interruption of social ties, the feeling of being cut-off, a sense of disbelonging, being removed from the context, being out of place, a sense of invisibility, immobility and arbitrariness. These traits resonate with people waiting in the photographs, who seem slightly erased, detached from the space and time surrounding them. Güler’s choice of décor, the Ottoman ruins, emphasises this detachment by fixing our regard on the remains of the past embodied in the present and the obsolete corners of the city, not “illuminated” yet by the city lights.
Perhaps this is the very reason why Güler’s Istanbul appears as the visual reflection of the Nobel winning author Orhan Pamuk’s description of the grayscale Istanbul, marked by the feeling of hüzün. Comparable to Baudelaire’s description of Paris Spleen, hüzün is a feeling of melancholia, nostalgia and loss in a multilayered city where multiple spatialities and temporalities are superposed. Guler’s photography reflects this singularity of Istanbul, its vibe and the ambiance experienced when wandering in the city. Given that urban heritage is never patrimonialised and the events of the imperial and republican past haven’t been confronted, they haunt city’s present. …
Ara Güler might be referred as a Proustian in search of lost time, however his madeleine would be persons; the urban poor in the streets of Istanbul. His quest to seize what is being lost is not an interior process of romanticisation, but comes from the external world. He always insisted that he is not an artist who proposes an interpretation of reality, but a visual archivist who documents life as it exists. In his photographs, it is the people who craft the urban sphere by sitting, waiting, settling, investing, appropriating it. Güler composes the cityscape of Istanbul by parting from the margins to join the center, the core of the city. This composition identifies the singularity of Istanbul, hüzün, a feeling of loss of firm ground, a loss of an emotional root, which opens up a wide range of emotions and experiences.
Wall text from the exhibition Ara Güler: Two Archives, One Selection: Tracing Ara Güler’s Footsteps in Istanbul at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Ara Güler (Turkish, 1928-2018) Children playing in Tophane, Istanbul 1986 Gelatin silver print Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Asmalımescit Mahallesi, Meşrutiyet Caddesi, No: 99, Beyoğlu, 34430 İstanbul
There are some heartbreaking images (in particular by French/Brazilian photographer Henri Ballot), but in Parks photographs we never seem to hear Flavio’s voice – just his representation through the image. Despite Parks coming from a similar background of poverty and disenfranchisement and wanting the best for the boy, one can only wonder about the psychological effects of showing him the promised land and then having it all taken away.
The only time we come close to hearing Flavio’s wishes and his voice is in a snippet: “In spite of his wish to remain in the United States, Flávio was sent back to Brazil in 1963. Now 70 years old, he has never returned to the United States.”
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
On assignment to document poverty in Brazil for Life magazine, American photographer Gordon Parks encountered one of the most important subjects of his career: Flávio da Silva. Parks featured the resourceful, ailing boy from an impoverished Rio favela (Portuguese for shantytown) and his family in the heart-rending 1961 photo essay “Freedom’s Fearful Foe.” It resulted in donations from Life readers but sparked controversy in Brazil. This exhibition explores the celebrated photo essay, tracing the extraordinary chain of events it triggered and Parks’ representation of Flávio over several decades.
Paulo Muniz (Brazilian, 1918-1994) Untitled (Gordon Parks and Flávio da Silva at Airport, Soon to Fly to United States), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Negative July 5, 1961, printed later Gelatin silver print Framed: 72.9 × 57.6cm (28 11/16 × 22 11/16 in.) The Gordon Parks Foundation Courtesy of the artist’s estate/IMS
The J. Paul Getty Museum announced today an exhibition of photographs by celebrated artist Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006). On view July 9-November 10, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story explores one of the most important photo essays Parks produced for Life magazine and traces how its publication prompted an extraordinary sequence of events over several decades. The exhibition is co-organised by the Getty and the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, Canada in partnership with Instituto Moreira Salles, Brazil, and The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York.
“Gordon Parks’ photographs chronicling social justice, civil rights, and the African-American experience in the United States are both a vital historical document and a compelling body of artistic work,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “And, of all his varied projects, Parks considered the photographs of Flávio among his most important achievements. The great impact that it had, and still has today, can only be appreciated by presenting these photographs in their full socio-political context, which is what this exhibition does for the first time.”
An accomplished filmmaker, composer, writer and poet, Parks is best remembered for his prolific career as a photographer. He became the first African-American photographer on staff at Life magazine, where he covered subjects ranging from fashion to social injustice. In 1961 the magazine sent him to Brazil with a specific assignment: to document poverty in Rio de Janeiro for a special series on Latin America. Told to photograph the hardworking father of a large, impoverished household, Parks all but disregarded these instructions and turned his attention instead to one resident in particular – an industrious, severely asthmatic twelve-year-old boy named Flávio da Silva who lived in Catacumba, one of Rio’s working class neighbourhoods known as favelas.
Over the course of several weeks Parks photographed Flávio as he performed household chores and entertained his seven brothers and sisters – daily activities that were often interrupted by debilitating asthma attacks. Having himself grown up in abject poverty in Kansas, Parks felt deep sympathy for his subject and forged an emotional bond with him. Ultimately Parks advocated for a comprehensive photo essay dedicated to Flávio’s story in the pages of Life; editors responded by publishing a twelve-page piece, titled “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty,” in June 1961. The exhibition will include images from this spread, as well as outtakes from the assignment.
Within days of its publication in the magazine, Flávio’s story emerged as a blockbuster. Moved by Parks’ heartbreaking coverage, Life‘s readers wrote thousands of letters and spontaneously donated money to support the da Silva family and the revitalisation of the favela. Upon seeing the images, the president of the Children’s Asthma Research Institute and Hospital (CARIH) in Denver, Colorado offered to treat Flávio as a patient, free of charge. In July 1961, Life sent Parks back to Rio as part of the magazine’s follow-up efforts. After helping to move the da Silva family from Catacumba, Parks accompanied Flávio from Rio to the United States. For the next two years Flávio lived and received treatment at CARIH but spent most weekends with a Portugeuse-speaking host family who introduced him to various aspects of American culture.
Anticipating a compelling story about Flávio’s medical progress and experience in the U.S., Life assigned a local photographer, Hikaru “Carl” Iwasaki, to document the boy’s arrival in Denver, admission to the hospital, and acclimation at school. A selection of these images will be on view in the exhibition, including some that Life never published, alongside snapshots made by Flávio’s host father in Denver, José Gonçalves. In spite of his wish to remain in the United States, Flávio was sent back to Brazil in 1963. Now 70 years old, he has never returned to the United States.
When published in 1961, “Freedom’s Fearful Foe: Poverty” was also met with criticism, particularly within the Brazilian press. Outraged and determined to retaliate against Life‘s negative portrayal of the Catacumba favela and its residents, the Brazilian magazine O Cruzeiro sent staff photographer Henri Ballot to report on poverty in New York, where Life was headquartered. While exploring the Lower East Side in Manhattan, Ballot documented an immigrant family from Puerto Rico – Felix and Esther Gonzalez and their children – who lived in a derelict one-bedroom apartment. Arguing that poverty was equally endemic in the United States, O Cruzeiro published Ballot’s photographs in October 1961 in the photo essay “Nôvo recorde americano: Miséria” (New American Record: Misery). Photographs from this story, as well as from an investigative exposé on Parks’ reportage also published in O Cruzeiro in 1961, will be on view in the exhibition.
Over the years Parks periodically returned to Flávio as a subject. In 1976 he published Flávio, which recounted and updated the story through words and pictures. In the book’s introduction, Parks provided insight into his own conflicted engagement with certain photographic assignments that focused on people like the da Silva family, acknowledging that he “was perhaps playing God” by digging “deeper and deeper into the privacy of these lives, hoping … to reshape their destinies into something much better.” Following this admission, Parks returned to Brazil only once in the 1990s; it marked the last time Parks and Flávio saw each other prior to Parks’ death in 2006.
“Parks regarded poverty as ‘the most savage of all human afflictions,’ in no small part because he was born into destitution,” says Amanda Maddox, co-curator of the exhibition and an associate curator at the Getty Museum. “As a photographer he consciously wielded his camera as a weapon – his chosen term – in an attempt to combat economic and racial inequality. Viewed in this context, his documentation of Flávio da Silva – for Life and beyond – reveals the complexity of his empathetic approach and the inherent difficulties of representing someone else’s personal story – a story that resonated with many people over many years – in any form.”
In addition to more than 100 photographs, the exhibition will also include original issues of Life that featured Flávio’s story, previously unseen ephemera related to Flávio’s time in Denver, and private memos, correspondence, and records held by Life and Parks.
Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story is on view July 9-November 10, 2019 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is co-curated by Amanda Maddox, associate curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Paul Roth, director of the Ryerson Image Centre. An accompanying book is available, published by Steidl Verlag, with essays by Maddox and Roth, as well as Sergio Burgi, curator at Instituto Moreira Salles; Beatriz Jaguaribe, professor of comparative communications, School of Communications, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; and Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho, professor of sociology, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum Cited 27/10/2019
Henri Ballot (French / Brazilian, 1921-1997) Ely-Samuel Gonzalez on His Bed, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.5 × 15.8cm (9 1/4 × 6 1/4 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Apartment Building Where the Gonzalez Family lives, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 × 23.9cm (6 5/16 × 9 7/16 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Child Playing Surrounded by Trash, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 × 24cm (6 5/16 × 9 7/16 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Bedroom in the Gonzalez Family Apartment, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 18.3 × 24cm (7 3/16 × 9 7/16 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Child Crying at the Window, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 24.2 × 18cm (9 1/2 × 7 1/16 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Photographer Henri Ballot with Ely-Samuel (on the Left) and His Brothers, Manhattan, New York 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 17.8 × 24.4cm (7 × 9 5/8 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Maria Penha da Silva, Flávio’s Grandmother, and Her Other Grandchildren, Reading ‘Life’, Guadalupe, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 16 × 24cm (6 5/16 × 9 7/16 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Henri Ballot (French/Brazilian, 1921-1997) Aracy, a Neighbour of the da Silva Family, Pointing out Where the Photographs for Gordon Parks’s Reportage Were Taken in the da Silvas’ Former Home, Catacumba Hill, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 1961 Gelatin silver print Image: 23.8 × 15.9cm (9 3/8 × 6 1/4 in.) Henri Ballot/Instituto Moreira Salles Collection
Many thankx to University of Otago academics Chris Brickell and Judith Collard for inviting me to write a chapter for this important book… about my glorious punk jacket of the late 1980s (with HIV/AIDS pink triangle c. 1989). Aaah, the memories!
Please come along to the Australian launch of the book at Hares Hyenas bookshop (63 Johnston Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne) on Wednesday, November 6, 2019 at 6pm – 7.30pm. The book is to be launched by Jason Smith (Director Geelong Gallery). Click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Marcus
“Gay and lesbian identity (and, by extension, queer identity) is predicated on the idea that, as sexualities, they are invisible, because sexuality is not a visible identity in the ways that race or sex are visible. Only by means of individual expression are gay and lesbian sexualities made discernible.”
Ari Hakkarainen. “‘The Urgency of Resistance’: Rehearsals of Death in the Photography of David Wojnarowicz” 2018
Punk Jacket
I arrived in Melbourne in August 1986 after living and partying in London for 11 years. I had fallen in love with an Australian skinhead boy in 1985. After we had been together for a year and a half together his visa was going to expire and he had to leave Britain to avoid deportation. So I gave up my job, packed up my belongings and went to Australia. All for love.
We landed in Melbourne after a 23-hour flight and I was driven down Swanston Street, the main drag (which in those days was open to traffic) and I was told this was it; this was the centre of the city. Bought at a milk bar, the Australian version of the corner shop, the first thing I ever ate in this new land was a Violet Crumble, the Oz equivalent of a Crunchie. Everything was so strange: the light, the sounds, the countryside.
I felt alienated. My partner had all his friends and I was in a strange land on my own. I was homesick but stuck it out. As you could in those days, I applied for gay de facto partnership status and got my permanent residency. But it did not last and we parted ways. Strange to say, though, I did not go back to England: there was an opportunity for a better life in Australia. I began a photography course and then went to university. I became an artist, which I have now been for over 30 years.
Melbourne was totally different then from the international city of today: no café culture, no big events, no shopping on Sundays, everything shut down early. At first living there was a real culture shock. I was the only gay man in town who had tattoos and a shaved head, who wore Fred Perrys, braces and Doc Martens. All the other gay men seemed to be stuck in the New Romantics era. In 1988 I walked into the Xchange Hotel on Commercial Road, then one of the pubs on the city’s main gay drag, and said to the manager, Craig, ‘I’m hungry, I’m starving, give me a job’, or words to that effect. He thought a straight skinhead had come to rob the place, but he gave me a job, sweet man. He later died of AIDS.
I went to my first Mardi Gras in Sydney the same year, when the party after the parade was in the one pavilion, the Horden at the showgrounds, and there were only 3000 people there. I loved it. Two men, both artists who lived out in Newtown, picked me up and I spent the rest of the weekend with them, having a fine old time. I still have the gift Ian gave me from his company, Riffin Drill, the name scratched on the back of the brass belt buckle that was his present. I returned the next year and the party was bigger. I ventured out to Newtown during the day, when the area was a haven for alternatives, punks and deviants (not like it is now, all gentrified and bland) and found an old second-hand shop quite a way up from the train station. And there was the leather jacket, unadorned save for the red lapels. It fitted like a glove. Somehow it made its way back with me to Melbourne. Surprise, surprise!
Then I started making the jacket my own. Studs were added to the red of the lapel and to the lower tail at the back of the jacket with my initials MAB (or MAD as I frequently referred to myself) as part of the design. A large, Gothic Alchemy patch with dragon and cross surrounded by hand-painted designs by my best mate and artist, Frederick White, finished the back of the jacket. Slogans such as ‘One Way System,’ ‘Oh Bondage, Up Yours!’ and ‘Anarchy’ were stencilled to both arms and the front of the jacket; cloth patches were pinned or studded to the front and sides: Doc Martens, Union Jack, Southern Cross … and Greenpeace. I added metal badges from the leather bar, The Gauntlet, and a British Skins badge with a Union Jack had pride of place on the red lapel. And then there was one very special homemade badge. Made out of a bit of strong fabric and coloured using felt-tip pens, it was attached with safety pins to the left arm. It was, and still is, a pink triangle. And in grey capital letters written in my own hand, it says, using the words of the Latin proverb, ‘SILENCE IS THE VOICE OF COMPLICITY’.
I have been unable to find this slogan anywhere else in HIV/AIDS material, but that is not to say it has not been used. This was my take on the Silence = Death Collective’s protest poster of a pink triangle with those same words, ‘Silence = Death’ underneath, one of the most iconic and lasting images that would come to symbolise the Aids activist movement. Avram Finkelstein, a member of the collective who designed the poster, comments eloquently on the weight of the meaning of ‘silence’: ‘Institutionally, silence is about control. Personally, silence is about complicity.’1 In a strange synchronicity, in 1989 I inverted the pink triangle of the ‘Silence = Death’ poster so that it resembled the pink triangle used to identify gay (male) prisoners sent to Nazi concentration camps because of their homosexuality; the Pink Triangles were considered the ‘lowest’ and ‘most insignificant’ prisoners. It is estimated that the Nazis killed up to 15,000 homosexuals in concentration camps. Only in 2018, when writing this piece, did I learn that Avram Finkelstein was a Jew. He relates both variants of the pink triangle to complicity because ‘when you see something happening and you are silent, you are participating in it, whether you want to or not, whether you know it or not’.2
Finishing the jacket was a labour of love that took several years to reach its final state of being. I usually wore it with my brown, moth-eaten punk jumper, bought off a friend who found it behind a concert stage. Chains and an eagle adorned the front of it, with safety pins holding it all together. On the back was a swastika made out of safety pins, to which I promptly added the word ‘No’ above the symbol, using more safety pins, making my political and social allegiances very clear. Both the jumper and the jacket have both been donated to the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives.
By 1993 I had a new boyfriend and was at the beginning of a 12-year relationship that would be the longest of my life. We were both into skinhead and punk gear, my partner having studied fashion design with Vivienne Westwood in London. We used to walk around Melbourne dressed up in our gear, including the jacket, holding hands on trams and trains, on the bus and in the street. Australia was then such a conservative country, even in the populated cities, and our undoubtedly provocative actions challenged prevailing stereotypes of masculinity. We wore our SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice) T-shirts with pride and opposed any form of racism, particularly from neo-fascists.3
Why did we like the punk and skinhead look so much? For me, it had links to my working-class roots growing up in Britain. I liked the butch masculinity of the shaved head and the Mohawk, the tattoos, braces, Docs and Perrys – but I hated the racist politics of straight skinheads. ‘SHARPs draw inspiration from the biracial origins of the skinhead subculture … [they] dress to project an image that looks hard and smart, in an evolving continuity with style ideals established in the middle-to-late 1960s. They remain true to the style’s original purpose of enjoying life, clothes, attitude and music. This does not include blanket hatred of other people based on their skin colour.’4
By the very fact of being a ‘gay’ punk and skinhead, too, I was effectively subverting the status quo: the hetero-normative, white patriarchal society much in evidence in Australia at the time. I was subverting a stereotypical masculinity, that of the straight skinhead, by turning it ‘queer’. Murray Healy’s excellent book, Gay Skins: Class, Masculinity and Queer Appropriation, was critical to my understanding of what I was doing intuitively. Healy looks into the myths and misapprehensions surrounding gay skins by exploring fascism, fetishism, class, sexuality and gender. Queer undercurrents ran through skinhead culture, and shaven heads, shiny DMs and tight Levis fed into fantasies and fetishes based on notions of hyper-masculinity. But Healy puts the boot into those myths of masculinity and challenges assumptions about class, queerness and real men. Tracing the historical development of the gay skin from 1968, he assesses what gay men have done to the hardest cult of them all. He asks how they transformed the gay scene in Britain and then around the world, and observes that the ‘previously sublimated queerness of working class youth culture was aggressively foregrounded in punk. Punk harnessed the energies of an underclass dissatisfied with a sanitised consumer youth culture, and it was from the realm of dangerous sexualities that it appropriated its shocking signifiers.’5 There is now a whole cult of gay men who like nothing better than displaying their transformative sexuality by shaving their heads and putting on their Docs to go down the pub for a few drinks. Supposedly as hard as nails and as gay as fuck, the look is more than a costume, as much leatherwear has become in recent years: it is a spiritual attitude and a way of life. It can also signify a vulnerable persona open to connection, passion, tenderness and togetherness.
In 1992 I took this spiritual belonging to a tribe to a new level. For years I had suffered from depression and self-harm, cutting my arms with razor blades. Now, in an act of positive energy and self-healing, skinhead friend Glenn performed three and a half hours of cutting on my right arm as a form of tribal scarification. There was no pain: I divorced my mind from my body and went on a journey, a form of astral travel. It was the most spiritual experience of my life. Afterwards we both needed a drink, so we put on our gear and went down to the Exchange Hotel on Oxford Street in Sydney with blood still coming from my arm. I know the queens were shocked – the looks we got reflected, in part, what blood meant to the gay community in that era – but this is who I then was. The black and white photograph in this chapter (below) was taken a day later. Paraphrasing Leonard Peltier, I was letting who I was ring out and resonate in every deed. I was taking responsibility for my own being. From that day to this, I have never cut myself again.
These tribal belongings and deviant sexualities speak of a desire to explore the self and the world. They cross the prohibition of the taboo by subverting gender norms through a paradoxical masculinity that ironically eroticises the desire for traditional masculinity. As Brian Pronger observes,
“Paradoxical masculinity takes the traditional signs of patriarchal masculinity and filters them through an ironic gay lens. Signs such as muscles [and gay skinheads], which in heterosexual culture highlight masculine gender by pointing out the power men have over women and the power they have to resist other men, through gay irony emerge as enticements to homoerotic desire – a desire that is anathema to orthodox masculinity. Paradoxical masculinity invites both reverence for the traditional signs of masculinity and the violation of those signs.”6
Violation is critical here. Through violation gay men are brought closer to a physical and mental eroticism. I remember going to dance parties with my partner and holding each other at arm’s length on the pumping dance floor, rubbing our shaved heads together for what seemed like minutes on end among the sweaty crowd, and being transported to another world. I lost myself in another place of ecstatic existence. Wearing my punk jacket, being a gay skinhead and exploring different pleasures always took me out of myself into another realm – a sensitive gay man who belonged to a tribe that was as sexy and deviant as fuck.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Marcus Bunyan. “Punk Jacket,” in Chris Brickell and Judith Collard (eds.,). Queer Objects. Manchester University Press, 2019, pp. 342-349.
Word count: 2,055
Endnotes
1/ Anonymous. ‘The Artist Behind the Iconic Silence = Death Image’, University of California Press Blog, 1 June 2017 [Online] Cited 30th October 2019. No longer available online
Featured photographers: Wolfgang Schulz, Hans Christian Adam, Dörte Eißfeldt, Verena von Gagern, André Gelpke, Dagmar Hartig, Andreas Horlitz, Reinhard Matz, Angela Neuke, Heinrich Riebesehl, Wilhelm Schürmann, Holger Stumpf, Petra Wittmar, and Miron Zownir
I love this gritty, inventive, subversive German photography from the late 1970s – early 1980s. Challenge me. Take me bleak places. Tell it like it is, baby…
Marcus
Many thankx to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
As part of its exhibition series Reconsidering Photography, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg is undertaking a survey of the German photography scene around the year 1980. The springboard for the examination is the journal Fotografie. Zeitschrift internationaler Fotokunst, published by Wolfgang Schulz (b. 1944) between 1977 and 1985. On the occasion of the exhibition, MKG is inviting photography experts Reinhard Matz (Cologne), Steffen Siegel (Folkwang University Essen), and Bernd Stiegler (University of Konstanz) to relate their research project on the 1980s to the historical photographs in the MKG collection. The aim of the collaboration is to create a historical archaeology of German photography around 1980 based on the example of the journal Fotografie and its protagonists. The exhibition will show some 150 photos by Wolfgang Schulz, Hans Christian Adam, Dörte Eißfeldt, Verena von Gagern, André Gelpke, Dagmar Hartig, Andreas Horlitz, Reinhard Matz, Angela Neuke, Heinrich Riebesehl, Wilhelm Schürmann, Holger Stumpf, Petra Wittmar, and Miron Zownir, together with the journal itself, accompanied by a series of interviews conducted with contemporary witnesses expressly for the exhibition.
Something remarkable happened in the field of photography between 1975 and 1985: important galleries were established and photography increasingly became a coveted item on the art market. Suddenly, collecting and exhibiting photographs in museums was no longer the exception. Photography really stepped into the limelight in style at the so-called Mediendocumenta in 1977. Basic academic reference books were published and a large number of journals were founded. These include both periodicals that since that time have dominated the scholarly discourse, such as History of Photography and Fotogeschichte, as well as magazines designed for the broader public with an interest in photography, including Camera Austria, European Photography, Volksfoto, and Fotokritik.
Among this second group was a journal that was published between 1977 and 1985 with a total of 40 issues, for which its editor, Wolfgang Schulz, who had studied physics and then taught himself photography, chose a name that was as concise as it was ambitious: Fotografie. Zeitschrift internationaler Fotokunst (later Fotografie: Kultur jetzt). Today, this journal seems to have been almost completely forgotten. And yet the achievements of the editor and the contributing authors and photographers surely deserve a closer look. The mix of images and texts they came up with is an important resource for exploring a photography scene that, around 1980, was working hard to establish the medium as an independent art form. At the same time, the 40 issues of Fotografie exude the charm of the open-ended and were shaped by the personal predilections of their editor. An in-depth study of the journal lets us return to the origins of recent photographic history in Germany, which today – surprisingly enough – seem largely to have been buried in the dust of the past.
The exhibition is divided into four sections. It pays tribute to the photographic work of Wolfgang Schulz from the period around 1980, presents works by photographers that for the most part found their way into the MKG collection during that era, displays all 40 issues of the journal Fotografie (unfurling an impressive creative panorama), and lets contemporary witnesses have their say in video interviews as a kind of “oral history.”
Wolfgang Schulz was not merely one of the first journal editors to set himself the task of presenting “a complete overview of contemporary photography with a focus on German photography” but also a notable photographer in his own right. In his photography, as in his editorial work, Schulz tried to evade established norms, while also trying his hand at different styles and subjects. In his Ireland pictures, for example, he followed the narrative tradition of pictorial reportage but simultaneously created a strictly documentary-seeming typology of barns and their various manifestations. With a series of shots of undergrowth, he turned his attention to the unspectacular, and he also portrayed the protagonists on the photography scene who crossed his threshold. For the first time ever, the exhibition is showing his photographic works from the period around 1980.
The images in the MKG collection give an idea of the broad scope covered by art photography in the 1980s. The selection is based on the photo spreads published in Fotografie and thus undoubtedly reveals the preferences of its editor, who seems to have been interested neither in the circle around Bernd and Hilla Becher nor in Michael Schmidt, and who deliberately set out to provoke his readers. Heinrich Riebesehl (1938-2010) explored the North German landscape in his documentary series Agrarlandschaften (Agricultural Landscapes). In a similarly factual style, Wilhelm Schürmann (b. 1946) devoted himself to a highly subjective theme: his childhood surroundings on Steinhammerstrasse in Dortmund. These images are supplemented by his photographs of urban landscapes and residential architecture. Riebesehl and Schürmann both sought their motifs in the realities of life in West Germany that confronted them everywhere they looked. André Gelpke (b. 1947) for his part explored Hamburg’s St. Pauli entertainment district for an independent series he called Sex Theater. He conveys here his view of erotic theatre as a mirror of society that tellingly reveals the audience’s double standards. Wolfgang Schulz also printed Miron Zownir’s pictures of New York’s underground SM, queer, and transsexual scene. These photo spreads reflect the editor’s interest in non-establishment subcultures and in people living on the margins of society.
The photography scene around 1980 was predominantly male: of 147 portfolios published in Fotografie, only 24 presented female photographers. One of the privileged few, Dörte Eißfeldt (b. 1950), combined in her work Große Liebe (True Love, 1980) photographic montage techniques with the serial principle, creating in the darkroom photograms with motifs from her own daily life. Her approach might be dubbed “poetic photography,” the term used by photographer Verena von Gagern (b. 1946) to describe the “representation of private realities.” Von Gagern made pictures in the late 1970s within the “emotional realm” of her own family, among them the image Barbara (1978). Petra Wittmar (b. 1955) pursued by contrast a stricter documentary concept. In her series Spielplätze (Playgrounds, 1979), she takes a critical look at the dreary world of the modern metropolis.
Press release from the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
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