Exhibition: ‘ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85′ at Four Corners, London

Exhibition dates: 20th September – 19th October, 2024

Curator: Isaac Blease

Chris Killip (British, 1946-2020)
Durham Miners’ Gala
1984
Gelatin silver print
© Chris Killip Photography Trust – Magnum Photos

This is another excellent exhibition with a social conscience from Four Corners, ably supported by the Martin Parr Foundation.

THE LEGACY: “The strike was lost, Scargill defeated. But the greatest losers were not just the miners, but the whole labour movement which soon found itself trampled by the global restructuring of business by Thatcher and her successors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Workers in Britain and the world would soon awake to the reality of the new Thatcher – and Reagan – industrial revolution; a huge rise in ‘compensation’ for a few executives, and gutted workplaces, leading to low-paying McJobs for the rest.”

Audsley Edwards

Losers and losers

Pardon my language but, in a guttural English accent, I declare Thatcher and her minions, police and media, bastards … bloody bastards!

Her name still sends shivers down my spine. Vindictive, unbending, inhuman.

Class warfare has never been far from the surface in British society. Upstairs downstairs, the haves and the have nots. New wealth devolved from the British Industrial Revolution 1750-1900 (which produced machine-made, mass produced goods) used man power and child power – in the factories, down the pits.

Trade unions were legalised in 1871 in the UK and sought to reform socio-economic conditions for people in British industries. They were especially strong in the coal mining industry. Coal mining in the UK has a long history dating back to Roman times and this history has long been celebrated, as can be seen in Bill Brandt’s photographs of the tough life of miners and their families (1937, below) and the ACKTON HALL COLLIERY commemorative plate (1985, below).

After the Second World War, “All the coal mines in Britain were purchased by the government in 1947 and put under the control of the National Coal Board (NCB).”1 Pit closures became a regular occurrence in many areas. “Between 1947 and 1994, some 950 mines were closed by UK governments.”1 “In early 1984, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher announced plans to close 20 coal pits which led to the year-long miners’ strike which ended in March 1985.”2

“A strike was called by the Yorkshire region of the NUM in protest against proposed pit closures, invoking a regional ballot result from 1981. The National Executive Committee, led by Arthur Scargill, chose not to hold a national ballot on a national strike, as was conventional, but to declare the strike to be a matter for each region of the NUM to enforce. Scargill defied public opinion, a trait Prime Minister Thatcher exploited when she used the Ridley Plan, drafted in 1977, to defeat the strike. Subsequently, over several decades, almost all the mines were shut down.”3

“Scargill stated, “The policies of this government are clear – to destroy the coal industry and the NUM.” … This was denied by the government at the time, although papers released in 2014 under the thirty-year rule suggest that Scargill was right.”4

In the era of anti-Apartheid (in June 1984 Thatcher received a visit from P. W. Botha the South African premier), anti-war, pro abortion, nuclear disarmament, Gay Liberation, Women’s Liberation, Clause 28, anti-fascist marches and student protests – in the era of Thatcherism (“deregulation, privatisation of key national industries, maintaining a flexible labour market, marginalising the trade unions and centralising power from local authorities to central government”),5 Thatcher saw strong trade unions as an obstacle to economic growth through the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

“Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency…. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers.”5

The losers from the Miners’ Strike were the working class communities and people of the mining villages… and the power of the unions. Thatcher wanted to destroy their power more than anything else and bugger the cost to communities and human beings. Their side of this conflict is portrayed in this exhibition through artefacts and photographs using photography as a tool of resistance.6

The photographs depict the miners struggle for existence through nuance, context and detail and set out to portray the essence of the mining communities identity under duress. There is a wonderful sense of empathy from the photographers towards the people they are photographing, a warts and all approach documenting their class struggle. But we must also be aware that photographs were used by the government and the media to portray the miners as the villains of the conflict, for photography is situated ‘within the reproduction of certain forms of power that can reorganise, map, and penetrate the body’.7 This power is then used in exploitative and controlling ways… as in when the “BBC reversed footage on the Six O’Clock News to suggest the miners had attacked the police, and that the police had simply retaliated. [Despite an Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 confirming the reversal, the BBC has never officially accepted this.]”8 Other examples of the exploitative use of photographs and biased reporting to denigrate the fight and plight of the miners appeared in the tabloid press with newspapers facing allegations that the coverage of the strike amounted to a “propaganda assault on the miners.”9

Photography and film, then, was used to reorganise the truth, map the conflict on tv and in the media, and penetrate the political and social “body” of the United Kingdom, used by the powers that be in controlling and exploitative ways to demonise the miners’ cause in the eyes of the British public.

Susanna Viljanen perceptively, directly and sadly observes that,

“While technically Thatcher was right – most of the mines were unprofitable, many worked at loss and each tonne of coal produced negative cash flow – the aftermath was sad. Thatcher was not only a crank, she was utterly vindictive. The Unions had brought down Edward Heath’s cabinet 1974, and now the Conservatives extracted revenge on the Unions – and on the British working class. Many of the former mine towns fell into bankruptcy, poverty and despair.

It also turned out that her theory of self-correctiveness of the market economy was simply wrong. New businesses did not emerge and the miners did not get relocated on job markets, but mass unemployment ensued. The aftermath also destroyed the social fabric and the networks of the mining towns and the working class, exacerbating the situation even worse. The destruction wasn’t creative, it was merely destructive.”

While I realise the coal mining industry would have eventually closed with the move to renewables (the United Kingdom has just become the first major country to announce the closure of all coal fired power stations ending its 142-year reliance on the fossil fuel) – there is still a double loss from the British state’s abuse of power and the outcome of the Miners’ Strike, the results of which are still being felt today – namely that Britain lost any form of empathy for the working man, and it lost the history of its working people, its culture and social community.

Men had to move away to find jobs as new industries did not emerge where old ones were closed. Country towns and mining towns were depopulated and became even more impoverished than they were before. Colliery bands and choirs vanished, a sense of community was eviscerated and with the closure of the pits the life energy of the villages was destroyed. Bankruptcy, poverty and despair ensued. A social history that stretched back centuries had been disembowelled, obliterated.

This is the great sadness of those times. This cold, freezing winter of our discontent.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Footnotes

1/ “History of coal miners,” on the Wikipedia website

2/ “Coal mining in the United Kingdom,” on the Wikipedia website

3/ “History of trade unions in the United Kingdom,” on the Wikipedia website

4/ “Arthur Scargill,” on the Wikipedia website

5/ George Monbiot. “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” on The Guardian website 15 April 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

6/ “Photography has long been associated with acts of resistance. It is used to document action, share ideas, inspire change, tell stories, gather evidence and fight against injustice.”

Text from the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, 2024 on the South London Gallery website [Online] Cited 29/09/2024

7/ Michael Hayes. “Photography and the Emergence of the Pacific Cruise: Rethinking the representational crisis in colonial photography,” in Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (eds.,). Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place. Routledge, 2002, pp. 172-87.

8/ Lesley Boulton quoted in Adrian Tempany. “‘A policeman took a full swipe at my head’: Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984,” on The Guardian website 17 December 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

“The miners always said the police had brutally attacked them without justifiable provocation, and that the attack felt preplanned. They complained that the BBC had reversed footage, to show miners who threw missiles seemingly before the police charge rather than in retaliation for it…

Far less publicised, a year later, was the unravelling of the police case. Officers had arrested and charged 95 miners with riot, an offence of collective violence carrying a potential life sentence. Yet in July 1985 the prosecution withdrew and all the miners were were acquitted after the evidence of some police officers, including those in command, had been discredited under cross-examination.

In 1991 South Yorkshire police paid £425,000 compensation to 39 miners who had sued the force for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. But still the police did not admit any fault, and not a single police officer was ever disciplined or prosecuted.”

David Conn. “We were fed lies about the violence at Orgreave. Now we need the truth,” on The Guardian website 22nd July 2015 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

9/ “My recent research, which involved analysis of both news language and press photographs of the time, shows that this year-long strike was portrayed by newspapers – on all sides – as a metaphorical war between the government and the National Union of Mineworkers.

It shows how the media used “war framing” words, phrases and photographs while reporting the strike – often drawing on iconic texts and images associated with World War I. This framing presented the miners as “the enemy”, while at the same time, it justified the actions of the government and the police as necessary and even noble.”

Christopher Hart. “War on the picket line: how the British press made a battle out of the miners’ strike,” on The Conversation website June 8, 2016 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

“The 1984-1985 miners’ strike was a defining moment in British industrial relations. Shafted, edited by Yorkshire freelance Granville Williams and published by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF), to which the NUJ is affiliated, has been published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the start of the strike. It bravely explores the ways in which the media covered the strike and looks into the devastating impact of the pit closure programme on mining communities.

It analyses the pressures on journalists who reported the strike, with accounts from prominent reporters, among them Pete Lazenby of the Yorkshire Evening Post, Nick Jones of the BBC, and Paul Routledge of The Times. But the book also looks at the important contribution from the alternative media and the coverage of the long conflict by freelance photographers and filmmakers.”

Julio Etchart. “Shafted,” on the Freelance website May 2009 [Online] Cited 03/10/2024

10/ Susanna Viljanen. “Why didn’t Thatcher realize the mining towns would become much poorer without the mines?,” on the Quora website Nd [Online] Cited 29/09/2024

Many thankx to Zena Howard for her help, and to the Martin Parr Foundation and Four Corners for allowing me to publish the photographs and art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“We face not an employer, but a government aided and abetted by the judiciary, the police and you people in the media.”

Arthur Scargill

“For those who have lived through this strike, its enormity cannot be underestimated. We have brought together some of the best-known photographs – including John Harris’s image of a policeman with a truncheon held from a horse swinging at a cowering woman, and John Sturrock’s photograph of the confrontation between mass pickets and police lines at Bilston Glen – to rarely seen snapshots taken by Philip Winnard, a striking miner himself.”

Martin Parr

“The exhibition is an attempt to commemorate and reflect on the miners’ strike of 1984-85, a seismic, yet often overlooked event in the recent history of Britain. By focusing on the complex role photographs played during the year-long struggle we hope for the show to transcend the purely historical or nostalgic and take the visitor on a journey through a series of timeless images that show the resilience, camaraderie and violence of the strike, to reconnect and consider it again in relation to the present. The ephemera materials show the urgent use of images and the creativity that was deployed in support of the striking miners. Together, the works tell a story of the battle against Margaret Thatcher and the National Coal Board’s pit closures, but what ultimately shines through is the unity and imagination of people coming together in defence of their communities and the basic rights to work and to survive.”

Isaac Blease, Exhibition Curator

ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 explores the vital role that photography played during this bitter industrial dispute. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to tour this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation. One of Britain’s longest and most violent disputes, the repercussions of the miners’ strike continue to be felt today across the country.

The exhibition looks at the central role photographs played during the year-long struggle against pit closures, with many materials drawn from the Martin Parr Foundation collection. Posters, vinyl records, plates, badges and publications are placed in dialogue with images by photographers, investigating the power and the contradictions inherent in using photography as a tool of resistance. They include photographs by Brenda Prince, John Sturrock, John Harris, Jenny Matthews, Roger Tiley, Imogen Young and Chris Killip, as well as Philip Winnard who was himself a striking miner.

The photographs show some familiar imagery – the lines of police and the violence – but also depict the remarkable community support from groups such as Women Against Pit Closures and the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Photography was used both to sway public opinion and to document this transformative period in British history.

The catalyst for the miners’ strike was an attempt to prevent colliery closures through industrial action in 1984-85. The industrial action, which began in Yorkshire, was led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its President, Arthur Scargill, against the National Coal Board (NCB). The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher opposed the strikes and aimed to reduce the power of the trade unions. The dispute was characterised by violence between the flying pickets and the police, most notably at the Battle of Orgreave. The miners’ strike was the largest since the General Strike of 1926 and ended in victory for the government with the closure of a majority of the UK’s collieries.

Text from the Four Corners website

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

George Monbiot. “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,” on The Guardian website 15 April 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

Bill Brandt (British, born Germany 1904-1983)
Unemployed miner returning home from Jarrow
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing:

At top left

Unknown maker (British)
Dartboard with Margaret Thatcher photograph
Nd
Martin Parr Foundation Collection

At left,

John Sturrock (British)
In the wake of an earthmoving machine, men search for small lumps of coal on an old colliery tip at South Kirby
13th December, 1984

At second left,

Unknown maker (British)
When They Close A Pit They Kill A Community
Welsh Congress in Support of Mining Communities 1984-1985
1985
Poster

Bill Brandt (British, born Germany 1904-1983)
Coal-Miner’s Bath, Chester-le-Street, Durham
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Dot Hickling on strike from N.C.B canteen at Linby Colliery helped organise and turn the miners kitchen in Hucknall for a year during strike. Son & son-in-law also on strike, Nottingham
1984/85
© Brenda Prince

Bill Brandt (British born Germany, 1904-1983)
Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal
1937
Gelatin silver print

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing below the text from the magazine at left:

The Women’s Support Group

“This Time We Didn’t Want To Be On The Outside”

At Lea Hall women came to play a crucial role in the dispute. And the same was true throughout the country. In the past women have often been criticised for putting pressure on their husbands during strikes, pressures that come from the responsibilities of paying the rent or the mortgage, of keeping the house nice and making sure that the children are well clothed and fed. But the Lea Hall women stood by their husbands, their sons and their fathers for the whole twelve months. To being with they set up the Lea Hall Women’s support Group, and organised it along similar lines to the Strike Committee. They appointed their own officials, and they met on a regular basis. At first their main concern was with raising money and making sure that everyone was fed. But later they came to be concerned with the whole running of the strike, and demanded that they should have their own representatives on the Strike Committee. In December four of their members were admitted, and in that way the women came to be unbolted in organising everything from picketing to fundraising to welfare.

“It started one Sunday. We talked about it and walked around the estate trying to find out if women were interested. We got quite a good response. The first meeting was at Chris’ house, 30 women turned up, we chose a Chairwoman, a Secretary and a Treasurer. After that we met at the Social Club. We had weekly meetings where we discussed things like correspondence, what we can afford to buy, food parcels and collections. We organised ourselves as Lea Hall Women’s Support Group; it was something separate from the Strike Committee.”

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at left, Jenny Matthews’ quilt commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike

Jenny Matthews (British)
Cole Not Dole
Nd
© Jenny Matthews

Detail from a quilt commissioned by the Martin Parr Foundation to mark the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at left the wall text below; in the four photographs from top left clockwise, John Sturrock’s Miners’ Strike 1984 mass picket confronting police lines, Bilston Glen. Norman Strike at the front of a mass picket, Scotland, unknown photographer Carcroft NCB Central Store 1984, Howard Sooley’s Rossington Main Colliery 1984, Roger Tiley’s ‘Scabs’ returning to work, Newbridge, South Wales, 1984-1985; and at right, the poster VICTORY TO THE MINERS, VICTORY TO THE WORKING CLASS (below)

To mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to present this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation, which looks at the vital role that photographs played during the year-long struggle against pit closures.

The miners’ strike was one of Britain’s longest and most bitter industrial disputes, the repercussions of which continue to be felt throughout the country today. This industrial action was led by the National Union of Mineworkers and its president, Arthur Scargill, against planned colliery closures by the National Coal Board which threatened 20,000 job losses.

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government strongly opposed the strike and aimed to reduce the power of the trade unions. It was a dispute characterised by weaponised news coverage and visual media created sway public opinion against the strike. Photographs documenting the events in 1984-85 are exhibited here in dialogue with selected ephemera created in support of the miners – including posters, vinyl records, plates, badges and publications.

The exhibited works cover a variety of approaches, from photo-journalism to photo-montage, as well as vernacular photographs taken by Philip Winnard, himself a striking miner. They include some iconic imagery of the lines of police and picket violence – most notably at the infamous Battle of Orgreave. But they also depict the remarkable community solidarity from groups including Women Against Pit Closures and Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners.

The strike ended in defeat for the miners on the 3rd March 1985, with most of Britain’s coal mines shut down. It was a running point in British society, leading to weakened trade unions and loss of workers’ rights, the privatisation of nationalised industries, and today’s insecure jobs market. Forty yeas on, ex-mining communities face a legacy of mass unemployment and social inequality. This exhibition offers a unique account of the strike, but also a space to reflect on power, community and the relationship between photography and societal change.

The exhibition features work by John Harris, Chris Fillip, Jenny Matthews, Brenda Prince, Neville Pyne, Howard Sooley, John Sturrock, Roger Tiley, Philip Winnard, Imogen Young and uncredited photographers of original press prints. It includes many materials drawn from the Martin Parr Foundation collection. The original exhibition was curated by Isaac Blease at Martin Parr Foundation. A book to accompany the exhibition is published by Bluecoat Press.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Alex Sainsbury, Foyle Foundation, Hallett Independent, National union of Mineworkers and the Society for the Study of Labour History. With many thanks to the Martin Parr Foundation, Mary Halpenny-Killip, Matthew Fillip, Ceri Thompson, National Museum of Wales, Craig Oldham, Graham Smith, Bluecoat Press, British Journal of Photography, Isaac Blease, Tom Booth Woodger, Mick Moore and Safia Mirzai.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unknown maker (British)
VICTORY TO THE MINERS, VICTORY TO THE WORKING CLASS
Nd
Poster

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing closed colliery commemorative plates:

Commemorative Plates

Left, top to bottom

Clayton West NUM Yorkshire Area
The Dirty Thirty No Surrender
Durham Miners Association

Right, top to bottom

Justice for Mineworkers
Littleton Miners’ 1984 Struggle 1985
Loyal to the Last Ollerton Miners

Unknown maker (British)
ACKTON HALL COLLIERY commemorative plate
1985

A series of commemorative plates was made for closed collieries. As shaft sinking began in 1873 the year 1877 may indicate when coal production began.

Installation view of the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing at second left in the bottom image, Brenda Prince’s photograph Women’s’ picket at Bevercotes Colliery, night shift, 11pm. Nottingham, February 1985 (below); and at third right top, Roger Tiley’s photograph NUM union officials, Maerdy Miners’ Hall, Rhondda Fach, South Wales, 1984-1985

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Women’s’ picket at Bevercotes Colliery, night shift, 11pm. Nottingham
February 1985
Gelatin silver print
© Brenda Prince

We were all documentary photographers who had our own
projects and interests. We would work on our own stories and
my miners’ strike images came out of that. As a working class
woman, I became aware of the inequalities in society; not just
between men and women but also relating to race, class,
people with disabilities and sexuality. The miners’ strike gave
me the opportunity to document working class people who were
really struggling to keep their jobs and keep their communities
alive.

…on starting to document the miners’ strike

My brother lived in Calverton, a small pit village so I was able to
stay with him. I got in touch with Women’s action groups in the
area (Hucknall & Linby, Ollerton) and they put me in touch with
others (Clipstone, Blidworth). I began by photographing the
striking miners’ communal kitchens or soup kitchens and they
gradually got to know me. I was accepted by the men because
they knew I was on their side and perhaps because I was a
woman, they didn’t take me seriously as a ‘Press’
photographer. The more I went up there the more I got to know
people. They’d say, ‘oh you should come with us to so and so’.
I think that’s how I heard about the night pickets at Blidworth.

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’
strike:

There was so much the women were doing. What I found
important about the miners’ strike and women getting involved,
is that up till then many hadn’t taken so much interest in what
was happening in this country politically, but the strike
politicised them – they began to take note and watch the news
and realise that a lot of politicians are hypocrites, and you can’t
trust them and you still can’t.

Women became more confident as a result of the strike, which I
thought was great. It was good for other women and young girls
to see their Mums and daughters speaking out at the meetings,
doing things they wouldn’t have done before, eg. picketing.
Most of them would have been typical mothers and wives,
cleaning, cooking, shopping, looking after their children instead
of going on the picket line, visiting and supporting other
collieries, getting together with other women and planning days
of action, e.g., Women Against Pit Closures.

After the strike, as told to me and recorded in interviews about
the strike, they saw things differently, so it was a positive
experience for some women despite the hardship but hard for
the men who lost their jobs.

Extract from ONE YEAR interview with Brenda Prince on the Martin Parr Foundation website [Online] Cited 24/09/2024

Philip Winnard (British)
Houghton Main
1984
© Philip Winnard

Howard Sooley (British)
Carcroft NCB Central Store
1984
© Howard Sooley

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Buying an ice cream at Yorkshire Miners’ Gala. June
1984
© Brenda Prince

Photographer uncredited
Three coaches used to take miners to Hem Heath Colliery, burning fiercely at a depot at Trentham near Stoke-on-Trent
1984
Press print

Neville Pyne (British)
A policeman getting to grips with a picket
1984
Press print
© Neville Pyne

Philip Winnard (British)
Spread from photo album NUM Strike, 12th March 1984, TILL WE WIN
1984
Photo album
© Philip Winnard

The last picket line at Darfield Main. Monday morning March 4th 1985.
Houghton Main scabs had been taken in 2 hours early (we called at Darfield on way home)

The last picket line of the strike. This was at Corton Wood waiting for scabs comeing out at dinner time. Mont 4th March 85. The Picket’s were joined by Women from the Support Group.

Text from the photo album pages above

“The media was a very important aspect of the miners’ strike – the photographs were used against the miners in terms of demonising them,” Blease explains. “Images were used to illustrate violence and chaos in quite demonising and weaponised ways, but then on the other hand photographs were used to debase that media bias – through posters, photojournalists working for left-wing and union press, and people like Sturrock, John Harris, Prince and Imogen Young who were photographing the strike in a more holistic way.” …

Many of the photographers featured were part of the communities that they were documenting. Philip Winnard was one such example, as he was on strike himself from the Barnsley Main Colliery. “When he went on strike, he took his camera along and started recording his experiences when he was picketing,” Blease says. “We wanted to focus on how photographs were used in different ways and shared with friends and colleagues. He compiled these really amazing photo albums and they follow the strike chronologically, starting with the first picket lines and finishing with the return to work marches a year later.”

“They feel like family albums and spare no punches in how they record the strike,” he continues. “There’s violence, the intimidation of strike breakers, fundraising community activities, newslettering – there’s everything, and it gives an intimate familiarity with the event.”

Women also feature heavily throughout the exhibition, highlighting the oft-overlooked role they played in supporting – from those making food in the striking miners’ kitchens to all female picket lines at the collieries. Photographers such as Brenda Prince, who was a member of women’s only photography agency Format, documented this.

“Prince was focusing a lot on women’s roles in the strike,” Blease says. “So miners’ wives, community work, fundraising, picketing themselves, gathering food packages, and they played a very important role. These photographers were not just focusing on the sensational battle that was going on, they were showing how communities were coming together, but also how communities were being destroyed by the dispute, and photography was the medium that was catching this.”

Isaac Muk. “In Photos: The miners’ strike, 40 years on,” on the Huck website 6th March, 2024 [Online] Cited 24/09/2024

Brenda Prince (British, b. 1950)
Sidney Richmond, retired Pit Deputy, babysitting Sean (3 months old) – first strike baby in the village. Clipstone Colliery, Nottingham
1984-1985
© Brenda Prince

Imogen Young (British)
London’s Lesbian and Gay ‘Support the Miners’ Group take part in David’s Day celebration in Neath Colbren Club
2 March 1985
© Imogen Young

ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 explores the vital role that photography played during this bitter industrial dispute.

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike, Four Corners is delighted to tour this exhibition from the Martin Parr Foundation. One of Britain’s longest and most violent disputes, the repercussions of the miners’ strike continue to be felt today across the country.

Press release from Four Corners

John Harris (British)
Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave
1984
Gelatin silver print
© John Harris/reportdigital.co.uk

Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research

Photographer Lesley Boulton is attacked by a truncheon-wielding policeman at Orgreave. The picture was published by only one of 17 national newspapers in Britain.

On 18 June, miners came from all over the country to picket the coking plant outside Orgreave village, near Rotherham. I arrived at about 9.15am, with my camera – I was documenting life on the picket line. It was a glorious day: miners were sitting in the sun, or playing football, when suddenly police horses charged out in small groups. They did this twice, then there was a massive charge and they started attacking people. I didn’t see any trigger for this.

People tried to escape across the railway line, which led to a lot of injuries. And there were policemen on foot with short shields, laying about people with truncheons. I was numb with shock. This was violence far in excess of anything I’d ever witnessed: they were whacking people about the head and body with impunity. Some men tried to defend themselves. We couldn’t believe it when the BBC reversed footage on the Six O’Clock News to suggest the miners had attacked the police, and that the police had simply retaliated. [Despite an Independent Police Complaints Commission report in 2015 confirming the reversal, the BBC has never officially accepted this.]

It was chaos. I ran back to the village and hid in a car repair yard. After a few minutes, I came out and photographed one man pinned to a car bonnet, being beaten terribly. At the bus stop, a man was lying on the ground with a chest injury. I was calling to a policeman standing in the road, asking him to get an ambulance, when these two mounted police bore down on me. A man pulled me out of the way just as one of them took a full swipe at my head with his truncheon, and missed.

When I look at this photograph, I wonder what was going through his mind. The police claimed the image was doctored; when I tried to press charges for assault, the director of public prosecutions’ office told me there wasn’t enough evidence. How much did they need?

I don’t take this image personally, because it’s not about me; it’s about something much bigger: an expression of arbitrary power, and what can happen when our masters decide to put us in our place. Besides, I didn’t suffer the way the miners and their families did.

Lesley Boulton quoted in Adrian Tempany. “‘A policeman took a full swipe at my head’: Lesley Boulton at the Battle of Orgreave, 1984,” on The Guardian website 17 December 2016 [Online] Cited 23/09/2024

Philip Winnard (British)
Spread from photo album NUM Strike, 12th March 1984, TILL WE WIN
1984
Photo album
© Philip Winnard

Showing photographs from the Battle of Orgreave

Battle of Orgreave

The Battle of Orgreave was a violent confrontation on 18 June 1984 between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) and other police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, at a British Steel Corporation (BSC) coking plant at Orgreave, in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, England. It was a pivotal event in the 1984–1985 UK miners’ strike, and one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history.

Journalist Alastair Stewart has characterised it as “a defining and ghastly moment” that “changed, forever, the conduct of industrial relations and how this country functions as an economy and as a democracy”. Most media reports at the time depicted it as “an act of self-defence by police who had come under attack”. In 2015, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) reported that there was “evidence of excessive violence by police officers, a false narrative from police exaggerating violence by miners, perjury by officers giving evidence to prosecute the arrested men, and an apparent cover-up of that perjury by senior officers”.

Historian Tristram Hunt has described the confrontation as “almost medieval in its choreography … at various stages a siege, a battle, a chase, a rout and, finally, a brutal example of legalised state violence”.

71 picketers were charged with riot and 24 with violent disorder. At the time, riot was punishable by life imprisonment. The trials collapsed when the evidence given by the police was deemed “unreliable”. Gareth Peirce, who acted as solicitor for some of the pickets, said that the charge of riot had been used “to make a public example of people, as a device to assist in breaking the strike”, while Michael Mansfield called it “the worst example of a mass frame-up in this country this century”.

In June 1991, the SYP paid £425,000 in compensation to 39 miners for assault, wrongful arrest, unlawful detention and malicious prosecution.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Poster for the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 at Four Corners, London showing in the background, Brenda Prince’s photograph Riot police await orders in fields surrounding Orgreave coke works, S. Yorkshire, Miners’ dispute, 1984

Poster for the exhibition ONE YEAR! Photographs from the Miners’ Strike 1984-85 outside of Four Corners, London

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Exhibition: ‘The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar’ at Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 15th September 2024

Altstadt (Rupertinum)

Curator: Katharina Ehrl

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976
Silver gelatine print on baryta paper, brown toned
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna 2024

Deriving pleasure from the dérive

In recent weeks Art Blart has posted on social documentary photographers of the urbanscape: David Goldblatt documenting social conditions in South Africa under apartheid and Roger Mayne with his “mixture of reality and unreality” photographs of the communities of Southam Road and surrounds, London.

One could argue that both could be seen as a focused urban male flâneur (or flâneuse in the case of a female), who saunters around the city observing society – the serendipitous Mayne more so than the working in series focused Goldblatt. And here we have another photographer of the urbanscape until recently unknown to me, that of the magnificent Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020) who – according to the exhibition text – is another flâneur, “her flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work.”

But Mejchar’s was a very concentrated photographic practice, one in which the photographer again and again “explored Vienna’s peripheral zones on the southeast edge of the city” to create photographic series often created over several years. Therefore, rather than being a wandering dilettante photographer, I believe that Mejchar was a focused conceptual artist who used Guy Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive” (1956)1 (or “drift”) to ground her photographic practice.

With its focused flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters, one of the goals of the dérive includes studying the terrain of the city (psychogeography), the exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places. The pyschogeography of the urbanscape.2

A quotation by Grant W. Ray is instructive in this regard:

“Debord’s Dérive is not simple a walk through the streets of the city, of chance encounters. Instead one must move rapidly and decisively through the urban space, with intention… They should be aware of their surroundings, of the “… ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction…” Thus the most talented photographers who’s oeuvre includes the investigation of the urbanscape. The walk itself, the interaction of operator, camera, and site breaks down the normal relationship we have with public urban spaces. Their activity alone is the Dérive.”3

Working decisively and with intention, at the edge of the city, in spaces with no boundaries, where there were few people, or using different typologies of the city such as hotel rooms in which she stayed during her everyday job, Mejchar focused on the pyschogeography of the urbanscape through her reflective, non-decisive moment photographs, capturing “the complexity of this desolate and yet, in her eyes, beautiful landscape” and the changes that were happening to the urbanscape.

“Elfriede Mejchar consciously broke away from the photographic mainstream and the reportage style that was popular at the time. Rather than searching for the so-called “decisive moment,” she approached her subjects in a strongly conceptual and serial manner. She focused not on the extraordinary but on the unspectacular and the commonplace, the everyday and the banal, repeatedly addressing these in new ways in her photographic series.” (Text from the Wien Museum website)

Working with the periphery, the borders between urban and rural spaces, the non-decisive moment, landscapes subjected to human interventions and photographs in series, Mejchar’s photographs are more than mere representation of these sites: they challenge the viewer to “instigate more than just chance encounters for the viewer looking at the photographs,” through an understanding of the “subtle variations of the daily social realities created and maintained through public works and layout.”4 “The photographers activity of finding these sites is the dérive, the photograph itself is the pyschogeography, the questioning.”4

With her training as a classical photographer in the manner of Sudek, Brassaï or Tudor-Hart (see the first two photographs in the posting On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar) grounding her later objective conceptual photographs, Mejchar’s point of departure is the pleasure she derives from the focused dérive and the results of her activity (through the objective and precise eye of a topographer a la Bernd and Hiller Becher) – the questioning photographs – brought to the attention of the viewer.

Mejchar investigates “traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric” and in so doing brings peripheral things (and her ideas about them) to the centre of our attention, making them psychologically valuable for all of us. The artist derives pleasure from her measured dérive and investigation of the evanescent, posing important questions about seemingly mundane things before they pass out of sight, memory, and existence.

And in her pleasure, is ours.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

See another posting about the artist’s work: On Her Own. The photographer Elfriede Mejchar at Wien Museum MUSA, Vienna, 18th April – 1st September, 2024

1/ “Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.

How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.”

Anonymous. “Psychogeography,” on the Tate website Nd [Online] Cited 13/09/2024

2/ Guy Debord (November 1956). “Theory of the Dérive”. Les Lèvres Nues (9). Translated by Ken Knabb.

3/ Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” 1958 on the Bureau of Public Secrets website Nd quoted in Grant W. Ray. “Dérive,” on the Silverpoetics website 13 July 2009 [Online] Cited 20/08/2024

4/ Ibid.,

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

Poesie des Alltäglichen. Fotografien von Elfriede Mejchar / The poetry of the everyday

To mark the centenary of her birth, in 2024 three museums in Austria host exhibitions of works by the photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents the artist as a portraitist. Curator Katharina Ehrl guides you through the exhibition in this short film.

In 2024, three museums host exhibitions of works by the Austrian photographer Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020, Vienna, AT). The Museum der Moderne Salzburg is collaborating with the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich and the Wien Museum to honor the artist’s work at three different locations on the occasion of her 100th birthday, with each location offering a different focus.

Salzburg’s contribution to this collaborative project will present the artist’s portraits. With her series of works entitled “Artists at work” (1954-1961), for example, Mejchar demonstrates impressively how she engages with the artistic personalities of Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl and Arnulf Rainer by mapping their working situation in their studios. But she also demonstrated the same precision of perception when encountering the inanimate objects in her surroundings, thereby giving landscapes, flowers and discarded furniture the appearance of animated portraits.

The photo collections at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg hold a total of 665 photographs by Mejchar. Otto Breicha, the first director of the Museum’s predecessor institution, was a long-time colleague of Mejchar who recognised the artistic value of her photographic work and helped to promote it. As early as 1982, one year before the official opening of the Rupertinum, a comprehensive collection of her work was added to the photographic collection that later grew through further purchases and donations and today constitutes a focal point of the Museum’s photographic holdings.

Text from the Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below); and at right, photographs from the series Nobody is Perfect (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Arnulf Rainer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)

Arnulf Rainer (born 8 December 1929) is an Austrian painter noted for his abstract informal art.

Rainer was born in Baden, Austria. During his early years, Rainer was influenced by Surrealism. In 1950, he founded the Hundsgruppe (dog group) together with Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, and Josef Mikl. After 1954, Rainer’s style evolved towards Destruction of Forms, with blackenings, overpaintings, and maskings of illustrations and photographs dominating his later work. He was close to the Vienna Actionism, featuring body art and painting under the influence of drugs. He painted extensively on the subject of Hiroshima such as it relates to the nuclear bombing of the Japanese city and the inherent political and physical fallout.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Christa Hauer
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954–1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (Austrian, 1925-2013)

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (b. March 13, 1925 in Vienna; d. March 21, 2013 in St. Pölten) was an Austrian painter. …

She was initially under the artistic influence of her father and created representational works such as landscapes, portraits and nude drawings. At the end of her stay in the USA, around 1960, she turned to abstract painting, particularly action painting, color field painting and informal art. Later, cosmic forms and a turn to nature determined her works.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
1954-1961
From the series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Austrian, 1928-2000)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser Regentag Dunkelbunt (born Friedrich Stowasser, born December 15, 1928 in Vienna; died February 19, 2000 on board the Queen Elizabeth 2 off Brisbane) was an Austrian artist, who worked primarily as a painter, but also in the fields of architecture and environmental protection. …

Artistically, he was an opponent of the “straight line” and any kind of standardisation throughout his life. This is particularly evident in his work in the field of building design, which is characterised by imaginative liveliness and individuality, but above all by the inclusion of nature in architecture.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Aglaia Konrad
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Aglaia Konrad (Austrian, b. 1960)

Aglaia Konrad (born 1960) is an Austrian photographer and educator living in Brussels. …

Konrad’s photographs explore urban space in large cities. Konrad’s work has been to known to be distinctly international in that it highlights urban elements independent of cultural markers. Her work highlights the ubiquitous elements of urban life through methods like filming a city from the perspective of a moving car or compiling a series of aerial views of skyscrapers.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Prof. Dr. Otto Breicha
1988
From the series Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Otto Breicha (Austrian, 1932-2003)

Otto Breicha (b. 26 July 1932 in Vienna; d, 28 December 2003 in Vienna) was an Austrian art historian, publicist and museum director. …

Breicha is considered an important integration figure in the Austrian art and literature scene of the 1960s. As director of the Rupertinum he collected works by Kurt Moldovan, Günter Brus, Fritz Wotruba and Gotthard Muhr, among others. He edited portfolios by Karl Anton Fleck, Gotthard Muhr, Peter Pongratz, Alois Riedl, Karl Rössing, Johannes Wanke, Max Weiler and many others.

Breicha built up an important photo collection in the Rupertinum. He also took photos of authors himself, especially during his time at the Austrian Society for Literature from 1962 to 1972.

Text from the German Wikipedia website translated by Google Translate

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs from Mejchar’s series Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais, 1967-1976 (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Creative Element in Documentation

Created between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide und Erdberger Mais” (Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais) is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mekchav first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstatten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-fact manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in there art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Hotel (Fremdenzimmer), 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room), 1970-1986)
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper, brown tones
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Flachsspinnerei in Stadl-Paura (Flax spinning mill in Stadl-Paura)
1986
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from Mejchar’s series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Die Monatssesseln, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month, 1986-1988)
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio))
1988
Silver gelatin print on baryta paper
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing work from the Mejchar’s series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity) (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität (A Masquerade of Borrowed Identity)
1989
Gelatin silver print on baryta paper
Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Introduction

Elfriede Mejchar (1924-2020 Vienna, AT), the grande dame of Austrian photography, was in the employ of the Federal Monuments Office for almost forty years. Meanwhile, she also began her groundbreaking work on the outskirts of Vienna. Harnessing the photographic series as a documentary and investigative medium, she limned an imposing portrait of the urban landscape. Her work, which had a lasting influence on the evolution of photography in Austria, now also stands as an important documentary record of the country in the postwar period.

As a professional photographer, Mejchar traveled to various regions throughout Austria, including in Lower and Upper Austria and Styria, to capture buildings and cultural assets of art-historical significance in photographs. Yet she also used her official trips and her scant free time to pursue her own photographic interests, which focused on the small and seemingly trivial and the traces of civilisation that humans leave in nature or along the edges of the urban fabric and that receive little if any attention. It may seem that the documentary dimension is less important in the resulting works, that it is eclipsed by the narrative element. In fact, Mejchar fuses both, scrutinising her motifs with an attentive eye that picks up on the singular or peculiar and registers it without manipulation.

Elfriede Mejchar was not interested in the so-called “pivotal moment” and did not care for the conventional photojournalistic style of her time. Her work began when people had left, and she approached her themes from a very conceptual angle. Both the documentary series she created under the open sky and the object photographs, still lifes, and collages she made in her studio reflect this approach. She photographed the “evanescent before it evanesces”, in urban and rural landscapes and everyday scenes, capturing the changes that affected the particular scenery and its distinctive atmosphere.

The Creative Element in Documentation

Produced between 1967 and 1976, the photographic series “Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais” is Mejchar’s first long-term cycle, for which she takes hundreds of pictures over the years. The series uses the photographic medium to explore the Viennese periphery. Simmeringer Heide and Erdberger Mais are areas on the southeastern outskirts of Vienna that were altered by humans and gradually taken over by commercial operations which transformed them into an industrial landscape. Mejchar first discovers them at a time when unused parcels of land (locally known as “Gstätten”), derelict market gardens, and scattered industrial structures are still defining features of the scenery. What sets the series apart is the choice of subject and the matter-of-factly manner in which the photographer treats it, compiling a kind of anecdotal inventory – empty lots, paths and roads, utility poles and a select few close-ups. The shots demonstrate that Mejchar’s objective in her art – as in the documentary photography that is her day-to-day work – is to render exactly what the objective and precise eye of a topographer sees. In framing an area in the urban periphery as a landscape, she trains this eye and her lens on a subject that has been largely absent from Austrian photography.

The use of a sulfur-based solution to tone the photographs – which is the cause of the brownish tinge – reflects a recurring concern in Mejchar’s photographs: existence in time and impermanence. In this instance, the technique’s purpose is not to alter the colour, but rather to make it more durable.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Künstler bei der Arbeit, 1954-1961 (Artists at work, 1954-1961); and at right, the wall text ‘The Artist as Chronicler’
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Artist as Chronicler

Portraiture plays a role early on in Elfriede Mejchar’s work; she receives her professional training in a portrait studio. She subsequently makes a conscious choice to avoid the genre, but then, in the 1950s, returns to it.

“Künstler bei der Arbeit”, 1954-1961 (Artists at Work)

The series “Künstler bei der Arbeit” (Artists at Work) is her first major cycle of portraits, comprising over 340 gelatin silver prints. Mejchar is often brought in to capture exhibitions in installation shots, especially at the Vienna Secession, where she is introduced to many young artists waiting to make a name for themselves as well as some of their older colleagues who have been active since before 1945. The incomprehension with which the visitors gaze at abstract art that does not represent anything with any accuracy prompts the young photographer to record the intensity and seriousness with which the artists dedicate themselves to their craft, often braving considerable hardship. The series accordingly focuses on visualising the real studio and workplace settings of thirty-six artists, including Christa Hauer, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Josef Mikl, and Arnulf Rainer.

“Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern”, 1988-1994 (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)

In the body of work “Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern” (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators), by contrast, Mejchar undertakes to depict everyone involved in fine art photography in Austria in the late twentieth century. Over the years, the series grows to comprise eighty double portraits, each composed, in accordance with a rigorous conception, of an en face portrait side by with a three-quarter view. The works have a distinctly staged quality, underscored by the unvarying austere setting and the emphasis on the hands, among other aspects. In this respect they recall Mejchar’s final examination, in which she had to realise a portrait both in profile and en face to demonstrate her command of photographic lighting designing and the handling of human sitters.

With these two projects, Mejchar becomes an important chronicler of the Austrian arts scene.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing at left, work from Mejchar’s series Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier) (Oscillation (Salzburg State Studio)) (above); and at right, the wall text ‘The Other Gaze’ (below)
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

The Other Gaze

“Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)”, 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room))

As part of her work for the Federal Monuments Office, Elfriede Mejchar has to travel a great deal, mainly to more rural areas. The photographic series “Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)” (Hotel (Guest Room)) is a kind of lasting documentary record of these trips and perhaps the most significant one. Bed, table, chair, mirror, wardrobe, patterned wallpaper, and sometimes a washbasin: for over fifteen years, the photographer captures her rooms with their often spartan furnishings in the numerous modest hotels and inns that – though it may not look like it at first glance – provide her with accommodation. Here and there one does espy a toothbrush, a pair of shoes, a ruffled bedcover, all traces that reveal the ostensibly absent photographer’s presence. A certain melancholy suffuses these shots of hotel rooms as witnesses to a world that has all but disappeared

“Die Monatssesseln”, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month)

The same melancholy is also unmistakable in the photographs of objects that have outlived their usefulness and been discarded and, it seems, forgotten. In the series “Die Monatssesseln” (The Armchairs of the Month) Mejchar portrays found motifs such as discarded seating furniture. The series shows a wide variety of such items, from kitchen chairs to living-room armchairs and even car seats, that have become part of the natural or other scene where they were dumped. No less diverse than the pieces of furniture and their environments are the feelings they elicit; as Mejchar puts it, “a mess can be beautiful in its own way.”

“Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)”, 1988

The dreariness of the hotel rooms contrasts with the sober-mindedness and lucidity of the photographs in “Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)” (Oscillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)). Yet although the two series are very different on the surface, both are sustained by a minimalism that is operative on the level of the motifs, in the austere interiors, as well as in Mejchar’s precisely chosen camera angles. These photographs capture the rooms of the State of Salzburg’s studio residence for visiting artists, located, like the Salzburger Kunstverein, in the historic Künstlerhaus. Mejchar herself lives there for a while in 1988, a change of working environment that is reflected in her output from the period.

Nobody Is Perfect

In the late 1980s, Elfriede Mejchar branches out in a fresh creative direction. She has been retired for some years and feels free to take on new challenges. Setting aside the flaneur-like practice underlying her earlier bodies of work, she starts photographing in the studio.

Tapetenbild. Triptychon, 1988 (Wallcover Picture. Tryptic) “Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität”, 1989 (A Costume for the borrowed Identity) “Tagebuch Jänner 1988”, 1988 (Diary January 1988) “Nobody Is Perfect”, 1996

Faces change shapes, snakes coil around heads, open and closed eyes alternate. For the collages in “Tagebücher Jänner 1988,” Mejchar reuses her own photographs; in other series, by contrast, she works with found images such as shots of female models from print advertisements or fuses figural representations with fabric and wallpaper patterns. The works are rapidly composed out of visual fragments that she often only loosely places side by side or in overlapping arrangements, dispelling their aura of perfection. “I build pictures for myself on the wall, from materials that are at hand in the public sphere, that are on public display, but I strip away the ideal of flawless beauty that is constantly rubbed in our faces by dismembering it or covering it up.” It is the temporary and easily mutable that fascinates Mejchar, qualities that had had no place in her professional work.

“Amaryllis”, 1994-1997

Pictures of flowers in fine art, whether painted or photographed, inevitably have a clichéd dimension. Mejchar photographs only a special selection of flowers such as amaryllises, lilies, and tulips that she grows in her own garden. In the studio, rather than recording the flowers with a romantic gesture, she captures their gradual transformations – full blossoms, some full of delicate life, some already wilting and recognisably perishable. Showing them between florescence and decay, in a kind of liminal instant, she revisits a theme that surfaces throughout her oeuvre: the capturing of a state of affairs at a defined point in time.

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing the wall text Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT; and some photographs of Elfriede Mejchar working
© Museum der Moderne Salzburg, photo: wildbild/Günter Freund

Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT

Elfriede Mejchar is raised in Lower Austria. In 1939, she moves to Germany, where, from 1941 until 1944, she trains as a photographer with Ernst Ley in his small photography studio in Nordenham, completing her education with the official apprenticeship examination.

In light of the political developments, the young photographer and her mother to return to Vienna in 1944. She gets her first job when the Federal Monuments Office (BDA) hires her to document historic architecture with a view to potential bomb damage. She witnesses the turbulent final weeks of the war in Austria, then returns to northern Germany, before settling in Vienna in 1947. From then until her retirement in 1984, Mejchar works as a photographer for the Federal Monuments Office on a steady contract. She buys her first own camera in 1953, and in 1960 she earns a master’s certificate in photography as an external student at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt Wien. Busy with her daytime work for the BDA, she also starts pursuing her own photographic interests in the 1960s, although she does not publicly exhibit her output until 1976, when the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna mounts the fifty-two-year-old photographer’s first solo exhibition. After retiring in 1984, she dedicates herself entirely to freelance and fine art photography.

Elfriede Mejchar does not win the public recognition she merits until old age; in 2002, she is awarded the Honorary Prize for Photography of the Federal Chancellor’s Office, followed in 2004 by the Honorary Prize for Fine Art Photography of the State of Lower Austria and the Prize of the City of Vienna for Fine Art.

Text from the exhibition

Anonymous photographer
Elfriede Mejchar
Nd
Gelatin silver print

Installation view of the exhibition The Poetry of the Everyday. Photographs by Elfriede Mejchar, Museum der Moderne Salzburg 2024 showing photographs of Mejchar’s flower series

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
Amaryllis
1997
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
1996
Chromogenic print
Federal Photography Collection at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg
© Bildrecht, Vienna, 2024
Photo: Andrew Phelps

Elfriede Mejchar (Austrian, 1924-2020)
From the series Nobody is perfect
2003
© Elfriede Mejchar/Landessammlungen NÖ

Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Altstadt (Rupertinum)
Wiener-Philharmoniker-Gasse 9
5020 Salzburg
Austria

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 6pm

Museum der Moderne Salzburg website

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Exhibition: ‘Suburbia. Building the American Dream’ at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB

Exhibition dates: 20th March – 8th September 2024

Curators: Philipp Engel and Francesc Muñoz

Suburbia. Building the American Dream exhibition poster

An offer you can’t refuse

“The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage… Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry.” (Text from the CCCB website)

To me, there has always be something slightly askew, slightly out of kilter about the “American dream”. It promotes a generalised simulation of a imaginary reality, sold as a lifestyle, more fiction than fact. It is the ghost of desire that haunts the everyday reality of life, entirely on the side of demand: I want therefore I must have.

This desire must be satiated in the nuclear family, the white picket fence, the idyllic family home, the loveable children – as much a surface that reflects the approbation of others as for the sustenance of the self. As Anthony Giddens observes we are inescapably involved in a

“‘reflexive project of the self’: this project is reflexive because it involves unremitting self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, planning and ordering of all elements of our lives appearances and performances in order to marshal them into a coherent narrative called ‘the self’. We have to interpret the past and plan the future in relation to an identity we are attempting to constitute in a particularly immediate and transient social present. Consumerism is central to this self-obsession. This is partly because we not only have to choose a self, but (as Foucault’s line of argument also indicates) have to constitute ourselves as a self who choses, a consumer.”1

The American Dream endeavours to direct the identity we are attempting to constitute (through consumerism), so that it fits into a particularly conformist idea of a wholesome life: patriarchal, hegemonic, puritan (most important in America), god fearing, white – a particularly hyperreal simulation of a world that never existed in the first place. An imaginary construction.2

Photographs reinforce this “imaginary” state of being, this desire for the American Dream. As the wonderful Victor Burgin observes,

“The structure of presentation – point-of-view and frame – is intimately implicated in the reproduction of ideology (the ‘frame of mind’ of our ‘points-of-view’). More than any other textual system, the photograph presents itself as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’. The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the textuality of the photograph itself – substituting passive receptivity for active (critical) reading. … With most photographs we see, […] decoding and investiture takes place instantaneously, unselfconsciously, ‘naturally’; but it does take place – the wholeness, coherence, identity, which we attribute to the depicted scene is a projection, a refusal of an impoverished reality in favour of an imaginary plenitude. The imaginary object here, however, is not ‘imaginary’ [as in fictive] in the usual sense of the word, it is seen, it has a projected image.”3 (My bold and italics)

The photographs of the American Dream, then, deny an impoverished reality in favour of a desired imaginary plenitude. You too can live the dream, because you have seen the evidence of the projected image, and this imaginary identification can have very real effects.

In the desire for the dream we witness (elsewhere in the world) the egocentric obsession of some of the builders in the British series “Grand Designs” where people mortgage themselves up to the hilt, become sick, have marriage breakdowns and can’t finish the project, because of a dream… to build huge houses with 7 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms that no one in their right mind needs to build for 2 people. Or the case of the Australian Melissa Caddick who, in a Ponzi scheme stole A$30 million from investors, including her friends and family, in order to appear a successful business woman. “Caddick used the proceeds of her crimes to acquire “all the trappings of wealth” and that her “success was all a façade and the financial services business was an elaborate front for Ms. Caddick’s Ponzi scheme”.”4

Ego is reinforced by the image reflected back to us by the photograph.

Christopher Lasch comments that, “The proliferation of recorded images undermines our sense of reality. As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” We distrust our perceptions until the camera verifies them. Photographic images provide us with the proof of our existence, without which we would find it difficult even to reconstruct a personal history…”5

Photographs posit a reality that promotes the dream, that verifies the dream, as ‘an offer you can’t refuse’.

Thankfully, some of the contemporary artists in this posting (I particularly like the work of Weronika Gęsicka) undermine the utopian ideal through wit, humour and critical inquiry.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991

2/ “In sociology, the imaginary as a Lacanian term refers to an illusion and fascination with an image of the body as coherent unity, deriving from the dual relationship between the ego and the specular or mirror image… “The term ‘imaginary’ is obviously cognate with ‘fictive’ but in its Lacanian sense it is not simply synonymous with fictional or unreal; on the contrary, imaginary identifications can have very real effects.””

David Macey, “Introduction”, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London, 1994, p. xxi quoted in “Imaginary (sociology)” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

3/ Victor Burgin (ed.,). Thinking Photography. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1982, pp. 146-148.

4/ Farid Assaf SC quoted in Kate McClymont. “Melissa Caddick’s ‘trappings of wealth’ a front for her Ponzi scheme”. The Sydney Morning Herald 29 June 2021 in “Melissa Caddick,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 01/09/2024

5/ Christopher Lasch. The Culture of Narcissism. W.W.Norton and Company, New York, 1978, p. 48.

Many thankx to the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream

Philipp Engel, curator of the exhibition “Suburbia”, examines the origin and vast expansion of residential neighbourhoods in the United States, an urban model centred on constructing large swathes of single-family homes on the outskirts of cities. Engel reflects on the allure that suburban landscapes have stirred in Western culture while highlighting the main issues and contradictions of the model, including segregation, safety paranoia and unsustainable consumption of water and energy.

Introduction

Greg Stimac (American, b. 1976)
Chandler, Arizona
2006
From Mowing the Lawn portfolio
Impressió digital Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago

Who hasn’t longed for the American dream? A big house with a garden, a swimming pool and a couple of cars in the garage. A quiet, safe place to live as a family, close to nature in a people-friendly neighbourhood. This exhibition traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal that has been endlessly reproduced on television, in advertising and in cinema, and analyses the validity and the most controversial aspects of its urban planning model.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream draws us into the imaginary of the idyllic family home and shows how this lifestyle has been sold and promoted by fiction and the entertainment industry. The exhibition goes back to the origins of residential neighbourhoods in the early nineteenth century, explains how they developed massively in the 1950s, and reviews the economic, political and social context of their relentless expansion across the United States.

Now, when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on the outskirts of cities, it is a good moment to analyse the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation.

The dream of living in a house with a swimming pool is still very much alive today and has been exported all over the world. The exhibition shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid.

With abundant historical material, period documentaries, photographs, paintings, films and series, novels and magazines, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition places us in the mental paradise of the suburb and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream presents the work of foremost creators who, from different points of view, help us to take a critical look at the famed American way of life: Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Rodrigo Fresán, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronika Gesicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Todd Solondz, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan.

Text from the CCCB website

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Land. Provincetown
1976
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

Joel Meyerowitz (American, b. 1938)
Dusk. New Jersey
1978
Archival pigment print
Collecció Pancho Saula i Michelle Ferrara / Galeria Alta, Andorra

The “American dream” can be summed up in a mental image that seems frozen in time: a home of one’s own, surrounded by lawns, with a pool in the back garden and a couple of cars slumbering in the garage. Suburbia. Building the American Dream traces the cultural history of a lifestyle ideal shared far and wide by literature, television, advertising and cinema, and analyses the most controversial aspects of an urban planning model that has spread beyond US territory and reached our shores. Journalist Philipp Engel curates this exhibition with geographer Francesc Muñoz collaborating as adviser on the model in the local context.

Since the 1990s most of the American population has lived in this sprawling urban mass that has continued to spread, even beyond US borders. At a time when more and more families are pursuing their own version of the dream on city outskirts, the exhibition analyses the contradictions of an urban planning model based on social, ethnic and gender segregation. It also shows the impact of this highly unsustainable model, based on constant car use, with examples of developments around Barcelona and Madrid. With abundant historical material, photographs, paintings, audiovisuals, literature, works of art and everyday objects, the exhibition situates us in the mental paradise of the model of residential development inspired by American suburbia, and invites us to rethink the value of the city and public space today.

Suburbia. Building the American Dream decodes an almost abstract landscape that is still valid in pop culture. It does so through the work of foremost creators who help us take a critical look at the famed American way of life. It includes works by Jessica Chou, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Doyle, Gerard Freixes, Gabriele Galimberti, Weronicka Gęsicka, Benjamin Grant, Todd Hido, Joel Meyerowitz, Matthias Müller, Blanca Munt, Alberto Ortega, Bill Owens, Sheila Pree Bright, León Siminiani, Amy Stein, Greg Stimac, Angela Strassheim, Deborah Stratman, Ed & Deanna Templeton, Kate Wagner and Christopher Willan, among others.

Installation views of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing in the second image photographs by Charlotte Brooks (below); and in the bottom image, visitors looking at satellite images of US cities and suburbs that show their grid layout
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Charlotte Brooks (American, 1918-2014)
[Image from LOOK – Job 57-7621 titled Myers family]
20th December 1957
Film negative
Look magazine photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing photographs by Gregory Crewdson (below)

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Untitled (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

American photographer Gregory Crewdson is best known for his uncanny images of deceptively serene suburban life. Using Hollywood film techniques and elaborate sets, Crewdson creates what he calls “frozen moments”: meticulously staged scenes whose narrative meaning remains a mystery. Throughout this series, special attention is paid to light. The twilight setting favoured by the photographer functions as a metaphor, an eerie evocation of the darkness on the edge of town.

Crewdson created this twelve-part portfolio, Dream House, as a commission for The New York Times Magazine in 2002. The cinematic character of these frozen vignettes is underscored by the use of Hollywood actors (Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton, and Philip Seymour Hoffman among others) whose celebrity contrasts with the “Anytown” anonymity of their environments.

Text from the Mutual Art website

Gregory Crewdson (American, b. 1962)
Julianne Moore (Dream House)
2002
Digital C-print
29 x 44 inches

Sections of the exhibition

Planning A Dream

When the Industrial Revolution reached the USA in the first half of the 19th century, big cities became engines of progress, but they were also seen as dangerous places, in contrast with the opulent nature of the New World. With the emergence of the railway, the tram and the automobile, the mobility revolution prompted the gradual colonisation of city outskirts, transforming the countryside into residential neighbourhoods.

From Llewellyn Park (New Jersey) to Tuxedo Park (New York), throughout the 19th century the first gated communities began to pop up across the United States. At the end of the century, after the West was won, the appearance of the tram gave the middle classes access to the periphery, giving rise to a new type of housing that led to an orderly arrangement of city grids. But it wasn’t until the popularisation of the famous Ford Model T that the US landscape was radically transformed, crisscrossed by roads that became freeways. The automobile became a symbol of freedom, marking the birth of the suburbs that were to spring up everywhere.

This first section includes historical material like the original lithograph View of New York by John William Hill (1836); The American Woman’s Home by Catharine Beecher, the bible of “domestic feminism”; a Ford T Touring (1923) produced by General Motors, and films like The Suburbanite (1908), among other Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics.

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Villa for David Codwise, near New Rochelle, NY (project; elevation and four plans)
1835
Pen and ink, watercolour, graphite
Sheet: 14 5/16 x 9 in. (36.4 x 22.9 cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803–1892)
Ericstan, for John J. Herrick, Tarrytown, New York (perspective)
1855
Watercolour, ink, and graphite on paper
25 5/16 x 30in. (64.3 x 76.2cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Davis’ most successful castellated villa was built for dry-goods merchant John J. Herrick. The design was dominated by an enormous three-story circular tower facing west over the Hudson River. The tower housed an extraordinary circular parlor that had an intricately vaulted ceiling springing from a massive central cluster of delicate Gothic columns. Ericstan was demolished in 1944.

After Alexander Jackson Davis (American, 1803-1892)
Friend & Aub (Publisher Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Map of Llewellyn Park and Villa Sites, on Eagle Ridge in Orange & West Bloomfield
1857
Lithograph
14 7/16 x 23 7/16 in. (36.7 x 59.6cm)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1924
Public domain

Morse & Fronti (Charles W. Morse and J. Fronti)
Residence of Mr. E. Hooker, Fremont Ave., Orange, N.J.
1860
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
Sunnyside on the Hudson (detail)
1856-1871
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Currier & Ives (Publisher, New York active between 1856-1907)
American railroad scene: lightning express trains leaving the junction
1874
Hand coloured lithograph
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Advertising by Samuel. E. Gross.
August Gast & Co. New York (detail)
c. 1900
Lithography
Library of Congress

Anonymous photographer
Bain News Service (publisher)
Skaters on the lake at Tuxedo Park
1910
Glass negative
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
Public domain

Anonymous photographer
Thomas Edison in the garden of his residence in Glenmont
1917
Thomas Edison National Historical Park, West Orange, New Jersey

Anonymous photographer
General Motors Pavilion: Futurama, Norman Bel Geddes. New York World’s Fair. General Motors – Crowds leading into Futurama
1939
New York World’s Fair 1939-1940 records
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library
Public domain

Catalog of the Aladdin company selling houses by mail
1950
Courtesy Historic New England

Federal Housing Administration, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota
c. 1950
Courtesy Minnesota Streetcar Museum, Minneapolis

The advertisement reads, “With a small down payment your rent money will buy a home. Consult your architect, builder, material dealer or any participating financial institution. Federal Housing Administration.”

The Suburban Room

The suburban explosion was first and foremost demographic, occurring as World War II soldiers returned, eager to set up home. There was no room for them in the crowded cities. With the support of the state, which offered generous loans, suburbs were built using the Fordist assembly-line production logic. It was the “American way of life”, the start of a collective dream that fascinated the whole world.

And so the baby boom took place in 11 million single-family homes fitted with all kinds of electrical domestic appliances, presided over by a brand new television set on which the new suburbanites watched idealised versions of themselves with identical skin colour and the same war experiences, age, mortgage and feeling of uprootedness. The media echoed this phenomenon, and cinema and literature reflected this standardised landscape in which a wife waited at home for her husband with a drink for him in her hand, children went everywhere by bicycle, and everyone had barbecues on Sundays.

Sponsored by the state, Suburbia became a paradise that excluded racial minorities. But little by little, by the sixties, the gates of paradise were opened to African Americans and other minorities, giving rise to a white exodus, the white flight.

As well as a variety of historical material, this section reviews sitcoms portraying the suburbs, from the 1940s to the present day. It also includes the famous illustration New Kids in the Neighborhood by Norman Rockwell and a broad selection of the photographs that make up Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972), the first book of photographs about this American urban planning model.

Arthur S. Siegel (American, 1913-1978)
Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth homes, a new U.S. federal housing project, caused by white neighbours’ attempt to prevent Negro tenants from moving in. Mounted police and whites
Detroit 1942
Library of Congress
Public domain

General Electric advertisement
It’s a promise
1945
Private collection, Barcelona

Anonymous photographer
Aerial view of Levittown
1949
Courtesy Levittown Public Library

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines
1947-1962

Mural of household appliance advertisements published in different American magazines (details)
1947-1962

Getting to Work. The Trials to U.S. commuters
Time, January 18, 1960
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

John Cheever
Time, March 27, 1964
Library of Catalonia, Barcelona

Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978)
New Kids in the Neighbourhood
1967
Lithograph
Norman Rockwell Museum Collection

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
Suburbia, Cul de sac, Pleseanton, California
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

Bill Owens (American, b. 1938)
I don’t feel that Richie playing with guns will have a negative effect on his personality. (He already wants to be a policeman.)
1972
Gelatin silver
Bill Owens Archive, Milan

The Residential Nightmare

And night fell on Suburbia. What had been a dream became a nightmare. The idea of a safe, healthy, happy place was gradually contaminated with fears, terrors and paranoias. Doors were bolted and alarms installed. After all, in the American Gothic tradition, the house, often haunted, had always been a source of horror – evil lurked there. With the appearance of mass-produced housing, a new sub genre called Suburban Gothic was consolidated, and began to manifest itself both in literature and in cinema. Unlike the traditional Gothic, in this new landscape the family residence was no longer tied to a specific territory, as it had been in New England; now, with its white picket fence and green lawn, it could be anywhere in the country. And evil came from outside, it threatened to invade the home and even undermine it. Under the guise of shiny normality, American suburbs always conceal cracks through which terror creeps.

To illustrate this residential nightmare, we take in historical materials of the atomic age, photographs of the dark side of suburbia by Amy Stein, Todd Hido, Gregory Crewdson, Angela Strassheim and Gabriele Galimberti, and Kate Wagner’s installation, McMansionHell. Alberto Ortega, an artist from Seville resident in the US who has devoted himself to painting the suburbs at night, presents two works for the first time at the CCCB.

Todd Hido (American, b. 1968)
Untitled #2214
1998
From the series House Hunting

Angela Strassheim (American, b. 1969)
Untitled (Elsa)
2005
Left Behind series
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of the exhibition Suburbia. Building the American Dream at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB showing the work of Gabriele Galimberti from the series The Ameriguns with at top right, Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas 2021; and at bottom right, Eric Arnsberger (30) and Morgan Gagnier (22) – Lake Forest, California 2021
© Alice Brazzit, CCCB, 2024

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Joel, Lynne, Paige and Joshua (44, 43, 5 and 11 years old) – central Texas
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Gabriele Galimberti (Italian, b. 1977)
Avery Skipalis (33) – Tampa, Florida
2021
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Avery Skipalis (33) stands with her firearms in front of her house in Tampa, Florida, USA. Her son looks on from a window. Avery joined the US Air Force when she was 17, and after serving in the UAE, Japan and Germany, left to start a company that offers firearms safety classes to adults and children.

Alberto Ortega (American born Spain, b. 1976)
Annunciation
2023
Oil on aluminium panel
Courtesy of the artist

Alberto Ortega (Sevilla, Spain 1976) creates oil paintings made after miniature sets that he builds as references. The small-scale sets enable him to recreate suburban scenes using details that recall the 1950s. Since he’s able to control the angle and point of view, the lighting, the location of every element, much like a film director would do, his works have a strong cinematic feel.

As an immigrant to the United States, Alberto is intrigued by American suburban life as depicted in film, literature, and visual art. Through these images of American homes, buildings, and neighbourhoods, he portrays society and some of its contradictions. These scenes represent hopes and dreams, the threat of their failure, and alienation.

Text from the Alberto Ortega website

Kate Wagner (American, b. 1993)
Observations from McMansion Hell
2023
Digital print on palboard
Courtesy of the artist

McMansion Hell is a blog that humorously critiques McMansions, large suburban homes typically built from the 1980s to 2008 and known for their stylistic attempt to create the appearance of affluence using mass-produced architecture. The website is run by Kate Wagner, an architectural writer. …

The blog uses Wagner’s commentary atop images of the interiors and exteriors of McMansions, using arrows to note features she finds questionable or in poor taste. Besides critiquing the homes themselves, the website also criticises the perceived material culture of wastefulness McMansions can represent, gives anecdotes of situations when McMansions have been a poor financial investment, and provides other essays on urban planning and architectural history. The blog offers subscriptions with bonus content, generating sufficient funding for Wagner to work on the blog full-time.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Post-Suburbia?

The appearance of New Urbanism in the 1990s began to herald the inevitable death of Suburbia due to the announced depletion of oil that has not yet occurred. Meanwhile, Suburbia continues to spread, transform and diversify. Today, 8 out of 10 Americans live in sprawl and single-family homes, representing 75% of the residential areas where new generations continue to dream of living. This is a new suburbia that is more open but also more unequal.

This suburb is made up of very diverse communities, as captured by the cameras of the photographers Sheila Pree Bright (who portrays African American life around Atlanta) and Jessica Chou (who immortalises the Asian community in Monterrey Park, California). New lifestyles also proliferate there, like at Huntington Beach, a “contemporary suburb” and surfing capital featured in the works of artist and skateboarder Ed Templeton.

This section also focuses on the environmental impact of this highly polluting city model, through the apocalyptic bonsai of artist Thomas Doyle and the satellite photographs of Benjamin Grant, a lethal panorama of the effects of the sprawling city.

Thomas Doyle (American, b. 1976)
Proxy (Haven Ln.)
2012
Mixed media
Courtesy of the artist

Thomas Doyle work mines the debris of memory through the creation of intricate worlds sculpted in 1:43 scale and smaller. Often sealed under glass, the works depict the remnants of things past – whether major, transformational experiences, or the quieter moments that resonate loudly throughout a life. In much the way the mind recalls events through the fog of time, the works distort reality through a warped and dreamlike lens.

Text from the Ronchini Gallery website

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #16
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

For her series “Traces”, Polish artist Weronika Gęsicka searched through various online image databases for photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s that in her eyes reflect the American way of life at that time. Many of these scenes are full of clichés, showing happy-looking people in an apparently perfect world. The exact origin of the pictures is not verifiable. As a result, they are a mixture of advertisements and private photos. Gęsicka manipulates the idyllic scenes in a playful way by digitally distorting the images. In doing so, she does not follow a strict pattern, but instead decides intuitively what detail she finds fascinating and will edit. In this way, the rather stereotypical scenes of suburban American life are transformed into a humorous, but also uncomfortable reality. Covered faces, deformed bodies and peculiar superimpositions create a distorted version of the American dream. Gęsicka’s photos are characterised by a discomforting, almost oppressive mood that sometimes only reveals itself at second glance: young men at a tea dance, whose heads are submerged in the cleavages of their oversized female partners, family members hidden behind a curtain at the dinner table, or a father coming home from work, separated by a trench from his children, who are running towards him.

In “Traces”, Weronika Gęsicka questions how we perceive images. In doing so, she makes us aware that even the medium of photography, which allegedly reflects reality, is not objective. Each photograph merely satisfies a perception of what is happening and, in the photographer’s eye, remains a subjective likeness. By modifying the images, she is playing with the observer, who is initially confident that he can quickly classify and identify the scene – until he notices that nothing in these pictures is as it seems at first glance.

Anonymous. “Weronika Gęsicka: A Disconcerting Idyll,” on the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation website Nd [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

Weronika Gęsicka (Polish, b. 1984)
Untitled #52
2015-2017
From the series Traces
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist and Jednostka Gallery, Warsaw

Ed Templeton (American, b. 1972)
Contemporary Suburbium
2017
Digital printing on baryta paper
Courtesy of Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

Jessica Chou (American born Taiwan, b. 1985)
The Mark Keppel High School Dance Team at the 2019 Miss Dance Drill Team USA National Dance Competition
2019
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Overview takes its inspiration from Daily Overview – an Instagram account established by author Benjamin Grant. Since he began the project in December 2013, his daily posts have both delighted and challenged his audience from all corners of the globe. For Overview, Grant has curated and created more than 200 original images by stitching together numerous high-resolution satellite photographs. With each Overview, Grant aims to not only inspire a fresh perspective of our planet but also encourage a new understanding of what human impact looks like. He lives and rides his bike in New York City.

Text from the Penguin Books website

Benjamin Grant (American, b. 1984)
Berwyn, Illinois (detail)
2023
Digital printing
Images created by Overview, source images
© Nearmap

Sprawl Reaches Our Shores

The formation of Suburbia as a cultural phenomenon in Catalonia is a reality historically ignored by narratives about the Catalan process of urbanisation, too focused on city growth and the ideological differentiation between an urban, Barcelona-based Catalonia and an “inner” Catalonia, the birthplace of what still today we call the “countryside”.

Suburban Catalonia shows how, in many territories, urban growth no longer corresponds to the well-known metaphor of city growth as an “oil stain”. In fact, an endless mass of oil stains has spread across the territory, giving rise to the same cloned reality everywhere: regional urban sprawl. The sprawl that is so commonplace today developed with the motorisation of society starting in the latter half of the 20th century as part and parcel of a very heterogeneous cultural discourse: the ideological propaganda of the American way of life mixed with local traditions derived from criticism of the built-up, crowded industrial city popularly disseminated in expressions such as “la caseta i l’hortet” (a little house and a garden) that idealised rural life. The path leading from those initial suburban choices to today’s regional urban sprawl is not a straight one, making the Catalan suburb a world yet to be discovered.

Christopher Willan has made a photographic reportage about the Catalan suburban world specially for the exhibition, which also includes Blanca Munt’s installation Mira-Sol Alert about the neighbourhood’s paranoid state of alert and an audiovisual piece by filmmaker León Siminiani that closes the exhibition.

Pere Torné Esquius (Spanish, 1879-1936)
The rocking chair (El balancí)
1913
Oil on canvas
National Art Museum of Catalonia, Barcelona

For different reasons, the singular work of the painter, illustrator and cartoonist Pere Torné Esquius (Barcelona 1879 – Flavancourt, France, 1936) doesn’t fit in with either the modernist proposals or the noucentista style (turn of the century), even though the latter considered him to be one of theirs.

Settled in Paris from 1905 onwards, although he would often return to Barcelona to regularly exhibit there, his work, of apparent simplicity, responded to a certain primitivism which was somewhat naive and with a strong French influence. His painting, highly singular, maintained pictorial and atmospheric values which provided the whole production with a sense of unity.

The favourite topics of Torné Esquius were interior or secluded spaces, such as gardens or living rooms, humble or of artisan extraction. It is worth highlighting, very often, the absence of the human figure and the main presence of inanimate elements that on occasions would cause a disturbing or even alarming effect. He also produced other genres such as landscapes or portraits.

Despite the fact that he was a painter, his professional work was based on illustration, focused on three main lines: children’s literature, the illustration of literary texts and the collaboration in magazines and periodical publications, often satirical, such as Papitu, Picarol or Le Rire, amongst others.

Anonymous. “Torné Esquius. Poetics of the Everyday,” on the Museu Nacional D’Art De Catalunya website 2017 [Online] Cited 13/08/2024

XXIII Barcelona International Exhibition Fair, 1955. USA Pavilion. OITF: Office of International Trade Fair. Single-family house model: “house beautiful prefabricated”
1955
Historical Archive of the College of Architects of Catalonia

Barcelona Metropolitan Area
Orthophoto. Dispersed urbanisation in the municipality of Corbera de Llobregat
2015

Blanca Munt (Spanish, b. 1997)
Mira-sol alert
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

In 2019, photographer Blanca Munt engaged in a neighbourhood chat group created to surveil her own neighbourhood and alert to any potential home burglaries or other suspicious activity. What is initially presented as an effective tool for the neighbours soon becomes a source of speculation, suspicion and paranoia. The seemingly quiet community life in a neighbourhood of well-lit streets and conventional homes founders due to the actual burglaries, but also due to the disintegration of the idea of community when personal security is at stake: mistrust, typically based on suspicious appearance or behaviour, now extends to any neighbours who fail to rigorously conform to the group’s purpose.

With a clean and sober design reminiscent of a real estate or security company brochure, the dispassionate pictures portrayed in Mira-sol Alert intertwine with the mental images stemming from an inflamed rhetoric, which gradually take shape as we learn the self-interested views of the different actors in this landscape – neighbours, suspects, police officers, local authorities – and which appeal strongly to our fears and contradictions. In her own words, Blanca Munt calls for a “reflection on the tension between the privilege of living in a peaceful place and the constant sense of lurking threat encouraged by our current culture of fear.”

Text from the Dalpine website

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Sant Quirze del Vallès
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

Christopher Willan (British lives Spain)
Els Trullols Park-1
2023
Digital printing
Courtesy of the artist

The Curators

Philipp Engel: Graduate in Modern Literature from the University of Toulouse, with a thesis on Bret Easton Ellis. After ten years in the music sales and distribution business, he started to work as a cultural journalist, specializing in cinema and literature. He is currently a contributor to various periodicals, such as Cultura(s), El Mundo, Cinemanía, Sofilm and Coolt.

Francesc Muñoz: Lecturer in Urban Geography, director of the Observatory of Urban Planning at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and professor at the Università IUAV di Venezia. He has received prizes such as the Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis Attending to Human Values in Engineering (UPC, 2004) and the Bonaplata Award for the exhibition The Light Factory, about the power station in Sant Adrià de Besòs (2014). He has curated shows such as the commemorative exhibition of 30 years of democratic town councils, Local, Local! The City to Come (CCCB, 2010), and the exhibition Architectures on the Waterfront (Fundació Mies van der Rohe, 2019), and was a member of the Cerdà Year Advisory Board (2010).

Press release from the CCCB

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB
Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona
Phone: (+34) 933 064 100

Opening hours:
From Tuesday to Sunday and bank holidays 11.00 – 20.00
Closed Monday

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona | CCCB website

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Exhibition: ‘A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa’ at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, New Zealand

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 1st September 2024

This exhibition is a collaboration between Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, Alexander Turnbull Library, and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena

Hartley Webster (New Zealand, 1818-1906) (Attributed to)
Jane and Alexander Alison
30 June 1852
Half-plate daguerreotype, passe-partout mount
130 mm. x 100 mm. (plate)
Auckland Museum Collection

Hartley Webster was Auckland’s first resident professional photographer, but despite his longevity and his unique role in the growth of photography in 19th century New Zealand his death in 1906 passed without an obituary.

~ Keith Giles

Then and now

I went to the annual Melbourne Rare Book Fair at the University of Melbourne recently. There, albums of early photographs of Aotearoa were available to purchase for nearly AUD$7,000. These days, colonial photographs from both Australia and New Zealand are only for those that can afford them – to on sell, to secrete away in collections, to act as memento mori.

The colonial settler lens focused on landscape photography and portrait photographs of white settlers and Indigenous people, Māori “captured” by the camera. Professor Angela Wanhalla observes that, “Photographs are complicit in colonialism because they were used to document the impacts of migration, settlement and land transformation.”1

Through the use of material culture studies – an interdisciplinary field that examines the relationship between people and their things, the making, history, preservation, and interpretation of objects – we can study colonial photographs and the albums that hold them in order to understand how photographs are complicit in colonialism, and how colonial photographs can become a “rich sources for historians trying to uncover and understand late-nineteenth-century life.”2

Historian Jules Prown outlined material culture and a suggested approach. He wrote:

“Material culture as a study is based upon the obvious fact that the existence of a man-made object is concrete evidence of the presence of a human intelligence operating at a time of fabrication. The underlying premise is that objects made or modified by man reflect, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged.”3

Colonial photographers and their photographs then, reflect the dominant hegemonic, patriarchal society to which they belong. According to Jarrod Hore they were engaged in “settler colonial work” because they “mobilised and visually reorganised local environments in the service of broader settler colonial imperatives.”4

Evidence of this reorganisation and the loss of individual and cultural identity can be found in the photographs Māori people. While the names of the Pākehā commercial photographic studios that took photographs of Māori might be known, the identity of the Māori subjects were often not recorded. Sapeer Mayron observes that, “Māori in particular were often photographed and their names and identities not preserved, called instead “Māori celebrities” and dressed with props in the artists’ studios” while in the same article Shaun Higgins, Auckland Museum pictures curator and curator of this exhibition observes, “When you’re documenting, you’re not this invisible entity that’s just documenting everything, you are making choices. You are, in effect, not documenting neutrally, but with your own agenda.”5 Again, photographers using material culture to record what was around them, reflecting, “consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, the beliefs of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and by extension the beliefs of the larger society to which they belonged.”

But while Pākehā commercial photography captured Māori as ethnographic photographic subjects, conversely the Māori themselves were not always passive subjects in their own representation, posing for the camera as they wanted to be seen, or using the camera themselves to document family and culture. Indeed (and applicable to early New Zealand photographs as well as early Australian ones), academics such as the Australian Jane Lydon in her important books Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (2005) and Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (2016) note that these photographs were not solely a tool of colonial exploitation. Lydon articulates an understanding in Eye Contact that the residents of Coranderrk, an Aboriginal settlement near Healsville, Melbourne, “had a sophisticated understanding of how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating their representations.”

Professor Angela Wanhalla also enunciates that the relationship between the camera and the Māori whānau (extended family group) is multilayered and complicated:

“At different times, and depending on the context, Māori embraced or rejected photography. Because of its colonial implications, Māori whānau and communities have a complicated relationship with the camera. But, as scholars Ngarino Ellis and Natalie Robertson argue, there is evidence it was regarded as friend as much as foe. …

Colonial photographs are culturally dynamic. Their integration into Māori life means they do not just depict relationships but are imbued with them. As such, photographs are taonga (treasures) and connect people across time and space.”6

Then and now, through the photographs ‘materiality’ and their role as sensory things that are held and used as well as viewed – the photographs imbued with the spirit of people long past – images of Indigenous ancestors taken by Māori and Pākehā act as talisman against the vicissitudes of colonial oppression.

They picture a land and culture which has irrevocably changed but the photographs can can still bring past stories into present life, which then regenerate the spirit of the ancestors into the presence of contemporary Māori families. With the recent acts of regression against the Māori people by the current New Zealand government, any object, any taonga (treasures) which connect people across time and space and make them stronger, is to be valued, especially if the photographs upend the tropes of colonial power and control.

As Joyce Campbell observes of these photographs, “The living connection to the sitter was the same as to a carved ancestor, or any other manifestation… It is easy to see that how they lived intersects with how we live now, and also to recognize the ways in which it does not. If these photographs are technically rough, or worn, we easily look past all that to engage with an image of another person or place. The images defy the notion that we need hyper-reality, immersion, massive scale, vivid colour or idealised beauty in order to achieve psychic proximity.”

In psychic proximity and unity, across time.

Strength people, strength. Hope, spirit, respect, strength.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Extract from Professor Angela Wanhalla. “The past in a different light: how Māori embraced – and rejected – the colonial camera lens,” on The Conversation website April 11, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/08/2024

2/ Jill Haley. “Otago’s Albums: Photographs, Community and Identity,” in New Zealand Journal of History, 52, 1, 2018, p. 24 on the Academia website 2018 [Online] Cited 28/08/2024

3/ Jules Prown, ‘Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method’, Winterthur Portfolio, 17, 1 (1982), pp. 1-2 quoted in Haley, Op. cit., p. 24.

4/ Jarrod Hore. “Capturing Terra Incognita: Alfred Burton, ‘Maoridom’ and Wilderness in the King Country,” in Australian Historical Studies Volume 50, Issue 2, 2019, pp. 188-211 quoted in Professor Angela Wanhalla Op. cit.,

5/ Shaun Higgins, Auckland Museum pictures curator quoted in Sapeer Mayron. “A Different Light: A chance to see 19th-century Aotearoa as our first photographers saw it,” on The Post website April 7, 2024 [Online] Cited 28/06/2024.

6/ Professor Angela Wanhalla, Op. cit.,

7/ Joyce Campbell. “A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa,” on the New Zealand Review of Books website May 14, 2024 [Online] Cited 23/06/2024

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

“For Māori there was another dimension. The living connection to the sitter was the same as to a carved ancestor, or any other manifestation. Wharenui would eventually feature photographs of ancestors located where at one time they would have been depicted in other forms. But their presence has the same significance.” …

In Natalie Marshall’s essay ‘Camera Fiends and Snapshooters: Early Amateur Photography in Aotearoa’, it is the immediacy of photographs by James Coutts Crawford, Henry Wright and Robina Nicol that ‘pricks’ me, as Roland Barthes would have it. These photographers working far from the global centre of their craft are freed to explore domesticity and love. Their photographs are suffused with intimacy, warmth, pregnancy, yawning and easy comradery. It is easy to see that how they lived intersects with how we live now, and also to recognize the ways in which it does not. If these photographs are technically rough, or worn, we easily look past all that to engage with an image of another person or place. The images defy the notion that we need hyper-reality, immersion, massive scale, vivid colour or idealised beauty in order to achieve psychic proximity.

Joyce Campbell. “A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa,” on the New Zealand Review of Books website May 14, 2024 [Online] Cited 23/06/2024

A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa – from the curators

Hear from the curators of A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, from from Auckland Museum, Hocken Collections, and Alexander Turnbull Library, as they speak to some of their favourite objects from this new exhibition that explores the captivating evolution of photography in 19th-century New Zealand.

Witness the dawn of photography in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through precious, original photographs, explore its beginnings as an expensive luxury, through to becoming a part of everyday life.

Step into A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa and explore the captivating evolution of photography in 19th-century New Zealand. Delve into the advances that took photography from its beginnings for an exclusive few in the mid-1800s, to being a part of daily life by the turn of the century.

Experience the 19th-century studio as you pose for your own digital Victorian portrait, and explore the wonder of this new technology that changed the way we see ourselves forever.

Featuring precious, original photographs from Auckland Museum, Hocken Collections, and Alexander Turnbull Library, this exhibition offers a unique glimpse into our visual heritage.

Text from the Auckland War Memorial Museum website

James Coutts Crawford (New Zealand born Scotland, 1817-1889)
Jessie Crawford, probably outside the Crawfords’ home in Thorndon, Wellington
c. 1859
Salted paper print
143 × 110 mm
Alexander Turnbull Library

A rare image of a heavily pregnant Victorian woman, shot outdoors in a domestic garden.

James Coutts Crawford (New Zealand born Scotland, 1817-1889)
Nurse Edgar [left] and Jessie Crawford
c. 1860
Salted paper print
Alexander Turnbull Library Collection

William Temple (New Zealand born Ireland, 1833-1919)
The Bush at Razorback, Great North Road New Zealand
1862-1863
Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

Medical officer with Imperial forces during New Zealand Wars; photographer. Born Co Monaghan, Ireland, son of William Temple MD and Anne Temple. Entered army service 1858, and served as Assistant Surgeon with the Royal Artillery in the Taranaki (1860-1861) and Waikato (1863-1865) campaigns. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry at Rangiriri. Died in London.

Text from the National Library of New Zealand website

“… every single photograph is taken with purpose. The photographer chooses what’s in the frame. There is always a bit of an edit in that regard.

“When you’re documenting, you’re not this invisible entity that’s just documenting everything, you are making choices. You are, in effect, not documenting neutrally, but with your own agenda.”

While many of the pictures have full captions detailing not only who took the photo but who is featured in it, some people’s names were lost – or possibly were never recorded at all, Higgins says.

Māori in particular were often photographed and their names and identities not preserved, called instead “Māori celebrities” and dressed with props in the artists’ studios.

“Sadly we sometimes know the studio, but we don’t know who they are, we don’t know answers to questions why they were taken. Did you walk away with your own picture, but did you know that that would then be sold to collectors for their albums?

“You might see someone and say, ‘Oh, they’re sitting with their taonga’. Well, not necessarily, they might be sitting with the studio’s prop and dressed up for a certain image.

“Photos like these are why throughout the exhibition you might see the question: Do you know who is in this picture? Higgins hopes with a bit of luck, some of the “orphan pictures” with no names might be identified.

“Our own institution and others play a part. We collect from collectors and photos end up in an institution with no name,” Higgins says.

“The best thing we can do is put them out and say, ‘Do you know who these people are?’ and hopefully we find out more about these orphan photographs that have made their journey through time in albums collected by largely white men.

“We don’t have answers, but we can pose the questions. I hope people walk away from an exhibition like this questioning some of the things they’ve seen and maybe looking at things in a different light.”

Shaun Higgins, Auckland Museum pictures curator quoted in Sapeer Mayron. “A Different Light: A chance to see 19th-century Aotearoa as our first photographers saw it,” on The Post website April 7, 2024 [Online] Cited 28/06/2024.

Montagu Higginson (English, 1840-1910)
The Native Earthworks at Rangiriri partially destroyed
November 1863
Auckland Museum

In 2006 Auckland Museum acquired the album Photographs of the South Sea Islands; a photograph album featuring the work of a hitherto unknown photographer, one George Montagu John Higginson (Auckland War Memorial Museum 2006:28). Known commonly as Montagu Higginson (Illustrated London News vol. 045 XLV:91), this amateur photographer produced many images of the Waikato campaign that are either new, or at the very least previously of unknown authorship. There are also many images which cross over to other albums compiled by other photographers indicating the strong possibility of trading. This notion has been considered by Main and Turner (1993:10) with regard to other photographers such as Daniel Manders Beere.

Shaun Higgins. “Brothers in Glass: Montage Higginson and the Photographers of the Waikato War,” Auckland Museum Records, 2012

Batt & Richards (firm) (finished January 1874)
Tom Adamson and Wiremu Mutumutu, Wanganui
c. 1867-1874
Hocken

This studio carte de visite provides striking evidence of cultural exchange in the way of Māori and European fabrics and designs, with Tom Adamson on the left wearing a woven flax kaitaka with a geometric tāniko border, and Wiremu Mutumutu on the right wearing a fringed tartan rug, both in the manner of kilts. Adamson worked alongside Māori as a military scout and guide, hunting down dissidents in the dense native bush for pro-government forces during the New Zealand Wars. This service earned him a New Zealand Cross in 1876.

John McGregor (New Zealand born Scotland, 1831-1894)
Bell Hill
c. 1875
Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena

Photographer, Stuart St, Dunedin, fl 1863-1884. Awarded first class certificate at The New Zealand Exhibition 1865 (Source: Photography in New Zealand / Hardwicke Knight and back of photograph). Died 12 Oct 1894, aged 63 years. 32 years in New Zealand, formerly of Glasgow, Scotland. Buried at Southern Cemetery, Dunedin (Source: Dunedin online cemetery database).

In 1848, two decades after a French inventor mixed daylight with a cocktail of chemicals to fix the view outside his window onto a metal plate, photography arrived in Aotearoa. How did these ‘portraits in a machine’ reveal Māori and Pākehā to themselves and to each other? Were the first photographs ‘a good likeness’ or were they tricksters? What stories do they capture of the changing landscape of Aotearoa?

From horses laden with mammoth photographic plates in the 1870s to the arrival of the Kodak in the late 1880s, New Zealand’s first photographs reveal Kīngi and governors, geysers and slums, battles and parties. They freeze faces in formal studio portraits and stumble into the intimacy of backyards, gardens and homes.

A Different Light brings together the extraordinary and extensive photographic collections of three major research libraries – Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, Alexander Turnbull Library and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena – to coincide with a touring exhibition of some of the earliest known photographs of Aotearoa.

Text from the Auckland War Memorial Museum website

William James Harding (New Zealand born England, 1826-1899)
Young woman looking at photograph album
c. 1870s
Quarter-plate collodion silver glass negative
Alexander Turnbull Library Collection

William and Annie Harding arrived in New Zealand in 1855. Two brothers had already emigrated – John in 1842 and Thomas in 1848. The three brothers, and Annie, were followers of Emanuel Swedenborg, and strong supporters of the Total Abstinence Society. William and Annie settled in Wanganui, where William set up briefly as a cabinet-maker but in 1856 established a photographic studio. By the 1860s his studio was installed in a two-storeyed, corrugated-iron building on Ridgway Street.

Text from the Wikipedia website

William James Harding founded his studio in Wanganui in 1856. In 1889 he sold it to Alfred Martin, who had previously practiced in Christchurch. During his tenure, Harding occasionally hired out his studio to other photographers, and there are images in the 1/4 plate sequence which the Library also holds as cartes-de-visite by the photographers D Thomson and T Tuffin. Alfred Martin sold the business to Frank Denton in 1899. Denton in turn sold out to Mark Lampe around 1930, but retained Harding’s negatives, and Martin’s 10 x 8 and 10 x 12 negatives, himself.

Text from the National Library of New Zealand website

William James Harding (New Zealand born England, 1826-1899)
Studio portrait of a woman and child
1870s
Reproduction from quarter-plate collodion silver glass negative
Alexander Turnbull Library Collection

William James Harding (New Zealand born England, 1826-1899)
Captain Nathaniel Flowers and wife Margaret, with a dog
February 1878
Glass negative
4.25 x 3.25 inches
Negatives of Wanganui district
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand

When Nathaniel and Margaret Flowers visited the Whanganui photographic studio of W.J. Harding (1826-99) in February 1878, they engaged with a technology that was only a few decades old but one that had been rapidly embraced by ordinary people such as themselves. By the 1870s, people – as individuals, couples and families – could have their likenesses made for a small fee. Harding photographed people from an array of backgrounds, from social elites to imperial and colonial soldiers, as we as interracial couples such as Nathaniel and Margaret. As soon as photography was invented, it was used by individuals, families and communities to fashion their social identities around age, class, ethnicity and gender. It was quickly integrated into society through social and cultural practices such as the making and keeping of photograph albums.

Text from the Introduction to the book A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa

Elizabeth Pulman (New Zealand born England, 1836-1900)
King Tāwhiao
1882
Carte de visite
Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

Blackman, Elizabeth, 1836-1900, Chadd, Elizabeth, 1836-1900 Auckland photographer. Married George Pulman (d. 1871). Worked with him in his photographic studio in Shortland Street, specialising in scenic photographs and portraits. Elizabeth continued Pulman’s Photographic Studio for almost 30 years until the business was sold shortly before her death in 1900. After George Pulman’s death she married John Blackman (d 1893). She continued to be known professionally as Elizabeth Pulman.

Text from the National Library of New Zealand website

In the early years of photography it was relatively uncommon for women to take photographs, let alone work as professional photographers. Elizabeth Pulman was quite possibly New Zealand’s first female professional photographer.

Born in Lymm, Cheshire, England in 1836, she married George Pulman in 1859, and emigrated to New Zealand in 1861. Although a joiner and draughtsman by training, in 1867 George Pulman opened a photographic studio in Auckland, specialising in scenic photographs and portraits. Elizabeth assisted George with the business and after he died in 1871 she continued the work of the studio.

She married John Blackman in 1875, and was once more widowed in 1893. But for almost 30 years, until the business was sold to the Government Tourist Bureau shortly before her death, she carried on Pulman’s Photographic Studio, almost single-handedly managing the upbringing of nine children, running a successful business, and the problems of a period of rapidly changing technology in photography.

Pulman’s Photographic Studio left a legacy of many prints of historical interest, in both portrait and scenic subjects. Among the portraits are photographs of many important Maori chiefs of the North Island, including Tawhiao, the second Maori King, taken in Auckland shortly after he left his King Country stronghold.

Adapted by Andy Palmer from the DNZB biography by Phillip D. Jackson published as “Elizabeth Pulman,” on the New Zealand History website updated 8-Nov-2017 [Online] Cited 10/08/2024

John Martin Hawkins Lush (New Zealand, 1854-1893)
Picnic party at Thames
c. 1884
Half-plate gelatin silver glass negative
Auckland Museum Collection

Unknown photographer
Three men in hats
c. 1880s
Ferrotype
Hocken Collections

Charles Spencer (New Zealand born England, 1854-1933)
Cold Water Baths White Terrace
c. 1880s
Cyanotype
Auckland Museum Collection

New Zealand photographer operating in Tauranga from 1879. Active in Auckland from the 1880s to 1917. Was one of Stephenson Percy Smith’s survey party at Mount Tarawera after the 1886 eruption. Took a series of photographs on White Island in late 1890s.

For more information on the photographer see Charles Spencer, Photographer (Part I) May 2019 and Charles Spencer, Photographer (Part II) July 2019 on the Tauranga Historical Society website

Josiah Martin (New Zealand born England, 1843-1916)
Portrait of an unidentified sitter from the Teutenberg family album
c. 1880s
Albumen silver print, cabinet card
Auckland Museum Collection

Josiah Martin was born in London, England, on 1 August 1843 and, in 1864, married Caroline Mary Wakefield. They emigrated to New Zealand a few years later with an infant daughter and eventually settled in Auckland. Martin founded a private academy, where he was headmaster until 1874 and proved to be a gifted teacher but retired from the profession in 1879 due to failing health.

He then concentrated on photography. During 1879 he returned to Europe, and while in London studied the latest innovations in photographic techniques and processes. On his return to Auckland he opened a photographic business with a studio on the corner of Queen and Grey streets in partnership with W.H.T. Partington. After the partnership was dissolved he opened another studio in Queen Street, later selling the portrait business and transferring premises to Victoria Arcade. Martin visited the area of Tarawera and Rotomahana many times and was there on the eve of the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886; some of the photographs he took after the eruption were reproduced in the Auckland Evening Star. He also appears to have visited several Pacific Islands, including Fiji and Samoa, in 1898, and in 1901 travelled there with S. Percy Smith. He published an account of this trip in Sharland’s New Zealand Photographer and also contributed articles and photographs to the Auckland Weekly News and the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine.

Martin gained an international reputation for his ethnological and topographical photographs. His work was exhibited in London at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and he won a gold medal at the Exposition coloniale in Paris in 1889. He was also editor of Sharland’s New Zealand Photographer for several years and lectured frequently, not only on photography but also on scientific subjects.

Josiah Martin died on 29 September 1916 at his home in Northcote, Auckland, aged 73. His photographs provide a record of changed landscapes and societies. Martin was one of the first photographers to realise the commercial potential of photography to encourage tourism, but he was also aware of the need for conservation of the landscape and of the role of photography in providing a documentary record (Orange 1993, pp.313-314).

Orange, Claudia ed. (1993), The dictionary of New Zealand biography, volume 2, 1870-1900, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books Limited and the Department of Internal Affairs.

Harriet Cobb (New Zealand born England, 1846-1929)
Two wāhine
c. 1887-1890
Albumen silver print, carte de visite
Alexander Turnbull Library Collection

The word “wahine” came into English in the late 18th century from Maori, the language of a Polynesian people native to New Zealand; it was originally used for a Maori woman, especially a wife. The word is also used for a woman in Hawaiian and Tahitian, though spelled “vahine” in the latter.

Harriet Sophia Cobb (née Day, 10 February 1846 – 18 December 1929) was a New Zealand photographer. Her works are held in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Cobb operated two successful photography studios in the late 1800s and into the 20th century.

In 1866 she married Joseph Edward Cobb, and they went on to have 15 children… In 1884 Cobb and her husband emigrated from the United Kingdom to New Zealand with their nine children and set up a photographic studio in the Hawke’s Bay. They arrived in Wellington on the Lady Jocelyn.

The couple operated two studios known as JE & H Cobb in Napier (from 1884) and Hastings (from 1885), but in 1887 after Joseph’s bankruptcy, Cobb won a plea to operate the businesses in her name until she retired in 1911… Cobb died on 18 December 1929 in Ōtāhuhu, Auckland.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Ambitious and creative

Harriet was a busy and ambitious woman – having a sensibility for the photographic trade learnt from her father that was out of step in the sleepy colony of New Zealand. Her work in the 1885 Industrial Exhibition in Wellington caught the attention of Julius von Haast who selected it for inclusion in the New Zealand court at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London.

Cobb’s work was described by a reviewer as being portraiture of mostly female subjects. By being included in the exhibition, Cobb’s work inserted the visual existence of family life and women’s lives in the colony into the multitude of industrial and scenic exhibits that dominated the New Zealand court at the London exhibition.

An art photographer

Cobb advertised herself as an ‘art photographer’, which was a way of claiming that her work was of higher quality than other photographers. In one of Cobb’s advertisements she claimed that the basics of photography could be learnt by any school boy in a week but not the skills, experience, and eye for creating quality photographs that she had.

Cobb’s marketing targeted a broad clientele and emphasised quality service in a quality establishment run by herself. She wanted it understood that her studios were respectable places for women to go unaccompanied by men.

Extract from Lissa Mitchell. “Inspiring stories about NZ women photographers – Harriet Cobb (1846-1929),” on the Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa website 16 Oct 2018 [Online] Cited 10/08/2024

Henry Wright (New Zealand, 1844-1936)
Māori woman in a tag cloak (possibly Rīpeka Te Puni) and Amy Elizabeth Wright, Wellington
c. 1885
Alexander Turnbull Library

John Kinder (New Zealand born England, 1819-1903)
Mount Tarawera
1886
Albumen silver print mounted on album page
151 × 200 mm
Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

While he [Kinder] was at Ayr Street Kinder also practised as an amateur photographer. There is no indication that he had taken an active interest in photography in England. Rather, it seems likely that he learned the wet-plate photographic process in Auckland about 1860-61. He was friendly with Hartley Webster, a prominent professional, who was the Kinder family photographer in the 1860s. He also collected prints of the work of Daniel Manders Beere, a photographer working in Auckland at the same time, whose photography has some affinities with his own.

Kinder was primarily a landscape and architectural photographer, although he did take a few portraits of family and friends, including Celia Kinder and the Reverend Vicesimus Lush, vicar of Howick. One of his best-known photographs is the portrait of Wiremu Tāmihana, which was used as the frontispiece for John Gorst’s The Māori King (1864). There are also a few fine photographs of Māori artefacts, including canoes and canoe prows. He took photographs of Parnell in the 1860s, especially of Anglican buildings such as the first St Mary’s Church, St Stephen’s Chapel and Bishopscourt (Selwyn Court). These provide a good historical record as well as having high artistic merit. Kinder also travelled extensively and his paintings and photographs are not confined to Auckland. After his sisters Mary and Sarah settled in Dunedin in 1878 he made several trips to the South Island.

In his photographs and paintings Kinder imposed a sense of order on his views, as if regulating them to current conventions of composition where clarity and intelligibility were paramount. This tidiness, combined with the serene calmness of the depicted weather conditions, can give a Utopian or idealised dimension to his colonial scenes. While there is a high degree of objectivity in his works, this does not exclude an element of interpretation – an adaptation of landforms and buildings to an ideal. His art expresses a positive view of the colonising process. It is worth noting that many of his finished paintings were made late in life, during his retirement, when he was looking back through rose-tinted glasses to a time of great achievement and rapid progress. In an unpublished autobiography, written in his later years, he recalled with pride how the city of Auckland had grown from the humble beginnings he encountered in 1855, when there were only one or two decent buildings to be seen.

Extract from Michael Dunn. “Kinder, John,” first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography in 1993 digitally published on the Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand website [Online] Cite 11/08/2024

Unknown photographer
Portrait of an unidentified child
c. 1890
Crystoleum
Auckland Museum Collection

Elite Photographers
Portrait of the Thompson family, with drawn-on eyes and eyebrows
1893
Opalotype
Auckland Museum Collection

The settler lens

Photographs are complicit in colonialism because they were used to document the impacts of migration, settlement and land transformation. For example, they illustrate the advance of settlement and the subjugation of Māori after the Waikato War (1863-1864).

Imperial officers such as William Temple, who was active in military campaigns to advance European settlement, photographed two icons of colonisation: roads and military camps.

An Irish-born soldier, Temple followed the Great South Road on foot and with his camera as the route advanced towards the border of Kiingitanga territory. One of his photographs (The Bush at Razorback, Great North Road New Zealand, 1862-1863) demonstrates the impacts of the Great South Road on the local environment.

Photography’s commercial interests also aligned with colonial propaganda, especially as landscape photography grew in popularity from the 1870s. Historian Jarrod Hore has demonstrated how landscape photographers helped shape settler attitudes to the environment, but also documented colonial progress.

Photographs were used to illustrate engineering successes and the advancing tide of settlement. For instance, John McGregor’s 1875 photograph (Bell Hill, c. 1875) depicts the clearing of Bell Hill in Dunedin. In the background, the church embodies the possibilities of colonial advancement enabled by environmental transformation.

Our early photographers were, in Hore’s words, engaged in “settler colonial work” because they “mobilised and visually reorganised local environments in the service of broader settler colonial imperatives.”

The photograph as taonga

Indigenous peoples were a particular focus of early photography in other settler colonial societies. New Zealand followed this pattern and Māori feature prominently in our colonial photographic record.

As soon as photography arrived in the colony, Māori were captured by the camera. Itinerant daguerreotype photographers travelled the new colony in the 1840s and 1850s to exploit the commercial opportunities available in new colonies such as New Zealand.

Reproduction of colonial tropes became common in commercial photography, reflecting the collectability of Māori as photographic subjects. The carte-de-visite, popular from the 1860s and of a size that could easily be posted, meant images of Māori found their way into albums all around the world.

Such images became an important part of the business for studio photographers in the colonial period.

At different times, and depending on the context, Māori embraced or rejected photography. Because of its colonial implications, Māori whānau and communities have a complicated relationship with the camera. But, as scholars Ngarino Ellis and Natalie Robertson argue, there is evidence it was regarded as friend as much as foe.

Māori have long integrated visual likenesses into customary practices, such as tangihanga (funerals), while portraits adorn the walls of wharenui [meeting house, large house] across the country.

Te Whiti and the camera

Māori also took up the camera. Canon Hākaraia Pāhewa, for instance, was a skilled photographer who took his camera on his pastoral rounds, during which he recorded scenes of daily life.

He depicted people at work and documented transformations of landscapes, important cultural events, religious service and domestic routines. These photographs bring to light the diversity and richness of Māori life in the early 20th century.

Māori whānau [basic extended family group] already valued and used photographs in a variety of ways in the 19th century. Photographs were memory containers, mementos of family, markers of personal transformation, and generators of social connection.

Designed to be shared and displayed, photographs were prompts for discussion and storytelling. They are visual records of whakapapa [Whakapapa is a fundamental principle in Māori culture. Reciting one’s whakapapa proclaims one’s Māori identity, places oneself in a wider context, and links oneself to land and tribal groupings and their mana], identity and notions of belonging. They also mark Indigenous presence and survival in the face of settler colonialism.

At the same time, though, photography’s role in advancing colonialism meant Māori were cautious about the reproduction of images. There was an awareness of what could happen to photographs once they were out of the subject’s control.

Extract from Professor Angela Wanhalla. “The past in a different light: how Māori embraced – and rejected – the colonial camera lens,” on The Conversation website April 11, 2024 [Online] Cited 10/08/2024

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Henry Wright (New Zealand, 1844-1936)
Rahui Te Kiri Tenetahi [right] and her daughter Ngāpeka Te Roa of
Ngāti Manuhiri
1893
Full-plate gelatin silver glass negative
216 × 165 mm
Alexander Turnbull Library

Rahui Te Kiri Tenetahi (right) and her daughter Ngapeka Te Roa, of Ngati Manuhiri, alongside a building made of ponga logs, Little Barrier Island, 1893. They hold dahlia flowers.

Henry Wright was a prominent Wellington businessman. He was also a keen amateur photographer. Negatives found in two wooden boxes under house at 117 Mein Street, originally the home of Henry Wright, who had lived there from 1896 until his death in 1936.

Henry Wright spent nearly three months living on the island and produced a report for the government on its value as a bird reserve. After the government purchased the island from iwi and it was declared a forest reserve and bird sanctuary, Wright was appointed its first ranger. Wright’s series of photographs capture the vegetation, coastline and the last of the mana whenua [the right of a Maori tribe to manage a particular area of land], Ngāti Manuhiri, to live and sustain themselves on the island, including Rāhui Te Kiri Tenetahi, her daughter Ngāpeka Te Roa, and her second husband Wiremu Tenetahi, who were forcibly evicted just three years after Wright had visited the island.

Text from the book A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa

John Robert Hanna (New Zealand born Ireland, 1850-1915)
Portrait of unidentified sitters
c. 1895
Gelatin silver print, cabinet card
Auckland Museum Collection

Photographer of Auckland. Born Ireland in 1850, eldest son of Eliza Crawford and Robert Hanna of Drum, County Monaghan, Ireland; arrived in Auckland per ‘Ganges’ in 1865; began his photographic career in Auckland with R H Bartlett whose business he managed for some time. Then managed the firm of Hemus & Hanna for 10 years before business dissolved in 1885. Bought the business of J Crombie (which had been established in 1855) in Queen Street. Died in 1915.

Text from the National Library of New Zealand website

Margaret Matilda White (New Zealand born Northern Ireland, 1868-1910)
Nurse Pierce and Bessie McKay smoking with Mr Hodson and other nurses at Huia Private Hospital
1895
Gelatin silver print
Auckland Museum Collection

Margaret Matilda White

Margaret Matilda White came to New Zealand in the 1880s to join her family when she was 18 years old. She was acquainted with the photographer Hanna, possibly working in his studio. She established her own photographic business, which was not a success, but continued to photograph on an amateur or semi-professional basis until her early death in 1910.

Margaret Matilda White is best known for her photographs of the Auckland Mental Hospital, known at times as the Whau Lunatic Asylum, Oakley Mental Hospital or Carrington Mental Hospital. She photographed the buildings and the staff, making pictures of nurses and attendants with her characteristic structured group poses.

The Museum has a large collection of her glass plates, donated by her son Albert Sherlock Reed, in 1965.

Text from the Auckland Museum website

Margaret Matilda White (New Zealand born Northern Ireland, 1868-1910)
Self Portrait
c. 1897
Half-plate gelatin silver glass negative
164 × 120 mm
Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum

A series of photographs taken around 1897 by Margaret Matilda White (1868-1910) at the Whau Lunatic Asylum, also known as the Avondale Asylum, show a rare example of what appear as deliberately staged images of staff in the grounds. Starting as an apprentice to Hanna in 1890, White briefly operated a studio in Queen Street. She spent some time working as an attendant at the asylum, photographing the staff on location using a dry-plate camera. The playful approach White takes shows an unexpected side to her sitters, despite their formal uniforms. Arranged in the grounds, sitting together for a portrait, the men and women who worked at the asylum appear to have shed the formality of the studio. Even when they appear lined up in rows, they all look in different directions as a man peers through the window behind them. One image, thought to be a self-portrait, shows White in her uniform holding a set of keys. An informal portrait taken at Huia Private Hospital shows staff smoking together on a break: a far cry from the wooden poses of early likenesses.

Text from the book A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa

James Ingram McDonald (New Zealand 1865-1935)
Te Whiti
c. 1903
Alexander Turnbull Library

James Ingram McDonald (11 June 1865 – 13 April 1935) was a New Zealand painter, photographer, film-maker, museum director, cultural ambassador film censor, and promoter of Maori arts and crafts.

James McDonald was born in Tokomairiro, South Otago, New Zealand on 11 June 1865. He began painting early in his life and took art lessons as a young man in Dunedin with James Nairn, Nugent Welch and Girolamo Nerli. He continued his art studies in Melbourne, Australia, but returned to New Zealand in 1901, where he worked as a photographer. From 1905 he was a museum assistant and draughtsman in the Colonial Museum, later to become the Dominion Museum and even later the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa). He began making films about various scenic sights. At the museum he was responsible for the maintenance of the photographic collection and the production of paintings, drawings and photographs for the Dominion Museum bulletins.

He began to gather information about Māori tribal traditions. His films show poi dances and whai string games. He was probably the earliest known ethnographic filmmaker in New Zealand. In 1920 he filmed the gathering of the Māori tribes in Rotorua, when they welcomed the Prince of Wales, and other aspects of the royal journey. He filmed traditional skills and activities, including the make of fishing nets and traps, weaving, digging kumara camps and cooking food in a hangi. Most of his often unedited and fragmentary negatives became only known in 1986 after restoration by the New Zealand film archive. …

He died in Tokaanu on 13 April 1935 and was buried at Taupo cemetery. The School of Applied Arts, which he had founded, doesn’t exist anymore, but many examples of McDonald’s work have been preserved. Many hundreds of his photographic negatives are kept by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. There are prints of his works in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Hawaii. The four ethnographic films he has made are preserved in the collection of the New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki or Nga Taonga Whitiahua.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Te Whiti o Rongomai III (c. 1830 – 18 November 1907) was a Māori spiritual leader and founder of the village of Parihaka, in New Zealand’s Taranaki region.

Te Whiti established Parihaka community as a place of sanctuary and peace for Māori many of whom seeking refuge as their land was confiscated in the early 1860s. Parihaka became a place of peaceful resistance to the encroaching confiscations. On 5 November 1881, the village was invaded by 1500 Armed Constabulary with its leaders arrested and put on trial. Te Whiti was sent to Christchurch at the Crown’s insistence after it was clear the crown was losing its case in New Plymouth. The trial, however, was never reconvened and Te Whiti, along with Tohu were held for two years. Te Whiti and Tohu returned to Parihaka in 1883, seeking to rebuild Parihaka as a place of learning and cultural development though land protests continued. Te Whiti was imprisoned on two further occasions after 1885 before his death in 1907.

Text from the Wikipedia website

A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa book cover

The mīhini mīharo reveals nineteenth-century Aotearoa as never before.

Editors

Catherine Hammond is the director of collections and research at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. She was formerly Hocken Librarian at the University of Otago Te Whare Wānanga o Ōtākou, and before that head of documentary heritage at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum and research library manager at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Shaun Higgins is curator pictorial at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. He has worked on exhibitions for two decades, most recently Robin Morrison: Road Trip (2023). He has an MA, BA and PGDip from the University of Auckland in anthropology, art history and museum studies, and further qualifications in photography and care and identification of photographs.

Alongside the editors, A Different Light includes essays by Angela Wanhalla (Kāi Tahu), professor of History at the University of Otago; Paul Diamond (Ngāti Hauā, Te Rarawa, Ngāpuhi), curator, Māori at the Alexander Turnbull Library; Anna Petersen, curator, Photographs at Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena; and Natalie Marshall, formerly curator, Photographs at Alexander Turnbull Library.

Text from the Auckland University Press website

A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa Introduction to book

A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa book pages

Auckland War Memorial Museum
The Auckland Domain Parnell,
Auckland New Zealand
+6493090443

Opening hours:
Open weekdays from 10am – 5pm.
Open Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays from 9am – 5pm.
Open late every Tuesday evening until 8.30pm

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Exhibition: ‘Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July 2024

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Cover of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”]
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Shock of the new

At the moment the archive is going through a veritable feast of wonderful exhibitions on 19th century photography, this exhibition at the Getty a companion to last week’s posting on the exhibition Nineteenth-Century Photography Now also at the J. Paul Getty Museum. What a delight!

This posting on the important photographer and inventor Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) – one of the pioneers of photography who was finally acknowledged as such during his lifetime and received due recognition – offers the visitor the opportunity to view fragile photographs from the Getty’s treasured Bayard album, one of the first photographic albums ever created, before the leaves of the album are reassembled after restoration.

“The album includes 145 of Bayard’s experiments with different photographic processes on paper, primarily salted paper prints from paper negatives from about 1839 to the late 1840s… Bayard divided the album into four sections: still lifes, portraits, urban and rural landscapes, and an assortment of miscellaneous images. The inclusion of twenty-two photographs by British photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, provides evidence of Bayard’s interactions with his fellow pioneers across the English Channel. …

Inscriptions found on the Getty album pages and versos of its photographs support the theory that the artist himself – or someone with firsthand knowledge of the chemicals he used – compiled this volume. Thus, this treasure offers intriguing insights into Bayard’s practice, aesthetic choices, and strategies for presenting himself through the order and arrangement of the photographs.”1

The full album and layout can be viewed on the Getty’s website.

What I find delightful about this “album of experiments” – other than Bayard’s perceptive, inquisitive self-portraits and delicate, atmospheric cyanotype and salted paper print photograms – is the colour (including hand coloured), size and placement of the photographic prints on the pages of the album. Sometimes gridded, sometimes singular in grand isolation, sometimes asymmetrical with empty pages between images, the album seems to flow allow like a river… only for the viewer then to have to change orientation, as vertical images on one page are then abutted next to a page of images that need to be viewed in a horizontal format but turning the album through 90 degrees.

It’s as if the compiler of the album, probably Bayard himself, applied this prick of consciousness to the viewing of the album, to stop the viewer skimming over the images but forcing them to be attentive, to be aware, of the progression of the story that the artist was telling, to be aware of a certain “disposition” in the viewer in order to – a/ disrupt the tendency of something to act in a certain manner under given circumstances and b/ impinge on a person’s inherent quality of mind and character. To offer a new dispensation on reality.

In other words, the artist challenges the viewer as to how photographs are read and interpreted through changes to the perception and point of view said “reader”. I don’t think I have ever seen such an early photo book that proposes such a daring reorientation of consciousness as does this album.

New technologies, new aesthetics, new dispositions.

The shock of the new.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2024

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

Parisian bureaucrat by day and tireless inventor after hours, Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) was one of the most important, if lesser-known, pioneers of photography. During his thirty-year career, he invented the direct positive process and several other photographic techniques on paper. This exhibition presents an extraordinarily rare opportunity to view some of Bayard’s highly fragile photographs dating from the 1840s – the first decade of the new medium. The exhibition journeys back to the 19th century to unveil a collection of Bayard’s delicately crafted photographs, offering an extraordinarily rare glimpse into his unique processes, subjects, and persistent curiosity. He brought an artistic sensitivity into capturing the first staged self-portraits and set precedents for photography as we know it today. It highlights Getty’s treasured Bayard album, one of the first photographic albums ever created.

This exhibition is presented in English and Spanish.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Title page of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] with Hippolyte Bayard’s [Self-Portrait in the Garden] June 1845
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Text above the photograph: Bromure d’argent vapeurs de Mercure (Silver bromide Mercury vapors)

Hippolyte Bayard’s self-portrait at his garden gate [Self-Portrait in the Garden] introduces the contents of this 184-page album, one of the earliest photographic albums ever created…

Titled Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Receuil No. 2 [Photographic Drawings on Paper. Collection No. 2], the album includes 145 of Bayard’s experiments with different photographic processes on paper, primarily salted paper prints from paper negatives from about 1839 to the late 1840s. Twenty-two photographs by six of his British peers are also interspersed through the album. With its green-and-black marbled covers, it is similar in style to the other known album devoted to Bayard – Album d’essais [Album of Experiments] – owned by the Société française de photographie (SFP) in Paris. Inscriptions found on the Getty album pages and versos of its photographs support the theory that the artist himself – or someone with firsthand knowledge of the chemicals he used – compiled this volume. Thus, this treasure offers intriguing insights into Bayard’s practice, aesthetic choices, and strategies for presenting himself through the order and arrangement of the photographs.

Bayard divided the album into four sections: still lifes, portraits, urban and rural landscapes, and an assortment of miscellaneous images. The inclusion of twenty-two photographs by British photographers, including William Henry Fox Talbot, provides evidence of Bayard’s interactions with his fellow pioneers across the English Channel.

This album has passed through several owners over its 180-plus year life. While gaps still exist, we have traced much of its provenance, or history of ownership. Working back in time, the Getty Museum purchased the album in 1984 from the American collector Arnold Crane (1932-2014) as part of its foundational photography collection. Crane had acquired it in 1970 from Alain Brieux (1922-1985), a Parisian book dealer. By the early 1950s, the album was in the possession of the commune of Breteuil-sur-Noye, Bayard’s hometown, or its mayor, François Monnet (1890-1970). A member of Bayard’s extended family may have given or sold the album to Breteuil. Moving further back into the nineteenth century, Bayard’s family likely chose to keep the album at the time of his death in 1887. We believe that Bayard possessed the album from its creation until he passed away.

Over time different individuals have added inscriptions, numbering systems, correspondence, a biography, and a souvenir from a 1959-1960 exhibition on Bayard in Essen, Germany. At the top left corner of pages, an early inventory system notes the page number, the number of images on the page, and total number of photographs in the album up to that point. Numbers under each photograph represent a second system. At the bottom of the pages, Getty Museum staff and Crane each assigned an accession number to identify the album within their collections. Note that Getty numbers begin with “84.XO.968.” and Crane numbers with “A58.”.

With each change of hands, the album has adopted new meanings. It started as an artist’s notebook and portfolio. Upon Bayard’s death it became a family memento and then a symbol of a commune’s pride. Later in the twentieth century, it shifted from an antiquarian book dealer’s curious commodity to a collector’s treasure. Today it is a museum object valued for what it tells us about processes, subject matter, and sophisticated lines of communication between photographers during the earliest years of photography.

Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs, 2024

For more information see:

~ Hellman, Karen and Carolyn Peter, eds. Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024.
~ Peter, Carolyn. “The Many Lives of the Getty Bayard Album.” Getty Research Journal 15 (2022): 67-86.

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top left Hippolyte Bayard’s [Three Feathers] About 1842-1843
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Three Feathers]
About 1842-1843
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Cyanotype
13.8 x 11.1cm (5 7/16 x 4 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard’s Arrangement of Flowers about 1839-1843
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
Arrangement of Flowers
About 1839-1843
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Salted paper print
17.5 × 21.3cm (6 7/8 × 8 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Portrait of a Man] 1843-1845
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Portrait of a Man]
1843-1845
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Salted paper print
Image: 15.3 × 11.6 cm (6 × 4 9/16 in.)
Sheet: 15.7 × 12 cm (6 3/16 × 4 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[In Bayard’s Studio]
About 1845
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Salted paper print
23.5 × 17.5cm (9 1/4 × 6 7/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard is one of the earliest photographers to explore self-portraiture using a camera. The Getty Museum’s collection includes seven of Bayard’s self-portraits (see 84.XO.968.1, 84.XO.968.166, 84.XO.968.20).* While Bayard is not present in this image, it too can be considered a self-portrait of sorts as it offers the viewer a window onto his artistic world. The seemingly casual composition shows a make-shift photographic studio with wood doors leaning up against a brick wall to form the principal back wall. The floor is rough; it isn’t clear whether it is made of tile, wood, or simply dirt. Bayard featured the tools of his trade – glass bottles filled with chemicals, a beaker, a funnel, a dark canvas backdrop, and a light curtain or coverlet as well as some of his favourite subjects – three plaster casts and a porcelain vase. The Société française de photographie (SFP) collection in Paris has two versions of this image; one of them is hand-coloured. The overpainting with watercolour heightens the various patterns and adds colours that the photographic process was unable to capture.

Many of these same props can be found in a number of Bayard’s photographs. The vase with its elaborate floral design as well as the small figure with arms extended, the coverlet, backdrop, and bench are integral parts of Bayard’s most famous self-portrait, Le Noyé [The Drowned Man], now housed at the SFP.

*Four of the Getty’s Bayard self-portraits are part of a portfolio printed in 1965 by M. Gassmann and Son from Bayard’s original negatives that are housed in the SFP collection. (See: 84.XO.1166.1, 84.XO.1166.2, 84.XO.1166.8, and 84.XO.1166.25).

Carolyn Peter. J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photographs
2019

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at bottom right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine] 1843
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Galerie de la Madeleine with Scaffolding, Place de la Madeleine]
1843
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Salted paper print
Image: 16.5 × 22cm (6 1/2 × 8 11/16 in.)
Sheet: 16.8 × 22.3cm (6 5/8 × 8 3/4 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] showing at top right, Hippolyte Bayard’s [Rue des Batignolles] about 1845
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Rue des Batignolles]
About 1845
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Salted paper print
15.4 x 11 cm (6 1/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Bitch in profile]
About 1865
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Albumen silver print
Mount: 10 x 6.1cm (3 15/16 x 2 3/8 in.)
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Unidentified woman standing, leaning against a credenza]
About 1861
Albumen silver print
Mount: 10.4 x 6.1 cm (4 1/8 * 2 3/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887) William Henry Fox Talbot (English, 1800-1877) Samuel Buckle (British, 1808-1860) Nicolaas Henneman (British, 1813-1893) Reverend Calvert Jones (British, 1804-1877) David Kinnebrook (English, 1819-1865) M.H. Nevil Story-Maskelyne (British, 1823-1911) Unknown maker
Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”]
1839-1855
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Two Men and a Girl in a Garden]
About 1847
Part of Dessins photographiques sur Papier. Recueil No. 2. [The “Bayard Album”] 1839-1855
Albumenised salted paper print
12.9 x 15.6cm (5 1/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Hippolyte Bayard

Frenchman Hippolyte Bayard was one of the earliest experimenters in photography, though few will recognise his name today. While working as a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance in the late 1830s and early 1840s, he devoted much of his free time to inventing processes that captured and fixed images from nature on paper using a basic camera, chemicals, and light. The announcement of the inventions of his fellow countryman Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s daguerreotype on January 7, 1839, and Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot’s photogenic drawing soon after greatly diminished opportunities for recognition of Bayard’s contributions. He was most likely persuaded by François Arago, the head of the French Academy of Sciences, to keep quiet about his own distinct process until after the announcement of Daguerre’s process and subsequent celebration in August of 1839.

Bayard nonetheless continued his investigations and submitted letters detailing three photographic recipes to the Academy of Sciences. Though he exhibited examples of his work in what has been recognised as the first public exhibition of photography in July 1839 and presented his direct positive process at the Academy of Fine Arts in November of 1839, where it was lauded as an important tool for artists, he remained in the shadows of Daguerre and Talbot.

Bayard is best known today for his 1840 self-portrait as a drowned man, to which he added text protesting the lack of recognition for his invention. The humorous, yet biting text read:

The corpse of the gentleman you see here…. is that of Monsieur Bayard, inventor of the process that you have just seen…. As far as I know this ingenious and indefatigable experimenter has been occupied for about three years with perfecting his discovery…. The Government, who gave much to Monsieur Daguerre, has said it can do nothing for Monsieur Bayard, and the poor wretch has drowned himself. Oh! The precariousness of human affairs! …

In reality, of the three inventors, it was Bayard who actively continued to photograph the longest. He was a founding member in the 1850s of the Société héliographique and its successor, the Société française de photographie. He kept up with the latest developments in the world of photography and integrated new processes into his practice. He was one of only five photographers selected to be part of the Missions héliographiques in 1851, charged with the task of documenting France’s historic architecture for the Commission des Monuments historiques. He exhibited regularly in the universal expositions and, in the 1860s after his retirement from the Ministry of Finance, opened a photographic portrait studio in Paris with Charles Albert d’Arnoux, known as Bertall (1820-1882). During his lifetime, Bayard was described as the “Grandfather of Photography” by several commentators. The Légion d’honneur (still considered today the highest order of military and civil decoration in France) awarded him the first level of merit – Chevalier – in 1863. In the late 1860s he left Paris and moved to Nemours near his lifelong friend, the actor and painter Edmond Geffroy (1804-1895). Bayard died there in 1887.

Text from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Self-Portrait in the Garden]
1847
Salted paper print
Image: 16.5 × 12.3cm (6 1/2 × 4 13/16 in.)
Sheet: 17.1 × 12.5cm (6 3/4 × 4 15/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

By October 1840, a little over a year after several competing photographic processes had been made public, Hippolyte Bayard began staging elaborate self-portraits in his garden and other locations. His best known, Le Noyé [The Drowned Man], was made on October 18, 1840 (three variants are now part of the collection of the Société française de photographie in Paris).

The Getty Museum’s collection includes six other self-portraits by Bayard in addition to this 1847 Self-portrait in the Garden (See: 84.XO.968.1, 84.XO.968.166).* In five of the seven self-portraits, he placed himself in garden settings. This was, in part, a practical decision since natural light was required to make photographs at the time. However, his choice of setting also reflects his passion for plants. He came from a family of gardeners – his maternal grandfather worked in the extensive grounds of the abbey in Breteuil, the village where Bayard grew up. His father, a justice of the peace, was a passionate amateur gardener who grew peaches in an orchard attached to the family home. The garden(s) featured in Bayard’s self-portraits may indeed be part of the family property in Breteuil or his own home in Batignolles – an area that was just on the outskirts of Paris.

The setting becomes an integral aspect of these portraits; Bayard, the man, merges with his environment. In this particular image, he is surrounded by vegetation and is seated in a wooden chair whose arms and legs resemble vine branches. The lower portion of his legs merges into the darkened lower foreground as if he too is rooted in the earth and has sprouted from it. He shares the foreground with a tall leafy plant that bursts into blossoms at the top. The artist’s choice of clothing, including his cravat, brimmed cap, as well as his direct gaze, all combine to convey a sense of confidence.

Another image found mounted on a separate page in the same album in which this one appears offers a slightly more distant view of almost all the same elements. Bayard is no longer part of the composition, which instead features a watering can and an extra pot (See 84.XO.968.85). Perhaps this photograph was a study in preparation for this self-portrait.

Carolyn Peter, J. Paul Getty Museum, Department of Photograph
2019

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Self-Portrait in the Garden]
June 1845
Hand-coloured
Salted paper print
12 1/4 × 9 13/16 in.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

The 19th-Century Selfie Pioneer

Before Instagram influencers, there was Hippolyte Bayard

More than 160 years before smartphones and selfie sticks allowed even the most inexperienced shutterbug to snap a photo of themselves, Hippolyte Bayard was turning his camera on himself.

The year was 1840. Several competing photographic processes had just been made public for the first time the year before, effectively introducing the medium of photography to the world. Bayard, a bureaucrat who worked at the Ministry of Finance in Paris and took pictures on weekends or his lunch hour, was one of the first photographers to practice the art of the self-portrait. Examples of these are on view in the new Getty Center exhibition Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer.

With himself as the subject, Bayard could experiment with new photographic processes, set a scene, and pose in front of the camera, creating images that represented his hobbies, frustrations, and achievements. Sound familiar?

“The earliest photographers wanted to capture people in photographs. Bayard was one of the first to actually succeed,” says Carolyn Peter, the exhibition’s co-curator. He also demonstrated that photography was a new art form. “The public was so taken by the realistic depictions of the world in photography, but he was saying that you can also make things up. You can stage things.”

Bayard in the Garden

Self-portraits were an appealing solution in those early days of photography largely because taking a picture required a long, labor-intensive process, explains Peter. Photographers had to set their cameras in front of their (motionless) subjects for anywhere between 20 minutes and three hours – a daunting ask for any human being – to expose the sensitised surface (metal, paper, or glass) to enough light to create the image.

“He probably didn’t want to subject others to this endurance test, but he still wanted to try and work on his photography techniques. Gradually, the amount of time it took to make a photo shortened, maybe down to around 10 minutes, and finally down to seconds,” Peter said.

In a series of self-portraits from the 1840s, Bayard posed himself in his or his family’s gardens, among plants and tools, emphasising his passion for horticulture. The outdoor setting was a necessity as it offered plenty of natural light. He adopted several different configurations of items and positions in each portrait. Notice how in one image (above left) he hid his feet behind greenery, as if he were planted in the earth.

“Today artists, along with the rest of us, still try a lot of different positions and poses with slight variations when we are making self-portraits,” Peter says.

Hippolyte Bayard (French, 1801-1887)
[Self-Portrait in the Garden]
About 1845-1849
Salted paper print
Image: 15.9 × 12.7 cm (6 1/4 × 5 in.)
Sheet: 16.3 × 13.1 cm (6 7/16 × 5 3/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Public domain

Bayard as Dramatist

Perhaps Bayard’s best-known photo is his Drowned Man (1840), in which he slumps over, partially covered by a sheet, eyes closed, as if he had perished. Bayard created three versions of the image, changing the pose and props in each one, and eventually added this over-the-top lament to the back of the final version:

“The corpse of the gentleman that you see here… is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process you have just seen…. To my knowledge, for about three years this ingenious and indefatigable researcher has been working to perfect his invention…. The Government, which has given so much to M. Daguerre, said it could do nothing for M. Bayard, and the unfortunate man drowned himself. Oh! The precariousness of human affairs!”

Clearly, Bayard had a few frustrations about his position in the photography world and about how little respect he felt he had been given in comparison to fellow photographer Louis Daguerre. This self-portrait allowed him to express his woes in a humorous and, yes, dramatic way, perhaps inspired by his connections to the theater.

“One of his very best friends from childhood on was Edmond Geffroy, a famous actor, so Bayard hung out with actors and theater people as well as fine artists and writers,” Peter says. “He had this connection to theatricality and theater. He attended a lot of plays. So I think that influenced him.”

A Special Effects Pioneer

In the 1860s, Bayard opened a portrait studio where customers could pay to have their pictures taken. Exposure times had been dramatically reduced, making it significantly easier for ordinary folks to sit for photographs. Bayard continued to experiment, using himself as a subject. Here he combined two negatives to make it look as though he is having a conversation with himself (or an imaginary identical twin?). This is 100 years before The Parent Trap was released!

“He’s just got this sense of humour and this desire to keep playing around,” says Peter.

A Self-Portrait of Pride

Bayard might have felt profoundly under acknowledged for his work in the 1840s, but it turns out he just needed to wait a little to get his due. In 1863 he was awarded the cross of the French Legion of Honor, a prestigious award bestowed in recognition of his contributions to photography. He took the portrait above while wearing the badge, showing off what must have been one of his proudest achievements. Bayard retired from photography soon after.

Bayard’s selfies are now more than 160 years old, but selfie-takers of today seem to be (unconsciously) following the same principles Bayard experimented with. He was one of the first to show that photography could represent not just the literal world but also how you wanted to present yourself. While selfies may appear to be a new phenomenon spawned by the reverse-camera button on smartphones, selfie aficionados should pay proper homage to Bayard for pioneering this art form.

“Today, selfies often include humour. Photographers invest a lot of strategic thought into how they want to present themselves. Selfies are performative and create something that isn’t fully realistic. Bayard was also conscious of the power of photography to visually imagine other worlds and invent different versions of himself.”

Erin Migdol. “The 19th-Century Selfie Pioneer,” on the J. Paul Getty Museum website Apr 09, 2024 [Online] Cited 12/04/2024

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Review: ‘Julie Millowick: Surrounding’ at the Castlemaine Art Museum

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 16th June 2024

Curator: Jenny Long

Installation view of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Down with Earth

This is a magnificent exhibition by Australian photographer Julie Millowick (b. 1948) which documents “the environmental legacy of gold mining around her home near Fryerstown in Central Victoria, capturing the beauty of this landscape in tumult and recovery.” (Wall text)

What I admire about the work in the exhibition (other than photographs that evidence the persistence of an inquiry into one subject, the result of 34 years of visual and intellectual exploration), is the way that the photographs envelop you in the gallery space. It’s as if the accumulation of images over decades creates a nurturing story which comforts you in the gallery space: that the landscape so desecrated will heal itself, will spring forth anew. The sustained investigation into the landscape around Fryerstown captured my soul.

The exhibition is beautifully constructed, rendered, seen, so very quiet yet so powerful. On every wall of the gallery there is an intimate story, told through remarkable photographs of the Australian bush that combine light and dark, near and far, low and high perspective (the raising and lowering of the horizon line) and the feeling of claustrophobia and expansiveness within the same environment: photographs of mullock heaps and mine sites with open sky and residual left-over soil or rock from the shaft excavation process. Shadows of trees obscure abandoned mine shafts which litter the landscape, traps for the unwary who go wandering, or is that wondering, through the bush. And through Millowick’s lens, this landscape is all about the wonder of the landscape and its rejuvenative potential.

In this unsettling place which continually transforms through drought and rain, human mining, erosion and regeneration we can observe in Millowick’s photographs the strength and transformative qualities of nature. It may seem strange (and probably is) but I argue that the Australian bush presented here is a heterotopic space (Foucault), a landscape outside the normality of the everyday (although any landscape with human intervention is not “natural” but always a constructed space), one that is somehow “other”: disturbing, intense, contradictory and transforming, a landscape which mirrors the outside world yet upsets that representation due to its un/settling, its mining and ecological past – creating a space which changes from day to day, month to month – growing, contracting, evidencing human interaction and touch, but then outgrowing human interference.

The spaces that the artist envisions in her beautiful micro / macro, order / chaos photographs picture something unusual: the imaginative wish for of a utopian world that could never exist in the first place and a dystopian, illusionary world in the process of healing itself (possibly), the very definition of a heterotopic space. As the characters in Fallout Season 1 observe, “Time is the apex predator” … and through time, nature will hopefully outlive all human beings to again become something belonging solely to the Earth, to again become something “natural” (existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind).

Millowick’s photographs also picture something else: photography as an exposition of the self. As the artist Ans Westra observes, photography should not be “solely controlled by the brain. Your personality, subconscious, flows through […] you have to allow it to come through […] for the outcome to be relevant.”1 Ultimately, she said, photography was “always an exposition of self.” Such is the energy with the photographs of this artist, also.

Through wonder, respect and the grounding of spirit in Earth, Millowick has sustained a bond and an understanding in her fascination with this subject, a sensitivity to subject nurtured over so many years which “invites viewers to appreciate them [the photographs] as a poetic connection to, and love for, the landscape” side by side with a conceptual thinking or intellectualisation about the land. In their containment of energy, in their penetrating into life and its things, these photographs contribute something to our life and history on this planet.

Robert Frank said, “It is important to see what is invisible to others.”

Minor White, in one of his Three canons said,

“Be still with yourself,
Until the object of your attention,
Affirms your presence”

Millowick has achieved both aims admirably. In some of the most insightful and poignant photographs of the Australian landscape I have ever seen, the artist has revealed not just aspects of the earth (ground) which are undergoing transformation but aspects of herself as she has journeyed through life, remaining true to her path as an artist, remaining true to documenting her journey with the land, remaining true to a legacy towards the planet, down with Earth.

I was very moved by these photographs.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Ans Westra quoted in Paul Moon. “An outsider on the inside: how Ans Westra created New Zealand’s ‘national photo album’,” on the Conversation website May 8, 2024 [Online] Cited 11/05/2024

All installation photographs by Marcus Bunyan. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Marcus Bunyan and Julie Millowick

“The artist does not turn time into money, the artist turns time into energy, time into intensity, time into vision. The exchange that art offers is an exchange in kind; energy for energy, intensity for intensity, vision for vision… Can we afford to live imaginatively, contemplatively?”

Jeanette Winterson. Art Objects. London: Vintage, 1996, p. 139.

Wall text from the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Gallery One

Installation view of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing at left, Perseverance Mine mullock heap, Fryerstown (2020); at top right, Mosquito Mine depleted mullock heap, Fryerstown (2020); and at bottom right, Duke of Cornwall Mine mulch heap, Fryerstown (2020)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Mullock and mine sites

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Perseverance Mine mullock heap, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Duke of Cornwall Mine mulch heap, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing from left to right, top to bottom, Ferrons Mine mullock heap, Fryerstown (2007); Ferrons Mine mullock heap, Fryerstown (2007); Exocarps cupressiformis (cherry ballart) in the foreground, Ferrons mullock heap in the background (2018); Mullock from New Era Mine, Fryerstown (2022); Ferrons Mine mullock heap with one of several surrounding shafts, Fryerstown (2018); Three fragments of goldrush-era glass bottle, Fryerstown (2019); New Era Mine mullock heaps, Fryerstown (2022); Abandoned mine shaft, Fryerstown (2022); Introduced invasive thistles, Fryerstown (2022); New Era Mine mullock heaps, Fryerstown (2022); New Era Mine mullock heaps, introduced get mullein in foreground, Fryerstown (2022); New Era Mine mullock heaps, introduced get mullein in foreground, Fryerstown (2022)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ferrons Mine mullock heap, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exocarps cupressiformis (cherry ballart) in the foreground, Ferrons mullock heap in the background
2018
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Because of the conifer-like foliage, European settlers referred to Exocarps cupressiformis (cherry ballart) as a ‘bush Christmas tree’. First Nations people used the wood for spear throwers and Europeans used it for gunstocks.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ferrons Mine mullock heap with one of several surrounding shafts, Fryerstown
2018
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
New Era Mine mullock heaps, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Originally much larger, these mullock heaps have been substantially depleted by both private individuals and the former shire, who used the mullock for roadworks. New Era Mine, at a depth of 1100 feet (335.3 metres), was the deepest shaft in the local area.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Abandoned mine shaft, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Abandoned mine shafts occur throughout the Central Victorian area. Discarded mine waste appears in the background of the photograph

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Introduced invasive thistles, Fryerstown
2022
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
New Era Mine mullock heaps, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing from left to right, top to bottom, Trees defoliated by the caterpillar (larval) stage of Cup Moth, Doratifera sp. Fryerstown (2013); Studio photograph of leaves damaged by the caterpillar (larval) stage of Cup Moth, Doratifera sp. Fryerstown (2013); Fallen leaves damaged by the caterpillar (larval) stage of Cup Moth, Doratifera sp. Fryerstown (2013); The quite shocking impact of searching for gold using hydraulic sluicing (early 1900s and 1930s), Golden Gully, Fryerstown (2022); The remains of a deeply sluiced gully, Golden Gully, Fryerstown (2022); Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush) Fryerstown (2023); Forest, evening, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballarat), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2021); The secret cubby in the New Era Mine tailings sand, surrounded by introduced invasive blackberry, Golden Gully, Fryerstown (2016); Invasive blackberry grows along the track to the New Era Mind tailings, Fryerstown (2010); Gelatin silver paper exposed while lightly buried under introduced invasive blackberry plant, Fryerstown (2019); Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush), Fryerstown (2023); Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush), growing in the cyanide-contaminated tailings sand from the New Era Mine, Golden Gully, Fryerstown (2021); Acacia implexa (hickory wattle) foliage, Fryerstown (2023)
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park

Damage by Cup Moth

During 2013m large areas if trees in Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park were defoliated by the caterpillar (larval) stage of Cup Moth, Doratifera sp. Fortunately, most trees eventually recovered. Environmentalist, entomologist and Fryerstown resident, John Landy (former Governor of Victoria 2001-2006 and the second many to break the four-minute mile) also shored Julie Millowick’s concern for the forest. John viewed Julie’s photo documentation and offered valuable information.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Trees defoliated by the caterpillar (larval) stage of Cup Moth, Doratifera sp., Fryerstown
2013
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Large areas of forest in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park were affected. Every day Julie Milowick witnessed the decline of the trees as the Cup Moth infestation became more widespread.

Tailings sands

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
The quite shocking impact of searching for gold using hydraulic sluicing (early 1900s and 1930s), Golden Gully, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
The remains of a deeply sluiced gully, Golden Gully, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Growing in the foreground and along the top of the cliff is Cassinia sifton (coffee bush)

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush), Fryerstown
2023
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Cassinia sifton also called the coffee bush, is a plant associated with regeneration and survival. Referred to as a pioneer plant, it is often the first growth to occur in disturbed, damaged and bare earth.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Forest, evening, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballarat), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In spring the tree has tiny red berries that provided a valuable food source for Indigenous people.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
The secret cubby in the New Era Mine tailings sand, surrounded by introduced invasive blackberry, Golden Gully, Fryerstown
2016
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Gelatin silver paper exposed while lightly buried under introduced invasive blackberry plant, Fryerstown
2019
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush), Fryerstown
2023
Digitised wet cyanotype, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag paper, open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Because Cassinia sifton (coffee bush) is the fist plant to regrow in damaged land, it symbolises renewal.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Cassinia sifton (Coffee Bush), growing in the cyanide-contaminated tailings sand from the New Era Mine, Golden Gully, Fryerstown
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Acacia implexa (hickory wattle) foliage, Fryerstown
2023
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The beauty of Central Victoria’s landscape in tumult and recovery.

Julie Millowick is a localist, an artist who is deeply embedded in the place where she lives. Over many years, Millowick has documented the environmental legacy of gold mining around her home near Fryerstown in Central Victoria. This strangely poignant landscape has been turned upside down through violent extraction – but it remains resilient and in the process of recovery.

Surrounding exhibits a curated selection of Millowick’s work including a new series seen for the first time. Millowick’s photographs show us the devastating effects of mining, drought, flood and invasive plants, but also remind us of the interconnectedness that links all parts of this ecosystem including its human occupants. This is a terrain which the artist loves, and which she sees with acute perception. It is a landscape full of complexity, a region with a terrible past, but in its capacity for renewal is also a place that offers a spark of hope for the future.

Julie Millowick

Julie Millowick began her photographic career working in the darkroom of Athol Shmith, John Cato and Peter Barr. After completing her studies at Prahran College of Advanced Education, she worked as a press and public relations photographer, after which the direction of her commercial folio changed and she worked as a corporate industrial photographer. Julie achieved early recognition for her photojournalism when she exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria and Australian Centre for Photography in 1977 in Australian New Work. She has exhibited and published regularly since then, with work held in major photography collections in Australia and internationally. In 1993 she exhibited work in the exhibition Intimate Lives with Sally Mann, Nan Goldin and Jaques Henri Lartigue at the International Fotofeis in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Text from the Castlemaine Art Museum website

Installation views of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing from left to right, top to bottom, Dog shadow on the edge of an abandoned mine shaft, evening light, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2009); Cassini Sifton (coffee bush) with seeds, Fyerstown (2023); Abandoned mine shaft, horse paddock, Fyerstown (2009); Survivor tree, surrounded by uniform post-goldrush regrowth, horse paddock, Fyerstown (2023); Gelatin silver paper exposed while lightly buried under introduced invasive blackberry plant, Fyerstown (2019); Post-goldrush uniform regrowth trees in mist, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2014); Post-goldrush uniform regrowth trees in mist, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2014); Late evening, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2021); Late evening, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2021); Early morning light, horse paddock with washing line and feed bin, Fryerstown (2009); Tree with hay band, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2009); A beautiful little mare, hose paddock, Fryerstown (2009); A much-loved little mare, horse paddock, Fryerstown (2009); Christian McArdle on top of Ferrons mullock heap, horse paddock, Fryerstown (1989); Christian McArdle with Blue Dog on top of Ferrons mullock heap, Fryerstown (2023)

Horse Paddock

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Dog shadow on the edge of an abandoned mine shaft, evening light, horse paddock, Fryerstown
2009
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Abandoned mine shaft, horse paddock, Fyerstown
2009
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A small Cassinia soften (coffee bush) valiantly grows on the edge of an abandoned mine shaft.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Survivor tree, surrounded by uniform post-goldrush regrowth, horse paddock, Fyerstown
2023
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Gelatin silver paper exposed while lightly buried under introduced invasive blackberry plant, Fyerstown
2019
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Post-goldrush uniform regrowth trees in mist, horse paddock, Fryerstown
2014
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Late evening, horse paddock, Fryerstown
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing from left to right, top to bottom, Ecological Thinning Trial, first week. Christian McArdle driving his 1967 Ford F100 truck into one of the ‘thinned’ areas, Fryerstown (2007); Ecological Thinning Trial, first week, Fryerstown (2007); Ecological Thinning Trial, three months later, Fryerstown (2007); Ecological Thinning Trial, two years later, Fryerstown (2009); Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park seven weeks after a DELWP (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) planned burn, Fryerstown (2020); Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park thirteen weeks after a DELWP (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) planned burn, Fryerstown (2020); Evening light, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Quietly beautiful landscape in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2013); Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart) with a kangaroo track running across the background and the abandoned Fyers Extension Water Race (channel) on the right-hand side, Fryerstown (2022); Ferrons Mine mullock heap in distant background of what is referred to as ‘worked over land’, Fryerstown (2020); Beautiful, rugged and challenging terrain of the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2014); Post-goldrush uniform regrowth of the forest is clearly evident in this image from (2014); Three Wildflowers, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Wattle from the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart), Fryerstown (2022); Acacia pycnantha (golden wattle), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022); Exploring the multi-layered complexity of the forest using the technique of double exposure, Fryerstown (2008)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park

Ecological thinning

In April 2007 an Ecological Thinning Trial commenced in sections of the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park. The trial has a duration of fifty years and aims to transform selected areas of the box ironbark forest from uniform post-goldrush regrowth to an environment supporting widely-spaced trees of different heights, age and canopy.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ecological Thinning Trial, first week. Christian McArdle driving his 1967 Ford F100 truck into one of the ‘thinned’ areas, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ecological Thinning Trial, first week, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

The uniform post-goldrush regrowth trees have been ‘thinned’, leaving a selected few to grow larger and provide a protective canopy and more diverse habitat.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ecological Thinning Trial, three months later, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

‘Thinned’ trees in foreground remain on the ground while in the background (centre of image) others are stacked ready for removal. Uniform regrowth after the gold mining deforestation is evident in trees that remain standing. The 50-year trial hopes to return the forest of the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park to a landscape of various sized trees, canopy and habitat.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ecological Thinning Trial, two years later, Fryerstown
2009
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

The flowering local Hakea decrees (hake or ‘bushy needlewood’) is growing through stacked wood. Uniform regrowth trees can be seen in the background.

Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park seven weeks after a DELWP (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) planned burn, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park thirteen weeks after a DELWP (Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) planned burn, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Evening light, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The conifer-like foliage of Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart) in the foreground demonstrates why European settlers referred to it as a ‘bush Christmas tree’.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Quietly beautiful landscape in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2013
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballast) with a kangaroo track running across the background and the abandoned Fyers Extension Water Race (channel) on the right-hand side, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Ferrons Mine mullock heap in distant background of what is referred to as ‘worked over land’, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Wattle from the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2022
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart), Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick specifically photographed Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart or ‘bush Christmas tree’) for several years. This is one of her favourite images.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Acacia pycnantha (golden wattle), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2022
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exocarpos cupressiformis (cherry ballart), Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (2022)
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Exploring the multi-layered complexity of the forest using the technique of double exposure, Fryerstown
2008
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Installation view of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum showing from left to right, top to bottom, Jetty in mist, Fryerstown (2004); Early morning, reflected pink cloud, Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2001); Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered reeds, Fryerstown (2007); Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered reeds, Fryerstown (2007); Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered jetty, Fryerstown (2005); Coffee bush, Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2007); Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2008); Crocodile Reservoir, Christian McArdle on the Crocodile Reservoir jetty with the dog called Black, Fryerstown (2008); Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2009); Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2010); Christian McArdle surveys flooded Golden Gully, Fryerstown (2010); Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown (2004); Crocodile Reservoir. Julie Millowick and her son Christian McArdle, Crocodile Reservoir, during the El Nino year of 2007 from the series Drought, Continuing Drought, Fryerstown (2007)
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Crocodile Reservoir

Crocodile Reservoir was constructed in 1861 and supplied water to the Fryerstown area for both mining and domestic purposes. In 1877, via a series of water races (channels), it became part of the main Coliban channel system. Later, when Fryerstown was connection to McCay Reservoir, it became catchment only.

‘Croc Res’, as it is called by Fryerstown residents, is 650 metres from were Julie Millowick lives and was an integral part of person’s childhood.

The reservoir, like all other water catchments, was severely affected by the Australia-wide Millennium Drought, between 1999 and the spring of 2010. During that time Millowick photographed the impact of the drought across Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. She included the 1860’s Crocodile Reservoir, Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, as part of that documentation. The latter photographs, although local, were a microcosm of what was happening across Australia.

As the water level of Crocodile Reservoir fell earth was exposed to daylight for the first time since the 1860s. Immediately Cassinia soften (coffee bush) flourished.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Early morning, reflected pink cloud, Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown
2001
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

As the drought progressed and the water level fell, Fryerstown locals were astonished to see a small wooden jetty appear out of the receding water. It was in remarkably good condition and Julie Millowick immediately began to photograph it.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered reeds, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

At the Crocodile Gully inlet to the reservoir, the valuable habitat of the once thriving reeds had been lost. The trees indicate the pre-drought water level. Cassinia sifton (coffee bush) encroaches on the left hand side.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered reeds, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, ice-covered jetty, Fryerstown
2005
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

The newly-exposed dam wall of Crocodile Reservoir, adjacent to the jetty, was almost blocked by the uncontrolled growth of Cassinia sifton (coffee bush)

Minor White (American, 1908–1976)
Vermont (dock in snow)
1971
Gelatin silver print

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Coffee bush, Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown
2007
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Thriving seed-laden Cassinia sifton (coffee bush) can be seen here encroaching on the northern end of Crocodile Reservoir, where large areas of reeds, no longer partially submerged in water, had died.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown
2008
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Damaged jetty and exposed infrastructure used for the release of water into the races (channels) is visible. The small amount of water in the reservoir and surrounding wet earth resulted from a violent storm that occurred mid-2007. It did not break the drought, but caused damage across Victoria.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, Christian McArdle on the Crocodile Reservoir jetty with the dog called Black, Fryerstown
2008
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Crocodile Reservoir, Fryerstown
2010
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

In the spring of 2010 heavy drought-breaking rain fell throughout Victoria. The drought-weakened wall of the reservoir partially collapsed, and water flowed through the cavity into Golden Gully. Standing on the wall above the area of partial collapse looking down.

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
One of the numerous abandoned mine shafts in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown (installation view)
2010
inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
One of the numerous abandoned mine shafts in the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park, Fryerstown
2010
inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Mine disturbances and uniform regrowth trees can be seen in the background.

Gallery Two

Installation views of the exhibition Julie Millowick: Surrounding at the Castlemaine Art Museum
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown (installation view)
1996
Digitised pinhole camera paper negative, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown
1996
Digitised pinhole camera paper negative, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, Horse Paddock, Fryerstown
1996
Digitised Pinhole Camera paper negative, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown (installation view)
2010
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown
2010
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, front verandah, Fryerstown (installation view)
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, front verandah, Fryerstown
2022
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown. Corrupt card (installation view)
2012
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Washing, horse paddock, Fryerstown (installation view)
2012
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Child’s 19th century boot metal heel-band, found on property, Fryerstown (installation view)
2023
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Child’s 19th century boot metal heel-band, found on property, Fryerstown
2023
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Tree foliage, patio, Fryerstown (installation view)
2022
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Tree foliage, patio, Fryerstown
2022
Digitised gelatin silver lumen, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Introduced invasive cactus, horse paddock, Fryerstown (installation view)
2001
Digitised 6-45 film negative, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Introduced invasive cactus, horse paddock, Fryerstown
2001
Digitised 6-45 film negative, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Original interior wall of 1862 miner’s cottage with introduced invasive blackberry, Fryerstown (installation view)
2023
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 39, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown (installation view)
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 39, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown
2020
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 155, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown (installation view)
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 264, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown (installation view)
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 155, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Julie Millowick (Australian, b. 1948)
Day 264, lockdown, Chinese pistachio tree, Fryerstown
2021
Digital image, inkjet print on 100% cotton rag
open edition 2023

Castlemaine Art Museum
14 Lyttleton Street, Castlemaine

Opening hours
Thursday – Saturday 11am – 4pm
Sunday 12pm – 4pm

Castlemaine Art Museum website

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Exhibition: ‘What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999’ at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 7th June 2024

Curators: Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

A mid-week posting!

I wouldn’t have forgiven myself if I had missed this important exhibition about an interesting subject, the “underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999.”

So I thought I would squeeze it into the posting schedule which stretches a couple of months into the future…

Other than the group photographs of the book covers and installation photographs of the exhibition (below), there were no individual book covers nor details about some of the books in the media images, so I have added a few were it has been possible along with accompanying text.

I have also included photographs from what I think is one of the most iconic photobooks, even though I am not sure it is in the exhibition: Marion Palfi’s There is No More Time: An American Tragedy (1949).

So many important photobooks by so many glorious photographers.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

Many thankx to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 (Nueva York, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021) cover images (detail)
Design: Ayumi Higuchi
Photography: Jeff Gutterman

What They Saw project, a touring exhibition accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. The present show is organised in collaboration with 10×10 Photobooks, a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding.

In seeking out the omissions in photobook history, the standard definition of the photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher or a commercial publisher, needed to be expanded to incorporate those who do not call themselves photographers or artists but who nevertheless put together a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others: individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, mock-ups, fanzines and artists’ books to be more inclusive.

This iteration of the What They Saw exhibition includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are from the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. From the pioneers, such as Anna Atkins, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook, or Isabel Agnes Cowper, who used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books, to the independent and self-published photobooks of the 1990s, including Colored People: A Collaborative Book Project by Adrian Piper or Twinspotting by Ketaki Seth, this selection allows for greater inclusion of previously marginalised photographic communities, including women, queer communities, people of colour and artists from outside Europe and North America.

Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past anthologies documenting photobook history, and those included are already quite well known. This exhibition of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks is a necessary step in unwriting the current photobook history and rewriting an updated photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

Anna Atkins, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob) (French, 1894-1954) Aveux non avenus (Disavowals or Cancelled Confessions) 1930

In her 1930 publication, Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun used the relationship between her inwardly focused poetic writing and symbolic photomontages to construct a unique reality for self-expression. This article focuses on three chapters and respective photographic images from the publication to relate Cahun’s, and by association her partner Marcel Moore’s, discussion on sexuality and gender expression. The utopian dreamscape created investigates issues of narcissism and otherness, female homosexuality, dandyism and going beyond gender, individual and social critique, mocking the antiquated views of art and writing, accepting and breaking taboos, while allowing for other departures from the accepted norm. Through analysis of the publication and supporting evidence from early influences, it can be seen that Cahun created a world in Aveux non Avenus where she could exist in a space between the established feminine–masculine binary of 20th-century Europe.

Abstract from Erin F. Pustarfi. “Constructed Realities: Claude Cahun’s Created World in Aveux Non Avenus,” in Journal of Homosexuality, 67(5), pp. 697-711

Germaine Krull (photographer) Cover design by M. Tchimoukow. MÉTAL cover 1928

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928, p. 33

I did not have a special intention or design when I took the Iron photographs. I wanted to show what I see, exactly as the eye sees it. ‘MÉTAL’ is a collection of photographs from the time. ‘MÉTAL’ initiated a new visual era and open the way or a new concept of photography. ‘MÉTAL’ was the starting point which allowed photography to become an artisanal trade and which made an artist of the photographer, because it was part of this new movement, of this new era which touched all art.

Germaine Krull. Extract from the Preface to the 1976 edition of ‘MÉTAL’

See my writing on Germaine Krull’s portfolio MÉTAL.

Germaine Krull (1897-1985) Image from the portfolio MÉTAL 1928 p. 37

Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke-White. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931

In 1951, Westbrook Pegler wrote numerous articles attacking Margaret Bourke-White for her associations with leftist politics in the 1930s. It is probably for this reason that in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, written about ten years later, Bourke-White didn’t mention her first book, Eyes on Russia, published in 1931. And yet, this book is of extraordinary interest, not only as a landmark in Bourke-White’s career but also as a source, both visual and narrative, on the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan. With letters of recommendation from influential people, including the Russian film maker, Sergei Eisenstein, Bourke-White arrived in Moscow in the fall of 1930, where she obtained the official endorsement of A.B. Khalatoff, chief of the Soviet publishing house (he was later liquidated in the 1937 purges). Khalatoff supplied her with a thick roll of rubles and a guide. Bourke-White then toured some of the most important industrial and other sites and came back with stellar images of Russia under construction, which she complemented by a spritely and charming narrative of her experiences as the first foreign photographer to photograph in the Soviet Union with official permission. On her trip, she made 800 negatives, of which 40 were published in Eyes on Russia in a sepia tone. This book, along with at least eight related illustrated articles in Fortune, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and other periodicals, significantly enhanced Bourke-White’s reputation (and commercial business). They also helped initiate relationships she established both with Soviet officials and Americans sympathetic to the U.S.S.R. She returned to Russia in 1931 and 1932 for additional photography, but Eyes on Russia, a fascinating book for a variety of reasons, remains the largest single published collection of her work in that country. It was very well received in numerous book reviews when it appeared. For a more detailed review, see my article, Gary D. Saretzky “Margaret Bourke-White: Eyes on Russia,” The Photo Review, 22: 3-4 (Summer & Fall 1999),

Text from a comment on the Amazon website

Roll, Jordan, Roll by Julia Peterkin (text) and Doris Ulmann (photographs) New York: Robert O. Ballo, 1933

Doris Ulmann’s photographic collaboration with Julia Peterkin focuses on the lives of former slaves and their descendants on a plantation in the Gullah coastal region of South Carolina. Peterkin, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929, was born in South Carolina and raised by a black nursemaid who taught her the Gullah dialect before she learned standard English. She married the heir to Lang Syne in today’s Calhoun County, SC, one of the state’s richest plantations, which became the setting for Roll, Jordan, Roll. Ulmann’s soft-focus photos-rendered as tactile as charcoal drawings in the superb gravure reproductions here-straddle Pictorialism and Modernism even as they appear to dissolve into memory.

Text from the Amazon website

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937)

Leni Riefenstahl Schönheit im olympischen Kampf [Beauty in the Olympic Games] Berlin: Im Deutschen Verlag, (1937) pp. 220-221

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

“The camera alone can catch
the swift surfaces of the
cities today and speaks a
language intelligible to all.”

~ Berenice Abbott

Abbott’s landmark work on New York, illustrated with 97 halftone plates that display “the historical importance of the documentary model its power as a medium of personal expression” (Parr & Badger).

In January 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott boarded an ocean liner to New York City for what was meant to be a short visit. Upon arrival, she was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape and saw the city as ripe with photographic potential. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,” she recalled. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” Abbott observed. “At almost any point on Manhattan Island, the sweep of one’s vision can take in the dramatic contrasts of the old and the new and the bold foreshadowing of the future. This dynamic quality should be caught and recorded immediately in a documentary interpretation of New York City. The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystallised now in permanent form, it will be forever lost…. The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.”

On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication Changing New York.

With a handheld camera, Abbott traversed the city, photographing its skyscrapers, bridges, elevated trains, and neighbourhood street life. She pasted these “tiny photographic notes” into a standard black-page album, arranging them by subject and locale.

Consisting of 266 small black-and-white prints arranged on thirty-two pages, Abbott’s New York album marks a key turning point in her career – from her portrait work in Paris to the urban documentation that became one of her lasting legacies.

From 1935 to 1965, Berenice Abbott and art critic Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965) lived and worked in two flats they shared on the fourth floor of the loft building at 50 Commerce Street.

Lannyl Stephens. “Berenice Abbott’s Changing New York,” on the Village Preservation website July 17, 2023 [Online] Cited 26/05/2024

Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. Changing New York. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1939

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Photographs by Dorothea Lange; text by Paul Taylor. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939

“We need to be reminded these days about what women have been, and can be. It’s a question of their really deep and fundamental place in society. I have a feeling that women need to be reminded of it. They are needed.”

~ Dorothea Lange

First published in 1939, An American Exodus is one of the masterpieces of the documentary genre. Produced by incomparable documentary photographer Dorothea Lange with text by her husband, Paul Taylor, An American Exodus was taken in the early 1930s while the couple were working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) The book documents the rural poverty of the depression-era exodus that brought over 300,000 migrants to California in search of farm work, a westward mass migration driven by economic deprivation as opposed to the Manifest Destiny of 19th century pioneers.

Text from the Google Books website

In 1938, Dorothea Lange and her husband Paul Taylor began sorting through the stacks of photographs she had made documenting migrant farmworkers and homeless drought refugees. Their goal was to create a book that would reveal the human dimension of the crisis to the American people and, hopefully, prompt government relief. One of several books released in the late 1930s that made use of the Farm Security Administration photo archive, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion was innovative in several ways. Rather than tell the story from their own perspective, Lange and Taylor used direct quotes from the migrants themselves, which Lange had painstakingly collected in the field. Released as war tensions were building in Europe and Asia, An American Exodus was largely overlooked at the time. In the years since its publication, the book has gained power, presenting an iconic image of the Dust Bowl era that has shaped the way we think of those difficult years.

Text from the Dorothea Lange Digital Archive, Oakland Museum of California website

Eslanda Goode Robeson. African Journey. New York: John Day Company, 1945

Eslanda Robeson’s 1936 African journal with her own photographs. Africa seen through the eyes of an African American. She went to South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Congo, and visited African kings and British governors, villages, gold mines, plantations, herdswomen, and modern African leaders.

Eslanda Goode Robeson (1895-1965) was an American anthropologist, author, actress, and civil rights activist. She was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Columbia University in 1917 with a degree in chemistry, and in 1921 married the singer and actor Paul Robeson. In 1936, she received her degree in anthropology from the London School of Economics, and in 1946, the year following the publication of African Journal, earned her anthropology Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary where she specialised in African studies and race relations.

Text from the Boyd Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945)

During the Second World War Lee Miller was the official war photographer for Vogue magazine. The images contained in Wrens in Camera were commissioned by the Admiralty and show the female navy officers and workers fulfilling their war duties. There are signallers, technicians, trainers, housekeepers and transport crews. The whole is an important document of women’s roles in war-time Britain.

Text from the Beaux Books website

Wrens in Camera by Lee Miller (London: Hollis and Carter, 1945) p. 47

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Black woman with a white child)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (Portrait of Mrs. Caleb Hill, widow of a lynching victim)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

“As a photographer, she was as interested in the discriminator as in the victims of discrimination. Long before what we tend to think of as the crux of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s, Palfi went to Georgia at a particularly dangerous time. In 1949, she was drawn to do an in-depth portrait of Irwinton, a small community where a young black man had been torn out of jail and shot by a lynch mob. The tremendous public outcry over this barbaric incident included front-page coverage and editorials by the New York Times. Obviously, the presence of a photographer in such a community would attract unwanted attention and might have endangered her life. But by a happy stroke of luck, the Vice-President of the Georgia Power Company was interested in her work. Warning her that she must “photograph the South as it really is, not as the North slanders it,” he wanted her to get to meet the “right” people. As it happened, the “right” people turned out to be the very discriminators she wanted to photograph. Left in the protection of the local postmistress, she proceeded to take terms, objective pictures of overseers and white-suited politicians.

Even if the press had not indicted Irwinton for its racism, the extreme conservatism and tension were evident in the faces of its citizens. She found a white supremacist group, “The Columbians,” whose insignia was a thunderbolt, the symbol of Hitler’s elite guard. “Mein Kampf was their bible,” she believed. Meanwhile, the wife of the lunch victim said, simply, “Caleb was a good man … he believed in his rights and therefore he died.”

Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock. “Marion Palfi: An Appreciation,” in The Archive Research Series Number 19, September 1983, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, pp. 7-8.

Marion Palfi (American born Germany, 1907-1978)
Untitled (A woman explained: “If a white man buys something…”)
1949
From the book There Is No More Time: An American Tragedy
Marion Palfi/Center for Creative Photography
© All Rights Reserved

Acapulco en el sueño by Francisco Tario (text) with photographs by Lola Alvarez Bravo, 1951

“If my photographs have any meaning, it’s that they stand for a Mexico that once existed.”

~ Lola Alvarez Bravo

Dare Wright. The Lonely Doll. New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957

Once there was a little doll. Her name was Edith. She lived in a nice house and had everything she needed except someone to play with. She was lonely! Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears! Since it was first published in 1957, The Lonely Doll has established itself as a unique children’s classic. Through innovative photography Dare Wright brings the world of dolls to life and entertains us with much more than just a story. Edith, the star of the show, is a doll from Wright’s childhood, and Wright selected the bear family with the help of her brother. With simple poses and wonderful expressions, the cast of characters is vividly brought to life to tell a story of friendship.

Text from the Amazon website

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

Le Clercq is the wife of choreographer George Balanchine; she wrote this book after Mourka became famous because of the photograph of Martha Swope in Life magazine, where George Balanchine assists Mourka in his grand jeté. Mourka writes about his exercises in dance and his aspirations to travel in outer space.

Text from the Cats in Books albums Facebook page

Mourka, the autobiography of a Cat, by Tanaquil Le Clercq and Martha Swope. Stein and Day 1964

A Way of Seeing, 1965. Photographs by Helen Levitt

Dublin: A Portrait by V.S. Pritchett (text) and Evelyn Hofer (photographs). New York: Harper & Row, 1967

The starting point for this book is Evelin Hofer’s Dublin: A Portrait, which features an in-depth essay by V. S. Pritchett and photos by Hofer, and enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967. Dublin: A Portrait is an example of Hofer’s perhaps most important body of work, her city portraits: books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained visual essays with their own narratives. Dublin: A Portrait was the last book published in this renowned series. …

In Dublin Hofer repeatedly turned her camera to sights of the city, but mainly to the people who constituted its essence. She made numerous portraits – be they of writers and public figures or unknown people in the streets. Her portraits give evidence of an intense, respectful engagement with her subjects, who participate as equal partners in the process of photographing.

Text from The Eye of Photography Magazine website

Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, 1972

When Diane Arbus died in 1971 at the age of forty-eight, she was already a significant influence-even something of a legend-among serious photographers, although only a relatively small number of her most important pictures were widely known at the time. The publication of Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph in 1972 – along with the posthumous retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art – offered the general public its first encounter with the breadth and power of her achievements. The response was unprecedented.

The monograph of eighty photographs was edited and designed by the painter Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus’s friend and colleague, and by her daughter Doon Arbus. Their goal in making the book was to remain as faithful as possible to the standards by which Diane Arbus judged her own work and to the ways in which she hoped it would be seen. Universally acknowledged as a classic, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph is a timeless masterpiece with editions in five languages and remains the foundation of her international reputation.

Nearly half of a century has done nothing to diminish the riveting impact of these pictures or the controversy they inspire. Arbus’s photographs penetrate the psyche with all the force of a personal encounter and, in doing so, transform the way we see the world and the people in it.

Text from the Fraenkel Gallery Shop website

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

A photographic documentation of the Beatty-Cole Circus, recording and portraying the customs, activities, animals, and singular personalities of an endangered way of life.

Jill Freedman. Circus Days. New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1975

Susan Meiselas. Carnival Strippers book cover 1975

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing women who performed striptease for small-town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed the shows from town to town, she captured the dancers on stage and off, their public performances as well as their private lives, creating a portrait both documentary and empathetic: “The recognition of this world is not the invention of it. I wanted to present an account of the girl show that portrayed what I saw and revealed how the people involved felt about what they were doing.” Meiselas also taped candid interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers, which form a crucial part of the book.

Meiselas’ frank description of these women brought a hidden world to public attention, and explored the complex role the carnival played in their lives: mobility, money and liberation, but also undeniable objectification and exploitation. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterised a complex era of change.

Text from the Booktopia website [Online] Cited 22/04/2022

Claudia Andujar, Amazônia, 1978

Since the early 1970s, Claudia Andujar has been committed to the cause of the Yanomami Indians living in the heart of the Amazon rainforest and is the author of the most important photographic work dedicated to them to date. A founding member of the Brazilian NGO Comissão Pró Yanomami (CCPY), the photographer has played a fundamental role in the recognition of their territory by the Brazilian government. …

Claudia Andujar first met the Yanomami in 1971 while working on an article about the Amazon for Realidade magazine. Fascinated by the culture of this isolated community, she decided to embark on an in-depth photographic essay on their daily life after receiving a Guggenheim fellowship to support the project. From the very beginning, her approach differed greatly from the straightforward documentary style of her contemporaries. The photographs she made during this period show how she experimented with a variety of photographic techniques in an attempt to visually translate the shamanic culture of the Yanomami. Applying Vaseline to the lens of her camera, using flash devices, oil lamps and infrared film, she created visual distortions, streaks of light and saturated colors, thus imbuing her images with a feeling of the otherworldly.

Text from the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain website

Cover image of Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians (1979). Photographs by JEB (Joan E. Biren)

In 1979, JEB (Joan E. Biren) self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. Revolutionary at that time, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives-working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by testimonials from the women pictured in the book, as well as writings from icons including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and a foreword from Joan Nestle. Eye to Eye signalled a radical new way of seeing – moving lesbian lives from the margins to the centre, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years and featuring new essays from photographer Lola Flash and former soccer player Lori Lindsey, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that continues to resonate in the queer community and beyond.

Text from the Amazon website

Jo Spence. Putting Myself In The Picture: A Political, Personal, and Photographic Autobiography. London: Camden Press Ltd, 1986

Photographer Jo Spence challenges the assumptions of conventional photography in this groundbreaking visual autobiography, which traces her journey from self-censorship to self-healing.

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986

Cristina García Rodero. España Oculta. 1989

When Spanish photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero went to study art in Italy, in 1973, she fully understood the importance of home. Yet her time abroad formented a deeper interest in was happening in her own country and, as a result, at the age of 23, Garcia Rodero returned to Spain and started a project that she hoped would capture the essence of the myriad Spanish traditions, religious practices and rites that were already fading away. What started as a five-year project ended up lasting 15 years and came to be the book España Oculta (Hidden Spain) published in 1989. At 39 years old, Garcia Rodero had managed to compile a kind of anthropological encyclopedia of her country. The work also captured a key moment in Spain’s history – with Spanish dictator Franco dying in 1975, and the country commencing a period of transition – something that would come to have a huge effect on the way the nation’s cultural traditions and rites were experienced and performed from then on.

Text from the Google Books website

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. The MIT Press & The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999

This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger’s work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger’s work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You, created especially for the catalog.

Text from the Amazon website

Graciela Iturbide. Juchitán de las Mujeres. Mexico: Ediciones Toledo, 1991

In 1979 Graciela Iturbide took a series of photographs of the Zapotec culture, published as Juchitán de la mujeres. This is certainly the best known of all her works. It is the result of ten years of work, numerous trips to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and a prolonged experience of living among its inhabitants. None of the subjects of these photographs was captured candidly; all were carefully posed.

Photobook history is a relatively recent area of study, with one of the first “book-on-books” anthologies published in 1999 with the release of Fotografía Pública / Photography in Print 1919-1939, a catalogue associated with an exhibition of the same title at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Over the past two decades, a virtual cottage industry of books-on-photobooks has emerged, documenting photographically illustrated books based on geography or around a theme. Photobooks by women are in short supply in most of these anthologies, which is why 10×10 Photobooks launched the How We See: Photobooks by Women touring reading room and associated publication in 2018. Focusing on contemporary photobooks by women from 2000 to 2018, the project was the first step in 10×10 Photobooks’ ongoing interest in reassessing photobook history as it relates to women. Although only twenty-five years old, photobook history has been written primarily by men and has focused on publications authored by men. Very few books by women photographers appear in past photobook anthologies, and those included are already quite well known.

As a nonprofit organisation with a mission to share photobooks globally and encourage their appreciation and understanding, the 10×10 Photobooks team frequently discusses how photobook history was – and continues to be – written from a skewed perspective and that a “new” history needs to emerge. Early in our discussions, we recognised photobook history as needing to be “rewritten,” but this implied we accepted the partial history already in existence, which we did not. Instead, we concluded that photobook history needs to be “unwritten,” as the existing history is riddled with omissions. What is left out is not by mistake – it indicates bias and incomplete research by the current gatekeepers. To present a more inclusive and diverse vision, we must collectively address these omissions.

What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999, a touring reading room accompanied by a publication and series of public programs, is a means to ignite interest in some of the underexposed and undocumented photobooks by women made between 1843 and 1999 and to begin a process of filling in the gaps. We say “some photobooks” because we are keenly aware that much work is still required, and we have only opened the door a crack. In several cases, particularly for books done before 1900 in regions other than North America and Europe or by women of colour, we heard about an artist who may have produced a photographically illustrated book or album, but we were unable to find any further documentation other than a brief mention before the trail went cold. Other impediments emerged among the cohort of women who collaborated with their husbands. Many of their collaborative books are credited only with their husbands’ names, and their contributions, if mentioned at all, are included as footnotes. In some cases, women authors marked their works with a gender-neutral signature that used only their studio name or first initial and last name. In addition, our initial research was impeded by the standard definition of a photobook: a bound volume with photographic illustrations published by the author, an independent publisher, or a trade publisher.

We found that we had to widen the frame to include individual albums, slim exhibition pamphlets, scrapbooks, maquettes, zines, and artists’ books in order to be more inclusive. This wider frame necessitated redefining a photobook author to incorporate those who may not call themselves a photographer or artist but who nonetheless assembled a “book” composed of photographs taken by themselves or others. Funding was another limitation. Many women photographers who actively exhibited their work either lacked the personal resources to produce a book or could not find anyone willing to underwrite such a venture.

This iteration of the What They Saw reading room includes 60 books of the more than 250 volumes highlighted in the associated publication. Most of these publications are kept in the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre. They are presented chronologically and show examples of books from around the globe. We begin with Anna Atkins, a British botanist, who was the first person ever to print and distribute a photobook. Her simple desire to share images of her algae specimens ushered in a new art form that presents photography in the book format. In the following years, women such as Isabel Agnes Cowper, the Official Museum Photographer at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), used photography to document museum objects, subsequently reproduced in numerous books. Until recently, her name was forgotten, as none of the South Kensington Museum publications credit her as the photographer.

In the early twentieth-century, women authors of photobooks gained some visibility. Fine-art photographer Germaine Krull published numerous books that approached photography from a creative and inventive perspective. Margaret Bourke-White emerged as a well-regarded photojournalist who traveled worldwide photographing for Fortune and Life magazines and producing countless books. In the 1930s, in Russia, Varvara Stepanova collaborated with her husband, Aleksandr Rodchenko, to create books filled with experimental photomontages. As the century progressed, women in other parts of the world also found their voices in photobooks. African American anthropologist Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson traveled to Uganda and South Africa and published African Journey in 1945, one of the earliest books written on Africa by a female scholar of color. In Mexico in 1951, Lola Álvarez Bravo contributed photographs to Acapulco en el sueño, a bold publication created to attract tourism to Acapulco. A few years later, Fina Gómez Revenga, a Venezuelan photographer, worked in Paris with the famed French printing house Draeger Frères to illustrate the poems of Surrealist poet Lise Deharme.

With the arrival of the 1960s, women emerged from the sidelines and began to produce widely distributed, often socially focused, photobooks. A New York City street photographer, Helen Levitt, published A Way of Seeing in 1965, while Carla Cerati collaborated on Morire di classe in 1969, a visually compelling commentary on the appalling conditions in Italian psychiatric hospitals. With the women’s movement finding its full voice in the 1970s, women photographers took center stage in the last three decades of the twentieth-century, releasing a steady flow of photobooks. A year after her death in 1971, Aperture published Diane Arbus’s monograph, a photobook that continues to influence generations of photographers. Barbara Brändli, a Swiss immigrant to Venezuela, documents the energy and rapid transformations of Caracas, while activist-photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren) toured the United States, capturing lesbian pride events. In South Africa, Lesley Lawson, a member of the Afrapix photo agency, combined interviews and her photographs to reveal the working conditions of Black women in Johannesburg. Cameroonian Angèle Etoundi Essamba shares the beauty and spirit of Black women in Passion (1989), while American Donna Ferrato unflinchingly explores domestic violence in Living with the Enemy (1991), and Nan Goldin exposes violent love and loss in her personal narrative, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). In books centered on cultural explorations, Wang Hsin photographs the fading traditions of Lanyu (Orchid Island) off the coast of Taiwan, Cristina García Rodero records religious festivals and rituals in her native Spain, and Ketaki Sheth documents twins and triplets in the Indian Gujarati community.

In reaching out to the far corners of the world, we uncovered numerous forgotten books, but many remain undiscovered. For example, we learned about a nineteenth-century woman in Iran who kept her husband’s diary and most probably added her photographs to the volume, but no visual documentation of this diary could be found. We also discovered several books that featured the participation of women in collaboration with male photographers where the women’s contributions were ambiguous. There were several “leads” of this nature, and we decided that leaving them out would be a missed opportunity. Therefore, in the associated anthology, we have included a “timeline” that presents several historically significant publishing, magazine, small press, photography, and feminist events that may or may not have produced a photobook, but have undoubtedly influenced its history. To support further exploration of these unresolved “leads,” 10×10 Photobooks has launched a research grant program to encourage scholarship on underexplored topics in photobook history.

From its inception, What They Saw has sought to include a diverse group of photographically illustrated publications by women. For photobook history to become more inclusive, it requires everyone (men, women, nonbinary, white, Black, Asian, African, Latinx, Indigenous, Western, Eastern, etc.) to contribute. We see this reading room of women’s role in the production, dissemination, and authoring of photobooks as a necessary step in the unwriting of the current photobook history and a rewriting of a photobook history that is more equitable and inclusive. We invite future researchers to take the next steps to explore further women and other marginalised people’s historical impact in the realm of photobooks and to expand upon the books we present in this reading room and its associated anthology.

Text from the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Installation views of the exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843-1999 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Sabatini Building
Santa Isabel, 52
Nouvel Building
Ronda de Atocha (with plaza del Emperador Carlos V)
28012 Madrid
Phone: (34) 91 774 10 00

Opening hours:
Monday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Tuesday Closed
Wednesday – Saturday 10.00am – 9.00pm
Sunday 12.30am – 2.30pm

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía website

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Exhibition: ‘Jakob Tuggener – The 4 Seasons’ at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zurich, Switzerland

Exhibition dates: 10th February – 20th May, 2024

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Threshing machine in the Töss Valley (Dreschmaschine im Tösstal)
1950s
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

The Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is well known for his revolutionary book Fabrik (Factory) (1943) – subtitled Ein Bildepos der Technik “A picture of technology” – which tells a subjective story of the relationship between human and machine through pairings of modernist images, through “a modern new style of photography showing not just how things looked, but how it felt to be there.” Tuggener portrays the mundanity of the “operational sequence” (la chaîne opératoire) of the machine, where the human becomes the oil used to grease the cogs of the ever-demanding “mechanical monsters.”

“As Arnold Burgaurer cogently states in his introduction, Tuggener is a jack-of-all-trades: he exhibits, ‘the sharp eye of the hunter, the dreamy eye of the painter; he can be a realist, a formalist, romantic, theatrical, surreal.’ Tuggener’s moves effortlessly between large-format lucidity and grainy, blurred impressionism, in a book that is a decade ahead of its time.” (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History Volume I, Phaidon Press, 2005, p. 144.)

These pastoralist, romantic photographs of the seasons and of country life were unknown to me. While still exhibiting formal, romantic, theatrical and blurred impressionist qualities, these sensitive photographs by an expressionist photographer ask the viewer to stop and contemplate the cycles of land and life.

“After he had already composed four unique book pieces on the themes spring, summer, autumn and winter during the 1940s, he created completely new versions of these “farm books” under the title The 4 Seasons in 1973 and 1974, at the age of almost 70 years. They are devoted to simple life in the countryside, reflecting in sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, yet never picturesque recordings, the recurring cycle of nature and are at the same time a reflection on human life and transience.” (book description)

A gathering of chickens, farmers bread in a wheelbarrow, two bicyclists riding in the spring wind captured in a blurred moment of stasis, or the grizzled gamekeeper, pipe clamped between his lips, cleaning his shotgun while his wife darns socks behind surmounted by a stuffed animal overseeing both… all are beautifully observed.

These are images to imbibe so that we soak up their essence, so that we absorb their energy into our soul. It is the power of poet-photographer Tuggener’s pictures that they expand our experience and consciousness of the earth from which we come, taking us back to childhood, play, land, laughter, people, life through expressions of each season of the year.

As Tuggener observed in December 1950, “Everyone is at a loss when it comes to contemplating a picture without the aid of a text. And yet with a text, an image can only be explained, not experienced. That is because the soul resides at a greater depth, which words cannot reach. This realm is much larger than the periphery of the mind.”

Fo more information on the artist see my text “Rare magician, strange alchemist, tells stories through visuals” on the exhibition Jakob Tuggener – Machine time at at Fotostiftung Schweiz in 2018.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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

The Expressionist Photographer

The expressionist photographer does not exist in the commercial register. He is the freest of the free. Unbound by any purpose, he photographs only the pleasure of his experience. He is the artist seeking to express himself with his instrument, in this case the camera. Indeed, art is not art at all until an idea has been crystallised, visualised or set to music, and it does not matter which instrument we use to achieve this. However, the key factor is not reproduction, but the desire to make something. Ten years ago, I began to use photography as my language and to speak in self-contained books: about ball nights, about iron, about ships, about everything that particularly moves and excites my soul. The public, or rather the publishers, have no confidence in this approach. They say people would not understand a book without words, merely to be seen with the eyes. Yes, we are made more superficial by illustrated magazines and by reading: Everyone is at a loss when it comes to contemplating a picture without the aid of a text. And yet with a text, an image can only be explained, not experienced. That is because the soul resides at a greater depth, which words cannot reach. This realm is much larger than the periphery of the mind.

Jak. Tuggener
Schweizerische Photorundschau 23, 8th of December 1950

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
In the moor, near Brüttelen
1944
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
In the spring wind (Im Frühlingswind)
1950s
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

The work of Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is well positioned within 20th-century photography. His expressive photographs of glittering ball nights are legendary and his 1943 book Fabrik (Factory) is seen as a milestone in the history of the photo book. However, Tuggener was also captivated by a third subject: simple life in the countryside.

His countless sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, but never picturesque depictions of everyday farming life reflect the cycle of nature, while simultaneously contemplating life and its transience. In 1973/74, Tuggener compiled four individual book maquettes under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten (The 4 Seasons): unique ready-to-print books, which he designed himself.

In addition to those book maquettes, this exhibition displays other photographs by Jakob Tuggener, which demonstrate how intensively this outstanding photographer devoted himself to the theme of country life for more than 30 years.

In parallel to the exhibition, Die 4 Jahreszeiten will also be presented in a book. In close collaboration with the Jakob Tuggener Foundation and Steidl Verlag, Fotostiftung Schweiz is thus providing new insight into the series of around 70 books that Jakob Tuggener himself considered the centrepiece of his oeuvre, even though they remained unpublished during his lifetime.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Jakob Tuggener – The 4 Seasons, published by Steidl Verlag, edited by Fotostiftung Schweiz, Jakob Tuggener-Stiftung and Martin Gasser.

Text from the Fotostiftung Schweiz website

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Bauernbrot, Brüttelen (Farmers bread, Brüttelen)
1944
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Yoke of oxen, Küssnacht am Rigi (Ochsengespann, Küssnacht am Rigi)
1943
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Manure spread in February, Oeschgen (Ausgebrachte Jauche im Februar, Oeschgen)
1942
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Holiday guests at La Forclaz, Val d’Herens (Feriengäste des La Forclaz, Val d’Herens)
1957
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener The 4 Seasons

Jakob Tuggener (1904-1988) is one of the exceptional figures in 20th-century Swiss photography. He had the confidence to consider himself an artist from the outset. His expressive photographs of glittering ball nights are legendary and his book Fabrik (Factory) from 1943 is seen as a milestone in the history of the photo book. However, it has so far gone largely unnoticed that Tuggener was also captivated by a third subject: simple life in the countryside.

Already in the early 1930s, after his brief artistic education at the Reimann School in Berlin, Tuggener began to take an interest in rural life and the traditions of his homeland. This focus certainly had to do with the political developments in Europe, which prompted Switzerland to reflect on its own values and to disseminate them via the illustrated press. While Tuggener was earning his living as a freelance industrial photographer, he managed to make a name for himself with photographs of everyday country life, livestock markets and folk festivals, until the Second World War began. During his subsequent active army service, he still had enough time to pursue the subject further and also capture the changes of the seasons with his camera. As early as 1942/43, he compiled four individual book maquettes from the photographs he had taken since the mid-1930s – unique books that he designed himself and were ready to print. However, as was also the case with all his later book maquettes, Tuggener never found a publisher willing to publish them exactly as he had imagined. Only a small selection of images were presented by Arnold Kübler in the magazine Du in 1946. “Tuggener tries to hint at the inner workings of people and things in pictures,” wrote Kübler, also pointing out Tuggener’s special way of using the sequencing and juxtaposition of photographs to achieve a manner of artistic expression that went far beyond the documentary.

In the military

After the outbreak of the Second World War in autumn 1939, Tuggener was called up for active service, like all Swiss men of military age. Naturally, he had his camera with him in his kit, so to speak, as he aimed to provide the illustrated magazines with pictures of daily soldiering life. This was only possible for a short time though, as censorship became increasingly strict and prohibited the publication of images with military content. Tuggener kept taking photographs, just for himself, but was beginning to run out of subjects. Although most of his time was spent on guard duty, Tuggener was certainly able to get something positive out of it: “When I stand guard at night,” he wrote home, “I contemplate the full splendour of nature, because before us, there lies a marvellous land and a mighty, open sky.”

During the winter of 1942, Tuggener was in the valley Fricktal, serving as a guard in the Oeschgen internment camp. It was a camp for Polish soldiers who had found refuge in Switzerland in June 1940 after being surrounded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the French-Swiss border. They were subsequently distributed among camps set up at short notice, where they lived in safety until after the war, but were strictly kept apart from the local population. Compared to a number of larger camps in places like Büren an der Aare or Wettingen, Oeschgen was a relatively small and manageable one, so Tuggener was soon able to approach these foreign men he was supposed to be watching over and strove to establish a rapport with them. Despite language difficulties, he succeeded in doing so very well, thanks to his camera – particularly as he came up with the idea of taking portrait photos of all the internees, then offering these to them for sale. As his financial situation was anything but a bed of roses during the war years, he appreciated this source of extra income, but was also pursuing a completely different goal with it: He was planning to publish a book about the internment camp, but it never materialised. Only a book maquette compiled shortly after his service in Oeschgen under the title Polen-Wache (Pole Watch) has survived. It is primarily a portrait book, a lively group portrait that visibly reveals Tuggener’s sympathy for the interned men and shows that he treated them as equals, even in his role as a guard. The portraits are complemented by wintry atmospheric images and by photographs of the monotonous daily camp routine, from morning roll call to working in the forest, or attending to the barbed wire fences in the surrounding area.

Book maquettes

Almost thirty years later, in a societal environment characterised by fears of foreign infiltration, Tuggener once again compiled four book maquettes, under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten (The 4 Seasons). They were created during the preparations for his first major retrospective at Helmhaus Zurich in 1974, which he conceived as a kind of arc, with sections ranging from ‘Nature of Switzerland’ to ‘Peace and Earth in Farm Life’. With photographs from the years 1932 to 1973, these four book maquettes are among the last and most extensive that Tuggener created during his long career. Together, they convey a traditional image of the four seasons, as is familiar from music and painting. In sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, but never picturesque photographs, they reflect the recurring cycle of nature, while simultaneously contemplating life and transience. Alongside Tuggener’s four unique books, the exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz also presents many other photographs that demonstrate how intensively this master of black-and-white photography devoted himself to the theme of ‘country life’ for more than 30 years.

The book maquettes

During the long months of active service that Jakob Tuggener spent in small villages in the canton of Aargau, in Bernese Seeland and in Ticino, he would travel around with his Leica whenever off duty, capturing what increasingly fascinated him: farmers at work, village scenes, and modest still lifes in barns and inns. He also photographed private rooms though, such as kitchens or bedrooms, when granted access. People always took centre stage; he captured them in their familiar surroundings, as rawly and authentically as possible.

Tuggener developed and enlarged his photographs when at home on leave. In 1942/43, almost at the same time as the publication of his book Fabrik (Factory), he compiled four individual book maquettes with the titles Frühling, Sommer, Herbst and Winter (Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter). With these ‘farmer books’, he created his own personal counter-world to the world of the factory. Jakob Tuggener also felt in his element in rural surroundings. In a later interview with Magnum employee Inge Bondi, he spoke very fondly about the smell of fresh manure in a snow-covered field, which he could still remember.

None of the book maquettes that Tuggener created during the war years were published, not even the one called Uf em Land (In the Countryside), which he compiled in 1953 using variations on earlier photographs and many new ones. Nevertheless, thirty years later, in connection with his first retrospective at Helmhaus Zurich, he returned to the theme and, between March 1973 and February 1974, put together new individual volumes on spring, summer, autumn and winter, under the title Die 4 Jahreszeiten. Compared to the original versions from 1942/43, these are about four times as extensive. Most of the photographs were new, which shows how intensively Tuggener had addressed the subject. The format of the maquettes, still 30×24 cm, had not changed though, and he had also retained the same simple layout for the pictures: single images, arranged either each on one page (very rarely in non-page-filling landscape formats) or as borderless double pages. The major themes relating to the seasons also remained the same: from tilling the fields in spring to haymaking in summer, to harvesting in autumn and through to forest work in winter. This time perhaps not so much a counter-world to factory work, but to the hectic pace of the modern city, Die 4 Jahreszeiten, encompassing more than 300 photographs, reflects how, in nature, things come into being and disappear, and it is simultaneously an allegory of the cycle of human life.

Like all earlier maquettes, Die 4 Jahreszeiten from 1973/74 contain juxtapositions and sequences of images that evoke certain associations or feelings. Tuggener believed in the suggestive power of images and the narrative potential of montage, as used to great effect in German expressionist film during the 1920s. The fact that these unique books remained unpublished during his lifetime is probably due to their author’s uncompromising nature: Tuggener insisted that his photographic compositions needed no explanatory text or captions. He saw them as an independent and viable means of expression – an attitude that put him far ahead of his time.

Zürcher Oberland (Zurich highlands)

In June 1955, Tuggener was commissioned by the printing house Wetzikon und Rüti to photographically document the region Zürcher Oberland for a photo book. This suited Tuggener well, as he was already quite familiar with the area. He worked on the project for a year and, for once, was well paid. The book came out in 1956 under the title Zürcher Oberland with the aim, as the publisher put it, of showing “the beauty of the […] so scenically diverse areas, and of their inhabitants in their homes and workplaces.” It is an idyllic world that appears in Tuggener’s 240 photos, arranged in a somewhat restless-looking layout, with snow-covered Alps in the background, and peaceful lakes and ponds in the foreground. There are also plenty of pictures of the grain harvest and haymaking, as well as photos that thematise the area’s rich cultural heritage. However, at the end of the pictorial section of this ‘ideal-world book’, a portrait of a contemplative man is juxtaposed with a nocturnal landscape in a manner that seems to call much into question. It is not surprising that Tuggener used only a few images from this book in his later book maquettes.

Forum alpinum

In 1964, Jakob Tuggener contributed photographs to the ‘Mountain Farmers Exhibition’ in the ‘Field and Forest’ pavilion at the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo 64) in Lausanne. He was also involved in a follow-up publication, which was meant to comprehensively present the problems of mountain regions. While the exhibition was still running, the book was advertised for sale by subscription, as a “contribution to the clarification of our mountain population’s current existential issues” and was published in 1965 as a 400-page volume of texts and images, entitled Forum alpinum. It covers seven Swiss mountain regions: western Switzerland (Jura and Gruyère), Valais, Bernese Oberland, central Switzerland, Ticino, Graubünden, and eastern Switzerland (Appenzell and St Galler Oberland). For each of the seven regions, there is a picture section with photographs by Jakob Tuggener, almost 130 in total. The interspersed blocks of text are about the people, agriculture, art, customs and music. There are also map extracts, aerial photographs and numerous woodcuts by Bruno Gentinetta. Forum alpinum has an almost square format and was designed by Kurt Büchel. Tuggener was busy for months, researching in his archive, travelling to take pictures in all the regions to be covered and working in his darkroom.

In the new photographs that Tuggener produced, it is evident that he was endeavouring to depict as many regional features as possible, without compromising his artistic standards. Naturally though, such a broad collection of images taken over many years presents itself as very heterogeneous. The photographs are mostly arranged as juxtapositions: of old and new, for instance, or of inner and outer. They are visual contrasts like those that characterise Tuggener’s own book maquettes, but in Forum alpinum, there are always comments inserted in between, which interrupt the images’ dialogue and reduce it to a message that is easy to grasp. In the book, for example, a photograph of a jukebox in Saint-Ursanne is juxtaposed with the evangelists on a cathedral’s medieval capitals. In the comment, it is noted with disappointment that young people are less interested in tradition and more open “to the superficial and international allure of the ‘juke box’.”

The exhibition

Alongside Tuggener’s four unique books, the exhibition at Fotostiftung Schweiz also presents many other photographs that demonstrate how intensively this master of black-and-white photography devoted himself to the theme of ‘country life’ for more than 30 years. In the exhibition The 4 Seasons and the accompanying publication of the same name, Fotostiftung Schweiz is delighted to present a previously unknown work by Jakob Tuggener to the public. This follows on from numerous projects with which it, together with the Jakob Tuggener Foundation, has gradually provided access to Tuggener’s oeuvre: In addition to various exhibitions and publications, the online collection, which now shows a comprehensive representative cross-section of Tuggener’s work, also serves this purpose. None of this would have been possible without the artist’s widow, Maria Euphemia Tuggener, who deposited his photographic estate at Fotostiftung Schweiz in 2004.

Text from the Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Fasnacht, Sennhof (Carnival, Sennhof)
1935
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Sleeping chamber, Oeschgen (Schlafkammer, Oeschgen)
1942
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Gamekeeper of Sternenberg with his wife
1956
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Potato harvest, Müntschemier (Kartoffelernte, Müntschemier)
1944
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Farmer from Heiden (Bauer aus Heiden)
1934
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Forestry worker, Strahlegg (Waldarbeiter, Strahlegg)
Around 1954
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener (Swiss, 1904-1988)
Farmer’s wife, Brüttelen (Bauernfrau, Brüttelen)
1944
© Jakob Tuggener Stiftung / Fotostiftung Schweiz

Jakob Tuggener Die 4 Jahreszeiten catalogue book cover

Often, artists take a new curve in their final phase of creation, their language and attitude changes, other themes and motifs come to the fore. The Swiss photographer Jakob Tuggener, on the other hand, remained true to himself and his work in an almost irritating way. After he had already composed four unique book pieces on the themes spring, summer, autumn and winter during the 1940s, he created completely new versions of these “farm books” under the title The 4 Seasons in 1973 and 1974, at the age of almost 70 years. They are devoted to simple life in the countryside, reflecting in sensitively observed, atmospherically charged, yet never picturesque recordings, the recurring cycle of nature and are at the same time a reflection on human life and transience. While the world and society changed fundamentally between 1940 and 1970 – life in the countryside no less than life in the city – Tuggener allowed himself to assemble recordings from this entire period into a new, very personal epic. Especially the constancy in Tuggener’s work, this unwavering confidence in the power of the pictures, is one of the special qualities of The 4 Seasons.

Text from the Amazon website

Jakob Tuggener Die 4 Jahreszeiten exhibition poster

Fotostiftung Schweiz
Grüzenstrasse 45
CH-8400 Winterthur (Zürich)
Phone: +41 52 234 10 30

Opening hours:
Tuesday to Sunday 11am – 6pm
Wednesday 11am – 8pm (with free admission from 5 pm!)
Closed on Mondays

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Exhibition: ‘Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle’ at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris

Exhibition dates: 30th January – 19th May, 2024

Exhibition curator: Clément Chéroux, director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera
1950
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

To see ourselves as others see us

This exhibition attempts to reconcile the two sides of the work of American photographer Weegee (Arthur Felig, 1899-1968) – “First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life” – by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is a critically coherent investigation into the omnipresence of the spectacle in modern society.

The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle:

“Debord traces the development of a modern society in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation… The spectacle is the inverted image of society in which relations between commodities have supplanted relations between people, in which “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity”. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord writes, “rather, it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.””1

While both halves of Weegee’s photographic work picture the spectacle, I believe that they are a different but connected order of being. Like yin and yang, Weegee’s scenes of chaos “Murder is my business” and “photo-caricatures” emerge from the same psyche but image equal opposites which both repel, attract and complement each other.

Weegee’s photographs which tell stories for the New York press are external representations or emanations captured from the world around us, whereas his later photo-caricatures of public personalities feel to me to be internalised, dream-like representations of his own feelings towards the celebrity people he observed and photographed as much as they are offer insights into their personality.2 Thus, Weegee’s photographs are an examination of a body (an autopsy) both external and internal.

Personally I don’t think that it is necessary to reconcile both halves of Weegee’s work. The bodies exist for what they are: perceptive insights into the existence and spirit of the world and the human race, spec(tac)ular images that mirror a social relation among people which don’t necessarily have to be conflated one with the other.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Debord, Guy (1994)[1967] The Society of the Spectacle, translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books), p. 4 quoted in “The Society of the Spectacle,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 10/05/2024

2/ “external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality”
“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

Many thank to the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“The curious […], they’re always in a hurry […], but they still find the time to stop and look.

Weegee

“Crime was my oyster,” Weegee wrote in his 1961 memoir, Weegee by Weegee. “I was friend and confidant to them all. The bookies, madams, gamblers, call girls, pimps, con men, burglars and jewel fencers.” … Weegee’s photos from the 1930s and ’40s defined Manhattan as a film noir nightscape of gangsters, bums, slumming swells and tenement dwellers.”

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

“Weegee is not the first nor the only person to have taken interest in people watching. Not long before him, in 1937, Henri Cartier-Bresson photographed spectators at the Coronation of George VI for Ce Soir. And a quarter century prior, in 1912, Eugène Atget photographed passers-by observing a solar eclipse at Place de la Bastille. But Weegee took the idea even further. He systematised it. He made it a principle he never shied from applying at the first opportunity. It’s a way of placing things at a distance, pushing the viewers to ask themselves about the manner in which they look, making them aware of the fact that they themselves, like the people watching in the photo, are in a voyeuristic position. It’s also a critique of how American society transforms news into spectacle.”

Clément Chéroux

The specular image, then, is accompanied by anxiety-anxiety that it will “soon dissolve like a cloud.” It is the nature of visions (apparitions) to dissolve before our very eyes without disclosing their secrets, just as dream-images are quickly forgotten upon awakening.

Craig Owens. “Posing,” in Difference: On Representation and Sexuality. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985, p. 12

There’s still a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. First are his stories for the New York press from 1935-1945. Then, photo-caricatures of public personalities developed during his Hollywood period, between 1948-1951, which he continued to produce for the rest of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. This project seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, coinciding with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators or other photographers in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular, its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds, and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Wall text from the exhibition

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Self-Portrait, Weegee with Speed Graphic Camera (1950, above); at second left, “Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York (c. 1943, below); at third left bottom, Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York (c. 1939, below); at fourth left, Self-portrait (1950,below); at fifth left, Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide (1944, below); at sixth left, Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces (1942, below); and at eighth left, Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Chevrolet”. Weegee in front of his typewriter, installed in the trunk of a 1938 Chevrolet, New York
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee Himself: “I have always been a doer and not a thinker.” Weegee enjoyed putting himself in front of the camera, re-enacting circumstances he was confronted with in his daily work. In the name of pedagogy, and probably a little out of narcissism and self-advertisement, he took pictures of himself writing captions for his photographs in the back of his car, in police wagons and behind bars, never without his camera.

Wall text from the exhibition

Unidentified photographer
Untitled [Weegee covering the morning line-up at police headquarters, New York]
c. 1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee Tells How

Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, was a New York city freelance news photographer from the 1930s to the 1950s. Here he talks about his career and gives advice to those wanting to become news photographers.

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Frank Pape, Arrested for Homicide
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Charles Sodokoff and Arthur Webber Use Their Top Hats to Hide Their Faces
1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver)
1939
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at second left, Weegee’s Man Arrested for Cross-Dressing, New York (Gay Deceiver) (1939, above); and at top right, a magazine print of his photograph Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York] (1941, below)

Off Road: “Sudden death for one… sudden shock for the other.” American culture is fascinated by twisted metal. In the 19th century, a railroad company staged public collisions between locomotives destined for the junkyard. Weegee photographed many traffic accidents introducing the “car crash” genre, later adopted by other figures, such as Andy Warhol, J.G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, etc.

Wall text from the exhibition

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Young man smoking cigarette in crashed car while waiting for ambulance, New York]
1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at right, Weegee’s photograph Henry Rosen (left) and Harvey Stemmer (centre) cover their faces with handkerchiefs after their arrest for bribery and conspiracy to fix a US college basketball match (25 January 1945)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Holiday Accident in the Bronx
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Exhibition

How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

The spectacle is omnipresent in Weegee’s work. In the first part of his career, which coincides with the rise of the tabloid press, he was an active participant in transforming news into spectacle. To show this, he often included spectators, or other photographers, in the foreground of his images. In the second half of his career, Weegee mocked the Hollywood spectacular: its ephemeral glory, adoring crowds and social scenes. Some years before the Situationist International, his photography presented an incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Biography

Weegee was born Usher Fellig on June 12, 1899, to a Jewish family in Zolochiv, a small town in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in western Ukraine. At 11 years old, he joined his father who’d emigrated to the United States. At the immigration station Ellis Island, he became Arthur Fellig. Living in the slums of the Lower East Side, he left school at 14 to earn money to support his family. After working in different professions, he became a traveling photographer, worked for photographers Duckett & Adler, then in the lab of ACME Newspictures agency.

Starting in 1935, he was self-employed as photo-reporter. Towards 1937, he began using the pseudonym Weegee, and around 1941, started marking the backs of his prints with a stamp in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Weegee the Famous.” For 10 years, connected to Police radio, he took photographs, mainly at night, of crime, arrests, fires, accidents and other news items. Though the photographer most certainly had connections within the Police, without whom his work would not have been possible, he also frequented left-wing circles. He was very close to the Photo League, a group of independent photographers who firmly believed in emancipation through the image and fought for social justice. In 1945, he published his best photographs in a book entitled Naked City, which met with great success both in its reception and sales.

In the spring of 1948, he moved to Hollywood to work in cinema as a technical advisor, sometimes as an actor. He photographed the endless party and developed different photographic techniques used to create his caricatures of celebrities. In December of 1951, after four years on the West Coast, he returned to New York with no intention of resuming his former practice. Up until his death on December 26, 1968, the majority of his work involved taking advantage of his notoriety to publish other books, go on tour, and promote his photo-caricatures in newspapers.

Text from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at left, Performer Jimmy Armstrong (c. 1943, below); at second left, Ladies keep their money in their stockings… (1944, below); and at centre, Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn (1940, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Performer Jimmy Armstrong
c. 1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Ladies keep their money in their stockings…
1944
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

“There is no cover charge nor cigarette girl, and a vending machine dispenses cigarettes. Neither is there a hat check girl. Patrons prefer to dance with their hats and coats on. But there is a lively floor show… the only saloon in the Bowery with a cabaret license.”

Weegee

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Afternoon Crowd at Coney Island, Brooklyn
1940
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Courtesy Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Sleeping at the Circus, Madison Square Garden, New York
1943
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing at centre left, Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera (1943); In the Lobby at the Metropolitan Opera, Opening Night (1943); and at centre right, The Critic (1943, below)

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
The Critic
November 22, 1942
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Collection Friedsam

Even his most popular photograph was a set-up, says Wallis: “The Critic, which was taken in 1943, was surely staged and shows the wealthy Mrs George Washington Cavanaugh and Lady Decies arriving at the opera, greeted by a staggering drunk who seems to be mocking them and who Weegee reportedly rounded up at Sammy’s bar on the Bowery.

“This picture is a good example of how Weegee previsualized a scene, developed a punchy satirical narrative, and staged the picture. The Critic was widely reproduced at the time, and even shown at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Boo Paterson. “Big guns to big top: Weegee at circus,” on the Boo York City website [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

In Weegee’s day similar culture clashes happened at Sammy’s Bowery Follies (267 Bowery, between East Houston and Stanton Streets), which from 1934 to 1970 attracted what The New York Times once described as a mixed crowd of “drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten.” …

Among the regulars, he wrote in his 1945 book, “Naked City,” was a woman they called Pruneface and a midget who walked the streets dressed as a penguin to promote cigarettes. When the midget got drunk, Weegee wrote, he “offered to fight any man his size in the house.”

Weegee held two book parties there. At the photography center Mr. George showed me silent-film footage taken in 1946 at the party for Weegee’s second book, “Weegee’s People.” Pretty uptown blondes and dowagers in pearls mingle with toothless crones and panhandlers, as models parade in their foundation garments, and a man with a flea circus puts his tiny performers through their paces.

John Strausbaugh. “Crime Was Weegee’s Oyster,” on The New York Times website June 20, 2008 [Online] Cited 13/04/2024

Installation view of the exhibition Weegee, Autopsy of the Spectacle at the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris showing his photographs in magazine layouts

“Il Fotografo cattivo”, Epoca, Vol. XIII, No. 636, December 1962
© International Center of Photography. Collection privée Paris

Weegee Looks At Dali

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats

Custom milliners often go to extremes. This spring, the have outdone themselves by creating 1957 version of the most exaggerated hats of the last fifty years. Here again are the flapper cloche, the slouch had Garbo wore in the ’30’s, the heavy veiling of the early 1900’s, the turban of the World War I era, the perennial mad profusion of fruit and flowers. Look had Michael A. Vaccaro photograph examples of these hats as they really are. Then camera artist Weegee turned out satirical prints, with these startling results.

Look magazine 1957

WAIT. Don’t reach for a drink. Don’t reach for your glasses. And don’t – please don’t – write us an indignant letter. What you think you see on these pages is there, all right. It’s the work of a zany photographer named Weegee (few know his first name) who has a wicked sense of caricature and an outrageous sense of humor.

The subjects were not photographed under water. Wedge simply prints his negatives through bubbles glass, wire screens, press, kaleidoscopes or whatever gives him the characterization he is after. It’s a sort of three-way-stretch technique in which Weegee is assisted by photographic color expert Mike Lavelle.

The results of Weegee’s impudent manipulation of reality are both perceptive and astonishing: Faces take on a certain ga-ga verity; external exaggeration high-lights internal character and distortion offers surprising insights into personality. Weegee calls this “Photo-Caricature.” There was a man who might have enjoyed revelations like these. His name was Bobbie Burns and he wrote in one of his poems: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us.”

“How your TV heroes look to Weegee’s magic camera” in Look magazine

“”Modern Women Aren’t Human!’ … If You Don’t Believe It … This Man Tells Why” in the National Enquirer, 1967

There’s a mystery to Weegee. The American photographer’s career seems to be split in two. One side includes his sensational photography printed in North American tabloids: corpses of gangsters lying in pools of their own blood, bodies trapped in battered vehicles, kingpins looking sinister behind the bars of prison wagons, dilapidated slums consumed by fire, and other harrowing documents on the lives of the underprivileged in New York from 1935 to 1945. Then come the festive photographs – glamorous parties, performances by entertainers, jubilant crowds, openings and premieres – to which we must add a vast array of portraits of public figures that Weegee delighted in distorting using a rich palette of tricks between 1948 and 1951, a practice he pursued until the end of his life. How can these diametrically opposed bodies of work coexist? Critics have enjoyed highlighting the opposition between the two periods, praising the former and disparaging the latter. The exhibition Autopsy of the Spectacle seeks to reconcile the two parts of Weegee by showing that, beyond formal differences, the photographer’s approach is critically coherent.

With a new perspective on Weegee’s oeuvre, Autopsy of the Spectacle presents the photographer’s iconic images beside lesser-known works, including images not-yet-exhibited in France.

Curator Clément Chéroux

Press release from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Their First Murder
c. 1936
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Drowning victim, Coney Island
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Mrs Bernice Lythcott and her son Leonard looking through a window broken by stones thrown by thugs, Harlem, New York
October 18, 1943
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Tenement sleeping during heat spell, Lower East Side, New York]
May 23, 1941
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine, Weegee knew the slums, like those children seeking coolness on the fire escape ladder. He produced “real social documents” on the living conditions of the poor.

“In Central Park the lawns were crowded before darkness with family groups,” reported the July 10, 1936 New York Times; the temperature had reached an astounding 106 degrees the day before. “On the Lower East Side traffic was seriously impeded as small armies of persons emerged from tenement houses with chairs, boxes and even beds which they set up in the streets.”

And from the Times on August 4, 1938, when the mercury hit 93 degrees:

“More than 3,000 persons slept on the sand at Coney Island and Brighton Beach to escape the heat last night, the police estimated. Ten additional patrolmen were assigned to the area to prevent molestation of the sleepers, many of whom brought blankets and sheets.”

Anonymous. “How New Yorkers survived hot summer nights,” on the Ephemeral New York website Nd [Online] Cited 14/04/2024

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Untitled [Fire in loft building, New York]
1947
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Anthony Esposito, Booked on Suspicion of Killing a Policeman
1941
Gelatin silver print
© International Center of Photography. Louis Stettner Archives, Paris

At noon Fifth Avenue was crowded. Alfred Klausman, middle-aged office manager of a linen firm, walked across the street from his office to the bank on the corner and drew the weekly pay roll: $649.

As the genial, round-faced Klausman walked back, two men silently threaded through the crowd behind him, two strange, grey-coated creatures washed up from the depths of New York City’s criminal world. One was Anthony Esposito, 35, a long-nosed, horse-faced hoodlum who had been in & out of New York’s prisons and reformatories for 16 years, had once been deported to Italy and sneaked back in. His brother William, 29, had robbed drunks, snatched pocketbooks, done a seven-year stretch in Sing Sing. Their father had served time for forgery. Their brother was in Clinton Prison, Dannemora, N. Y. for parole violation. Their lives had been spent in squalor, petty crime, prison and torpid, hard-eyed loafing.

Klausman entered the elevator to his office. The Esposito brothers stepped in after him. Between the second and third floors they drew revolvers from their overcoat pockets, ordered the operator to stop, face the door. He heard Klausman cry “No! No! No!” – then one of the gunmen put his revolver to Klausman’s head and pulled the trigger.

They ordered the operator to take the elevator down, ducked out into the street, disappeared into B. Altman’s big department store.

Out into the street the operator yelled “Holdup! Murder!” The cry spread. Two patrolmen raced from the corner, into the store, a long way behind.

Down the crowded aisles of the store darted the Espositos, through the block-long building. At the far entrance they climbed into a cab, put a gun at the driver’s head. But Madison Avenue was jammed with traffic; they were trapped. “Get going. Make it fast. Get moving or we’ll kill you.” Back in the store panic was spreading as police with drawn revolvers moved down the aisles shouting, “Get down!” The cab stalled behind a bus. Like men leaping over a cliff, the brothers jumped out into the traffic. At sight of the two running men, waving revolvers, people flattened themselves against the buildings or ducked to the sidewalk. A taxi driver ran to Patrolman Edward Maher, directing traffic on the corner, yelled “Stick-up!” and pointed at the fleeing men. Maher raced after them, only 20 feet behind, afraid to shoot into the crowd. Motorists left their cars and joined the chase. Maher saw a clear space, shot twice, and William Esposito staggered sideways, fell face downward, one arm outstretched, one twisted under him, apparently dead.

A little crowd collected around him. Patrolman Maher held the gunman by the overcoat, started to turn him over, turned to warn the crowd away. “Back up, please,” he said, “someone’s liable to get hurt.” As he rolled William over, the gunman’s .38 came up. William Esposito pulled the trigger and Patrolman Maher slumped over, dead.

The crowd surged back, then forward. A taxi driver named Leonard Weisberg leaped on the prone gunman. He grabbed for the revolver, missed. Esposito jerked it back a few inches, fired again. Weisberg, clutching his throat, gasping for breath, fell to the sidewalk.

Esposito, still lying down, drew another gun from his overcoat pocket. Two men leaped on him. Then the crowd closed in, kicking and beating.

Anthony ran on when his brother fell. Behind him the police fired into the air. He shot a few times, wildly, apparently to clear crowds out of his way on Fifth Avenue. He ducked into Woolworth’s, bowling over the women shoppers. He plunged to the basement, put away his guns, walked up again to hide in the crowd – and met six policemen at the head of the stairs, went down with revolver butts thudding on his skull.

The Espositos went to the hospital, to the lineup, to indictment for murder. Leonard Weisberg, recovering from his throat wound, was promised a new cab of his own, and won a hero’s praise. The Nazi press gleefully played up the crime as evidence of democratic depravity.

Anonymous. “National Affairs: SLAUGHTER ON FIFTH AVENUE,” in TIME Monday, Jan. 27, 1941 on the TIME website [Online] Cited 14/04/2024

Weegee (Arthur Fellig) (American born Ukraine (Austria), Złoczów (Zolochiv) 1899 – 1968 New York)
[Outline of a Murder Victim]
1942
Gelatin silver print
33.9 x 27.4cm (13 3/6 x 10 13/16 in.)
Gift of Bruce A. Kirstein, in memory of Marc S. Kirstein, 1978
© Weegee / International Center of Photography

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
“Hopper’s Topper” Hedda Hopper Hollywood
c. 1948
Gelatin silver print
© Photo Weegee/ICP New York

Weegee (American, 1899-1968)
Marilyn Monroe, Distortion
c. 1955
Gelatin silver print
© Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York / Friedsam Collection, Frankfurt am Main

Weegee (author)
Textual, Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (editor)
January, 2024 (release)
ISBN 9782845979901
208 pages
55 euros

This book accompanies the exhibition Weegee, Autopsie du Spectacle presented from January 30, 2024 to May 19, 2024 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation.

There is a Weegee conundrum. His photographs fall into two distinct categories. On the one hand, there are his images of news items taken in New York during the 1940s, in a documentary, direct and raw approach. And on the other, photographs of starlets, politicians and other socialites taken in Hollywood in the following decade, for which he willingly resorted with special effects. Declaring himself “bewitched by the mystery of the murders,” Weegee stood out for his ability to arrive promptly at the crime scene or to wait for the salad baskets to arrive on the steps of the police stations to capture the defendants on the spot. Nevertheless, he strives to bring onlookers, often from the working classes, into his framework, or even to be interested only in them. Made up of around a hundred photographs – the best known, but also many images never highlighted – this book shows the coherence of Weegee’s work based on a radical and incisive critique of the Society of the Spectacle, borrowing from an unexpected empathy towards the disadvantaged.

Weegee (1899-1968) was an American photojournalist known for his images of a New York marked by crime. In 1941, New York’s Photo League dedicated an exhibition to him which was followed by that of MoMA in 1943. He published his first book Naked City in 1945 and his autobiography Weegee by Weegee in 1961.

Hardcover
20 x 26cm
Texts by Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany,
Clément Chéroux and Cynthia Young.
Texts in French

Translated from the French by Google Translate from the Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson website

Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 rue des Archives
75003 Paris

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 7pm
Closed Mondays

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation website

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Exhibition: ‘Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit’ at the KBr Photography Center KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 12th May, 2024

Curator: Drew Sawyer

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Self-portrait
Nd
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

What have you got to say?

We must acknowledge the importance of the Consuelo Kanaga, a strong, compassionate human being, an under recognised photographer. What a trailblazer for future female and male photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott and Milton Rogovin.

Kanaga is a story teller. Her photographs are strongly modernist, realist compositions. The portraits are direct and revealing, no external flourishes necessary in capturing the essence of the person; her landscapes, dark and brooding atmospheric iterations of land and spirit.

Consuelo Kanaga:

~ one of the pioneers of modern American photography

~ one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper (1918)

~ a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others

~ passionate about social justice … social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality… especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

~ maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League

~ focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair

~ interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement

~ became very active in civil rights and took part in and photographed many demonstrations and marches in the 1960s

Whatever type of photograph Kanaga took (and there are many) her photographs are always perceptive = having or showing sensitive insight.

The sensitivity of Hands (1930, below); the tired eyes and clasped hands of the Widow Watson (1922-1924 below) contrasting with the mannerist hands of the boy staring off camera; the stoicism of the mother in Tree of Life (1950, below) with her children’s faces in deep shadow coupled with the subconscious symbology of the unyielding, white brick wall behind; and the dark mesa of Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico (Nd, below) hello Georgia O’Keeffe … all reflect Kanaga’s superb handling of shadow and light, of energy and spirit.

“Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional.”1

Dr Marcus Bunyan

1/ Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024

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

“One of America’s most transcendent yet, surprisingly, least-known photographers.”

Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe (1992). Consuelo Kanaga, An American Photographer. Seattle: University of Washington Press. pp. 21-40.

“I could have done lots more, put in much more work and developed more pictures, but I had also a desire to say what I felt about life. Simple things like a little picture in the window or the corner of the studio or an old stove in the kitchen have always been fascinating to me. They are very much alive, these flowers and grasses with the dew on them. Stieglitz always said, “What have you got to say?” I think in a few small cases I’ve said a few things, expressed how I felt, trying to show the horror of poverty or the beauty of black people. I think that in photography what you’ve done is what you’ve had to say. In everything this has been the message of my life. A simple supper, being with someone you love, seeing a deer come around to eat or drink at the barn – I like things like that. If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”

Margaretta K. Mitchell (1979). Recollections: Ten Women of Photography. NY: Viking Press. pp. 158–160.

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is the first exhibition in Europe to present a comprehensive retrospective of the entire career of the American Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978). The exhibition covers six decades of her professional dedication to photography.

Passionate about social justice, Kanaga was more interested in people and their problems than in photography: social marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, inequality…, especially in relation to the African-American population in the United States.

Consuelo Kanaga was one of the few women who became a professional photojournalist, and as early as the 1910s in the United States. She was also one of the few who maintained a close relationship with avant-garde circles, both in San Francisco and in New York, and whose friendship and professional support opened the way for important women photographers such as Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange, among others.

Despite the fame she achieved during her lifetime, her work is still surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to make a conclusive contribution to the recognition that Kanaga’s work undoubtedly deserves.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Text from the Fundación MAPFRE website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Fire, New York
1922
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (Downtown New York)
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1920s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
c. 1925
Toned gelatin silver print with graphite
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Louise Dahl-Wolfe
c. 1928
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 × 5 in. (10.2 × 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Louise Emma Augusta Dahl-Wolfe (November 19, 1895 – December 11, 1989) was an American photographer. She is known primarily for her work for Harper’s Bazaar, in association with fashion editor Diana Vreeland. At Harper’s Bazaar she pioneered a new standard in colour photography. …

Among the celebrated fashion photographers of the 20th century, Louise Dahl-Wolfe was an innovator and influencer who significantly contributed to the fashion world. She was most widely known for her work with Harper’s Bazaar. Dahl-Wolfe was considered a pioneer of the ‘female gaze’ in the fashion industry and credited for creating a new image of strong, independent American women during World War II.

From 1943, Dahl-Wolfe introduced the “New American Look” to fashion photography, which Vicki Goldberg describes as “all clean hair, glowing skin and a figure both lithe and strong”. Dahl-Wolfe was known for taking photographs outdoors, with natural light in distant locations from South America to Africa in what became known as “environmental” fashion photography. The outdoor settings helped to evoke “a mood of freedom and optimism” associated with women’s liberation. Her photographs brought a new naturalism to fashion photography which had previously been dominated by a stiff and haughty “European” or “Germanic” studio style. Dahl-Wolfe described it as “that heavy, heavy look, with everybody looking very clumsy”. Her methodology in using natural sunlight and shooting outdoors became the industry standard even now.

Her models appear to pose candidly, almost as if Dahl-Wolfe had just walked in on them. In fact the poses are highly, constructed with an “almost abstract formal perfection” which she credited partly to the influence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Dahl-Wolfe innovatively used colour in photography and mainly concerned with the qualities of natural lighting, composition, and balance. Compared to other photographers at the time who were using red undertones, Dahl-Wolfe opted for cooler hues and also corrected her own proofs, with one example of her pulling proofs repeatedly to change a sofa’s colour from green to a dark magenta.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
House Plant
1930
Bromide print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Kenneth Spencer
1933
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Kenneth Spencer (25 April 1913 – 25 February 1964), was an American operatic singer and actor. Spencer starred in a few Broadway musicals and musical films in the United States during the 1940s. Frustrated with the racial prejudice he experienced in the United States as a black man, Spencer moved to West Germany in 1950 where he had a successful singing career. He also appeared in a number of German films. His career was cut short when he died in the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 304.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Clapboard Schoolhouse
1930s
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

A Pioneer of Realism

Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) was one of America’s most important photographers. Yet largely because she disdained wealth, fame and self-promotion, her transcendent images have never received the acclaim they deserve. The photographs on this page appear in the first major retrospective of her work, “Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer,” which will open Friday at the Brooklyn Museum.

Born in Astoria, Ore., Kanaga was hired in 1915 as a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle but quickly became more interested in the work of the paper’s photographers. She took a job in the darkroom and was eventually named a staff photographer.

Inspired by the images in Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine, Camera Work, she left the newspaper and moved to New York in 1922. She soon became closely associated with such photographers as Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Louise Dahl. In 1932, Miss Kanaga was represented in the landmark “f.64” exhibition in San Francisco, the first major photography show that stressed realism over romanticism.

Her talent was rooted in an almost mystical belief that photography was a sacred trust — she felt obligated to capture the true essence of her subject. Her drive to fulfill this trust helped Kanaga, who was white, to understand the lives of blacks and to produce some of the most moving works ever done in African-American portraiture. She was equally talented in still-life and landscape photography, and her feeling for urban architecture was stimulated by her involvement with the socially committed New York Photo League during the 1930’s.

She continued to work into her 70’s, despite suffering from emphysema and cancer, which were probably caused by the chemicals used in creating her prints. Her body of work, though comparatively small, is consistently exceptional. Consuelo Kanaga died virtually unknown in 1978, but her talent endures.

Barbara Head Millstein. “A Pioneer of Realism,” in The New York Times October 9, 1993 on the New York Times website [Online] Cited 04/05/2024

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Sargent Johnson
1934
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Sargent Claude Johnson (November 7, 1888 – October 10, 1967) was one of the first African-American artists working in California to achieve a national reputation. He was known for Abstract Figurative and Early Modern styles. He was a painter, potter, ceramicist, printmaker, graphic artist, sculptor, and carver. He worked with a variety of media, including ceramics, clay, oil, stone, terra-cotta, watercolour, and wood.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1930s
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Horse’s Eye
1930s
Gelatin silver print
4 × 3 1/2 in. (10.2 × 8.9cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Bowery
1935
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Angelo Herndon
1936
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Angelo Braxton Herndon (May 6, 1913 – December 9, 1997) was an African-American labor organiser arrested and convicted of insurrection after attempting to organise black and white industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. The prosecution case rested heavily on Herndon’s possession of “communist literature”, which police found in his hotel room.

Herndon was defended by the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party of America, which hired two young local attorneys, Benjamin J. Davis Jr. and John H. Geer, and provided guidance. Davis later became prominent in leftist circles. Over a five-year period, Herndon’s case twice reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that Georgia’s insurrection law was unconstitutional, as it violated First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly. Herndon became nationally prominent because of his case, and Southern justice was under review. By the end of the 1940s he left the Communist Party, moved to the Midwest, and lived there quietly.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled
1936
Gelatin silver print, printed 2023
4 × 5 in. (10.2 × 12.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Two Women, Harlem
c. 1938
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Untitled (New York)
c. 1940
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

For the first time in Spain and Europe, Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features the work of this North American photographer spanning her entire career. Kanaga (1894-1978) is considered today a key figure in the history of contemporary photography, both for her contribution toward the recognition of women in this field and for the intensity with which her images confront the spectator with the great social issues of our time, particularly the conditions of African Americans in the United States.

The exhibition

Consuelo Kanaga. Catch the Spirit features six decades of work by this key figure in the history of modern Photography. With this new project, Fundación MAPFRE renews its commitment to promote the work of women photographers. On this occasion, despite having garnered much notoriety in life, the artist’s work is today surprisingly little known. This exhibition aims to contribute conclusively toward the recognition that Kanaga’s oeuvre undoubtedly deserves.

Consuelo Kanaga (Astoria, Oregon, 1894 – Yorktown Heights, New York, 1978) was truly passionate about social justice. She was most interested in people and issues such as marginalisation, poverty, racial harassment, and inequality, particularly in relation to African Americans in the United States. These were some of the fundamental matters she addressed through her work. Likewise, she also defended the formal and poetic possibilities of photography as an art form.

An unconventional figure, Kanaga was able to become a professional photojournalist in the United States as early as the 1910s. She was also one of the few women involved in the avant-garde circles both in San Francisco with the f.64 Group and in New York with the Photo League, whose friendship and professional support paved the way for other important women photographers. However, gender inequalities and social conventions limited her ability to dedicate herself completely to her artistic work. Kanaga worked full time jobs during many years and was only able to practice her art on weekends. She repeatedly put her career on hold for her partners; these are but a few reasons why her work is not more recognised today.

Organised around the Brooklyn Museum’s collection – the institution that has preserved the artist’s archive – the exhibition features nearly 180 photographs and a wide range of documentary material; contextualising Consuelo Kanaga’s work while focusing on some of her most iconic images and her portrayal of African American life in the 1930s through her photography.

Exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Drew Sawyer, former Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum.

Keys

New Negro Movement: From the late 19th century, magazines and novels published by black men and women began to emerge as a response to the prevailing racism in cities such as San Francisco, Washington, and New York. This literary explosion was the precedent of what became known as the New Negro Movement, which developed in Harlem, New York, between 1920 and 1930; a movement that also lent its name to the most comprehensive anthology dedicated to said cultural renaissance, written by Alain Locke and considered at the time as “the fundaments of the black canon”. Not only did black artists flourish during this time, white artists were also encouraged to join this movement in defence of the freedom, rights, and equality of African Americans through culture.

Kanaga Photojournalist: In 1915, when she was only 21 years old, Consuelo Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she learned photography in order to illustrate her assignments: “For my articles requiring photographs, I went with the photographer to help make the pictures more interesting,” she later recalled. “The editor liked the results and encouraged me to learn photography, ‘from scratch’.” In 1918 she began to work as a photographer for the newspaper and was also hired by the Daily News the following year. Kanaga was undoubtedly one of the first women photojournalists on staff at a newspaper; as her friend Dorothea Lange remarked: “she was the first newspaper photographer I’d ever met. She was a person way ahead of her time.”

Kanaga and Women Photographers: Kanaga’s career was interwoven with a solid and broad circle of women photographers who she cultivated special relationships with over the course of five decades. She was a great supporter and a confidant for Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa, among many others, who she advised and shared her company and connections in the art world with. These women inspired her and likewise she was an inspiration for them. Despite the fact her accomplishments were as relevant as those of her colleagues, her oeuvre received much less attention. Kanaga spent little time self-promoting since she was always more interested in cultivating the affective bonds with the people closest to her.

Biography

Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was born on May 15th, 1894, in Astoria, Oregon. The daughter of a lawyer who was interested in agriculture and of the writer Mathilda Carolina Hartwing, she helped her parents with tasks related to editing from a very young age, eventually leading her to study journalism. In 1915 she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle. Three years later, she became staff photographer. Kanaga met Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and Dorothea Lange at the California Camera Club and became interested in artistic photography thanks to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. Between 1927 and 1928 she travelled through Europe and northern Africa. Throughout her adult life, she lived both in San Francisco and New York, was married three times, and established her first portrait studio in San Francisco in 1932. She also participated in the f.64 Group and her images were exhibited for the first time at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in 1932. Kanaga participated in West Coast liberal politics. After returning from New York in 1935, she became associated with the Photo League in 1938. Edward Steichen defended her photography and included her work in the renowned exhibition The Family of Man in 1955. In 1974 Kanaga held a solo exhibition at the Lerner-Heller gallery in New York and in 1976 she produced a small yet relevant retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1977 she exhibited her work at Wave Hill in Riverdale, New York. She passed away at her Yorktown Heights (New York) home in 1978. One year later, Kanaga’s work was included in the exhibition Recollections: Ten Women of Photography at the ICP and was the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1992, where most of her work is currently preserved.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
After Years of Hard Work (Tennessee)
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Young Girl in Profile
1948
Toned gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Tennessee
1950
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Barbara Deming
c. 1964
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Barbara Deming (1917-1984) was one of the most dearly loved civil rights and feminist activists of her time. Born in New York City in 1917 and educated there at the Friends Meeting House Quaker School, she later studied literature and drama at Bennington College and earned a master’s degree in drama from Case Western Reserve University in 1941.

Deming began her career as a poet, professional writer, and film critic, and turned to political writing and human rights activism in the middle of her life. …

In the 1960s Deming joined demonstrations against Polaris submarines, took part in the 1962 San Francisco-to-Moscow walk for peace, and attended the International Peace Brigade in Europe. Protesting nuclear-weapons testing at the Atomic Energy Commission led to her first experience with being jailed for civil disobedience, this time at the Women’s House of Detention in New York City.

Acting on her belief that the struggles for racial equality and for peace were one effort, Deming marched in the bi-racial Nashville-to-DC walk for peace alongside SNCC members. In 1963 she joined black activists protesting segregation in Alabama and Georgia as well as attended the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. In 1964 she participated in the 2800-mile Quebec-Guantanamo walk for peace and freedom, a racially integrated protest over US actions in Cuba. During this march, she was arrested and jailed in Albany, Georgia, an experience she describes in her book Prison Notes.

Deming participated in political actions whenever and wherever individual rights and human dignity were being threatened. In 1965-1967 Deming traveled to North and South Vietnam to protest the war. In the 1970s she demonstrated for gay rights and feminist causes. In 1983 she was arrested on the march through Seneca Falls, organised by the Women’s Peace Encampment to protest the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe. Despite failing health, she was once again jailed.

Anonymous. “Barbara Deming,” on the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund website Nd [Online] Cited 03/04/2024

Photojournalism and the City

After having opted for journalism, influenced perhaps by her parents, Kanaga began to write for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915, where she learned to produce photographs for her articles encouraged by the newspaper editor. In 1918 she became staff photographer, and the following year was hired by the Daily News, another San Francisco newspaper.

Between 1920 and 1950 she worked for newspapers and magazines in Denver and New York, capturing scenes of urban life and images of economic and racial inequality; as in The Widow Watson (1922-1924 below), which was taken while she was working for the newspaper New York American and depicts a woman suffering from tuberculosis next to her son.

Photojournalism led Kanaga to become aware of photography’s potential as an art form. Around 1918 she joined the California Camera Club in San Francisco. Not only did she gain access to a dark room and photographic equipment, but also books and magazines on the medium. The publication Camera Work by Alfred Stieglitz and the works of New York and San Francisco photographers, such as Arnold Genthe, who portrayed street scenes and urban architecture in their images, influenced her greatly.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
The Widow Watson
1922-1924
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portrait Gallery

Kanaga began to produce portraits for additional income as a complement to her journalistic work, initially in San Francisco and later in New York. She opened her first studio in the early 1920s and was able to support herself and her partners financially for the rest of her life by taking photographs of wealthy clients and friends who were part of the avant-garde movements in San Francisco and New York. Thus, the portrait became the main focus of Kanaga’s creative production. It is also important to note that while most of her work as a photojournalist was lost, her portraits remain well represented among the negatives and prints that have been preserved.

Influenced by Stieglitz, in her portraits Kanaga experimented with poses, cropping, lighting, and printing in order to highlight the expressive capabilities of her images. Aside from flash, she used dark room techniques such as over-and underexposure, manipulating exposure times in specific parts of a photographic print to accentuate the contrast between light and shade, which generated a theatrical effect. The artist also frequently toned her prints with metals such as gold, adding pencil or graphite to highlight certain features.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Portrait of a Woman
c. 1925
Gelatin silver print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

North Americans Abroad

One of the fundamental experiences in Kanaga’s formative development was her time in Europe and northern Africa between 1927 and 1928, made possible through the financial support of the patron Albert M. Bender. Kanaga spent close to a year travelling through France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, and Tunisia, taking photographs and visiting museums, monuments, and churches. The artist also sought opportunities to learn modern photographic techniques. In Kairouan (Tunisia) she came into contact with a community of ex-pat artists and produced three photo albums portraying the city and its people, consolidating her interest in portraiture.

Consuelo Kanaga began to express her opinions on racism in the United States during these trips. A subject she would explore in more depth through photography during the 1930s. “I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people.”

Photography and the American Scene

Beyond portraiture, Kanaga practiced numerous genres and styles throughout her career. Like other North American artists, she was attracted to what she encountered in the “American Scene”; naturalist and descriptive representations of national and regional heritage and everyday life. Kanaga mostly focused on marginal day to day and political motifs, including workers, African Americans, objects, and buildings that were often in a state of disrepair.

Her first portraits of African Americans were aligned with the New Negro Movement that arose in the 1920s and 30s. Black intellectuals and artists tried to redefine and celebrate African American identities through cultural self-expression, economic independence, and progressive policies. Likewise, they advocated for the creation of inspiring images of their community and of negritude at a time when lynchings and racial terror were some of the most pressing legal and ethical issues. Within this context, Kanaga’s photographs can be considered a true statement of intent: Hands (1930 below) is the first preserved photograph that captures her anti-racist ideals. She also portrayed the singer Kenneth Spencer, the poet Langston Hughes, and the painter and ceramist Sargent Johnson, among others.

Along with her interest in African American communities, Kanaga became interested in worker’s rights and the worker movement that emerged in the Soviet Union and Germany during the 1920s. After moving to New York in 1935, she took photographs for leftist publications and became involved with the Photo League. At a time marked by the will to promote solidarity among workers beyond race and gender, Kanaga focused on the experiences of African Americans and Workers in particular.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Hands
1930
Gelatin silver print
23 1/16 × 29 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (58.6 × 73.8 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Portraits of Artists

Throughout the 1930s and 40s, Kanaga produced portraits of artists, writers, actors, and musicians. She met many of them thanks to her relationship with several photography clubs and collectives, as well as during her trips through the United States and Europe. Her images include portraits of the photographers Alfred Stieglitz and W. Eugene Smith, the painters Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, and of designers such as Wharton Esherick.

Conversely, Kanaga’s career was especially linked to a solid and broad circle of women photographers whose relationships she cultivated throughout her time as an artist. She was a great supporter and confidant for a series of photographers who often photographed each other, such as Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Louse Dahl-Wolfe, Dorothea Lange, Alma Lavenson, Tina Modotti, and Eiko Yamazawa.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
Wharton Esherick
1940
Bromide print
20 1/16 × 15 1/16 × 1 1/2 in. (51 × 38.3 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Wharton Esherick (July 15, 1887 – May 6, 1970) was an American sculptor who worked primarily in wood, especially applying the principles of sculpture to common utilitarian objects. Consequently, he is best known for his sculptural furniture and furnishings. Esherick was recognised in his lifetime by his peers as the “dean of American craftsmen” for his leadership in developing nontraditional designs and for encouraging and inspiring artists and artisans by example. Esherick’s influence is evident in the work of contemporary artisans, particularly in the Studio Craft Movement. His home and studio in Malvern, Pennsylvania, are part of the Wharton Esherick Museum, which has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1993.

Text from the Wikipedia website

Trips to the Southern United States

Between the late 1940s and early 60s, Kanaga went on numerous trips through the southern United States where she continued to photograph black children and workers. While in Florida, she produced a series of photographs dedicated to black families and farmhands working in recovered swamp lands known as mucklands. During those trips, she took one of her most renowned photographs titled She is a Tree of Life (1950 below), which depicts a stoic mother with her son and daughter on either side. In 1950 she also photographed self-taught black artist William Edmondson next to his carved stone sculptures.

In 1964, amidst the struggle for freedom of Black Americans in the United States, the activist and writer Barbara Deming invited Kanaga to photograph the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace in protest of United States actions against Cuba. During the march, Deming and other activists were arrested for demanding that all demonstrators be allowed to walk together on a “white only” sidewalk. The book Prison Notes, published by Deming in 1966, includes photographs by Kanaga.

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
She is a Tree of Life
1950
Gelatin silver print
22 13/16 × 16 13/16 × 1 1/2 in. (57.9 × 42.7 × 3.8cm) framed
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Studies of Nature

In 1940 Kanaga and her husband, the painter Wallace Putnam, purchased a house outside the city, in Yorktown Heights, seventy kilometres north of Manhattan. They moved there permanently in 1950. Meanwhile, Kanaga continued taking photographs for household magazines in order to support herself and her husband financially. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why, after having her work exhibited in important exhibitions during the 1940s, Kanaga’s artistic output decreased during the following two decades. Nevertheless, she photographed the natural environment surrounding her house and in 1948 one of the pictures she took of the pond in their back yard was included in the exhibition In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Catalogue

The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition has been published in English, Spanish, and Catalan by Fundación MAPFRE and the Brooklyn Museum. It features an essay by the show’s curator Drew Sawyer and texts by Shalon Parker, Ellen Macfarlane, and Shana Lopes. The publication includes a complete overview of the artist’s life and work.

Press release from the Fundación MAPFRE

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape Near Taos, New Mexico)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
4 3/4 x 7 3/4 in. (12.1 x 19.7cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978)
[Untitled] (Landscape with Farmhouse)
Nd
Gelatin silver print
3 5/8 x 4 3/4 in. (9.2 x 12.1cm)
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
Photo: Brooklyn Museum

KBr Photography Center
Avenida Litoral, 30 – 08005 Barcelona
Phone: +34 93 272 31 80

(Attention only during the opening hours of the exhibition hall)

Opening hours:
Mondays (except holidays): Closed
Tuesday to Sundays (and holidays): 11am – 8pm

Fundación MAPFRE website

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Exhibition dates: 20th September – 19th October, 2024

Losers and losers

Footnotes

Neoliberalism

The Women’s Support Group

“This Time We Didn’t Want To Be On The Outside”

Commemorative Plates

…on starting to document the miners’ strike

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’ strike:

Battle of Orgreave

Exhibition dates: 26th April – 15th September 2024

Altstadt (Rupertinum)

Deriving pleasure from the dérive

Poesie des Alltäglichen. Fotografien von Elfriede Mejchar / The poetry of the everyday

Arnulf Rainer (Austrian, b. 1929)

Christa Hauer-Fruhmann (Austrian, 1925-2013)

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (Austrian, 1928-2000)

Aglaia Konrad (Austrian, b. 1960)

Otto Breicha (Austrian, 1932-2003)

The Creative Element in Documentation

Introduction

The Creative Element in Documentation

The Artist as Chronicler

“Künstler bei der Arbeit”, 1954-1961 (Artists at Work)

“Porträts von Künstler-Photographen und Kunstvermittlern”, 1988-1994 (Portraits of Artist Photographers and Art Educators)

The Other Gaze

“Hotel (Fremdenzimmer)”, 1970-1986 (Hotel (Guest Room))

“Die Monatssesseln”, 1986-1988 (The Armchairs of the Month)

“Oszillation (Salzburger Landesatelier)”, 1988

Nobody Is Perfect

Tapetenbild. Triptychon, 1988 (Wallcover Picture. Tryptic) “Eine Kostümierung der geliehenen Identität”, 1989 (A Costume for the borrowed Identity) “Tagebuch Jänner 1988”, 1988 (Diary January 1988) “Nobody Is Perfect”, 1996

“Amaryllis”, 1994-1997

Elfriede Mejchar: biographical note 1924-2020 Vienna, AT

Exhibition dates: 20th March – 8th September 2024

An offer you can’t refuse

Inside the exhibition: Suburbia. Building the American Dream

Introduction

Sections of the exhibition

Planning A Dream

The Suburban Room

The Residential Nightmare

Post-Suburbia?

Sprawl Reaches Our Shores

The Curators

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 1st September 2024

Then and now

A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa – from the curators

Ambitious and creative

An art photographer

The settler lens

The photograph as taonga

Te Whiti and the camera

Margaret Matilda White

The mīhini mīharo reveals nineteenth-century Aotearoa as never before.

Editors

Exhibition dates: 9th April – 7th July 2024

Shock of the new

Hippolyte Bayard

The 19th-Century Selfie Pioneer

Before Instagram influencers, there was Hippolyte Bayard

Bayard in the Garden

Bayard as Dramatist

A Special Effects Pioneer

A Self-Portrait of Pride

Exhibition dates: 15th February – 16th June 2024

Down with Earth

Gallery One

Mullock and mine sites

Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park

Damage by Cup Moth

Tailings sands

The beauty of Central Victoria’s landscape in tumult and recovery.

Julie Millowick

Horse Paddock

Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Park

Ecological thinning

Crocodile Reservoir

Gallery Two

Exhibition dates: 23rd February – 7th June 2024

Exhibition dates: 10th February – 20th May, 2024

…on covering the role played by women in the miners’
strike:

Weegee spoofs
the
new spring hats