Exhibition: ‘Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget’ and ‘Impressions of Melbourne’ at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 17th July – 20th September, 2015

National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition

Curator of Impressions of Paris: Jane Kinsman, National Gallery of Australia’s Senior Curator of International Prints

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927) 'No title (Brocanteur)' c. 1898-1905 from the exhibition 'Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget' and 'Impressions of Melbourne' at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, July - Sept, 2015

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
No title (Brocanteur)
c. 1898-1905
Albumen silver photograph
17.8 x 21.9cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget is a particularly dry and uninspiring National Gallery of Australia touring exhibition, which was only enlivened for me by the enlightened presence of 20 or so vintage Eugène Atget photographs, specifically added for this showing at the Monash Gallery of Art, the home of Australian photography.

Atget’s photographs have an almost ether/real quality to them in their visual representation and, physically, an ephemeral feel to the quality of the paper – as though the images are about to dissolve into nothing – even as he photographs solid objects such as stairways, doors and door knockers. Observe the photographs Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives (c. 1898-1905), A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre (c. 1900) and Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal (c. 1901-1914), below, to witness this shimmering phenomenon. It is as if the emulsion of the plate is insufficient to capture the light of life.

In an accompanying exhibition in the smaller gallery, Impressions of Melbourne, photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones investigate the city of Melbourne… but it is the stunning photographs by Atget that make the long drive out to Wheeler’s Hill worth the visit.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Monash Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927) 'Versailles, Grand Trianon' c. 1901-1925 from the exhibition 'Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget' and 'Impressions of Melbourne' at the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, July - Sept, 2015

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Versailles, Grand Trianon
c. 1901-1925
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
17.6 x 22cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Hôtel du Maréchal de Tallard, 78 rue des Archives
c. 1898-1905
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
22 x 18.1cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Eugène Atget (France 1857-1927)
A la Grâce de Dieu, 121 rue Montmartre
c. 1900
Printing out paper photograph
22 x 17.7cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1984

Eugène Atget (France, 1857-1927)
Heurtoir, 6 rue du Parc Royal
c. 1901-1914
Gold-toned silver chloride photograph
21.9 x 17.8cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1980

Monash Gallery of Art is delighted to present its major international exhibition of 2015, Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget featuring over 120 prints, posters and photographs drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier, Atget examines the major contribution to French art made by key figures: Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and includes a selection of photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) specially conceived for Monash Gallery of Art.

Newly appointed Gallery Director Kallie Blauhorn states, “I’m thrilled that for my first exhibition at MGA we are able to present a major international show, Impressions of Paris. Residents of Monash and art lovers across Melbourne will experience the extraordinary works by household names, Toulouse Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Honore Daumier and the wonderful photographer Eugène Atget.”

“This is a first for MGA and a true testament to the reputation of the gallery that we can host this important and significant exhibition,” said Blauhorn.

A generation apart, Lautrec, Degas and Daumier were consummate draughtsmen whose innovative compositions and embrace of modern subject matter played a significant role in artistic developments in France over the nineteenth century. Atget, the only specialist photographer among these artists, spent much of his life documenting the streets of Paris as they underwent modernisation. His photographs show us how modern life was expressed in the architectural experience of France, giving us a glimpse of what modernity left behind.

The generation of French artists who followed Daumier in the nineteenth century were inspired by his critical observations, which became an extraordinary reservoir of ideas. Both Degas and then Lautrec were enthusiastic admirers of French caricature, delighting in its animated qualities, stylistic freedoms and contemporary themes. They were particularly enamoured of Daumier’s caricature.

Degas adopted themes of modern French life, the ballet, the race course, the café-concert and the demi-monde and played an important role in the rejection of mythological and historical subjects favoured by the Impressionists. Many of Degas’ ideas on composition and subjects were, in turn, drawn from Daumier. This French satirist was both extraordinarily gifted and prolific, making a name for himself by lampooning the affectations, stupidities and greed of members of the French bourgeois society in caricatures, which Degas avidly collected.

The youngest of the artists, Lautrec, who sadly dies before reaching 37, borrowed themes and compositions from Degas, an artist he much admired and emulated. Images of drinkers at a table, ballet and cabaret scenes and nudes reveal the powerful influence that Degas had on the younger artist, as well as Lautrec’s own considerable originality, particularly as a portrayer of individuals rather than the depiction of types often favoured by Degas.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of Old Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

These four artists captured the spirit of Paris in their prints, posters and photographs. Through the examination of this work, we find clues as to why dramatic changes took place in French art over the nineteenth century. They formed part of other generations of artists who admired Daumier and who adapted the caricaturist’s critical lithographic observations. In this way Daumier’s legacy was a brilliant journalistic record of the modern capital and contributed to an era in France ripe for a new art.

Press release from the MGA website

Eugène Atget: growth and decay in the great city

After an unspectacular career in the theatre, Eugène Atget (1857-1927) began to take photographs of Paris in 1892. By 1897 he had established a successful business photographing the spaces that remained of Old Paris. In all, Atget made over 10,000 images of Paris and its surrounds, each taken with a straightforward approach that laid the basis for much of the documentary photography that followed. Atget’s pictures were immensely popular: he sold thousands of prints, satisfying a strong demand for views of a city undergoing massive social and architectural transformation.

For the most part, Atget’s pictures of streets, parks, courtyards, buildings and their ornamental motifs record remnants of pre-Revolutionary Paris. While there is a nostalgic aspect to these views, for contemporary viewers these pictures were about modern Paris. They recorded and helped make sense of changes to the city as it struggled to cope with modernism. Street traders and other workers are seen selling their wares along old streets and laneways; ancient buildings stand in laneways and courtyards undergoing physical transformation; cafes and shops await bustling crowds. Atget’s views of modern Paris focussed on its intimate places, those spaces of the everyday in which people had always worked, loved and lived.

Impressions of Melbourne

17th July 2015 – 20th September 2015

In response to the photographs by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) included in the National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibition, Impressions of Paris, this exhibition offers views of Melbourne’s streets, laneways and urban landscape. Drawn from the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection, this selection traverses a period from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.

Atget photographed Paris during a time when the French capital was undergoing significant transformation. From the 1850s through to the 1920s, the dark medieval neighbourhoods of the city were demolished to make way for the wide avenues and open public spaces that Paris is known for today. Atget’s ambition was to produce clear and detailed photographs that would document the heritage of Paris before it disappeared. Typically taking his photographs in the early morning when the streets were empty, Atget imbued the city with ghostly nostalgia.

The earliest photographs in Impressions of Melbourne, taken by Nicholas Caire and Charles Kerry in the late nineteenth century, are contemporary to those of Atget. While Atget focused longingly on the past, however, these Australian photographers celebrated the civic accomplishments of modern progress in the colonies. The portrayal of Melbourne as a civilised metropolis, attractive to both immigrants and tourists, persisted through the twentieth century. Max Dupain captured the city as a lively and enterprising place, while Mark Strizic lingered on the shimmering ambience of window shopping and city strolling.

Impressions of Melbourne showcases a range of photographic responses to our urban environment, revealing some of Melbourne’s many moods and highlighting the city as a rich photographic subject. The exhibition includes photographs by Nicholas Caire, Charles Kerry, Max Dupain, Mark Strizic and Noel Jones.

Nicholas Caire

Nicolas Caire was born in Guernsey and arrived in Australia, settling in Adelaide, in 1858. He set up his first photographic studio in Adelaide in 1867. He moved to the Victorian goldmining town of Talbot in 1870 before relocating to Melbourne in 1876. At this time, Melbourne was the largest Australian city.

While Caire is best known for his picturesque landscape photographs of the Victorian countryside, he also produced photographs of major city thoroughfares, public buildings, parks and gardens. These subjects were common amongst photographers in the second half of the nineteenth century, conveying a sense of local pride and achievement. Caire’s photographs were often mounted in albums and accompanied by individual descriptive texts, a format that was popular amongst local and overseas visitors at the time.

Charles Kerry

Charles Kerry grew up in country New South Wales before moving to Sydney at the age of 17 to begin his photographic career. After a failed studio partnership, which left him with a lot of debt, Kerry rebuilt his business and by 1890 found himself running a successful studio that had a monopoly on the popular postcard market. By 1898 Kerry’s studio was the largest in Australia, housed in a three-storey building at 310 George Street, Sydney.

Throughout his career, Kerry photographed a broad range of subjects including social and sporting events, portraits of Indigenous people, city streets as well as the New South Wales countryside. He also spent a year documenting every station homestead in New South Wales. Kerry retired in 1913.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
View of Bourke Street, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series Views of Victoria
Albumen print
13.4 x 18.7cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: Bourke Street is the principal business thoroughfare in the great City of Melbourne. It is about a mile in length, extending from the Parliament House to the Spencer Street Railway Station. On the left hand side of the picture is the Post Office, and at the extreme end of the street can be seen the Parliament House.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Government Domain of Victoria
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Governor’s Residence is on an eminence near the Botanical Gardens, and occupies one of the best positions around the City of Melbourne. Looking westward from the front of the Domain, a splendid view is obtained of Hobson’s Bay, with the townships of St Kilda, Emerald Hill, Sandridge, and Williamstown on the coast. On the north side can be seen the City of Melbourne, with its busy suburban towns – Hotham, Carlton and Fitzroy. From the rear of the building towards the east, in the distance, the retired towns of Richmond, Hawthorn, and Toorak can be distinguished. The building, as seen in the illustration, was completed in the year 1876. Sir G F Bowen, GCMG, being the Resident Governor at the time.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Royal Mint, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: The Royal Mint of Victoria is situated in the north-easterly part of William Street, West Melbourne. This Government Building is not thrown open to the public for visitation at any time; but an inspection by visitors can be effected on an order from a Member of the Ministry, conditionally that there be no fewer than eight persons at each visitation; one of the number being required to become responsible for the conduct of the party.

Nicholas Caire (born United Kingdom 1837; arrived Australia 1858; died 1918)
The Post Office, Melbourne
1877-1878
From the series The public buildings of Melbourne and suburbs
Albumen print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Original album caption: This imposing structure is erected at the junction of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, which may be considered perhaps the most central position in Melbourne. It is provided with a very long corridor for the posting and delivery of letters, & c. The Telegraph Department, as also the Post Office Savings Bank and Money Order Office, are all conducted in connection with the General Post office, Melbourne, of which the Hon. R Ramsay, MLA, is at present Postmaster-General.

Charles Kerry (Australia, 1858-1928)
Collins Street, looking south
c. 1890
Albumen print
14.5 x 17.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1984

Max Dupain (Australia, 1911-1992)
Melbourne with rain
1946
Gelatin silver print
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection acquired 1987

Max Dupain

Max Dupain began his photographic career in 1930 as an apprentice in the studio of Cecil Bostock. In 1934 he established his own studio in Sydney and continued to produce a broad range of commercial work over the course of his life. Dupain was strongly influenced by modernist photographic principles and is renowned for his architectural photography as well as his iconic images of Australian beach culture.

While he primarily worked in Sydney, the photographs exhibited here are among several he took of otherAustralian cities. They highlight his interest in documenting city life as well as his use of light, shadow and aerial perspective. They were taken during the post war period; in the year that Dupain was commissioned by the Department of Information to photograph Australia’s way of life as part of a campaign to increase migration to Australia. This period marked a shift in Dupain’s practice, away from advertising and fashion toward social documentary.

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Near 101 Collins Street, Jan 1963
1963
Gelatin silver print
36 x 53.5cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic (born Germany 1928; arrived Australia 1950; died 2012)
Collins Street at McPherson’s building – 1, 1967
1967
Gelatin silver print
53.8 x 36cm
Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection
Donated by the Bowness Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008
Reproduction courtesy of the artist

Mark Strizic

Mark Strizic was born in Berlin and migrated to Melbourne from Zagreb, Croatia in 1950. Strizic had no formal training in photography, but began taking photographs of Melbourne in the 1950s. He abandoned his studies in physics to become a full-time photographer in 1957, taking up subsequent commissions in architectural, industrial, interior design and portrait photography.

Among Strizic’s most widely recognised images are those he created of Melbourne between 1955 and 1970. Strizic documented the streets of Melbourne, showing many sides of the city, from derelict back alleyways to the grand arcades and buildings of Melbourne’s ‘Paris end’. Strizic’s photographs were produced during a period of dramatic change, a time when Melbourne’s Victorian-era buildings were being replaced by modern architectural developments. The images not only serve to document this change but also provide significant and important records of Melbourne pre-modernisation.

Monash Gallery of Art
860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill
Victoria 3150 Australia
Phone: + 61 3 8544 0500

Opening hours:
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Sat – Sun: 10pm – 4pm
Mon/public holidays: closed

Monash Gallery of Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exhibition dates: 17th January – 13th September, 2015

Curator: Karen Haas, the MFA’s Lane Curator of Photographs, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) 'Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan' 1950 from the exhibition 'Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan - Sept, 2015

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

It’s been a really tough time writing the Art Blart recently, as my beloved Apple Pro tower that has served me so well over the years has died and gone to god. I have been making do with a small laptop, but tomorrow I pick up my new 27 inch iMac with Retina screen, to pair with my Eizo Flexscan monitor. I can’t wait!

I have so much admiration for the work of this man. The light, the sensitivity to the social documentary narrative just emanates from these images. You don’t need to say much, it’s all there in front of you. Just look at the proud profile of that old woman, Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott, Kansas (1950, below), and you are instantly transported back to the slave fields and southern plantations of the 19th century. No words are necessary. The bony hands, gaunt cheeks and determined stare speak of a life hard lived.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006) 'Untitled, St. Louis, Missouri' 1950 from the exhibition 'Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott' at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Jan - Sept, 2015

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, St. Louis, Missouri
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Tenement Dwellers, Chicago, Illinois
1950
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most celebrated African-American photographers of all time, is the subject of a new exhibition of groundbreaking photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott (January 17 – September 13, 2015) traces Parks’ return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas and then to other Midwestern cities, to track down and photograph each of his childhood classmates. On view in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing, the exhibition’s 42 photographs were from a series originally meant to accompany a Life magazine photo essay – but for reasons unknown, the story was never published. The images depict the realities of life under segregation in 1950 – presenting a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African-American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. One of the most personal and captivating of all Parks’ projects, the images, now owned by The Gordon Parks Foundation, represent a rare and little-known group within Parks’ oeuvre. This exhibition, on view in the Robert and Jane Burke Gallery, is accompanied by a publication by Karen Haas, the MFA’s Lane Curator of Photographs, in collaboration with The Gordon Parks Foundation, which includes an introduction by Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. The book includes previously unpublished photographs as well as archival materials such as contact sheets and a portion of the 1927 yearbook from the segregated school Parks attended as a child.

“These personal and often touching photos offer a glimpse into the life of Gordon Parks and the prejudice that confronted African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s,” said Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director at the MFA. “We’re grateful to The Gordon Parks Foundation for giving us the opportunity to display these moving works.”

Fort Scott, Kansas was an emotional touchstone for Gordon Parks and a place that he was drawn to over and over again as an adult, even though it held haunting memories of racism and discrimination. Parks was born in Fort Scott in 1912 to a poor tenant farmer family and left home as a teenager after his mother died and he found himself – the youngest of 15 children – suddenly having to make his own way in the world. By 1948, Parks was the first African-American photographer hired full time by Life magazine. One of the rare African-American photojournalists in the field, Parks was frequently given magazine assignments involving social issues that his fellow white photographers were not asked to cover. For an assignment on the impact of school segregation, Parks returned to Fort Scott to revisit early memories of his birthplace – many involving racial discrimination – and to reconnect with childhood friends, all of whom went to the same all-black elementary school that Parks had attended. He was able to track down all but two members of the Plaza School Class of 1927, although only one was still living in Fort Scott at the time. As he met with fellow classmates, his story quickly shifted its focus to the Great Migration north by African Americans. Over the course of several days Parks visited with his childhood friends – by this time residing in Kansas City; Saint Louis; Columbus, Ohio; Detroit; and Chicago – joining them in their parlours and on their front porches while they recounted their life stories to him. Organised around each of these cities and families, the exhibition features previously unpublished photographs as well as a seven-page draft of Parks’ text for the article.

“With the Back to Fort Scott story, Parks showed – really for the first time – a willingness to mine his own childhood for memories both happy and painful, something he would continue to do in a series of memoirs over the course of his long career” said Haas. “The experience also seems to have inspired him to write The Learning Tree in 1963, his best-selling novel about growing up poor and black in Kansas, that he transformed a few years later into a groundbreaking Hollywood movie – the first by an African American writer-director.”

Parks began his research in Fort Scott, where he found classmate Luella Russell. In addition to photographing Luella with her husband and 16-year-old daughter, Parks took photos of his own family and life around town – finding friends and acquaintances at the local theatre, railway station and pool hall. Parks also visited the local baseball field at Othick Park, where he recorded a group of white spectators seated at one end of the bleachers watching a game, while two African-American girls in summer dresses stand at the other end, in an area loosely designated for the town’s black residents. Parks’ image of the girls at the ballpark, where black and white baseball teams sometimes competed against each other, subtly refers to the separation of the races that marked much of everyday life in Fort Scott.

Fort Scott had not changed dramatically since Parks’ youth. Parks attended the all-black Plaza School through the ninth grade in 1927, and as he wrote in his draft for Life magazine: “Twenty-four years before I had walked proudly to the centre of the stage and received a diploma. There were twelve of us (six girls and six boys) that night. Our emotions were intermingled with sadness and gaiety. None of us understood why the first years of our education were separated from those of the whites, nor did we bother to ask. The situation existed when we were born. We waded in normal at the tender age of six and swam out maladjusted… nine years later.”

After Fort Scott, Parks discovered three of his classmates in Kansas City and St. Louis – cities that were easily reached by rail and were often the first stops made by African Americans leaving smaller towns. Many left towns like Fort Scott in the hope of finding jobs and better futures for their children in these larger, more industrial cities. When Parks tracked down his classmates, he recorded their jobs and wages – the sort of detail that Life typically included in such pieces, allowing its readers to measure their own lives against a story’s subjects. In Kansas City, classmate Peter Thomason was working as a postal transportation clerk (a position, Parks noted, with a minimum salary of $3,700 a year), while in St. Louis, Parks recorded that classmate Norman Earl Collins was doing quite well, making $1.22 an hour at Union Electric of Missouri. Parks’ sympathetic images of Earl and his daughter, Doris Jean, may have been a conscious effort on Parks’ part to offset contemporary stereotypes of black families as less stable and strong than their white counterparts.

By 1950, Chicago was the de facto capital of African-American life in the US, with more black inhabitants than any other city in America – including three of Parks’ classmates. Parks discovered them residing only a mile or two apart from one another on the city’s South Side. Untitled, Chicago, Illinois (1950), depicts Parks’ classmate Fred Wells and his wife Mary in front of their apartment building in the Washington Park neighbourhood. A number of the photographs in the exhibition repeat the simple compositional device seen here – featuring a classmate and his or her family, framed by the front door of their home. These images highlighted the families’ similarities to, rather than differences from Life‘s readers, who would have found such strong representations of black families at once surprising and reassuring.

In Detroit, Parks traced classmate Pauline Terry to the McDougall-Hunt neighbourhood. In Fort Scott, Pauline had married Bert Collins, who had run a restaurant during much of the 1930s. By 1950, they were settled in Detroit and had five children. Unlike Parks’ other classmates who had migrated north in search of opportunity, Pauline (yearbook ambition: “To be young forever; to be a Mrs.”) now had a large family and no longer worked outside the home. In the course of her conversation with Parks, she emphasised the importance of religion in their lives. Parks’ powerful portrait of the couple walking to Sunday services at the Macedonia Baptist Church, Husband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan (1950) reinforces the seriousness of their faith. The cigar-smoking Bert wears a sharp suit and straw boater and carries a well-worn Bible.

Once completed, Parks’ Fort Scott photo essay never appeared in Life. The reason for that remains a mystery, although the US entry into the Korean War that summer had a major impact on the content of its pages for some time. The magazine’s editors did try to resuscitate the story early in April of 1951 only to have it passed over by the news of President Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur. In the end, all that survives, as far as written documentation of the Fort Scott assignment, are Parks’ project notes from his individual visits with his classmates in May and June of 1950; several telegrams sent by Life staffers regarding his friends’ whereabouts before his arrival; fact-checking when the piece was again slated to run in April 1951; and an annotated seven-page draft. Because the photos were never published, and most have never before been on view, the exhibition presents a unique opportunity to explore a body of work that is almost completely unknown to the public.

“The Gordon Parks Foundation is pleased to collaborate with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on this exhibition and publication highlighting a series of very personal, early works by the artist” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., the Foundation’s executive director. “Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott allows us a focused look at a single Life magazine story and reveals a fascinating tale of Gordon Parks’ segregated beginnings in rural Kansas and the migration stories of his classmates, many of whom, like him, left in search of better lives for themselves and their families.”

Press release from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston website

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Chicago, Illinois
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Columbus, Ohio
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The lives of the classmates – six girls and five boys who graduated from the segregated Plaza School in 1927, in what was then a town of 10,000 people – present a miniature snapshot of African-American aspiration and struggle in the years before Brown v. Board of Education or the civil rights movement.

Parks found Emma Jane Wells in Kansas City, Mo., where she sold clothes door-to-door to supplement her husband’s salary at a paper-bag factory. Peter Thomason lived a few blocks away, working for the post office, one of the best jobs available to black men at the time. But others from the class led much more precarious lives. Parks tracked down Mazel Morgan on the South Side of Chicago, in a transient hotel with her husband, who Parks said robbed him at gunpoint after a photo session. Morgan’s middle-school yearbook description had been ebullient (“Tee hee, tee ho, tee hi, ha hum/Jolly, good-natured, full of fun”), but in 1950 she told Parks, “I’ve felt dead so long that I don’t figure suicide is worthwhile anymore.”

The most promising of the classmates, Donald Beatty, lived in an integrated neighbourhood in Columbus, Ohio, where he had a highly desirable job as a supervisor at a state agency and where Parks’s pictures show him – very much in the vernacular of Life magazine’s Eisenhower-era domestic scenes – happy and secure with his wife and toddler son and a brand-new Buick. But notes made by a Life fact-checker just a year later, when the magazine planned once again to run Parks’s article, recorded a tragedy, blithely and with no explanation: “Aside from the death of their son, nothing much has happened to them.”

Lorraine Madway, curator of Wichita State University’s special collections, said of the Fort Scott story: “There are those moments in an archive when you know you’ve found the gold, and this is one of them. It’s a wonderful example of micro-history. It’s not only that there is so much material written at a specific time in people’s lives, but then there are Parks’s reflections on it later.” …

Besides fact-checking notes, Parks’s own notes and a typewritten draft for what might have been his introduction to the photo spread, there is almost no other documentation surrounding the project, for which Parks shot about 30 rolls of 35-millimetre and medium-format film. And so the question of why it was not published might never be answered. In an essay for the show’s catalog, Ms. Haas speculates that it might have been doomed by its very newsworthiness, as national challenges to school segregation began gathering speed and Life waited – in the end too long – for just the right moment…

Parks carried his own psychic wounds from those years, which profoundly shaped his writing and approach to photography. But his feelings were always bittersweet. Though he lived for many years in New York City, he chose to be buried in his hometown, whose African-American population has declined even more markedly than its overall population. In a 1968 poem about his childhood, he wrote that he would miss “this Kansas land that I was leaving,” one of “wide prairies filled with green and cornstalk,” of the “winding sound of crickets rubbing dampness from wings” and “silver September rain.”

Then he added: “Yes, all this I would miss – /along with the fear, hatred and violence/We blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.”

Extract from Randy Kennedy. “‘A Long Hungry Look’: Forgotten Gordon Parks Photos Document Segregation,” on The New York Times website, December 24, 2014 [Online] Cited 29/08/2015.

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Railway Station Entrance, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Shoes, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled (Outside the Liberty Theater)
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Untitled, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Uncle James Parks, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Gordon Parks (American, 1912-2006)
Mrs. Jefferson, Fort Scott, Kansas
1950
Courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts

Opening hours:
Wednesday – Monday 10am – 5pm
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Exhibition: ‘The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940’ at the Museum of Brisbane

Exhibition dates: 13 February – 30 August, 2015

Curator: Phil Manning

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Brisbane Botanic Gardens, near the Edward Street entrance' 1895 from the exhibition 'The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940' at the Museum of Brisbane, Feb - Aug, 2015

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Brisbane Botanic Gardens, near the Edward Street entrance
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

This is more like it… what a find!

There are some fascinating punctum (which denote the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within the image), contained among this recently discovered treasure trove of photographs by Alfred Elliott.

At first, what looks like a real dog is actually a toy sitting in front of Alfred Goldsbrough Elliott, Stanley Terrace, Taringa (1908). And then you notice the hard-nosed stare of the little girl in Dorothy Elliott (1911). She is not a happy camper. Then the scruffy, bare-footed urchin in ‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street (1895). Or the unhappy woman staring directly into the camera in Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York (1901), as though her thoughts are being transmitted to us from beyond the grave. And finally, to the two young, blurred children running in front of a white picket fence in Windmill, Wickham Terrace (1895), the smaller of the children noticing the photographer and camera and looking towards both. Just a joy!

And don’t forget, all of these early photographs were taken with a large plate camera (the photographs after 1921 were taken with a film camera and have a totally different feel to them). For an artist to obtain the street photographs and portraits out in the field with this type of camera is superb. Just look at the image Members of the QLD League of Wheelmen, Wellington Point (1897). You can tell the personality of every individual in this image through the clarity, not just of the image but of the thought of the photographer, before he exposed his plate. It is so Australian in its iconography, it could come from nowhere else in the world. This photograph deserves to be up there with one of the seminal images of Australian photography.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thanks to the Museum of Brisbane for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Brisbane, from the Windmill' 1895 from the exhibition 'The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940' at the Museum of Brisbane, Feb - Aug, 2015

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Brisbane, from the Windmill
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Aborigines fishing in the Maroochy River
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Central Railway Station, from Edward Street
1922
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Citizens’ Welcome’ arch, Queen Street
1927
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) ''Citizens' Welcome' arch, Queen Street' 1927 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Citizens’ Welcome’ arch, Queen Street (detail)
1927
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane’s latest exhibition offers an amazing visual portrait of a lost city – Brisbane at the turn of the 20th century – through a rare collection of photographs, all shot by a single resident and left forgotten under an inner-city house for decades. The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940 showcases the life’s work of the avid Brisbane-based photographer, offering a fascinating chronicle of the places he visited, major events he witnessed and intimate glimpses into his family life.

The historic collection of glass-plate and film negatives remained stored in cigar boxes under a house in Red Hill until they were uncovered in 1983 and acquired by Museum of Brisbane. For the past 30 years ‘The Elliott Collection’ was thought to comprise 285 glass plate negatives, until a neglected cigar box with more than 400 film negatives was uncovered at the Museum’s storage facility last year. This significant discovery has allowed the Museum to further piece together fragments of the passionate amateur photographer’s past. The collection provides a window into both his life and the life of a quickly changing city.

Elliott’s work also captures significant moments in Brisbane’s history, including the Duke and Duchess of York’s visit in 1901 and the farewell of the troops aboard SS Cornwall from Pinkenba in 1899. Museum of Brisbane Director Peter Denham said the collection was an exceptional record of one man’s perspective of Brisbane at a very exciting time.

“These unseen photographs offer a unique view of Brisbane at a significant turning point – the city’s population was booming, grand civic structures were erected and huge social change was occurring,” Mr Denham said. “The interactive elements of The view from here offer visitors the chance to get up close with buildings from our past, as well as investigate the photographic technology from the turn of last century.”

“With the discovery of hundreds of new photos, we have learned a lot about Elliott and his family and were even able to locate his much-loved home in Taringa. It is part of our mission as the city’s museum to uncover new stories and we are thrilled to share these findings with visitors. The exhibition wonderfully captures how much our city has changed and I think it will encourage people to reflect on their own perceptions of Brisbane.” The view from here will run until 30 August 2015.

Press release from the Museum of Brisbane website

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott, Amy Lock, Mrs Lock and Elizabeth Ellen Elliott
Nd
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Elizabeth Ellen Elliott w the Dillon sisters Mary, Clare, Margo
Nd
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Government House, George Street
1908
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Maroochy
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Maroochy' 1890 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Maroochy (detail)
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Members of the QLD League of Wheelmen, Wellington Point
1897
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

The first shipment of tricycles arrived in Brisbane in 1870 and the first race is reported to have been between a cyclist and a Cobb and Co coach from Brisbane to Sandgate. No official timing was recorded.

The initial Brisbane Bicycle Club meeting was held in 1881 at the Belle Vue Hotel. High wheel bicycles including the Penny Farthing were the only bikes available and novelty Penny Farthing races were held in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens where more riders fell off than stayed on. By 1886 Brisbane had 200 bicycles and 50 of these were used for racing…

The first Queensland championship was held at the Breakfast Creek Sports Ground in 1891 and was won by Lou Isles. Isles also rode long distance, riding from Brisbane to Sydney in 1891 a 700 mile trek which he completed in 7 days. Imported bicycles cost £30 although local bicycles could be bought for two pound ten. Successful Queensland riders of the day included Ben Goodsen, Billy Dowd and Percy Davies.

In 1895 a record of 1 hour 2 minutes and 10 seconds was set by George Stombaco for a 34 kilometre race over rough dirt roads from Brisbane and Cleveland. That same year, The League of Queensland Wheelmen held a Christmas Carnival with over 8000 attendees. Brisbane wasn’t the only town with a club as Maryborough, Townsville, Ipswich and Rockhampton also had successful clubs.

Karen Hind. “Cycling in Queensland.” 18 July 2011 [Online] Cited 19/08/2015.

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Treasury Building, William Street
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Victoria Bridge, decorated for the Duke of York
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Victoria Bridge, decorated for the Duke of York' 1901 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Victoria Bridge, decorated for the Duke of York (detail)
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

The images chronicle a broad range of Elliott’s life – from private moments with friends on family trips and picnics at the Glasshouse Mountains to key moments in Brisbane’s history such as the construction of Central Railway Station in 1899 and the visit from the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901. Images were captured in locations including Mt Coot-tha, the city’s Botanic Gardens, Tweeds Heads just south of the border and the Moreton Bay Region – all undertaken by train, bus, boat, car and possibly even by horse and bicycle.

Curator Phil Manning, who discovered the last cigar box, said it was evident from the body of work that Elliott was proud of his city.

“He documented the city by walking the streets and going on travels with his family,” Mr Manning said. “He had a strong connection to the British Empire, that was probably the area he was most drawn to documenting … royal visits and the Queensland troops going off to the Boer War. But he’s also photographed Brisbane’s new buildings and structures such as the bridges that went up following the 1893 flood.”

Elliot’s first photographs were dated 1890 and captured on dry-plate glass negatives, including both single image and stereograph negatives. They were a mixture of amateur and professionally produced plates. Elliot used glass plates until 1921 when it appeared he changed to a camera with film.

Very little was known about Alfred Henrie Elliott. He was born in Paignton in England in 1870 and was the youngest of seven children. His family came to Queensland when he was seven years old, with his father taking up post as principal of Humpybong Primary School in Redcliffe, north of Brisbane. Elliott was known to have worked in Brisbane as a civil servant in a variety of roles. His working life also included jobs as a law clerk, professional shorthand writer and a bank clerk.

Patrick Williams and Maria Hatzakis. “Uncovered glass plates and film negatives capturing 50 years of Brisbane’s history go on display,” on the ABC News website, 10 Feb 2015 [Online] Cited on 19/08/2015.

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Eight hour day procession on Queen Street in Brisbane city
1893
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Alfred Goldsbrough Elliott, Stanley Terrace, Taringa
1908
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott
1911
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Dorothy Elliott' 1911 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott (detail)
1911
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York' 1901 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York (detail)
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Picnic party on Brisbane River at Seventeen Mile Rocks
1898
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Picnic party on Brisbane River at Seventeen Mile Rocks' 1898 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Picnic party on Brisbane River at Seventeen Mile Rocks (detail)
1898
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Queen Street, Brisbane
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Treasury Building, Queen and William Street
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street
1920
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) ''Welcome to Brisbane' arch, Queen Street' 1920 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street (detail)
1920
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Windmill, Wickham Terrace
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954) 'Windmill, Wickham Terrace' 1895 (detail)

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Windmill, Wickham Terrace (detail)
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Alfred Henry Elliott (1870-1954)
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Elizabeth Ellen Elliott and Alfred Elliott
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane is located on Level 3, Brisbane City Hall (Adelaide and Ann Street, Brisbane QLD)

Opening hours:
Open 7 days a week, 10am – 5pm

Museum of Brisbane website

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Exhibition: ‘Early Photography in Imperial China’ at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 23rd August, 2015

Curator: Ferry Bertholet

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890) 'A Chinese Party Game' c. 1895 from the exhibition 'Early Photography in Imperial China' at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June - Aug, 2015

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
A Chinese Party Game
c. 1895
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

For me, the standout photographs in this posting are Mee Cheung’s rhythmic Buddhist Monks in Chefoo and the work of Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz, especially the three photographs Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum, Portrait of a Chinese woman and Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting.

The latter three have a deceptively simple structure, delicate hand colouring, and a visual and metaphysical presence that is almost beyond description… as though you know the character and personality of these anonymous human beings through the rendition of their image. In a way they are humanist portraits presaging the tradition of the more scientific and archetypal portraits of August Sander.

You can see in the face of Admiral Ting that he is a prosperous and powerful man, you can see the individuality of each person in these images, the individualisation of these people, a tradition which is continued by today’s documentary photographers. But not generally by today’s art photographers looking at the portrait because, for them, the portrait is surface and detail – controlled by the photographer and not responsive to the subject.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Rijksmuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

A. Chan (YA Zhen) (Chinese) 'Sheung-mun-tai Street in Canton' c. 1870 from the exhibition 'Early Photography in Imperial China' at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, June - Aug, 2015

A. Chan (YA Zhen) (Chinese)
Sheung-mun-tai Street in Canton
c. 1870
Collectie Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

A. Chan (YA Zhen) (Chinese)
Sheung-mun-tai Street in Canton (detail)
c. 1870
Collectie Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Mee Cheung. 'Buddhist Monks in Chefoo' c. 1880-1890

Mee Cheung & Co
Buddhist Monks in Chefoo
c. 1880-1890
Collection Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Mee Cheung & Co
Buddhist Monks in Chefoo (detail)
c. 1880-1890
Collection Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
Studio Portrait of Courtesans in Shanghai
c. 1875-1880
Collections Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
Studio Portrait of Courtesans in Shanghai (detail)
c. 1875-1880
Collections Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Rare photos, photo albums and stereo photos from the collection of China expert Ferry Bertholet, enhanced with photographs from the Rijksmuseum’s collection, show 19th century unknown China at the time of the last emperors for the very first time. From 5 June to 23 August 2015 the Rijksmuseum is presenting Early Photography in Imperial China in it’s Photo Gallery.

In the 19th century Imperial China was almost entirely hidden away from the world until the last Emperor was deposed in 1912. Access was limited to port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong and Canton, which were forced to be open to the West after 1842 so that Westerners could trade unimpeded. The advent of photography coincided with a rapidly growing interest in the unknown China. The photographs in the exhibition take the visitor into this exciting unknown world of ports, quays and rickshaws, but also of narrow crowded streets bustling with the multitude of shops and ‘tea houses’ and their hostesses.

The display includes important photographs by such as Felice Beato (his famous photograph of the Second Opium War 1857-1860) and the famous China photographer John Thomson. They were among the first Europeans able to record images of a country that – even at that time – was still barely accessible to the rest of the world. Furthermore, this is also the first time that the work of Chinese photographers such as Afong, Lan Wah and Sze Yuen Ming has ever been shown in the Netherlands.  Other highlights of the exhibition include a rare Chinese family portrait from 1860 from the Bertholet collection of American photographer Milton Miller, as well as the coloured photos of ‘types of people’ by Baron Raimund Ratenitz von Stillfried.

Besides the 35 photos in the exhibition, a huge travel camera from that time is also on display, illustrating how awkward it was to photograph such material. There are also stereo photos in 3D, including a special shot of the city of Peking in 1860, and photo albums and amateur photos of travellers to China are also on display. A richly illustrated book was published recently: Ferry Bertholet & Lambert van der Aalsvoort, Among the Celestials. China in Early Photographs, Brussels 2014.

Press release from the Rijksmuseum website

Anonymous photographer
Peking
c. 1860 – c. 1930

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz. 'Chinese carriers' c. 1861 - c. 1880

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Chinese carriers
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum
1875

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum (detail)
1875

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of a Chinese woman
1860 – 1870

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting (detail)
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Jan Adriani (Dutch, d. 1948)
A street with several people in Kinkiang, China
1907

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Jan Luijkenstraat 1, Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Every day from 9:00 to 18:00

Rijksmuseum website

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Exhibition: ‘Crowd Source’ at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 23rd August, 2015

Co-curator: Margot Riley

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935) 'Argyle Cut, The Rocks' c. 1880s - 1900 from the exhibition 'Crowd Source' at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, April - August, 2015

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Argyle Cut, The Rocks
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

There is an almost Dickensian mellow dramatic feel to some of these 1880s-1900 albumen photographs by Sydney photographer Arthur K. Syer.

While the photographs offer a unique point of view (low down by the waist) of Victorian era Sydney, you get the feeling that Syer was more interested in the fact that his camera was hidden, and the game he was playing to get these photographs, than in the visual construction of the images themselves.

The best of them are photographs – such as Hawker haggling with customers, with its links to the photography of Atget, and crowd scenes like Men in street, where the different poses of the men and the rising and falling of the six items of headgear – offer a rhythmic consideration and interest that other photographs in the posting lack.

The gem in this group of images is the outstanding Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W. Again, it is the attitude and rhythm of the protagonists within the image frame that makes this diorama so engaging. The man at left looks away from us with his back to the camera, while above him a man stands in the tram perpendicular to him, giving a nice play to the space between the tram carriages. Three people in alternating dark and light hats wait patiently for a old biddie to descend from the open door of the tram, the man holding on to the hand rail of the tram ready to pull himself up, just as everyone still does on old trams in Melbourne to this day. Above on the top deck sits a young man staring straight at the camera (without knowing it is there), with his legs crossed in a most unusual and uncomfortable way.

Below him to the right a gent in a bowler hat talks with his wife, cigar stuck in his mouth. His facial outline, lit by the sun, is echoed in the darkness of the interior of the tram by another man with a beard and hat sitting in shadow. In front of this husband and wife is a son with his mother / grandmother – she, clutching her bag in heavy tassel-fringed cloak, protecting herself with umbrella against the sun – he, in long gents morning coat and hat looking very dapper. It must be mid afternoon by the length of the shadows cast by the sun. To the right of this pair is an older, heavy set man with great beard and hat, looking out of the image to the right. His gaze is cut across by a man sitting in the tram, all darkness and outline, beard and hat, looking out onto the scene from the interior. Finally, to ground the foreground of the image, there is a mother and daughter at bottom right of the image, with the small child clutching at the mother’s dress.

The characters in this Dickens play rise and fall from left to right. They wash over you in their happenstance, frozen interaction. It is a superbly constructed image. Interesting as they are in their own vernacular way, it just makes the other images in this posting seem rather, well, prosaic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the State Library of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935) 'George Street, The Rocks' c. 1880s - 1900 from the exhibition 'Crowd Source' at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, April - August, 2015

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
George Street, The Rocks
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for pointing out this is Little Essex Street, looking East towards George Street; this street is no more as the underground railway now comes out at this point.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935) 'George Street, The Rocks' c. 1880s - 1900 (detail)

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
George Street, The Rocks (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Martin Place near the GPO Colonnade
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Devonshire and Chalmers Streets near Central Station
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935) Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W. c. 1880s - 1900 (detail)

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W.
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for the following comments:

“I’d love to know how you [the Mitchell Library that is] identified this view as being “near Supreme Court”. Does this imply that it is King Street on the left? But the building behind the tram has a window on the corner facade; the Supreme Court building has no such feature; then, the destination is Forest Lodge which implies that the tram is traveling South. The building behind the tram looks more like that one on the corner of Park Street, complete with telegraph pole; see “Trams in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, 1886” on the City of Sydney Archives & History Resources website Len Stone and Vic Solomons Collection Nd [Online] Cited 29/01/202.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W. (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Some of the world’s earliest street photographs, capturing many previously unseen views of Sydney from the 1880s will go on public display for the first time in a new exhibition opening at the State Library of NSW, from Saturday 4 April. Crowd Source presents over 50 rare snapshots of Sydneysiders and Sydney’s bustling streets secretly taken with the world’s first hand‐held camera – branded the ‘Detective Camera’ – by amateur local photographer Arthur Syer.

“Arthur Syer took candid photographs of ordinary people in everyday situations which he supplied to illustrators to use as ‘source material’ to help them create a life-like quality and characters in their drawings,” says exhibition co-curator Margot Riley. “Syer’s distinctive low angle photographs evocatively capture the buzz of 1880s Sydney showing the shoe-shiners and fruit sellers, road workers, transport deliveries and barrow shopping, queues at Circular Quay, children playing, shipping and scenes at the horses races,” said Ms Riley.

Syer crossed into the publishing industry through his artist brother Walter, who introduced him to internationally renowned English cartoonist, Phil May. Invited to Sydney by The Bulletin in 1885, May often used Syer’s images to add authenticity to the backgrounds for his illustrations, for example drawings of people at the racecourse.

When the hand‐held camera was introduced in Australia in the mid‐1880s “it became a craze much like the smart phone or selfie stick of today, with photographs for the first time being able to be taken quickly and unnoticed,” said Ms Riley. The camera resembled “a square case… disguised as a … shoeblack’s box, or even a book. The operator places it upon the ground, or under his arm, the pressure of the pneumatic ball opening or closing the hidden lens at the required moment.” (The Sydney Mail, 2 July 1881).

No skill was required to operate the Detective Camera, signalling the beginning of mass photography. It used dry plate negatives – commercialised by George Eastman of Kodak fame – which were available over the counter at photography shops where negatives could be taken for developing and printing.

“This new technology, which also saw the introduction of other novelties like the ‘vest camera’ and ‘watch camera’, triggered debate around issues of privacy which led to the passing of new privacy laws in America,” says Ms Riley. “Manners and rules around candid photography continue to be a hot topic today.”

The State Library holds over 170 original Arthur Syer photographs – the most extensive collection of early Australian street photography known to exist. With the help of the Flickr community the Library has been able to label many of the images in the collection.

Crowd Source is a free exhibition at the State Library of NSW from 4 April to 23 August 2015. #1880Sydney @statelibrarynsw

Press release from the State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Tram, West Crescent St., North Sydney
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for pointing out this is in fact Elizabeth Street, near King Street.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Tram, West Crescent St., North Sydney (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Pyrmont Bridge looking across to City
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Circular Quay near First Fleet Park
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Children crowd around a ladder
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Children crowd around a ladder (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Royal Exchange Building in Bridge Street
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Men in street
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Hawker haggling with customers
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Shoe shiner with customer
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

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NSW 2000 Australia
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Exhibition: ‘The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay’ at Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 15th April – 9th August, 2015

Curators: curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern

One of my favourite female artists of all time. Up there with Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin and Louise Bourgeois.

The early portrait paintings are a revelation. And then, how avant-garde are her Electric Prisms paintings, fashion designs, theatre costumes, embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage… the very epitome of a “progressive woman synonymous with modernity.”

I have always loved her creativity, vibrancy, colours and asymmetric, musical rhythm – her photogeneity, in the sense of her works producing or emitting light, like an organism does. They seem to grab you, like a jolt of electricity, saying “Wake up!” and “Look at me!”

Perhaps I’m a little bit in love with this very wonderful women.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“In this case, the pram in the hall was not the enemy of promise. (In any case, surely poverty is the more likely candidate.) It is still rare, however, for a cradle cover to be given gallery space and acknowledged as an important artwork. The little blanket Sonia stitched for her son, Charles, in 1911 [see image below] is to be exhibited, and it seems to have been a breakthrough piece which moved her from figurative work to abstract. The coverlet is a patchwork medley of pinks, creams and greens with hints of maroon and black. It shows how Sonia melded Russian folk-craft with Parisian avant garde, and anticipated the experiments with colour and shape that would become the Delaunay hallmark style, simultané.

As well as the baby quilt, there is on display the child’s painted toy box, and the outfit Sonia made in the same manner, the one in the photograph mentioned above: by 1913 the Delaunays had found a babysitter and were setting off to the dancehall, the Bal Bullier. As well as making clothing for herself and her friends, Sonia still painted. Next to the dress, which is composed of swatches of fabric in different textures, is her large canvas ‘Bal Bullier’. A flow of colour and rhythm, it shows several couples (or one couple twirling) under a new Parisian sensation: coloured electric lights.”

Kathleen Jamie. “Sonia Delaunay: the avant-garde queen of loud, wearable art,” on the Guardian website, Saturday 28 March 2015 [Online] Cited 03/08/2015

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Quilt cover
1911

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Syncopated rhythm, so-called The Black Snake
1967
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Propeller (Air Pavilion)
1937
Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden
© Pracusa 2014083
Photo: Emma Krantz

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979) 'Propeller (Air Pavilion)' 1937 (detail)

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Propeller (Air Pavilion) (detail)
1937
Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden
© Pracusa 2014083
Photo: Emma Krantz

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Rhythm Colour no. 1076
1939
Centre National des Arts Plastiques/Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, on loan to Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Court shoes
1925

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay (right) and two friends in Robert Delaunay’s studio, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris
1924
Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colourful work spanned painting, fashion and design. Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of her vibrant artistic career, from her early figurative painting in the 1900s to her energetic abstract work in the 1960s. This exhibition offers a radical reassessment of Delaunay’s importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth century.

Born in Odessaand trained in Germany, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern, then Terk) came to Parisin 1906 to join the emerging avant-garde. She met and married the artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed ‘Simultaneism’ – abstract compositions of dynamic contrasting colours and shapes. Many iconic examples of these works are brought together at Tate Modern, including Bal Bullier 1913 and Electric Prisms 1914. Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay shows how the artist dedicated her life to experimenting with colour and abstraction, bringing her ideas off the canvas and into the world through tapestry, textiles, mosaic and fashion. Delaunay premiered her first ‘simultaneous dress’ of bright patchwork colours in 1913 and opened a boutique in Madrid in 1918. Her Atelier Simultané in Paris went on to produce radical and progressive designs for scarves, umbrellas, hats, shoes and swimming costumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Clients included the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson and the architect Erno Goldfinger, as well department stores like Metz & Co and Liberty. The exhibition reveals how Delaunay’s designs presented her as a progressive woman synonymous with modernity: embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage, and creating daring costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The diverse inspirations behind Delaunay’s work are also explored, from the highly personal approach to colour which harked back to her childhood in Russia, to the impact of her years in Spain and Portugal where she painted The Orange Seller 1915 and Flamenco Singers 1915-1916. The show also reveals the inspiration provided by modern technology throughout Delaunay’s career, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the aeroplane, and from the Eiffel Tower to the electric light bulb. It also includes her vast seven-metre murals Motor, Dashboard and Propeller, created for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and never before shown in the UK.

Following her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia Delaunay’s work took on more formal freedom, including rhythmic compositions in angular forms and harlequin colours, which in turn inspired geometric tapestries, carpets and mosaics. Delaunay continued to experiment with abstraction in the post-war era, just as she had done since its birth in the 1910s, becoming a champion for a new generation of artists and an inspiring figure for creative practitioners to this day.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay is curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator. It was organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris-Musées and Tate Modern, and was realised with the exceptional help of Bibliothèque nationale de France and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou.

Text from the Tate Modern website

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Finnish woman
1908

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Yellow Nude
1908
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Nantes
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Sleeping girl
1907

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Philomene
1907

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Electric Prisms
1913
Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, Gift of Mr. Theodore Racoosin
© Pracusa

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Electric Prisms
1913-1914

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Prismes electrique
1914
© Pracusa 2013057
© CNAP

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979) 'Prismes electrique' 1914 (detail)

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Prismes electrique (detail)
1914
© Pracusa 2013057
© CNAP

Who is Sonia Delaunay?

Who is she?

Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Alongside her husband, Robert Delaunay, she pioneered the movement Simultanism. Her exploration of the interaction between colours has created a sense of depth and movement throughout her oeuvre.

What is her background?

She was born Sonia Illinitchna Stern to a Jewish Ukrainian family. At the age of seven she went to live with her comparatively wealthy uncle Henri Terk and his wife, Anna, in St Petersburg, Russia. The Terk’s offered her a privileged and cultured upbringing in St Petersburg. Nevertheless, her childhood memories of Ukraine remained with her and she often referred back to the ‘pure’ colour and bright costumes of the Ukrainian peasant weddings.

How did she start her career as an abstract artist?

“About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”

What does she do?

“I always changed everything around me… I made my first white walls so our paintings would look better. I designed my furniture; I have done everything. I have lived my art.”

Delaunay’s creativity expanded beyond painting to include many other outlets such as Casa Sonia, an interiors and fashion boutique that she set up 1918; The entire set and costume design of Tristan Tzara’s 1923 play Le Cœur à Gaz; An illustration for the cover of Vogue in 1926; Costumes for the films Le Vertige directed by Marcel L’Herbier and Le p’tit Parigot, directed by René Le Somptier; Furniture for the set of the 1929 film Parce que je t’aime; And her textiles label Tissus Delaunay, which sold her designs worldwide.

What is Orphism?

Orphism is a term originating from 1912 when French poet and art critic Guillaume Appollinaire identified the new style of Cubist painting. Appollinaire was inspired by the work of František Kupka and the Delaunays, who, although channelling the Cubist vision, prioritised colour in their work. Appollinaire felt this use of colour brought movement, light and musical qualities to the artwork and therefore referenced the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus, when naming the movement.

What is Simultanism?

Simultanism is the strand of Orphism practised by the Delaunays. The name comes from the work of French scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul who identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colours look different depending on the colours around them. For example, a grey will look lighter on a dark background than it does on a light one. The Delaunays dispensed with form and aimed to created rhythm, motion and depth through overlapping patches of vibrant hues.

What are her key artworks?

Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914, displays Delaunay’s trademark concentric circles at their best. Interpreted as an ode to modernity, Delaunay refracts the lights and bustle of Boulevard Saint Michel into almost complete abstraction. Everything disintegrates into colour except two figures, which remain discernible in the lower centre of the piece.

Nu jaune, 1908, juxtaposes the models’ warm yellow skin against lashings of cool emerald. This is one of Delaunay’s most striking uses of tone. The bright colours are frequently offset by black marks. These create a bold and heavy outline which is primitivist in its intention. The face of the model is mask like, suggesting melancholy. Delaunay makes no attempt to depict her as attractive, giving the artwork a brusque, modern feel.

What are her thoughts on colour?

Colour is the skin of the world.

Colour was the hue of number.

One who knows how to appreciate colour relationships, the influence of one colour on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.

9 April 2015 on the Tate Modern website

Unknown photographer
Lizica Codreanu wearing the Pierrot-Éclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay, on the set of René Le Somptier’s 1926 film ‘Le P’tit Parigot’
1926
Still photo from the film Le P’tit Parigot, written by Paul Cartoux, Directed by René Le Somptier, 1926, collection of Antoine Blanchette
© L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay in front of her door-poem in the Delaunays’ apartment, Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris
1924
© Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Sonia Delaunay in her studio at boulevard Malesherbes, Paris, France
1925
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, © L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay in Simultaneous dress
c. 1913

Unknown photographer
Bathing suits designed by Delaunay
c. 1920s

It was extremely inspiring to see a woman working with different disciplines – design, painting, textiles. Her reach was enviable. She was part of a tradition of Russian artists such as Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova who combined their knowledge of artisanal techniques with their beaux arts training as a way into the world of fashion. And her designs were outstanding. Look at her marvellous knitted bathing suit or patterned overcoat. If you were to walk into an exhibition and saw a woman dressed in that overcoat, she would steal the show.

Of course in Paris there were other powerful women designers, such as Madame Grès and Coco Chanel. The former’s designs were very sinuous, and Chanel was cutting back to the bone, whereas Sonia seemed to work on a frontal level. I like the powerful geometry of her designs – encasing a curvilinear body, contained and boxed-in like a walking cubist form. They were definitely not cute; they were harsh designs for husky women. I would have loved to see Gertrude Stein dressed in Sonia Delaunay’s clothes.

I admire her early paintings, especially Yellow Nude from 1908. You can’t really tell if the reclining figure that she has painted is male or female. It is coy, seductive, androgynous, as if she didn’t seem to care whether it was either. And if you read her biography, you find that she had a rather open attitude to sexuality – her first marriage was to a homosexual, and later to Robert. It was probably part of her shrewdness too – in making things work for her.

Has her work influenced mine? I came out of the Josef Albers camp, where colour was more magical and less obvious than Delaunay. I tend to go for unexpected nuanced colour combinations. So I would say not, but her workaholic attitude and willingness to experiment and try out things in different ways has. She was fearless, so why shouldn’t we be fearless. And I am very influenced by her teamwork – the big mural paintings she did for Palais de l’Air in 1937. I love those. She would have had teams of people working on them. They are such powerful works, so present and timeless. They send out a strong message – pronouncing a new world. They are not domestic works done at the easel. They are out in space. They are universal.

Sheila Hicks. “The multi-talented Delaunay. Sonia Delaunay: The Fortune of Colour,” Tate Etc. issue 34: Summer 2015 on the Tate Modern website, 8 June 2015 [Online] Cited 03/08/2015

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Illustration for cover of Vogue
1926

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Simultané playing cards
1964

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Coat made for Gloria Swanson
1923-1924
Private Collection
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Simultaneous Dresses (The three women)
1925
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Rythme
1938

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Rythme
1945
Grey Art Gallery, New York
© Pracusa 2014083

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

Opening hours:
Open daily 10am – 6pm

Tate Modern website

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Exhibition: ‘Carnival: Photographs by Roger Vail’ at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California

Exhibition dates: 11th July – 22nd August, 2015

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945) 'SkyDiver 2' 1996 from the exhibition 'Carnival: Photographs by Roger Vail' at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California, July - August, 2015

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
SkyDiver 2
1996
Platinum/palladium print

For the length of each ride

I just love these photographs. They are thrilling, like the rides themselves.

The photographer Roger Vail comments,

“There was no initial inspiration, just an experiment. I had already been making photographs at night with a 4 x 5 (later 8 x 10) camera which involved time exposures. I went to a carnival to shoot the facades. While there I decided to see what would happen it I made a time exposure of the ferris wheel in question. First sight of the negative was thrilling so I decided to make more. Most of the fun was in not knowing what the end result would look like. I made these into large silver prints throughout the seventies. In the nineties I learned to make platinum-palladium prints and after printing one of the older negatives decided to do them again specifically for that medium. Finally in 2001, at the suggestion of my wife Carol, I did them for a third time shooting 8×10 transparencies.”

All the light is ambient light, with the exposures usually around 3 minutes (hence the ghostly shadows of people moving in the foregrounds of some of the photographs). Vail observes, “Carnival grounds are often flooded with fairly bright light, so balancing the exposures is not that difficult. I found out early on that virtually all carnival rides last around 3 minutes. So I would adjust the F stop accordingly to get the maximum rotation and therefore pattern.”

I am in awe of this extended investigation. What a passion for what is coming on 45 years working on one idea.

Just as Hiroshi Sugimoto’s time lapse movie screens (where the exact length of a movie was captured by the open lens of the camera, the substance of time and space evidenced by a seemingly empty screen) were wonderfully poetic and transformational – the gesture of compressing the narrative, reality and action of a movie into a single frame of light – so Vail’s photographs focus on the process of transition, the process of transition in the flow of time and space. Whereas Sugimoto captures the exact length of a movie, Vail’s photographs, ‘for the length of each ride’, could be a metaphor for the length of a life, for these rides contain the body of human beings, their embodiment, even though we can’t see them.

All the signs are there. The concentric circles with no beginning and no end. The YoYo circus of circuits or Wave Swinger with atomic cloud remind me of Fritz Lang’s seminal film Metropolis (1927). And then the colour work – Inverter with its Möbius strip non-orientable boundary, giving life a half-twist, SpinOut‘s nuclear intensity, and Evolution‘s DNA-like strands. And all of this done through serendipity, a fortunate happenstance, with the artist not knowing exactly what each negative will bring, but ultimately thrilling when (exposure) time – overseer of all things – is right. No wonder Vail was excited when he saw his first negative.

A total surprise, these photographs proffer a liminal space, one beyond our usual realm of understanding. Our cycle of life. The process of transition in the flow of space and time.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to Joseph Bellows Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945) 'Spinning Carnival Ride' 1971 from the exhibition 'Carnival: Photographs by Roger Vail' at Joseph Bellows Gallery, La Jolla, California, July - August, 2015

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Spinning Carnival Ride
1971
Gelatin silver print

“I started making urban night photographs at the end of graduate school in 1969. I used a 4×5 and later an 8×10 view camera which required time exposures of 30 seconds or more. At a carnival in 1971 I decided to set up in front of a ferris wheel, clueless about what the result would look like. I was greatly excited by what I saw when I looked at the first negative and print – a total surprise. The later color images are exposed for the length of each ride cycle.”

Roger Vail

In 1970, Vail began photographing carnivals and their thrill rides with his 8 x 10 inch view camera. His pictures were made in the evening hours with long exposure times, resulting in images that track the momentum of the ride with a sense wonderment that is both tangible and otherworldly. Carnival will feature Vail’s extraordinary, large-scale photographs of carnival rides in full motion; tracing the kaleidoscopic light play seen only through an extended moment that photography permits. In addition to the large-scale colour and black and white images, his smaller, more intimate platinum/palladium prints will be featured in the atrium gallery.

Vail’s carnival rides are described and transformed through the act of photography. He allows the viewer to experience the flux of the ride in a single scene, rendering both the atmosphere of the night and the energy of his subject, against the recognisable background of the state fair.

Roger Vail earned his BFA and MFA degrees from the Art Institute of Chicago. His photographs are in the collection of numerous institutions, including: Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum.

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Untitled
1996
Platinum/palladium print

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945) 'Untitled' 1996 'YoYo' 1996

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
YoYo
1996
Gelatin silver print
18 x 23.5 inches

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
YoYo #2
1996
Platinum/palladium print

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Wave Swinger
1996
Gelatin silver print

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Kamikaze #3
1996
Platinum/palladium print
10 x 8 inches

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Carnival: Photographs by Roger Vail. This solo shows will open on July 11th, with a reception for the artist from 6-8 p.m., and will continue through the 22nd of August. The exhibition will feature Vail’s extraordinary large-scale photographs of carnival rides in full motion; tracing the kaleidoscopic light play seen only through the extended moment that photography permits. In addition to the large-scale colour and black and white images, his smaller, more intimate platinum/palladium prints will be featured in the atrium gallery.

One such image graced the cover of Life magazine, introducing a picture essay with an accompanying text by Garrison Keilor titled, A Magical Spin on a Summer Night (2006). Vail’s carnival rides are described and transformed through the act of photography. He allows the viewer to experience the flux of the ride in a single scene, rendering both the atmosphere of the night and the energy of his subject, against the recognisable background of the state fair.

Press release from the Joseph Bellows Gallery

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Evolution 3
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Giant Wheel
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Inverter
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium
30 x 37.5 inches

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Kamakazi
2002
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
SpinOut
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Wave Swinger
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Roger Vail (American, b. 1945)
Evolution
2001
Chromogenic print mounted to aluminium

Joseph Bellows Gallery
7661 Girrard Avenue
La Jolla, California
Phone: 858 456 5620

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm and by appointment

Joseph Bellows Gallery website

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Photographs and text: ‘Quandong, New South Wales, Australia’ 1887

July 2015

Unknown photographer. 'Shearing, Quandong' New South Wales, Australia, 1887

Unknown photographer
Shearing, Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

A fascinating set of albumen prints mounted on cabinet cards of Quandong, New South Wales, Australia in 1887. These images are probably among the first ever taken of the area, most likely by a travelling photographer. The reverse of the cards bearing the monogram C.A. or A.C. Each image measures 10 x 8cm (c. 4 x 3 inches), on slightly larger card (12 x 9.2cm / 4.8 x 3.6 inches).

It is instructive to look at the structure of the images to see how this unnamed photographer visualised his subject matter.

Firstly, the three photographs of the house. Taken from the top of a barn (imagine lugging a large camera up there!), one image offers a three-quarter profile of the homestead, in the background wildness, with two white picket gates providing entry through a guardian hedge that protects the habitation. Next the photographer swings the camera around 180 degrees, photographing the homestead not from front on but again on an angle for dramatic effect, framing the foreground with a fence made of chopped down trees which encloses a sparse, newly planted garden. In one dark exposure, two men stand in formal pose stand with the grandmother sitting wrapped in a shawl beside one of the men. In the other lighter exposure (the photographer obviously had trouble here), we again have a formal placement of people, this time with the grandmother (without shawl) and grandfather sitting opposite each other, probably with their grandsons with dogs in front of them. Anyone who has lived in rural Australia would understand the significance of the verandah as a gathering place and congregational space to sit, and for youngsters, to play with their dogs.

Secondly, we observe the two side-on photographs of the horse and carts. Both show a distinctly formal placement of the objects within the picture plane with a limited spatial depth to the photographs, with no vanishing point. But there are distinctive differences between the two photographs. The horse and trap evidence the status of the people involved, the two horses and large carriage being held steady by a third person and far left of picture. The second photograph is much more informal… the horse and young foal, the man in relaxed pose, hand on knee and then, in the foreground – as though to emphasise the working nature of this cart – a pile of logs and trees fill our vision, a stark contrast to the dark trees in the background. There is nothing in the foreground of the first photograph, forcing the eye to rest on the formal structure of man/horse/men/trap.

Next we observe two photographs of a flock of sheep and men. In the first image the photographer has framed the man and dog at left with horse behind the flock of sheep, while at right a group of three men stand close together before a wooden fence… holding up the right hand side of the image. Wilderness can be seen beyond. Notice how there is a flat empty area at the front of the image which leads the eye to the right and up to the men, thence to the tall trees beyond. Lovely spaces in this image, with the grouping of the sheep and men, the horizontal line of the fence dividing the tonality of the image – dark at the bottom, light at the top.

In the second image the photographer has not moved the camera but he has moved the men at right. The framing of the man at left and the horse and flock of sheep are still the same, but now he has removed one man and moved the other two men to be slightly behind the spatial plane of the man with the dog. The sun has come out as we can see the shadow of the two men on the ground, and the exposure must have been short, for we can see the paw of the dog caught in mid-air. It is interesting to note that the photographer does not mind the two trees coming out of the tops of the men’s heads at right, instead of placing them in the negative space between the trees.

Further evidence of the nature of the environment in which this homestead was evolving can be found in the photograph At Quandong, an almost modernist rendition of the wilderness, in which the image is divided into a series of horizontal lines – foreground fence, mid-ground fence, horizon line with the wild beyond. The photographer thought this view important enough to warrant a photograph, even though there is nothing obviously substantial contained in the image. It does, however, graphically illustrate the isolation of the homestead within the environment.

Lastly we have the images of Shearing in Woolshed and Shearing, Quandong. The light is absolutely beautiful in both of these images, entering as it does through the door at bottom left of the images and, as an opposite, through the open doors at the top left of the image. Shearing, Quandong is the more successful of the two images through its pure simplicity. Note the strong diagonal from top left to bottom right, which in Shearing in Woolshed is disturbed by the presence of the two overseers. Also note how in the image that was likely taken first, Shearing in Woolshed, the camera is placed higher up. We can tell this by the visibility of the poles behind the overseer and the fact that we can’t see the base of the wooden pole at right. In this image the lad at right has his hat on. In Shearing, Quandong the distance between the door, poles and the top of the image at back is much shorter and we can now see the base of the wooden pole at right. The lad has taken off his hat and put in on the floor there.

How young both of these lads are, with their crew cut hair, using huge manual shears. What backbreaking work it must have been in the heat and humidity… and the one thing that you cannot get an idea of, is the smell of these woolsheds. If you have ever been in one of these woolsheds you know what a pungent aroma these places have.

These photographs were taken a year before the iconic Australian painting by Tom Roberts Shearing the Rams (1888-1890), an archetypal vision of Australian pastoral life, and through them we can see how much they confirm Roberts’ vision of Australian rural life. Leigh Astbury observes that,

“Roberts was not, however, the first artist to depict the subject of shearing sheep. It had been previously treated in a few isolated paintings but, more frequently, shearers were shown at work in photographs and in illustrated newspapers and magazines during the 1870s and 80s. An exploration of the contemporary pictorial tradition reveals that in the formulation of his painting Roberts followed an established photographic and illustrative convention, as opposed to originating a new subject for artistic attention.”

“Roberts began preparatory studies for the picture at the Brocklesby station during the spring of 1888 when he made between seventy and eighty sketches of ‘the light, the atmosphere, the sheep, the men and the work’. … During the following spring of 1889 Roberts set out his canvas in the Brocklesby shed and began to paint the final work. He ‘picked out the most characteristic and picturesque of the shearers, the “rouseabouts” and the boy’, and carefully posed them in the manner he required… Shearing the rams was a carefully and consciously formulated painting executed over a long period, not an informal, ‘slice of life’ glimpsed in an Australian shearing shed.”

“Roberts, who worked as a photographer’s assistant, may have been aware of shearing scenes which appeared in contemporary photographs. A photograph entitled Shearing [see below], by a well-known Melbourne photographer, Charles Nettleton, anticipates the construction of pictorial space found in Shearing the rams. There is the same slightly diagonal thrust into distance, accentuated by the lines of the floorboards. The structure of the shearing shed roof plays a similar role in the composition, while one gains the same sense of rhythmic interval as the central poles recede into the background. Equally significant is the way the photograph conveys the quality and sources of light in the shed: the light filters through from outside and permeates the atmosphere.”1

This carefully planned composition, based on photographs and black and white illustrations, is a (social) construction and performance based on a reality that excludes outsiders and Other (namely Indigenous Australians in this case in point). Artist Dianne Jones rightly questions this deterministic, colonial envisioning of Australian heritage and national identity.

“Jones uses appropriation and reinterpretation to create conversations about issues that are important to her. By placing Aboriginal figures into historical artworks where previously there were none, Jones makes us aware of their absence from Australian art and from Australian history…

Shearing the Rams provides an example of Jones’ ongoing concern with the lack of accurate Indigenous representation within Australian culture, particularly within iconic nationalistic images. The original oil painting created by Tom Roberts in 1890 celebrated pastoral life and labour, and came to be considered an icon of Australian Impressionism and popular history. Even if the painting itself is not instantly recognisable to the viewer, the sentiment behind it is familiar, it is a sentiment repeated within iconic images of Australia’s post-colonial history. By replacing some of the figures, who are all white men in Roberts’ painting, with male members of her own family, Jones is reasserting their previously unrecognised presence in this part of Australian history. Her family were actively involved in the pastoral industry, but this involvement has not previously been acknowledged or celebrated in any way.”2

This blindness and bigotry towards others continues to this day in rural and regional Australia. I have experienced it myself in rural areas of New South Wales. A certain right-wing conservatism permeates the land, is almost embedded in its ongoing structures. We need artists like Jones to shine a light into the dark corners of the Australian psyche, for only then will we begin to understand the long path as a nation that we have to travel, the new narratives that we must construct.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Extract from Leigh Astbury. “Tom Roberts’s Shearing the rams: the hidden tradition,” in Sonia Dean (ed.,). Art Journal 19. National Gallery of Victoria, Nd. [Online] Cited 26/07/2015

2/ Extract from Sarah Norris. “Dianne Jones: Revisiting/Revising Australian Icons,” on the Art Right Now website June 2013 [Online] Cited 16/07/2015

Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Unknown photographer. 'Shearing, Quandong' New South Wales, Australia, 1887 (detail)

Unknown photographer
Shearing, Quandong (detail)
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
Shearing in Woolshed, Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Shearing in Woolshed, Quandong' 1887 (detail)

Unknown photographer
Shearing in the Woolshed, Quandong (detail)
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Charles Nettleton (Australian, 1826-1902)
Seven Creeks Station near Longwood. Shearing
c. 1880
Albumen silver photograph
23.5 x 28.5cm on mount
Currie collection, State Library of Victoria

Tom Roberts (Australian, 1856-1931)
Shearing the Rams
1888-1890
Oil on canvas on composition board
122.4 x 183.3cm

Dianne Jones (Australian, b. 1966)
Shearing the rams
2001
Inkjet on canvas, edition of 10
121.9 x 182.6cm
© Dianne Jones

Please note: This image is used under conditions of “fair use” for the purpose of academic scholarship and art criticism.

Dianne Jones: Revisiting/Revising Australian Icons

Imagery plays an influential role in the formation of national identity. When this imagery is dominated by a particular cultural and ethnic perspective it results in the formation of a mythology that does not accurately reflect the culture it informs. Through her art practice Jones examines the relationship between popular imagery and national and personal identity. By questioning the validity of the imagery that has illustrated Australian history and has long been considered representative of Australian culture, Jones gives a voice, and a face, to those who were previously denied a place within the paradigm of Australian art.

Jones creates reproductions of classic Australian paintings in which the original image has been altered and reinterpreted. Images by artists such as Tom Roberts, Eugene von Guerard and Max Dupain have come to be representative of a romanticised Australian history. These well-known and well-loved images have had a significant role in defining Australian national identity, their nationalistic tone reflects a particular viewpoint of Australia’s post-colonial history. This viewpoint is limited and denies the experiences of many Australians, including the history of Jones’ family. In spite of these limitations, these images continue to hold significant cultural value for many Australians. The status of the original paintings Jones reinterprets, as highly valued and iconic works, make them ideal choices for affective reinterpretation.

Jones uses appropriation and reinterpretation to create conversations about issues that are important to her. By placing Aboriginal figures into historical artworks where previously there were none, Jones makes us aware of their absence from Australian art and from Australian history. She tries to make us aware of the lack of diversity in the images that are seen to illustrate Australian history and represent Australian culture. She highlights the absence of certain cultural groups by placing them back into the picture. In doing this she shows us how we can create a new and more accurate history that is inclusive rather than exclusive…

Extract from Sarah Norris. “Dianne Jones: Revisiting/Revising Australian Icons,” on the Art Right Now website June 2013 [Online] Cited 16/07/2015

Unknown photographer
Untitled [Horse and trap]
Quandong, 1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
At Quandong [Horse, foal and cart]
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Quandong from top of barn', New South Wales, Australia, 1887

Unknown photographer
Quandong from top of barn
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Quandong', New South Wales, Australia, 1887

Unknown photographer
Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Quandong', New South Wales, Australia, 1887 (detail)

Unknown photographer
Quandong (detail)
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Quandong, N.S.W.', New South Wales, Australia, 1887

Unknown photographer
Quandong, N.S.W.
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
Quandong (detail)
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer
At Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

Unknown photographer. 'Stile at Acme hut, Quandong', New South Wales, Australia, 1887

Unknown photographer
Stile at Acme hut, Quandong
1887
Albumen print on cabinet card
10 x 8cm

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Photographs: Thomas Eakins photography

July 2015

Please click on the photography for a larger version of the image.

Marcus

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
(Thomas Eakins and John Laurie Wallace on a Beach)
c. 1883
Public domain

The great American painter and photographer Thomas Eakins was devoted to the scientific study of the human form and committed to its truthful representation. While he and his students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were surrounded by casts of classical sculpture, Eakins declared that he did not like “a long study of casts. … At best they are only imitations, and an imitation of imitations cannot have so much life as an imitation of life itself.” Photography provided an obvious solution.

This photograph, in which Eakins and a student affected the elegant contrapposto stances of classical sculpture, was probably taken during an excursion with students to Manasquan Inlet at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, during the summer of 1883. Valuing his photographs not only as studies for paintings but also for their own sake, Eakins carefully printed the best images on platinum paper. In this case, he went to the additional trouble of enlarging the original, horizontally formatted image and cropping it vertically to better contain the perfectly balanced figures.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Nude, Playing Pipes
c. 1883
Platinum print
22.7 x 16.6cm (8 15/16 x 6 9/16 in.) irregular
Metropolitan Museum of Art
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943
Public domain

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Standing Male Nude with Pipes
1880s
Platinum print
22.9 x 17.3cm (9 x 6 13/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943
Public domain

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Bill Duckett nude, reclining on side, hand on knee
c. 1889
Platinum print
2 15/16 x 4 5/16 in. (7.46252 x 10.95502cm)
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust
Public domain

In January 1886, Thomas Eakins removed the loincloth from a male model while lecturing about the pelvis to an anatomy class that included female students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Angry protests by parents and students soon forced him to resign from the Academy at the request of the board. Following Eakins’ departure, however, thirty-eight of his male students resigned from the Academy and formed the Art Students’ League of Philadelphia, providing him with a new forum for his life classes and for the creation of many of the paintings and photographs of the 1880s, including this nude study of Bill Duckett, an amateur athlete. The relaxed atmosphere of the Art Students’ League, where Eakins and his students governed themselves, permitted greater freedom in the photography of models than had prevailed at the Pennsylvania Academy. This photograph is an excellent example of Eakins’ unabashed exploration of frontal male nudity.

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

For Eakins, the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical drawing, a tool the modern artist should use to train the eye to see what was truly before it.

In the 1880s, through a series of technical advances that greatly simplified its practice, photography had expanded from being the province solely of the specialist into an activity accessible to the millions. To define photography as a discipline distinct from its casual, commercial, and scientific applications became the overriding goal of many American artists in the last two decades of the century, who claimed for it a place commensurate with those artistic endeavours that celebrated the complex, irreducible subjectivity of their makers. The photographs of Thomas Eakins are a perfect example of this development.

In addition to being an accomplished painter, watercolorist, and teacher, Thomas Eakins was a dedicated and talented photographer. Working with a wooden view camera, glass plate negatives, and the platinum print process, he distinguished himself from most other painters of his generation by mastering the technical aspects of the new medium and requiring his students to do the same. For Eakins, the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical drawing (43.87.23; 43.87.19), a tool the modern artist should use to train the eye to see what was truly before it.

Although it is not known from whom or when Eakins learned photography, it is clear that by 1880 he had already incorporated the camera into his professional and personal life. The vast majority of photographs attributed to Eakins are figure studies (nude and clothed) and portraits of his pupils (43.87.17), extended family (including himself) (43.87.23), and immediate friends (41.142.2). More than 225 negatives survive in the Bregler collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and approximately 800 images are currently attributed to Eakins and his circle – ample proof of the intensity with which Eakins worked with the camera.

Eakins did not generally use photographs as a preparatory aid to painting, although there are a small number of oils which have direct counterparts in existing photographs: the Amon Carter Museum’s The Swimming Hole [below] and the Metropolitan’s Arcadia [below] being the foremost examples. To the contrary, Eakins saw a different role for photography – one related to his extraordinary interest in knowing the figure and improving his sensitivity to complex figure-ground relationships. Committed to teaching close observation through the practice of dissection and preparatory wax and plaster sculpture, Eakins introduced the camera to the American art studio. At first his photographs were likely quick studies of pose and gesture; later, perhaps during the process of editing and cropping the negatives, and then making enlarged platinum prints, he saw the photographs as discrete works of art on paper, at their best on equal status with his watercolours.

The artistic freedom of the classical world that Eakins strove to bring to life in his academic programs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (and in his Arcadian paintings) also appears as an important element in many of his nude studies (43.87.19) with the camera. These photographs, far more than the paintings, celebrate the male physique; even today, more than a century after their creation, their unabashed frontal nudity still has the power to shock contemporary eyes.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website October 2004 [Online] Cited 16/08/2021

Citation: Department of Photographs. “Thomas Eakins (1844-1916): Photography, 1880s-90s,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Thomas Eakins and J. Laurie Wallace at the Shore
1883
Public domain

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Unidentified model, Thomas Anschutz and J. Laurie Wallace
1883
Public domain

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
(Three Boys Wading in a Creek)
1883
Public domain

In 1882, Thomas Eakins was promoted to the post of director of schools at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he became known as a charismatic and innovative teacher who advocated intensive study of the nude figure. Committed to teaching close observation through every means possible, Eakins turned his school into a laboratory of photographic experimentation. He and his students (male and female) made negatives of each other – in lithe repose or in action, nude or in costume. At times, Eakins must have realised that he was pushing the limits of Philadelphia decorum. This small 4 x 5 albumen silver print shows several of Eakins’ nephews playing in a creek on the property of the artist’s sister Frances and her husband, William J. Crowell. In the 1880s, Eakins spent much of his free time at the Crowell family home in Avondale, Pennsylvania, thirty miles southwest of Philadelphia. Distant from urban distractions, the idyllic farm soon became a refuge for him. The Crowell children delighted Eakins and he made many photographs of their spirited games.

Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Arcadia
c. 1883
Oil on canvas
98.1 × 114.3cm (38.6 × 45 in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Circle of Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Thomas Eakins and students, swimming nude
c. 1883
Public domain

The Swimming Hole (1884-1885) features Eakins’ finest studies of the nude, in his most successfully constructed outdoor picture. The figures are those of his friends and students, and include a self-portrait. Although there are photographs by Eakins which relate to the painting, the picture’s powerful pyramidal composition and sculptural conception of the individual bodies are completely distinctive pictorial resolutions. The work was painted on commission, but was refused.

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Swimming / The swimming hole
1885
Oil on canvas
27.625 × 36.625 in (70.2 × 93cm)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Wrestlers in Eakins’s studio
1899
Platinum print on paper
3 5/8 x 6 in. (9.0 x 15.2cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966
Public domain

On May 22, 1899, Eakins had two wrestlers pose in his 4th-floor studio at 1729 Mount Vernon Street, Philadelphia. Three days earlier, he had written to his friend, sportswriter Clarence Cranmer: “I am going to start the wrestling picture on Monday at half past two. I wish you could find it convenient to be at the studio and help us with advice as to positions and so forth.” The artist’s protégé Samuel Murray may have been present; he modelled a small sculpture of the wrestlers that is also dated 1899. Eakins painted the works from the live models and from a nearly identical photograph, that may have been taken that day. The photograph shows the wrestler on top holding the other in a half nelson and crotch hold.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Wrestlers
1899
Oil on canvas
48 3/8 x 60 in. (122.87 x 152.4cm)
Image: Museum Associates/LACMA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Image Library

Circle of Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Reclining Male Nude from The Grafly Album
1886
Albumen print
Mounting Sheet: 6 7/8 x 10 in. (17.5 x 25.4cm)
Photo: 4 1/2 x 7 in. (11.5 x 17.8cm)
Acquired by the Clark, 2001
The Clark Art Institute
Public domain

Circle of Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Three Male Nude Models Supporting a Reclining Fourth Model, from The Grafly Album
1886
Albumen print
Mounting Sheet: 6 7/8 x 10 in. (17.5 x 25.4cm)
Photo: 4 1/2 x 7 in. (11.5 x 17.8cm)
Acquired by the Clark, 2001
The Clark Art Institute
Public domain

Circle of Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Four Standing Male Nudes, Frontal View, from The Grafly Album
1886
Albumen print
Mounting Sheet: 6 7/8 x 10 in. (17.5 x 25.4cm)
Photo: 4 1/2 x 7 in. (11.5 x 17.8cm)
Acquired by the Clark, 2001
The Clark Art Institute
Public domain

Circle of Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916)
Two Male Nude Models Posing as Boxers, from The Grafly Album
1886
Albumen print
Mounting Sheet: 6 7/8 x 10 in. (17.5 x 25.4cm)
Photo: 4 1/2 x 7 in. (11.5 x 17.8cm)
Acquired by the Clark, 2001
The Clark Art Institute
Public domain

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Exhibition: ‘Lee Miller’ at the Albertina, Vienna

Exhibition dates: 8th May – 16th August, 2015

Curator: Walter Moser

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Floating Head (Mary Taylor), New York Studio, New York, USA' 1933 from the exhibition 'Lee Miller' at the Albertina, Vienna, May - August, 2015

Leave artist’s alone

It takes some time to form an opinion as to the merit of Lee Miller’s work, given the amount of photographs available online, including the ones available on the Lee Miller Archives website. It is also difficult to separate the muse / socialite from the artist, the icon from the person.

Certainly there are unforgettable photographs, such as the haunting SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, Germany (1945, below). Once seen, never forgotten. But then there are the usual fashion photographs for Vogue that are no different from anyone else, a lot of pretty average social documentary photographs, some excellent and not so excellent portraits of friends and artists, and some surreal offerings that sometimes hit the mark.

Only occasionally do her photographs raise themselves above the mundane. This is not the fault of Lee Miller, but the fault of people claiming that someone is more than they are. The fault of people in control of her image. And that all comes down to money and power.

Instead of limiting access to her photographs, if her work was just left to breathe – just letting Lee Miller be nothing, in a Zenian sense – just let the work be what it is … then she and the work might attain more credibility than it has at the moment.

If Lee Miller was not set up as this icon, if she just is, then the work would be all the better for it. Icon and artist need to be separated. Let’s see more of the work freely available, for only then can we truly understand, believe.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Albertina for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Lee Miller (1907-1977) is considered one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century. In only 16 years, she produced a body of photographic work of a range that remains unparalleled, and that unites the most divergent genres. Miller’s oeuvre extends from surrealistic images to photography in the fields of fashion, travelling, portraiture and even war correspondence; the Albertina presents a survey of the work in its breadth and depth, with the aid of 100 selected pieces.

Lee Miller began her artistic career as a surrealist photographer in the Paris of 1929. She alienated motifs by using narrow image frames and applying experimental techniques like solarisation, so that it would be possible to see paradox reality. Travel photography, in which she translated the landscape into modernistic and ambiguous shapes, originated in Egypt in 1934.

As one of just a handful of female photojournalists, she began to photograph the disastrous consequences of the Second World War back in 1940. Lee Miller photographed the attack on London by the German Luftwaffe (“the Blitz”), as well as the eventual liberation of Paris. Her reporting led her to Vienna via Salzburg in 1945 where she photographed a cityscape destroyed by war, as well as the hardships in the children’s hospitals. In this exhibit, the focus is specifically placed on the vast bulk of this unpublished group of works.

Lee Miller | Surrealist Photography from Albertina Vienna.

Lee Miller | War Photography from Albertina Vienna.

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) 'Portrait of Lee Miller, Paris, France' 1929 from the exhibition 'Lee Miller' at the Albertina, Vienna, May - August, 2015

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Untitled (Exploding Hand), Paris, France' c. 1930

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Self Portrait, New York Studio, New York, USA' 1932

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Paris' 1944

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Picnic, Ile Sainte Marguerite, France' 1937

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Nude bent forward' 1930

Lee Miller 'Surrealism: Paris and New York, 1929-1934' exhibition text

Lee Miller 'Travels: Egypt. 1934-1939' and 'War: England and France, 1940-1944' exhibition text

Lee Miller 'Zero Hour: Germany and Austria, 1945' and 'After the war: Vienna 1945' exhibition text

Lee Miller exhibition texts

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Fire Masks, London, England' 1941

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977)
Irmgard Seefried, Opera Singer, Singing an Aria from Madame Butterfly, Vienna Opera House, Vienna, Austria
1945
© Lee Miller Archives England 2015. All Rights Reserved

Irmgard Seefried (German, 1919-1988)

Irmgard Seefried (9 October 1919 – 24 November 1988) was a distinguished German soprano who sang opera, sacred music, and lieder.

One of the outstanding singers to emerge immediately after the Second World War, she was noted for her Mozart and Richard Strauss roles. But she also sang in other composers’ operas; the title role in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Marie in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Eva in Meistersinger, Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites, and the title role in Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová. She was also a noted lieder singer, and a number of her Salzburg Festival recitals were recorded. She left many recordings of oratorio and sacred music by Bach, Mozart, Haydn (including at least four different renditions of the Archangel Gabriel in Die Schöpfung), Brahms, Fauré, Beethoven, Dvořák, Verdi and Stravinsky.

Although she was a high soprano, she performed, and recorded, both the trouser roles of the Composer and Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Der Rosenkavalier, respectively. These roles are usually associated with weightier voices, and today are usually sung by mezzo-sopranos.

She often sang with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who said in interview that Seefried was naturally able to achieve results effortlessly which other singers, including Schwarzkopf herself, had to work hard to produce.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) with David E. Scherman (American, 1916-1997) 'Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub, Munich, Germany' 1945

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Luxembourg' 1944

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, Germany' 1945

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Scharnhorst Boy, Vienna, Austria' 1945

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'The latest hat model, Vogue Studios, London, April 1942' 1942

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976)
Solarised Portrait of Lee Miller
c. 1929
© MAN RAY TRUST / ADAGP, Paris / Bildrecht Wien 2015

Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977) 'Solarized Portrait of an unknown model' 1930

Man Ray (American, 1890-1976) and Lee Miller (American, 1907-1977)
Neck (Portrait of Lee Miller), Paris, France
c. 1930
© Lee Miller Archives England 2015. All Rights Reserved
© MAN RAY TRUST / ADAGP, Paris / Bildrecht Wien 2015

Albertina
Albertinaplatz 1
1010 Vienna, Austria
Phone: +43 (0)1 534 83-0

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

Albertina website

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